Short History Of... - The Moon Landing

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

After multiple coups by the Soviet Union, astronaut Alan B. Shepard has just become the first American in space. But this is only the beginning. Now, NASA have the moon in their sights, but it's still a long way off. For either the USA or the USSR to succeed, they'll need newer and better technology. The 1960s are about to become the defining decade in space exploration. Who will touch down first on Earth's nearest neighbour? This is a Short History of the Moon Landing. Written by Luke Kuhns. With thanks to Robert Godwin, Historian, and author of multiple books on the Space Race. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's September the 12th, 1962, at Rice University in Houston, Texas. A crowd applauds President John F. Kennedy as he stands at a podium adorned with the presidential seal. Photographers and reporters swarm around him taking pictures. The Texan sun beats down. A sheen of sweat forms on his brow. The Texan sun beats down. A sheen of sweat forms on his brow. The previous year, he challenged Congress to support plans for American astronauts to fly to the moon. After early successes by the Soviet Union, the rocket scientists at NASA have successfully

launched a man called Alan B. Shepard into orbit. The United States has truly arrived in the space race. Now a nation expects. At the microphone, Kennedy addresses the people stood shoulder to shoulder in the stadium bleachers. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked off the American Soviet space race. The Soviet satellite in orbit struck fear into the hearts of Americans.

It seemed the Communists had seized space, seized the future. America responded by launching its first satellite, Explorer 1. But the USSR has already sent animals to space and returned them safely. They got the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. They've shot multiple spacecraft to the moon and taken the first photographs of its far side. America struggled to outdo the Soviets. The moon may be in their sights, but it's still a long way off. For either nation to succeed, they'll need newer and better technology.

It's one thing to loop a satellite into orbit, even a human being. It's another thing entirely to shoot a crew out into deep space for a 477,800 mile return journey. The 1960s are about to become the defining decade in space exploration. Who will get there first? This is a short history of the moon landing. Kennedy's proclamation in 1961 in front of Congress is often viewed as the first serious declaration of intent in terms of travelling to the moon.

But behind the scenes, many of the US government's leading scientists have been beavering away for years in pursuit of this objective. Wernher von Braun is the chief architect behind America's Saturn V rocket. After being transported to the States from his native Germany in the aftermath of World War II, this former Nazi party member has denounced his past and taken US citizenship. In the pay of the American government,

von Braun has notched up a series of notable firsts. He was the mastermind, for example, behind the USA's groundbreaking orbiting satellite, Explorer 1. Von Braun has known for years that the country to land first on the moon will likely be the one to dominate space exploration going forward. Since 1958, he's worked to develop engines powerful enough to make a moon landing a realistic prospect. Sergey Korolev, meanwhile, is the Soviet Union's leading rocket scientist. A largely unknown figure in the West, von Braun's secret rival developed Sputnik, the

world's first satellite. He believes the same, that getting to the Moon first is an absolute must in the context of the Cold War. The proxy conflicts and wars of words between the two superpowers rumble on. Nuclear conflict might reduce human civilization to rubble, long before anyone has a chance to set foot on the silvery surface of the moon. Regardless, this uncertainty will do nothing to deter Korolev or von Braun. If anything, the chaos of the time will turbocharge their efforts to cross new frontiers beyond planet Earth.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is the Soviet Union's headquarters for space operations. This is the USSR's version of Cape Canaveral, America's HQ in Florida. Since Sputnik, Baikonur is where the Soviets launched their spacecraft. In fact, to this very day, the Russian government operates from this site. It's August 6th, 1961, four months since Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit Earth in Korolev Fostok-1. Now Korolev and his team need more data. To determine the prolonged effects of spaceflight on the human body, Fostok 2 is launched, with the cosmonaut German Titov on board.

The mission is a success. Titov is the first person to orbit Earth for a full 24 hours. America, on the other hand, is a long way from achieving an orbit lasting this long. But there's a reason for this. Their eyes are on a rather different prize. Werner von Braun's focus is on landing astronauts on the moon. The German scientist needs a plan to make his bosses really sit up and listen. His initial proposal for a moon landing is like something straight out of Star Trek. Robert Godwin is an historian of the space race.

