Nick Smith’s article on his North Pole adventure as published in Winter 2009 Explorers Journal

Ninety degrees North, the easy way

A century ago no one had been to the North Pole for certain. Today you can sail to 90° North as a tourist on a Russian nuclear icebreaker. Explorers Journal contributing editor Nick Smith did just that and, glass of chilled vodka to hand, ponders the issues involved when you travel to the end of the earth the easy way

Nick Smith at a ceremonial North Pole with the Russian nuclear icebreaker '50 Years of Victory' in the background

For more than a decade I’ve been writing about North Polar affairs, the history of the region’s exploration, its climate, ice cover and biodiversity. And although I’ve interviewed climatologists, photographers, conservationists and sea captains, the people associated with the Pole that I’ve enjoyed listening to most are those explorers who have travelled in the region on foot. These are the people who seem to instinctively understand the big picture, the people with ice in their blood. I’ve learned much about the Arctic from classic explorers such as the late great Wally Herbert, as well as from today’s most notable expedition leaders such as Pen Hadow. Over the years I’ve become fascinated by what draws human beings to this desolate frozen desert at the end of the earth, but never once thought I’d go there myself.

Prior to the 20^th century no one had even seen the North Pole, much less set foot on it. We know that a century ago – in 1909 – U.S. naval Commander Robert E Peary might have got there on foot with a team of dogs. He certainly believed he’d achieved his goal, but some commentators think he may have fallen short by as much as 100km. Richard Byrd may or may not have reached ninety degrees north in an aeroplane in 1926. In 1948, Russian Alexandr Kuznetsov set off under the instructions of Joseph Stalin to fly north for scientific and strategic purposes, and in so doing became the first person to undisputedly set foot on the Pole. In 1968 Ralph Plaisted reached it from Canada by combination of snow scooter and air. In 1969 Briton Wally Herbert broke new ground, and his arrival at the North Pole by dog-sledge was the crowning moment of one of the greatest ice journeys of the century.

Since these landmark expeditions there have been many successful arrivals at the Pole by fixed-wing aircraft, helicopter and even parachute; by surface traverse, whether complete, one way or partial; by submarine (USS Skate was the first in 1959) or surface vessel. Of these, the first was the Soviet icebreaker Arktika, which reached the Pole on 17^th August 1977. Since then there have been 65 Soviet or Russian voyages to the Pole, of which 64 have been in nuclear powered ships. Twelve other icebreakers from five other nations have made token expeditions to the top of the world, but the Russians are the experts.

The reason for this, according to Captain Dmitry Lobusov of the Russian nuclear powered icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, is simply that there is a need. Of those countries with extensive Arctic Ocean shorelines, only Russia relies on the commercial transportation of goods through the sea ice. ‘We have very vast country from west to east and there is need to carry cargo by sea and so we need an ice fleet.’ Captain Lobusov explained how the development of nuclear technology has led to icebreakers of increasing power and range, with the ability to remain at sea for long periods without refueling. In the Arctic summer, when the atomic fleet is less in demand for keeping open commercial seaways, the 50 Years of Victory – or the ‘50 лет Победы’ – becomes available to adventure tourism companies such as Quark Expeditions, who commission the ship in order to make the armchair explorer’s dream of going to the North Pole a reality.

I joined the Victory at Murmansk on the extreme northwest of Russia, on the Kola Bay. Way inside the Arctic Circle, the world’s northernmost city consists almost entirely of glum communist tenements hastily thrown up after the Second World War. After near annihilation by the Germans, who had an airbase only eight minutes away, Murmansk was designated one of only 12 ‘Hero cities’ in Russia. In 1943, Harper’s published an article about Murmansk by Dave Marlow called ‘How it Looked to a Merchant Seaman’, in which he quotes a Scots-Canadian mess-man: ‘they’ve took a beating here.’ The mosquitoes are like flying fortresses and the only dabs of colour are the buttercups and dandelions that seem to grow everywhere in Murmansk.

