by Robert Stone
The television cameras followed the arrival of former president Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. A few feet behind them was the recognizable face of General William Westmoreland, forever linked to Johnson’s White House legacy and his controversial command of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Washington D.C.’s mayor, Walter Washington, scanned the bleachers filled with other politicians and celebrities and remarked to his wife that he saw very few black faces among the invited guests. In another part of the vast VIP area, however, stood Ralph Abernathy and the families from the Poor People’s Campaign.
The networks had little to report about the Soviet Luna 15 probe heading toward the Moon, but the continued Soviet silence about its purpose added even more suspense to the unfolding news events. A leading British astronomer monitoring the probe had just reported that its trajectory indicated it would likely attempt to retrieve a lunar sample. Bemoaning the lack of international cooperation between the superpowers, he boldly predicted that within ten years—and after lunar bases had been established—the United States and the Soviet Union would realize it would be in their best interest financially and diplomatically to collaborate in space.
Meanwhile, the immediate suspense was heightening as the steady voice of the Cape’s veteran public-affairs announcer Jack King chronicled each moment of the countdown. King was seated in a swivel chair before a monitor in the huge Launch Control Center. Like the hundreds of other technicians in the room, King wore dark slacks, a white shirt, and a headset. “The target for the Apollo 11 astronauts, the Moon, at liftoff will be a distance of 218,096 miles away,” he reported. Few knew his name or his face, but for the past few years his familiar voice had accompanied nearly every launch. He liked to work without a script, relying on a few note cards and his extensive knowledge of each step that preceded the launch.
Beneath the three-story glass window that dominated the eastern wall of the control center stood Wernher von Braun, whose Saturn V would be put to the test a sixth time. He would occasionally train his oversize binoculars on Pad 39A, but he never betrayed any sense of anxiety.
Also carefully observing the activity was documentary filmmaker Theo Kamecke, the only person not directly involved in the launch who’d been given a pass to the control center that day. Commissioned by Julian Scheer to create a film record of this historic moment, Kamecke sensed the unease in the control center as the countdown clock clicked closer to zero. “I suddenly understood what it meant to smell fear,” he recalled. “Every single one of those hundreds of people in the room was afraid that their gauge, or their valve, would go wrong—and the rocket would blow up.”
In newsrooms across the country, a singular occurrence took place. Suddenly, less than two minutes before the launch, all were transformed by a pervasive silence. The automated UPI and AP wire-service machines, which normally provided an unending background clatter of banging type and ringing bells, were not making a sound. News dispatches from around the globe came to a halt while the world watched the live transmission from Cape Kennedy and listened to Jack King continue the countdown.
“Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start. Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.” Though his voice remained calm, the emotion of the moment affected King’s delivery, and he could be heard slightly stumbling his words as he said, “All engine run-ning.” Quickly recovering his composure, he continued, “Liftoff! We have a liftoff, thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11.”
A wave of bodies rose to their feet on the VIP bleachers, as everyone strained to get a better view and position their snapshot and 8mm movie cameras. Lady Bird Johnson beamed under a plastic cowboy hat. To her left, her husband watched the slow progress of the Saturn and thought that, in its struggle to escape Earth’s gravity, it appeared as if it were being lifted by the consolidated physical strength of the half million Americans who had built it.
A few seconds after the billowing clouds at the base of the pad and the brilliant flame of the Saturn’s engines became visible, the observers watching three and a half miles away heard a rolling and overpowering roar. With it came a buffeting concussive shock wave of pressure that could be felt through the ground and in the air pushing against their chests and eardrums.
The violent controlled combustion needed to lift 6.5 million pounds away from the force of the Earth’s gravity was an unequaled engineering achievement—and remains unequaled half a century later. The Saturn V was the physical creation of the mind and hand of the human species, a work of imagination conceived by beings composed of living cells, beings who evolved from aquatic life on a small planet orbiting a minor star. The launch of Apollo 11 followed in the tradition of the early explorers who expanded out of Africa’s Great Rift Valley and extended their presence to nearly every part in the world. Like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the great cathedrals, and the statues on Easter Island, Apollo was an enterprise guided by the human genetic code, which over the course of hundreds of thousands of years had favored those who could dream, reason, persist, and create. A technological marvel, a manifestation of political will, or, perhaps, a work of cosmic conceptual art, Apollo 11 defined what it was to be human.
After the Saturn V had cleared the tower, King and everyone else in the Launch Control Center—whose job permitted it—swiveled in their chairs to watch the rocket climb into the Florida sky. Some rose to their feet and reached for their binoculars, following the Saturn as it slowly disappeared from view.
Former president Lyndon Johnson, flanked by Lady Bird Johnson and Vice President Spiro Agnew, observes the launch of Apollo 11 from the VIP observation stand. In the row behind them is James Webb, NASA’s administrator during the Kennedy and Johnson years. During his entire tenure running NASA, Webb attended only one piloted launch from Cape Kennedy. He explained, “I had a job to do in Washington.”
