The Apollo 11 handbook contains nearly 150 handwritten annotations by the astronauts and possible traces of moondust.The book also contains the first human writing on another world with coordinates written by Aldrin after the Eagle landed on the lunar surface. The Lunar Module Timeline Book is set to sell for more than £7million by Christie’s in New York on Thursday.
The spaceflight that first landed humans on the moon will celebrate 50 years since the historic event.
Amazing stories surrounding the flight, which launched July 16 1969, from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, have since been revealed by Mr Armstrong.
Many don’t know the legendary astronaut could have actually missed his monumental mission on July 20, 1969, after cheating death a few years earlier.
Mr Armstrong was an X-15 was a hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft operated by the US Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as part of the X-plane series of experimental flights.
The jet set speed and altitude records in the 1960s, reaching the edge of outer space and returning with valuable data for NASA ahead of planned missions to space.
Mr Armstrong, being the fearless pilot he was at the time, volunteered to a daring test in April 1962, but it has been revealed during Altitude films’ upcoming release “Armstrong” things did not go to plan.
Voiced by Harrison Ford, Mr Armstrong’s memoirs reveal: “This particular flight they went to somewhere around 200,000 feet.
“In the process, I got the nose up above the horizon and I tried to push down, but discovered I had no aerodynamic control.
“I was actually skipping outside of the atmosphere.
“It wasn’t going down as there was no air for it to bite into.
“I just had to wait until I got enough air to have aerodynamic control and some lift on the wing and I immediately started to make a turn back.”
Mr Armstrong took the rocket plane to an altitude of 207,000 feet – the highest any human had reached, had it not been for his quick-thinking he may have suffered the same fatal fate as many other test pilots.
Source: Read Full Article