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Buzz Aldrin carried out a private and quiet communion service on the Moon after landing and just before they exited the lunar module. It happened when he said:“"Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM Pilot speaking. I would, like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way."His account of it in detail is here: Guideposts Classics: Buzz Aldrin on Communion in Space. He didn’t talk about it until much later.This is not exactly secret, but kind of fun and not many people know it. The first “flag” like object unfurled on the Moon was not the American flag. It was a blank sheet produced by the Swiss to capture the solar wind, and was the first experiment they deployed, before the US flag. It consisted of an aluminium foil sheet, 1.4 m by 0.3 m, fixed to a pole facing the Sun. They deployed it first to maximize its exposure to the solar wind.Buzz Aldrin standing next to the blank “Swiss flag” experiment. It was also the only non US experiment on the flight. First 'flag' on the Moon?This “flag” was detached from its pole at the end of their time on the Moon and returned to Earth for analysis. Solar Wind Composition ExperimentWhen Neil Armstrong died, his widow found a secret stash of pieces of hardware from the Apollo 11 mission in a white bag. Secret stash of Moon artifacts found hidden in Neil Armstrong's closetThe astronauts scribbled notes on the inside of the Command module during the mission - something only discovered this year (2016) through 3D scans.And:(Says “SMELLY WASTE” above the PPK sign)Those were written during the flight. Michael Collins also crawled back in after splashdown to write this (this has been known for a long time, not one of the newly discovered graffiti):“Following splashdown,while en route to Hawaii on the USS Hornet, Michael Collins crawled back into the command module (it was connected to the mobile quarantine facility by an air-tight tunnel) and wrote this short note on one of the equipment bay panels. The inscription reads:Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11, alias ‘Columbia.’The Best Ship to Come Down the Line. God Bless Her.Michael Collins, CMP”Michael Collins' Inscription inside Apollo 11 Command Module "Columbia"This shows how they did it. Basically taking lots of photos from inside the module, along with doing laser scans of it all.The Smithsonian is 3-D scanning Apollo 11 to share with the digital generationMore images and details here:Apollo 11: The Writings on the Wall - AirSpaceThe reason they weren’t found before is because nobody can enter the craft. Even while doing this scan they weren’t permitted to go inside but did it from outside. The aim is to create a virtual 3D version of the module for anyone to download and explore or make a 3D print of it. It was a very challenging project apparently"We tried to determine how to provide the most possible access to the data collecting technology, but at the same time, protect the object and not damage it," said Needell. "We decided that [the people collecting the data] could not get in and sit in the seats, for instance, nor could they build a platform to put scanners physically inside the command module."“Needell and his team also decided that they would provide access to the lower equipment bay, the area located below the astronauts' seats, which housed the ship's navigation sextant, telescope and computer.”"No one from the Smithsonian, as far I knew — not as long as I've been the curator for 20 years, has ever been below there to document the conditions or any of the aspects of the lower equipment bay," said Needell. "We've been able to sort of see above the seats, but that's about all."From: Apollo 11 astronauts wrote on moon ship's walls, Smithsonian 3D scan reveals | collectSPACEThey removed a big bag of stuff, and beneath that they saw the graffiti for the first time.See also: Apollo 11 Crew Wrote on Moon Ship Walls, Smithsonian 3D Scan RevealsAlso: Analysis of Handwritten Notes Inside the Cabin of Apollo 11 Spacecraft CM-107 "Columbia"

To stay in the spirit of the question, I'll take this to mean that you're describing an asteroid on the scale of a Ceres, at approximately 300 miles or 450 km in diameter, so the diversion simply wouldn't work, even given 50 years. (say a Rogue planet came through and passed close enough to pull Ceres into an orbit headed our way). This way we're out of options except for leaving. We could even go so far as to say a rogue planet, itself, was headed our way, something larger than earth itself, making ideas of diverting it or earth out of the question of feasibility, as even the gravitational disturbance of a near miss of such a planet could doom earth.I'd say the first step is to treat this like a World War II economy, with as much economic activity as possible diverted to the effort, with the beneficial distinction that all nations work together, rather than separately. Clearly this might exclude nations so caught up in their own cultural trifles, but no time to worry about them.At which point I think we go STEM education all the way.I like some of the other ideas, particularly William Ewing's idea of building O'Neill cylinders.I think the only way we are going to succeed at saving a sizable percentage of the population is to build some form of a Space elevator. This would require upping the production of carbon nanotubes dramatically. So I think that would be one of the many initial parallel tracks with a parallel focus of research.This project would have to occur along the equator to gain the full advantage of the geosynchronous satellite, which limits the facilities locations to being in South America, Africa and Indonesia. In general, Europe and Africa would focus their efforts on the African space elevators, the far east and Australia/New Zealand areas would focus their efforts on the Indonesian space