Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they accomplish their mission, the three men assigned to pilot Columbia and Eagle to the moon will rank with history's most illustrious explorers. Yet each realizes that the privilege?and the peril?of making man's first lunar landing belongs to them only by an unlikely combination of luck and circumstance. Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, 39, who will steer the lunar module to the surface of the moon, puts it this way: "We've been given a tremendous responsibility by the twists and turns of fate...
Michael Collins, 38, owes his couch on the moonship to a bout of bad health. He was to have been a member of the Apollo 8 crew, which made man's first orbits around the moon last Christmas. A paralyzing bone spur in the neck sent Collins to the hospital in June 1968 for a risky operation, however, and Bill Anders took his place. The surgery was a complete success, and Collins was back on full flight status by last November. It was much too late for him to resume his original place with the Apollo 8 crew?...
Like so much else at NASA, the selection of the moon-landing crew seemed totally routine. Indeed, when the crew was selected in January, there was no assurance that Apollo 11 would make the first moon landing. Apollo 10 was then still a candidate for the mission; there was also the distinct possibility that if problems developed, the attempt would be postponed until Apollo 12, 13 or even 14. "There isn't any big magic selection that goes on for each mission," says Slayton, whose crew recommendations have never been overruled. "It is like every squadron of fighter pilots...
...interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. More than any other astronaut, Neil Armstrong epitomizes small-town America...
...about the same time, the future astronaut was taking his first close look at the moon through a homemade 8-in. reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on roller-skate wheels atop a garage. The wondrous device belonged to Jacob Zint, a neighbor of the Armstrongs and a draftsman in the Westinghouse plant. "I can't recall that Neil ever said he wanted to go to the moon," says Zint. But as early as 1946, Armstrong was regularly visiting the makeshift observatory and often, says Zint, "he looked right into the Sea of Tranquillity"?the prime site...