Moon: Video shows stumbling astronauts from Apollo missions

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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon: Not easy to walk on the moon

Photo: NASA/ REUTERS

They stumble, fall, pick themselves up, and fall again.

It looks a bit like a new edition of the Teletubbies, the people in the suits jump around so clumsily.

However, the video, which has been going viral for days (and has been shared on social media for months), is not a trailer for the children's program.

It shows NASA astronauts on the moon.

Twitter posts about the "outtakes" of NASA's moon missions.

Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions landed on the moon.

When Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon's surface in 1969, video footage was still serious.

His famous words are "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

According to the US magazine »The Atlantic«, the video recordings, which presumably show the first falls rather than the first step of a human being on the moon, date from the 1970s.

Not easy walking on the moon

NASA collected the astronauts' falls and used them as an opportunity for an analysis, a kind of risk assessment.

It is unthinkable that a suit would be damaged while walking on the moon.

The concern was not entirely unjustified, not only since the video recordings.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin once said that the lunar surface was like a wet powder.

That makes walking difficult enough, but then there is the altered gravity: on the moon, people would only weigh a sixth of their weight on earth.

A conclusion of the Nasa study: People fall much more slowly on the moon and thus have more time to compensate for missteps or slips.

It also shows that walking and hopping on the moon appear to require the same amount of energy.

The attraction of the moon has not left the USA since the Apollo missions.

With the "Artemis" mission, people are not supposed to be sent to the moon again until 2025 at the earliest. A first renamed test flight, which was originally supposed to start on August 29, was canceled due to technical problems.

Now the end of September is targeted.

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