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Things You Never Knew About the First Moon Landing

Forty years ago this month a mighty Saturn-5 rocket blasted off with the force of one hundred locomotives propelling two men into history! They became the first human beings to ever set foot on another world. This was the first Moon landing.

David Reneke And Buzz Aldrin. Image Credit: David Reneke 

No-one had ever done this before. Would they land OK? Would they crash? Would they sink into the lunar soil? NASA gave them a 50-50 chance at best. Would you go?

Well, it did work and they got back safely. Together they spent 21 hours on the moon's surface, planting the American flag and a steel plaque bearing a message of peace. They collected some 21 kilos of rocks before making a triumphal return to Earth.

Was it a hastily conceived "flags and footprints" effort to keep ahead of the Soviet competition? Perhaps, but a lot of things happened during that mission we weren’t told about.

Australian astronomer, writer, lecturer and representative for Australasian Science magazine David Reneke has unearthed dozens of things you weren’t told about the first Moon landing from previously classified CIA files and talks he had with Buzz Aldrin when he spent time with him at his home in California in 2008.

They form the basis of a new E-Book David’s compiled which can be found at www.davidreneke.com. David warned some of the information will make you shudder and may be disturbing to some people. Here’s just a few.

We know now Apollo 11 was followed part of the way to the Moon by an unknown and unidentified object. The astronauts thought it was the third stage booster, but NASA advised the booster was 6,000 miles away. “Video was shot and to this day, no satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming,” David said.

As Armstrong and Aldrin approached the Moon in the lunar module their onboard computer froze. No wonder, the hard drive was rated at just 74kb! Ridiculous by today’s standards! In fact, there’s more computing power in the average mobile phone than there was on the entire flight of Apollo-11.

During descent, NASA were sending them to their doom, a boulder filled crater that would have turned the lander over. Armstrong, seeing the danger, took over manual control, landing them in a relatively flat area with just 14 seconds of fuel to spare!

On the day of the moonwalk more than 3.9 billion people stopped what they were doing to watch and you just couldn’t help but feel you were part of something very, very special. Armstrong announced he was going to exit the lander early, hours ahead of schedule.

Dave Reneke and Buzz ALdrin with lunar lander model. Image Credit: David Reneke 

As we all watched Armstrong set foot on the Moon we all thought we were watching the original footage – but we weren’t. The format was unsuitable for television. To get transmissible pictures out, a Parkes technician held a video camera up to a black and white monitor on a table in the control room recording the images from the screen. This was then sent to TV stations around the world! “No wonder the images were double exposed,” David said.

Only a handful of people in that control room have ever seen the original, sharper footage. Amazingly, the original reels of tape that held such rare and historic images of Neil’s Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon ended up, along with hundreds of others, of being lost!

Also amazing is the fact that there was no outside door handle on the lunar lander. Nobody remembered to fit one on! Imagine this, if the hatch had closed while Neil and Buzz were on the lunar surface they had no way of getting back inside.

When Buzz and Neil entered the lunar module to prepare to blast off the lunar surface Aldrin’s backpack snapped the firing switch to fire their engines. They were in trouble. Buzz managed to stick a pen into the switch though and connect the contacts. It worked, and saved the moon mission from certain disaster.

On the Moon, the astronauts got a call from President Nixon praising their efforts. What we didn’t know was that a tape he’d recorded earlier saying how sad it was the two gallant men died on the Moon was sitting on his desk. This was to be broadcast immediately world-wide if something went wrong.

Upon return the three astronauts held in quarantine, just in case they came back with any strange organisms from the moon. By the way, in a case of bureaucracy gone mad, the astronauts had to fill out a customs declaration form after returning with their samples of moon rocks and lunar dust. True!

I guess Buzz Aldrin was always destined to walk on the moon – after all, his mother’s maiden name was … ‘Moon.’ Really! They left a plaque on the Moon that reads, “We came in peace for all mankind.” Let’s hope it always remains that way. For more previously unreleased info on the moon landing visit www.davidreneke.com 

David Reneke is a space/astronomy writer, lecturer and radio broadcaster. More about David and his work can be found on his web page http://www.davidreneke.com/

Reneke and 'The Dish' (Parkes Radio Telescope) in background. Image Credit: David Reneke 

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