Generally, the consensus was that there were three different ways for getting to the moon. You could use what was called lunar direct, which was like Buck Rogers. You'd build a really, really big rocket, fly it straight to the moon, land backwards on its tail, and then have enough fuel on board to take off from the moon and fly straight back to the Earth again. There was a thing called Earth Orbit Rendezvous, because von Braun didn't believe you could actually build rockets big enough to do lunar direct. So you needed to come up with a different approach. An Earth orbit rendezvous was essentially building lots of rockets that would take pieces of your space system up to orbit.

And then you would assemble them in orbit around the Earth, fuel them from tankers in Earth orbit, and then fly to the moon with a smaller, or even indeed a large spacecraft that you could build in Earth orbit. He wanted to launch multiple smaller rockets and have them meet in Earth orbit and refuel and construct. And this would involve a space station. So there was this entire architecture being proposed by von Braun that would leave a legacy behind it. You would have space stations in orbit, you'd have refueling stations in orbit, and you would have a spacecraft that would only fly from the Earth orbit to the moon and back and would never actually have to come back through the atmosphere. So there was a lot of logic behind that. But the clock was now ticking. Kennedy had given them basically nine years to get to the Moon.

There were people who believed that you could not do even Earth orbit rendezvous in eight or nine years. Under such time restraints, von Braun is forced to ditch the notion of a space station and come up with something more streamlined. A third scheme, von Braun's Lunar Orbit Rend rendezvous plan, gets the green light. Now, lunar orbit rendezvous meant that you would launch perhaps multiple rockets into Earth orbit. You would then send those parts to lunar orbit and then have pieces of the spacecraft go down to the lunar surface and then come back and rendezvous in lunar orbit and then send your payload, whether it be people or whatever, back to Earth orbit before descending back to Earth.

So this idea for a lunar orbit rendezvous was hatched, actually it was hatched as early as 1948 by the British Interplanetary Society, but it was put on paper and delivered to NASA's desk in 1960. So the head of NASA looked at Chance Vought's plans and said, we should do something like this. And there was this idea for a modular spacecraft system that would separate into different parts and some of it would land on the moon, some of it would stay in lunar orbit, and some of it would come back to Earth. So that became the sort of paradigm that NASA began to follow. But even this has its fair share of skeptics.

It hadn't quite been accepted as the exact way to go yet. There was a lot of resistance to lunar orbit rendezvous. A lot of people didn't think that you could even bring two spacecraft close enough together safely that you couldn't do what's known as docking. So the next step in the space race was being able to prove that somebody could stay in space for the duration of a lunar mission. You needed to be able to stay up for probably as much as 14 days without killing the crew. You needed to be able to develop the spacesuits that could handle that. You needed to be able to develop new foods, new power systems. And you had to develop a lander that could actually land on the moon and come back again. So these were all the things that were on the desks of people at NASA in 1961 when Kennedy said, we're going to the moon.

On June the 16th, 1963, Sergei Korolev's Vostok 6 mission scores yet another first for the Soviet space program. The cosmonaut inside this craft is Valentina Tereshkova. She is the first woman and the first civilian to travel into space. Unlike other cosmonauts, Tereshkova is not a pilot by background. Her expert skills as a parachutist got her chosen for this assignment. Tereshkova successfully orbits the Earth 48 times in 71 hours. She takes extraordinary photographs of Earth's horizon.

The images are later used to identify the aerosol layers within our atmosphere. As with previous Vostok missions, parachuting from the capsule is the only way to safely return to Earth. Back home, Tereshkova becomes an instant role model for women and girls worldwide. But despite the veneration she inspires, and the global fame she finds, this will be her only mission into space. It will take until 1982 for the second Soviet woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, to make it into space. Tereshkova's first and last spaceflight also marks the end of the Vostok program.

With funding cut, Korolev is changing his game plan. Vostok's one-person flights are a thing of the past now. He knows that a single cosmonaut won't make it to the moon. He'll need a multi-person crew. But Korolev's old rival, a man called Valentin Glushko, has other ideas. He has begun work on a new rocket called the Proton. Unlike in America, the USSR space program is not centralized. This limits the amount of money Korolev has access to, because it's spread amongst his competitors. So Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. So it was another feather in the Soviets' caps.

became the first woman in space. So it was another feather in the Soviets' caps. Unbeknownst in the West, they felt that they kept being upstaged by the Soviets, and indeed they were in a political sense. But what they didn't know is that Karloff was fighting for his very life as far as being able to keep his space program going because of this fight that had been going on. And so now, going because of this fight that had been going on. And so now, Glushko was teaming up with another guy called Chelemy. And Chelemy was going to build a new heavy launch vehicle, which became known as the Proton. And so while the United States was becoming more and more integrated in its approach to its space program and winning this race to the moon, the Soviet program was becoming more and more fractured. And we were completely unaware of this in the West to the moon. The Soviet program was becoming more and more fractured, and we were completely unaware of this in the West at the time.

