Moon Landing – 5 interesting facts about the historic Apollo 11 mission

On 20 July 1969, exactly 46 years ago, a team consisting of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins landed Apollo 11 on the moon. So how did it start? What made human beings think they could go and walk on the surface of Earth's satellite?

Here are some interesting facts about the amazing tale:

It all started with the Space Race

The term Space Race was coined to describe the competition between the two global superpowers post World War II - the USA and the USSR - to ‘conquer space’. The Soviet Union actually won the first few rounds in this battle. In 1957, the Soviets sent the first artificial satellite into space ('Sputnik' which is Russian for traveller). In 1959, Luna 2 became the first space probe to hit the moon and in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit space. The US was clearly losing and many laughed at President John F Kennedy's bold proclamation in 1961 that the US would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The US effectively won the competition when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon in 1969. 

.

The numbers that matter

The Apollo space programme cost around $25.4 billion, which is around $150 billion (Rs 95,43,750,000,000) in today’s money. Over 400,000 people worked on the mission that started after President John F Kennedy’s bold proclamation in 1961. An estimated 600 million watched the Apollo 11 landing live on television, a record that was broken when 750 million watched the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

The Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories

Till this date, there exist conspiracy theories that the moon landing was faked by NASA to get the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself. This was even explored in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (set in a dystopian future) where his daughter’s teacher tells Matthew McConaughey that the Apollo 11 mission was government propaganda.

The conspiracy theory was particularly popular in Russia as well, where they couldn’t believe that Americans had beaten them. But it’s hard to believe the conspiracy theory simply because of the sheer number of people involved. Either the Americans went to the moon or somehow, 400,000 people who were part of the mission managed to parrot the same lie!

“Good Luck, Mr Gorsky”

One of the most salacious urban rumours attached to the moon landing is an anecdote from Neil Armstrong’s childhood neighbour Mr Gorsky. Apparently, when Neil was a kid, he overheard his neighbour asking his wife to perform oral sex. She is alleged to have said "You'll get it when the kid next door walks on the moon." Decades later, Neil is supposed to have remembered this and allegedly said “Good luck, Mr Gorsky” before he stepped on the moon’s surface. But the joke was apparently a hoax which was popular on the internet in 1995 and even had a mention in the opening credits scene of Watchmen.

A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind

There’s also some contention about what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the moon. Did he say: “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind”, or did he miss out the ‘a’? Semantically speaking, it makes a lot of difference because the lack of the indefinite article would mean that he was speaking for the entire human race.

Armstrong, who died at the age of 82, said that people missed the ‘a’. The debate was finally ended in 2006 when computer programmer Peter Shann Ford, downloaded the audio recording from the NASA website and analysed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate using computers.

Ford found the missing ‘a’ in the graphical representation of sound waves as a 35-millisecond-long bump between ‘for’ and ‘man’, a period too brief for human ears to perceive. So we guess Armstrong’s grammar was spot on, even when he was on the brink of doing something, no man had ever done before.

Incidentally, Aldrin who was second on the spot, also had an interesting first. He was apparently the first man to have ever relieved himself on the moon, and did so in his spacesuit with 600 million watching!