The eagle which flew to the Moon On 20th July, 1969, something amazing happened. A man climbed down from a door to the ground. It was amazing because the door was on a small spaceship, the man was an astronaut and the ground was the Moon. The man’s name was Neil Armstrong. Another astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, waited in the small spaceship while the third person in the team, Michael Collins, was in a large spaceship above the Moon. Four days before, at 9.32 a.m. on July 16th, the three men took off from the Earth. It took 76 hours to travel the 390,000 kilometres from the Earth to the Moon. The large spaceship went round the Moon while a small spaceship called Eagle went down to the Moon. More than 500 million people watched the event on television as it happened. They heard Armstrong say, ‘The Eagle has landed.’ Armstrong and Aldrin stayed on the Moon for two and a half hours. They collected rocks and took photographs. They then returned to the large spaceship and began the journey back to the Earth. They arrived back on 24th July and landed in the ocean near the island of Hawaii. There were another six journeys to the Moon in the next three years. For the last three visits, the astronauts took a car which could travel over the rocky ground of the Moon. This meant that they could explore large areas of the Moon around the landing site. In total, 12 men have walked on the Moon, including Armstrong and Aldrin, but no human has walked on the Moon since 1972. Only American astronauts have ever walked on the Moon, but several countries, including China, India and Japan, have sent spacecraft to the Moon without humans on board.’ |