What has become of the American flag that was left behind after the U.S. landed on the moon 52 years ago?

What has become of the Americans who pioneered the pioneering manned moon landing, once successfully landing on the moon 52 years ago and leaving the American flag on the moon?

Background to the Moon Landings and the Apollo Programme

To understand this, we have to start with the background of the moon landings in those days. After the end of the Second World War, the United States of America and the Soviet Union became the new rulers of the world.

However, as the saying goes, one mountain cannot accommodate two tigers, and neither country wanted the other’s influence in the world to exceed its own, so various kinds of open and secret battles kept appearing in such a background. Especially after the introduction of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the United States for the first time put forward the concept of “containment of communism”, and regarded it as an important guiding ideology for national development for a long time afterwards.

Under these circumstances, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, have begun to compete on various fronts while avoiding direct armed conflict. The space sector is one of the most important scientific research areas for both countries.

What many people did not expect was that the United States was completely defeated in the early stage of the competition in the field of space. The world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik I was successfully launched on 4 October 1957 by the Soviet Union, and the world’s first manned spaceflight was also sent into space on 12 April 1961 by the Soviet Union. Therefore, the U.S. had to make changes as soon as possible in order to recover from the “defeat”.

In November 1960, President John F. Kennedy made a campaign promise that the United States would catch up with the Soviet Union in space exploration, and the Apollo programme was officially launched.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States of America planned to complete the idea of landing on the moon within ten years, and the American flag had to be planted on top of the moon within ten years.

In 1966-1968 three years inside, in order to obtain more data on the moon landing, the United States accumulated 6 times not manned flight test, through these experiments, NASA successfully obtain a large amount of data.

However, anyone who knows about scientific research knows that when human beings are personally involved in a certain experiment, a large number of variables are bound to arise, so the U.S. moon landing process is still not optimistic. On 23 January 1967, three NASA astronauts, Virgil Gleason, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, were killed in a fire as a result of the Apollo 1 flight simulation. Just two years later, Neil Armstrong and others successfully landed on the moon.

So what would it look like today, after fifty-two years of time since the Apollo 11 spacecraft planted the American flag on lunar soil? This is only possible if you analyse the environment of the moon.

Unlike the Earth, the Moon is a pure vacuum, with no gases present on either the surface or in near-lunar space.

Figure : Neil Armstrong

In such an environment, objects naturally change differently than on Earth. To take a simple example, if you throw away a certain piece of food on the Earth, perhaps after a few days, this piece of food will produce mould due to bacterial action. But the moon is different, when the food enters this vacuum environment, the food itself will not be affected by any bacteria.

So wouldn’t food last longer on the moon than it would in a refrigerator? Again, the answer is no. While it is true that the food itself would last longer because of the vacuum, when the sun’s ultraviolet rays hit the surface of the moon, the food would deteriorate far faster than it would on Earth.

The same is true for the American flag, which is exposed to a large amount of UV light almost every day on the surface of the Moon, where there is no atmosphere to protect it. Under such circumstances, the pigment molecules in the American flag would be severely damaged, and when all the pigments fall off, the Stars and Stripes would become a white flag.

This is actually very easy to understand, from the molecular point of view, the ultraviolet ray itself is a kind of high-energy rays, when it shoots to an object, the main thing is to affect the object of its own chemical bonds, when the object of its own chemical bond formation has been destroyed, the object will naturally undergo mutation.

After this, the large molecules of matter are gradually decomposed into small molecules, and the small molecules gradually turn into gas molecules that can escape from the object’s boundaries, and ultimately change the appearance of the entire object’s form.

In optical research, scientists also call this phenomenon optical corrosion. Unlike the traditional image of corrosion, optical corrosion is much more subtle, and it is difficult to see the same phenomenon in nature without careful observation.

It is worth noting that the Moon is not only unprotected by an atmosphere, but also has a much longer rotation period than the Earth. With a rotation time of 27 days, 7 hours and 43 minutes, ultraviolet rays are more likely to destroy materials on the Moon.

For the American flag to last in such an environment, it would have to be made of certain special materials, yet for the United States in those days, this was apparently not a concern.

According to the information, the American flag inserted on the moon at that time was not a high-tech product, but a very common nylon material. The biggest advantage of this material is that the wear resistance is much stronger than other fibres, but in front of the strong ultraviolet radiation, excellent wear resistance does not change anything.

Because of this, a year or two after the American flag was planted on the surface of the moon, the flag actually became a “white flag”, and the stars and stripes on the American flag almost all disappeared.

We can’t say whether the flag will still be there after 50 years, because anything can happen in the course of time.

Well, not long ago, an American space probe observed the surface of the moon and found that the American flag was still planted on the surface of the moon in an upright position. American scientist Robinson was surprised to say: I didn’t think the flag was still planted on the moon, I thought they had disappeared long ago.

One might ask whether the act of planting a flag on a planet after landing on it would still make sense if the flag was planted on the Moon, where it would inevitably “bleach” over time. The answer is yes.

We should know that the national flag symbolises the achievement of a country in a certain field, which represents the strength and glory of the country and should never be given up lightly.

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