London: The three men who made the historic landing on the moon on board the Apollo 11 were nearly doomed to their death and would have ended up stranded there if not for a Biro ball point pen.
Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin had accidentally snapped off the switch of a circuit breaker, which was essential for their take off from the moon after the completion of their mission. But, Aldrin improvised it by jamming the end of a ballpoint pen into the hole where the switch had been, and the astronauts' landing module was again able to lift off from the moon's surface.
A new documentary has revealed that NASA was very eager to beat the Soviets on a moon-landing mission, more so since the Soviets had beaten the Americans in sending the first man, woman and animal into space. As such, the Americans launched their mission more in hope than expectation, and this episode was one of the strings of near disasters that threatened to turn their triumph into a complete tragedy.
So great was the danger that Richard Nixon, the then US President even prepared an address to the nation announcing the deaths of Apollo 11 trio Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins, reports The Mirror.
Aldrin, now 76, told filmmakers his heart sank when he realised that the vital switch had been broken, probably as a result of a light collision when one of the astronauts brushed against it in his bulky spacesuit.
He said, "In looking around at some of the lunar dust on the floor, I discovered something that really didn't belong there - a broken end of a circuit breaker”.
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"In the countdown procedure I used a pen, one of several that we had on board that didn't have metal on the end, and we used that to push the circuit breaker in," he added.
Aldrin also said, the mission had the possibility of getting doomed even before Neil set his foot on moon.
As they frantically tried to work out what was wrong, the module drifted, and they became dangerously short of fuel. At one stage they were still 100ft from landing, but had only 60 seconds of fuel left in the tanks, he said.
"Without trying to disturb Neil's concentration, my body language was urging him to 'Get on the ground as soon as you can’. Armstrong managed to land with just 15 seconds of fuel left,” Aldrin said.
He added that NASA bosses had also failed to tell the astronauts that the escape procedures they had been taught could well be useless, as the escape plan they banking on would only work if the giant Saturn V rocket that powered their craft had already broken off.
The US Government had also ordered NASA to cut links with the astronauts if disaster struck, as it did not want the entire world to watch pictures of American astronauts spinning off into space, he said.
Aldrin further said the astronauts even believed they saw a UFO during the flight, but NASA kept it under wraps for thirty years.
“There was something out there that was close enough to be observed,” he further said.
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