Apollo 11 and other scientific wonders

Fifty five years ago today, on July 19, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida, on July 16, went into orbit around the Moon. The three astronauts on board were about to make history. On the next day, July 20, mission commander Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin entered the lunar module Eagle and separated it from the command module Columbia. As Michael Collins remained in orbit on board the Columbia, Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the Eagle to a location within a large plain called the Sea of Tranquillity on the surface of the Moon.

After some harrowing moments before making contact with the lunar surface, Armstrong announced, “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Several hours later, he climbed down to the surface, becoming the first human being ever to walk on the Moon. He famously stated that “It was one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin then followed him to the surface. As he looked at his surroundings, Aldrin’s description of what he saw provided the third well-known Apollo 11 quotation: “Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation.”

NASA. Photograph by Neil Armstrong of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon and the US flag.

To this day, NASA lists the Apollo 11 mission on its website as a project with two objectives: to “perform a crewed lunar landing and to return to Earth.” To begin the return to Earth (which is also the title of Aldrin’s first autobiography), Armstrong and Aldrin left the lunar surface in the upper part of the Eagle lunar module to rendezvous with the Columbia in lunar orbit. After they rejoined Collins in the Columbia, the Eagle was left behind. The crew then returned to Earth in Columbia, which splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, 1969. (The Columbia is now on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, within walking distance of the Folger.)

An artifact that traveled to the Moon

Thanks to the extraordinary Imprints in Time special collection of 52 items from Stuart and Mimi Rose’s wide-ranging collection, the Folger Shakespeare Library currently has on display a remarkable relic of that Apollo 11 journey: a sheet from the Apollo 11 flight plan, consisting of page 3-119, the side that is on display, with page 3-119a on the reverse.

During the Apollo 11 mission, the hours were numbered in a series that began at the start of the mission and increased each hour until the end of the mission; the 24th hour was succeeded by hour 25, and so on. This flight plan sheet begins with hour 169 and ends at the beginning of hour 171. This was a two hour period on July 23, 1969, during the return to Earth, on the last full day of the Apollo 11 mission. Columbia splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on the next day, July 24.

The flight plan sheet covered the start of the day for the crew, who woke up at hour 170, and it was annotated by both Armstrong and Aldrin—the two astronauts who walked on the Moon. Armstrong used checkmarks to indicate tasks that had been completed, logged two event times, and noted the hours of sleep for each crew member. As the mission commander, he was CDR; Collins was the command module pilot, or CMP; and Aldrin was the lunar module pilot, or LMP. At hour 170, Aldrin updated the use of “consumables” for the craft’s A, B, C, and D rocket engine groups.

In an accompanying letter, Aldrin noted that “The flight plan was probably the single most important document related to the success of our mission. It provided a time schedule of crew activities and spacecraft maneuvers to accomplish the first lunar landing. This page has been in my private collection since 1969.” He also notes that the reverse side of the sheet, 3-119A, provided a chart for the MCC6 “Mid Course Correction” maneuver, but that no course correction was needed. “Our entry trajectory was so precise that plans for the MCC6 burn were not carried out. This gave us a longer period to enjoy our breakfast.” Aldrin also wrote and signed notes on each side of the sheet to confirm it went to the Moon and back.

And still more wonders

One of the delightful aspects of the Imprints in Time special exhibition is its great variety, from a rare early printed Buddhist sutra to illuminated manuscripts to an early edition of Bocaccio’s Decameron—and first editions of Winnie the Pooh and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The 1969 Apollo 11 flight plan is the newest object in the exhibition. It is also one of several extraordinary scientific objects on view throughout Imprints in Time, by scientific figures from Galileo to Darwin and more. Many of these works represent fundamental breakthroughs that helped to make spaceflight possible.

In addition to the Apollo flight plan sheet, Imprints in Time includes the first edition of De revolutionibus (1543) by Nicolaus Copernicus, considered the most important scientific contribution of the 1500s for its proposal of the heliocentric theory that the Earth orbited around the Sun; the first edition, in the same year of 1543, of Andreas Vesalius’s masterpiece De humani corporis fabrica on human anatomy, which pioneered modern observational science; and the first edition of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609), which built on Copernicus’s work and included Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

Other items include the first edition—one of 58 copies—of William Harvey’s 1628 book De motu cordis, which described the circulatory system of the blood—an insight as transformative to the history of medicine as Copernicus’s heliocentric description of the cosmos. The exhibition also includes a presentation copy of the first edition, inscribed by Galileo, of his 1632 book Dialogo, a defense of the Copernican theory that was notoriously banned from 1633 to 1823; the first edition of Isaac Newton’s 1687 work Principia, which elucidates the laws of gravitation and motion; and a presentation copy and first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, presenting the idea of the evolution of species through natural selection—a work that has been called the greatest scientific work of the 19th century.