49 Fun Facts About Apollo Program

Who was the last Apollo astronaut to walk on the Moon, leaving it in December 1972?

Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, was the last to leave the surface; three years earlier he had flown Apollo 10's lander to within ten miles of the Moon in a practice run that stopped short of landing.

Which president told Congress that America should land a man on the Moon before the decade was out?

John F. Kennedy made the pledge in May 1961, when America's whole record of human spaceflight was one 15-minute hop and the Soviets had already orbited a man; Apollo 11 met his deadline with five months to spare.

Apollo 11 made the first Moon landing in which lunar 'sea' in July 1969?

Sea of Tranquility was picked as a smooth, level plain near the equator, yet the computer was taking the lander into a field of boulders and Neil Armstrong had to fly on past them to find a clear spot.

What was the name of the lunar module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon?

Eagle was named for the bald eagle on the crew's mission patch, drawn carrying an olive branch to show they came in peace; 'The Eagle has landed', Armstrong radioed on touchdown.

At its peak, roughly how many people did the Apollo program employ?

About 400,000 people at more than 20,000 firms and universities worked on Apollo at its height; the spending behind them peaked in 1966, three years before the first landing.

Roughly what did the Apollo program cost in the dollars of its day?

$25 billion is the usual round figure, about $300 billion in 2025 money and more than half of all NASA spending from 1960 to 1973; budget pressure is why three further landings were cancelled.

How many people walked on the Moon during the Apollo program?

Only 12 men walked on the Moon, two on each of six landings; 24 Apollo astronauts flew there in all, three of them twice, yet nobody ever landed a second time.

Which mission mode, championed by Langley engineer John Houbolt, was chosen for reaching the Moon?

Lunar orbit rendezvous won after Houbolt went over his bosses' heads with a letter calling himself 'a voice in the wilderness'; as Apollo 11 landed, von Braun turned to him in Mission Control to give him the credit.

Which giant launch vehicle, larger than the Saturn V, did NASA plan for Moon flights but never build?

Nova was the super-rocket sketched to land one big spacecraft whole on the Moon; once NASA settled on a lighter plan in 1962, the Saturn V could do the job and Nova was dropped.

Which company won the contract to build the Apollo Lunar Module?

Grumman's engineers pared the lander's weight so hard that even the seats went: someone saw there was no rule that astronauts had to sit, so they flew the landing standing up.

In the Lunar Module's original abbreviation, LEM, what did the E stand for?

Excursion was dropped in 1966, when the craft became simply the Lunar Module; Apollo manager George Low wrote that NASA feared the word lent the program a frivolous note.

Which company built both the Apollo command and service module and the Saturn V's second stage?

North American Aviation paid a price after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire: senators aired a highly critical NASA review of its late, over-budget work, and the firm replaced the head of its space division.

Which engine, used in a cluster of five, powered the Saturn V's first stage?

F-1 engines kept tearing themselves apart in early tests, so engineers set off small bombs inside firing engines and reworked the injector until the flame steadied itself within a tenth of a second.

What carried each Saturn V upright to its launch pad?

Crawler-transporters beat rival plans for a barge canal and a railway; borrowed from the giant shovels of the coalfields, they carried each Saturn V at about 1 mph, and 13 of the rockets flew between 1967 and 1973.

The Saturn V was developed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in which city?

Huntsville, Alabama, was a cotton town until the Army moved Wernher von Braun's rocket engineers there in 1950; it now calls itself Rocket City.

Under which codename was Wernher von Braun secretly brought to the US after the war with about 1,600 other Germans?

Paperclip, first called Overcast, brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America; von Braun's team fired captured V-2s in New Mexico, then launched the first US satellite in 1958.

The 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts happened during what?

A launch rehearsal on the pad: the 'plugs-out' test was not rated hazardous because the rocket held no fuel, and the crew could not get the inward-opening hatch open in time.