We sailed for a week via Franz Josef Land, the northernmost Russian archipelago, and landed at Cape Tegetthof, where we saw the wind-blasted remains of explorers’ huts. Then to Cape Fligley on Rudolf Island from which Kuznetsov departed on his successful flight to the Pole. We saw polar bears, kittywakes, walruses, ivory gulls and memorials to dead explorers. As we reached the higher latitudes we navigated through the last of the open water before crunching our way through the pack that got denser and denser as we approached the Pole. Were there any ice conditions that the Victory couldn’t negotiate, I asked the captain through his interpreter Irena. ‘No’ was the reply.

When I set foot on the ice at the North Pole I was the 22,500^th person to do so, give or take a small margin for error created by the possibility of unrecorded military expeditions reaching ninety degrees North. The Pole is, of course, an imaginary place; a point on a grid of invented geometry, that in reality is no more or less impressive than a thin membrane of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The ice that is here today is not the ice that was here yesterday or will be here tomorrow. There is no marker other than one you may bring yourself, and the sapphire blue pools of water that lie on the surface of the multiyear ice here are just as beautiful here as they are at 89°N.

T.S.Eliot wrote in his poem ‘Burnt Norton’ of what he called ‘the still point of the turning world’. At the earth’s ‘axle-tree’ he imagined the past and future to coalesce, a place where the spiritual and terrestrial worlds meet. And although it may be too fanciful to say that to stand at the Pole is to stand with one foot in another world, if you look directly upwards along the earth’s axis you will come to Polaris, the North Star, the so-called celestial pole. Look down and beneath your feet after a couple of metres of sea ice, there are 4,000 metres of sea. Then, after 14,000km of planet, you will reach sea level at the South Pole, after which there are then another few hundred metres of rock, followed by 2,835 metres of ice. If you have managed to maintain a straight line down through the globe you will end up almost in the middle of the geodesic dome of the Amundsen-Scott science research base at the South Pole.

The significance of the intersection of all lines of longitude depends as much on who you are and how you got there as anything else. I arrived at 11:57pm 15^th July 2009 sitting in the bridge bar of the world’s largest nuclear-powered icebreaker with a glass of ice-cold Russian vodka in my hand. Something like a hundred passengers from 24 countries had gathered below me in the bright midnight sun to wander around with their global positioning systems, anxious to be the first to claim that theirs read ‘90°N’ exactly. Of course, any such claims were irrelevant because the icebreaker was only at the Pole when the Captain said so, and his GPS on the bridge was the only one that mattered.

As champagne corks popped we cheered and congratulated each other on our passive achievement, as if we’d arrived on skis after weeks of doing battle with pressure ridges, half-starved, frostbitten and with exhausted dogs. A ringed seal popped its head out of a channel of inky black water to see what the commotion was about, to find out what was breaking the rhythm of the creaking ice. There were no birds and despite the razzamatazz that goes with this extraordinary adventure tourism, it was possible to detect something of the deep primal spirituality that has lured the great explorers of the past to this pinprick of nothingness in the middle of nowhere.

Accounts by explorers who arrive on foot after weeks of man-hauling sledges over pressure ridges vary wildly on how time at the Pole is spent. Some scrape together the last of their tobacco and alcohol for an all too brief party, while others become stranded while waiting for the twin otter to get in to pick them up. Tom Avery describes how in 2005 he arrived at the Pole with 4 other humans and 16 dogs only to see an immaculately dressed woman step off a helicopter with a bottle of champagne. She was leading a small group of tourists who had flown to the Pole (presumably from an icebreaker) on a once-in-a-lifetime ultimate tourist experience, as marketed by top end adventure travel companies.

The jury will probably remain out forever on whether tourists should be allowed to travel to ecologically sensitive destinations such as the higher latitudes of the Polar Regions. But the prevailing sentiment on the 50 Years of Victory was that, provided the operator transacted its business responsibly, that the environment came first and that we didn’t cause any unnecessary stress to the wildlife, then not only did we have a right to enter this pristine world, but we would come home as ambassadors, to write articles and tell our friends exactly what it is we’re supposed to be protecting.

