Neil Armstrong's wife finds priceless bag of missing space equipment

The ‘McDivitt purse’ and its contents had been lost for four decades.

Credit: Getty

The bag full of power cables and utility clamps may not have looked very interesting when Carol Armstrong found them stuffed in a closet in her Ohio home.

Yet the items, which had lain hidden for more than four decades, were actually priceless mementos from the most famous space mission of all, during which her husband became the first person to walk on the Moon.

The so-called “McDivitt purse” contained objects carried in the Eagle lunar module during the historic Apollo 11 mission, and included the camera that filmed Neil Armstrong’s descent on to the Moon’s surface on 20 July 1969.

Neil Armstrong’s McDivitt purse, stowed in the lunar module during Apollo 11. 

The white cloth bag was returned to Earth, despite being scheduled to remain on the moon, and was stashed in Armstrong’s closet until his death in 2012.

The objects, which were supposed to be left on the Moon so as to not add extra weight to their capsule on its launch off the lunar surface, will go on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum alongside other artefacts from the mission. Experts said they were “of priceless historical value”.

Mounted in the right-hand window of the lunar module Eagle, this Data Acquisition Camera filmed the first landing on the moon. 

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin later repositioned it to film their work on the lunar surface.

Allan Needell, curator in the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, said: “Seeing such things with one’s own eyes helps us to appreciate that these accomplishments are not just books or movies but involve real people and real things, and that they involved an extraordinary amount of detailed engineering and planning”.

Ms Armstrong found the bag after her husband’s death in 2012 and emailed the curators saying it contained “assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft”.

Mr Needell said: “For a curator of a collection of space artefacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”

A smiling Neil Armstrong in the Apollo 11's Lunar Module cabin after the EVA.

Credit: NASA

Among the 18 objects were cables, netting, mirrors and the waist tether Armstrong used.

There was also the 16mm camera which filmed the landing on the moon and the planting of the US flag, alongside a bracket for the camera, a 10mm lens and a lens shade.

They were put in the “purse”, named after Apollo 9 commander Jim McDivitt, who first suggested taking a spare bag to temporarily carry items, as there was no time to return them to storage.

A picture still survives of the bag in Buzz Aldrin’s hands in 1969.

Mr Needell said: “As far as we know, Neil has never discussed the existence of these items and no one else has seen them in the 45 years since he returned from the moon.”

Armstrong had not mentioned the items to his biographer James Hansen.

Two artifacts from the bag, the 16mm Data Acquisition Camera that was mounted in the window of the lunar module Eagle to capture the historic landing and a waist tether that Armstrong used to support his feet while briefly resting on the moon, are currently on display at the museum in a recently opened exhibition.

For more detailed information about the purse and its contents, head over to NASA.

Threadbare UK moon landing funded by Kickstarter, public charitable contributions - Video

A British-led consortium has outlined its plans to land a robotic probe on the Moon in 10 years' time, despite, and because of, UK government's lack of investment in science and innovation.

Its aim is to raise £500m for the project from Kickstarter, i.e. donations by the public.

In return, donors would be able to have photos, text and their DNA included in a time capsule which will be buried under the lunar surface.

Lunar Mission One aims to survey the Moon's south pole to see if a human base can be set up in the future.

The plan has received the endorsement of a host of well-known scientists and organisations.

These include Prof Brian Cox, the Astronomer Royal Lord Rees, and Prof Monica Grady of the Open University.

David Iron, who is leading the project, said he was setting up the initiative because governments were increasingly finding it difficult to fund space missions.

"Anyone in the world will be able to get involved for as little as just a few pounds. Lunar Mission One will make a huge contribution to our understanding of the origins of our planet and the Moon," he said.



Immortality

The team hope to raise £600,000, using the international crowd funding web service Kickstarter, in the next four weeks to fund the initial phase of the project.

For the next four years, funds will be received through contributions from the public, who will be able to buy digital storage space on the lander for their own personal text messages, pictures, music and videos.

They will also be able to pay for an immortality of sorts by sending up a strand of their hair, which the project team claim could survive for one billion years.

The cost of a short message will be a few pounds, a compressed photo will be a few tens of pounds while a short compressed video will be about £200. The cost of sending a hair sample will be around £50.

The lander will also contain a public digital archive of human history and science which will be compiled as a legacy which will survive even if our species becomes extinct.