This isn't to say that America's space program is going entirely swimmingly. Von Braun hears rumors that behind closed doors, JFK has made it clear he couldn't care less about space travel or a moon landing. It seems those impassioned speeches about placing Americans on the lunar surface were just paying lip service. Kennedy's interest has not just waned, it was never there to begin with. Indeed, in one meeting with his advisors and NASA administrator James Webb, Kennedy says point blank, I'm not interested in space. Despite the hype, the whole program is at risk of being scrapped. The president is wary of the financial drain that goes with the mission. Von Braun's work and the budding Apollo program consume four percent of the entire federal budget between them. America simply doesn't have that

kind of spare cash lying around. To save money, Kennedy even suggests negotiating with the Soviets on a joint mission to the moon. It's an extraordinary thought, the two Cold War superpowers putting aside their differences and teaming up for a groundbreaking voyage into the heavens. But few around Kennedy are sold on a joint venture. The mission to the moon must remain a solely American endeavour. The Nazi pastor von Braun, America's top guy, is largely glossed over. In any case, this idea of a collaboration does seem rather far-fetched at the time. After all, it's barely a year since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then, on November 22, 1963, a tragedy strikes which puts all talk of space travel in the shade. In Dallas, Texas, Kennedy is shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. At 1 p.m. local time, the President is pronounced dead. As the nation mourns, uncertainty swirls. What will happen to the space program now? Some believe that in a roundabout way the tragic death of President Kennedy actually salvaged America's missions in space.

In private he may have cooled on the idea, but because of his fervent public pronouncements in 1961 and 62, the race to the moon is now seen as a way to honour the President's memory. America is set on getting to the moon by the end of the decade at any cost. By 1964, the Soviet space programme, by contrast, is wobbling somewhat. Watching newsreels and films about America's progress, Sergei Korolev can't help but feel envious. Von Braun now has financial and government backing that Korolev can only dream of.

With the USSR's decentralized approach, Korolev simply can't get the serious financing he needs. He also knows that without a rocket to match the power of on Brown's Saturn V, the Soviets will undoubtedly lose the race. Korolev needs to think on his feet, and he needs to cut his cloth accordingly. Pacing his office, the germ of an idea appears. Might he be able to repurpose the Vostok spacecraft? Korolev now had to try and figure out how to take his little one-man Vostok spacecraft

and turn it into something more sophisticated. And now the Americans had announced they were going to the moon. There was nothing that was actually being built in the Soviet Union that could compete with a lunar-capable spacecraft. So 1962, the United States had announced that they were going with a thing called Apollo. They chose the contractors that were going to build the hardware. And lunar orbit rendezvous, this technique for using a special lander from lunar orbit, had been chosen. And so all of this was plowing ahead in the United States. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Korolev was trying to figure out how he was going to put more than one person into a Vostok.

On October the 12th, 1964, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Korolev prepares to test his refitted rocket. It's been given a new, albeit very similar name. Voshkot-1. Extraordinary risk is part and parcel of the game. After all, what we're talking about is shooting people into the air propelled by a giant bomb. Korolev knows this all too well. It makes his stomach turn when he recalls the many lives lost to test site accidents. He's been taking medication to calm his nerves.

The message from on high is to plough on, whatever the cost. Voshkhod-1 is easily the Soviet Union's most dangerous launch to date. Korolev is risking the lives of three cosmonauts on a rocket he's barely tested. Commander Vladimir Komarov, Engineer Konstantin Fyokhtistov and Dr. Boris Yegorov travel up in the gantry elevator.

They don't look like typical cosmonauts. For a start, they aren't wearing spacesuits. Instead, they're decked out in thin jumpsuits and flimsy headguards. Across the way, the cosmonauts marvel at the debris from numerous failed rocket launches. This is hardly the first time the Soviets have scarfed safety for a PR boom. In order to fit three cosmonauts inside, Korolev has gutted the Vostok. He's ditched its ejection seat, omitted the spacesuits, and forced the cosmonauts to diet extensively. Extreme measures, to say the least.

