Apollo's Moon Persuasive Speech

Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were eventually the first men to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. That would not have been possible, however, without years of trial and error and massive manpower and motivation that led up to their now famous Apollo 11 mission that put them on the moon.

Before President Kennedy’s 1961 speech funding for the Apollo program was less than 1 percent of NASA’s total budget. In the years following his speech Apollo’s share of the budget grew to 70 percent. Without that income it would not have been possible for NASA scientists and engineers, contractors and the entire country to put in the hours and energy to make this dream a reality.

Gearing up for the Apollo missions, which all took place

between 1967 and 1972, was a massive undertaking. NASA had the original seven astronauts from the Mercury program who were still active, however, they had to find and train new astronauts for the number of missions scheduled to explore far enough to the point we would be able to land a man on surface of the moon. Only the best of the best were chosen and they had to fit a specific list of requirements. And that was just the start of the manpower it would take to get to the moon.

NASA director James Webb would have to find and put to work people from every profession all across the country to work on projects of every size, from the design of the screws used on the spacecrafts to the thermal heating pads that would keep the capsules from burning to a crisp upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere from space.

From scientists to seamstresses, men and women from all across the U.S. were chosen to help with the Apollo missions. Even though very few Americans would ever walk on the moon — only 12 to this day to be exact — hundreds of thousands of people were required to make it happen. Nothing quite as significant in terms human cooperation had ever been attempted before that point.

While clearly the scientific advances in space exploration were the most obvious successes of the Apollo program, some historians like NASA’s Roger D. Launius report that perhaps the most important legacy of the program was in the way so many people had to come together to manage such a gigantic and important project. This had never been done before and many think it could never be replicated again.

Encounter: Politics, Pressure and

Tragedy

Even with the support of the entire country, billions of dollars in funding from the government and the smartest scientists and engineers in the world working toward a common goal there was no guarantee that the Apollo program would be a success. The 400,000 people who dedicated themselves to the Apollo missions encountered daily obstacles that could have killed the program at anytime.

The political pressure that President Kennedy put on NASA and its contractors by publicly stating a deadline to reach the moon was tremendous. People were working around the clock to meet deadlines to keep the program moving forward, and some people thought that this type of pressure was causing mistakes to be made. This led to ongoing conflict between the astronauts and the people working behind the scenes on the Apollo project.
The astronauts became worried for their safety and didn’t always feel like the designers and engineers were as concerned as they were. Some astronauts like Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Walter “Wally” Schirra Jr. voiced concerns that the design team was taking risks they shouldn’t be in order to meet deadlines. This was the source of a lot of conflict behind the scenes in the lead up to the Apollo missions but NASA officials did their best to contain the debates going back and forth between the crew and the design team in order to avoid showing any weakness to the media and U.S. citizens.
The conflict became very public, however, on January 27, 1967, the day three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, were sealed into the Apollo 1 capsule at Kennedy Space Center in Florida performing a routine test before their mission was scheduled to go live. What should have been a routine test became an epic failure when a frayed wire in the spacecraft’s electrical system sparked inside the capsule igniting anything flammable inside the capsule because they were operating in a 100 percent oxygen-filled environment inside the sealed capsule.
Normally helpful and harmless things like the Velcro used to secure small objects such as pens and clipboards inside the capsule became extremely dangerous, acting as kindling for an explosive fire that ended up killing the entire crew right there on the launch pad before the Apollo program even got off the ground.
The tragedy was devastating for everyone involved. It immediately became global news. Everyone knew about it and people were demanding answers, especially the politicians who doubted the program’s value and the family members of the dead astronauts.

Fingers were beginning to be pointed as to who was to blame for the fire. NASA launched a full investigation and inspected every single piece of the spacecraft to try to determine what had gone wrong. While there were several design flaws that contributed to the tragedy it was ultimately determined that the astronauts died of asphyxiation not because they burned to death. The suits they were wearing were fireproof but had no air filters and the astronauts were not able get out of the inward-opening hatch door because the pressure inside the capsule made it too difficult to open. The weight of the blame for the deaths of Grissom, White and Chaffee fell onto the shoulders of North American Aviation, the company NASA contracted to engineer the project.
Top officials from North American Aviation did not necessarily agree their design was to blame for the deaths but they accepted the blame in order to keep the program moving forward because they felt there was a bigger picture to be considered. NASA administrator James Webb and the remaining astronauts all came together so they could still accomplish their total goal of getting to the moon.
After the Apollo 1 fire Webb said, “We've always known that something like this was going to happen soon or later . . . Who would have thought that the first tragedy would be on the ground?"
Another astronaut, Frank Borman, summed up what many people in the program were feeling after the Apollo 1 fire when he told Congress during its investigation that the tragedy was due to a “failure of imagination.” He said no one could have imagined the fire was going to happen because if they had, they would have done everything they could to prevent it from happening.

Borman’s comments essentially saved the entire Apollo program.

In the two and half years that followed, NASA and the massive Apollo mission team banned together to launch four manned flights Apollo flights (Apollo 7, 8, 9 and 10), each one setting the stage for the first moon landing. Apollo 7 orbited the earth 163 times and was the live television broadcast from space; Apollo 8 looped around the moon for the first time in history; Apollo 9 tested the lunar module for the first time; and Apollo 10 orbited the moon and came within nine miles of its surface and transmitted the first live color TV images from space.

Then, on July 20, 1969, a little more than eight years after President Kennedy announced to the world that Americans would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and more than five years after Kennedy’s untimely death, the crew of Apollo 11 — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — landed on the moon.

Only 30 seconds of fuel remained when the lunar module, called the “Eagle,” landed on the surface of the moon at 5:18 PM CDT.

Armstrong sent a radio message.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong said. Then Mission control team in Houston and basically the entire world

celebrated.

Armstrong sat the spaceship down so gently on the moon’s surface that the shock absorbers didn’t fully compress the way they were designed to do. Because of this he actually had to jump three and a half feet down from the lunar module’s ladder onto the surface of the moon.

Then Armstrong said the words we all know: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Aldrin followed Armstrong out of the lunar module and had to be careful not to close the door because there was no handle on the outside of it.

After that day, life as we know it has never been the same. Man has been striving to achieve something as great as that moment ever since.

Exchange: “One Giant Leap for Mankind”

That was the day America officially won the Space Race but a win for America that day was also a win for the whole world.

Armstrong and Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon that day but did not claim the territory as their own as other explorers had done in the past. This was said to be their way of saying that the space frontier was from that day forward open for exploration by all of humanity.