Analysis Of One Giant Leap

“One Giant Leap” by Nate Kuczun

July 16th, 1969. It’s a peaceful morning at Cape Canaveral with pleasant temperatures and little wind. All is calm. Suddenly, a tremendous roar shatters the morning as the crew of Apollo 11 blast off toward the moon, riding the biggest rocket ever created. Burning 20 tons of explosive fuel a second, it propels Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins into history. The spacecraft lands four days later on the moon. Millions watched as Men took the first steps on a strange place 238,900 miles away, or 9 and ½ time around the earth. After placing America’s flag among the lunar rocks, the Apollo 11 crew lit their engines and headed for the small blue sphere we call home, splashing down safely in the ocean and completing Kennedy’s challenge as well as winning the space race to the moon. It took a monumental effort by the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) and billions of dollars to reach this point. The Apollo Missions’ accidents, successes, and space leadership have drastically changed our country’s space program.

On the 25th of May, President Kennedy shocked the nation with his historical speech to put an American on the moon before the decade was out. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!” Kennedy announced. In the rest of his speech he challenged the nation’s smartest minds to build a rocket capable of lifting a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the earth. He also stressed that it would finally put America’s space program in front of the Soviets. The Russian’s had beat America not only to put a satellite in space, but a man too. Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth just weeks before Americ...

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...on realized that the Titan was too small and lacked the rocket power. Titan rockets were also very unstable and had a gruesome history of exploding upon ignition.

The design for the Saturn 5, the rocket which launched the Apollo Missions, had enormous dimensions. At 363 feet tall, 30 feet wide, and carrying almost a million gallons of highly explosive rocket propellent, it remains today the biggest rocket ever made. Tipping the scales at a whopping 6 million pounds, the first stage producing 7 and ½ million pounds of thrust, was followed by two others with a combined output of over 8.6 million pounds of thrust in total (Boeing). NASA astronaut and crew member of Apollo 8 Frank Borman recollects,“There were some seagulls flying above us, I often wondered what happened to them, they must have been the most surprised birds in the world when that thing lit up!”