Disturbing History - DH Ep:64 "In Event of Moon Disaster"

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

In July of 1969, while the world watched Apollo 11 head for the Moon, a speech sat folded in a White House desk drawer. Written by Nixon speechwriter William Safire, the memo titled "In Event of Moon Disaster" was a contingency address prepared for the very real possibility that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would never leave the lunar surface. The ascent engine that had to fire to bring them home had no backup and had never been tested under actual lunar conditions. If it failed, two men would die on the Moon while the world listened.This episode breaks down Safire's memo line by line, examining the rhetoric, the political strategy, and the emotional weight behind every word. We explore the grim contingency planning happening simultaneously in Houston, where young flight controllers faced the unbearable question of how long to maintain communication with a stranded crew. We talk about the Cold War stakes that made failure not just a tragedy but a potential strategic defeat for the United States, and how Nixon's political survival was tangled up in the outcome of a single rocket engine. We also dig into the moments that nearly made the speech necessary, from the computer alarms during descent to the broken circuit breaker switch that Aldrin fixed with a felt-tip pen. We discuss Michael Collins, the often-forgotten third astronaut who would have had to fly home alone, and what that journey would have meant for the rest of his life.The episode covers the memo's discovery in 1999 by journalist James Mann in the National Archives, the way it reframed the Apollo 11 story for a generation that had only known the triumph, and the unsettling 2020 MIT deepfake project that used AI to show Nixon delivering the speech that was never given.This is the story of the speech that was written to never be read, and what it reveals about courage, fear, and the impossibly thin line between humanity's greatest achievement and its greatest disaster.

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The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

a true crime podcast that unpacks real-life horrors one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge of, off. We're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact.

This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, Investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. There's a folder in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. that most people have never heard of. It sat there for 30 years, collecting dust, buried under mountains of bureaucratic paperwork, and classified memos from an administration that produced more secrets

than perhaps any other in American history. Inside that folder is a single page, a speech, written in the careful, deliberate prose of a man who made his living choosing exactly the right words at exactly the right time. It was never delivered, never read aloud from behind a presidential podium, never broadcast across the airwaves to a grieving nation,

but it was ready, and what it says, what it reveals about what the most powerful people on Earth genuinely believed might happen on July 20th, 1969. That is one of the most chilling footnotes in the history of the American space program. Now, a few episodes back, we did a deep dive into the Apollo 11 moon landing itself. The mission, the moments, the sheer audacity of what humanity pulled off that summer. If you haven't listened to that one yet, go back and check it out. It's a hell of a ride.

But today's episode, this is not a recap. This is not a retelling of the moon landing story. This is its own thing entirely. Today we're talking about the speech that was written in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin died on the surface of the moon. We're talking about a contingency plan drawn up inside the Nixon White House that laid out step by step, exactly what would happen if those two men were stranded 240,000 miles from home with no way back. We're talking about a document that instructs the President of the United States to call the widows, to order NASA to cut communication with astronauts who were still alive,

to let them suffocate or starve in silence while a clergyman commended their souls too. And I'm quoting here, the deepest of the deep. This is the story of a memo titled, An Event of Moon Disaster. And I promise you, by the time we're done here today, you will never think about the Apollo 11 mission the same way again. Let's go back, way back, before the speech, before the memo, before any of it. Because to understand why someone in the White House sat down and wrote what amounts to a eulogy for living men, you have to understand just how terrified everyone involved in the Apollo program

actually was. We tend to look back at the moon landing through the lens of triumph. We know how the story ends. Armstrong steps off the ladder. He says the line. Aldrin joins him. They plant the flag. They come home. Tick or tape parades. American heroes. End a story. But that's hindsight talking. That's the comfortable version. The version where everything works out and we all get to feel good about it. The reality in the summer of 1969 was very, very different. The reality was that NASA was attempting something that had never been done before in the history of human civilization. They were going to launch three men on top of a controlled explosion. Curl them through the vacuum of space for three days. Put two of them into a spacecraft roughly the size of a small closet. Land that spacecraft on the surface of another world. Let them walk around for a couple of hours.

And then launch them back up to reconnect with the third astronaut who'd been orbiting alone the entire time. Every single phase of that mission had a thousand ways to go wrong. A thousand ways to kill the crew. and everyone at NASA knew it. But there was one phase that scared them more than any other. The ascent from the lunar surface. See, here's what most people don't realize about the Apollo lunar module.

That spindly, fragile-looking spacecraft that sat on the moon's surface. It was actually two spacecraft in one. The bottom half, the descent stage, had its own rocket engine. That's what slowed them down and landed them on the moon. but once they were on the surface, that bottom half was done. It became a launch pad. The top half, the ascent stage, had a completely separate engine, a single engine. And when it was time to leave the moon, that engine had to fire.

It had to work perfectly. There was no backup. There was no plan B. There was no second engine sitting there just in case. One engine. One chance. If that engine didn't ignite, Armstrong and Aldrin weren't coming home. Period.

Full stop. There was no rescue mission coming. There was no way to send another spacecraft to pick them up. Michael Collins, orbiting above them in the command module, would have had to leave them there and fly back to Earth alone. And they would have died on the moon. Now the ascent engine was built by Bell Aerosystems, and it used a hypergolic fuel system.

That means the fuel. fuel and the oxidizer ignite on contact with each other. You don't need a spark plug. You don't need an ignition system. You just let the two chemicals meet and they explode. That's your engine. In theory, this made it incredibly reliable. Fewer moving parts.

Fewer things that could fail. The engineers called it the simplest engine on the entire spacecraft. But simplest and guaranteed are not the same word. And everyone knew it. There had been test firings. There had been simulations. But nobody had ever actually tried to launch a crude spacecraft off the surface of the moon before. Nobody.

This was the first time. And if something went wrong, if a fuel line cracked, if a valve stuck, if some tiny piece of debris blocked an injector, then two American heroes were going to die a slow, agonizing death while the whole world watched. Or more accurately, while the whole world waited, because NASA wasn't going to broadcast that. They had a plan for that, too. But we'll get there.

The point is this. The risk was real. The fear was real. And the people running the show knew it. Tom Payne was the NASA administrator at the time. He visited the crew the night before launch. July 15th, 1969. And according to multiple accounts, he told Neil Armstrong something extraordinary.

ordinary. He told him that the most important thing was that the crew come back alive. He said that if anything looked wrong at any point during the mission, they should abort. Don't worry about the landing. Don't worry about the goal. Don't worry about the president or Congress or the American public. Just come home. Armstrong reportedly nodded and said he understood. But Payne wasn't the only one thinking about what might go wrong. Not by a long shot. inside the White House, there was a man named Frank Borman. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it should. Frank Borman was an astronaut himself who'd commanded Apollo 8,

the first mission to orbit the moon, just seven months earlier in December of 1968. He'd seen the far side of the moon with his own eyes and read from the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, while the entire world listened. But by the summer of 69, Borman had taken on a different role. He'd become NASA's liaison to the White House. His job was to keep the Nixon administration informed about the space program, to translate the technical jargon into language that politicians could understand, and to help coordinate the presidential aspects of the Apollo 11 mission.

