Lunar missions continue after 1969 landing

It was the third night of the full moon last month when Armenio Manuel’s 7-year-old grandson Andrey asked him how long it would take him and his grandfather to get to the moon.

The question quickly unsettled the elderly grandfather although he tried to shield it, with as calm a demeanor he could hold, that it would take them “four days, six hours and 45 minutes, plus or minus.”

Then he went on to narrate an episode, back in July 1969, when millions of people, including him and his girl friend, watched live on TV the historic landing on July 21, Philippine time.

It was for him and his girl friend, now Andrey’s grandmother, a singular event which captivated them and his paternal great grandfather in another part of the city then vacationing in the metropolis.

The words of aeronautical engineer, naval aviator and test pilot Neil Alden Armstrong, then 38 years old – “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – was heard on TV monitors.

But Armstrong (Aug 5, 1930-Aug 25, 2012) insisted he actually said “one small step for a man,” and annotated the American Philosophical Society’s copy of the transcript accordingly.

That legacy of man’s first few steps on the moon, essentially, has remained in the memory of those who had the opportunity to watch live the lunar landing on July 20, time in the United States.

Buzz Aldrin, now 93, an American astronaut, was the second person to walk on the Moon, a feat he accomplished during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 hours, 36 minutes on the moon’s surface. After a rest period that included seven hours of sleep, the ascent stage engine fired at 124 hours, 22 minutes.

Some in the scientific community as a whole say there was really no field of planetary science in 1969, just a handful of people who called themselves planetary astronomers and studied other worlds through telescopes or with theoretical work.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had sent spacecraft to Venus and Mars by the time of Apollo 11, so there were a few people who were working on planetary data, but the space age was less than 12 years old at the time of the first Moon landing.

NASA, the US government agency, is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. The Space Age started in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.

Almost everybody who worked on the scientific return from the Apollo program came from other fields – earth science, chemistry, or physics – and they became lunar scientists.

Some in the scientific community have said NASA’s investments brought in huge numbers of scientific experts and funded new instruments and labs across the United States to create a lunar community that had not been there previously.

They say it is important to remember that nearly coincident with the Apollo program was an explosion of robotic missions to explore other parts of the solar system.

Within a few years of Apollo 11 the United States launched spacecraft to fly by Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn.

“It was an enormous expansion of our presence in space that was enabled by a healthy NASA built up to conduct the Apollo missions but an agency that also had the budget and the engineering expertise to figure out how to explore the rest of the solar system by spacecraft,” some planetary scientists said.

Today many say the Apollo 11 mission demonstrated convincingly for the first time how ancient the Moon is – the samples brought back were more than 3 billion years old.

Man learned that the Moon recorded and illuminated a period of solar system history that we had not begun to appreciate through our study of Earth.

This 2023, India planned to launch the Chandrayaan 3 mission to the Moon in June, taking a landing module and robotic rover to explore the surface. India first reached the moon in 2008 with Chandrayaan 1.

Russia also plans to launch its Luna 25 mission in July, putting a probe on the Moon to gather samples from its southern polar region.

SpaceX plans to take Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and eight other passengers on the dearMoon voyage around the Moon in late 2023. This would be the first mission for its Starship vehicle, which is capable of carrying 100 people.

NASA itself plans to launch its next Moon mission in 2024. Called Artemis II, it will take astronauts to orbit the Moon.

The US Agency is due to launch the Artemis III mission in 2025 or 2026, landing the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon.

It will be the first time that people have walked on the Moon since the last of NASA’s Apollo missions in 1972. NASA has said it will use the Space X Starship for the mission.

Verily, as some scientists say, landing humans on the Moon and bringing them back safely has been a formidable technological challenge.

And the 7-year-old Andrey continues to look at the moon in its various phases, with his grandfather wondering what must be on the former’s mind.