Nine Days in July is a production of I Heart Radio and Trade Traft Studios in association with High five Content. On May fifth, nineteen sixty one, just four months after he assumed the presidency, John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and said the following, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on
the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive
to accomplish. Think about it. Less than three weeks after launching the first American into space, a trip that lasted only fifteen minutes, the President went before Congress and charged the country with landing on the Moon before the end of the decade, and why so that we could wallop
the rush. Recognizing the head stock obtained by the Soviets, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless or required to make new efforts on our own. For a while, we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first. We can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us lost. Kennedy is inspiring
and pragmatic. He wants America to go to the Moon, but he recognizes that the colossal technology, infrastructure, hardware, and workforce necessary to make it happen does not exist. America would be starting from scratch, and it was going to be expensive. Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a cost which will
lost for many years and carry very heavy costs. If we ought to go only ah way or reduce our sites in the face of difficulty, In my judgment, it would be better not to go at all. Apollo would be bigger than anything NASA had ever attempted, by several orders of magnitude, requiring the most significant commitment of peacetime
resources and innovation the country had ever seen. There is no sense in desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. Kennedy is down to brass tax now, and he's not above baking. This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel, and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they're already
thinly in spread. In bringing it Home, Kennedy reminds his audience of the stakes. Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, now it is time to take longer strides, Time for a great new American enterprise, time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key
to our future on Earth, freedom and tyranny. For most Americans, at least in retrospect, Apollo was about science, technology, and exploration, but not Kennedy. For the President, it was about stopping communism before it swallowed the planet whole. The stakes were literally saving the free world. But as we will learn this hour, there were many more Americans who didn't give a damn about either of those two motivations, and with very good reason. It's July nineteen sixty nine, day three
of the Apollo eleven mission. This is Apollo control of forty six hours twenty eight minutes around the lapse of time a little more than a half hour remaining in the crew sleep period. Members of the Green team of flight controllers, headed up by Prime Flight Director Cliff charles Worth, are coming into the control room at this time, and that each console handover is taking place from the black watch. Have you ever stopped to consider the gargantuan undertaking that
the Apollo project represented. Pulling off Kennedy's audacious vision required hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of companies, and tens of billions of dollars on paper, There's no way that Apollo should have worked. It should have been too big, too unwieldy, too time consuming, and too expensive. And yet, against all odds, in spite of tragic accidents, political hatchet jobs, and public protests, the United States pulled
it off. But before we look into the army that was required to get Apollo off the ground, let's listen in as Bruce McCandless in Mission Control rouses our crew at morning hands. You're a great day, pride night. Yeah, we very quiet night down air. I've got the morning news here if you're interested over Yeah, already copy and comment already there uh Roder buzzes pointing out that if it's too thirty in the afternoon in Houston, this can't
be called the morning news from St. Petersburg, Florida. Come to the radio report from a Narrowagian explorers or hired Doll which in the crew of his p pirates boat or well they'll end a break down Barbados and bite damage from heavy seas. Thor hired All was a Norwegian explorer who wanted to prove that ancient peoples were capable of making epics, sea voyages and contacting far flung cultures. He constructed a boat made from papyrus, just like the
ancient Egyptians did, and attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean. However, the raw would sink before reaching its destination. Thankfully, the entire crew was rescued and a year from now Thor will build Raw too and successfully complete the journey from Morocco to Barbados, a fitting terrestrial echo to Apollo Levin's
extraordinary stellar journey. And in Corby, England and Irish wind John Coyle has won the World urried Gating Championship by consuming twenty three bowls events, and not meal in a ten minute time limits from a field of thirty five other competitors over I like Dianna and Time. Pretty good at that. He's, as you may have already guessed, Mission Control is curating the news, choosing only stories designed to bring a smile to the faces of three astronauts racing
far away from everything and everyone they love. But the truth is all is not well back home. Spanning Apollo eleven's nine day mission, the streets of York, Pennsylvania, will become the site of a race war after a seventeen year old African American boy is shot by a white gang looking to stir up trouble. Soon, black and white mobs clash violently across the city. The next day, three police officers will be shot, and one, the two year old rookie who's only been on the force for ten months,
will be killed. The mayor will declare a state of emergency and flood the streets with state troopers to begin restoring order, or so he thinks. Angry at the death of one of their own, the city police officers will begin telling white gangs they need to protect their homes and shoot any blacks they come across. Local cops even pass out ammunition. One of those bullets may have killed a twenty seven year old black woman and mother of two from South Carolina who is visiting her sister when
the violence begins consuming the city. She and her family are returning from a fishing trip when barricaded streets forced them to drive through a white neighborhood, where several men opened fire in the car, hitting her in the chest and killing her. Why don't I bring this up? As the sun sets? In the nineteen sixties, race relations threatened to tear this country apart, and the systemic suppression of African Americans even intersects profoundly with the Apollo eleven mission.