He decided that he would take the seats out and cram three people into a Vostok and change the name of it, calling it Voskhod. And they did this by realigning the way that the astronauts were faced so they couldn't even look out the window. They couldn't wear spacesuits either. He was being basically ordered by the Politburo to show that the Soviets were still ahead. Has Korolev done what's needed to be done? Or has he, knowingly, sent three men to their graves?

At 7.30am in the blockhouse, the watching scientists are anxious. This mission is beyond reckless. The engines fire and Voskhod-1 lifts off the pad. In the coming minutes, the cosmonauts make it into orbit without issue. It seems Korolev's gamble has paid off. The next stage of the plan is for Voskhod-1 to remain in orbit for 24 hours. The next stage of the plan is for Voskhod-1 to remain in orbit for 24 hours. Mid-flight, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev speaks with the passengers via radiophone. Khrushchev congratulates them on their success.

He promises to greet them personally upon their return. But on Earth, a radical political shake-up is brewing. Soon after Khrushchev ends the call, he's expelled from office and the Communist Party. Remarkably, Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov return to Earth safely. They are greeted by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, the new leaders of the Soviet Union. The mission, though a success, does Korolev no favours. The risks, the cramped spacecraft, and Khrushchev's expulsion from office during the flight see

the mission labelled a circus, in the Western media at least. Amongst America's rocket scientists, however, the viewpoint is rather different. America's rocket scientists, however, the viewpoint is rather different. NASA Administrator James Webb calls Vashkod-1 a significant space accomplishment. The Russians are continuing a large space program for the achievement of national power and prestige, he adds. America has yet to achieve a two-man spaceflight, let alone a three-man one. And so by 1965, all the talk was about how do you fly in space? How do you navigate in space?

Can you have two spacecraft meet up in space safely? There was also the issue of what kind of spacesuits were you going to use for these long duration flights? And what happens if you needed to get out to fix the spacecraft or to maneuver around and construct things in space? And that meant spacewalking. On March the 18th, 1965, Sergei Korolev launches Voskhod 2. Unlike the insanely cramped three-person crew, this time there are only two cosmonauts inside. Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyaev. Voskhod 2 reaches orbit. Then Leonov performs the first ever spacewalk and tests the Soviet's new state-of-the-art spacesuits. The spacewalk makes history, but very nearly goes pear-shaped.

One of the things that they didn't really understand at that time was how spacesuits behave in the vacuum of space. And so they had developed this sort of concertina airlock to go on the side of Voskhod. And Leonov, they were supposed to depressurize the cabin. You get in a spacesuit, depressurize the cabin, climb into this airlock, and then pop out into space. What they hadn't accounted for was the fact

that his spacesuit would blow up like a balloon. And once he got outside, he knew he was in trouble, that he was going to have a really hard time getting back inside. And he struggled with it for some length of time. Some of it's captured on film, but he struggled for some considerable length of time. And in the end, he had to just start to deflate his suit. He had to start letting air out into space so that he could get in head first. Well,

once he got back in head first, he then had to rotate inside this sort of concertina flimsy airlock before he could get back into the capsule. Once he got back into the capsule, they couldn't seal the hatch properly. The hatch was leaking. So at that point, the ground crew said, look, we've done what we wanted to do. He's had the spacewalk's time to bring them down early. Well, when they went to bring them down early, the control systems were acting up and they weren't able to automatically trigger the re-entry sequence. And so they had to get out of their seats and Leonov had to lie on the floor underneath

Belyaev's seat so that Belyaev could be facing the control systems. And then Leonov held him down in the seat while Belyaev had to plot the re-entry manually once he'd done all the manual calculations and and done all that lenovo let go of him got back up climbed into his seat and the two of them got back in the spacecraft and re-entered but even now leonov from beliaev are not out of the woods they land off target in the frozen wilderness of the perm region in russia They land off target in the frozen wilderness of the Perm region in Russia. It's a dense forest area miles from civilization. A rescue helicopter eventually spots them, but there's no place to land.

Having survived space, the two cosmonauts are stranded amidst the icy landscape of their own home country. After three days and two nights, a rescue crew finally reaches them. Luckily, both are trained survivalists and have managed to make a fist of it. In the eyes of von Braun and America, despite a few hiccups, the Soviet spacewalk is a stunning success. The pressure is firmly on America to up its game. On June 3, 1965, America's Gemini 4 launches. The astronauts on board, James McDivitt and Ed White, are rookies. Neither has flown in space before this point. Their mission is to prove that the United States can do a spacewalk and do it better than the Soviets. The astronauts do not disappoint.

