Gold played an important role in the Apollo 11 moon mission. It is a reliable component of spacecraft circuitry and the lining of astronauts’ visors to shield them from the sun’s dangerous heat and ultraviolet light.
You can also find gold in architecture, medicine, dentistry, and almost every electronic component.
Remarkably, knowing how little gold there is here on Earth with all that in mind might surprise you. Here is an example. If you melt down the world’s entire aboveground stock of approximately 190,000 tons of gold, it will form a 72-foot cube.
And if that were divided up proportionately for every person on Earth, we’d all get about an ounce of complete 24-karat gold each. And that’s around $1,500 worth.
New deposits of gold are increasingly difficult to come by and increasingly challenging to locate.
Geologists have concluded that only 55,000 tons remain hidden away in the Earth’s crust. This means if current global mining rates continue, we could run out of newfound gold in just 20 years.
Therefore, as gold mining continues to slow down and the costs associated with mining increase to meet the challenges of extraction, gold could become even more expensive.
Apollo Space Program and Gold
Gold is a valued industrial metal for its conductivity, pliability, and resistance to corrosion. Precious metals are also a valuable component in the aerospace industry because of their thermal control property as it reflects dangerous infrared radiation.
Pictures of the Apollo Lunar Module show how NASA has used gold. According to their engineers, a very thin layer of gold leaf was used as the top layer of the thermal blanket used to cover the module’s bottom. The blanket was quite complex, with 25 layers of material, including glass, wool, Mylar, Kapton, and aluminum.
Due to its reflective properties, a thin layer of gold is also in an astronaut’s helmet’s visor. The gold in the astronaut’s visor will allow visible light through but reflects infrared light.
For the Apollo 16 moon landing, the crew left a gold-plated, extreme ultraviolet telescope that “performed the first astronomical observations from another heavenly body, according to NASA.
Over the decades, technological advancements have improved gold usage in space exploration. One of the most important steps forward was the creation of Laser Gold, which NASA has extensively used for gold plating.
Not All Gold is Equal (Laser Gold)
We’ve developed a process to increase gold’s reflectivity. Laser Gold was first developed in mass quantity for Xerox. This company needed durable and reflective gold plating for its copy machines, which use infrared heating. NASA then learned about that technology later.
For nearly 40 years, NASA has gold-plated about 50 different instruments that have been launched into space. And for any instrument NASA needs to keep cool, they plate it with Laser Gold.
Gold Plating vs. Silver
What makes Laser Gold so unique is that while it is pure gold, it is three times harder than regular metal. The metal is hardened by manipulating the electrical current in the plating bath. By manipulating the current in a certain way, they can pack the gold atoms more densely to make a harder gold material.
The gold plating is only a micron thick, about forty-millionth of an inch.
So, it doesn’t take much gold to get the reflectivity that is required. Not only has gold been a critical element in space exploration, but we don’t see any substitution anytime soon. Silver has similar reflective properties, but the metal is not as durable.
Neil Armstrong’s Personal Apollo 11 Gold Medal
The personal gold medal that commander Neil A. Armstrong brought in his baggage during his July 1969 mission to the lunar surface was sold at auction for more than $2 million on July 16, 50 years after the Apollo 11 crew took off on their historic journey.
The gold medal realized $2,055,000 in the sale conducted by Heritage Auctions. It was graded Mint State 67 by the well-known Numismatic Guaranty Corp. So, and it was part of the firm’s auction of items from the collection of Neil Armstrong’s family.
Production of those gold medals debuted during NASA’s Apollo program, starting with the first manned Apollo flight. Apollo 7 mission crew members negotiated with the Robbins Co. to produce a series of silver and gold medals. The Robbins medals were ordered by NASA crew and staff, who were allowed to buy medals for any mission despite their mission participation. Many of Robbin’s medals were placed aboard the Apollo spacecraft throughout a mission.
The Neil Armstrong gold medal is one of three for Apollo 11. Astronauts Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins also held personal examples of the mission’s medal.
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SPEEDMASTER APOLLO 11 50TH ANNIVERSARY MOONSHINE GOLD LIMITED EDITION
The original gold Speedmasters were presented to astronauts at a gala dinner in Houston in 1969. A unique gold Speedmaster was created to celebrate the success of Apollo 11. Only 1,014 pieces were made, with numbers 3 – 28 being gifted to NASA’s serving astronauts. Today’s new watch remains true to that design.
There are different models of the Speedmaster. This is the original Moonwatch. It comes only in black with white dials. Due to its success, Omega developed many iterations of this original model.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and please feel free to browse my website for more interesting facts about the Mission to the Moon, and especially Apollo 11.
To learn more about the first landing on the moon, check out our article, First Apollo Mission to Land on the Moon: A Historic Milestone.