Cape Canaveral: Fifty years after a mighty rocket set off from Florida carrying the first humans to the Moon , a veteran of the Apollo 11 crew returned to its fabled launch pad on Tuesday to commemorate “one giant leap” that became a defining moment in human history.“We crew felt the weight of the world on our shoulders, we knew that everyone would be looking at us, friend or foe,” command module pilot Michael Collins said from the Kennedy Space Center He and Buzz Aldrin , who piloted the module that landed on the Moon’s surface, are the two surviving members from the mission that would change the way humanity saw its place in the universe. Their commander Neil Armstrong , the first man on the Moon, died in 2012 aged 82.The spacecraft took four days to reach the Moon, before the module known as “Eagle” touched the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.Armstrong emerged a few hours later, descending to the foot of the ladder, as he uttered the immortal line: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command module Columbia, their only means of returning to Earth. “I always think of a flight to the Moon as being a long and fragile daisy chain of events,” the 88-yearold said at launch pad 39A, at the first of many events planned across the week.These include the return of Armstrong’s suit to the Air and Space Museum in Washington after more than a decade of restoration work.The Washington Monument will be lit up between July 16 and 18 with a life-size, 363-foot (111-meter) projection of the colossal Saturn V rocket built by ex-Nazi war criminal Wernher Von Braun.Collins described how the mission was broken into discrete goals such as breaking free of the Earth’s gravity or slowing down for lunar orbit.“The flight was a question of being under tension, worrying about what’s coming next. What do I have to do now to keep this daisy chain intact?”Unlike Collins, Aldrin has remained relatively elusive and did not participate at Tuesday’s launchpad event.

Source: Economic Times July 17, 2019 17:58 UTC