Things like, what does the president say if the astronauts land successfully? When does he call them? What are the optics? How do we make this look good for the administration? But Borman was a realist. He was a pilot and an engineer who understood the risks better than anyone in the West Wing. And sometime in the days leading up to the launch, Borman raised a question that nobody in the White House wanted to think about. What does the president say if they don't come back?

It's the kind of question that makes political people deeply uncomfortable. Politicians live in the world of optimism and messaging. They don't like to plan for catastrophe because planning for catastrophe implies that catastrophe is possible. And implying that catastrophe is possible makes people nervous, and nervous people don't vote for you. But Borman pushed it because he knew the ascent engine was a single point of failure. He knew that if those men got stranded, there'd be a window of time, maybe hours, maybe a day or two, where they'd still be alive but with absolutely no hope of rescue. And during that window, the president of the United States would need to say something.

You can't have silence. You can't have the leader of the free world sitting in the Oval Office with nothing to say, while two astronauts slowly die on live television. That's not how it works. There has to be a plan. So Borman took the question to the one person in the Nixon White House, whose entire job was putting the right words in the president's mouth. William Sapphire

William Sapphire is a fascinating figure in American history, and he doesn't get nearly enough attention. Most people, if they know the name at all, know him as a longtime columnist for the New York Times. He wrote the on-language column for decades, won a Pulitzer Prize, and was a wordsmith of the highest order. But before all of that, before the fame and the columns and the awards, Sapphire was a speechwriter, and not just any speechwriter. He was one of Richard Nixon's guys. Sapphire had been with Nixon since the late 1950s. He'd worked on Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, the one Nixon famously lost.

He'd stuck with Nixon through the wilderness years of the mid-60s when most people thought Nixon's political career was over. And when Nixon mounted his remarkable comeback and won the presidency in 1968, Sapphire came with him to the White House. By July of 1969, Sapphire that was 39 years old, sharp, ambitious, and very, very good at his job. He understood the power of language in a way that few people do. He knew that the right words at the right moment could define a presidency, could define an era. And now, Frank Borman was asking him to write the words

that would define the worst moment in the history of space exploration. Think about that assignment for a second. Just sit with it. You're a speechwriter. Your job is words. And someone comes to you and says, Hey, we need you to write a speech for the president. The topic is the death of two American heroes on the surface of the moon.

Men who are alive right now as you're writing this. Men who are in the middle of training, eating meals with their families, making final preparations. Men with wives and children. And you need to write the words that the president will read to a grieving world if they don't make it. You need to write it now, before the mission, while they're still alive. Sapphire later described the experience as one of the most difficult things he ever did in his career, and this is a man who spent decades writing about the most consequential events in American politics, but writing a eulogy for living men. That was something else entirely. He sat down at his typewriter,

and he wrote, The memo is dated July 18, 1969, two days before the actual moon landing, two days before Armstrong and Aldrin would descend to the surface. Two days before the moment of truth. It was addressed to H.R. Haldeman. Now, there's a name that carries a lot of weight in American history, and not the good kind. Bob Haldeman was Nixon's chief of staff, the gatekeeper, the enforcer, the man who controlled access to the president and managed the daily operations of the White House. He would later become one of the central figures in the Watergate scandal and go to prison for conspiracy,

obstruction of justice, and perjury. But in July of 69, all of that was still years away. Haldeman was simply the most powerful staffer in the White House, and if you wanted something to reach the president's desk, it went through Haldeman first. Sapphire's memo was titled simply, An Event of Moon Disaster, and it laid out, with chilling precision,

exactly what would happen if Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the lunar surface. The memo was structured in two, parts. The first part was the protocol, the step-by-step procedure for how the White House and NASA would handle the crisis. The second part was the actual speech the president would deliver. Let me walk you through it, because the details matter, every single one of them. The protocol section laid out three steps. Step one. Before the president read his statement, he would telephone each of the widows to be. Stop right there. Widows to be. The astronauts aren't dead yet in this scenario. They're still alive on the moon, still breathing, still conscious, still aware of their

situation. But the memo refers to their wives as widows to be, because everyone involved understood that if the ascent engine failed, the outcome was inevitable. It was just a matter of time. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Ever look up in the sky and wonder what's really going on up there? Hi, I'm Martin Willis, and I host podcast UFO, the longest consistently running podcast dedicated to UFOs and UAP, with over 700 episodes in the last 15 years. Each week I sit down with scientists, researchers, filmmakers, and people who have had real encounters to talk honestly about what we know and what we don't.

There's no shouting, no crazy music, just thoughtful conversations about one of the biggest mysteries out there. If you're curious, open-minded, or just a little bit obsessed with UFOs, you will feel right at home. Search Podcast UFO wherever you get your podcast, or visit PodcastUFO.com. Podcast UFO, we're searching the mystery never ends. And I want to tell you a little about these women, because they deserve to be more than footnotes in a contingency memo. They deserve to be seen as real human beings who live through one of the most anxiety-ridden weeks in modern history. Janet Armstrong, Neil's wife, had been married to him for 13 years by the summer of 69. She was raising two sons, Ricky who was 12 and Mark who was 6,

and she'd already survived more near-death experiences with her husband than most people could handle in a lifetime. She'd been there when Neil nearly died in the Gemini 8 emergency. She'd been there when he ejected from the lunar landing research vehicle. Every time the phone rang, at an unexpected hour. Every time a car pulled up to the house unannounced, her heart must have stopped. During the actual Apollo 11 mission, Janet was at home in El Lago, Texas, near the manned spacecraft center, and the house was surrounded by reporters, cameras, neighbors, and well-wishers. She later described the experience as overwhelming. She wasn't just processing her own anxiety. She was performing it, for the cameras, for the nation. Smile for the press, look comfortable,

be the brave astronaut's wife. There's a moment captured by journalists during the mission that illustrates this perfectly. Janet standing in her living room listening to the mission audio on the squawk box, knowing that her husband was running out of fuel during the descent, knowing that something wasn't going right, and having to keep it together because the whole world was watching her through the windows. Joan Aldrin, Buzz's wife, was dealing with her own private struggles during the mission. Her marriage to Buzz was already understre. She was already under train. Aldrin would later reveal publicly that he struggled with depression and alcoholism in the years following Apollo 11. The enormous pressure of the mission didn't create those problems,