Ed White's well-publicized spacewalk goes extraordinarily smoothly. And he opened the hatch and went outside with a little hand rocket propellant pack in his hand that he could theoretically use to move himself around. Leonov had not had one of those. And so Leonov was really, only way he could move around was like pulling on his tether and pulling himself backwards and forwards. So he was kind of floating erratically and out of control to some extent. Whereas White had this little rocket gun in his hand that he could push himself around with. And of course, the whole world got to see those pictures of Ed White because they were in glorious color, filmed on movie film and with still pictures taken by Jim McDivitt. And they made the cover of National Geographic and Life magazine, whereas we still really hadn't seen hardly anything of Leonov's spacewalk. anything of Leonov's spacewalk. So that really gave the United States a propaganda coup because we had

these really incredible pictures of the first human satellite flying over this blue ball. Not to be outdone, Sergei Korolev soon presents his latest innovation, a new spacecraft called Soyuz with a capsule adjoining it.

The Soyuz will supersede the Voshkor program. The Soviet scientist believes this will be the project that gets the USSR to the moon. But as Korolev shows off the new spacecraft to potential pilots, he begins to feel unwell. He collapses, suffering severe chest pains. His health issues date back before the start of the Second World War. In 1938, Korolev was imprisoned in the Gulag. The experience brought on heart issues.

He also had scurvy and lost most of his teeth. He suffered a heart attack in 1960. The doctors discovered he had a kidney disorder, another direct result of his time in the Gulag. Now Korolev is ordered by his doctor to rest. Over the coming months, his health continues to decline. On January 14, 1966, Korolev is placed under anesthesia as surgeons attempt to remove a tumor. Incisions are made, and the operation gets underway. But then the doctors start to lose him.

Reports vary as to how exactly it happened, but Sergei Korolev dies on the operating table, aged just 59. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, announces to the public that Korolev was the genius mind behind the Soviet space program all this time. The scientist has been largely anonymous for the best part of 20 years. Korolev is given a full state funeral. Thousands gather in Red Square to honour his memory and achievements. The man who was once locked up by the state is buried as a communist hero. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in

space, gives the eulogy. Sergei Korolev's ashes remain in the Kremlin wall to this day. In America, von Braun is the news. He's surprised to learn that one man has been behind so much of the USSR's success. Sputnik, the first man and woman in space, landing crafts on the moon and planetary flybys. How will the Soviet Union do without him? What the Americans didn't realise is that the space race was already in its death throes. And that was because Sergei Korolev died during an operation. So the head guy,

who wasn't even known by name in the West, had died on the operating table in 1966. Three months after Korolev's death, the Soviets begin testing Soyuz, with the intention of one day using it to land people on the moon. But in America, they are closer than ever to achieving this ultimate objective. The Apollo program, powered by von Braun's Saturn V rockets, is pulling ahead. On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 undergoes a launch simulation. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Shafi are fully pressure-suited, strapped in, and shut inside the command module.

At 6.30pm, a series of tests and troubleshoots keeps the simulated countdown stuck at T-minus 10 minutes. Then, all hell breaks loose. There's a fire in the cabin. The three astronauts are killed almost instantly. They didn't stand a chance. Any chemist will tell you that if you use 100% oxygen at 15 pounds per square inch inside a confined space, everything becomes flammable. Well, Ed White was a national hero because of his spacewalk. Gus Grissom was now going Cuba and was one of the ones

that took the photos of the Cuban missiles being unloaded that had caused the Cuban missile crisis. And sadly, the Apollo 1 spacecraft was not ready for primetime. A spark broke out in the bottom of the capsule right below the feet of one of the crew. And they just had time to say, there's a fire in the cabin. Within 30 seconds, they were dead. and they were not dead from the fire they were dead from asphyxiation. The oxygen atmosphere ignited everything in the capsule and so the space race had claimed three lives on the pad in a way that nobody anticipated. Three months after the Apollo 1 fire, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Soviet cosmonaut

Vladimir Komarov sits inside the Soyuz 1. But all is not well. Yuri Gagarin himself has written a 10-page report on the Soyuz, noting 203 structural problems. He hands the file to a KGB friend, but it goes no further. Gagarin even demands to swap places with Komarov.

He doesn't want the rookie to risk his life. The request is denied. The officials think he's being foolish. The flight will be fine. Gagarin watches Soyuz 1 launch Komarov into space. Once in orbit, the problems begin.