As we will learn today, the country about to land on the Moon seems incapable of solving its most fundamental problems back home. As the political turmoil at home rages on and our boys continue their trek toward the Moon, Let's take a look at how NASA made the impossible possible. The Apollo program dwarfs any other engineering project ever undertaken by humanity. Previous ventures like the Manhattan Project and the construction of the Panama Canal pale in comparison. I'm Bill
Berry and I'm the NASA chief historian. So over the course of the nineteen sixties, the official numbers billion dollars in nineteen sixties money. That's a huge amount of money, and four hunds of thousand people worked on the project, and twenty thousand different U S companies across the unitsates were subcontractors are in some way, shape or form. In nineteen sixty one, the year Kennedy kicked Apollo off, NASA
spent about one million dollars on the program. Just five years later, it was spending roughly the same amount every three hours. NASA slice of the federal budget at the time was about five point five If the national budget were a dollar, NASA was consuming more than a nickel. Adjusted for two thousand and nineteen, the Apollo program costs two hundred and eighty eight billion dollars. Only the Vietnam
War was more expensive. At the time of Kennedy's charge, NASA was just eight thousand employees scattered around a handful of small facilities, but Apolloscope made them instantly obsolete. NASA needed a lot more people and a lot more space. The first priority was a command center from which to run the entire program. It really need a much larger facility, and the decisions made located in Houston. So that's the
birth of the Johnson Space Flight Center. At the time, the facility was known as the Manned Space Fight Center. This was to be the home of mission control and space flight missions to the Moon and perhaps the planets will be commanded from this control room of the Mission Control Center at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, twenty two miles
southeast of Houston, Texas. It was built on six acres of cattle grazing land donated by Rice University, the same Rice University where Kennedy uttered these famous words, Great, here's to go to the moon and this detained and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Next up was a place to launch the rockets from. People have been using the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station down there on the coast of Florida. But they realized that for you, for quality're going to
need much bigger facility. So the Kennedy Space Center. It's not the Kennedy Space Center is built next to the Cape Canaveral, a huge facility of its own, One of dasa's major installations devoted to achieving the goals of the nation's space programs is the John F. Kennedy Space Center Launch Site, or the Apollo Saturn five. It would not be named the Kennedy Space Center until after the President's death.
At this time, it is the Launch Operations Center. To give you some context of just how much bigger and more powerful the Saturn was going to be than anything that came before it. The launch escape system that sat on the very top of the Saturn five to yank the command module free in an emergency was more powerful than the entire Mercury Redstone that launched the first American into outer space. The abort signaled figures separation of the
module from the launch vehicle. Simultaneously, the launch escape motor and pitch control motor ignite, accelerating the command module away from the launch vehicle. NASA also needed a place to build the Saturn five. They decided to build a test facility in the middle of the swamps on the south
coast Marshall Space Flight Center. Why in the middle of a swamp, building and testing rockets tends to be well noisy, So NASSI goes from being um sleepy eight thousand or so of personal organization there ultimately small leg and grows over fourfold. By the mid sixties, you've got over thirty eight thousand employees working for NASA, and all these multiple facilities, all brand spanking new that are all built all across
the South and the United States. As these various centers were being built, NASA turned its attention to even more fundamental problems. Exactly how is America going to get to the Moon. The problem is really quite simple, find the best path to get from point A two point B. But of course this is a great over simplification. There are three options. Direct descent, where you take a big rocket, launch it to the Moon, the whole thing lands in
the Moon, and the whole thing goes back again. This is the model made popular by classic sci fi films of the eighteen fifties, when the moon monsters, under the direction of writting, ruthless Dictator of the Moon, scheme to invade the Earth and have your rank un set up ready to blast them. This time you must not fail. And they decided, well, there's another alternative, where we could build a spaceship in Earth orbit. We launched pieces of it, so we don't have to build such a big rocket