elevators and North and South America would focus their efforts on the South American Space Elevators.Projects should probably proceed in parallel on sites chosen for maximum stability and minimum weather variance. Regarding weather, wind turbine should be placed near each site so that weather variance can be offset ny active stabilization coming from the power generated by the turbines. The Indonesian Stations should probably also be running tidal power systems.In regards to power systems, with the earth doomed, Nuclear power needs to get a stronger green light for earth's quick sprint to the finish line, and environment concerns that have more than a 50 year horizon should be abandoned in favor of powering the construction of the initial space elevators, and ultimately the full space stations.Inflatable structures should be used around the elevators to enable the building of massive protective zones around the space elevator cables. By having the structures be pressurized, rather than free standing, the material needs would be greatly reduced, and the potential sizes of the structures greatly increased.All (or as close to all as geo-politics allows) money formerly devoted to defense should be devoted to gearing up the R&D efforts.World Fusion efforts should declassify and combine forces.Genetic engineering should proceed with the goal of vastly improving the economies.The idea of keeping primitive people in the dark should be abandoned, and people who are trained as missionaries should be purposed to let these indigenous populations know that this world is going to end.Computer resources should be devoted to materials science and advanced molecular self-manufacturing, along the scales of automation that trees do naturally now. The idea is that we keep the elevators sending material up constantly, and the Geosynchronous outpost would be a location of non-stop materials assembly into space station structures.The idea of finding another habitable planet will be put on hold, for now. The arks (yes, more than one, many more) will instead need to be designed to be a permanent homes, but built on scales like we've never before imagined. As a result, a whole set of research projects that need to be spearheaded on earth aimed at producing permanently habitable space stations.Fusion Power needs high focus, because Fossil fuels, and probably even Fission power just won't cut it given both the confines and the huge needs of our eventual homes.Sustainable living research, along the lines of Biosphere 2, solving the problems of providing a full cycle ecosystemBiomimicry of Tree-like growth processes, but under computer design, and in materials beyond wood's capacity, possibly even bio-growing our carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets via photosynthesis.And this is along with the research we need to do to get the space elevators off the ground (literally)Mass Production of extremely long carbon fibersMassive inflatable structural architectures.Laser based power systems to push cables upward.And there will need to be re-engineering and organized on massive scales.Supply lines need to be optimized to go from raw materials centers to the space elevators assembly areas.Huge irrigation projects need to be undertaken to build cities and infrastructures around the projects, with possible desalination and distillation efforts involved to use sea water.*** After-thought addendum - The space arks themselves ***Several people answered about the need to find a new world, later. I'm going to contend that a set of arks, well-built, would be a better permanent residence, once fusion power was mastered, than earth itself is. So I think the plan isn't an ark, but a new, space-faring way of living in which we build enormous space stations, building the original scaffolds, and seeds, from materials lifted from earth, but filling out the space stations, possibly even after the impact destroys earth, from the materials available in the asteroid belt.So the concept is that these structures will, ultimately, be massive, on a scale that would eventually give us more usable land and ocean mass than the earth does now.So how do we build them? The same research I mentioned above into inflatable materials to build super-massive earth structures would also apply to the scaffolds used to build the space stations. The idea of using inflatable superstructures to build the early scaffolding of the space structures would greatly simplify a lot of the material requirements. This would facilitate the building of enormous superstructures on the ground while requiring minimal material. These structures could be rolled up like a bicycle inner tube, highly compact pre-inflation. And then inflated, once they in place up at the geosynchronous satellite. And since that satellite will be above the 23,000 mile basic orbit, they can use minimal active prolusion to be set free, slingshot like, off to the asteroid belt though carefully aimed to specific locations.As to how much air is needed, we live on the 21% partial pressure of oxygen. Plants don't do much with the nitrogen in the air (which is 78%) mainly just using the 1% CO2. One big savings would be to reduce the air pressure of structure from the sea level pressure here on earth, to 22%. This would reduce the tensile strength requirements of the scaffolding materials to handling 4 lbs per square inch rather than 15 in the non-weight bearing portions.With early successes at building super-massive superstructures, we could mine much of the material needed from the asteroid belt, rather than from the earth itself. And that could also act as a fall back plan should the space elevator approach fail some critical physical or technological limitation, that is, the building of massive inflatable super-structures that will act as scaffolds to be built up from the more gravitationally available material in the asteroid