108 Fun Facts About Apollo 11

On what date did Apollo 11's lunar module land on the Moon?

July 20, 1969. The touchdown came eight years after President Kennedy asked Congress for a Moon landing before the decade was out, and it beat his deadline by just over five months.

While Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon, where was Apollo 11's third astronaut, Michael Collins?

Orbiting the Moon alone. Collins kept Columbia circling for more than a day and hunted for the lander through his sextant on pass after pass, but never managed to spot it.

What was the call sign of the Apollo 11 lunar module?

Eagle. Its ascent stage was cut loose in lunar orbit once the crew were back aboard Columbia, and a 2021 study found it may still be circling up there instead of having crashed.

Apollo 11's command module name, Columbia, was a nod to the Columbiad, a giant cannon in which author's novel?

Jules Verne. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon fires three men moonward from the Columbiad, a giant cannon sunk into the ground in Florida, a century before the real crew left from the same state.

Which flight director was on console for Apollo 11's lunar landing?

Gene Kranz. With the radio link fading in and out, he polled his White Team one controller at a time and judged he had just enough data to tell the crew they were 'Go' for powered descent.

What does the bird on the Apollo 11 mission patch carry in its talons?

An olive branch is clutched in the talons; it was first drawn in the beak and moved after Bob Gilruth felt the open talons looked too warlike.

Which former president watched Apollo 11 lift off from the VIP stands?

Lyndon B. Johnson. As vice president in 1961 he had advised Kennedy that a Moon landing was a race America could win; he watched it leave along with about a million people on the nearby beaches.

Which Soviet probe launched three days before Apollo 11 in a bid to return lunar samples first?

Luna 15 crashed into Mare Crisium about two hours before Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off from the surface, while astronomers at Britain's Jodrell Bank listened in: 'it's going down much too fast'.

In which lunar 'sea' did the Apollo 11 lunar module land?

Sea of Tranquility. Robot scouts had been there first: Ranger 8 photographed the plain as it crashed into it and Surveyor 5 soft-landed on it, showing ground flat and smooth enough for a crew.

The 1202 alarms during Apollo 11's descent meant the guidance computer was struggling with what?

Too many tasks at once. Stray radar signals were eating its processing time, so the software dropped its low-priority jobs and kept the vital ones running, which let the landing go ahead.

Which MIT computer scientist led the team that wrote the flight software for Apollo 11's guidance computer?

Margaret Hamilton. Her team had built in routines to recover from errors, so when alarms hit during the descent the software kept the landing going instead of forcing an abort; she later popularised the term 'software engineering'.

Why did Armstrong take manual control late in Apollo 11's descent?

Boulders ahead. The autopilot was steering for a crater the size of a football field, strewn with big rocks, so Armstrong flew on past it to smoother ground.

Houston's 'sixty seconds' call during Apollo 11's landing counted down what?

Fuel left. The calls ran down to a 'bingo' point where the crew had to land within 20 seconds or abort; they touched down with about 25 seconds in hand by Houston's count, and later analysis roughly doubled that.

After Apollo 11 touched down, CAPCOM Charlie Duke said a bunch of guys were about to what?

Turn blue. 'We're breathing again,' Duke added; in 1972 he landed on the Moon himself with Apollo 16 and, at 36, became the youngest person to walk on it.

What reason is usually given for Armstrong leaving Apollo 11's lander ahead of Aldrin?

Where the LM hatch was: it hinged on Aldrin's side and opened inward, leaving the commander nearest the exit; Chris Kraft later revealed managers had met to ensure Armstrong went first.

After landing, Apollo 11's crew asked to skip which part of the flight plan?

A rest period. With the lander checked out, they asked to go straight outside, Houston agreed, and Armstrong was on the surface about six and a half hours after touchdown.

Armstrong's first words on the Moon are often printed with which bracketed word he meant to say?

The bracketed word is 'A': Armstrong meant to say 'one small step for a man', which is what makes sense of the line, but no recording clearly carries it.

How did Buzz Aldrin describe the Moon as he stepped out?

Magnificent desolation. Aldrin came down the ladder about nineteen minutes after Armstrong, and forty years on he used the phrase as the title of a memoir about his depression and drinking after the flight.

Apollo 11's moonwalk was broadcast live to an estimated audience of about how many people?

