Washington (AFP)
No suspense this time, but memories always thrilling: 50 years ago to the day Saturday, the Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, followed on television by half a billion Earth.
The exact lunar module lunar time, also called "LEM" and christened Eagle, was 20H17 GMT on July 20, 1969.
A little more than six hours later, at 02:56 GMT - at night in Europe, a Monday morning at 03:56 at the time in France - Commander Armstrong put the first foot, left, on the Moon, and pronounced the famous sentence: "It's a small step for man, a giant leap for humanity".
NASA has been overheating for weeks to celebrate the anniversary, with many exhibitions and events including the space centers of Florida (Kennedy) and Houston Texas (Johnson).
On Saturday, in the absence of Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence will deliver a speech from Kennedy Center, from which Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins, the third teammate who remained in the orbit of the Moon, took off. All were born in 1930.
Donald Trump's last speech on the space space, Mike Pence, shocked the old agency: in March, he suddenly announced a four-year shortening of the calendar for the return of astronauts on the Moon, passing the deadline from 2028 to 2024.
It is in this tense context, when Donald Trump himself says aloud that he would prefer to go directly to Mars, that the anniversary of Apollo 11 takes place.
- Look on the Earth -
Despite his 88 years, Michael Collins is the most active veteran of Apollo, and the most poetic when he recalls his memories of the Moon.
"When we left and saw it, oh, what an imposing sphere," said the former pilot and astronaut Thursday evening in Washington, at a conference at George Washington University.
"The Sun was behind her, so she was illuminated by a golden circle that made the craters really strange, because of the contrast between the whitest of whites, and the blackest of blacks."
"As splendid and impressive as it was, it was nothing compared to what we saw through the other porthole," he continued. "There, was that pea the size of an inch at the end of your arm, a beautiful little thing nestled in the black velvet of the rest of the universe."
"I said to the control center: + Houston, I see the world in my porthole +".
This is the message of Michael Collins, and of so many who have been torn from the earth's atmosphere: the conquest of space changes the gaze of men on Earth.
Our world is "fragile", hammered the former astronaut.
He, moreover, told Donald Trump on Friday during a meeting in the Oval Office: he is in favor of a direct mission to Mars, without returning to the Moon.
© 2019 AFP