NASA’s Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, just eight years after President John F Kennedy outlined his plan to win the Space Race. The mission saw astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin blast off on a Saturn V rocket into space. The Saturn V, until the development of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, was the most powerful spacecraft capable of sending humans beyond low Earth orbit. But, a former NASA insider has now revealed the incredible powerful rocket was “effectively a big bomb”.
The Apollo 11 expert said: “I think we all knew that the launch was dangerous because the Saturn V is effectively a big controlled bomb, you know, gradually letting explosives off all at once.
“It was almost a million gallons of combined fuels of various grades of explosivity – essentially the power of a small nuclear weapon.
“Very small, like half-a-kiloton, but had it hit the launch tower leaving or something gone wrong could have thrown a turbine blade in an engine or something, you could have had a spectacular failure there.
“Now, I think the crew probably would have survived but it would have made a real mess of the launch site.
READ MORE: What did Apollo 11 discover during lost two minutes of SILENCE?
“Then, once it up into orbit, things were generally pretty safe but it did have to have that Third Stage restarts in space, which is something we haven’t had much experience with but that worked every time.”
The next “big moment”, Mr Pyle said, was the lunar landing itself, where so many things could have gone wrong but everything ended up going just right.
The space expert said: “I think the overview here is we were operating right at the edge of what technology could do.
“This technology was being designed in the early 1960s with pencil, graph paper, protractors and slide rulers.
READ MORE: Filmmaker ‘proves’ Stanley Kubrick faked Apollo 11 landing
“Computers haven’t really come into use until the mid-60s in a major way.
“And so when you think of that and what they accomplished, it’s almost harder for me to believe now than it was at the time.”
Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20 and after six hours of preparations, just before 3am UTC on July 21, commander Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon.
The NASA mission returned to Earth on July 24, where it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, southwest of Hawaii.