Neil Armstrong Tells What Really Happened On The Moon

Posted by majestic on December 13, 2010

Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11 mission

All you space bloggers out there, take note: Neil Armstrong reads blogs and just might respond to you, as he did to Robert Krulwich on his NPR blog:

Well, this doesn’t happen every day.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?

Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:

• It was really, really hot on the moon, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We needed protection.

• We were wearing new-fangled, water-cooled uniforms and didn’t know how long the coolant would last.

• We didn’t know how far we could go in our space suits.

• NASA wanted us to conduct our experiments in front of a fixed camera.

• We [meaning Neil] cheated just a little, and very briefly bounded off to take pictures of some interesting bedrock.

But basically, he says, we were part of a team and we were team players on a perilous, one-of-a-kind journey. Improvisation was not really an option.

But, reading between the lines, I kinda think he wanted to do more, go further. Anyway, read for yourself:

Dear Mr. Krulwich

I was delighted to read your December 7 column on the the Apollo 11 lunar surface traverses, The NASA maps do accurately portray the locations of the pathways used to complete the myriad of tasks we were assigned. And, although I have not checked, I believe the comparison with the size of athletic fields is reasonably accurate…

[continues at the Krulwich Wonders blog]