outer space life: January 2007 Archives

Three incredible, little-known things about the Apollo 11 mission:

1. Although everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said as he hopped out of the landing module, I've always preferred Buzz Aldrin's elegiac phrase, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation." This leads me to the next point.

2. Aldrin, always the most conceptually approachable of the Apollo 11 astronauts, claims in this interview that he (as well as Collins and Armstrong) observed an unidentified ship traveling alongside theirs, but never said anything about it for fear of being sent back to Earth. The sighting, which was repeated on later Apollo missions, has never been formally acknowledged by NASA, although video of it exists.

3. In the event that the moon-walkers might become stranded on the moon and, by consequence, die there, president Nixon had a funerary speech prepared, entitled "In Event of Moon Disaster." Reading it offers a devastating glimpse at an alternate past. Imagine this as part of our cultural vocabulary: "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."