On July 20, 1969, the pair successfully touched the Eagle lunar lander on the Moon’s surface, after a tense descent that forced Armstrong to take manual control to avoid landing in a crater and the director of the crew, Deke Slayton, asked “where the hell” did they land? Six hours later, at 2:56 a.m. on July 21, 1969, the legendary astronaut jumped off the spacecraft and delivered his “one step” speech to the millions anxiously observing Earth before Aldrin left. join him 19 minutes later. Armstrong and Aldrin would spend two and a quarter hours exploring what would become the Base of Tranquility, collecting over 20kg of rock samples before burying the US flag on the surface to signal the end of the Race. Space and take off to meet Michael Collins who was orbiting at the Columbia Command Module.
Back at Mission Control, Professor Farouk El-Baz, the lead geologist in the Apollo program who was responsible for landing site selection, was celebrating with his colleague after a difficult couple of days seeing questions about their decisions.
The 82-year-old recalled in an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk the incredible experience he had working on the show and how his team selected a place to land a spaceship on an unregistered alien body.
He said: “We wanted to have absolutely flat surfaces in the area, so we started looking at the Moon and hired engineers to count the craters per unit area.
“To start with, we wanted areas that had fewer craters, then we wanted to look at the type of material, whether it be light or dark in color, clear, which means it had been there a long time and dark that it was new.
Farouk El-Baz spoke to Express.co.uk about his experience (Image: GETTY)
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 (Image: GETTY)
“So we started looking at these kinds of things and feeling what we had to do, until we decided, looking at the whole area, that there were around six that would be good enough for the first missions.
“Where Apollo 11 landed was one of them.”
Professor El-Baz detailed why scientists were so intrigued by the Moon in the first place and what they wanted to learn from it, and recalled how they confirmed that “Earth was formed at the same time.”
He added: “It was so important to study the Moon because, first of all, we could determine when the Moon formed, if it formed at the same time as Earth and if it is part of the Solar System.
“We wanted to know what it was made of and if we were going to find new elements in it. Are rocks the same as Earth? How old are they
READ MORE: NASA Director’s Confusion About Landing Images: “Where the Hell Did They Land?”
Farouk El-Baz was key to Apollo’s success (Image: WIKI)
“We had all kinds of groups: experimenters, chemists, etc., who would tell us exactly what the composition is and those who dated by age to tell us exactly when the Moon formed.
“We certainly discovered a basic understanding of the Moon’s surface. We had not been wrong, we had actually correctly thought that the Earth was formed at the same time as the Moon. “
Speaking of his experience, Professor El-Baz detailed NASA’s incredible feat.
He added: “It was an experience out of this world, to think and study the geology of something outside of Earth.
“No one had thought of that, no one: ‘what do you mean by moon geology? What is that?’
Buzz Aldrin more than half a century ago (Image: GETTY)
Neil Armstrong sadly passed away in 2012 (Image: GETTY)
“Others wanted to know how we were going to think about the Moon in terms of what we already knew about Earth because it could have been something very different.
“’What makes you think that this place has rocks like Earth? And what can we learn from them? Who are you to think that is so?
“No one had ever done anything like this before, so it was an out-of-this-world experience, it was fascinating and we were also terrified that the Soviet Union did it before us and that Congress killed everything.”
Professor El-Baz detailed the state of mind at NASA throughout the program and the pressure that scientists were under to defeat the Soviet Union after the launch of Sputnik 1.
He continued: “If NASA was delayed and the Russians landed on the moon before us, because very clearly there was a possibility, then Congress would have said ‘okay, enough, assholes, you screwed it up and embarrassed. To hell out of here.’ .
The couple landed on the Moon after a tense descent. (Image: GETTY)
“So people were working very hard and very fast and if someone gave someone else a job to do and wanted to emphasize how important it was, you would hear it a lot in Houston: people were saying ‘go ahead, do it and do it fast damn it Do you want the Ruskies to beat us?
“It was a constant statement: nobody wanted Russia to beat us.”
At just 31 years old, Professor El-Baz became secretary of the Lunar Landing Site Selection Committee for the Apollo program.
But, at the heart of this great American project, he was very far from home.
Born in January 1938 in the city of Zagazig in the Nile Delta, his first years of primary school were in Damietta, an Egyptian port city north of the nation’s capital, Cairo.
During his candid interview with Express.co.uk, he revealed the unique position he held in the early days as a foreign scientist, particularly an Egyptian, whose president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had forged ties with the Soviet Union.
Astronauts safely return to Earth (Image: GETTY)
He said: “Apollo management didn’t really care where you came from, your color, your language.
“It was ‘what do you know and how well can you do that job?’
“[On paper] I should not have been appointed to select landing sites, I am not an expert in lunar geology, I never took an astronomy course, I had not worked in space before and spoke strangely, I still have an accent to this day.
“It wasn’t really part of the scene, they didn’t have to choose me, but they saw how interactive it was with the rest of the geologists in the geological study.
The geologists respected me and called me, and many of them were on the committee that finally selected me as their secretary. “
Professor El-Baz moved to Cairo with his family to study geology, chemistry, biology, and mathematics, and graduated with a bachelor of science in 1958.
Upon moving to the U.S., he earned a master’s degree followed by a doctorate in geology, but a return to Egypt would see him try and not get a position there.
He returned to the US in 1967 and was successfully interviewed for Bellcomm, which provided engineering support to NASA headquarters, and soon made his way into the Apollo program.
He detailed how he ended up becoming the man who would select the landing zone.
He explained, “Some of the geologists had been working on the Moon for six years before I joined, but somehow the people there thought they should do the best they could and that meant putting pressure on the best person possible to do that job.
“They wanted people in management who could deal with everyone, even the geologists themselves said that I was the only one who could talk to the engineers and convince them.
“They hated talking to the engineers and that’s why they chose me.
Moon landing chronology (Image: GETTY)
“I came from Egypt and they had been friends of the Soviet Union, but I was not.
“During my education, we had opened ourselves to reading all kinds of things, so we were very well informed about the different systems in the world.”
But, scientists admitted that things could have turned out very differently for him.
He continued: “When I graduated, I received my first PhD offer from the Soviet Union.
“But my older brother, who worked in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said ‘you don’t want to go there, you will never see any geology’ and that was because the Russians kept all their students in Moscow.
“So I waited for a scholarship in the United States and went there to get my degree, so I was familiar with the American system, its way of life and politics.
“I was really prepared before I joined the Apollo program and had a lot of knowledge on how to work with Americans.”