Mr Iron believes the fact that people will have a stake in the mission will make it all the more engaging.

Legacy

"The project's long-term legacy will be a new way of funding space exploration," he told reporters.

"Rather than just watching the mission, people can be directly involved, not just through funding but helping to make key decisions such as the selection of the landing site or what should be included in the public archive."

All the money raised by the project will go to funding the mission, and any money left over will be put into a charitable trust whose proceeds will be spent on future space exploration. Mr Iron described it as "a Wellcome Trust for space exploration".

The mission will also have a scientific component. The aim is to drill and analyse a sample from underneath the lunar surface, something which has never been done before.

A key aim of the project is to educate and inspire a new generation to become engaged in science in the same way that the Apollo Moon landings did in the 1960s and 70s, and as indeed the Rosetta landing did just last week.

The Golden Spike Company reduces it's Moon Landing Ticket Prices

Good news for all you frugal Space travelers out there: A private startup's manned moon missions could end up costing around $500 million per seat instead of the originally advertised $750 million.

The Golden Spike company, which aims to start flying paying customers to the lunar surface and back by 2020, has pegged the cost of these two-person trips at about $1.5 billion. But the company plans to bring the per-seat ticket price down considerably by staging an Olympics-like media spectacle around each mission.

"We think that we can lower the effective ticket price, by selling the air time, the naming rights and the merchandising rights to these missions, by between 20 and 30 percent — by creating that other revenue stream and sharing it with our customers," Golden Spike president and CEO Alan Stern told reporters Thursday (April 11) at the 29th National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

An artist's illustration of a Golden Spike Company moon lander on the lunar surface.

CREDIT: Golden Spike Company

Fly Me to the Moon! Golden Spike Private Space Tourism Company

The Golden Spike Company intends to be the first company planning to offer routine exploration expeditions to the surface of the Moon.

CREDIT: The Golden Spike Company

The new moon travel startup Golden Spike has chosen its first contractor to design private lunar lander vehicles: veteran aerospace firm Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman built the very first manned lunar landers back in the 1960s (when the company was called Grumman) for NASA's Apollo program.

The firm made the Eagle module that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface for the first manned moon landing in 1969.

Now the company will design a vehicle to help Golden Spike achieve its goal of establishing routine commercial transportation of people to the moon and back by the end of the decade.

"This is a significant step forward in our plans," Gerry Griffin, Golden Spike's board chairman, said in a statement. "Northrop Grumman brings Golden Spike a unique body of knowledge and skills as the only company to ever build a successful human-rated lunar lander, the Apollo Lunar Module."

The founding of Golden Spike (named after the final spike built into the First Transcontinental Railroad), was announced just last month, though the project has been secretly in the works for two and a half years.

Graphic: How Golden Spike's Moon Landing Plan Works]

The startup hopes to sell round-trip moon expeditions to foreign countries, research organizations and even some wealthy individuals. Company market studies suggest Golden Spike could sell and carry out 15 to 25 of these trips within 10 years, once it gets going. Each expedition will carry a price tag of roughly $1.5 billion, company officials have said.

To launch these journeys, Golden Spike officials say existing rockets and spacecraft already built or under development can be enlisted. The only major hardware element that must be designed and constructed from the ground up is the lunar lander.

Northrop Grumman will explore a variety of different lunar lander concepts, looking for the best combination of reliability, affordability, and operability, officials said.

"We're very proud to be working with Northrop Grumman, which has the most experience and successful performance record for human lunar lander designs in the world," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, Golden Spike's president and CEO.

Scottish Screen Archive - Neil Armstrong in LANGHOLM' Scotland

Neil Armstrong swears the oath of allegiance and is granted the freedom of the burgh of Langholm.

Video shows sections of original news footage from Scottish Border Television.

Shots of pipe band in the streets of Langholm. Neil Armstrong and his wife, accompanied by the Provost and civic officials, stand to attention for the American national anthem.

Shots of the party as they are driven through the burgh streets in an open landau carriage.

They arrive at parish church. Shots inside the church as Armstrong swears oath of allegiance and is granted the freedom of the burgh. He signs the Burgess Roll.

Shots of Neil Armstrong as he addresses the congregation. Shots of the party outside the church.

Armstrong signs autographs and walks through the crowds.