600 million is the usual estimate, about a fifth of humanity, though NASA has also put it at 650 million. The first steps reached them through a tracking dish near Canberra, whose picture was clearer than California's.

How did Buzz Aldrin privately mark the Moon landing before he and Armstrong stepped outside?

He took Communion. Aldrin, a Presbyterian elder, sipped wine from a chalice his church had given him, and kept it off the air because an atheist campaigner's challenge to Apollo 8's reading from Genesis had left NASA wary.

What made Apollo 11's flag appear to fly on the airless Moon?

A crossbar along the top. The astronauts could not pull the telescoping rod all the way out, which is why the flag looks rippled, as if caught in a breeze.

What happened to Apollo 11's American flag when the lunar module's ascent stage lifted off?

It toppled over: Aldrin glimpsed it falling in the ascent-engine exhaust, and later crews planted their flags farther from the lunar module.

From where did Nixon make his 'most historic phone call' to the astronauts on the Moon?

The White House: Nixon spoke from the Oval Office by a radio-telephone link relayed through Houston, after Frank Borman had persuaded him to drop a long prepared speech.

The plaque on Apollo 11's lander ends with which sentence?

'We came in peace for all mankind' echoes the 1958 law that created NASA, which pledged America's space activity to 'peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind'.

Apollo 11's rocks held a mineral, armalcolite, named after what?

The three astronauts: ARMstrong, ALdrin and COLlins. It was one of three minerals in their rocks that were thought to exist only on the Moon, and all three have since turned up on Earth.

Which Apollo 11 surface experiment remained in scientific use for more than 50 years?

The retroreflector array. It needs no power, just 100 small mirrors that bounce laser pulses straight back to Earth, and decades of timing them showed the Moon drifting away about as fast as fingernails grow.

Apollo 11 left a tiny silicon disc on the Moon carrying messages from whom?

World leaders. Presidents, prime ministers and monarchs of 73 countries sent goodwill notes, etched too small to read by eye; the disc was still in Aldrin's sleeve pocket as the moonwalk ended, until Armstrong reminded him.

Armstrong and Aldrin left memorial items on the Moon, including a mission patch honouring which flight's crew?

Apollo 1's patch, honouring Grissom, White and Chaffee, went into a bag with medals for cosmonauts Gagarin and Komarov, which Aldrin tossed from his sleeve pocket at the end of the moonwalk.

What did Apollo 11's moonwalkers use to push in a broken circuit breaker so their ascent engine could fire?

A felt-tip pen, a Duro marker with a nonconductive tip, pushed the broken engine-arm breaker back in and let the ascent engine fire to get them off the Moon.

Which aircraft carrier recovered the Apollo 11 crew after splashdown in the Pacific?

USS Hornet, with President Nixon aboard to greet them, picked up the crew after a storm in the target area forced the splashdown point to be moved about 250 miles.

The Apollo 11 command module Columbia is preserved where?

National Air and Space Museum. NASA first sent Columbia round 49 state capitals, then handed it to the Smithsonian in 1971; it did not leave again until a tour for the landing's 50th anniversary.

On one August day in 1969, Apollo 11's crew paraded through New York and Chicago, then dined with Nixon where?

Los Angeles. After ticker-tape parades in both cities, the crew crossed the country the same day for a state dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel, where Nixon gave each of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Which rocket lifted Apollo 11 off its Florida launch pad at 9:32 on a July morning in 1969?

Saturn V. Its first stage fell into the Atlantic minutes after launch, and in 2012 a team paid for by Jeff Bezos found the engines on the seabed; a serial number on one later matched this flight.

Speechwriter William Safire drafted words for Nixon in case which Apollo 11 disaster struck?

Astronauts stranded on the Moon. Under Safire's memo, 'In Event of Moon Disaster', Mission Control would have closed down communications and a clergyman commended the two men's souls to 'the deepest of the deep'.

Which spacecraft photographed the Apollo landing sites in 2009 clearly enough to show foot trails?

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was sent in June 2009 to map safe landing sites for future crews, and within weeks it was also passing over the old ones, where descent stages and foot trails still show.

The camera that filmed Apollo 11's descent to the Moon was rediscovered decades later in which unlikely place?

A closet in Armstrong's home. After he died in 2012 his widow, Carol, found a white cloth bag of gear that was meant to stay on the Moon; telling Collins about it in 1969, he had called it 'just a bunch of trash'.