belt, might help to give us both super large, space cannons, and hyper-light rocketry.Ultimately, with the asteroid belt's material at our command, we could have many independent O'Neil cylinders that would have, in total, far more surface area to walk on than the earth has now. However, instead of walking in a situation where between yourself and the center of earth was 35000 miles of planetary layers, you'd be walking on a self-repairing (thanks to the Tree-like nanotechnology) floor that separated you from outer space by about 100 feet of material, the last 5 feet of which would contain the hydrogel like material Nasa researched for making meteorite impacts non-destructive (see comments).The interesting aspect is that, once this is underway, and we've began to master fusion, we could begin to be independent even of the sun itself, meaning we'd be well positioned to survive whatever happens to the solar system.A couple of points on power. An enormous amour of power, now, is used to generate light a night, heat when it's cold, and cold when it's warm. And a lot of our caloric needs come from fighting gravity, keeping warm, and breathing. Breathing in a 22% pressure, pure oxygen environment, and running at below earth's gravity levels might greatly reduce our initial needs while we master our new homes.*** end of addendum ***While this seems daunting, possibly far fetched, I have always been amazed at the speed with which World War II galvanized so many nations to achieve such amazing things, unfortunately for such a decidedly destructive purpose.And what the US was able to do in the 1960s, culminating with landing someone on the moon in an era when pocket calculators were out of the reach of the ordinary person, and computers were owned only by large companies, governments and universities.I actually think we could pull this off, if we had to, and save almost all of the able bodied people around the world.The Manhattan Project happened in a couple of years. The US space race in only 10, and this with technology and world-wide communication abilities that would embarrass a middle-schooler.And there will be a huge freeing up of resources if we don't have to be so much in fear of each other. I've always thought that the biggest impediment to our success in the world is that we've organized so much of it so that it is man verses man, and so little that it is man verses nature.I'm glad we don't have to do this, because there's a lot of great non-STEM things going on in the world, and war time economies are not fun. But I think it's something we could do if we had to. That's what we're really good at, as a species, doing what absolutely positively must be done, when we are given no other choice.

I would posit the lowly Cessna 177 for this category. The Cessna management had been producing the 170-series airplanes for 2 decades, and felt the design could/should be improved. They planned to introduce a completely-reworked 172 for the 1968 model year, to be called the 172J. They wanted: 1) a more modern-looking vehicle; 2) faster, on the same power; 3) visibility of the ground in a turn. This last item was a real disadvantage, well-known to everyone who has trained in high-wing Cessnas. When flying up high, it doesn’t matter if the wing blocks your side vision in a turn, but when flying the landing pattern, the runway disappears when you turn to base, and disappears again when you turn to final - right when you should be keeping the desired landing spot in your vision - or at least your consciousness - at all times.To give a more modern-looking vehicle, they hired a designer who had some kind of connection to Ford automobile design (I hate to call him an actual “Designer”, but that’s the title they gave him at Cessna), and told him to make the plane look sexy and modern.To give greater speed, they lowered the cabin height, removed the wing struts, switched to a NACA63-series airfoil (the “laminar-flow” series, which got so much glory from its use on the P-51 Mustang in WW2); and replaced the fixed horizontal stabilizer with a smaller all-moving tail.To resolve the ground-view problem, they moved the front seats forward relative to the wing, so the pilot was sitting ahead of its leading edge. Because this messes with the required center of gravity, they compensated by switching the powerplant from the tried-and-true six-cylinder Continental O-300 (145 hp) to a significantly lighter four-cylinder Lycoming O-320 (150 hp). That didn’t completely put things back in balance, so they were almost relieved to learn that the smaller stabilator was actually heavier, both in its basic structure and in the 11.5 pounds of lead needed to balance it at its aerodynamic center. (actually, it took more lead than that to fully balance it, so they made an executive decision to only balance it to 75% - more on the consequence of that decision later).As every good industrial engineer or planner will recognize, for Cessna to be able to build a few thousand airplanes every year, they need a good supply chain set up, and that is what happened. Before the prototype first flew, contracts had been signed for thousands of engines, wheels, etc etc, so the project HAD to move ahead or heads would roll.The prototype 172J flew a few months before public announcements were scheduled, and the following items were noted.The greatest contribution that the Detroit Stylist made was a flat-plate-with-raised spokes area on the cowl under the propeller. He swore that it looked Sexy, but anybody with a feel for the need to streamline the flow through a propeller would slap his forehead in amazement.To save weight, the flat-spring main landing gears were replaced with tubular springs. Yes, they did save several pounds, but added so much drag that the plane would not have been certifiable (in the Balked Landing category, when a plane has to show positive rate of climb with full flaps) until