on Earth. So that's Earth orbit rendevou Verni von Braun, the x Nazi rocket scientists who designed the Saturn five, preferred this option. A voyage around the Moon must be made in two phases. A rocket ship taking off from the surface. We'll use almost all the fuel that can carry just to attain a speed great enough to balance the pool of gravity. However, if we can refuel the ship in this orbit with fuel brought up by cargo rocket chips, it can set out on the second phase,
the trip around the Moon and back. And there's this other idea that they're called lunar orbit rendevout, where you build a rocket, sent it to the Moon and it's like a big cruise ship. It pulls into the harbor and then the passengers get off on a smaller dinghy and run into the shore to go to their visits and then come back out again. The problem was known at NASA liked this last idea well, almost no one. John Hubalt was convinced that lunar orbit rendezvous was the
only way NASA would successfully meet Kennedy's vision. The idea of using l O R lunar Orbert rendezvous as a way to go into the Moon appealed to me tremendously. I knew, however, that it would meet with much opposition. People in fact, would probably think I was crazy. Who about This is a really interesting character. He's was an engineer at Langley Research Center where they were looking at
questions about orbital mechanics. Hubbolt sort of grabbed this idea. Mathematically, this makes the most sense, and he basically championed that idea. The reason known at NASA like who Bolt's option is because it required the astronauts to dock their spacecraft two hundred and fifty thousand miles away. Remember this is half a decade before Project Gemini proved it was even possible in Earth orbit. So this terrified NASA's engineers, and so
who Bolt was sidelined. He may not have been high ranking or well connected, but he was tenacious, and so he jumped the NASA chain of command. They really put his career on the line by being a real pest about it, you know, going over people's head, sending letters to Dept Administrator NASA and other things that you know could have gotten fired. Who Will argued that for direct descent to work, they need a rocket even larger and more expensive than the proposed SATURD five and Earth orbit
rendezvous required multiple launches. But he kept at it, and eventually pounding away at it. You know, people realize, well, you know, maybe that's winder with thing around the moon isn't so bad, And look at the math on this, we can actually do with missing one Saturn five launch, you know it. Eventually it wins out, and hop Will becomes sort of the hero in the story, largely because he was smart enough to do it and brave enough to take on the powers that be to push the idea.
The accomplishment of lunar orbit rendezvous is a vital portion of the Apollo lunar landing missions. The next question was what would these spacecraft look like and who would build them. Getting a very good view of the work going on in the come out on Service module tunnel preparation for
the dress people Uner module. But first let's check in with Apollo eleven, currently one and seventy five thousand nautical miles away from Earth, where the astronauts are preparing to open up the lunar module for the very first time. They're filming the whole thing and beaming it back to Charlie Duke in mission control. We're really getting great a drug remment coming back. Once removal of the drogue is completed, they will have access to the lam hatch and be
able to go into the tunnel. The drogue is part of the mechanism used to dock the two spacecraft to enter the lunar module. Neil must first remove the drogue as it blocks the narrow tunnel connecting the two ships. Looked like it's pretty crowded in there with that grove over alright, dv Cale will get in a way. One guess who the guy making the jokes is, of course as Michael Collins. If it sounds like I've been making fun of Michael Collins, think again, in a very real way.
He is the most accessible of our crew. Neil and Buzz are always so straight laced. Both were described in their day as squares. Michael is much more well down to earth bare. He didn't really have a hanging card there. We can't really complain things like I had. They were about to open the hand now, but we don't see
anything up there. Well, greas good, This is the first time that anyone other than the technicians who built her has climbed inside the lemb During the Apollo mission, this vehicle, the Lunar Module, will take two men and their scientific instruments to the surface of the Moon. While there, it will serve as command post and communications center, and when the astronauts finished their exploration, it will take them back to the orbiting command module for the return trip to Earth.
