The first men on the Moon had to use a pen to fix a broken switch on their lunar module and return home to Earth.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Buzz Aldrin, his fellow astronaut, accidentally snapped off the switch of a circuit breaker, and found they could not take off without it, British newspaper the Daily Mirror reported on Monday ahead of a new television documentary.
Aldrin then jammed a ballpoint pen into the hole where the switch had been, allowing their lunar module Eagle to leave the surface of the Moon.
“In looking around at some of the lunar dust on the floor, I discovered something that really didn’t belong there — a broken end of a circuit breaker,” Aldrin told Channel Five.
“In the countdown procedure I used a pen, one of several that didn’t have metal on the end and we used that to push the circuit breaker in.”
