The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third U.S. human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968. In these six spaceflights, twelve people walked on the Moon.
About Apollo program in brief
The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third U.S. human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was first conceived during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration as a three-person spacecraft to follow the one-person Project Mercury. The program was named after Apollo, the Greek god of light, music, and the Sun, by NASA manager Abe Silverstein. It ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968. In these six spaceflights, twelve people walked on the Moon. It stands alone in sending crewed missions beyond low Earth orbit. Apollo used Saturn family rockets as launch vehicles, which were also used for an Apollo Applications Program, which consisted of Skylab, a space station, and Apollo–Soyuz, a joint US-Soviet Union Earth-orbit mission in 1975. The Apollo program returned 842 pounds of lunar rocks and soil to Earth, greatly contributing to the understanding of the Moon’s composition and geological history. It laid the foundation for NASA’s subsequent human space flight capability, and funded construction of its Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Apollo also spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and human spaceFlight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers. It is the only program to have sent a man to the Moon, and was the first to orbit another celestial body. Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy’s national goal for the 1960s of \”landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth\” in an address to Congress on May 25, 1961.
The last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972, landed astronauts on the lunar surface, and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24, 1972. The first mission to the moon was the Apollo 8 mission, in 1969, and it was followed by the Apollo 11 mission in 1970, in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module on July 20, 1969. Apollo 13 landing was prevented by an oxygen tank explosion in transit to theMoon, which destroyed the service module’s capability to provide electrical power, crippling the CSM’s propulsion and life support systems. The crew returned to Earth safely by using the lunar module as a \”lifeboat\” for these functions. Apollo 1 cabin fire killed the entire crew during a prelaunch test in 1967. After the first successful landing, sufficient flight hardware remained for nine follow-on landings with a plan for extended lunar geological and astrophysical exploration. Budget cuts forced the cancellation of three of these. Five of the remaining six missions achieved successful landings, but the Apollo 13 landings were prevented by a failure of the Apollo 1 service module during a launch test in July 1970. The mission was the last to land humans on one of the four moons of the Earth, on July 25, 1972, and they returned safely to Earth the next day. Apollo 17 was the only mission to orbit the moon.
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This page is based on the article Apollo program published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
