How Neil and Buzz Almost Were Stranded on the Moon in 1969
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By Jeffrey Kluger
July 21, 2019
Even after half a century, people still don’t know much about the little broken switch that nearly stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface in July of 1969.
No one will ever be certain how the switch broke, but Aldrin is pretty sure it happened after he and Armstrong reentered the lunar module following their two-and-a-half hour moonwalk. The flight plan called for them to seal the hatch, repressurize the cabin, disconnect their backpacks and connect their suit hoses to the spacecraft’s life support systems. Then they would vent the cabin once more, open up the hatch and chuck the backpacks and other unneeded equipment onto the moon’s surface, reducing the weight of the ship for liftoff.
They’d practiced the routine uncounted times, but in all of the shifting and moving and garbage-tossing this time, one of the astronauts banged something or other against Aldrin’s side of the instrument panel, snapping off the switch that sent power to the ascent engine. Without power, the engine wouldn’t light and the crew would go nowhere, leaving Michael Collins, orbiting overhead in the Apollo command module, to fly home alone. Aldrin spotted the problem after they had shut the hatch once more and he looked out the window.
“I saw something that didn’t belong, in the dust,” he told TIME in a conversation last year. “And it was this thing that looked like a circuit breaker. We got up on my side and looked and it was the engine arm circuit breaker.”
In Houston, engineers scrambled to find a workaround that would reroute power to the engine without the switch, but after several hours, they had nothing. In the end, the solution was wonderfully simple, wonderfully crude. The stem of the switch was still visible, recessed inside the small hole remaining in the instrument panel. It was far too small a hole for a finger. But a pen—a felt tip to prevent the risk of a metal-on-metal short—might do just fine. Aldrin had one and he used it, and on the pivot point of a fifty-cent bit of plastic nothing, history turned and the lunar module lifted off.
We’re contemplating that history a lot this week, as the world celebrates the half-century anniversary of Apollo 11—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But celebrating history is, by definition, a backward-looking exercise—a fond one, but backward all the same. Yet, tantalizingly, there is a lot of looking forward too: to a robust competition to return to the moon and explore deeper in space. This week’s TIME cover takes a deep dive into the new moon race. And in the future, we’ll be looking at some of the other players in the space game—India, Japan, the European Union, and more. All over the world, countries are looking at ways to move beyond the world. It’s an exciting time for space dreams.
Poster Comment:
Neil and Buzz also left the Lunar Range Finder mirrors on the moon's surface. There is an observatory in west Texas that has been shooting a laser beam at the moon. They found the moon is moving away from earth.
The Moon continues to spin away from the Earth, at the rate of 3.78cm (1.48in) per year, at about the same speed at which our fingernails grow. Without the Moon, the Earth could slow down enough to become unstable, but this would take billions of years and it may never happen at all.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12311119