In late July of nineteen sixty two, NASA invited nearly a dozen companies to bid on the Lunar Module design. The winning concept came from the aircraft manufacturer, the Grumman Corporation. These are the guys who built the F nine Panther that Neil flew in Korea. Later, they designed the most beautiful American fighter jet to ever take to the sky, the fourteen Tomcat. I'm standing on the floor of plant number five at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Best Page,
New York. The Lunar Modules, or lambs for short, were designed, assembled, and tested at Grumman's Long Island facility in New York. Mike Lisa was a Grumman environmental test engineer. When I went to the interview to Grummin. They said, James, you're gonna be working on the LAMB. I go, Lamb, you're kidding So now I said, oh my gosh, I was through the day one. None of the engineers at Grumman had ever built anything like the LAMB before. No one had. The Lamb was for use on the Moon. It would
never taste Earth's atmosphere. It would live and die in the vacuum of space. As such, unlike its gum drop shaped sibling, the Command Module, the Limb did need to be aerodynamic. Once you get two D fifty miles away, there's no atmosphere it obviously, it doesn't have to be sleek, doesn't have to look Because of that, it would never be described as beautiful. Instead of smooth, sleek sides, it was functional, bristling with sharp edges, antennas, weird bulges, and
clusters of thrusters. Appropriately enough, it looked like something alien. The thing has a face, eyes, nose, even a mouth. It was a spider, it was. The Lamb evolved a lot. First it was roughly capsule shaped. Still later it resembled a helicopter cockpit with large curved windows. Then someone got out of calculator and added up how much it would weigh, and that was the end of that. The lamb had to be liked or else it would never get off
the moon. Grumman's engineers soon became obsessed with taking weight off. The single massive window was ditched and in its place two small triangular shaped windows were substituted. Glasses heavy. Five landing legs offered the best possible stability, but that was one too many. Now it was only four. At one point in time on the lemb they actually had seats, and they said, now get these things out of here.
Grumman proposed having the astronauts climb out of the vehicle by using a rope ladder, or even at one point repelled down the side via a rope. Ultimately they compromised on an aluminum ladder. Throughout the different phases of its design and construction, Grumman built full sized wooden mock ups for the NASA personnel to tour, equipment to be test fitted,
and even space suited astronauts to try out. Buzz and Leo had put it on the backpack, and what happened was when they tried to get through the round opening, it was beaten the heckhead of the backpack, so it instantly was a redesign. I mean it was like, stop everything, this thing has to become rec dangular. The limb has two sections, the ascent stage from which the astronauts operated the craft, and the decent stage, with its spider legs and compartments for all of their equipment. This is the
bit that gets left on the Moon. The engine on the decent stage is the most sophisticated ever designed. It's powerful enough to get the lemb down to the lunar surface, but it can also allow the lemb to hover like a helicopter while the astronauts choose a suitable landing spot. All that gold foil wrapped around the descent stage is milar insulation. It reflects hot sunlight away from the sensitive equipment.
Beneath the foil is the craft's metal hull. At some places, it's the thickness of only three inches of kitchen aluminum foil, but once pressurized, it was remarkably strong. Think about it in terms of a soda can. After you've finished your soda. It's fairly easy to pierce the side of its aluminum skin, but it takes a lot more work to do, so when the contents are under pressure, it's the same idea here.
Once the lemb was pressurized in the vacuum of space, it was much stronger than how it was back in Grumman's labs, where a misplaced foot or a fallen screw driver could have easily punctured the hull. Never in history had a flying machine gone into service without a comprehensive test fight. But when it came to landing on the Moon, there was no other way to do it, which meant that Mike and his team had their work cut out
for them. It was their job to stress test every individual part that went into the lamb, not once, but thousands of times. I need you to picture a huge speaker, a regular ordinary speaker, except that the speaker is going to be about fifteen ft in diameter. Mike's vibration machines are basically speakers. They would mount the lamb on top of these shakers to simulate the vibrations experience during takeoff
and all the other phases of the mission. It was shaking the lamb to the point where it was they would fall apart. I mean, we had actually introduced so many g forces that we wouldnock things off and m just to see if we can break it. We had to prove that the best thing was going to make it to the bone and back to Earth in one piece. On another test, they rotated the lamb upside down and shook it to see if anything would come off, and well,
MD hold outcomes are nut a plane ordinary nut. It hit the ground on and the Nasser inspector was there and he pulled the plug on us. He stopped us for an entire week, and all of those units had to be inspected to a point where you wouldn't believe. Mike and his colleagues were obsessed with ensuring that everything they touched was perfect. Three folks life depending on this, and he wanted to be flawless. The importance that would leaned on everybody's mind was the safety of bringing these
guys out and hitting them back. It wasn't an easy job. We were twelve hours a day here, sixty five days. He would never stopped. I remember taking a week off of my own, remember that. Other than that, no vacations, no, no, nothing. I couldn't wait to get to work. I knew this was going to be a big thing in all life I mean. To be a part of that history is