As we returned from the Pole the sense of anticlimax was inevitable, but on the 20^th July I reminded some of my fellow travellers that we should celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing. After all, we had more in common with one of the astronauts than most of us might have suspected. In 1998 Buzz Aldrin travelled to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear icebreaker. He too went with Quark, only he sailed on the Sovetsky Soyuz, on a trip organised by the Explorers Club and headed by Mike McDowell. Aldrin’s experiences were remarkably similar to ours aboard the Victory, and indeed, ‘except for comments about the cold, I never heard a negative word.’ While at sea Buzz spend much of his time skipping lectures and designing a new rocket on the ship’s stationary, and like me he kept a journal. ‘There’s something about being at the top of the world that’s exhilarating,’ said Buzz. ‘We set up a baseball diamond and played a game of softball at the North Pole, and a group of younger passengers even took an extremely brief swim. The adventure was priceless.’

Nick Smith went to the North Pole with Quark Expeditions. Visit their site www.quarkexpeditions.com

Nick Smith’s exclusive interview with Buzz Aldrin – ‘Out of this world’ – taken from E&T magazine

Out of this world

Not only was NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon one of the great voyages of exploration of the 20^th Century, but it was also one of the greatest collaborative feats of engineering co-ordination. Nick Smith, spoke with Buzz Aldrin about how the project got off the ground…

On 20^th July 1969, when the first men stepped on the moon, mankind had finally achieved its ambition of reaching another celestial body. Mr Armstrong and his co-pilot, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. of the Air Force, as the New York Times of the day described them, had managed to bring their ship to rest on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquility.

It was one of the great human stories of the 20^th Century, a measure of how far we had come. But it was also a technical story; a story of how computer coordinated re-entry and rendezvous had made space travel and an all–too-brief walk on the moon possible.

It’s now forty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history, and although NASA and other bodies have since made great strides in space exploration, there seems to be a lack of political will to get back out into space. Although we regularly go into Earth’s orbit, many, including Aldrin, believe that the real mission before us is today is to find a way to get men on Mars.

As a fighter pilot serving in Korea, and with a career in the military, Buzz was an all-American hero even before becoming an astronaut. By the time he’d been into space with the Gemini programme and then actually set foot on the moon, he was seen by the world as superman. But despite the universal adulation, Buzz Aldrin was a troubled man.

While some have mid-life crises, Aldrin went into meltdown. Today we tend to think of what happened to him as a combination of ill health and bad luck. But in the 1970s the military wouldn’t tolerate mental illness such as depression, and to admit to being a sufferer meant curtains for any further career development. Moreover, Buzz was what we now call a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, meaning that while he was perpetually locked in mortal combat with alcohol, he could (and did) at least attempt to keep his career on track with a degree of success.

Unfortunately, the problem for Aldrin was that he wasn’t able to star in a career befitting a moonwalker, and as his new book Magnificent Desolation explains, back then merely being a celebrity didn’t pay the bills. He was dogged by ‘Status versus income disequilibrium syndrome’, which meant that while he was invited to the most elevated of social occasions that America could offer, by day he had been reduced to selling second-hand cars.

Things started to look up when, in his fifties, he married banking heiress Lois Driggs Cannon. This turn of events provided him with the opportunity to clean up his act, and he has now been sober for three decades. But it wasn’t all plain sailing, and in the recession of the 1990s Mrs Aldrin’s financial affairs took a turn for the worst, leaving them (by their standards at least) penniless.

Resolved to work his way out of his newfound poverty, Aldrin became a ‘freelance astronaut’, and ever since he has devoted his life to touring the world advising governments, the aerospace industry and the public on what is needed to get space exploration moving again. Outspoken, opinionated and sometimes a thorn in the side of the establishment, Aldrin is renowned for talking to those who will listen. Especially about technology…

Engineering & Technology magazine:  Apollo 11 has been called one of the greatest collaborative ventures of the 20^th century. Do you think that this is true and can you describe, 40 years on, the sheer scale of the technical coordination required to land a craft on the moon and bring it home to Earth?