Technical failures mean the antennae fail to open properly, power to the craft is compromised, and Komarov struggles to navigate it. Down on the ground, a second Soyuz launch, prepped for the following day, is cancelled. Gagarin's fears are proving to be well-founded. Komarov has just the tiniest chance of a safe re-entry. In all likelihood, he's going to die. Alexei Kosygin and Komarov's wife both speak to the doomed cosmonaut over the radio. As Komarov's wife says her goodbyes,

Kosygin is in tears. But there's still a chance, however slim, that the cosmonaut might survive re-entry. Soyuz 1 begins to punch through the Earth's atmosphere. He's made it through. Komarov triggers the parachutes. But they fail to launch. The cosmonaut hurtles towards the Earth with no way to eject.

He's trapped. US intelligence picks up his radio frequency. They hear Komarov's cries as he plunges to his death. His body, once recovered, is unrecognizable. So what you were seeing was two lunar spacecraft not ready for primetime being rushed forward and trying to get there first, and the different problems. So in the United States, everything of course was done publicly. There was a big investigation, heads rolled at North American Aviation. And the astronauts

themselves began to take a much more keen interest in what was going on in the building of the spacecraft. And so Apollo, which was known as the Block 1 spacecraft, was completely revamped. And this, of course, delayed the entire Apollo program by perhaps as much as 18 months. The same exact thing was happening in Russia. Because of the failure of Soyuz 1, there was about an 18-month delay with any further manned flights. Tragedy soon strikes the Soviets again. On March the 27th, 1968, Yuri Gagarin takes off on a training flight from an airbase 20 miles northeast of Moscow. In mysterious circumstances, Gagarin tries suddenly to maneuver the craft, seemingly to avoid a collision. But the outcome is disastrous.

His plane enters into a tailspin and plummets to the ground. The Soviets have lost another hero, their greatest one yet. The Soviets have lost another hero, their greatest one yet. Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, is dead. This is a body blow to the USSR's space program, which is, truth be told, already on its last legs. The initiative is now firmly with America, where von Braun continues his own preparations for a mission to the moon. After the tragedy of Apollo 1, he's ready to test his Saturn V rocket once again. Once it was decided that the Apollo program was going to continue,

despite the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, the families had said, you know, these guys would want it to carry on. The train was rolling, and von Braun's super booster, the Saturn V, was going ahead full steam. They had done engine tests on the test stands in Alabama and Mississippi. And there's an interesting anecdote that the first time they fired all five F1 engines on the test stand in Alabama, there was an inversion layer in the weather and the shockwave bounced off the clouds and shattered the windows in half the houses in the town about four miles away. By the time November of 67 rolled around, von Braun was ready to test his ultimate achievement, this enormous 365-foot-tall Saturn V rocket. The press are kept 3.5 miles from the exclusion zone as they wait to see the rocket launch.

If it succeeds, it'll be the greatest weight ever lifted off the ground. The Saturn V launch registers on earthquake sensors across America. It's also the loudest man-made object ever devised. It's also the loudest man-made object ever devised. Von Braun watches his rocket climb higher and higher. But then, engine problems begin to disrupt the rocket's trajectory. Mission control question if they should abort the test. Von Braun bites his tongue and opts not to intervene.

The rocket stabilizes and limps into orbit. Nobody really knew what to expect, but this phenomenal achievement, this massive three-stage rocket, launched almost flawlessly. There was a large panel ripped off the side of it during the launch. That was the only real failure, and everybody was delighted.

So von Braun had sort of proven the first stage of his lifelong dream. In October 1968, Apollo 7 completes a 14-day mission to space. This seems to confirm that NASA is capable of getting astronauts to the moon and back within a two-week time frame. But the Soviets are not going down without a fight. They are boasting of their new craft's capability of reaching Earth's nearest neighbor. David Morgan The same month that Apollo 7 flew the first

time with people aboard, the Russians were getting ready to send an unmanned Soyuz to the moon. At this point, they were calling it Zond. So Apollo 8 suddenly became incredibly urgent. And so it was decided that they were going to put people into space, but also send them around the moon and put them in orbit around the moon. Apollo 8 is rushed to the launch pad. Von Braun is reluctant.

He wants more tests, but he agrees to the mission at the risk of losing out to the Soviets. It's a successful launch. On Christmas Eve, the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, look down at the bleak lunar surface from orbit. They send a holiday message back to the world. And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.