absolutely incredible. I really loved doing that work. Mike was a new father when he watched the landing from the living room of his house, the same house in fact, where he lives today. I was sitting right here on this look with my black night television, the little baby upstairs crying, and uh. When I finally swear after they hit the ground, I couldn't believe it. I tell you, I had goose poems that you almost get a tear out of it. It was starting. It was incredible to
see all all were finally coming to fruition. It was great. Today Mike volunteers his time at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City as a docent, talking to people about the lamb he helped build. Now that Neil and Buzz have opened her up, let's take a look inside, shall we. As you can see, there is not a lot of space in here, just room enough for two men to stand side by side. They each have a
window angled down towards the ground. In the front there you can see joysticks, altimeters, a bunch of knobs, switches and circuit breakers. The hatch to get out to the Moon is below these consoles just here at their feet, and that whole directly above your head. That's the hatch connecting the lamb to the command module. The lunar module trammed with instrumentation, communications, equipment, and propulsion, all needed for the important job of jetting two men down to and
away from the surface of the Moon. In all, it took an estimated nine thousand engineers and two point four billion dollars to design and build the lunar module. That's billion with a B. There are many at this time of history who felt that that money could have been better spent. America was losing about fifty men every day in Vietnam, some of the country's most inspiring leaders were
being felled by assassin's bullets. Campus protests and street riots were breaking out across the country, and according to the US Census, of African Americans were living in poverty. In an era of intense racial discrimination, African Americans found themselves trapped between America's technological abilities and its social injustice. America, it seemed, would rather spend hundreds of billions of dollars on war and petty political one upmanship than actually improving
the lives of its citizens. The plight of African Americans at this time inspired Gil Scott Heron depend these words in the song Whitey on the Moon. I can't pay no doctor bills, but White he's on the moon. Ten years from now, I'll be paying still while white is on the moon. You know the man just off my rent last night, because why it is on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but White he's on the moon. Lelon, we haven't good to be to
the window there. It looks like the turns farrently coming through there. We're back in the level. Kneel and Buzz have the camera with them and they're showing the world what it looks like inside. Now, let me tell you if you're looking the other way, Buzz turns the camera around, shooting back into the command module. That's a great good
right there. That's Neil and mind better bigger line. Remember when Mike Lisa mentioned that they'd yanked the lemb seats to save on weight, Well, they swapped them out with tethered restraints so that Neil and Buzz didn't float around inside the spacecraft. Buzz decides to try them on early, but without being in his bulky pressure suit, they don't quite have the same effect. Restraints in here do a
pretty good job of pulling my bands down. We haven't quite got that before the fifty million TV audience yet, careful, Buzz, this is a family show having that th real good camera work, probably the most unusual provision of cameraman's ever head hanging from a tunnel. One thing in a picture up down leven. You got a pretty big audience. It's live in the US, it's going live to Japan, Western Europe and much of South America. Appreciate the great skill.
Hello there, poor Michael, he's feeling left out. Meanwhile, Buzz is fantasizing about pushing off from one end of the lamb and sailing all the way through to the other side of the command module, a travert from the bottom of them to the bulk of the command Model's interesting to not apply to putting off from one and founding on into the other vehicle all the way through the tunnel. But comperiance, if Colin is gonna go in and look around, we're willing to let it go. Come up with the
price of the ticket again. But to advice invocate the man's off. This twitches well, buzzing. Neil are busy in the lem. Let's check out Michael's domain. The command module, after all, this is where the lions share of our podcast takes place. Cockpit, crew, quarters, command center. When America's three astronauts travel to the Moon, they'll use the Apollo Command module for all these things. And of the three modules that make up the spacecraft, this is the only
one that will come back. The commanded service modules were built by North American Aviation. This is the company that built the P fifty one Mustang, one of the most extraordinary planes to come out of World War Two, Buzzes F eight six Saber, and Niel's X fifteen rocket plane. So yeah, these guys know a thing or two about
building extraordinary machines. Chuck Lowry was working for North American Aviation in Columbus, Ohio, designing airplanes when he was given the opportunity to begin working on a new program that NASA was calling Apollo. I was invited to move from Columbus, Ohio to California to be in charge of the landing system. The parachute jumped at the chance to do that. Not many people in the early sixties believed a moon landing was even possible. Chuck remembers being at church one night
shortly before they made the move to California. There was a leader speaking to a group of people, and he said something like a crazy government. Now they say we're going to go to the moon. Go, I don't put people at How many of you really believe that we're gonna put people on the moon? Of course, I raised my hand, and I looked around, and my hand was the only one up. And I looked over my wife sitting next to me and heard him was not a So at that point, not many people in the population
