The Fraught Effort to Return to the Moon
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.
The 50th anniversary of the moon landing is almost here, and NASA has gone all-out for the occasion.
The agency has been celebrating the memory of Apollo 11 for months. It has a steady stream of archival photos and footage of the astronauts suiting up, blasting off, and posing on the lunar surface with the American flag, a pop of color against an expanse of gray. It the room at the Johnson Space Center where Mission Control monitored the journey so that now it looks the way it did in 1969, down to the coffee cups, clipboards, and packs of cigarettes. NASA headquarters even asked every communications officer at the agency to be “mindful of posting evergreen materials in human history. It’s been moon time, all the time.