sheet-metal fairings were designed and installed. To this day, it is illegal to fly a 177 with those fairings off.The wing did not offer the expected speed improvement, because to achieve anything like “laminar flow”, the construction techniques and materials used must be many levels above what Cessna is capable of using 0.032 aluminum sheet and hand riveting, and access panels are still required, and antennas, fuel tanks, door-holding brackets, flaps and ailerons all provide interruptions to the required airflow. In addition, to make a cantilever wing, the previous 12% thick wing was increased to 15% at the root - greater thickness brings greater drag.The wing did not fly like the previous NACA2412 wing: you couldn’t get the airplane to climb at a lift coefficient of 1.0, which is common in the usual Cessna takeoff and climb. You had to keep the nose down at liftoff until 80 mph, or else you would never clear the airport area. And then build it up to 90 mph in order to get up to cruise altitude in a reasonable time.The 75%-balanced tail was a killer (almost literally). If the nose bobbed and the pilot tried to chase it, unless he was careful he got into PIO, pilot-induced oscillations, that got wilder and more out of control until he stopped trying to chase the plane’s gyrations - or until he hit the ground. This was such a big deal that after a few months of sales, all planes in the field were recalled long enough to add 100% balance weights.The landing flaps were given a greater percentage of the wingspan than on the previous 172 wing, but were limited to 30 degrees of deflection so as to not have too much drag in the Balked Landing condition. This probably seemed like a wise decision when the paper airplane was being designed, but the resulting convoluted airflow with full flaps caused the stabilator to be “blanked” and suddenly lose its effectiveness if the plane was sideslipped. Not a good characteristic if you desire safe landings. As part of the above-mentioned safety recall, the stabilator had leading-edge slots installed, which helped reduce the sudden loss of effectiveness in that event.The total result: even with 3% more installed power, the replacement for the C172 did not fly any faster, did not carry any more, did not fly any quieter or safer, had more engine vibration, did not have as much headroom, had its occupants sitting with their legs straighter (and thus less comfortable), did not allow as good visibility over the nose cowling, etc - in short, the real airplane did NOT fulfill the promise of the paper drawings. However, the management was committed to phase out the 1967 Cessna 172H and replace it with this new airplane, and the clock was ticking. A last-minute decision was made: the 172H would be continued - sorta : they would take half the delivery of Lycoming engines and mount them in 172s, and use the other half of the Lycomings to power a reduced-level number of the new airplanes, which would now be called “177”. So, the management realized at the outset that the 2000 new airplanes they envisioned was probably not going to be viable, but they could probably sell a thousand or so, and could eventually get rid of another thousand of the re-engined 172s. And that is what happened. The re-engined 172 had to receive a new designation, since it was no longer a 172H (remember, a 172H had a Continental engine). They previously had planned on skipping the 172 “I” designation in the sequence, because of the probability of confusion, thus they planned on the next model being the 172J. However, when the decision was made to keep the old-design 172 in the lineup, they titled it the 172I. And, that’s the rest of the story.14 Feb. update: G R Mells responded that he was impressed with the 177 in a demo ride, and made me realize that I sounded very down on the 177. I am not. It is an OK airplane, and starting with the 177B, the company threw some serious effort to improve it. They actually reworked the wing to put a NACA2412 profile on its forward portion, which made it fly “like a Cessna” at lower speed, and made a controllable-pitch propeller available. But they had to pitch the plane as a separate line, a new product meant to “fill a niche” between the 172 and the 182, which in reality didn’t exist to any great extent, so that there was only a small market segment and thus not many potential buyers. No, my point was a response to the question “ What airplane did not do in reality what designers thought it would do as it was being drawn up? “ And the original-concept 172J failed miserably at being a drop-in replacement for the previous 172s produced since the 1950s or the 170s produced from the late 1940s.For what it is worth: I am a blue-sky straight-level kind of pilot, so I don’t have lots of war stories to tell. I have only had 3 loop-the-loop flights in my life. The first was in a Luscombe Silvaire, a tough little two-seater airplane that did the trick without a complaint. The next was in our service-test Cessna 172J airplane when I was riding with a fellow engineer-pilot who had been receiving aerobatic instruction, and who showed me that a loop is no big deal, even in a plane not expressly designed for it (however, we “neglected” to mention to our supervisors that the plane had been looped). My third loop - my only solo effort - was in a Cessna 150 which had been modified by Doyn Aircraft Co. (a small Wichita modification shop) to sport a 150-hp Lycoming in place of its 100-hp Continental. As you can imagine, the increased power made that plane a relative firecracker. One day I had to reposition a customer’s plane (with the new engine installed) to another airport, so while enroute, I tried the loop, and it went off without a hitch. I also neglected to mention to anybody that the plane had been looped; I hope this public confession is far enough gone that nobody cares by now. And that’s the rest of the story.