On this day: 40 years ago
17 July 1969
At 12:54 a.m. CEST (7:54 p.m. EDT), Apollo 11 is reported as 47 700 km from Earth and traveling at 3.9 km/s. Crew members are busy with housekeeping duties.
1:52 a.m. Mission Control in Houston, Texas, says good night to the crew as they prepare to go to sleep two hours early.
3:59 a.m. Because of the pull of Earth's gravity, the spacecraft has slowed to 2.2 km/s at a distance of 116 700 km from Earth.
1:48 p.m. Mission Control wakes the crew with a brief review of the morning news, including sports developments. They are informed about the progress of the Russian spacecraft Luna 15 and that Vice-President Spiro Agnew called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000.
5:17 p.m. A midcourse correction is made with a 3-second engine burn, sharpening the course of the spacecraft and testing the engine that must get them in and out of lunar orbit.
More information:
ESA celebrates the 40th anniversary of mankind first setting foot on the Moon and pays tribute to the men and women who took part in this endeavour, some of whom are still active in NASA, ESA and international space programmes. A series of articles chronicles each day of the historic mission 40 years ago, from launch to landing, with many rarely-seen archive photographs and highlights of some fascinating European contributions to lunar exploration.
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