Neil Armstrong Tribute - YouTube

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on a world that was not Earth, has died. Getting his pilot's license before his driver's license probably didn't hurt when it came to becoming one of the world's most famous men - certainly the world's most famous space man.

A remarkable man who was able to accomplish many great things, his legacy is far larger than himself - he became a symbol of our greatest accomplishments and it is very sad to now be in a world without him.

Russia's ROSKOSMOS Plans To Send Man To The Moon By 2030

Russia has set forth an ambitious space plan to send cosmonauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Jupiter and Venus and build a network of research stations on Mars, all by 2030.

The blueprint was revealed in a leaked strategy document from Russia's space agency, Roskosmos, published in Kommersant, a business daily newspaper.

The strategy document lays out the space agency's plans for the next 18 years, including a moon landing for cosmonauts.

"Conduct a demonstrative manned circumlunar test flight with the subsequent landing of cosmonauts on surface and their return to Earth," it reads.

According to the leaked document Russia will replace the Soyuz with the six-seater Angara craft by 2020 as the spaceship that launches Russian payloads.

It will launch from the new Vostochny cosmodrome that is scheduled for completion in 2018. The Vostochny cosmodrome will replace the old Soviet Baikonur facility in Kazakhstan as the choice launch site.

Russia will send robots to the moon to collect samples by 2030. In addition to the planned moon landing, Roskosmos is planning to explore other planets in the solar system and perhaps a follow-up to the International Space Station.

The bold strategy is a sign of Russia's continued commitment to space exploration. The Soviet Union was the first country to send a man in orbit but eventually lost out to the U.S. when NASA successfully landed a man on the moon.

Russia's space program has been in decline since then. It's Mars probe Phobos-Grunt had an immediate engine failure after launch and was stuck in orbit around Earth before eventually crashing back to the planet.

Yury Karash, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, says Russia should focus on sending manned flights to Mars, the next plum goal of many space agencies. NASA has plans to send astronauts to Mars by 2030.

"Back in the 1960s the Soviet Union was competing head-to-head with the United States," he told The Telegraph. "But it is hard to find a better way to hurt Russian prestige and emphasise Russian technological backwardness than by sending cosmonauts to the Moon around 2030, 60 years after Apollo."

Space travel: Returning from the moon | The Economist

Knowing the character and humour of the early NASA astronauts, you will not be surprised to know that this is a true story and an actual US Customs form completed by the Apollo 11 crew.

My favourite bit of this is the line asking whether there was "any condition on board which may lead to the spread of disease", and someone has typed "TO BE DETERMINED".

It seems a bit 'science-fiction-esque' but, in tose early learning days, there were real concerns about the health and welfare of the astronauts and the risk of contamination.

NASA assigned a contamination expert who studied the health effects of moon dust, and consequently, the Apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined for a short period, upon their return from the moon.

For Information:
Apollo 11 splashed down 920 miles (1,480 km) southwest of Hawaii and 13 miles (21 km) from the USS Hornet, a Navy ship sent to recover the crew.

It took a two more days for the astronauts to actually return to Hawaii on July 26, where they were welcomed with a July 27 ceremony at Pearl Harbour.

The catch
The astronauts were confined inside a NASA trailer as part of a quarantine effort just in case they brought back any germs or disease from the moon.

They had to wear special biological containment suits when they walked out on the deck of the USS Hornet, after being retrieved.

NASA transported them to Houston, quarantine trailer and all, and they emerged from isolation three weeks later.


The truth, alas, is less fun than the joke. Then again, if you were going to spend three weeks cooped up in an isolation trailer, you might need a laugh, too.

NASA in Space 2020: what will they do next

ASTRONAUTS digging into an asteroid for samples to send back to Earth. Experimental robots on the moon, paving the way for extraterrestrial refuelling stations and for astronauts "living off the land". Commercial space taxis ferrying crew members to and from the International Space Station, while a "plasma thruster" - a precursor to engines that will eventually send astronauts to Mars - undergoes tests in space.

All this could be happening a decade from now, following a change of direction for NASA signalled by the White House last week.

The Obama administration has said it wants NASA to scrap the Constellation programme, which would have taken astronauts to the moon and Mars. The decision could mark one of the most significant shifts since the agency was set up in 1958.

