Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  Despite their contrasting temperaments—Armstrong deceptively affectless and placid, Aldrin intense and focused—both were as competitive as the other alpha-male astronauts. A moment during the Houston press conference revealed some of the personal determination and drive that Armstrong kept largely invisible from the public.

  From the gallery of journalists came the inevitable question that everyone wanted answered: “Which one of you gentlemen will be the first man to step on the lunar surface?”

  Aldrin had performed his Gemini 12 spacewalk while commander Jim Lovell remained in the spacecraft. Such had been the protocol for all extravehicular-activity exercises during Gemini. It seemed logical to assume this practice would continue on Apollo. The first Apollo extravehicular activity to test the new self-contained lunar space suit would be performed on the next mission, by Apollo 9’s lunar-module pilot. Aldrin had begun training for the lunar EVA and had reason to assume that, as the lunar-module pilot, he would be the first to set foot on the Moon, with Armstrong following him forty minutes later.

  However, when Armstrong answered the question, he revealed, uncomfortably, “The current plan calls for one astronaut to be on the surface for approximately three-quarters of an hour prior to the second man’s emergence. Now, which person is which has not been decided up to this point.”

  Following Armstrong’s response, Aldrin diplomatically used one of the models of the lunar module to describe how each astronaut would exit the spacecraft when it was on the Moon. Aldrin, of course, also left open the question of who would be first man. Outwardly, neither man showed much emotion about the matter at the Houston press conference. But the tension in the room did not go unnoticed. Privately there was a standoff between Armstrong and Aldrin, as Armstrong made it clear he wasn’t going to rule himself out of being first.

  Fortuitously, a solution arose out of practical necessity. The lunar module’s designers at Grumman Aircraft had placed the hinge of the square exit door on its right side. When the door opened inward, the lunar-module pilot’s movement within the spacecraft’s cramped interior was confined; only the commander, on the left side of the cabin, had sufficient room to exit. Therefore, the commander would have to exit first and reenter last. The lunar-module pilot could not exit until he repositioned the door, moved to the left side of the cabin, and then exited through the hatch. Aldrin was justifiably disappointed but was professionally stoic whenever the issue was discussed with the press.

  Although he received slightly less attention than his crewmates at the Houston press conference, Michael Collins emerged as the reporters’ favorite. More socially at ease than his two crewmates, Collins possessed an observant eye, an understated wit, and a facility with language that distinguished him from many of the other astronauts. He memorably described the Apollo 11 crew as “amiable strangers,” in contrast to others crews like Apollo 8, who bonded far more easily.

  For Collins, the unique personal challenges were of an entirely different sort. By remaining in the command module in orbit above the Moon while his crewmates were on the surface, he would experience a form of solitude unknown to any human being in the entire history of the species. During forty-seven minutes of each lunar orbit, Collins would be cut off from all communication and any sign of life. On one side of the Moon would be the Earth, with its three billion inhabitants as well as Armstrong and Aldrin. On the other side would be Collins, entirely alone.

  Aldrin had established himself as the astronaut specialist on orbital rendezvous and mission planning. With his test pilot’s background, Armstrong was the astronaut office’s expert on training vehicles and simulators. And Michael Collins’s specialty was the Apollo space suit. The Apollo pressure suit was in fact a miniature self-contained spacecraft, with its own independent environmental system. It had to be bulky and insulated yet flexible enough so that the body inside could move freely and observe what was around it. It had to be strong enough to contain the interior air pressure in the vacuum of space, protect from micrometeorites, and withstand the harsh temperature differences on the lunar surface, which could range from 260 degrees Fahrenheit in the sunlight to -280 Fahrenheit in the shade. And it had to have a sustainable cooling system that would prevent the person wearing it from overheating.

  Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, the “amiable strangers” of Apollo 11, photographed on the deck of a modified landing craft used for spacecraft water recovery training in the Gulf of Mexico. The preparations required the crew to practice changing into sealed garments, an attempt to keep the astronauts physically isolated in the event they returned to Earth infected with an extraterrestrial life form.

  Apollo 11’s chosen landing site was a relatively level and smooth area in the Sea of Tranquility, near the lunar equator. It had been photographed from orbit by the Lunar Orbiter mapping probe and later by the Apollo 8 crew. Should the moonwalk proceed as planned, the Apollo 11 crew would deploy a small array of scientific experiments, including a seismometer, a device to measure the solar wind, and an optical reflector. It was hoped the latter would aid in determining the precise distance between the Earth and Moon within an accuracy of about three centimeters by using a laser beam sent from an earth observatory station.

  In early spring NASA convened a Committee on Symbolic Articles Related to the First Lunar Landing. In his inaugural address, President Richard Nixon had said, “Let us go to the new worlds together—not as new worlds to be conquered, but as a new adventure to be shared.” In light of those words, the NASA committee resolved that nothing during the lunar landing should suggest the United States was laying claim to the Moon’s sovereignty. Such a claim would be a clear violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, in any case, but the committee thought it necessary to avoid anything that could be misinterpreted as American imperialism.

