Liftoff from the moon was seemingly the biggest fear of the whole flight to the moon. Because what if the engine didn’t start? The Apollo 11 astronauts had just one shot, fail, or success. What If Apollo 11 failed and got stuck on the moon? For all the celebrations surrounding the first human-crewed lunar landing of Apollo 11, 1969. What is forgotten today is just how close they and the other Apollo missions flew to the edge of disaster. Apollo 11 came within seconds of failing the landing. Because they had overshot the landing area, and we’re running low on fuel. This was only one of many issues with the Apollo missions that arose, leading to the loss of the mission and the crew.
Though, as it turned out, only Apollo13 came close to this actually happening. It obviously eliminates the Apollo 1 accident where the crew died because of the fire as they rehearsed the launch on January 27th, 1967.
When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during the launch, it knocked out several electrical systems. But the main navigation systems continued to work, and the rest of the mission proceeded successfully.
Apollo 16, the engine backup system malfunctioned on the command module as it orbited to the moon, resulting in the flight being one day shorter. Still, Mission Control determined that they could work around the fault instead of aborting the mission.
Apollo 11 was just a test flight
Even Apollo 11 was just a test flight, and it was building upon the result and achievement of the previous Apollo missions.
Apollo 11 was the first attempt at a human-crewed landing. It was driven as much by the desire to achieve President Kennedy’s directive to put a man on the moon before the end of a decade, and it was to beat the perceived threat of the Soviets getting there. First, US national pride was a steak if either of these failed.
As Apollo 11 was to be the first landing, NASA wanted to make sure that it would be as event-free as possible, so they chose to land on the most significant flattest part of the moon they could find, officially known as “Site 2,” which was a 10-mile wrong elliptical area in the northern sea of tranquility. The idea was the flight computer onboard the lander would guide it down from 50,000 feet to 500 feet above the surface when Armstrong would then take over the final landing controls.
How Neil Armstrong overshot his intended landing point
However, Armstrong became aware early on that things were not going to plan, and then they’d already flown over the landing site and were heading to a boulder-strewn area known as West crater about the size of a football field.
He assumed control from the computer and manually flew over West crater and another small crater before landing on the outer edge of “Site 2” about four miles from its intended target and uttering the immortal words “Houston, Tranquility Base here – the Eagle has landed.”
As he was making the final descent, Mission Control estimated that they had just 25 seconds of fuel left when they landed. However, this was later revised to 45 seconds after the mission.
NASA rules it required that missions be aborted if there were less than 20 seconds of fuel left because if they didn’t, there was a danger, but they might not be able to perform an emergency ascent.
Apollo 11 emergency abort
To abort the mission, they would have to start an emergency ascent protocol that would separate the ascent module from the lander to fly back to the command module. It would take between two and four seconds for the emergency abort to complete any ascent engine to fire.
All the time, they would still be traveling alongside the descent stage. If they didn’t get far enough away from the descent stage, then there was the risk of any remaining rocket fuel exploding when it crashed into the surface, and the flying debris could hit and damage the escaping module.
How many ascent engines did the lunar module have?
The other great danger of the mission was, but no one really knew if the ascent module would take off. It has not been tested on the moon up until the start of the mission. Don’t forget that the lunar module had only one ascent engine.
If this were the case, then the crew would be stuck on the moon. It’s not known if the crew had suicide pills with them. If in case they were stranded because there would be no chance of any rescue. NASA did not have any standby rockets or landers ready.
Thirty years after the first landing, a previously secret memo was discovered at the American National Archives. They were showing what NASA plans to do in the case of such a tragic event.
Did NASA plan to cut communications?
In the event of a worst-case situation, NASA planned to cut communications with the stranded crew. And they will be left to die as they run out of oxygen or commit suicide. Something but the crew later said they did not know of.
Just two days before the Apollo 11 mission, Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire was tasked with creating for condolence speech. That will be delivered by the President in the event of such a tragedy occurring.
Unlike the Apollo one disaster, there would be no way for NASA to examine the scene closely to determine what happened if the lander crashed on the lunar surface.
NASA had discussed using one of the four remaining Ranger probes, which had six TV cameras on board. The Rangers didn’t fly over the moon, taking a video. Instead, they picked areas to image and then transmitted the images back to earth. All this while as it approached and crashed into the lunar surface.
Was there a Hasselblad camera onboard the command module?
Finally, this idea was dropped in favor of using a Hasselblad film camera onboard the command module. It was able to take images at a low altitude of 10 miles above the surface. This would give a resolution of down to one foot. That is enough to see what happened to the lander and if the crew were outside.
Although the commander taking the images would have just 10 seconds to locate and photo. The scenes from 10 miles above and traveling at orbital speed around the moon. Luckily no major tragedies occurred with the remaining Apollo mission. And neither NASA’s final plan nor the President’s speech was needed.
I hope you enjoyed this short article. Find out more about Apollo 11 experiments on the moon.