Apollo 11 Astronauts Relive Historic Countdown

Exactly 20 years after Apollo 11 roared skyward toward the first manned moon landing, astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins returned here Sunday to relive the moment.

“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero . . . we have liftoff,” said the recorded voice of a launch commentator as the astronauts listened to a tape of the final 3 minutes, 15 seconds of their countdown.

The tape reached “liftoff” at 9:32 a.m., the precise time a Saturn 5 rocket launched the three on their historic mission on July 16, 1969.

Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin left the mother ship Columbia and landed on the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity in the lunar module Eagle. After 22 hours on the surface, as most of the world followed their every move, they launched Eagle and rejoined Collins in Columbia for the journey home.

“We can on this launch anniversary look back on those very special times and allow ourselves just a touch of pride, a touch of satisfaction, that we were participants and witnesses to the birth of a new human era,” Armstrong, Apollo 11 commander and the first man to step on the moon, told about 6,000 flag-waving space workers and their families.

He said historians in future centuries will identify the mission “as the time when the human species broke the bonds of gravity that had heretofore bound them to this planet.”

Hundreds of engineers and technicians who helped launch Apollo 11 were in the audience, and Armstrong recognized them when he equated the moon trip to a “summer vacation . . . going to new places, seeing new sights, taking lots of pictures.”

“Most of us earn our vacations by something like 11 months of hard work,” he said. “In our case, we got our vacation because of nearly a decade of work by hundreds of thousands of people in offices and laboratories.”

“Almost three decades ago, President John F. Kennedy started it all when he said we will go to the moon and do all those other things, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard,” said J. R. Thompson, NASA deputy administrator.

“Well, Mr. President, 20 years later, we in this audience today don’t remember it as being hard; we remember it as the good times when you brought out the very best in all of America. You would have been very proud of the Saturn 5, the Columbia and the Eagle and the launch team that made it happen.”

Aldrin called Kennedy’s commitment to the moon landing goal 28 years ago “a starter’s gun for our pioneering giant leap for mankind.”

Collins said that “one of these years, and I hope it won’t be too long, this country will decide to press on again far out into space, perhaps to the planet Mars.”

After the ceremony, about 10,000 people lined a 20-mile route to wave and cheer as the astronauts rode in convertibles to a luncheon honoring them in Cocoa Beach.

REMEMBERING APOLLO

There were 200,000 unseen heroes who helped man to walk on the moon. Metro, Page 3