Buzz Aldrin: It certainly was a cardinal event. Apollo 11 will probably go down in history as one of the major responses of two nations facing each other with threatening technologies – sometimes called mutually assured destruction. It was also our response to the apparent superiority of the Russians in putting objects into space before we could. Both nations gave assurances to each other that it wasn’t going to be just dogs and monkeys, but it was also going to be humans. And in the case of the US, it was going to be very out in the open. I think the Russians responded to that by realising that they needed to be more open with what they were doing. Even though they launched and recovered well inside their boundaries and didn’t necessarily need to expose a lot of the technology, they became more open about what they were doing.

In the US we were faced with the question of who was going to carry this out, and the Navy’s Vanguard mission was chosen. When this didn’t succeed – the Atlas missiles were blowing up on the launch pad – the army then brought in its Explorer satellite programme and matched what the Russians had done with Sputnik. Then it became clear that humans were going into space and it also became clear that we weren’t progressing with Atlas as we had hoped. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin shocked the world by becoming the first man in space and the best response we had – less than a month later – was a sub orbital flight.

But then shortly after that I guess the world was surprised by Kennedy’s announcement about going to the moon.

E&T: Did you have any sense that the technology was ready for this, or did you think ‘this is way too ambitious’?

Buzz: There was still a long way to go with the not-so-successful launches of the Atlas and other rockets. But I think we charted a course at that time. As I reflect back on it from where we are now, we had two features that assisted with the transition from not having a space programme to reaching the moon – flexibility and continuity. When the President said we were going to the moon, the air force had already been studying missions to the moon – including manned flight – so it wasn’t a totally unexplored area. And we had a unity of purpose that was missing in the Soviet Union. The Russians at the time really had two space programmes competing with each other. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have alternate ways of accomplishing something. But when we said we were going to the moon we also had a Mercury programme and an Apollo programme, and we realised we couldn’t stretch one until the other started flying. And so we filled the gap and retained continuity between the two with the very ambitious and successful Gemini programme that accomplished long-duration flight, computer-controlled re-entry, space walking and rendezvous.

E&T: The computers of the time. It’s passed into urban legend that there is more computing power on your mobile phone now than there was on these missions. Is that true? How much computing power was there? What did the computers do, and how much computing power was there back at mission control?

Buzz: (Laughs) I can’t quantitatively give you the numbers, but there was no way you could possibly have had any kind of mechanical calculator and made the corrections needed to be able to get to the moon. Our computers gave us the sophistication of the mathematical smoothing techniques for the equations of motion and the perturbations. We were able to squeeze out of limited capacity some very, very remarkable achievements. We chose to use humans to execute and aid things like re-entry, final closure breaking and docking manoeuvres. We made use of the humans there, rather than try to automate everything and I think we made wise decisions when exploring how to do these things.

E&T: How important is it to have flexibility in developing your approach to solving huge collaborative efforts such as Apollo 11?

Buzz: We had the flexibility when the President said to go to the moon to look at the Nova rocket that was just on paper and wouldn’t be ready until 1970, as well as and two Saturn Vs that were the legacy of Werner Von Braun. But then an engineer came along and said: ‘wait a minute. If we optimise here and there, shed a little weight and send two more specialised spacecraft to the moon we can make do with just one Saturn V. One will land and the other will be available to take people home that doesn’t make the landing manoeuvre an operational asset’. And of course now this is the obvious way of going to the moon, instead of direct there and direct back. These were wise decisions. The Russians looked at other short cuts that we didn’t evaluate very much. We chose flexibility.

E&T: In 2004 George W Bush, then president of the United States, announced a goal for US astronauts to return to the moon by 2020. What are your views on that?

Buzz: That doesn’t impress me too much. Going back to the moon 50 years after we went there in the last century, without having a clear development plan for what we were going to do – other than to say it is a rehearsal for when we go to Mars – doesn’t make much sense. As a project, going to Mars is quite a bit different, much more advanced, and I think we ought to be much more about doing that.

My schedule says if we economise on certain areas and develop what we really need to develop, we can get to Mars by 2031. But we really need to get to a moon of Mars by 2025 first. And that I think we can do, but we can’t do that and go to our moon as well. We should leave that to other nations and encourage them to accept our advice, consultation and assistance and let them experience the development issues associated with going to the moon.

