Video from the moon: How astronauts trip and fall

Hans Christian Dirscherl

Space travel is currently having to cope with some setbacks: NASA is making no progress with its Artemis 1 moon mission and Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is losing one of its New Shepard rockets; However, their space capsule was able to return safely to Earth. But keep your head up: Even with the legendary moon landings of the Apollo missions, not everything went smoothly. Or to put it another way: The US astronauts stumbled quite a bit over the moon.

Funny video doing the rounds

Because in the social networks, like

here on twitter,
a 60-second video goes viral showing astronauts landing on their stomachs, stumbling and other clumsy-looking acrobatics on the moon.

However, one must always keep in mind that the astronauts were packed in heavy, bulky space suits, found themselves in a completely alien and dangerous environment, and also had to cope with a much lower gravitational pull than on Earth. This inevitably leads to motion sequences that seem funny. In the NASA control center, everyone was also amused by the (unintentionally) funny pictures of the moon. It’s a good thing that at least some of them can be seen on the video that is now circulating. The videos are said to date from the 1970s, as The Atlantic writes.

NASA analyzed the astronauts’ falls as part of a kind of risk assessment. Because in the hostile environment of space, the protective space suit must not be damaged under any circumstances. However, the much lower gravity on the moon has one advantage: the astronauts fall more slowly and thus have more time to catch themselves. At least in theory…

You can read everything you need to know about the first landing on the moon in the article Apollo 11: Moon landing – facts, films, photos.

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