Grill of the Free

The Moon already has an eagle on it. The lunar module that landed Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, was named Eagle, and the mission patch showed an eagle coming down with an olive branch in its claws.

The crew also planted a flag. It was a standard 3-by-5-foot nylon flag with a rod sewn into the top hem so that it would look unfurled in a place with no wind, and it stood on an eight-foot pole. Buzz Aldrin said he saw it get knocked over by the engine exhaust at liftoff. Five more flags went up on later Apollo missions, six in all, and recent orbiter photographs suggest some of them are still standing.

A real grill would not light there, with no air to feed the fire. The picture does not worry about that.

In the foreground an eagle in a spacesuit helmet, with a star-lined blue cape and an apron that reads KISS THE COOK, holds up a sparkling skewer over a round red kettle grill. A second astronaut raises a sparkler, fireworks burst in the black sky, a cooler of cans sits on the gray dust, and a flag stands beside the Earth, blue and green overhead. GRILL OF THE FREE is set in gold block capitals at the lower left.