E&T: What are the issues politically or technically that might prevent this? Also, what you achieved 40 years ago… if you hadn’t done it then, would it be possible to do it now?

Buzz: Well sure it’s possible. I’m not really in a position to weigh that personally, but I do think that some of the consolidations in the industry have restricted innovation and new ideas, and the overheads have gone up as well as other costs plus contracting. And then there are changes that mean that we’re not making maximum use of what we’ve previously developed.

E&T: So, do you think these are potential threats to going to Mars by 2031?

Buzz: Yes. If we continue to develop two different launch vehicles, Aries I and Aries V we can go to Mars by a different way. But if we think we can do it by going to the Moon in 2025 it’s going to take a whole lot of time to transition away from the moon to Mars … I think in the US we have lost a tremendous investment in leadership.

E&T: Here in the UK it is often said that we need something or someone really inspirational to attract new talent into the science, engineering and technology (SET) sector. Can you describe what effect Apollo 11 missions and the Lunar Ladings had on the youth of that time?

Buzz: All sorts of people from engineers to airline pilots say it was the Apollo programme and the expansion into new and different technological adventures that inspired them. That can exist again – but I don’t see it as clearly now, because a lot of things can be done by robots as they increase in capability.

E&T: What role will robots play in our efforts to get to Mars, and do you think that they will do away with the need to send humans into space?

Buzz: We can control robots pretty well at the space station, but we need human experience. Once we factor in human experience, robots are much more effective, especially when they are using somebody else’s ability to fix things and do the human housekeeping efforts as they learn how to operate in low-earth orbit. The same thing can apply to the moon: robotic efforts can determine which development industries’ products and activities can be sufficiently productive to justify the big investment in maintaining human habitation. After we’ve experienced that and are in a position to expand our human habitation to fly-by comets, to station-keep with asteroids, to look at asteroids that could possibly threaten us, then we can begin to use human intelligence at a moon of Mars (much safer) to control robots on the surface in real time and assemble items necessary for occupancy on the surface. But to go direct to the surface would be a great mistake. The more prudent way is to make an incremental commitment to a pathway first that can clearly lead toward permanence at Mars and then reinforcing that commitment with resources at a later date. But not on the surface. The great cost in sending people there is not returned if you bring them back after two, three or four trips. You need a certain critical number of people to develop the resources to become self-sustaining. Think about the pilgrims on the Mayflower who left your jolly land to come over and establish a colony here. They didn’t hang around Plymouth Rock waiting for the return trip. But this an adjustment to how we think of human beings participating in space flight. They go somewhere, they do their thing, they turn around and then they come back.

E&T: Are you optimistic that this will happen?

Buzz: I think we have to make a decision one way or another to re-evaluate the destination, and who’s going to do what. Not everybody can do everything over and over again and I think co-operative ventures don’t gain much by simply being a race to the end. Maybe a race to develop something better, that we can do something with, so then you decide whose rocket is better, whose spacecraft is better and you can consolidate your efforts there. We haven’t got to the point where we have the luxury of dual competing efforts.

E&T: Looking back on Apollo 11, what have we learned from that great voyage of exploration 40 years ago?

Buzz: Apollo 11’s legacy is one of significant investment and pioneering effort that achieved a new degree of sophistication in leadership, technology advance and reliability that has become the pattern for how to do these things. But we need to keep doing that and we need to keep draining minds in order to keep doing new innovative things. We can’t just keep recreating the same thing over and over again. But then, we don’t want to terminate good operable machines like the Saturn V prematurely and venture out on something that may not live up to its expectations. There’s a great temptation to claim that something can do a great deal more than it may actually do. And then we have to pay the price of increasing costs.

E&T: What do you think you’ll be feeling personally on the anniversary? Apollo 11 must have dramatically changed your life?

