Darrell Castle talks about the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon and asks if President Kennedy would recognize the country today.

Transcription / Notes

ONE GIANT LEAP, BUT WHAT NOW

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday, July 19, 2019, and on today’s Report I will be talking about and remembering the Apollo 11 mission which has its 50th anniversary this week. Fifty years ago tomorrow, July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong did what no human had ever done before; he stepped from the Eagle’s ladder onto the surface of the moon.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the two astronauts who undocked the Eagle from the command module and Armstrong as pilot flew the ship to the area on the moon known as the Sea of Tranquility. I remember the events like they happened yesterday since I was, as was most of the human race, glued to my television for the entire mission. It was touch and go there for a while because the landing area was thought to be a flat plain but when the Eagle approached it was covered by boulders. Armstrong had to fly the Eagle across the Sea of Tranquility until he had a safe landing area and when he landed the descent engine had only 30 seconds of fuel left.

When his now iconic words came over the television, “the Eagle has landed”, I still remember the relief in Walter Cronkite’s face and the excitement in his voice.  Keep in mind that these men were doing something that no one had done before, something extremely dangerous, and something upon the successful completion of which rested the pride of a nation and the authenticity of its way of life.

Michael Collins remained in the command module as it orbited the moon waiting for the Eagle to complete its mission. Collins’ job was to locate the Eagle in its ascent and dock with it as Armstrong flew the Eagle into the docking mechanism. If the Eagle’s ascent engine had failed to ignite, or if some tiny miscalculation had been made in the rendezvous maneuvers, Michael Collins would have been making the trip home from the moon alone. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about 20 hours on the surface of the moon. They collected about 200 pounds of rock samples and planted a flag, an American flag, on the moon’s surface.

It may have been a giant leap for mankind, and a trip for all of humanity, but it was the American taxpayers who paid for it, and it was the guts and skill of three men along with the ingenuity of an entire nation that made it possible. Those who were not yet alive when the landing happened can’t grasp what a moment it was. It is no exaggeration to say that it was one of the greatest perhaps the greatest achievement of humanity in its history.

The United States was in a cold war with the Soviet Union at the time and that meant an arms and technology race. The threat of nuclear war was always present and people were nervously aware of that as we changed leadership in 1960. General Eisenhower led us in war and peace for many years but he gave way to John Kennedy with the 1960 election. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy spoke to a joint session of Congress and to the American people. He told them that the United States would put a man on the moon within the current decade. That promise was kept with six months to spare but, unfortunately, President Kennedy was not alive to enjoy it. He lived only two and one-half years after that speech.

The Soviet space program had launched a Russian cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1959. It was a simple ride into space on a rocket called Vostok and a return to earth alive, but it was enough to get American attention and enough to accelerate the United States into a race that it appeared to be losing. The space race was more than just who gets to the moon first; it was a question of which system is superior, Soviet totalitarian communism or American representative self government. To some extent,