really believe we were going to do that. I did. Chuck and his colleagues put in a lot of ours. We had so many heart attacks, so many divorces among the you know, the workers, and it was a hard job, but it was a thrilling job, and I don't regret a minute of it. All Right, listener, why don't you sit here in the center seat. This is Michael seat. It's going to give you the best view. Almost every inch of the interior wall space is filled with switches, dials,
and gauges. Some are similar to those found in modern jet planes, but others are new designed for the require moments of spaceflight. That's seven foot wide, three foot tall, crescent shaped panel directly in front of you is divided into three sections, one for each of the astronauts. On the left is the panel for Neil, the mission commander. He has the primary flight controls, which govern things like the command modules, altitude, velocity, and attitude. The center panel
is the Command Module Pilots. Michael controls the guidance and navigation computer, propulsion, the environmental system, and thruster controls. On the right is the Lunar Module pilots panel. This isn't Buzzes ship, but since he's going to be in that seat for roughly eight of the nine days, he gets to cover electricity, battery, fuel cells, and calms. In all, there are five hundred and fifty six switches in the command module and twenty four separate instruments, So yeah, this
is one complicated spacecraft. Then when you want to move around, you can stow a couch and you can go down below. There's a lower equipment by which, of course a lot of storage lockers. There are six equipment bays and all they house everything from guidance and navigation equipment, medical supplies, survival gear of food, locker, drinking water, a waste management system, close tools, cameras, fire stingishers, and a dozen other mission
critical supplies. Now, if you look up, you see the tunnels, which is what you used to go up and exit the command module and go into the lunar module. The command module has five small windows, two at eye level for buzz and Neil, two forward facing ones that are used primarily for rendezvous and docking, and a fifth on the hatch directly above you. You see those little black squares all over the walls. That's velcro in zero G where things tend to float away. It's really nice to
have something to stick things to. Everything from your checklists too, small tools, and even your food pouches. If all of this sounds cramped, it is. The Command module is just over ten and a half feet in height with a diameter of just under thirteen feet, barely over two hundred square feet in volume. The mid seat used by the pilot of the Command Module can be folded back to
provide working space and give the crew a chance to stretch. Luckily, the couches the guys sit in can not only be reconfigured for sleep, but the center one, the one you're in, can be completely broken down to allow them to stretch out, as well as access the telescope and the sextant. Despite all of the technological wizardry aboard the command Module, some
of the astronauts equipment is relatively unchanged. In two hundred years, mariners aboard eighteenth century sailing ships use sextants to chart their course using the stars. The astronauts on Apollo eleven us theirs to do exactly the same thing. In eighteen sixty five, the French novelist Jules Verne, one of the founding fathers of science fiction, wrote From Earth to the Moon. In it, a group of post Civil War engineers build
a giant cannon in well where else, Florida. With that cannon, they shoot a giant bullet shaped projectile, carrying three people to the moon helperically. Awesome is that the engineer's in vern story named the Canon columbiad Neil Buzzing Michael have dubbed this command module Columbia in its honor. The first time I had butterflies in my stomach because of apprehension about systems working. Was Apollo seven because that was the
first man flight. A lot riding on that flight. The whole program was writing and lives We're writing on that flight, and by the time we got to Apollo eleven um it was pretty rude tinae. But that sort of confidence comes only after years of success and hard work. Chuck would go on to work on every Apollo mission, and even today is a consultant on the Orion spacecraft, which will be taking astronauts back to the Moon in a
couple of years. I'm immensely proud in the fact that I worked on Apollo from the first to the last, the success of it, what it really meant to this nation, what it meant to the world, And the further I go in life, the more product I can live in all The total cost for developing and building Apollo's command and service modules was three point eight billion dollars. That is a lot of money. Between the lunar module and the command module, taxpayers shelled out around six point two
billion dollars. That's sixty two and a half billion in today's dollars, and it is worth asking was it worth it? Many people today bemoan the lack of public support for space exploration. They point back to the halcyon days of the Apollo program, when everyone was rooting for NASA and support for the moon landing was universal, except those days never existed. Sure, fifty years later, the Apollo program is regarded as an unqualified success, but that's not how it
was viewed at the time. In fact, the majority of scientists felt that NASA was moving with reckless speed and that the money and minds going towards space meant that other critical scientific pursuits were being sidelined, and the public agreed. NASA's Bill Berry and polls throughout the nights sixties when people ask the question is it a priority to you it should we be be spending money on sending humans to