On July 3, 1969, the Soviet rocket N1-L5 sits on the Baikonur launchpad. Shortly after liftoff, there's a sudden flash of light. Debris falls from the bottom of the rocket. All engines shut down except for one. This forces the craft to lean at a 45-degree angle. Then the N1 drops onto the launch pad. Some 2300 tons of propellant triggers an incredible explosion. The shockwave shatters windows across the Cosmodrome complex.

Debris will be found miles away. This is the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in the history of rocketry. And it will be kept under lock and key, a Soviet state secret for 20 years. The fallout from the disastrous launch is a killer blow to Soviet morale. But they have one idea left to try. The United States was probably aware in intelligence circles that the Soviet Union's lunar rocket had blown up at this point.

But the Russians still hadn't given up. They were still going to try and outperform the Americans. And so right before Apollo 11 was launched from Cape Canaveral, they launched a lunar return sample mission with a robotic rover that was going to land on the moon, bring moon rocks back and defeat the Americans with moon rocks right before Apollo 11 launched. But this will prove but a footnote in the history books. The time has come for the main event. July the 16th, 1969, in Florida. The crew of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong,

Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins are strapped in. One million people gather at the Cape to see them off. Half a billion are watching on television. Then Yvonne Brown, in mission control, taps his pen on the desk.

The ten-second countdown begins. Ten, nine, ignition sequence start. Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, all engine running. Liftoff.

We have a liftoff. Everything went flawlessly on the launch of Apollo 11. There was no hiccups. In fact, of all the Saturn V launches, it was probably the one that was the least troubled with delays and so forth. It left with millions of people on the beach watching it and headed out to the moon like clockwork.

Meanwhile, the Soviets' final mad dash to beat America, the mission to retrieve samples from the moon, comes to a chaotic end. While they were on their way to the moon during Apollo 11's flight, the Russian sample return mission, which became known as, I think, Lunar 15, crashed into the lunar surface. It put away all fears that maybe the Soviets were going to interfere with Apollo 11. On July the 20th, Armstrong and his crew gaze from the windows of their spacecraft, Columbia. Below them is the moon. At 5.44pm, the lunar module, the Eagle, separates from Columbia.

Michael Collins is left alone to orbit the moon until the landing mission is complete. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong begin the lunar descent. They were relying on an altitude radar to know where they were, because there's no frame of reference on the moon. There's no trees or cars to tell you how far away you are from the surface. A four-inch rock from three feet away looks like a 40-foot boulder from three miles away. So they really were relying on this radar to tell them where they were. And the radar was feeding information to the computer during the approach

and ultimately began to overload. And we started to hear these program alarms. And some of these alarms, people on the ground didn't even recognize. Fortunately, there was one guy in the trench at mission control who recognized them and said that they could reset the computer and keep going, so they didn't have to abort at the last minute. But then Armstrong himself realized that the flight computer was taking them into a boulder field. So he took over manual control, something that he trained for multiple times, and actually began to fly the spacecraft manually to take it away from this crater and boulder field

and look for somewhere safe to land. It's estimated that they may have had 15 to 20 seconds of fuel left when Armstrong actually put it right where he wanted. The Eagle is 100 feet from the moon's surface. The warning lights flicker. It's now or never. Cheers and applause erupt inside mission control. Mankind has successfully landed on the moon.

The unimaginable has been achieved. Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to disembark for the first moonwalk. Debate as to who will be the first person to set foot on the moon had gone back and forth before the launch. Aldrin was adamant that he should be the first. Buzz had argued that the captain was supposed to stay with the ship and leave last, but Neil had said, well, you know, I'm going to go out first, I'm the commander, and some would say that that argument was settled by the fact that the door opened in such a way that Buzz was behind the door, and it made more sense for Neil to go out first.

600 million people worldwide watch in awe from their black and white televisions or listen to the radio broadcast of the landing. Neil was now starting to descend the ladder and we got to see this ghostly apparition. Very slow frame rate, not very many lines per scan on the picture, but I remember it vividly

and it was truly a magical moment, like utterly ethereal moment. We just could not believe it was happening. And that's the way I felt. Stretching out before Armstrong is the bleak silvery grey surface of the moon. It's dotted with craters and rocks, a desolate but beautiful wasteland, a totally alien terrain. I'm going to step off the land now. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The next thing that Neil was supposed to do was remove this contingency sampler from a pocket that he had in his left hip.

