On 16 July , astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were strapped into their Apollo spacecraft on top of the vast Saturn V rocket and were propelled into orbit in just over 11 minutes.
Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface. Here's a visual guide to four lesser-known facts about the history-making mission.
Standing at more than m ft , the Saturn V rocket burned some 20 tonnes of fuel a second at launch. Astronaut Charlie Duke likened the feeling of stage separation - when parts of the spacecraft are jettisoned - to a "train crash". Standing more than metres tall, the Saturn V rocket blasted astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins into space in just over 11 minutes.
Stage One's five rocket engines burned 20 tonnes of kerosene and hydrogen fuel per second to power Apollo to 42 miles above the Earth. Stage three fired twice - once to get Apollo into orbit - and then again to propel the spacecraft away from Earth towards the moon at a speed of 25,mph.
The three astronauts sat in the Command Module. Behind came the Service Module containing engines, fuel tanks and fuel cells. The delicate moon landing craft was carried in stage three, just behind the Command and Service Module. Apollo performed a mid-flight flip to dock with the Lunar Module, before turning once more and heading toward the Moon.
Saturn V weighed 2, tonnes and generated That's enough to lift tonnes into Earth orbit, and send 43 tonnes to the Moon - the equivalent weight of almost four London buses. Our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the landing site over the past 12 years.
NationalMoonDay pic. With the 52nd anniversary of Apollo11 coming up, I look back and reflect on our last news conference before launching to the Moon — those are the faces of true wonder and pure excitement!
Watch the original mission video as aired in July depicting the Apollo 11 astronauts conducting several tasks on the surface of the moon here:.
For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. For starters, the moon is very far away, and even light takes more than one second to travel the , miles between here and there. So, too, did the audiovisual data beamed back down into the analog television sets of the roughly million people watching as Armstrong descended the ladder of the lunar module.
Add the time to process those data, and the delay between the moment Armstrong took the step and the moment viewers on Earth saw it extends to as long as a few seconds, by some accounts. Had Armstrong taken out a bass drum and given it a thump just before stepping off the ladder, that moment would have anchored the sights to the sounds. But when the astronauts spoke, their reflective visors concealed their lips. The one thing tying the audio recordings back to time stamps is the real-time air-to-ground transcript, which, of course, loops right back to the original problem: human error.
It's the first time Columbia has been outside the Smithsonian since In July , the National Air and Space Museum hosted a gala for Apollo 11's 40th anniversary, which included speeches by the three crewmembers of Apollo At an afternoon session in which Collins, Aldrin and Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean offered to sign autographs, the line of space enthusiasts and admirers quickly stretched across the length of the museum's floor. Collins and Aldrin still regularly make appearances for Apollo-related activities, despite both being in their late 80s.
Armstrong, 82, died on Aug. A public memorial service was held Sept. In , NASA announced that Armstrong's widow,Carol Armstrong, had found a bag full of lunar artifacts among Armstrong's belongings, which she donated to the museum.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the Apollo 11 landing site from space in and spotted the astronauts' tracks, some of the experiments, a discarded camera and the descent stage of the Eagle lunar module.
A 3D view of the site based on the images from the orbiter was generated in A lunar sample bag from Apollo 11 generated a legal dispute after it was accidentally sold at a Texas auction in , held on behalf of the U. Marshals Service. Originally, the bag was confiscated from Max Ary, a former curator convicted in of stealing and selling space artifacts that belonged to the Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas.
In anticipation of Apollo 11's 50th anniversary in July , Universal Pictures released "First Man," a movie based on Armstrong's training journey to become the first man on the moon. This article was updated on May 9, by Space. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more!
And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community space. Nola Taylor Tillman is a contributing writer for Space.
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