Though NASA has not yet been set formal new goals, the agency's administrator, Charles Bolden, is betting that the billions of dollars freed up by the change will buy big advances in the technology needed for new ways to explore the solar system. He also reckons that commercial space companies are finally ready to take the strain when it comes to transporting NASA astronauts.

To read the full article in NewScientist click here......

NASA moon plan was an illusion, wrapped in denial

NASA's Constellation programme, which was going to fly manned capsules to the International Space Station in (maybe) 2015, to the moon in (maybe) 2020, and to Mars someday, is dead. Some people are mourning it. I'm not.

Is manned space exploration important? Yes – not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. When you look past the rhetoric and superstitions and compare the results, today's robots (and tomorrow's too) are pitifully limited, painfully slow, and not really all that cheap. (Case in point – NASA recently gave up trying to free the Mars rover Spirit from a sand pit it had been stuck in for nine months.

But when the Apollo 15 crew's lunar rover got bogged down in loose soil, the astronauts got off, picked it up, moved it, got back on, and drove away – all in maybe two minutes. Robots do fine when everything goes as planned, but that's rarely true on complex, poorly-known planetary surfaces.)

Exploring with robots looks cheaper only because we set our expectations so much lower. Bolder goals need humans on the scene. Nevertheless, I'm not shedding tears for Constellation. Why not? Because it wasn't going to get us there.

First, it probably wasn't going to work. Even so early in its life, the programme was already deep into a death spiral of "solving" every problem by reducing expectations of what the system would do. Actually reaching the moon would probably have required a major redesign, which wasn't going to be funded.

Second, even if all went as planned, there was a money problem. As the Augustine committee noted, Constellation was already underfunded, and couldn't ever get beyond Earth orbit without a big budget increase. Which didn't seem too likely.

Finally, and most important, even if Constellation was funded and worked ... so what? The programme was far too tightly focused on repeating Apollo, which was pointless: we already did Apollo!

Early ideas of quickly establishing a permanent lunar base had already been forgotten. Constellation was going to deliver exactly what Apollo did: expensive, brief, infrequent visits to the moon. That was all it was good for.

Read the full article here at NewScientist...

The Sophisticated Moon Landing

© Getty Images

The Sophisticated Man on the Moon! In the words of the nursery rhyme: 'The man in the moon came down too soon, and asked his way to Norwich; He went by the south and burnt his mouth By supping on cold plum porridge.'

Apollo Moon Landing Sites Captured on LRO Camera

Images of five of the six Apollo landing sites were captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) within weeks of reaching the moon. The team hopes to see its first images of the Apollo 12 landing site next month.

LRO is currently orbiting the moon on an elliptical path that takes it some 30 km over the moon's south pole and 200 km over the north pole, but later this year it will enter a circular orbit at an altitude of about 50 km. (Illustration: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

The lunar module Eagle, which was used to carry Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the lunar surface on 20 July 1969 is clearly seen in the image on the left. When LRO settles into its final orbit later this year, it will deliver images that are at least twice as sharp as this one.

The lunar module Falcon from the Apollo 15 mission is visible in the image on the right. Apollo 15 astronauts, who reached the moon on 30 July 1971, were the first to use a lunar rover to explore the surface. Click here to see their trek superimposed on a map of London. (Image: NASA/GSFC/ASU)

This image of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in front of the lunar module Eagle provides a sense of scale to interpret the LRO images taken from orbit. The lunar module is about 4 metres wide. (Image: NASA/Neil Armstrong)

Good lighting conditions made the 1971 Apollo 14 site particularly easy to spot, says Mark Robinson, who heads up the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Well-worn tracks can be seen in the soil to the left of the lunar module Antares (arrow).
Click here to see the Apollo 14 crew's trek superimposed on a map of London. (Image: NASA/GSFC/ASU)

A footpath connects the Apollo 14 landing site to an experiments package that the crew members set up. The experiments station, which transmitted data back to Earth for years after the mission, boasts a reflector that can be used for laser-ranging measurements of the Earth-moon distance (see Mirrors on the moon) and a range of experiments used to study the lunar environment and interior. (Image: NASA/GSFC/ASU)

Apollo 16's Orion lunar module (left) landed in the heavily-cratered lunar highlands on 21 April 1972.

