The Apollo project, which came to fruition when human beings from planet Earth set foot on the Moon in 1969, was born eight years earlier. On May 25, 1961, American President John F Kennedy, speaking before Congress, urged that Americans should reach for the Moon and land there "before the decade is out". NASA had been set up three years previously and was already well into the Mercury project to get an American into orbit. It realised that from Mercury to Apollo would be too great a step, and so initiated an intermediate programme, the Gemini project. Six successful Mercury flights and ten successful Gemini flights by 1966 provided the know-how and experience that made the prospects of a decade's end Apollo Moon-landing very favourable. While the Mercury and Gemini astronauts were pushing forward the frontiers of manned space flight, work was forging ahead on the complex hardware that would be needed for a Moon landing. First there was the mammoth Saturn V launch vehicle, 111-metre
high on the launch pad, the mightiest rocket there had ever been. There was the new launch complex 39 at Cape Canaveral, which was dominated by the huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Saturn Vs would be put together. There was the Apollo spacecraft itself, a three-part craft designed for a three-astronaut crew. A modular craft was needed to effect the manoeuvres required to travel to the Moon, land and return to Earth. The technique was known as lunar orbit rendezvous. The crew travelled in the command module (CM), which was mated with the equipment, or service module (SM). The combined unit was called the CSM. Attached to the CM for the journey to the Moon was the Moon landing craft, the lunar module (LM). The whole craft went into lunar orbit, then two of the astronauts descended to the surface in the LM. After their surface exploration, they returned in the upper part of the LM and rendezvoused with their colleague, who had been circling above them in the CSM.
Jettisoning the LM, they returned to Earth in the CSM. The first planned manned Apollo mission, Apollo 1, never took place. The astronauts were killed in a horrific fire during training in their capsule on the launch pad in January 1967. Following a spacecraft redesign, the first manned mission, Apollo 7, did not take place until October 1968. Two months later, Apollo 8 set out on a pathfinding mission to circumnavigate the Moon. Two further missions - Apollo 9 in Earth orbit and Apollo 10 in lunar orbit - blazed the trail for Apollo 11 and the first Moon landing. Apollo 11 set down on the Moon's Sea of Tranquillity on July 20, 1969.
First Neil Armstrong and then Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin planted their footprints in the lunar soil. They collected samples of soil and rock, set up experiments and took pictures of the bare dusty landscape. They unveiled a plaque on one of the legs of the LM, which read: 'Here men from planet Earth first set foot on the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.' Over the next three-and-a-half years five more Apollo craft set down in different regions of the Moon on missions 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. Apollo 12 journeyed to the Ocean of Storms, Apollo 14 to the Fra Mauro region, Apollo 15 to the foothills of the Apennines, Apollo 16 to the Descartes highlands and Apollo 17 to the Taurus-Littrow region at the edge of the Sea of Serenity. There was an Apollo 13 mission, but this nearly ended in disaster when the spacecraft was crippled by an explosion on the outward journey. The crew just made it back to Earth.
On the last three Apollo missions, the astronauts roamed much farther afield using a lunar roving vehicle, or Moon buggy, for transport. By the time the last mission had finished, the Apollo astronauts had collected 385 kg of Moon rocks and soil, 50 core samples, 30,000 photographs and 20,000 reels of taped geological data. They had set up five scientific stations, using instruments and equipment known as ALSEP (Apollo lunar surface experiments package). These continued to send back data for years afterwards.
The Apollo 17 moonwalkers left the Moon on December 14, 1972. They left behind at their landing site a plaque that reads: 'Here man completed his first exploration of the Moon. December 1972. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.' So ended the greatest adventure in the history of mankind.