Buzz: For sure Apollo 11 changed my life. But each individual has their lives changed by different events. I had to turn my life around at a very crucial point of transition at the age of 45-50. What I knew about was the future of space, but not being affiliated with a big company that made it kind of difficult to do all those things. So I started projecting, talking, discussing and designing future improvements and learning. It’s in my blood to want to look at better ways of doing things. Several of us engineers were 15 years ahead in looking at reusable booster rockets, ejectable pods and spacecraft that could come back and land. But those things just didn’t seem to meet the fancy of what the air force, the military or NASA wanted, but it seems to be getting a whole lot closer now. I’m just not sure that we have the right destination and I’m not sure that we have the right means of carrying it out. But there are so many political and business contractual activities, that it may seem evident that it needs reevaluation when things don’t seem to be working out quite the way we hoped. There’s this attitude: ‘Don’t change what we’re doing – let’s keep with it – right or wrong – let’s do what we said we’re going to do.’

E&T: How important in a project such as Apollo 11 are the qualities of leadership and the ability to work as a team? How highly do you rate these managerial skills?

Buzz: In forming an organisation we looked around to try to find out where to get the talent we needed. Some of it came from Canada because they had some cancelled programmes. A good bit of it came from military leadership. Of course internationally we made use of some of the German technology and used a pattern of development that they seemed to be able to contribute. That worked out well. There were significant leaders in industry that banded together, and instead of trying to win all the contracts they just took what came out. There was more than enough for everyone involved. Everybody got a reasonable piece of the action, and it all came together in a very well managed, integrated way. When it came to testing and advancing the testing so that we could progress to what we called ‘all up’ testing, a lot of people had to get a lot of things together at the same time.

E&T: You’ve got a new book out at the moment – Magnificent Desolation: the Long Journey Home from the Moon – can you tell us a bit about how that came to be written…

Buzz: One theme is the evolution of change from short-term thinking about the details of future space modifications to an even bigger picture of what is our destiny and how we should go about preserving the investments we have made. Going to the moon was pretty much an American event. We started out the Space station and the Space Shuttle in that direction, made it international, but not quite free and open. We need to change these things regarding the moon and help other nations to catch up with us, while we pioneer what we are able to do in the pursuit of US leadership in the technology of aerospace that allows us to pursue science in outer space.

E&T: So you think that the future of space exploration can be a unifying thing in terms of international political harmony?

Buzz: Certainly. It can also be an increasing irritant unless we begin to make efforts to open up and understand. We need to set a boundary for what will happen in space, say once you get past 100km. Certain things will happen on the surface of the earth to do with conflict, human rights, piracy and we’ll need to deal with those down here. But in space for the betterment of many, many people, we’d like not to see communications technology encroached upon.

E&T: Thank you

Buzz Aldrin: A great pleasure.

A Trio Triumphant: Where are they now?

On July 20, it will be 40 years since Apollo 11 astronauts—Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins—reached the Moon, with Armstrong and Aldrin walking on its desolate regolith.

In the years since, Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, 79, has remained a staunch advocate for space exploration, particularly in the realm of private space ventures, which includes his own rocket design company, Starcraft Boosters. More recently, he launched the ShareSpace Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing education and affordable access to space, one of several new entities now operated under the aegis of Buzz Aldrin Enterprises.

Collins, 78, who has remained rather circumspect when it comes to his critical role as pilot of the command module Columbia, has chosen a quieter life, retiring to the Florida Everglades after directorship of the National Air and Space Museum and involvement in several private space companies. There, he has authored several critically acclaimed space-related books and indulged in his love of watercolors.

Mission commander Armstrong, 78, who saw no need to return to space after Apollo 11, chose instead to pursue his passion for teaching at the University of Cincinnati, near his Ohio home. In addition to serving on the corporate boards of several companies, including booster-rocket manufacturer Thiokol, Armstrong has remained committed to aerospace education. He recently donated his space-related papers to his alma mater, Purdue University, an institution with a long history of producing candidates for the American space program.

Whether staying in the limelight, fostering an interest in aeronautical engineering for the next generation, or enjoying more leisurely pursuits, all three have campaigned for a “return to the glory days of the space program,” particularly when it comes to the exploration of Mars. Aldrin has gone so far as to devise a spacecraft system known as the Aldrin Mars Cycler, which, he contends, could remain in perpetual orbit between Earth and Mars. For Collins, it is Mars and only Mars that should be our current space focus. In terms of time and money, he says, further exploration of the Moon could be “a bottomless pit.” When asked if he might be up for a journey to Mars, Armstrong has said simply, “I am available.”