but it certainly didn't help. Joan was managing the household, managing the press, managing Buzz's public image, all while her husband was 240,000 miles away, and Pat Collins, Michael's wife. In some ways, she had the strangest role of all. Her husband wasn't going to the loo. or surface, wasn't going to walk on the moon. He was going to orbit alone, and in the disaster scenario, he was going to come home. She would get her husband back, but he'd come back changed, haunted, the sole survivor of the most famous disaster in history. These three women living in houses within a few miles of each other in the suburbs of Houston, surrounded by the anxious energy of a nation watching, didn't get to be astronauts. They didn't get to have any control

over what happened. They just had to wait and hope and pretend to be okay. And in Sapphire's memo, they're reduced to two words, widows to be. I don't say that to criticize Sapphire. He was writing a government memo, not a novel, and he was being clinical because the situation required clinical thinking. But the distance between the sterile language of the memo and the lived experience of these women is vast. And it's worth acknowledging. Can you imagine being on the receiving end of that phone call from the president? Sitting in your living room, maybe with your kids, watching the coverage on television, still hoping, still praying, and the phone rings, and it's the president of the United States. And you know, before he even speaks, why he's calling. Step two of the

protocol. After the president's call to the families, a clergyman would adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to the deepest of the deep. That phrase, the deepest of the deep, is sapphire at his most poetic and is most devastating. A burial at sea is performed when a sailor dies far from home, and the body can't be recovered. The clergyman commits the soul to the ocean depths, but these men wouldn't be lost at sea. They'd be lost in space, on the moon. And so the clergyman would commend their souls, not to the ocean, but to the cosmos itself, the deepest of the deep. the most remote, unreachable place that human beings had ever ventured.

There's something profoundly lonely about that image. A body at sea will eventually be consumed by the ocean, broken down, returned to the earth in some form. But a body on the moon, in the vacuum of space, would be preserved almost perfectly for millions of years, maybe longer. Armstrong and Aldrin wouldn't decompose. They'd just stay there, two figures in space suits,

frozen in time, on a world with no wind, no rain, no weather of any kind to disturb them. The moon would become their tomb, and that tomb would be visible from Earth every single night for the rest of human history. Step 3. And this is the one that gets people. This is the one that, when you read it for the first time, makes your stomach drop. After the president's statement, NASA would cut communication with the astronauts. Not after they were dead, while they were still alive.

The memo specifies that at the point when NASA ends contact with the men, Mission Control in Houston would close down communications, and a clergyman would offer prayers. Think about what that means in practical terms. Armstrong and Aldrin are on the moon. Their ascent engine has failed. They can't get off the surface. They know they're going to die.

And Mission Control, the voice in their ear that has been with them every step of the way, the lifeline that connects them to Earth, to their families, to everything they've ever known. That voice goes silent. They're alone. 240,000 miles from home, in a spacecraft the size of a phone booth with a limited supply of oxygen and no hope of rescue.

And somebody made the decision to stop talking to them. Now, I want to be fair here. There's a logic to it. A grim, terrible bureaucratic logic. If the astronauts are going to die, there's an argument to be made that prolonging communication only extends the agony for the astronauts, for their families, for the hundreds of people in mission control who've become personally invested in these men's lives. At some point,

you have to let go. But there's another way to read it, a darker way. Cutting communication also means cutting the public's connection to the crisis. If mission control goes silent, there's nothing more to report. No more audio from the moon. No more transmissions. The media has nothing to broadcast except the president's eulogy and the clergyman's prayers. The story moves from active crisis to memorial, from present tense to past tense. It's neater that way, cleaner, more manageable. And if there's one thing the Nixon White House understood, it was managing a narrative. But let's talk about the speech itself, because Sapphire didn't just write a set of instructions. He wrote the words that Richard Nixon would have spoken to the nation and the world, and those

words are remarkable. The speech begins. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. Right out of the gate, Sapphire establishes the framework. This isn't a failure. This isn't a mistake. This is fate. Fate has ordained it. There's a weight to that word, ordained. And it suggests something larger than human error or mechanical failure. It suggests destiny, providence, a force beyond anyone's control. And that's deliberate. That's strategic. Because if the ascent engine fails, there are going to be questions. Hard questions. Who built this engine? Who tested it? Who signed off on the mission? Was the risk too great? Did we send these men to their deaths? By framing it as fate, Sapphire preemptively deflects

that line of inquiry. Not entirely. but enough. Enough to buy the administration time. Enough to shift the emotional register from anger to grief. Explore in peace. Rest in peace. The parallelism there is elegant and devastating. The mission's purpose, peaceful exploration, becomes their epitaph. They win in peace. They rest in peace. It transforms their death from a catastrophe into a kind of completion, as if this is where the journey was always meant to end. The speech continues. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery,

but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. Notice the structure. First, the brutal truth. There is no hope for their recovery. No sugar coating, no hedging. They're going to die, and everyone knows it. But then, immediately, the pivot. Their sacrifice gives hope to mankind.

Their death means something. It isn't meaningless. It isn't a waste. It's a sacrifice. And sacrifice, in the American tradition, is noble. Sapphire is doing what the best speechwriters do. He's not just expressing grief. He's shaping it.

He's telling the audience how to feel, how to process what's happening. You should be sad, yes. But you should also be proud. These men didn't die for nothing. The speech goes on. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding. Laying down their lives is the language of soldiers, of martyrs.

It implies choice and agency, as if Armstrong and Aldrin chose this, as if they walked onto the moon knowing they might not come back and accepted that possibility willingly. And in a sense, they did. Every astronaut understood the risks. But there's a difference between accepting a reality. risk and accepting a death sentence. And in this scenario, the death sentence has been imposed by a faulty engine, not by any noble choice the astronauts made in the moment. But Sapphire isn't writing a factual account. He's writing a narrative. And in this narrative, Armstrong and Aldrin are heroes who gave

their lives willingly. It's a more powerful story, a more useful story, and from the White House's perspective, a more politically manageable one. They will be mourned by their families and friends. They will be mourned by their nation. They will be mourned by the people of the world. They will be mourned by a mother earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. The repetition of they will be mourned is classic rhetoric, the kind of structure you find in the great speeches of history. Each repetition expands the circle of grief, from the families to the nation, to the world, to the earth itself. It's a zoom out from the personal to the universal, from the intimate pain of a widow and her children to the collective sorrow of an entire planet. And that last line,

a mother earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown, is almost mythological. Earth isn't a nation here. It isn't a government program. It's a mother, and her sons went out into the darkness and didn't come back. Sapphire was raised in a Jewish household and was deeply steeped in the traditions of biblical and classical rhetoric. And you can feel that in every line of this speech. The cadences, the imagery, the almost prophetic quality of the language. The speech concludes, In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one.