Neil Armstrong was born near Wapakoneta, a small town in which US state?

Ohio. Armstrong took flying lessons at Wapakoneta's airfield and held a student pilot's certificate at 16, before he had a driver's licence; a museum in his name opened there three years to the day after the landing.

Armstrong flew the Grumman F9F Panther from the carrier USS Essex in which war?

The Korean War. The Navy was paying his way through Purdue, and the bill came due halfway: he broke off his engineering degree, flew 78 combat missions and only then went back to finish it.

Neil Armstrong's first spaceflight, Gemini 8, was cut short in 1966 when what went wrong?

A stuck thruster. Soon after making the first docking in orbit, the craft was rolling about once a second; Armstrong shut the thrusters down, steadied it with the re-entry jets and came home early.

After leaving NASA in 1971, Armstrong taught aerospace engineering where?

University of Cincinnati, chosen over his alma mater Purdue partly because its aerospace department was small; he taught there from 1971 until 1979.

Buzz Aldrin's nickname came from his sister mispronouncing which word?

Brother. His older sister Fay Ann pronounced it 'buzzer', the family shortened that to Buzz, and in 1988 he made the nickname his legal first name.

Which new training method prepared Buzz Aldrin for Gemini 12's spacewalks?

An underwater mock-up. NASA had no training tank of its own yet, so Aldrin rehearsed in a Maryland school's pool, then spent five and a half hours outside where earlier spacewalkers had been left exhausted.

What nickname did Aldrin's MIT thesis on orbital docking guidance earn him among astronauts?

Dr. Rendezvous. The 1963 thesis paid off three years later on Gemini 12: when the radar gave trouble, Aldrin took sightings by hand, worked out the approach from charts, and the docking went ahead.

Buzz Aldrin shot down two MiG-15s as a pilot in which service?

Air Force. Aldrin had graduated third in his class at West Point, the Army's own academy, but took an Air Force commission instead and flew 66 combat missions in F-86 Sabres.

What took Michael Collins off the crew that went on to fly Apollo 8?

Surgery on his spine. His legs had begun to give way, and the 1968 operation on his neck cost him his place on the first flight around the Moon; six months later he was named to Apollo 11.

Which mission first took Michael Collins into space, three years before Apollo 11?

Gemini 10. With John Young he chased down the drifting Agena rocket stage that Armstrong had been forced to leave behind four months earlier, then spacewalked across to it and pulled off an experiment package.

What is the title of Collins's 1974 memoir of his astronaut years?

Carrying the Fire. Collins graded his fellow astronauts frankly in it, and Neil Armstrong came out on top: he could think of no better choice to be first on the Moon.

Who was Apollo 11's backup commander?

Jim Lovell led the backup crew; by the usual rotation they would have flown Apollo 14, but were moved up to Apollo 13 so Shepard's crew could train longer.

Bill Anders, Apollo 11's backup command module pilot, had taken which famous photograph on Apollo 8?

Earthrise. It was not on the schedule: on Christmas Eve 1968 Anders saw the Earth coming up over the lunar horizon, called for 'that roll of color quick' and took the picture.

Why is Neil Armstrong in so few of Apollo 11's Moon photographs?

He was holding the camera. Armstrong carried the Hasselblad for most of the walk, so the famous shots are of Aldrin, and in the best known of them Armstrong appears only as a reflection in Aldrin's visor.

Neil Armstrong's personal kit carried wood and fabric from which historic aircraft?

The 1903 Wright Flyer. Scraps of its wing fabric and propeller wood rode down to the surface with Armstrong, less than 66 years after the machine first flew, and are now on show at Kitty Hawk, where it took off.

Why did Armstrong pocket a scoop of soil minutes after stepping onto the Moon?

In case the walk was cut short. This 'contingency sample', about a kilogram grabbed in under four minutes, meant scientists would have some Moon to study even if the two men had to leave at once.

Which rocket pioneer led the team that built the giant launch vehicle for Apollo 11?

Wernher von Braun. He had built the V-2 missile for Nazi Germany, was brought to America after the war, and at NASA became chief architect of the rocket that sent the crew to the Moon.

What did Apollo 11's crew eat for the traditional astronaut breakfast on launch morning?

Steak and eggs. The menu had been astronaut tradition since Alan Shepard ate it before America's first spaceflight in 1961; this crew shared theirs with their boss, Deke Slayton, after a wake-up call soon after 4 a.m.