Time travellers

Omega is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing with a replica of its Speedmaster ‘Moon Watch’, as worn by Buzz Aldrin

When it comes to pushing back the frontiers of human achievement, landmark years don’t come much bigger than 1969. British explorer Wally Herbert and his team of Arctic scientists were conquering the North Pole on foot, while Robin Knox-Johnston was becoming the first person to sail single-handedly, non-stop around the world. But the off-world activities of NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission outshone these terrestrial endeavours, as a trio of American astronauts fulfilled their late president John F Kennedy’s dream of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’

On July 20^th 1969 the Lunar Module Eagle landed lightly on the moon’s powdery surface after a protracted descent. Following technical checks and preliminary contact with Mission Control the ceremony began. As the Eagle’s hatch opened and Neil Armstrong stepped out, 600 million watched the events unfold on their TV sets. A static glitch in the audio transmission muffled a vital syllable of the most famous line delivered in space, ensuring it will be debated and misquoted for evermore. ‘That’s one small step for a man’ is what Neil Armstrong actually said before delivering the historic payoff: ‘one giant leap for mankind.’

What is beyond doubt is that the time was 02:56 GMT exactly. Armstrong led the way, and Buzz Aldrin followed wearing his Omega Speedmaster Professional wristwatch. Armstrong had taken the precaution of leaving his chronograph aboard the Lunar Module as a backup to the electronic timing system, which had not been functioning correctly. Armstrong was right in thinking that his timepiece was one that could be relied upon.

In NASA tests the Speedmaster had withstood temperature fluctuations of over 100°C, shocks of 40g, acceleration of 16g – twice that of a fighter pilot. After two years strenuously testing models from different manufacturers NASA was left with an easy decision – the Speedmaster was the only contestant still in one piece. This famous chronograph was later to get Apollo 13 out of a jam when astronaut Jim Lovell used his to time the firing of the re-entry rockets after a power failure had knocked out the onboard electronics. It’s easy to see why Armstrong put so much faith in his.

To commemorate the Lunar Landing, watchmaker Omega has announced the release of the Speedmaster Professional Apollo 11 ‘40^th Anniversary’ Limited Edition, or ‘moonwatch’. Powered by the same movement Omega used four decades ago and fitted with the same Hesalite crystal – a man-made shatterproof material ideal for low-gravity environments – this replica watch is almost exactly what Buzz and his friends were sporting on their wrists back in the late Sixties.

And yet a few neat additions distinguish it from the original, such as the inclusion of the legend ‘02:56 GMT’ in red on the dial beneath the maker’s mark, while the stainless steel body design has been updated to make it even more durable. The Apollo 11 Eagle ‘mission patch’ is stamped on the back along with the words ‘The first watch worn on the moon’. Other information on the back includes the timepiece’s production limitation. But don’t worry: with the edition limited to 7,969 there should be plenty to go around.

Delivered in a black presentation box with a certificate of authenticity, the Moon Watch is accompanied by a 42mm silver medal bearing the mission patch again. Michael Collins, the third member of the crew – who never made it to the moon’s surface – designed this famous logo of a bald eagle with an olive branch in its beak, symbolising NASA’s ‘we come in peace’ mission statement. While Aldrin and Armstrong conducted scientific experiments, Collins was at the controls of the orbiting Command Module Columbia, counting the minutes until he was reunited with his colleagues, mission accomplished.