In their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the Brotherhood of Man. And then the final line. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellation. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. That ending is the part that stays with you, because it does something extraordinary. It takes Armstrong and Aldrin out of the 20th century and places them in the company of the mythological heroes. Odysseus, Achilles, Gilgamesh, the great figures of legend who ventured into the unknown and whose stories became part of the sky itself. It's saying that Armstrong and Aldrin would become like the constellations,

permanent fixtures in the human imagination, stories we tell our children, legends we carry forward through the ages. And the cruel irony is that in this scenario, their bodies would literally be up there, on the moon, visible every night. They wouldn't just be metaphorical constellations. They'd be the real thing.

Now let's step back from the words themselves and talk about the context. because the speech didn't exist in a vacuum. It was part of a larger apparatus of contingency planning that reveals just how seriously the government took the possibility of catastrophic failure. While Sapphire was typing up his memo in the White House, the engineers and flight controllers in Houston were doing their own kind of contingency planning, and theirs was even grimmer. The mission rules for Apollo 11 ran hundreds of pages

and covered every conceivable scenario, every system failure, every emergency. Deepen those rules were the procedures for what NASA internally called a contingency EVA, which is a polite way of saying emergency spacewalk, and even deeper were the discussions about what would happen if the crew couldn't return. Chris Kraft was the director of flight operations at the Mann spacecraft center in Houston. He'd been there since the beginning, since Mercury, since Gemini. He'd watched men go into space and come back.

and he'd been in the room when things had gone wrong. He knew about the Ascent engine concern. Everyone did. It was the elephant in the room throughout the entire Apollo program. The descent engine could be tested and retested on the ground. The command module systems had backups upon backups. But that Ascent engine, the one that had to fire to get them off the moon, had no backup whatsoever.

Kraft later wrote in his memoir that the possibility of losing the crew on the lunar surface was something that haunted him, not as an abstract risk, but as a very real, very specific scenario that he'd gamed out in his head a hundred times. What would mission control do? What would they say? How long would they maintain contact? Gene Krantz, the famous flight director, the man with the white vest who, you know from the movie Apollo 13, although that was a different mission, was the lead flight director for the Apollo 11 landing itself. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. He had a philosophy that he called tough and competent, born out of the Apollo One fire in

1967, when three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in a launch pad fire during a routine test. That disaster had shaken NASA to its core, and Cranz had responded by demanding that every person in mission control be tough enough to face the worst and competent enough to prevent it. But even tough and competent has its limits. And Cranz knew, as everyone knew, that if the ascent engine failed, there was nothing mission control could do. No procedure to run, no workaround to implement, no brilliant improvisation to save the day. They would just have to sit there and listen as two men died. And you have to understand what mission control was like during these missions to appreciate what that would have meant.

These weren't faceless bureaucrats sitting at desks. These were young men, most of them in their 20s and 30s, who had poured years of their lives into the Apollo program. They knew the astronauts personally. They'd trained with them, eaten lunch with them, played handball with them at the gym on the Man Spacecraft Center campus. Steve Bales, the guidance officer who made the critical call to continue the landing during those computer alarms,

was 26 years old, 26. He was making life and death decisions about men he knew and respected, men whose families lived in his neighborhood. Imagine being one of those young flight controllers and hearing the words that the Ascent engine had failed to ignite. Imagine knowing that everything you'd worked for, everything you'd sacrificed, every late night and missed birthday and strained relationship.

All of it had ended in the worst possible outcome. And then imagine being told that it was time to close down communications. that you had to stop talking to men who were still alive, men you'd been guiding and supporting for days, men whose voices you'd memorized over hundreds of hours of simulation and training. That's not a professional task. That's a personal devastation. There's a story, and I should note that I can't verify this 100%,

but it's been told by multiple people who were there. The story goes that during one of the pre-mission planning sessions, someone raised the question of how long communication should be maintained, with a stranded crew, and the room went silent. Nobody wanted to answer, because the question itself was unbearable. Do you keep talking to them until the oxygen runs out? That could be days. Do you let them say goodbye to their families over the radio while the world listens? Do you give them privacy? Or do you cut the line and let them face the end in silence? There was no good answer. There were only terrible answers and slightly less terrible answers. And in the end,

And the decision reflected in Sapphire's memo was the slightly less terrible one. Cut communication. Let them go. Don't make the world listen to two men die. But here's what the memo doesn't address, and this is something that historians and ethicists have debated for decades. What about the astronauts themselves? What about their agency and their choice? If Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the moon, they would have had a limited supply of oxygen. The exact amount varied depending on the scenario, but generally, the lunar module's life support system could sustain two crew members for roughly two to three days after landing. So in the worst case, Armstrong and Aldrin could have been alive for days, conscious, aware, knowing that they were going to die. And here's the part that nobody talks about.

There may have been discussions, very quiet, very private discussions, about giving the astronauts the option to end their own lives, rather than wait for the oxygen to run out. I want to be very careful here. There's no official documentation of this, no memo, no protocol, no written record whatsoever. But multiple sources over the years, including some NASA insiders,

have suggested that there was at least an informal understanding that if the worst happened, the crew would have options. The spacecraft carried pharmaceutical supplies, sedatives, pain killers, in sufficient quantities that, in theory, an astronaut could. Well, you understand what I'm saying.

Again, this is unconfirmed, and I want to be responsible in how I present it. But it's part of the broader conversation about what the Apollo program was prepared to face. The contingency planning didn't stop at speeches and phone calls. It extended into territory that is profoundly uncomfortable to think about. And if you're listening to this right now thinking, that's too dark.

That can't be true. I want you to remember something. These were military test pilots. These were men who had stared death in the face before. Armstrong himself had nearly died twice in training alone. These men thought about death, planned for death, and accepted death as a possible outcome of their profession.

And the idea that they might want some control over the manner of their dying isn't dark. It's human. Now let me broaden the lens here and talk about what this memo tells us about the wider culture of the 1960s and the Cold War. because the in-event-of-moon disaster speech didn't emerge from nowhere. It was a product of its time, a time when the possibility of sudden catastrophic death

was woven into the fabric of American life. This was the Cold War, the nuclear age. Every American over the age of 10 had grown up with the knowledge that the Soviet Union could launch nuclear missiles at any moment and end civilization. They'd done duck-and-cover drills in school. They'd seen the Cuban Missile Crisis bring the world to the brink. They'd watched their president, John F. Kennedy, get assassinated in broad daylight. They'd watched his brother Robert get assassinated five years later, and Martin Luther King two months before that.