  The State Department endorsed the idea of displaying the flag of the United Nations, a proposal that was immediately rejected by the Nixon White House. As a compromise, the committee recommended that the American flag be planted in the lunar soil and that the achievement’s larger human context would be conveyed by the unveiling of a commemorative plaque with a text that would be read aloud during the first moonwalk.

  The committee would not make any recommendations about one aspect of the mission that was increasingly invested with suspense: what Armstrong should say when taking his first step on another world. The suggestion Scheer had given Borman to simply say something appropriate had proven to be good advice. With Armstrong, he did the same. Scheer briefly considered offering guidance but had come to believe that making any suggestions would be a mistake. He looked at the journals of Lewis and Clark and other explorers and concluded “that the truest emotion at the historic moment is what the explorer feels within himself, not for the astronauts to be coached before they leave or to carry a prepared text in their hip pocket.”

  Armstrong was admired for his emotional stability, lack of ego, and ability to make split-second decisions when under pressure. However, among his peers, he was one of the least compelling public speakers. His shy demeanor conveyed authenticity before cameras and microphones, but his words were seldom memorable. He appeared painfully uncomfortable on such occasions, and an awkward penchant for favoring engineering metaphors and jargon didn’t help to forge an emotional connection with his listeners. He would now be placed in a situation that had already been imagined by scores of writers, filmmakers, and illustrators. Esquire magazine commissioned a cover story that asked, “What Words Should the First Man on the Moon Utter that Will Ring through the Ages?”

  During the Apollo 11 mission, individual call signs would be needed for both the command-and-service module and lunar module whenever they were separated. For the first test flight of the ungainly lunar module on the Apollo 9 mission, its crew had given it the call sign “Spider.” The more contoured command module answered to “Gumdrop.” On Apollo 10 the call signs had b
een “Snoopy” and “Charlie Brown.” However, for a mission as historically significant as Apollo 11, Julian Scheer thought the astronauts should adopt less frivolous call signs. Lyndon Johnson’s former press secretary Bill Moyers, now the publisher of Newsday, publicly suggested naming one of the spacecraft in John Kennedy’s honor. When his proposal reached the White House, President Nixon’s domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, summarily dismissed the idea as a partisan effort to perpetuate the name of Nixon’s 1960 rival. Independently, Armstrong and Aldrin chose “Eagle” as the lunar module’s call sign. Collins, however, was at a loss to come up with a name for the command-and-service module. During a phone conversation, it was Scheer who gently suggested to Collins, “Some of us up here have been kicking around ‘Columbia’…”

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  JAMES WEBB HAD intended a smooth continuity of his NASA stewardship on the eve of the first Apollo flight in late 1968. By endorsing Tom Paine as the agency’s acting administrator, Webb and Johnson gave Richard Nixon little choice once he arrived in the Oval Office other than to officially nominate Paine to the permanent administrator’s position. With the first lunar landing scheduled in a few months, this was not the time to begin the search for new NASA leadership.

  During the Kennedy and Johnson years, Webb had brought rare political and corporate management experience to the NASA administrator’s office. Now Paine would attempt to lead NASA through the Apollo program and beyond, but unlike his predecessor, he wasn’t as experienced in the ways of getting things done in Washington. Though an active Democrat, Paine was primarily a scientist, engineer, and manager, and not used to spending long hours in conference rooms on Capitol Hill.

  In contrast to Webb’s congenial, confident, and assertive public presence, Paine was less imposing. His reedy voice, horn-rimmed glasses, and general affect brought to mind a stereotypical high school science teacher rather than the World War II Navy submarine officer and deep-sea diver that Paine had been a quarter century earlier. Nevertheless, in his new leadership position at the space agency he strove to rekindle the idealistic and aspirational emotions of the Kennedy era, reminding Americans of the promise of a better future that the Apollo program invoked. Upon the Apollo 8 astronauts’ return from the daring mission he had personally approved, Paine echoed the rhetoric of early 1960s Camelot, telling the nation, “We should dream no small dreams. We should undertake those enterprises which lift the soul.”

  Incredibly, however, shortly before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11, Paine discovered that President Kennedy’s surviving brother, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, did not view the Apollo program in the same frame of mind.

  Paine had been at Cape Kennedy for the flight of Apollo 10 in May when he received word at his motel room that wire services were reporting that Senator Kennedy had called for a slowdown of the American space program. The comments had been made during a speech honoring rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard at Clark University. Sitting on the platform with Kennedy at the Goddard Library dedication were Goddard’s widow, Esther, and Buzz Aldrin, whose father had been a student of Goddard’s at Clark. Also in the audience was Wernher von Braun.

  As they looked on, Kennedy proposed diverting funding from NASA’s lunar program to address the many pressing problems on Earth: poverty, hunger, pollution, and housing. When he learned of the speech, Paine took Senator Kennedy’s words as both a broadside against the space agency and a provocative snub at his brother’s legacy. Delivering the words during an event honoring the father of American rocket science only deepened the psychological wound.

