Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: NASA

Now 55 years ago, Apollo 11’s “flag raising” of Old Glory on the ancient lunar surface took all of 10 minutes during Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s two-and-a-half hour moonwalking adventure in July 1969.

But that seminal event in “vexillological” history was not without a lot of debate, discussion and early worries that were run up the policy flagpole about “who owns the Moon?” The term vexillology is the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags.

In the early 1990s, Anne Platoff, then working with Hernandez Engineering Inc. in Houston, Texas put together a NASA contractor report titled, Where No Flag Has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon.

For more details, go to my new story on Space.com – “What became of the flags Apollo astronauts left on the moon?” – at:

https://www.space.com/apollo-program-flags-moon