Apollo 11: The Complete Mission in Real-Time 3D
July 20, 1969
Experience the Apollo 11 mission of July 20, 1969: follow the spacecraft's real Earth-to-Moon trajectory and back, in a real-time 3D reconstruction.
It's July 16, 1969.
On pad LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's Saturn V is about to lift off.
Its goal: to send two spacecraft to the Moon, Columbia and Eagle, 45 tonnes between them.
Apollo 11 is meant to be the first mission in history to land there.
At the top of the rocket, in Columbia's command module, three astronauts:
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin.
They will try to keep the promise President Kennedy made eight years earlier.
To land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth, before the decade is out.
The five Rocketdyne F-1 engines tear the 111-meter Saturn V off the ground.
Nearly 34 meganewtons of thrust: the most powerful rocket of its day.
The first stage, the S-IC, swallows nearly 13 tonnes of kerosene and liquid oxygen every second.
Nobody flies it: the guidance computer steers the rocket, the crew watches.
It also triggers every separation, when its sensors find a tank empty.
The lighter it gets, the harder it accelerates: the crew takes up to nearly 4 G.
After 2 minutes 40, the F-1s shut down: the S-IC drops away, the second stage takes over.
With a switch, the crew jettisons the escape tower, no longer needed.
The second stage, the S-II: five J-2 engines on liquid hydrogen, at -253 °C.
The third stage, the S-IVB, lights up: a single J-2 engine that can be restarted.
One of the most perilous stages of the mission is now behind them.
The spacecraft enters a parking orbit for two and a half hours.
For one and a half trips around the Earth, the astronauts are weightless.
Following the calculations of Mission Control in Houston, the rocket starts a new burn.
For six minutes, going from 28,000 to 39,000 km/h, they feel up to 1.5 G.
Collins flips a switch: explosive charges cut the adapter into four.
Columbia pulls away and the panels open like petals: Eagle is inside.
Collins backs off and turns around. The approach is his to fly, by hand.
He aims through a sight fixed to his window, lined up on a cross carried by Eagle.
Contact: Columbia is docked nose to nose with Eagle.
Another switch: Eagle is released, and Collins pulls it out of the third stage.
Columbia is two modules: the Command Module (CM) and the Service Module (SM).
The spacecraft spins on its axis in "barbecue" mode: the Sun never heats the same side for long.
The CM, the capsule: 6 m³ for three men, and the only piece that will come back.
The SM, the cylinder behind it: the main engine, its tanks, the oxygen.
Its fuel cells make the electricity, and the water the crew drinks.
Three days of travel, nearly 400,000 kilometers to the Moon.
The burn doesn't send them straight to the Moon: it stretches their orbit around the Earth.
Without the Moon, the ship would climb, slow down, then fall back toward the Earth.
But they aimed for where the Moon would be when they arrived, to cross its path.
Eagle, the lunar module (LM), has two stages: one to go down, one to come back up.
Built only for the vacuum of space, its hull is 0.3 mm thick in places.
The ship slows down the whole way, until the Moon's gravity takes over.
Without braking, it would swing around the Moon and fall back to Earth, engine off.
This is the "free return": insurance in case the engine failed.
They must brake to enter orbit. The burn happens behind the Moon, out of radio contact.
Houston worked it out, Columbia's computer flies it: nobody can help.
Only the crews of Apollo 8 and 10 had come this far before.
The next day, Armstrong and Aldrin move into Eagle.
"The Eagle has wings," Armstrong reports. Collins stays alone aboard Columbia.
Eagle turns a full circle: from Columbia, Collins inspects its landing gear.
Armstrong and Aldrin keep their spacesuits on: they protect them if the cabin leaks.
Eagle has no seats: they fly standing up, held in place by straps.
Collins pulls away with a short burn: Eagle will only fire its engine from a distance.
Forty-five minutes later, 4 km from Columbia, Eagle turns round, engine forward.
Behind the Moon, out of radio contact, Eagle brakes: 30 seconds of engine.
Over an hour, Eagle glides down to 15 km up, where the descent will begin.
In May, Apollo 10 went no further.
Eagle rolls over, head down: its windows now look at the lunar surface.
Powered descent: Eagle brakes lying on its side, windows facing the ground.
Twelve minutes to go from 15 km up and 6,000 km/h to a standstill on the Moon.
The pilot is Eagle's computer: Armstrong and Aldrin watch, ready to abort.
Eagle turns over, windows to the sky: its radar must see the ground to measure altitude.
Alarm 1202. Nobody aboard knows what it means: Armstrong asks Houston.
A radar left switched on swamps the computer, which restarts and keeps only what matters.
Should they abort? Steve Bales, 26, the guidance officer, decides: they carry on.
His backroom engineer, Jack Garman, had listed every alarm code after a failed simulation.
Eagle pitches up: Armstrong finally sees the site. It is covered in boulders.
Armstrong takes over and flies past the boulders, looking for a flat spot.
"Sixty seconds": one more minute of fuel, and they will have to give up.
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
Houston: "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again."
First job: get everything ready to leave in a hurry, in case Eagle is damaged.
Four hours of sleep were planned: they would rather get ready to go outside.
Up above, Collins passes behind the Moon every two hours, alone and out of radio contact.
Armstrong, 38, a former test pilot, is the first to set foot on the Moon.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Nineteen minutes later, Aldrin joins him: "Magnificent desolation."
On one of Eagle's legs, a plaque: "We came in peace for all mankind."
They plant the flag. The ground is so hard the pole barely goes in.
From the White House, President Nixon speaks to them on the telephone.
They set up a laser reflector: it is still used to measure the Earth-Moon distance.
They collect 21.5 kg of lunar rock and dust, which will come home with them.
Before leaving, they throw out their backpacks and boots: every kilo counts.
A speech had been written in case they were left stranded on the Moon.
The ascent stage lifts off. The descent stage and its plaque stay on the Moon.
Aldrin wrote his doctoral thesis on orbital rendezvous. Here it is for real.
Eagle docks with Columbia. Armstrong and Aldrin rejoin Collins.
Eagle's ascent stage is cast off: its work is done.
Nobody knows where or when it crashed on the Moon: no one tracked it.
After 30 orbits in two and a half days, it is time to go home.
Behind the Moon, out of radio contact, Columbia's engine fires: heading for Earth.
Had this burn failed, they would have stayed in lunar orbit forever.
The spacecraft starts its "barbecue" roll again for the trip home.
Apollo meant 400,000 people and 25 billion dollars of the day.
Two and a half days home: Earth grows larger ahead of them.
At its peak, NASA took more than 4% of the US federal budget.
On the last evening, on television, they thank everyone who made the flight possible.
Columbia casts off its service module: only the capsule returns to Earth.
It turns heat shield first. The shield will face nearly 2,800 °C.
The aim must be exact: too steep and the capsule burns, too shallow and it skips off.
40,000 km/h: the air flares up around the capsule and cuts off all radio.
Deceleration pins them to their seats: up to 6.5 times their weight.
Three parachutes open: the capsule drifts down to the Pacific at 35 km/h.
Splashdown in the Pacific, after an eight-day mission.
For fear of lunar germs, they will spend three weeks in quarantine.
The 1961 promise is kept, five months before the decade is out.
Ten more astronauts will walk on the Moon, until December 1972.