Death was not an abstraction in 1969. It was a constant companion. And the idea that two astronauts might die on the moon was not, in the context of the times, as shocking as it might seem to us today. It was terrible and tragic, but it was not unthinkable. In the 1960s, very little was unthinkable. The space program itself had already suffered terrible losses. The Apollo won fire in January of 1967

had killed those three astronauts, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, who burned to death in their spacecraft during a ground test. The investigation revealed horrifying negligence. The capsule was filled with pure oxygen at above atmospheric pressure. The hatch opened inward instead of outward making escape impossible in a fire, and the wiring was a mess of exposed connections and flammable materials. Those three men died because of bad design and institutional arrogance, and their deaths very nearly ended the Apollo program altogether.

But NASA recovered. They redesigned the capsule, improved their safety procedures, and pressed forward because the deadline was looming. Kennedy had said, before this decade is out, and by 1969, the decade had almost run out. That deadline pressure is important because it explains in part why the risks were so high. There were people inside NASA who thought the timeline was too aggressive,

that they needed more testing, more unmanned missions, more time. But the clock was ticking, and the Soviets were watching. Let's talk about them for a moment, because the space race wasn't just about exploration. It was about power, prestige, and ideological supremacy. The Soviet Union had beaten the United States at every major milestone in space. First satellite, Sputnik in 1957.

First human in space. Uri Gagarin in 1961. First woman in space. Valentina Tureshkova in 1963. First Spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, in 1965. America was losing, and in the logic of the Cold War, losing the space race was tantamount to losing the ideological battle between capitalism and communism. The moon landing was supposed to be the definitive answer, the checkmate, the moment when America proved once and for all that democracy and free enterprise could outperform any totalitarian regime. But imagine the alternative.

Imagine that Armstrong and Aldrin die on the moon. Imagine that the most ambitious, most expensive, most public endeavor in American history ends in catastrophic failure on live television in front of the entire world. The propaganda victory for the Soviet Union would have been incalculable, not because they would have gloated, although they might have, but because the failure itself would have been the message. American technology isn't good enough. American ambition outstrips American capability.

That's the geopolitical context of Sapphire's memo. It wasn't just about two dead astronauts. It was about the fate of the American century, the credibility of American power, the psychological balance of the Cold War. And Nixon understood that better than most, because Nixon was, above all else, a cold warrior. His entire political identity was built on anti-communism,

from his early days as a congressman hunting communists in the late 1940s, to his confrontation with Khrushchev in the famous kitchen debate of 1959, to his presidential campaigns built on law and order toughness. A disaster on the moon wouldn't just have been a personal tragedy. It would have been a strategic defeat. And strategic defeats in Nixon's world were unacceptable.

Nixon had come into office in January of 69 and had been president for barely six months when the most ambitious and dangerous mission in human history was set to take place. He was keenly aware of the political stakes, and he was also keenly aware of the irony of his position. Because the truth is, Nixon had never been particularly passionate about space. He wasn't a visionary in the way Kennedy had been. He didn't look at the stars and dream about humanity's future among them.

Nixon looked at the stars and saw a scoreboard, a way to keep track of who was winning the Cold War. In the months before Apollo 11, there had actually been discussions inside the administration. about whether to continue the Apollo program at all after the first landing. The costs were staggering. The war in Vietnam was draining the federal budget. The social programs of the Great Society were demanding more and more resources. And Nixon's domestic advisors were telling him that the American public's appetite for space exploration was waning, that the novelty was wearing off, that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

So there was a very real possibility that even if Apollo 11 succeeded, the later missions might be canceled, which is exactly what happened eventually. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were all scrubbed. The program ended after Apollo 17 in December of 1972. But in July of 69, all of that was in the future. What mattered right now was the mission at hand and the binary outcome it would produce. If the mission succeeded, he'd be the president who presided over humanity's greatest achievement. He'd stand at the podium, make the phone call, bask in the glow of American triumph.

Never mind that Kennedy started it and Johnson funded it. Nixon would be the face of success. But if the mission failed, if the astronauts died, then Nixon would be the president who presided over the greatest disaster in the history of exploration. He'd have to explain it, justify it, own it. And the political consequences could be devastating. So the White House wasn't just preparing for disaster out of some average. abstract sense of responsibility.

They were preparing because Richard Nixon's political survival might depend on how the administration handled the worst-case scenario. That's not cynical. That's just how Washington works. Every major event, every crisis, every triumph gets filtered through the political calculus, and the in-event of moon disaster memo was part of that calculus. It was about grief, yes, and about honoring brave men. But it was also about controlling the narrative, about making

sure that if everything went wrong, the president would be ready, eloquent, and in charge. Because in a crisis, the worst thing a president can be is speechless. So when we read this memo, we need to read it on multiple levels. It's a eulogy. It's a political document. It's a Cold War contingency. It's a piece of literary craftsmanship. And it's a deeply human response to the possibility of losing something precious. All of those things at once. That's what makes it so remarkable. Now let's go back to the mission itself, because the story of that memo sitting in Haldeman's desk, while the actual events unfolded, is where this really gets tense. On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Saturn

5 rocket, the most powerful machine ever built by human hands, roared to life and lifted the spacecraft off the pad. Three men were aboard, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Buzz, Aldrin and Michael Collins. The launch went perfectly. The trans lunar injection burn went perfectly. The coast to the moon went perfectly. And on July 20th, Armstrong and Aldrin separated the Lunar Module Eagle from the Command Module Columbia, with Collins remaining behind and began their descent to the surface. Now, I covered the landing in detail in the earlier episode, so I won't rehash all of it, but I do want to highlight something that's relevant to our story today. The descent did not go smoothly. There were computer alarms, the famous 1202 and 1201

program alarms that indicated the guidance computer was being overloaded. There was a communication dropout, and when Armstrong looked out the window and saw where the computer was taking them, he realized they were heading for a boulder field, a landing site full of rocks and craters that would have destroyed the lunar module on contact. So Armstrong took manual control. He flew the lunar module like a helicopter, skimming over the surface, looking for a clear spot to land, while the fuel gauge dropped toward zero. Mission control was calling out fuel quantities. 60 seconds, meaning 60 seconds of fuel remaining. Then 30 seconds. At 30 seconds, Armstrong was supposed to either land immediately or abort. He landed with roughly 25 seconds of fuel to spare. 25 seconds. That's how close it was.

In Houston, Charlie Duke, the capsule communicator said, Roger Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And they were. They'd been holding their breath literally.

