I’m hardly the first to inform anyone: forty years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63 stepped onto the surface of the moon, snatching the top prize in the Space Raceand placing the astronaut firmly ahead of the classic fireman as the dream occupation of every child. It was all over the mainstream media and even made it onto the MIT Admissions blog.
However – with no offense to Matt McGann – my favorite coverage of the anniversary is the Boston Globe’s feature, Remembering Apollo 11, from the Big Picture section (a perpetually stunning photojournalism section, well worth frequenting). It shows all the iconic pictures from the mission – the footprint, the Earthrise, the “visor” shot, etc. – but also many I had never seen before, especially pictures of the crew not walking around on the lunar surface.
Some things I found interesting:
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In picture 39, President Nixon greets the returned astronauts through a window on a heavily reinforced silver capsule, apparently using a microphone to transmit through the thick glass.
Surprisingly to me, the parades and other festivities welcoming the astronauts home didn’t begin just after splashdown. Instead, the astronauts were extracted onto the USS Hornet, hosed down with chemicals, and locked into a tricked out Airstream trailer, complete with a negative pressure containment system and oodles of air filters, which was the first stop in a 21-day quarantine, ending tomorrow, 40 years back. The possibility of harmful pathogens existing on the moon was seen as unlikely, but worth safeguarding against.
- Many of the pictures from the surface of the moon are covered in thin “+” marks.
This one took some research. As it turns out, the primary camera used on the surface was a modified Hasselblad, termed the “Lunar Surface Data Camera.” In order to make accurate measurements of photographed objects, a reference was necessary to control for stretching and shrinking in the film. The camera was fitted with a Reseau Plate, a sheet of glass placed just in front of the film which had etched crosses whose positions were known to great precision.
Of course, knowing precise coordinates on the film is useless if the image striking the film is distorted, so NASA worked with lens designers at Zeiss to create a 60mm prime with obscenely low distortion. It also had to be designed to operate in a vacuum, requiring the lens to forgo conventional lubricants.
The cameras performed admirably, but due to weight constraints, they were discarded on the surface of the moon. Only the film canisters were brought back. So, if you’re visiting, you can help yourself ot any of the 12 bodies and lenses presumably sitting in working order.
- Oddly enough, those cameras haven’t been disturbed for decades. This is the most shocking of any juicy tidbit: we haven’t returned to the moon since the conclusion of the Apollo program.
I believe that it’s not merely my Course 16 bias that makes this shameful. Humanity reached a high water mark with the moon landings, for the first time leaving the little gravity well we call “Earth” and taking the first step towards making our species more than carbon critters marooned on a rock.
However, since the end of the Apollo program, we’ve had no means of reaching the moon. The achievements from 40 years ago couldn’t be replicated today. With the Space Shuttle, we’ve been putting toys up into Low-Earth Orbit for decades, and next year the shuttle will retire and we won’t even be able launch humans into orbit. That’s just sad.