Which backup crewman helped Armstrong into his couch aboard Columbia about three hours before launch?

Fred Haise. As backup lunar module pilot he readied the cabin and helped strap the crew in; nine months later he flew Apollo 13, whose explosion cost him his own Moon landing.

Aboard the recovery ship, the Apollo 11 crew spent their first days of quarantine sealed inside a converted what?

Airstream trailer. NASA fitted the shiny caravan with bunks and a kitchen; the crew lived in it for more than 60 hours, spoke with President Nixon from inside it, and were flown to Houston still sealed in.

How did Michael Collins respond to a coolant fault aboard Apollo 11's Columbia?

Switched to manual and back. Houston had told him to take manual control and work through a malfunction procedure; Collins just cycled the control out of automatic and in again, and soon reported that the problem had gone away.

Where is the main collection of Apollo lunar samples kept?

Johnson Space Center in Houston. Because the city lies in hurricane country, the 1979 vault stands above storm-surge height, and part of the collection is kept at a second site so that one disaster cannot take it all.

Unable to buy enough life insurance, Apollo 11's crew left their families hundreds of what to sell?

Autographed envelopes, signed by the hundred before launch, would have soared in value had the crew died. Collectors call them insurance covers, and crews went on signing them through Apollo 16.

Which billionaire funded the expedition that raised Apollo 11's first-stage engines from the Atlantic seabed?

Jeff Bezos financed the sonar search that found the engines more than forty years after launch. A serial number hidden under the rust proved one of them had flown on Apollo 11.

Apollo 11's moonwalk spacesuits were made by a division of a company best known for which products?

Women's underwear was the trade of International Latex, the firm behind the Playtex brand. It won the Apollo suit contract in 1965 thanks to its flexible joints for air-filled suits.

Which coincidence links the births of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins?

All born in the same year, 1930, the three were 38 or 39 when they flew to the Moon. Aldrin arrived in January, Armstrong in August and Collins on Halloween.

Hoax believers often claim which famous film director secretly staged and filmed Apollo 11's landing?

Stanley Kubrick gets the blame because 2001: A Space Odyssey had such convincing effects. Its lunar surface, though, looks quite unlike the real one in the Apollo footage.

Apollo 11's capsule first floated in which awkward position before flotation bags righted it?

Upside down is how Columbia settled after striking the water hard at splashdown. Bags set off by the astronauts rolled the command module upright within ten minutes.

In 2005 Neil Armstrong threatened to sue his barber of 20 years for selling what to a collector?

Locks of his hair fetched $3,000 without Armstrong's knowledge. The barber could not get them back, so he gave the money to charity instead.

Buzz Aldrin tested two-footed hops named after which animal while trying ways to move on the Moon?

Kangaroo hops worked, but a long loping stride proved the easiest way to cover ground. Both men found they had to plan their movements six or seven steps in advance.

Which cable channel launched in 1981 using footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk as its on-air identity?

MTV's producers picked the footage because it was free to use and tied the channel to television's most famous moment. The astronaut statuettes of its Video Music Awards are a tribute.

Apollo 11 left memorial medals on the Moon for Vladimir Komarov and which other Soviet cosmonaut?

Yuri Gagarin had died in 1968, a year after Komarov. Leaving their medals on the Moon was a tribute to fallen rivals at the height of the Space Race.

Which president told Congress in 1961 that America should land a man on the Moon before the decade ended?

John F. Kennedy picked the Moon because it lay beyond every rocket then flying, so both superpowers would start level. Apollo 11 beat his deadline with five months to spare.

Apollo 10's crew named their two spacecraft after characters from which comic strip?

Peanuts supplied Charlie Brown for the command module and Snoopy for the lander. A NASA publicity manager then asked that Apollo 11's crew be less flippant in naming their craft.

Which actor played Neil Armstrong in First Man, the 2018 film about the years leading up to Apollo 11?

Ryan Gosling starred opposite Claire Foy under director Damien Chazelle. The film drew on James R. Hansen's biography of Armstrong, which shares its title.

Which TV anchor, paired with ex-astronaut Wally Schirra, rubbed his hands with glee as Apollo 11 landed?

Walter Cronkite's coverage made CBS the most-watched network for the flight. He had followed the space programme since Project Mercury and could barely contain himself at touchdown.

