Although today we remember it as an honorable and impressive episode, the truth is that stress and anguish predominated in the Apollo 11 mission. The odds of returning from the Moon safely were really low. Maybe that’s why president Richard Nixon preferred to watch his back by having a memo written entitled In Event of Moon Disaster as a tribute to the astronauts in case they never returned from Selene. Fortunately, he never had to read it.
Neil Armstrong was the first human being to walk on the Moon, but we should not forget the undoubted and scatological recognition of his fellow Buzz Aldrin: he was the first human being to urinate on the Moon. The problem is that when he jumped to the moon’s surface, his bag of urine from the space suit broke and all his liquid ended up in his left boot. So for the entire moon walk his foot was wet…
The astronauts’ worst nightmare almost came true. After finishing their two and a half hour moon walk they entered the lunar module “Eagle” ready to return with their companion Michael Collins. We can imagine Armstrong and Aldrin with their faces unstuck when they saw that the fuse in charge of starting the Eagle’s engine was broken. Thankfully, Aldrin used his engineering skills and fixed the damage… with a plastic pen. A few pennies were enough to repair millions of dollars worth of machinery…
The Apollo 11 logo has an important mistake. From that point of view, the Earth orb that appears in the background should be shadowed by its lower part, not by its left half, even though in the photographs taken during the Apollo 10 mission this could already be intuited.
When astronauts successfully landed in the North Pacific on July 24, 1969, they were quickly placed in quarantine (which lasted 21 days in total) and disinfected alongside the space vehicle in case they brought in any potentially dangerous alien pathogens. These procedures were only carried out on two more occasions: with the Apollo 13 and 14 missions. It was then definitively established that the Moon was a dead world and that it did not harbour any kind of life.
