Apollo 11’s giant leap for mankind and Cold War rivalry

US: At 9:32 am on July 16, 1969 a 2,900-tonne Saturn V rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the Columbia lunar command module and the dreams of a generation. The mission was Apollo 11, the commander was 38-year-old former navy pilot Neil Armstrong and the destination was the Sea of Tranquility, on the moon.

For the United States, the mission was a Cold War maneuver, a bid to fulfil the vow made by President John F. Kennedy that NASA could overtake the pioneering Russian space program and put a man on the moon.

But for spellbound audiences around the world, it was also an extraordinary and optimistic voyage of discovery and engineering.

The huge rocket carried Columbia and its crew -- Armstrong and fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins -- into Earth's orbit before the third and final booster stage catapulted them toward the moon.

Columbia was docked with the Eagle lunar landing module, and three days later, the combined Apollo 11 craft found itself in orbit around the moon. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin uncoupled the Eagle and began their descent.

As they descended, monitored by NASA mission control in Houston and watched by an audience of millions around the world in an unprecedented live broadcast, a computer error in the navigation computer caused two alarms to sound.

The computer recognized it was receiving spurious data and corrected itself, maintaining its descent. Propellant was also sloshing around Eagle's tanks more than had been expected, triggering a premature low-fuel warning.

With co-pilot Aldrin calling out flight data, Armstrong guided the craft, touching down at 2017 GMT in a 300-meter wide crater with only 25 seconds of fuel left. He and Aldrin began to work through their landing checklist.

AFP