But the landing was only half the problem. The ascent still loomed, and Sapphire's memo was still in Haldeman's desk. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about 21 and a half hours on the lunar surface. Their moonwalk lasted roughly two hours and 31 minutes. They collected samples, planted the flag, took the most famous photograph in human history, and received a phone call from the President of the United States. Nixon called from the Oval Office, saying it was the most historic phone call ever made from the White House. He told them that, for one priceless

moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one. It was a good line, written by Sapphire and it captured the emotion of the moment perfectly but here's what I keep thinking about while Nixon was delivering those triumphant words somewhere in the White House sitting in a folder was the other speech the one that began with fate has ordained two speeches two possible futures and the entire outcome rested on a single rocket engine that had never been tested in the actual conditions it was designed for and here's something I haven't mentioned yet that makes the whole thing even more harrowing. After the moonwalk, when Armstrong and Aldrin were back inside the lunar module preparing for

the ascent, Aldrin noticed something. A small plastic switch on the instrument panel had been broken off, snapped right off, probably bumped by one of their backpacks when they were moving around in the cramped cabin. That switch, that tiny, insignificant looking piece of plastic, was the circuit breaker for the ascent engine. The circuit breaker for the one engine that had to fire for them to leave the moon had been physically broken. The switch that armed it was gone. Aldrin later wrote about this moment in his memoir. He said that he and Armstrong stared at the broken switch for a long time. Then Aldrin got creative. He took a regular felt-tip pen, the kind you'd used to write a grocery list, and he jammed it into the hole where the switch had been. And he pushed. It was. It

worked. The circuit breaker engaged. The engine was armed. A felt-tip pen. That's what stood between life and death on the moon. A felt-tip pen and the quick thinking of a man who refused to panic. Aldrin kept that pen for the rest of his life and eventually donated it to the Smithsonian. If you go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, you can see it. A small, ordinary felt-tip pen in a display case. Arguably, the most important pen in human history. But think about the alternative. What if Aldrin hadn't noticed the broken switch until it was too late? What if the pen hadn't worked? What if the circuit breaker had been damaged beyond what a jury-rigged fix could solve? Then Sapphire's speech gets read. That's how

close it was. Then came the moment. July 21st, 1969, 154 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The Ascent engine ignited. It fired for seven minutes and 11. seconds. It was loud and violent. The lunar module lurched upward off the surface, leaving the descent stage behind. Armstrong and Aldrin watched through the window as the moon's surface fell away beneath them. It worked. The engine worked. Sapphire's speech would not be needed. In Houston, the flight controllers exhaled. In the White House, staffers exhaled. In homes across America and around the world, people who'd been holding their breath for days, finally let go. Armstrong and Aldrin rendezvoused with Collins in the command module, docked, transferred back,

jettisoned the lunar module ascent stage, and began the journey home. Three days later, on July 24th, the command module Columbia splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The crew was recovered by the USS Hornet. Nixon was there on the ship, beaming, speaking to the astronauts through the wind, window of their quarantine trailer because they had to be isolated in case they'd brought back lunar microbes. It was a triumphant moment, the kind that defines a presidency, and Nixon milked it for everything it was worth. The other speech, the contingency speech, was quietly filed away. It went into Sapphire's personal files, and for 30 years, nobody knew it existed.

Before I tell you how it was discovered, I want to talk about someone who often gets overlooked in discussions of this memo. Michael Collins, the third astronaut, the one who stayed in orbit, the one who would have had to come home alone. Collins' situation in the disaster scenario is almost unbearably poignant. He would have been orbiting the moon, passing over the landing side every two hours, knowing that his crewmates were down there, alive, dying, and there was nothing he could do. Collins himself wrote about this in his autobiography, carrying the fire. He said that he was aware during the mission that he might have to return to Earth without Armstrong and Aldrin, and the prospect filled him with a dread he couldn't fully articulate,

not fear for himself, dread for what it would mean for the world, for the families, for him personally as the man who came back while his friends didn't. Collins had been designated as the lonely astronaut by the media even before the mission. He was the man who would be alone on the far side of the moon, completely cut off from all communication for 47 minutes, minutes out of every orbit. No contact with mission control. No contact with Armstrong and Aldrin. No contact with anyone. For those 47 minutes, he was the most isolated human being in all of history. And in the disaster scenario, that isolation would have become permanent, not physically since he'd have

come home, but emotionally and psychologically. He would have been the man who left his friends to die on the moon. Sapphire's speech doesn't mention Collins, not by now. name, and that's a notable omission. Perhaps Sapphire felt the speech needed to focus on the dead. Perhaps he planned a separate statement. Perhaps it was simply an oversight. But Collins's absence from the memo speaks to a larger truth about how we remember Apollo 11. Armstrong is the hero, Aldrin is the hero, and Collins is the afterthought. In the disaster scenario, Collins would have been worse than an afterthought. He would have been the survivor, the one who had to be the one who had to carry the guilt and the grief for the rest of his life.

There's a famous quote attributed to Collins, though he may have been paraphrasing someone else. He said that if the mission had ended in disaster, he would not have committed suicide, but he would never have been the same person again. The man who went to the moon would have died on the moon, even if his body came home. And I think that's worth sitting with for a moment, because Colin's story illuminates something important about how we process tragedy. We focus on the dead, as we should, but we sometimes forget the living, the survivors, the ones who have to go on. In this scenario, Collins would have had to fly the command module back to Earth alone.

Three days. Alone in a spacecraft designed for three, with two empty couches beside him. Three days to think about what happened, to replay every moment, to wonder if there was something he could have done differently, even though he knew there wasn't. and then he'd have to land in the Pacific Ocean and face the world. The cameras, the questions, the grief that would be projected on to him from every direction. He'd become the living symbol of the disaster, the man who got away, the reminder of what was lost. That's a burden that would crush most people. And Collins knew it was a possibility every time he thought about the mission. Collins was, by all accounts, one of the most thoughtful and self-aware astronauts in the program.

He was the one who wrote most honestly about the experience, about what it felt like to be alone on the far side of the moon, about the strange mix of exhilaration and loneliness that defined his role in the mission. And he was the one who, more than Armstrong or Aldrin, seemed to grapple publicly with the enormity of what they'd done and how close they'd come to not doing it at all. Now let me jump ahead, because the discovery of this memo is its own fascinating story. In 1999, a journalist named James Mann was doing research in the National Archives for a book about Nixon's foreign policy.