The Apollo 1 fire spread so fast partly because the cabin atmosphere was what?

High-pressure pure oxygen filled the cabin at 16.7 psi, above the air outside, to flush out nitrogen and seal the hatch; in it, the nylon netting and Velcro lining the cabin burned fiercely.

Who asked NASA to keep the name Apollo 1 for the flight lost in the 1967 launch-pad fire?

The astronauts' widows asked that Apollo 1 be reserved for the flight their husbands never made; NASA agreed and resumed its numbering at Apollo 4, so there was never an Apollo 2 or 3.

Which astronaut commanded Apollo 7 in October 1968, the first Apollo flight to carry a crew?

Wally Schirra caught a head cold in orbit, sparred with Mission Control and refused to wear his helmet for re-entry; none of the three crewmen ever flew in space again.

Apollo 7 achieved which broadcasting milestone?

Live TV from an American spacecraft began on 14 October 1968, after the crew had at first put the broadcast off; they held up joke cards, one asking viewers to keep those cards and letters coming.

Apollo 8's crew read the opening verses of which book in their Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast?

Genesis was read in turn by all three astronauts from lunar orbit; atheist campaigner Madalyn Murray O'Hair sued NASA over the reading, and the courts dismissed the case.

Which Apollo 8 astronaut took the famous Earthrise photograph?

William Anders shot it on the fourth orbit, calling 'Hand me that roll of color quick' as Earth cleared the lunar horizon; his first frame of the scene had been in black and white.

On Apollo 9 the lunar module was nicknamed Spider, so what was the command module called?

Gumdrop was the crew's name for the cone-shaped capsule; nicknames returned on Apollo 9 because two craft flying apart needed separate radio call signs.

Apollo 10's spacecraft were named after characters from which comic strip?

Peanuts lent Charlie Brown to the command module and Snoopy, already the mascot of NASA's safety campaign, to the lander, so named because it would 'snoop' low over the landing site.

Who stayed in lunar orbit aboard the command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon?

Michael Collins circled alone, cut off from all radio contact whenever he passed behind the Moon; he said what he felt there was not loneliness but something close to exultation.

Apollo 8, 10 and 11 flew which type of trajectory, later abandoned to reach harder landing sites?

Free return meant the Moon's gravity would swing a crippled ship back toward Earth with no engine burn; later crews gave up that safeguard because it limited where on the Moon they could land.

What hit Apollo 12 twice during its first minute of flight?

Lightning struck 36 and 52 seconds after liftoff and scrambled the telemetry until controller John Aaron made an obscure call, 'Try SCE to Aux'; the crew went on to a pinpoint landing.

Apollo 12 landed within walking distance of which robotic probe, and brought parts of it home?

Surveyor 3 had sat on the Moon since April 1967; Conrad and Bean walked over on their second moonwalk and cut off its camera and other parts so engineers could see how 31 months there had aged them.

Apollo 12's colour TV broadcast from the surface ended abruptly when Alan Bean did what?

Pointed it at the Sun for a few seconds while setting it on its tripod: the glare burned out the camera's tube, and viewers saw nothing more from the surface for the rest of the mission.

Which Apollo 14 astronaut hit two golf balls on the Moon with a makeshift club?

Alan Shepard had fixed a six-iron head to the handle of a sampling tool; swinging one-handed in his stiff suit, he sent the second ball, he joked, 'miles and miles and miles'.

Fra Mauro, where Apollo 14 landed, was originally the target of which earlier mission?

Apollo 13 never landed after an oxygen tank blew out on the way to the Moon, so Fra Mauro, prized as debris thrown out by the giant Imbrium impact, passed to the next crew.

Apollo 14's Stuart Roosa, a former smokejumper, carried what around the Moon for planting back on Earth?

Tree seeds, about 500 from five species, rode in Roosa's personal kit; the Forest Service raised the seedlings, and 'Moon trees' were planted across America around the 1976 bicentennial.

