Apollo 11 took 76 hours to reach the moon. That might seem like a long time but compared to the few hours on the moon, and the trip back, it wasn’t that long. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into this project for it to all be over in a week's time! The money was clearly well spent because this means America won the space race against the Soviet Union. These countries are not only very powerful but they were also rivals in the Cold War, which was going on at the same time as the race. The United States’ goal in this race was to land man on the moon before the soviets. The American astronauts collected almost 50 pounds of lunar rocks. They brought these home to be studied because obviously they wouldn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars …show more content…
Half a billion people watched on television as the two astronauts moved about on the lunar surface with its gravity one-sixth that of earth's (Grimwood). This shows that there were actually people that walked on the moon, which was the goal. They collected samples of rocks from the moon. They spent a lot of money to get there so they were going to make sure that they got what they needed.The moon landing was successful. The goal for Apollo 11 was to put man on the moon and in the end, that is what they did. While it wasn’t all successful, it doesn’t matter because overall the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. to the moon and had proof. The small problems were never enough to cause a big change in the …show more content…
Over their onboard computer something started flashing, it was Error 1201 followed by error 1202. Human being’s first landing on the moon is jeopardized by two computer errors” (Nambi). These two error codes caused the computer to restart five times while they were trying to make their descent toward the moon. The error code 1202 means that the computer had run out of memory storage. These two error codes could have caused the whole mission to be a failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars would have been wasted when they were just minutes away from the moon's surface.While these error codes were going off, the astronauts tried to quickly assess the situation. The crew on Earth told them not to abort the mission and to keep trying. The computer couldn’t handle the commands and codes it was receiving but eventually it began working again. The astronauts were able to make it to the moon successfully even with these