Mann was a Los Angeles Times correspondent and a respected author, and he was digging through boxes of documents from the Nixon White House when he came across Sapphire's memo. He recognized immediately what he'd found. This wasn't just a historical curiosity. This was a window into the most tense, most dramatic moment of the 20th century. a moment when the United States government was genuinely prepared for the death of its astronauts on live television. The timing of the discovery matters too. 1999 was the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and the nation was already in a nostalgic mood. Television specials were airing, reunions were being held, and old astronauts were making the rounds on talk shows,

telling stories polished by three decades of retelling. And into that atmosphere of celebration dropped this memo. This cold, clinical, devastating document that said in black and white that the people running the show thought there was a real chance those astronauts might die. It reframed the entire narrative. Suddenly the story of Apollo 11 wasn't just about triumph. It was about how close the triumph came to being a tragedy. It added a shadow to the celebration, a chill to the nostalgia, and it made the achievement

feel even more extraordinary because we could finally see with our own eyes what was at stake. The public response was overwhelming. People who'd lived through the mission, who'd watched the landing as children or young adults, said the memo changed how they understood what they'd witnessed. They'd always known it was dangerous. But knowing and seeing are different things. And seeing the actual words, the actual protocol for handling the death of Armstrong and Aldrin, made it viscerally real in a way that abstract knowledge never could. Some historians have argued that the memo's discovery was the most important addition to the Apollo 11 story since the mission itself.

I think that might be going a little far, but I understand the argument, because the memo completes the picture. It shows us the full emotional landscape of the moment, not just the joy, but the fear, not just the hope, but the dread, not just the celebration, but the preparation for mourning, and it humanizes everyone involved. Nixon, who we tend to think of as a cynical, calculating political operator, Sapphire, who we think of as a newspaper columnist, Borman, who we think of as a steely-eyed astronaut. They were all afraid. They were all planning for the worst while hoping for the best, all grappling with the possibility that the most ambitious human endeavor

in history might end in the most public fail. imaginable. That's not cynicism or political calculation. That's just being human. And I think there's a lesson in that for how we think about the people who make consequential decisions. We like to imagine that the people in charge are always confident, always in control, always certain of the outcome. But the truth is, they're terrified. They're doing their best with incomplete information and impossible stakes. And most of the time, they're just as scared as the rest of us. The difference is that their fear has to be productive. Their anxiety has to be channeled into preparation. And that's exactly what happened here. Borman's fear became a question.

The question became an assignment. The assignment became a memo. And the memo became a contingency plan that mercifully was never needed. That's how competent institutions respond to existential risk. Not by pretending the risk doesn't exist. Not by hoping for the best and leaving it at that. but by staring the worst-case scenario directly in the face and writing it down. There's a concept in risk management called pre-mortem analysis, where you imagine that a project has already failed and then work backward to figure out what went wrong. It's a way of forcing yourself to confront possibilities that you'd rather not think about. The in-event of moon disaster memo is essentially a pre-mortem taken to its logical extreme.

It doesn't just imagine that the mission failed. It imagines the aftermath, the phone calls, the speeches, the prayers, the silence. It walks all the way through the worst day in American history and comes out the other side with a plan. And the existence of that plan, that uncomfortable, devastating, beautifully written plan, is what allowed everyone involved to proceed with the mission. Because they knew that if the worst happened, they were ready. They'd thought it through. They had the words.

William Sapphire, who by this time was a famous columnist and public intellectual, was suddenly fielding questions about something he'd written 30 years earlier. A speech he'd hoped would never be delivered. He gave several interviews about the memo over the years, and his reflections are illuminating. He said that writing it was one of the most difficult assignments of his career, not technically difficult since he was skilled enough to handle the rhetoric, but emotionally difficult because he was writing about real people, living people.

people he'd met. He said he drew on the language of Rupert Brook, the English poet who wrote about death in World War I. There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Sapphire adapted that sentiment for the space age. There would be some corner of the moon that would be forever America, forever Earth, forever human. He also talked about the practical considerations. The speech had to be short because in a moment of crisis, you don't give a long speech. The American people would be in shock and they wouldn't be able to process a lengthy address. They needed clarity and comfort,

and they needed it quickly. He estimated the speech would have taken approximately two to three minutes to deliver about the right length for a crisis address. And he talked about the political dimensions. He knew the speech would inevitably become a political document as well as a personal one. Every word choice would be scrutinized.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. So he tried to write something genuinely moving, genuinely eloquent, without being manipulative or exploitative. Whether he succeeded is a matter of opinion. Some people read the speech and are moved to tears. Others read it and see the machinery of political spin working even in the face of tragedy. Both readings are valid.

Both are true. Because that's the nature of presidential speech writing. It exists at the intersection of genuine emotion. and calculated strategy, and in the case of this memo, that intersection is more visible than usual. Sapphire died in 2009 at the age of 79. In his obituaries, the in-event-of-moon disaster memo was mentioned prominently. It had become, arguably, the most famous thing he ever wrote. Not his years of columns, not his political commentary, not his books on language, but a speech that was never delivered, a speech for a tragedy that never happened. There's something poetic about that,

and something a little sad, because Sapphire wrote millions of words in his career, brilliant words, important words, but the ones that endure are the words he wrote in the hope that they would never be spoken. The memo's afterlife didn't end with its discovery. In 2020, a project from the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality created a short film called An Event of Movement, disaster. It's a deep fake. They used artificial intelligence to create a synthetic video of Richard Nixon delivering Sapphire's speech, the real speech, the one that was never given. In the video, Nixon sits at his desk in the Oval Office, looks into the camera, and reads the words. Fate has ordained that

the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. The technology is unsettling. The video looks real. Nixon looks real. His lips move in sync with the words. His expressions are appropriate. If you didn't know it was a deep fake, you might believe it was genuine footage of a historical event that never happened. The project was designed as a warning, a demonstration of how easily modern technology can create convincing false realities. But there's an additional layer of meaning. By creating a video of Nixon delivering the disaster speech, they showed us the alternate timeline, the one where the ascent engine failed,

the one where Armstrong and Aldrin died, the one where the memo was needed. And watching it is a profoundly unsettling experience, because even though you know it's fake, even though you know that Armstrong and Aldrin came home safely, there's a part of your brain that responds to the video as if it's real. That's the power of the speech. More than 50 years after it was written,

it can still make your throat tighten and your eyes sting. even in a context that's explicitly artificial. The deep fake also forces you to reckon with something uncomfortable about how we consume history. We tell ourselves that we're rational, that we evaluate evidence carefully, that we can distinguish between what's real and what isn't. But the MIT video demonstrates just how easily our emotions can be manipulated. The speech was never given. The disaster never happened.

And yet watching Nixon deliver those words, even knowing it's synthetic, produces a genuine emotional response. Grief for men who didn't actually die. Sorrow for a tragedy that never occurred. Relief that it's not real. Mixed with the unsettling awareness that it could have been. That's the uncanny territory that the in-event of moon disaster memo has always occupied. It's a real document about an unreal event.

