That’s one small walk for two men

The Apollo 11 crew members had the time for their moon walk cut to a tenth of what they had been expecting.

Neil Armstrong snapped this image of Buzz Aldrin as he carried the Passive Seismic Experiments Package (in his left hand) and the Laser Ranging Retroreflector (in his right) to the deployment area. Picture: NASA

The Apollo 11 crew members had the time allowance for their moon walk cut to a tenth of what they had been expecting just five days before launch, with a limit of two hours and 40 minutes imposed by NASA as a precaution.

On this corresponding Friday in 1969, The Australian reported the reduced walk as the three ­astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins — prepared for the July 16 launch of their historic mission.

NASA’s Apollo mission director, George Hage, revealed the shortened timescale for the moon walk, saying the decision to limit man’s first walk on the moon’s surface was “prudent”.

“I think the powerful lesson we learned from the Gemini program was that we should be very ­cautious and move very slowly in adding complexity to the workload in this kind of operation,” Mr Hage was reported saying in The Australian’s coverage at the time.

“This is the first time that men will move in that environment and we think it prudent to limit them to the one outing. But if we are successful with Apollo 11, we will consider making two excursions when we land Apollo 12 later this year.”

Working in a vacuum with gravity only one-sixth that of the Earth’s would be a challenge.

To commemorate this month’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing, The Australian wants to hear readers’ recollections of the moment.

Where were you when the landing took place? What was the atmosphere like? Perhaps the event sparked an interest in space and adventure?

The Countdown to the Moon series of 1969, which we are now recreating in the lead-up to July 21, was a day-by-day offering of full-page features to illustrate every step of Apollo 11’s momentous and dangerous journey.

The first two astronauts chosen to walk on the moon’s surface were Armstrong and Aldrin, while Collins orbited.

Go to theaustralian.com.au/memories to submit your moon memories and photographs.

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Good thing corner shop had television

At the time of the moon landing, television was still so relatively new in Australia that our family didn’t own one.

I saw the landing by accident on the way home from school for lunch when I found my mother was watching it at the corner shop. The thing that struck me the most was that not only were these people doing something so unbelievable but that the whole world was able to watch it in real time on television.

The technology involved in making all this work first go was hard to take in.

Many years later, when I worked in the IT industry, I discovered in a class, where I was the only person in the room old enough to have seen it, that the number of lines of code that put these people on the moon was 145,000.

To put this in perspective Windows uses 45,000,000 lines of code. There was no built-in redundancy. No option for real-time testing. It just had to work and it did. I feel blessed that I witnessed it.

Mary Marlow, Blackheath, NSW