Robert M. White

A moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both manned and unmanned (robotic) missions. The first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 mission on 13 September 1959.

The Apollo program was the United States spaceflight effort that landed the first humans on Earth’s Moon. Conceived during the Eisenhower administration and conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Apollo began in earnest after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address to Congress declaring his belief in a national goal of “landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade in a competition with the Soviet Union for supremacy in space. This goal was first accomplished during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969 when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last in December 1972. In these six Apollo spaceflights, 12 men walked on the Moon. These are the only times humans have landed on another celestial body.

Neil Alden Armstrong is an American aviator and former astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor, and United States Naval Aviator. He was the first person to set foot on the Moon. Before becoming an astronaut, Armstrong was in the United States Navy and served in the Korean War. After the war, he served as a test pilot at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) High-Speed Flight Station, now known as the Dryden Flight Research Center, where he flew over 900 flights in a variety of aircraft. As a research pilot, Armstrong served as project pilot on the F-100 Super Sabre A and C variants, F-101 Voodoo, and the Lockheed F-104A Star fighter. He also flew the Bell X-1B, Bell X-5, North American X-15, F-105 Thunder chief, F-106 Delta Dart, B-47 Stratojet, KC-135 Stratotanker and Paresev. He graduated from Purdue University and the University of Southern California.

A participant in the U.S. Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest and X-20 Dyna-Soar human spaceflight programs, Armstrong joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962. His first spaceflight was the NASA Gemini 8 mission in 1966, for which he was the command pilot, becoming one of the first U.S. civilians to fly in space. On this mission, he performed the first manned docking of two spacecraft with pilot David Scott. Armstrong’s second and last spaceflight was as mission commander of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission on July 20, 1969. On this mission, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface and spent 2½ hours exploring while Michael Collins remained in orbit in the Command Module. For his spaceflights, Armstrong received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

After Armstrong served as backup commander for Apollo 8, Slayton offered him the post of commander of Apollo 11 on December 23, 1968, around the same time as the hcg diet was becoming popular in Italy, as 8 orbited the Moon. Hence, the first moon flight was made.

Aircraft are vehicles which are able to fly by gaining support from the air, or in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines. Although rockets and missiles also travel through the atmosphere, most are not considered aircraft because they do not have wings and rely on rocket thrust as the primary means of lift.

The human activity which surrounds aircraft is called aviation. Manned aircraft are flown by an onboard pilot. Unmanned aerial vehicles may be remotely controlled or self-controlled by onboard computers. Aircraft may be classified by different criteria, such as lift type, propulsion, usage and others.

On July 17, 1962 the US Air Force Major flew his X-15 rocket plane to an altitude of 59 miles (95km) above the Earth and reached weightlessness. He could see the coastline of the Western United States from north of San Francisco down to Mexico By that time four Americans had gone into space but they were in capsules that splash landed under parachutes in the ocean. White successfully flew his plane back to Earth and landed it on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

One approach to manned space flight is to put a man in a rocket and depend on a parachute or other drag-making device to ease him back to earth. Another approach is to fit a piloted airplane with rocket motors powerful enough to toss it out of the atmosphere. It will have wings of a sort for gliding, and the pilot will land it like a conventional but extra-hot airplane. The X-15 rocket-plane built by North American Aviation, Inc. is the second approach. It will probably make its first flight to the edge of space in less than a year. Made of stainless steel to resist heat, it is a stubby-winged airplane only 50 ft. long, weighing about 33,000 when fully fueled. Its single rocket engine has 60,000 of thrust and is capable of lifting it off the ground like a ballistic missile.

The rocket engine will have fuel for only six minutes of powered flight, but after its fuel is gone, the X-15 is expected to climb on momentum at least 100 miles above the earth, probably a good deal higher. This altitude is not strictly space; there is still a little air, but it is much too thin for an airplane to steer by. So for controls the X-15 will use six small jets of hydrogen peroxide gases shooting out of its tail and wings. When the X-15 is above the effective atmosphere, its pilot will feel zero gravity and float off his seat to the limit of his belts. Loose objects in the cockpit, if any, will drift around like smoke. This condition will last for something like five minutes, ending only when the X-15 meets denser air on the way down.