the moon? That pole question never got above support except for one week in the nineteen sixties and hours the week we landed on the Moon. Um So generally speaking, a majority you know, of Americans, uh, you know, we're not in favor of a major moon landing program. Back on Apollo eleven, exactly two days and nine hours from their launch, the guys are wrapping up their television broadcast. The consensus is that the Earth appears much smaller today. It appears now that we have a view of Earth
out the window land. If that's not the Earth, we're in trouble and differing after day and to day, and that large and image every continuing. If I get a big Thankley Paller here and now hundred seventy deeven thousand miles out over, and I'd like to say I fellow got from Cator that Farragut State Park in Idaho in the night called gamboree there this week and up all
eleven like to send the best ways. That was Neil other than Apollo fifteens, Jim Irwin, every single one of the Apollo moonwalkers were boy Scouts, and Neil and Charlie Duke, the two people chatting here, achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. And we're going to turn our V monitor off our short bit while we have some other work to do. A follow eleven find off right here, Levin, thank you very much that with one of the greatest goals we've
ever seen, was here appreciated over in all. Their TV transmission lasted just over an hour and a half, and in that time they've traveled more than two thousand miles. Now it's time to get back to work, transferring equipment they're gonna need on the Moon from the command module
to the lunar module. As Neil and Buzz work, astronaut Owen Garrett has commandeered the Capcom microphone to let Neil know that Mission Control is enjoying a little snack levin Youth and a little informaking to you their CD are. We've all taken a momentary brief respite from our work here to have a biden special Moon cheese that has understanded been sent to it directly from Wappa, Connectica. Wow, your own hometown. However, we can't pronounce the eather. I
think you'll enjoy that. Make up a fine branded cheese roger there, and I'll police up the grammar for the next chef. And a little less than three hours will pass a milestone of sorts as the spacecraft passes into the lunar sphere of influence. At that point, the spacecraft will be under the dominant influence of the Moon's gravity. Neil and Buzz finished their work and seal at the limb. The mood inside the spacecraft is casual and stress free.
The late workload is allowing the astronauts to relax, and they begin entertaining themselves with the music. The intermittent music that we're getting is apparently coming from the spacecraft. Eleven hit than we wanted his own horn. Yeah, we did. Had a little music there that was good. You can keep it coming down lever. Mission control wishes the crew
a good night. They assume they won't be hearing from the astronauts again until the morning, and for ten minutes or so the radio falls silent, and then go ahead and eleven over. You have any idea where the for a year for refector sem I. Neil is referring to the third stage of the Saturn five that, as you'll remember from our last episode, was nudged a safe distance away from the crew and is now following them to
the Moon. As they were settling in for the night, Neil saw a flashing light out one of the windows. Are you a phoe? Neil suspects it may be the third stage of the Saturn rocket. Paul eleven Houston be at four Bees, about six thousand nautical miles from you now over, Okay, so it's not the third stage given the distance between the two, it's highly unlikely the crew could make out what's left of the Saturn. So just what is this UFO? Well, to this day, the object
they saw has never been identified. However, before the conspiracy theorists and our audience get too excited, it was almost certainly one of the four panels that protected the lunar module during launch, and we're jettisoned yesterday right before its extraction. Even though those panels don't have their own propulsion source, they were already whizzing to the Moon at more than twenty four thousand miles an hour and are going to continue to do so until an equal or opposite force
acts upon them. Yeah, we got to the Moon using the discoveries of a guy who wore a wig and died in seventeen Thanks Isaac Newton. On July, the day before Apaul eleven lifted off, a group of five protesters set up camp outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center. They were led by Reverend Ralph Abernathy. This is the man who created Martin Luther King Jr's body in his arms as the civil rights icon died on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee NASA's Bill Berry so a great extent.
After Reverend King was assassinated, Abernathy sort of assumed the mantle of leadership of the civil rights movement. Abanathi was very smart about the training issues that he was concerned about, which was the fact that there are a lot of people living in poverty in the United States at the time. Abernathy and his protesters were hoping to bring attention to their cause by going to the one place guaranteed to have the majority of the nation's news cameras. NASA administrator
Tom Paine said, Okay, we're gonna ignore these guys. I'm gonna go out in with Reverdath Abernathy, and so there was a meeting. Um and Paine agreed that, you know, there were significant problems in America and that they should be addressed. Surrounded by protesters singing we shall overcome and holding signs reading hungry Kids Can't eat Moon rocks, Abernathy and Payne spoke for about twenty minutes. Abernathy asserted that
money for space fight was a misplaced priority. We may go on from this day into Mars, into Jupiter, and even to the heavens beyond. But as long as racism, poverty, and hunger and war prevail on the Earth, we as
a civilized nation have failed. Pain agreed. Everybody also pointed out that from his perspective that you know, I'm not going to the moon wasn't going to solve those problems, and in fact he actually said, you know, if me not turning to switch the launch to our to go to the moon could solve these problems, I would do that.
