For All Humankind. Tanya Harrison
a celestial body beyond Earth, while Command Module Pilot Michael Collins kept dutiful watch from orbit overhead. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and a “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, this amazing achievement could have easily been touted as a win for the US, laden with patriotic messages of America being the first to land people on the Moon.
Instead, alongside the two American astronauts, Apollo 11’s Eagle lander brought messages and mementos of world peace to the lunar surface, including a stainless steel plaque that reads:
Here men from the planet Earth
first set foot upon the moon
July 1969, A. D.
We came in peace for all mankind.
Neil Armstrong also left a silicon disc on the Moon etched with microscopic goodwill messages from the leaders of seventy-three countries. Most of the messages were written in their respective native languages. In this era before computers were commonplace, some of these messages were handwritten, while others were typed. A great many of these messages call for world peace, pointing to the exploration of space as a chance for humanity to work toward something larger, together.
Even the Apollo 11 astronauts themselves recognized that their mission was far bigger. They chose not to have their names included on the mission patch—a break from NASA tradition. Michael Collins said that this choice was made so that it would be “representative of everyone who had worked toward a lunar landing.”
The mission itself wasn’t a solely American endeavor: A Canadian company built the legs for the Eagle, the two-person landing craft that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to Tranquility Base, their temporary home and landing site on the Moon. Australian radio telescopes received the live footage direct from the moon and relayed it to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston for the world to see. German rocket engineers were critical in the design of the massive Saturn V rocket for the mission.
The global impact of the Moon landing was unquestionable. An estimated 600 million people worldwide watched the landing live—nearly one-fifth of the global population at the time. During the “Giant Leap” tour after returning from the Moon, during which the three Apollo 11 astronauts toured twenty-four countries in the span of thirty-seven days, over 100 million people gathered to see astronauts in person. Countries spanning every continent, from Belarus to Malawi, Mongolia to Australia, have released stamps commemorating Apollo 11 in some way. And yet, most of the stories we hear of the Apollo 11 moon landing in popular culture are American-centric.
I wanted to hear the stories of others, to get a worldwide perspective on this momentous event in human history. This book brings together the memories of the Moon landing from eight women and men who watched the event from outside the US, including a Lithuanian holocaust survivor, a Sudanese engineer, and an Indian primary school teacher. To fully capture the representation of humanity in this historic event, we made the decision to change the wording of this book’s title from the original quote “for all mankind” to “for all humankind” so that everyone reading this will know that space is for them. Space is for everyone. We all belong to the universe, and together we can all be awed and inspired by what is possible.
Tanya Harrison
In this book you’re going to read eight different stories about the Apollo 11 mission. These stories were told to us by people from all around the world, who experienced Apollo 11 in very different ways. But before going back in time and across five different continents, we thought it would be helpful to provide some information about NASA’s Moon landing program, Apollo.
The “Space Race”
Humanity’s course toward the Moon started in October 1957 when Russian scientists launched a rocket into space carrying a small metal sphere about the size of a beach ball. This rocket was traveling fast enough that when the metal ball was released from the nose cone, it went into orbit around the Earth. This metal ball was called Sputnik—humanity’s first artificial satellite. By most accounts, Sputnik officially kicked off the “Space Race.”
The term “Space Race” is used to describe a sort of technology Olympics between two countries: The United States of America and Russia—more often referred to at the time as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the Soviet Union for short. If we’re keeping score then, it was the Russians who were leading the medal rankings in the early days of the “Space Race”.
On April 12, 1961, the Russians scored their second big win. A young man named Yuri Gagarin sat cramped in a tiny cockpit atop a Russian Vostok rocket. Gagarin was a military pilot, but his job that day was to be a passenger. The rocket on which he sat was significantly bigger than the one used to launch Sputnik four years earlier and didn’t include any manual controls for Yuri to pilot the craft himself. After launching from Baikonur (in what is now Kazakhstan), Gagarin’s rocket pierced through the atmosphere and entered space. Like Sputnik, the speed of the rocket propelled Yuri’s cramped capsule into Earth’s orbit—where no human had ventured before.
After just over an hour circling the Earth, Gagarin’s Vostok capsule re-entered the atmosphere, deployed its parachute, and successfully touched down. His mission was a success, making him the world’s first cosmonaut, the Russian word for astronaut (both “cosmonaut” and “astronaut” come from the Latin words for “star sailor”).
Seemingly losing the “Space Race” at that point—or at least convincing themselves it was a race and that they were losing—American politicians and scientists set out to do something big. In May of 1961, President John F. Kennedy told the world that America was planning to put humans on the Moon. This was, to say the least, a bit of a shocker. The President was announcing this Moon plan mere weeks after the first human had even ventured into space. Few people before this had really taken a human Moon landing seriously. It seemed to many an impossible task. But Kennedy was confident—so much so that he gave America a deadline, saying, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Spurred on by the success of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, and against a looming deadline, engineers and scientists from around the world were brought to work at NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Far from the shining symbol of excellence it is viewed as today, NASA was barely a toddler when Kennedy made his announcement. It had only been created three years earlier.
NASA’s attempt to put humans on the Moon would be called Project Apollo, and it had about nine years to meet the President’s deadline. This gave those scientists and engineers less than a decade to do something people had barely started thinking about from a technical perspective. The clock was ticking.
So, You Want to Land on the Moon?
If you want to land on the Moon—and come back to Earth—you’re going to need at least two things: a gigantic rocket, and a spacecraft able to land and come back.
At this point it’s important to note that spaceships in sci-fi movies are very different from spacecraft that were built in the 1960s, or even those built today. In movies, spaceships are usually an all-in-one vehicle, like the Millennium Falcon or the starship Enterprise. Fictional ships like this take off from planets, fly around in space, and land all on their own, all in one piece. In real life, we aren’t quite there yet.
It’s incredibly hard to get off of Earth. Our planet has a lot of gravity that tries to pull you right back down. Long story short, you need a very powerful rocket to leave the Earth’s gravity. But once you’re in space, the rocket has done its job and there’s no further need to lug it around with you. We don’t need the rocket to get back down to Earth either. That’s where gravity is our friend. We can just fall back to Earth, albeit in a controlled manner so as not to burn up in the atmosphere.