Apollo 17's lunar module, Challenger (right), landed on the moon on 11 December 1972. Apollo 17 was the last mission to land on the moon and the first to boast a trained geologist – Harrison Schmitt. Schmitt and mission commander Eugene Cernan set records for the distance covered on the surface – 30 km – and the amount of samples collected – 110 kg – during their mission. (Image: NASA/GSFC/ASU)

Lunar Orbiter Looking for Apollo 11 Moon Landing site

Astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot of the first lunar landing mission, is beside the U.S. flag during an Apollo 11 moon walk.

The Lunar Module (LM) is on the left, and the footprints of both astronauts are clearly visible in the powdery dust of the moon.

Senior Commander, Astronaut extra-ordinaire and Lunar Module Pilot, Neil A. Armstrong, took this picture with a 70mm Hasselblad lunar surface camera. Credit: NASA

NASA's sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is configured to seek out the Apollo 11 landing site, the location of the first human foray to the moon in 20th July 1969, 40 years ago this month.

Along with carrying out the scheduled lunar science missions, the moon-orbiting probe in coming days, weeks and months will determine and photograph selected lunar targets, zooming in on a short list of Apollo landing locales to see the final resting spots of robotic spacecraft, moon buggy tracks and crashed rocket stages.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is already operational and using its LRO Camera, dubbed LROC for short.

The landed Eagle

One large item that would be interesting to view, is Apollo 11's Eagle descent stage, left behind after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin rocketed away from Tranquility Base.

The American Flag
Unfortunately, the LROC will not be able to pick the US flag on the lunar surface because it did not survive the Lunar Module's take-off. It was blown over and out of its precarious position when the Lunar Module blasted off to re-join with the Lunar Orbiter. A more detailed search of the surface would be required to locate this precious object.

On-line Poll: - Who should we rely on to take us back to the Moon? Click Here!

40 Years After Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Neil Armstrong Talks about his thoughts

Neil Armstrong

Forty years ago men from Earth made history on the moon. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became Earth's first human emissaries to set foot on the lunar surface while crewmate Michael Collins orbited high above.

In this retrospective for SPACE.com, the reclusive Neil Armstrong - the first human to walk on another world - recalls the heady year at the peak of the Space Race between the U.S. and Soviet Union that led to the first manned moon landing:

From a historic perspective, this is a particularly significant time in the annals of space exploration.

Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite was launched just over a half century ago marking the beginning of the Space Age in 1957. Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth four years later.

Forty years ago, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an epic battle to be pre-eminent in space and the first to send humans to the moon.

In October of 1968, the Americans launched their first Apollo spacecraft with humans aboard. Later that same month, the Soviets launched Soyuz 3 which rendezvoused with Soyuz 2. In December, the second Apollo crew (Apollo 8) became the first humans escape the Earth's gravity and the first to circle the moon.

In January of 1969, Soyuz 4 launched and was followed by Soyuz 5 the following day. After docking, two crewmen from Soyuz 5 exited their craft and transferred outside to the other craft, Soyuz 4. They returned to Earth in Soyuz 4.

Two months later, Apollo 9 launched with two spacecraft, the normal Apollo Command Module and the new lunar landing craft, the Lunar Module. It was the first checkout flight of the ungainly machine in Earth orbit.

The lunar module flew again in May on Apollo 10, this time to the moon in a full dress rehearsal except for the descent and landing. Those two flights completed the flight test requisites mandatory prior to an attempt to achieve the Apollo goal.

On July 20, Apollo 11's crew piloted their Lunar Module to the first successful landing on the surface of the moon. In October, Soyuz 6, 7, and 8, with seven cosmonauts aboard, flew simultaneously and in November, Apollo 12 made the second of the six successful landings on the moon.

The flights of 40 years ago were among the most exciting in the history of spaceflight. We can expect a number of retrospective articles and television broadcasts to focus on this anniversary year. I look forward to remembering that memorable time.

-- Neil Armstrong

Should NASA (Humanity) Return to the Moon? Opinion Poll!

NASA plans to return astronauts to the
moon by 2020.

Do you think they should really go?

Add your vote in this new SPACE poll.

Neil Armstrong: Banjo solo on the Moon

This is the famous picture of Neil Armstrong practicing his banjo solo during a break in the moon landing expedition.

This when he wrote his famous lyrics to "The Eagle has Landed"

Pictures and recordings of the Karaoke singing in the Lunar Module have been retained by NASA and may be released to the public in 2010.