Men Walk on Moon – how the New York Times saw it

The following is an extract from the front page of the New York Times, Monday, July 21, 1969…

Houston, Monday, July 21 – Men have landed and walked on the moon. Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time. Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old civilian commander, radioed to earth and the mission control room here: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The first men to reach the moon – Mr Armstrong and his co-pilot, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. of the Air Force – brought their ship to rest on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquility. About six and a half hours later, Mr. Armstrong opened the landing craft’s hatch, stepped down the ladder and declared as he planted the first human footprint on the lunar crust: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

His first step on the moon came at 10:56:20 P.M. as a television camera outside the craft transmitted his every move to an awed and excited audience of hundreds of millions of people on earth…

The ultimate gastronaut

When NASA initiated their space programme they soon started cooking up ideas for foods that astronauts could bring on spaceflights. The food needed to last without being refrigerated and not weigh too much. One of the more inventive ideas was to freeze-dry food, which removes almost all the food’s water content. The super-dried food then rehydrates in the astronaut’s mouth. The result was food that could keep for years which weighed almost nothing. Later astronauts were able to use hot water to boost the culinary merit of their space chow. And today’s space station even has a freezer for those hydrated chocolate chip goodies. But for the real freeze-dried McCoy, log on to Astronaut Foods for beef flavoured space dinners and astro-pack ice cream. Visit www.astronautfoods.com

With additional reporting by Angela M H Schuster, Editor of the Explorers Journal, and with thanks to the archivist of the Explorers Club, Dorothea Sartain, who made parts of this article possible.

Nick Smith reviews Buzz Aldrin’s new book ‘Magnificent Desolation’ in E&T magazine

Magnificent Desolation

By Buzz Aldrin, with Ken Abraham

Fighter pilots aren’t any good at poetry and are trained to keep their emotions in check. So says Buzz Aldrin in the latest installment of his autobiography ‘Magnificent Desolation’ that takes its name from a memorable phrase he uttered while walking on the moon in July 1969. ‘It was a spontaneous utterance, an oxymoron that would take on ever-deeper dimensions of meaning in describing this strange new environmet’ he writes early on in the book.

In fact ‘Magnificent Desolation’ starts on the upper platformon Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A, just as Aldrin is about to enter the Apollo Command Module prior to take-off. What happens over the next week or so is well-known, but such a terrific yarn that Buzz tells it gain. But it is the ‘Long Journey Home from the Moon’ that occupies the remainder of the book, and as his subtitle seems to imply, in many ways it was a much more dangerous journey.

The fabric of Aldrin’s life since Apollo 11 is woven with many threads. There is his devotion to the public understanding of space, his long-running one-man crusade to get NASA moving in a positive direction; And yet there are a pair loose threads that continually threatens to unravel the whole thing: depression and alcoholism. Faced with the awkward question of ‘what’s next?’, after the Lunar Landing, Aldrin hit the bottle hard and it retaliated. Failed marriages, long dark nights of the soul, physical immobility, the loss of dignity, all spiraling downwards hand-in-hand with their attendant depression. It was a horrible existence and Aldrin was a sick man. In some ways it’s harder to be a down-and-out when you’re an all-American hero and a moon-walker too. As Aldrin’s father, a distinguished aviator in his own right, continually urged his high-achieving son: pull yourself together.

Easier said than done, and after a spell of trying to sell cadillacs to a public that only wanted his autograph he saw ‘the long journey home from the moon’ as being one of public disclosure. He told the world he was ill, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on a daily basis, dried out, fell off the wagon and dried out again with a cyclical monotony that seemed to bore even himself. And when this happened he’d stay in bed and watch daytime TV.

Every superman needs his Lois, and when he married Lois Driggs Cannon, on Valentine’s Day in 1988 it seemed the only way was up. More than two decades later they are still together touring the world, lecturing on the future of space, dining with the crowned heads of Europe facing their second Recession together. In the early 1990s the private bank Mrs Aldrin was heiress to collapsed leaving the couple virtually penniless and having to build up from the floor. This is when Buzz became the extraordinary freelance astronaut he is today.

Nothing if not entrepreneurial by nature Aldrin is a pioneer even today. He has exploits his celebrity to lobby governments and to inspire school children alike. He has been one of the biggest supporters of space tourism and has launched the Sharespace foundation to try to get ordinary people up there. He’s had a best selling toy named after him and he’s been on the Simpsons. He famously kept a straight face while interviewed by Ali G and punched a conspiracy theorist journalist’s lights out when told his whole life was ‘a lie’. He likes to wear his dress whites and be seen with beautiful women, and he can compute orbital mechanics in his head. Buzz Aldrin’s story is amazing, and his new book Magnificent Desolation is inspirational.