  From his motel, Paine called Julian Scheer, and together they crafted a response. In the NASA rebuttal, Paine described Kennedy’s words as a “disappointing and dispiriting vision of this nation’s vigor and destiny in space.” It also added an aside that an account of Kennedy’s speech would not be transmitted as part of the daily news briefing read to the Apollo 10 astronauts on their way to the Moon.

  In a nation already growing increasingly polarized about the war in Vietnam, Kennedy’s words may have been intended for the ears of younger voters, many of whom viewed NASA and the space program as part of the greater military-industrial complex. Paine made it his mission to heal the rift with what he termed the “Kennedy establishment.” He hoped he could dissuade the thirty-seven-year-old senator from any further comments about budgetary allocations for space, especially with the lunar landing approaching. To that end, Paine scheduled a lunch meeting with Kennedy in Washington.

  The day they met, a leading Democratic politician was quoted in papers predicting Senator Kennedy would be the likely presidential nominee of his party in 1972. Maine Senator Edmund Muskie believed Kennedy was unstoppable, unless the political climate changed dramatically in the next three years. Should the responsibility for shaping the nation’s space policy in the 1970s fall to another member of the Kennedy family, Paine hoped the new president would give more attention to sustaining the nation’s spirit of adventure in space than acceding to a campaign platform designed to win votes with promises of NASA budget cuts.

  Paine began the discussion by expressing his admiration for the vision and courage his brother had displayed when he chose to commit the nation to the lunar program. Both NASA and the nation were looking forward to fulfilling that decade-long challenge in a few weeks, he said. Therefore, Paine hoped the senator would refrain from any further critical comments during the Apollo 11 mission. He then asked if there might be some additional way to honor his brother during the moon mission. He suggested a symbolic gesture, such as leaving Kennedy’s World War II PT-109 tie clasp or another personal item on the lunar surface.

  In response, Senator Kennedy gave Paine no encouragement. In fact, the NASA administrator received the impression that the Kennedy family wanted little to do with Apollo 11. Kennedy revealed his belief that the Apollo program was more an aberration than a true reflection of his brother’s lasting presidential legacy. And now that the Soviet threat in space had largely faded away, it wasn’t a position that would motivate voters in three years. As to the upcoming launch, the senator said he didn’t know if he would be there to attend.

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  THE CREW OF Apollo 11 made their last pre-flight public appearance during a thirty-minute live televised interview broadcast two days before their scheduled launch. Dressed in short-sleeve sport shirts and sitting in large easy chairs, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins answered questions over a closed-circuit video link so they could maintain an imposed semi-quarantine prior to the flight. The interviewers were situated in a building fifteen miles away.

  The crew gave every indication that they had great confidence in carrying out their mission. Aldrin spoke of “when” the lunar module Eagle would touch down, not “if.” Since the triumphant mission of Apollo 8, the two test flights of the lunar module—the first in Earth’s orbit on Apollo 9, and the second descending to ten miles above the lunar surface on Apollo 10—had demonstrated that the equipment performed as expected. Armstrong appeared slightly nervous in the interview, choosing his words with caution as usual. However, he agreed with some space-agency estimates that there was an 80 percent chance that the mission would be completely successful and placed the crew’s chance of returning safely even greater than that.

  While confined to a pre-launch quarantine, the Apollo 11 crew answer questions from journalists during a live television news conference less than forty-eight hours before their departure. Deke Slayton, the chief of the astronaut office, sits to the side, at left.

  Among the veteran newsmen who had chronicled the space program for years, there were many who thought it unlikely the first attempt at a landing would fulfill Kennedy’s goal. They had covered the Apollo fire, Gemini 8’s emergency return, and any number of aborted launches. Apollo appeared to be on an extended lucky streak in the two years since the fire, but a harrowing moment during th
e Apollo 10 mission—when the lunar-module ascent stage gyrated briefly before being brought under manual control—reminded everyone how the unexpected was always a part of every flight.

  Aldrin mirrored Armstrong’s confidence and admitted the only thing about the lunar module he would have preferred was a slightly larger descent-engine fuel tank, calling it “a little bit of extra protection in the hip pocket.”

  Once again, Michael Collins was much more at ease in front of the cameras, reminding everyone that he was probably going to be the only American who wouldn’t be able to watch his crewmates on live television as they walked on the lunar surface, “so I’d like you to save the tapes for me, please.”

  During their final news conference, Armstrong was also asked his thoughts about a Soviet scientific lunar probe Luna 15, which Tass reported had been launched the previous day. The purpose of its mission had not been disclosed, but it was believed to be an attempt to upstage Apollo 11 by soft-landing a robot on the Moon, which would obtain a sample of the lunar soil and then return it to the Earth. Armstrong said he thought the chance that Luna 15 would affect the planning of their mission was infinitesimal and he wished the Russians success.