In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon,

while an estimated 650 million people tuned in.

It was an incredible moment, and frankly, when I watch videos on YouTube,

I still get a little choked up watching it.

That said, it turned out that getting the flag there and raising it on the moon was a real hassle.

And it's a pretty good illustration of the kinds of hassles that we experience when we send humans to space.

For starters, there was this big political Bruhaha, which is a great word really,

that hopefully I pronounce correctly, over what kind of flag or flags to put up there.

So some folks wanted to bring loads of tiny flags, one for every

nation currently recognized on earth. But the US Congress felt like if the US was foot in the

bill, then it was an American flag that needed to go up.

And funding for the Apollo program appeared to be contingent on this, so it's a US flag that was

planted on each of the Apollo missions that made it to the Moon.

But the US had to be careful to let everyone know that planting the flag was just a symbolic gesture

and was not their way of showing the world that the moon now

belonged to the United States because that would have broken recently established

international law.

All right, so the politics was complicated.

The next problem was how to get the flag up there and how to make it look good in space.

The first problem for making it look good was that there's no atmosphere on the moon.

So if you hang the flag, it's just going to like sadly

droop down and look super not majestic.

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