In photos of later Apollo missions, you can see, amid all the pockmarked gray terrain, a little white smudge and, right next to it, a slightly bigger, black smudge-a flag, faded from the glow of the sun, and its shadow. The NASA astronauts who flew to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s always brought American flags with them. The spacecraft’s camera photographed several Apollo landing sites. The photographic evidence for this came decades later, thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that still circles the moon today. “That’s probably what the flag would look like now.” “Have you ever seen burnt newspaper from a fireplace? All the color is gone and everything,” says Dennis LaCarrubba, who worked at the New Jersey–based company that manufactured the flag. It wouldn’t have taken long for the ultraviolet light to eat away at the dye and bleach the flag white. Unlike Earth, the moon lacks an atmosphere capable of blocking out the worst of the sun’s rays. The flag, made of nylon, was an off-the-shelf purchase. Read: The moment that made Neil Armstrong’s heart rate spike As the Eagle module ignited its engines and rose, spewing exhaust around, Aldrin caught a glimpse of the flag falling from his window. In fact, it’s been flat on the ground since the moment Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off. (Some scientists, curious to examine how gut microbes fare in low gravity, even proposed going back for these.)įifty years later, of everything that remains at the cosmic campsite, the American flag has had the worst time of it. And they dumped things that weren’t really advertised to the public, for understandable reasons, such as defecation-collection devices. They left behind commemorative objects-that resplendent American flag, mission patches and medals honoring fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, a coin-size silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from the world leaders of planet Earth. The Apollo 11 astronauts discarded gadgets, tools, and the clothesline contraption that moved boxes of lunar samples, one by one, from the surface into the module. It was not so desolate when they departed. And then, one day, among craters both microscopic and miles-wide, two guys came along and stepped on the surface, carving new hollows with their boots.īuzz Aldrin, seeing the moon from the surface for the first time, described it as “magnificent desolation.” In the absence of the smoothing touch of weather and tectonic activity, every dent remained. From the fiery impact, shards swirled and fused into a new, airless world, itself bombarded with rocky objects. Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.Ībout 4.5 billion years ago, according to the most popular theory of the moon’s formation, a mysterious rocky world the size of Mars slammed into Earth.
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