by Bill Thornbrook Forty-five years after the first Moon landing, astronaut items still fly high.
Between December 1968 and December 1972, Americans voyaged to the Moon nine times. In all, twenty-four astronauts made the trip, three of them going twice. Two preliminary test missions closely approached the Moon without landing. Finally, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr., descended to the lunar surface. They became the first humans to reach another world. Five more successful Moon landings followed. In all, twelve men left boot prints in the trackless dust.
A significant highlight of the first landing was the ten-minute ritual of raising an American flag on the Moon. In the time-honored tradition of global exploration, planting a national emblem symbolizes conquest–and very often possession–of a new territory. The decade-long American and Russian race into space had ended with Apollo’s triumphant arrival at Tranquility Base, yet the United States did not assert ownership. Instead, the astronauts left behind a plaque proclaiming, “We came in peace for all mankind.”
Aldrin, soon after emerging from the lunar lander Eagle as the second man on the Moon, joined Armstrong in setting up the flag. The 5-by-3- foot nylon standard had been purchased for $5.50 at a Houston Sears store shortly before the mission. Stowed with its telescoping eight-foot pole in a protective case, it was attached to the descent ladder of the ungainly craft that had ferried the astronauts from the orbiting command module down to the lunar surface.
An automatic camera mounted in the lander captured the scene as the astronauts worked and then stood back to assess the result. Armstrong signed near his shadow, at left. The second moonwalker captioned the historic image: “Unfurling the Stars & Stripes with Neil at Tranquility Base–20 July 1969, Buzz Aldrin, Apollo XI.”
Each of the Apollo moonwalkers except Neil Armstrong was photographed by a crew mate multiple times during lunar EVAs (extra-vehicular activities). Ironically, while Armstrong shot several iconic photos of Buzz, Aldrin neglected to return the favor.
All but one other astronaut, Apollo 12’s Alan Bean, was pictured with the American flag while on the Moon. Perhaps Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., the mission’s commander, simply forgot after experiencing his own moment with the flag on the plains of Oceanus Procellarum in November 1969.
As an artist, Bean would later make up for his oversight by painting a dramatic self-portrait, a print of which he has signed.
The astronaut who waited longer than any other to reach the Moon was Alan B. Shepard, Jr. America’s first space traveler in 1961, Shepard passed nearly a decade before his second space flight took him all the way to the Moon aboard Apollo 14. Here, in February 1971, he steadies a flagstaff in the Fra Mauro region. He is probably best remembered for hitting a couple of golf balls he brought along. Red bands on the arms, legs, and helmet of his space suit designate Shepard’s status as the mission commander.
Shepard’s photo of Apollo 14’s lunar module pilot caught Edgar D. Mitchell striking a typical tourist stance as he poses stiffly beside the flag.
Since no breeze would unfurl the banner in the Moon’s airless environment, NASA technicians had hemmed its top edge over a fold-out arm that could be extended to display the flag to best advantage. The task of manually pushing the flag staff into the compact soil and then deploying the tight joint proved difficult for two men wearing inflated suits and stiff gauntlets.
In the end, Aldrin recalls, “The flag remained upright, but precariously so, and I dreaded the possibility of the flag collapsing into the lunar dust in front of the TV camera.” Old Glory held its place for the duration of the 21-hour lunar excursion. Then, as the visitors blasted off to rejoin Mike Collins in the command module, Aldrin looked up from his on-board computer just as the flag fell over.
The precious hours NASA allotted to each lunar landing team were tightly choreographed. The brief time on the Moon’s surface had to accommodate exploration and experiments, rock collecting, sleep and other housekeeping chores. But positive public response to the first flag-raising persuaded NASA to program a few minutes for setting up an American flag at each new lunar base camp.
By turns, later Apollo mission astronauts photographed one another paying their respects to the Stars and Stripes on the alien landscape. Several posed a bit self-consciously, some saluted with military precision, and one literally leapt for joy as he paid homage to his country’s flag. By their regard, the Apollo astronauts acknowledged not only their own individual accomplishments, nor even one nation’s triumph, but a singular achievement of humankind.
Today, 45 years after Apollo 11, one can hardly imagine a scene more evocative of what has been called “the American century” than a photo of a U.S. astronaut saluting the Stars and Stripes on the Moon. When enhanced by that astronaut’s personal autograph, the picture becomes even more profoundly interesting. Assembling a set of individual photographs hand-signed by all twelve moonwalkers from the six successful lunar missions can be a significant challenge. Now that the days of manned lunar exploration are apparently far behind us, acquiring images of these astronauts on another world stirs competition among space collectors.
Certain lunar surface photographs convey an especially strong sense of other-worldliness. Ash-gray mountains rise high and stark behind Apollo 15’s Hadley-Apennine landing site in early August 1971, where mission commander David R. Scott smartly salutes a glowing American banner near the Falcon lander. He and fellow moonwalker Jim Irwin had driven in the flag’s stake with a hammer “so it will stay up here for a few million years.”
For a long time after their missions, many Apollo astronauts obliged countless requests through the mail for signed photographs. They generally responded by autographing official “WSS” portraits of themselves posed in a white space suit. Images of the men on the Moon’s surface seem to have been sent out far less often, with the exception of Apollo 15’s Jim Irwin, whose signed WSS portrait is seldom seen in comparison to this lunar surface view.
John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 mission, acknowledged Old Glory with an energetic “jump-salute” that carried him several feet above the lunar surface, April 1972. (Note Young’s “detached” shadow.)
Like a car parked in a suburban driveway, the lunar rover vehicle sits alongside the lander Orion. Fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke, Jr., firmly attached to his shadow, salutes the flag at the Apollo 16 landing site in the Descartes highlands.
Mindful of their role as the final manned mission to the Moon, the Apollo 17 astronauts carried with them a special flag. Their banner was taken from a wall at NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston where it had hung throughout the Apollo program. Astronaut-geologist Harrison H. Schmitt, the only trained scientist to reach the Moon, salutes the flag placed at the Taurus-Littrow landing site, December 1972. Apollo 17’s rover and lander America appear behind him.
Mission commander Eugene A. Cernan holds the lower corner of that final flag sent to the Moon “in honor of all the people who have worked so hard to put us here.” The astronaut has inscribed at upper left, “Last man on the Moon, Gene Cernan, Apollo XVII.” The far-off, half-illuminated planet Earth glows overhead like a polished agate suspended in the inky blackness of space.
In 2012, high resolution photos returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter confirmed that flags remain upright at all the Apollo landing sites except the first. By now, though, the banners themselves are believed to be sun-bleached and tattered by micrometeorites.
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