For All Humankind. Tanya Harrison
out the equipment, preparing the astronauts, and making sure they were ready for everything and anything that might come their way.
Sadly, during this testing there were casualties. Apollo 1 was meant to be a test of the Command Service Module in low Earth orbit. It had a crew of three astronauts: Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Tragically, a fire in the module during launch rehearsals on the ground resulted in the deaths of all three astronauts. This mission had originally been designated AS-204, but the widows of the three astronauts asked that the mission be called Apollo 1 in their honor.
Two launch tests of the Command Module had taken place without a crew aboard previously, so the naming scheme for the next mission jumped to Apollo 4; there was never technically an Apollo 2 or Apollo 3 mission. Apollo 4 and 6 marked the first and second flights, respectively, of the mighty Saturn V rocket, still with no one onboard. Apollo 5 was the first uncrewed test flight of the LEM using the Saturn V’s little sibling, the Saturn IB. All of these tests were to make sure the equipment would be safe for humans before taking the risk of actually putting astronauts into the mix.
The first Apollo astronauts to fly were the Apollo 7 crew; Walter Cunningham, Walter Schirra, and Donn Eisele. Apollo 7’s goal was to test out the Command Module. They did this by flying it around the Earth a few times and making sure everything worked. The astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission had the same goal of testing the Command Module, but they were lucky enough to be asked to test it by flying around the Moon. On this mission, Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and Jim Lovell became the first humans to truly leave Earth and its orbit. Apollo 9, with James McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart, followed by staying back in Earth’s orbit and testing both the LEM and Command Module together. This was important to make sure the two spaceships could be connected and disconnected when needed.
Apollo 10 combined everything that had happened so far, flying both the Command Module and LEM to orbit around the Moon. Astronauts Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford, and John Young even detached the LEM from the Command Module and flew it within fifteen kilometers of the lunar surface—practicing almost everything needed to land on the Moon except actually landing. Because of this, Apollo 10 is often referred to as the dress rehearsal. In fact, NASA didn’t even include enough fuel for the mission to be able to land and take off again as it wasn’t intended to be done on this mission. Apollo 10 astronaut Eugene Cernan later joked that NASA might have done this intentionally so that he and Stafford couldn’t take it upon themselves to just go ahead and land on the Moon.
By 1969, NASA had gone step by step and were ready to attempt a lunar landing. They had tested the Command Module above Earth (Apollo 7) then above the Moon (Apollo 8). They had tested the Command Module and LEM together above the Earth (Apollo 9) and then, again, above the Moon (Apollo 10). Everything had been done at least once…except the actual landing. That would be left for Apollo 11 to try for the first time. You’ll read all about Apollo 11 in the rest of this book, so we won’t talk about it here.
Six more Apollo missions flew after Apollo 11. Five of these were successful in landing on the Moon: Apollo 12, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and the finale, Apollo 17. One other mission launched, but the astronauts had to fly around the moon without landing because of a malfunction in the Service Module. This was the famous Apollo 13 mission.
What all these missions had in common was the goal of landing on the Moon and, most importantly, getting back home safely again. Amazingly, each Apollo mission that launched accomplished the goal of getting the astronauts home safely.
A Truly Global Mission
To this day, the Saturn V remains one of the most complex machines humans have ever built. When it first launched from Cape Kennedy in 1967, now known as Cape Canaveral, NASA’s Moon rocket was the culmination of centuries of human ingenuity. The first rockets were invented in China and India almost one thousand years earlier. The mathematical formulas necessary to calculate the rocket’s flight and that of the Apollo 11 spacecraft used algebra developed by ancient Babylonians and perfected by Persian scholars in the ninth century. Work by seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and British physicist Sir Isaac Newton provided many of the basic equations for the orbital mechanics needed to get Apollo 11 on and off the Moon. And in the decades leading up to Sputnik, engineers from around the world studied the work of pioneering Russian rocket scientists such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who developed the crucial equations necessary for rockets to reach outer space.
In short, it took all of humanity’s ingenuity to launch the Saturn V.
And it wasn’t just the science and technology of past generations taking part. Along the way, people from around the world were with Apollo 11, even inside their spacecraft. Among the personal items Armstrong and Aldrin brought with them to the Moon was a cassette of Antonin Dvořák’s 9th Symphony. This nineteenth-century masterpiece of classical music, written by the Czech composer while he lived in the United States, was inspired by African American folk music. Dvorak wanted a symphony that expressed the musical potential of Indigenous American and African American cultures, which for too long had been ignored by other composers. The result: a blend of African American folk melodies and Slavic compositional traditions wrapped into a single musical masterpiece—a masterpiece that found its way to the Moon in July 1969.
What you will see in the pages to follow is that the Apollo missions were some of the most incredible adventures humanity has ever witnessed, and just as the world inspired Apollo, the mission, through its accomplishments, returned the favor. Throughout the 1960s, people from all around the globe watched these missions as they happened live, gripped with excitement and wonder.
Apollo didn’t happen in a vacuum (pardon the pun). It was intertwined with millions of people’s lives, as participants or observers. In this book, we want you to feel what it was like to be on Earth when humans first touched another world. We also want you to get a sense of what life was like in this different time, five decades ago. From India to Canada, Sudan to Iran, we want to take you around the world and back in time.
We hope you enjoy this sort of global folk history of Apollo that we’ve had the pleasure of hearing and assembling. We are honored to share these stories with the world and, most of all, want to thank those who shared their precious time and memories with us. They have provided us all with a gift, to have the opportunity to relive this unique time in human history.
Lying in bed staring up at the stone ceiling of the St. Ottilien Monastery, fatigued, exhausted, and still recovering from the most horrible of atrocities, Elly was torn between emotions. A part of him was relieved and felt safe for the first time in years. The other part of him was intensely angry and overcome with hatred.
It was the spring of 1945. Elly Gotz was seventeen and recuperating in a makeshift hospital near the town of Geltendorf in the south of Germany. When he looked up from his bed, he saw a three hundred-year-old stone ceiling held up by old wooden arches. The monastery was a cold place of mostly hard surfaces like stone floors and wood benches. The wheeled-in hospital cots were the only soft surfaces, and the first comfort Elly and most other people there had felt in years.
The long halls of the monastery housed dozens of other weakened men, women, and children. All had just been rescued from the main Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. Among these men was Elly’s father, a fifty-four-year-old Lithuanian who now barely weighed his own age in pounds. Elly himself only weighed about seventy pounds and struggled to lift his emaciated body from the bed. When he did have the strength, he would walk the stone stairs of the monastery to exercise and rebuild what muscle he could.
If he wasn’t exploring the grassy surroundings of the monastery, Elly was with his father and the other survivors in their room. Conversations filled the long stone halls with lively voices: German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, among others. The rows of beds the only soft surfaces to mute the echoes.
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