US was prepared for a tragedy on moon 30 years ago

Then President Richard Nixon would have taken the first step, personally informing the future widows of Armstrong and Aldrin by telephone that they would never see their husbands again.

NASA would then have cut off all communication with the stranded astronauts.A pastor would have been instructed to “adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to `the deepest of the deep’, concluding with the Lord’s prayer,” according to the plan, a copy of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Nixon was to make a speech to the nation, written by then White House speech writer WilliamSafire, now a newspaper columnist. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” the speech read. “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

But, fortunately, that was not to be.

Armstrong and Aldrin returned to Earth, leaving behind on the Moon a footprint in its dust and a memorial plaque, with the words: “Here men of the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind.”

The boot tracks of Neil Armstrong filmed for posterity by fellow pioneering astronaut Edwin `Buzz’ Aldrin capped an eight year drive launched by then US President John Kennedy in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of decade. The mission required the development of a monster rocket, Saturn V, towering 363 feet and costing $225 million to construct. On July 16, the three astronauts Armstrong,Aldrin and Michael Collins strapped themselves into the Apollo capsule perched on the top of the rocket.

More than a million wellwishers on the Florida coast and a television audience of 500 million more, unprecedented for that time, watched as the rocket thundered off the Florida launch pad.

Four days later Apollo entered lunar orbit. Armstrong and Aldrin moved into the lunar lander, Eagle, which undocked from the command module steered by Collins and headed for the moon’s surface.

On the descent computer alarms began to sound with the lander still 100 km above the surface. A few weeks earlier mission control had aborted a simulated descent in response to a similar alarm. Computer overload was the diagnosis this time, and the mission was ordered to go ahead. Then as the tiny craft approached the surface Armstrong noticed that the selected landing site was strewn with dangerous boulders. The former test pilot took manual control of the craft from the computer navigation system and guided it to a saferspot in the dust of the Sea of Tranquility, landing with fuel tanks almost empty. “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed,” he said.

Six hours later, he opened the hatch and stepped onto the surface. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said.Aldrin followed him onto the moon’s surface and the two men got to work after planting the American flag. “There was a lot of things to do, and we had a hard time getting them finished,”said Armstrong after his return to Earth. The astronauts spent only two hours 32 minutes outside the landing craft, working in temperatures varying from 100 degrees Celsius in sunshine to minus 80 degrees in the shade.

“After landing we felt very comfortable in the lunar gravity. It was, in fact, in our view preferable both to weightlessness and to the Earth’s gravity,” he added. Before returning to the Eagle, Armstrong and Aldrin set up scientific instruments and collected some 25 kg of moon rock during their stay. Twelve hours aftertouching down, the lunar lander began the return journey to the command module. “The ascent was a great pleasure. It was very smooth,” recalled Armstrong. On July 24, the three astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 1,500 km southeast of Hawaii.

Then President Richard Nixon was there to welcome them aboard the recovery ship, the Hornet, as they began a 21-day spell in quarantine because of fears they might have carried space germs back to earth. No microbes were found and astronauts have since been spared similar tedium. Ten more Americans were to set foot on the moon in the wake of the first lunar landing that sealed a significant American triumph in the space race with the former Soviet Union. It also paved the way for bigger dreams and the next potential space triumph, the first Mars landing in the 21st century.