Why did the Apollo 11 crew spend three weeks in isolation after returning to Earth?

Fear of Moon germs put the crews of the first three landings into 21 days of quarantine; no lunar life was ever found, and the rule was dropped for the later missions.

On Apollo 15, David Scott dropped a hammer and a feather together to confirm whose claim about falling bodies?

Galileo got the credit from Scott himself, who told viewers the Moon was the best place to confirm his findings; with no air, the falcon feather hit the dust at the same instant as the hammer.

The Apollo 15 crew drew a scandal when it emerged they had carried what unauthorised items to the Moon?

Postal covers, about 400 stamped envelopes, went to the Moon in a deal with a West German stamp dealer; when it came out, the three astronauts were reprimanded and none flew in space again.

What is the small aluminium statuette left on the Moon by Apollo 15 called?

Fallen Astronaut lies beside a plaque naming 14 dead astronauts and cosmonauts; the crew set it down unannounced, and the sculptor's later plan to sell hundreds of copies caused a row.

Which company was prime contractor for the Lunar Roving Vehicle?

Boeing delivered the first rover only 17 months after winning the contract; General Motors supplied its wire-mesh wheels and motors, and it rode to the Moon folded against the lander.

Apollo 16 landed in which lunar highlands region, chosen because scientists wrongly expected volcanic terrain?

Descartes was chosen for hills that looked volcanic from orbit, but virtually every rock the crew picked up proved to be breccia shattered by impacts, with no sign of the lava geologists had hoped for.

The largest Moon rock returned by any Apollo mission, collected on Apollo 16, is nicknamed what?

Big Muley, an 11.7 kg breccia, is named after field-geology chief Bill Muehlberger; hauling it up, the astronaut joked that if he fell into the crater getting it, 'Muehlberger has had it'.

Which Apollo 16 astronaut made a deep-space spacewalk on the way home to retrieve film cassettes?

Ken Mattingly had been pulled from an earlier crew three days before launch over German measles he never caught; on Apollo 16 he floated outside for an hour on the way home to bring in the film.

Who was the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon?

Harrison Schmitt replaced Joe Engle on Apollo 17 after lunar scientists pressed NASA to send one of their own before the landings ended; he had already helped train the other crews in field geology.

What set Apollo 17's liftoff apart from every other crewed Saturn V launch?

It was at night: an automatic cutoff 30 seconds before liftoff held the countdown for two hours and forty minutes, and Apollo 17 finally left at 12:33 am on 7 December 1972.

Apollo 17 landed in which valley, thought from orbit to be volcanic?

Taurus-Littrow kept the crew three days, the longest Apollo stay; the orange soil they found proved to be volcanic glass over 3.5 billion years old, not the young eruption geologists had hoped for.

The famous whole-Earth photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew is known by what name?

The Blue Marble shows a fully lit Earth because the Sun was behind the outbound crew, five hours and some 29,000 km into the flight; theirs was the first Apollo path to bring Antarctica's ice cap into view.

Roughly how much Moon rock and soil did the six Apollo landings bring back to Earth?

About 380 kg came home in some 2,200 separate samples; the Soviet Union's three robotic sample-return probes managed only about 300 grams between them.

Skylab fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across which country?

Australia's Shire of Esperance jokingly fined NASA $400 for littering after Skylab's debris fell around it; the bill sat unpaid until a radio host's listeners settled it in 2009.

The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was the only spaceflight for which original Mercury Seven member?

Deke Slayton was grounded in 1962 by an irregular heartbeat and spent the Moon years choosing other astronauts' crews; cleared in 1972, he finally flew at 51.

Which president proposed cancelling the last two Moon landings, Apollo 16 and 17, before an aide talked him round?

Richard Nixon, wary of another in-flight emergency while he ran for re-election, wanted the flights dropped; budget official Caspar Weinberger persuaded him to keep them, and Apollo 17 flew after the 1972 vote.