Apollo 11’s journey to the moon, annotated

The moon landing was a feat of engineering, accomplished through the careful deconstruction of a 3,000 ton spacecraft.

Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on a journey to pull off humankind’s first moon landing. The eight-day journey was made possible by the careful deconstruction of the Saturn V rocket and Apollo spacecraft, and made use of a technique of docking components of the spacecraft in lunar orbit so the astronauts could land on, and then launch from, the lunar surface.

[Vox]

For more space-inspired stories check out these Vox videos:

[afterburnerfox]

Michael Collins
The forgotten astronaut

[mubx]

Micheal Collins, the most humble astronaut ever

[jonas]

Im still amazed the 180° turn and docking with the lunar module mid flight worked without modern computers.

[BMarie]

All this footage makes me so excited for when we go back. Just imagine the photo and video quality we will get.

[iman]

Whoever did the animation and art-style for this video deserves a raise. This is a beautiful updating and utilisation of the visual style of original program.

[ThomasG_]

The idea of splitting your craft in half, spinning one half around, and then reattatching the halves - while flying through space at high speed - terrifies me.

[shotsfiredandmissed]

And I'm watching this video with a computer that is a 100x more powerful than what they used to get to the moon. Amazing.

[tajrian]

The amount of math and calculations the engineers had to do in order to make all of that happen in 1 go makes THEM the real heroes !

[jigsaw]

I always wondered, how they returned back to earth, this video made that clear for me, thank you Vox

[ManofOneGod]

Imagine accidentally leaving the moon rock samples in the other module.

[Jermaine_Jones]

This choreographed engineering feat is still amazing to me. Especially given the technology available at the time.

[omarfaruquexy]

When you're a kid the name Neil Armstrong is one of the first names you learn about in Science class. It's quite amazing the magnitude of what these men accomplished.

[bittech]

A correction here (3:10). The apollo craft actually had to light its engines and perform an orbit insertion burn once it got to the moon. Otherwise it would have performed a "s̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶h̶o̶t̶" m̶a̶n̶e̶u̶v̶e̶r̶
free return trajectory around the moon and returned to Earth. This is actually what happened on Apollo 13, and is what allowed that mission to return home without any propulsion.

It is worth noting that setting up this s̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶h̶o̶t̶ free return is actually not the most efficient way to get to the moon in terms of fuel requirements, but it was deemed to be worth the offset cost in case something went wrong, which it obviously did during Apollo 13.

[jeffvines]

Neil: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Buzz: "To infinity and beyond!"

[himmelsamuel]

REST IN PEACE MICHAEL COLLINS
1930-2021

[salokin]

These kinds of videos, along with borders, is Vox at their best

[matthewclarkson]

To think that only 60 years before, we had just invented the airplane.

[BradThePitts]

Armstrong: "The Eagle has landed."
Aldrin: "Great, I have to pee!"

[blacksabbath]

The news in 2154

NASA - "We're finally going back to the moon by 2160."