In his CBS News booth, Walter Cronkite tried to capture the immediacy of the moment for his viewers, describing the buffeting that had so surprised him at the Apollo 4 launch two years earlier. Now he mentioned the physical shaking in calmer tones, but he could still hardly contain his excitement. “What a moment! Man on the way to the Moon!”
Once Apollo 11 had disappeared from visual range and achieved orbit, journalists in the VIP viewing area scrambled to obtain the thoughts and reactions of some of the famous names before they departed.
“I really forgot the fact that we had so many hungry people,” Ralph Abernathy told a UPI reporter. “I was one of the proudest Americans as I stood on this spot,” he said, adding, “This is really holy ground.”
Nearby, another journalist cornered outspoken segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox as he stood surrounded by a contingent of state troopers. Maddox had risen to fame as an Atlanta restaurateur who refused to serve African American patrons. “Phooey on Ralph Abernathy!” Maddox shouted, certain his often-used catchphrase would appear in the next day’s papers. “Let’s quit feeding the have-nots. Apollo 11 would never have happened if it wasn’t for free enterprise.”
Few in the media overtly noted it, but prominent in his absence was Senator Edward Kennedy, who remained in Washington and released a statement calling for a revision of the nation’s priorities to reduce war, poverty, and hunger on Earth. The Kennedy family’s unofficial representative was the senator’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, the American ambassador to France. Shriver told the Miami Herald that he could vividly recall President Kennedy in his rocking chair on the day he addressed the joint session of Congress. “He told us, ‘I firmly expect this commitment to be kept. And if I die before it is, all of you here now just remember when it happens I will be sitting up there in heaven in a rocking chair just like this one, and I’ll have a better view of it than anybody.’ ” To NASA’s relief, Shriver’s comments garnered more attention from the wire services than the statement from his brother-in-law.
Less than an hour after the launch, Vice President Spi
ro Agnew arrived at the CBS News press facility for a live interview with Walter Cronkite. Since his selection as Nixon’s vice presidential nominee the previous year, the fifty-year-old Maryland governor had done little to endear himself to the American public, the press, or his running mate. A number of gaffes on the campaign trail—including reports of ethnic slurs and callous comments—had defined him in the eyes of many as a national embarrassment.
Tom Paine had thought he’d found NASA’s savior in the new vice president, who, following tradition, served as the head of the National Space Council. Seated next to Cronkite at his CBS desk, Agnew was asked about America’s future in space. “I don’t think we’d be out of line in saying we are going to put a man on Mars by the end of the century,” the vice president announced. “I think the people in the country, the average man, want something to look forward to as an exciting objective.”
Agnew repeated his Mars commitment to the cheers of NASA engineers in the Launch Operations Center a few minutes later. In reality, Agnew had no influence in the White House, and his Mars statement had not been approved in advance. Newspaper editorials roundly criticized Agnew’s infatuation with the Red Planet, and a scathing political cartoon published in The Washington Star depicted the vacantly grinning vice president as a space cadet proclaiming, “Mars or Bust.” The cartoon was close to how the White House viewed him as well. Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman sternly told Agnew to never again make any such comment about a Mars program.
Cronkite immediately followed his Agnew interview by welcoming Lyndon Johnson to his desk. The two politicians had arrived at the CBS facility simultaneously, causing a moment of panic among the producers, with Agnew receiving preferential treatment. Johnson was noticeably at ease as he settled into the seat. He soon attempted to place the legacy of Apollo in context, while alluding to Ralph Abernathy’s concerns—though not mentioning him or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by name. Why couldn’t the cooperative effort that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon be directed toward fighting poverty, hunger, disease, and eliminating war, Johnson asked. “We must apply some of the great talent that we’ve applied to space to these problems.” Cronkite wondered whether the principles of management pioneered by James Webb could be used to solve the nation’s many other problems. In response, Johnson praised the man more than the theory. He asserted that Kennedy had hired the best possible person to oversee the job, defined the objective, and then given Webb the necessary resources and independence to get the job done.
Outside the small CBS facility, Arthur C. Clarke had watched the liftoff from the slightly elevated ground at the press center. Like Wernher von Braun, Clarke had devoted much of his adult life to making this day a reality. Remarkably, the geosynchronous-satellite network that Clarke had envisioned in 1945 had also just come to fruition. Intelsat III F-3, one of a new generation of satellites, was moved into position over the Indian Ocean a few days before Apollo 11’s launch, thus completing the final link in the world’s first geostationary-satellite network. Now also internationally recognized as the co-author of the most successful movie released the previous year, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke had been signed by CBS to provide viewers with a vision of humanity’s destiny in space.
The promise of the moment energized Clarke and Cronkite to look forward to what was to come. Clarke assured CBS’s viewers that a future much like the one depicted in 2001 was on the horizon. Within the next five to ten years, crewed space stations would orbit the Earth, and the first permanent bases on the Moon would be established. Clarke predicted human flights to Mars and around Venus within twenty years. Much would depend on the development of nuclear rockets and reusable space vehicles to make this a reality. A few years from now, Clarke believed, Apollo 11’s manner of going to the Moon would seem incredibly wasteful, comparing it to sending a huge ocean liner on a single voyage to transport three passengers and then sending the ship to the scrap yard.