Which David Bowie single, rush-released days before launch, did the BBC play during its Apollo 11 coverage?

Space Oddity tells of an astronaut adrift in space, and when the BBC noticed how dark the story was it dropped the song until the crew were safely back on Earth.

Armstrong and Aldrin were the first of how many Apollo astronauts to walk on the Moon?

In all, 12 men walked on the Moon across six landings, the last of them in December 1972. Another dozen Apollo astronauts flew there without ever touching down.

Neil Armstrong was vice chairman of the commission President Reagan set up after which spaceflight tragedy?

The Challenger disaster drew Armstrong back into public life in 1986; he held private interviews with old contacts to help find the cause. He had earlier served on the Apollo 13 inquiry.

Before joining the astronaut corps, Neil Armstrong flew which rocket-powered research plane seven times?

X-15 flights carried Armstrong above 200,000 feet and to Mach 5.74, nearly 4,000 mph. A fellow pilot called him the most technically capable of the early men to fly it.

What did Apollo 11's crew leave off their mission patch so it would stand for everyone behind the landing?

Their own names stayed off, and so did the word 'eleven': Armstrong feared non-English speakers would not understand it, so the patch carries the numeral instead.

Which camera maker supplied Apollo 11's moonwalk still cameras, one of which was left behind on the Moon?

Hasselblad cameras could be used hand-held or mounted on a spacesuit. Only the film returned to Earth: an empty camera was thrown out with other gear to lighten the lander for liftoff.

Which Australian radio telescope, star of the film The Dish, relayed television of Apollo 11's moonwalk?

Parkes took over the broadcast minutes into the moonwalk because its 64-metre dish was the more sensitive receiver. The comedy about that night was the top-grossing Australian film of 2000.

Apollo 11's astronauts found two kinds of rock on the Moon: breccia and which rock formed from cooled lava?

Basalt makes up the Moon's dark plains, which formed when lava flowed into ancient impact basins. Breccia, by contrast, was forged by the impacts themselves.

The Apollo 11 patch design was adapted for the back of which American coin, first released in 1971?

The Eisenhower dollar shows the patch's bird touching down on the Moon on its reverse. The smaller Susan B. Anthony dollar reused the design when it was unveiled in 1979.

Which Apollo 11 recordings did NASA probably erase and reuse during a tape shortage in the early 1980s?

The raw lunar TV signal was much sharper than what the world saw in 1969, which was filmed off a monitor for broadcast. A three-year search for the tapes ended in 2009 without them.

An Apollo 11 instrument so sensitive it registered Armstrong moving in his sleep was built to detect what?

Moonquakes were the target of the seismometer, a simplified design that could be set up within ten minutes. It stopped answering commands from Earth about five weeks later.

The foil sheet Apollo 11's crew set up on the Moon to trap the solar wind was designed in which country?

Switzerland's University of Bern helped build the experiment, a sheet of ultra-pure aluminium foil on a telescopic mast. It caught particles from the Sun for 77 minutes before being flown to Earth.

Which award did Nixon and his vice president present to each Apollo 11 astronaut at a state dinner in 1969?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom capped a day that had begun with ticker-tape parades in two other cities. Some 44 state governors attended the dinner.

At which Texas school's football stadium did a president give his 1962 speech on choosing to go to the Moon?

Rice University drew a crowd of about 40,000 on a warm September day. The speech even slipped in a joke about the home football team taking on mighty Texas.

After Apollo 11 splashed down, what became true of the spaceflight careers of all three of its astronauts?

None flew in space again, since Apollo 11 was the second and final flight for each man. It was also only the second American crew made up entirely of space veterans.

Which wristwatch, worn on the lunar surface during Apollo 11, earned the nickname Moonwatch?

The Omega Speedmaster on Aldrin's wrist was the first watch worn on the Moon; Armstrong left his in the cabin as a backup timer. Aldrin's later vanished in the post on its way to a museum.

Which was the last Moon-landing crew that NASA quarantined on return, before judging the Moon barren of life?

Apollo 14 closed the quarantine era in 1971. Geologists delighted by how near its crew got to a crater's rim sent the isolated astronauts a case of scotch.

The Apollo guidance computer's software was literally woven by factory workers into which kind of storage?

Core rope memory stored each bit by threading a wire through or around a tiny magnetic ring. The women who wove it inspired the programmers' nickname for it: Little Old Lady memory.