It describes something that never happened with the same precision and gravity that you'd use to describe something that did. And because the writing is so good, because Sapphire's prose is so perfectly calibrated to the emotional register of National Morning, the speech almost creates its own reality. You read it, and you can see Nixon behind the desk. You can hear his voice.

You can feel the weight of the moment. It's history that never was, rendered so vividly that it feels more real than some history that actually happened. The MIT Project also raised profound questions. about how we relate to historical events, because we already live in a world where the line between what happened and what almost happened is blurred. Our understanding of history is built not just on what happened, but on what could have happened, on the roads not taken, the bullets

dodged, the disasters averted. And the in-event of Moon disaster memo is perhaps the most vivid example of that phenomenon in modern American history. It's worth noting that the Apollo program continued to flirt with disaster long after Apollo 11. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch, twice, and the electrical systems went haywire. Warning lights were going off everywhere, and for a few terrifying seconds, the crew and mission control thought they might have to abort. And then there was Apollo 13 in April of 1970, less than a year after the triumph of Apollo 11. When an oxygen tank exploded in the service module roughly 200,000 miles from Earth.

The crew, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigard, and Fred Hayes lost most of their power, their water, and their oxygen, and had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat. For four days, the world held its breath again, and the White House absolutely had to confront the possibility that three astronauts were going to die in space. The parallels to Sapphire's memo were impossible to ignore. In the end, the Apollo 13 crew made it home,

another miracle, another bullet dodged. But it confirmed what Sapphire's memo had anticipated, that disaster in space wasn't just possible. It was probable, and it was only a matter of time before something went catastrophically wrong. The fact that it took as long as it did, the fact that no Apollo crew was lost in space, is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of technology.

The Apollo program flew 11 crewed missions between 1968 and 960s, 1972. Twenty-four astronauts flew to the moon. Twelve walked on its surface, and every single one of them came home alive. That's not luck. That's the result of thousands of people working around the clock, checking and re-checking every system, every calculation, every bolt, and wire and seal. It's the result of a culture that understood deeply and personally what failure would mean. not just for the astronauts, not just for the program, but for every person who had devoted their professional life to making these missions succeed. And I think that's the part of this story that moves me the most. Not the speech itself, though it's extraordinary, not the

political maneuvering, though it's fascinating, but the sheer weight of human effort that went into making sure the speech was never needed. Thousands of engineers, technicians, mathematicians, seamstresses who sewed spacesuits, welders who joined metal, programmers who hand-threaded memory cores. Every one of them working toward a single goal, getting three men to the moon and back alive. And every one of them carrying the knowledge somewhere in the back of their mind that if they made a mistake, if they missed a flaw, if they let something slip through, those men would die. And a speech was waiting. That's the real story of Apollo 11. Not just the triumph on the surface of the moon, but the thousands of small triumphs that

preceded it, the tests that passed, the problems that were caught, the flaws that were fixed, the margins that were maintained. Each one of those quiet victories pushed the disaster speech a little further from the president's desk and a little deeper into the drawer where it belonged. But Sapphire's memo reminds us that perfection was never guaranteed. It was earned, mission by mission, decision by decision, engine firing by engine firing. And it could have been lost, at any moment. Let me bring this full circle. On July 20th, 1969, two human beings walked on the surface of the moon. They came home alive. They lived long lives. Armstrong died in 2012 at the age of 82. Aldrin, as of this recording, is still alive at 95. Collins died in 2021 at 90. They lived. They came

home. They grew old. And sitting in the National Archives in a folder that was sealed for 30 years is the speech that would have been their eulogy, written by a man who hoped with everything he had that nobody would ever read it. But we did read it, and we should. Because it reminds us of something crucial, something we tend to forget when we look back at the Apollo program through the golden haze of nostalgia. It could have gone the other way. Those men could have died. Not in some abstract theoretical sense, but in a very real, very specific, very likely sense. The people running the mission knew it. The people in the White House knew it.

The astronauts themselves knew it. And they went anyway. Armstrong climbed into that spacecraft knowing there was a real chance he'd never come home. Aldrin climbed in beside him. Collins climbed in, knowing he might have to come home alone. They went anyway. And somewhere in a drawer in the White House, a speech sat folded, in an envelope, waiting, hoping not to be needed. That's what courage looks like. Not the absence of

fear, not the denial of risk, but the willingness to face both openly and honestly and go anyway. The speech was never read. Thank God. Thank whatever force or fortune or engineering excellence kept that ascent engine firing. Thank the hundreds of people who built it, tested it, checked it, and checked it again. But the speech exists, and its existence. tells us something about that moment in history that no triumph can erase. It was close. Closer than we like to admit. Closer than the ticker tape parades and the commemorative stamps and the one small step mythology allow us to acknowledge. Two men walked on the moon and came home. But two men almost didn't, and a speech was ready. The next time you look up at the moon on a clear

night, I want you to think about that. Think about how close we came to looking up and seeing a tomb. Think about how close the president came to reading those words. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. Think about how thin the line is between triumph and tragedy, between history's greatest achievement and history's greatest disaster. Think about that speech, sitting in its folder, waiting, and be glad, be grateful, that it was never needed.

And one more thing before I let you go. I mentioned at the top of this episode that the speech was titled, An Event of Moon Disaster, Five Words, So Simple, So Bureaucratic. It sounds like something you'd find on the label of a filing cabinet, an event of moon disaster, like it's a memo about office supplies or a change in parking policy. But that's what makes it so disturbing. The banality of it, the matter-of-fact bureaucratic language

wrapped around the most horrifying scenario imaginable. That gap between the antiseptic title and the devastating content tells you everything you need to know about how institutions process the unthinkable. They file it. They put it in a folder. They give it a title that could apply to an insurance claim, and they put it in a drawer. Because that's how you cope with the possibility that the world might fall apart.

You write it down. You plan for it. You give it a label, and then you close the drawer and go back to work. Sapphire understood that. He understood that the machinery of government doesn't stop for grief or pause for horror. It processes. It categorizes.

It prepares. And then, if the worst doesn't happen, it files the preparation away and moves on to the next crisis. This one stayed in the drawer for 30 years until a journalist found it and pulled it out and held it up to the light. And the light revealed something extraordinary. Not a failure. Not a scandal. Not a cover-up. Just a piece of paper.

A speech that was never given, a plan that was never needed, a contingency for a disaster that, by the grace of good engineering and a felt-tip pen, and the iron will of men who refused to accept the impossible, never came to pass. That's the story. The whole thing. Every uncomfortable, spine-chilling page of it. Stay curious. Stay disturbed. And remember, history isn't always what they told you in school.