5 Faith Facts about the Moon Landing: Space Communion and a Prayer League of Its Own

(RNS) — Where humans go, faith seems to follow. It’s no less true of NASA’s first manned mission to land on the moon, when astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins made their way farther into the heavens than anyone had gone before.

Here are five faith facts about the moon landing, which half a century later still inspires awe and wonder in people of all faiths and no faith.

1. Aldrin took Communion aboard the Eagle lunar lander.

When Aldrin first floated the idea of celebrating Communion during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, NASA administrators responded with skepticism. The agency had already fended off a lawsuit filed after astronauts broadcast themselves reading from the Book of Genesis during the Apollo 8 mission, which atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair derided as a violation of the separation of church and state. (Her case was ultimately dismissed.)

But Aldrin, who would later describe the mission as “part of God’s eternal plan for man,” was insistent, and officials eventually granted him permission to hold a service under the condition that he keep it quiet. 

Aldrin then approached the pastor of his church — the Rev. Dean Woodruff of Webster Presbyterian Church near Houston — about the idea, where the questions shifted from legal to theological.

Although Aldrin was an ordained…