When Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon on July 20, 1969, there were no guarantees that they would make it back to Earth.
As then-President Richard Nixon call them on the moon from a landline phone, telling them in the televised call that the whole world was proud of them, the president was also prepared for another scenario.
In a recent report by Live Science, there were challenges facing the Apollo 11 mission. Not only was it hard for the lunar module which touched down that night, with Aldrin and Armstrong on board, to make it safely back to the orbiting command module where their crew-member Michael Collins waited, but also the journey back to Earth was hard.
With this in mind, Nixon asked speechwriter William Safire to pen him a contingency plan "in event of moon disaster", according to Safire during a 1999 press interview.
While the crew of Apollo 10 had previously piloted the lunar module to within 9 miles (14.4 kilometers) of the moon's surface, the Apollo 11 astronauts faced an unprecedented challenge in returning the module to orbit.
"If they couldn't (do it), they'd have to be abandoned on the moon, left to die there," Safire told Meet the Press. "The men would either have to starve to death or commit suicide."
In that scenario, NASA would have cut off communications with the doomed spacemen, and the President would have been tasked with telling the world what had happened.
Safire's lunar disaster plan speech— which was shared with the news media 30 years later — included instructions on how the president should first call the astronauts' widows before delivering a public address to the nation explaining how "fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."
"These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery," the speech continued. "But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice."
More men would follow in the Apollo astronauts’ footsteps, Safire wrote, and "surely find their way home." But Aldrin and Armstrong "were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts."
"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind," the speech concluded.
Following the somber address, the astronauts were to be given a modified burial at sea in a public ritual that commended their souls to "the deepest depths," Safire wrote.
Luckily, all of the three made it safely back to Earth. The president, happily, had no need to recite Safire's tragic statement, courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Take a look at it below:
Follow the latest news on Google News