CBS’s Apollo 11 coverage was in fact heavily influenced by the optimistic vision of the spacefaring future depicted in Clarke and Kubrick’s cinematic epic. After attending a screening of 2001 the previous year, Joel Banow, the CBS News television director assigned to produce its space coverage, began planning how to incorporate the excitement he felt in the movie theater into the upcoming forty-five hours of Apollo 11 special programming. He hired Douglas Trumbull, one of Kubrick’s special-effects wizards, to create a special “guest expert” for the broadcast, a HAL supercomputer much like the one in the film, albeit without a psychopathic programming flaw. “HAL10,000” engaged with Cronkite silently via a printed display screen. It was a Hollywood special-effects illusion unlike anything seen on live television before, especially as part of a news broadcast.
Whenever listening to Clarke’s unwavering rational optimism during their many on-air discussions, Cronkite appeared to be newly energized. Though much of the world was consumed in chaos, it was still possible for two middle-aged men to dream of new adventures, as if they were adolescents.
“Do you think that you and I will make a spaceflight?” Cronkite asked.
“I have every intention of going to the Moon before I die” was Clarke’s reply.
“I hope you’re right.” Cronkite then added with infectious enthusiasm, “I’m dying to go.”
* * *
—
THE STORY OF the three “amiable strangers” journeying to the Moon occasionally challenged journalists to add some element of suspense, color, or humor to their reporting. Luna 15 provided a little intrigue but no human drama. The astronauts’ biographies were respectfully detailed, but by far the most engaging way to tell the story to watchers around the world was via the live color-television transmissions from the spacecraft. Julian Scheer had fought to include the cameras, and during the event they proved to be essential. The result was a primitive progenitor of what later became reality television: It presented the astronauts at work in their fascinating zero-gravity environment, somewhat self-conscious of being watched but very much unrehearsed and unscripted. It also helped to diminish any lingering cynicism about government crafting of the astronauts’ public images.
In the six months since Apollo 8, the relevance of the space race between the superpowers had receded, replaced by the reality that the United States would soon meet its objective. Some within NASA, including Frank Borman and Bill Anders, believed that once a successful human moon landing had been accomplished, there was little practical reason to return. The United States would have proven its preeminence in space. Scientific lunar exploration and establishing moon colonies could wait. Space visionaries like von Braun, with ambitious goals for the near future, were never a faction with great persuasive power in Washington, except when there appeared to be a national threat. On the airwaves, however, the television networks were selling a thrilling adventure with great promise for tomorrow, an intoxicating extended broadcast for a world that had seen much bad news recently.
Four days after liftoff, on the Sunday when humanity’s first attempt to land on the Moon was scheduled, the three commercial American television networks commenced live coverage of what promised to be a broadcast lasting more than twenty-four hours. CBS began its marathon in the late morning, with a prologue that featured correspondent Charles Kuralt reading the opening lines of Genesis. At precisely the same moment, in the East Room of the White House, Frank Borman was reading the same lines, for a worship service at which President Nixon and more than 340 diplomats, congressmen, and government leaders were present.
In Houston’s Mission Control room, flight director Gene Kranz and his White Team had taken over from the Black Team, headed by Glynn Lunney. At thirty-five, former jet-fighter pilot Kranz was one of the older men in the room. On this day there would be no live-television cameras broadcasting images from the room; however, a small team of NASA cinematographers would be recording the event for history.
Nor would there be live television from the Moon during the landing phase. To tell the story visually, the television networks had to rely on their own full-size studio simulations, prepared animated films, and scale-model spacecraft, supplemented by the live audio of the astronauts’ voices. At CBS’s New York Broadcast Center on West 57th Street, Walter Cronkite anchored the coverage from an elevated desk positioned in front of an artist’s rendition of the Milky Way. The network’s largest sound stage, which usually accommodated two of the network’s afternoon soap operas, had been converted into “Space Headquarters” for the two-day broadcast. Cronkite had been so excited prior to the broadcast that he had slept little the previous night. In contrast, each of the Apollo 11 crew members had managed between five and six hours of sleep before their early-hour wake-up call.
By late morning of Apollo 11’s fourth day, the crew had been in lunar orbit for nearly twenty-four hours. Armstrong and Aldrin had checked out all systems on the lunar module Eagle and were preparing to separate it from the Columbia command-and-service module. It was July 20.
Not long after Armstrong and Aldrin in the Eagle and Collins in Columbia reported that they had successfully undocked the two spacecraft disappeared into radio silence as their orbits took them around the Moon’s far side. In Houston, those in Mission Control knew that one of three possible scenarios could play out within the next ninety minutes. The lunar module would either crash, abort the landing attempt, or successfully touch down on the lunar surface. Outwardly calm and confident, Gene Kranz addressed the White Team over a private audio channel. “The hopes and the dreams of the entire world are with us. This is our time and our place, and we will remember this day and what we will do here always.” But no matter what happened, he assured them, he would stand by their decisions.