You would cancel amission. But it's not. Pain told Abernathy he didn't know what NASA could do in the short term to combat poverty, but that the Moonshot was an example of what human beings were capable of achieving if they threw themselves behind a worthwhile cause. He wanted the civil rights leader to see Apollo as just the thing to spur the nation to tackling other giant problems and to use its success as a yardstick to measure what
was possible. And you very smartly, asked the Reverend Aberna, I think if he had prayed for the ct to the astronauts, and then he invited at and a significant part of the group of people that were there for the march to come into the v I P Visitors site to watch the launch the next day, and it was a really, I think telling incident that that tells us a lot about sort of where the space program sat and popular imagination at the time, and how much
strong leaders on both sides could make an impact on the conversation on the eve of man's noblest venture. I have profoundly moved by the nation's achievements in space and the heroism of the three men embarking for the Moon. But what we can do for space and exploration, we demand that we do for starving people. The hard truth, of course, is that we didn't use Apollo as an inspiration to eradicate poverty in America. We didn't go to the Moon because scientists were demanding it. We didn't go
to the Moon because the public was demanding it. We went to the Moon because the President pushed the program through, believing that a successful space race would earn the United States a significant victory in the Cold War. The most audacious thing humans had ever attempted was also something only the planet's richest nation could afford to try. Yes, it was deeply controversial, but it also worked and directly paved the way for the technological age in which we now
find ourselves. There may come a time when America will face a similar dilemma. Our planet is currently staring down unprecedented challenges in climate change, dwindling resources, terrorism, and a daunting refugee crisis. Some believe the solutions to these and other problems can be found amongst the stars. The next Apollo mission may not be about winning a Cold war, but rather saving the entirety of the human race. And when that time comes, that mission may be met with
the same controversy and skepticism. And why not. Our world has never looked more like nineteen sixty nine, plagued by war, racial discrimination, and political scandals. The same complaints made in nineteen sixty nine are being made today. It doesn't look
like we've learned much in the last fifty years. It's hard to care about space when grinding poverty, state sponsored racism, violence against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and turning away refugees fleeing war and oppression dominates the news every night. NASA administrator Thomas Paine was right. The moon shot was an example of what humans are capable of. Achieving, but so is creating a sea change for every citizen on this planet. Our choice is not one or the other,
it must be both. We must be bold enough and brave enough to transform life on Earth and the stars. This is Apollo Control at sixty one thirty nine minutes coming up. In less than ten seconds now, we'll be crossing into the sphere of influence of the Moon as the Moon's gravitational force becomes the dominant effect on the
spacecraft trajectory. At that point, which occurred a few seconds ago, the spacecraft was at a distance of one eighty six thousand, four hundred seven nautical miles from Earth and thirty three thousand, eight hundred two nautical miles from the Moon. Day three
is over. Day four, July nine begins with our next episode as we spin back to tell the story of three stars, not celestial stars, but reality stars, the astronauts and their families who lived beneath the withering media spotlight on Earth as they trained to go to the Moon. A moon vet on day four loose large and Apollo eleven's windows as our crew prepares to undertake a series of dangerous maneuvers to get into orbit. This podcast is a production of I Heart Radio and trade Craft Studios.
Executive producers Ashe Seroia and Scott Bernstein in association with High five Content, and an executive producer Andrew Jacobs. Amazing research and production assistants by associate producers Brian show Saw and Natalie Robomed. Our incredible editor is Bill Lance. Original music by Henry ben Wah thanks to this episode's voice actor Tim Gordon. The experts who contributed to this episode were NASA historian Bill Berry, Grummin's Mike Lisa and North
Americans Chuck Lowry. Licensing rights and clearances by Deborah Correa. This is a brand new podcast and we're so excited to be sharing it with you. Help us spread it far and wide, tell your friends, leave ratings and reviews, and chat about it on social media. Our hashtag is nine D I J. We would love to hear what you think. New episodes come out every week, so we sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brandon Phibbs. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next episode.