Which kerosene-burning engine, clustered in a group of five, lifted Apollo 11's rocket off the launch pad?

F-1 engines each drank more than 15,000 gallons of kerosene a minute, and even more liquid oxygen. All five shut down less than three minutes into the flight, their work done.

What carried Apollo 11's stacked rocket to the pad at a top speed of about one mile per hour?

A crawler-transporter was the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world when it was built. Its road to Apollo 11's pad ran for about three and a half miles.

Who was the only female engineer in the firing room when Apollo 11 launched?

JoAnn Morgan later became the first woman to serve as a senior executive at the launch centre. For her first 15 years there, she joked, her building had no ladies' rest room.

Which grounded Mercury Seven astronaut, as NASA's head of flight crews, assigned the three men to Apollo 11?

Deke Slayton lost his own Mercury flight to an irregular heartbeat, then spent years deciding who flew instead. He was finally cleared and made it into space himself in 1975.

NASA managers reportedly wanted the first person on the Moon to be calm and quiet like which famous aviator?

Charles Lindbergh was the model they had in mind, NASA manager Chris Kraft revealed decades later. The flight plan was changed so that the commander would step out before his crewmate.

Which civil rights leader led a protest at the launch site on the eve of Apollo 11, then watched the liftoff?

Ralph Abernathy brought several hundred campaigners to argue the money was needed by America's poor. NASA's chief invited them to the launch, and Abernathy prayed for the astronauts.

Early plans called Apollo 11's lander Haystack; which code name did they give the command module?

Snowcone and Haystack were used both inside and outside NASA during early planning. They gave way to grander names after a publicity manager urged the crew to avoid anything flippant.

What prompted NASA to shift Apollo 11's splashdown point more than 200 nautical miles at short notice?

A forecast storm was spotted in top-secret spy satellite pictures by a military weatherman, who warned its winds could shred the parachutes. Aircraft sent to the original site confirmed the bad weather.

For Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, its 363-foot rocket was projected onto which National Mall landmark?

The Washington Monument, at 555 feet, had height to spare. A 17-minute show used the obelisk as a screen to recreate the rocket's assembly and launch.

What do experts suspect decades of harsh sunlight have done to the flags Apollo crews planted on the Moon?

Faded them to white is one theory, the work of ultraviolet light, X-rays and the solar wind. Another is that the fabric has disintegrated entirely.

Ranging measurements made possible by Apollo 11 show the Moon is slowly doing what, year after year?

Drifting away from Earth by 3.8 cm a year sounds tiny, and aiming the laser at the reflector has been likened to hitting a moving dime with a rifle from nearly two miles off.

In 2016 Buzz Aldrin, aged 86, became the oldest person then to reach which remote spot, before falling ill?

The South Pole trip ended with Aldrin being evacuated to New Zealand for treatment. He had gone as a tourist, 47 years after walking on the Moon.

Michael Collins of Apollo 11 was born in which European capital, where his father was a US military attaché?

Rome was the first stop in an Army childhood that later took Collins to Oklahoma, Puerto Rico and Texas. Only one other astronaut in NASA's first three groups was born abroad.

As Apollo 11 flew home, a ten-year-old's small hands fixed a tracking station on which Pacific island?

Guam's station had a failed bearing, so its director had his son Greg reach into the housing and pack it with grease. Armstrong later thanked the boy.

Which status set commander Neil Armstrong apart from his two Apollo 11 crewmates during the flight?

He was a civilian, while both crewmates were serving military officers. Aldrin was livid when he heard a rumour that this was why Armstrong would step onto the Moon first.

In 1968 Neil Armstrong ejected seconds before which ungainly machine crashed and burned?

A lunar landing trainer, officially the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, began to roll 100 feet up when its controls failed. Armstrong's only injury was a bitten tongue.

Which type of Navy helicopter, flown as the famous Helicopter 66, lifted Apollo 11's crew from their raft?

Sea King number 66 picked up astronauts from five Apollo flights and was even sold as a die-cast toy. It was lost in the Pacific during a training exercise in 1975.

The Apollo 11 Cave, home to some of Africa's oldest art and named for the 1969 mission, is in which country?

Namibia's cave was named by a German archaeologist working there as the crew returned to Earth. Its painted stone slabs, the Apollo 11 Stones, are about 30,000 years old.