APOLLO 11 – PAVING THE WAY – Part 2
A U.S. government agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had been manning a space program that made slow but steady progress, with NASA launching two suborbital-manned flights in 1962. Marine officer, John Glenn, becomes the first American to blast off in a tiny space capsule and orbited the earth while NASA completed sixteen manned flights under Mercury and Gemini programs between 1962 and 1866.
Through these missions, a three-man crew was being prepared to take Project Apollo to the moon. However, in 1967 as three astronauts boarded the space capsule for routine testing a fire erupted–Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, died instantly from inhaling deadly smoke. An investigation revealed that a short circuit had caused a spark which led to the fatal fire. Because of the disaster, there was a twenty-one month delay in Project Apollo with many safety features being added to the space capsule to prevent any more accidents.
In 1968, a preliminary flight called Apollo 8 rose from Cape Kennedy in Florida to orbit around the moon. The crew was made up of astronauts–William Anders, James Lovell, and Frank Borman. The craft had to reach the speed of 24,226 miles per hour in order to break away from the earth’s gravitational pull. This meant it had to go ten times faster than a rifle bullet and much swifter than human beings had ever previously flown. Apollo 8 orbited around the moon after three busy days in space. It was the year 1968, and they had traveled farther away from home than at any other time in history.
After Apollo 8, two more Apollo missions paved the way for the historic moon landing. The world waited anxiously for Apollo 11 to begin the incredible voyage that would send American astronauts to the moon. In July of 1969, the Saturn rocket and Apollo 11 rose magnificently into the sky. It was much more than one nation’s expedition to the earth’s ancient champion, it was looked upon as mankind’s greatest adventure. As the Saturn rocket stood steaming on the pad at Cape Kennedy it was viewed as the largest, most powerful machine ever made by man. The rocket topped by the spacecraft towered as high as a 35-story building. It was heavier than the combined weight of 25 jetliners. Built by 300,000 workers, five million separate parts went into its construction. Tons of blueprints, millions of manual pages, and contracts from 20,000 different companies went into the results.
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