The Eagle has Landed: The Journey of the Apollo Mission

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July 21, 1969. American astronaut Neil Armstrong, radios to earth: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The control room in Houston, Texas bursts with cheering and applause. Kennedy’s Project Apollo put America in the lead in the Space Race. The Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States was a very big deal. The Apollo Program worked towards establishing the technology to meet other national interests in space, develop man’s capability to work in the lunar environment, and to promote nationalism and achieve preeminence in space for the United States.

The early missions of Project Apollo were mostly dedicated to the establishment and advancement of technology to meet America’s national interests in space. Apollo missions 1 through 10 were focused on building and testing the Command Module (CM), Service Module (SM), and Lunar Module (LM). Altogether the CM and the SM make the Command Service Module, or CSM.

Apollo 1 was to be the first crewed spaceflight in the space project. The Apollo 1 launch was scheduled for February 21, 1967, but on January 27, 1967 the Command Module caught fire during a preflight test launch one month before the projected date of launch. All three astronauts lost their lives in the accident. Astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White, Roger B. Chaffee were all aboard this spacecraft. This postponed crewed launches until NASA officials cleared them for flight.

Apollo 7 worked to demonstrate command and service module, or CSM, and crew performance; demonstrate crew, space vehicle and mission support facilities performance during a crewed CSM mission; and demonstrate CSM rendezvous capability. Apollo 7 mission was a three man flight as well. All the mission objectives ...

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...first launch that had been attended by a former U.S. president, Richard Nixon. Astronauts Charles Conrad Jr., Alan L. Bean, and Richard F. Gordon Jr., were all chosen to complete this mission. Conrad, Bean, and Gordon achieved a precise landing at their expected location on November 19, 1969. During this mission, the crew carried the first color television camera to the moon’s surface, but transmission from this camera was lost after Alan Bean accidentally pointed it at the Sun which destroyed the camera. The mission objectives were selenological inspection, surveys and samplings in the landing areas, development of techniques for precision-landing capabilities, further evaluate the human capability to work in the lunar environment for a long period of time, and photography of potential exploration sites for future missions. All mission objectives were successful.

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