In just a few hours, Artemis II will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending three NASA astronauts and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut on the first mission to the moon in over 50 years. The planned ten day trip will send the four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the moon and back, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles before ultimately splashing down in the Pacific Ocean after a 25,000 mph re-entry.
It’s the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, the heyday of the Apollo program. And while most are familiar with the stories of the men who first stepped onto the moon back in 1969, what is less known is that NASA kept a major secret from the public about this mission - one which many still don’t know to this day.
This is the untold story of how Buzz Aldrin took communion on the moon - and how NASA tried to keep the whole thing under wraps.
Sacrament on the Moon
On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon. But before they did, they quietly sat in Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar module, awaiting instruction from command back on Earth. Armstrong and Aldrin sat for hours and spoke little during the mandatory downtime intended to help them recover their strength, before boldly going where no man had gone before.
In the quiet calm before Armstrong opened the hatch to step into history, Aldrin radioed the ground crew at NASA. "I would like to request a few moments of silence,” Aldrin said. “I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way."
He then pulled out a small canister containing wine and bread from Webster Presbyterian Church outside of Houston, where he was an elder. Aldrin had requested - and received - special privilege to give himself communion 238,900 miles from Earth.
“I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” Aldrin recalled later. “It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements." Aldrin read from the Gospel of John as Armstrong looked on.
Then, the two men opened the door and took those giant steps for mankind.
The NASA Cover-Up
At the time, Aldrin believed that his communion - the first act of faith undertaken on the moon - should have been broadcast to the world. But NASA had ordered Aldrin to confine his expression of faith to the lunar module, rather than the surface where the world would be watching, and to keep his comments as general as possible.
That was because famed atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had sued NASA just months prior after Apollo 8 astronauts orbiting the moon read from the Book of Genesis during a Christmas Day broadcast. Murray O’Hair’s suit was ultimately dismissed, but NASA officials feared that such an overt religious display from Aldrin - with the world watching - would open them up to further religious discrimination lawsuits.
For All Mankind
Interestingly, Aldrin later said that he had mixed emotions on the act - admitting some regret not out of loss of faith, but because the mission represented far more than the hopes and dreams of one man.
"Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion,” he said. “Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists."
“But at the time,” he wrote, “I could think of no better way to acknowledge the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”
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