And it was just like a little scoop with a handle that popped out with springs and you just click it together with ball bearings and then he could scoop around and get some samples. Again, all because they weren't sure if he might suddenly get called back inside and they'd have to leave immediately. He chose not to do that. He kind of went off target and started taking pictures instead. And to do that, he had to bring the camera down. So almost immediately, he went out into the sunlight and used a conveyor belt, which is basically just a pulley with a cable. And Buzz sent the camera down to him, the still camera, and he got that down, mounted it on the plate on his chest, and then turned around and started taking photographs.

And the guys on the ground were freaking out a little bit because geologists were all tearing their hair out saying, go get the rocks, go get the rocks. And anyway, eventually, they gently sort of prodded him and said, Neil, you know, you want to get that contingency sample? And so he said, yeah, I'll get to it in a minute. Aldrin is the second human on the moon when he joins Armstrong. After two hours and 20 minutes on the surface, the astronauts return to the Eagle. They've taken photos, gathered samples of rock and dust, and set up equipment to monitor moonquakes.

The astronauts have a brief conversation with President Nixon. Then the Eagle prepares to depart. But there's a problem. The engine won't arm. After they got back inside, you know, the next thing, of course, was to take off from the moon and the lunar module ascent engine was using hypergolic fuels. It was as little plumbing as possible to make it as reliable as possible. Basically, all you had to do was open two valves, the two chemicals mixed, and the rocket ignites.

Unfortunately, when they got back in, one of them, their backpack, snapped off one of the breakers inside the cabin. And it just happened to be the breakers inside the cabin. And it just happened to be the breaker that armed the engine. And so there was a bit of a hubbub inside for a few minutes trying to figure out whether they could actually arm the engine to take off now that the breaker was snapped off. So legend would have it that Buzz jammed a pen in there and armed the breaker and then they were ready to take off. And of course, history shows the engine ignited on time and took them steadily back up to lunar orbit 60 miles up,

where Mike Collins was waiting for them. The Apollo 11 crew re-enter Earth's atmosphere. Columbia's parachute is deployed. Seven minutes later, the capsule lands in the ocean. The USS Hornet retrieves Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, along with their lunar samples. They've returned to Earth as global heroes. This is a human, not just a national achievement. As for von Braun, he will go on to oversee five more missions to the moon.

He has ideas for a moon base and more dynamic spaceflight, to take humanity far beyond the stars of our solar system. These dreams have yet to become a reality. But this hasn't stopped us trying. America might have overtaken the USSR by beating them to the moon, but is it really fair to say the Soviets lost the space race? It seems like the main reason the Soviets failed to beat the Americans to the moon was bureaucracy. They had shunted money around through multiple different programs, and at one point had two

entirely separate mandaluna landing programs running concurrently with each other and it's it's almost certainly why the soviets failed because there was no consistency and then of course when korolev died that was a fatal blow it could be argued that in many ways the soviets still won the space race because it was more like a relay where they were constantly passing the baton to the next guy ahead of the Americans. They had the first satellite, the first thing to fly on to Venus, the first thing to land on Mars, the first solar satellite, the first two craft, two man craft, three man craft. The list goes on and on. The first man, the first woman, the first space station, ultimately. The first pictures from the far side of the moon. I mean, it's just a very,

very long list of accomplishments that the Soviets achieved despite the machinations of the bureaucracy there. The Americans were really the hare in the tortoise and the hare situation. They had von Braun and surely the best rocket team in the world, but they also had President Eisenhower having the foresight to put it all under one umbrella and make all of those teams pull in one direction. And that had a lot to do with why they won. It could also be argued that the space race didn't end with the moon landings. Apollo flew five more times successfully to the moon, one failure, three space station missions, and one joint mission with the Soviets.

But Soyuz has flown hundreds of times now and continues to fly and continues to supply the International Space Station. The R-7 rocket is still flying today. The Russians realized that if it works and it ain't broke, don't fix it. Soyuz flies on. So, you know, does the space race continue? Evidently. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the Maya.

The Maya believed that the major time periods as they went in their cycles, that when you hit from one cycle to the new cycle, that these were times of change and renewal. Maya today will tell you that. of change and renewal. Maya Today will tell you that. I'm very intent on reminding people that the Maya are not some extinct civilization, that they still are around today and that they have, you know,

gone through incredible trials and tribulations to maintain their culture and their thinking. That's next time on Short History Of.