Following a champion's breakfast of steak, eggs, toast and coffee, at 6:45am Eastern Daylight Time, Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Mike Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin took their seats in the Saturn V rocket, the vessel scheduled catapult the intrepid explorers quite literally where no man had gone before.
#OTD in 1969, Apollo 11 Astronauts @TheRealBuzz, Neil Armstrong & Michael Collins launched into space, pushing humanity to new frontiers pic.twitter.com/w21C01z5Xu
— NASA Moon (@NASAmoon) July 16, 2017
On board, along with computers equipped with processing power comparable to those of a basic mobile phone, a communion wafer and the American flag, were medallions honoring Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Vladimir Komarov.
It would not be until 9:32 am before the Saturn took off from Launch Pad 39A, watched from the ground by an audience totalling possibly over a million, including half the members of Congress. They were seated three and a half miles from the site — Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn't rule out the possibility they might explode on takeoff.
Despite this concern for the fate of VIP observers in the event of an accident, the agency's anxieties didn't apparently extend to the astronauts themselves. In the lead up to the launch, NASA refused to offer the men life insurance policies — particularly callous one might think, given the crew of Apollo 1 (the US' first attempt to land astronauts on the moon) were killed by a cabin fire during a mere launch rehearsal test in 1967.