Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  Eagle reemerged from the far side of the Moon at a height of only eighteen nautical miles above the surface, just minutes before beginning its powered descent. Collins in Columbia remained in a higher orbit, sixty miles above the surface. Despite months of advance planning, the landing sequence contained hundreds of unknowns that could compromise the mission. Amid the curt audio communications peppered with technical acronyms, Armstrong and Aldrin offered few outward signs that revealed what they were feeling. Their voices remained alert and focused. Some broadcasters occasionally felt the need to step back and absorb the moment with awe. “Just four and half minutes left in this era…” Cronkite interjected as the landing approached.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the data-filled transmissions, both Armstrong and Aldrin called attention to a computer-program alarm unknown to them. There was a sudden atypical urgency in Armstrong’s voice as he mentioned it and then followed with a request to Mission Control for an explanation. “Give us a reading on the 1202 Program Alarm.” Armstrong received no clarification about the alarm from capcom Charlie Duke other than the words “We’re go on that alarm.” A few minutes later, when a related alarm sounded, Duke reassured Armstrong, “We’re go. Same type. We’re go. Eagle, looking great.”

  It was a moment of added suspense that no one had expected. Had the alarm occurred during a practice simulation on the ground, a landing abort would likely have resulted. But the first powered descent to the lunar surface 239,000 miles from home was a rather different situation. Armstrong was determined to land successfully, and every bit of his concentration was focused on piloting the lunar module. He intrinsically trusted his reflexes during an emergency and knew this situation wasn’t as serious as either Gemini 8’s violent tumble or the lunar-training vehicle when it began swerving out of control. An esoteric computer program alarm was not about to keep him from the ultimate goal of his career.

  The Apollo command-and-service module photographed in lunar orbit. While orbiting the far side of the Moon and unable to communicate with Earth or with Eagle, Michael Collins could speak to no one with the exception of his tape recorder. A NASA spokesperson observed, “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude.” This unusual view of the spacecraft was taken during the flight of Apollo 16.

  His instincts proved right. The alarm had been caused by an unintended information-overflow problem in the lunar module’s guidance system. Armstrong’s attention soon turned to a bigger concern: The available fuel for the descent engine was running low as Eagle approached the Moon’s surface. He had a good idea of his height as he came in for the landing, but he needed to find a safe location. There were more large craters than he’d expected, and he didn’t want to maneuver the lunar module backward. With nothing like a rearview mirror, it was impossible to tell if he might place the back landing leg on an unstable crater rim. His view of the surface was also becoming obscured as a mist of lunar-dust particles was agitated by the descent engine’s exhaust plume.

  The lunar module Eagle shortly after separating from Columbia. The LM was designed to function exclusively in space and was incapable of returning to Earth. Apollo 11 was only the third time the LM had been flown by astronauts during a space mission.

  Armstrong hovered above the Moon’s surface while gently maneuvering the lunar module to find the best landing spot. More than a half minute passed beyond the projected touchdown time. The descent engine’s fuel was running dangerously low, with only a few seconds of propellant remaining. In Houston there was still no word whether they had landed.

  “Contact light,” Aldrin announced. A moment later Armstrong responded, “Shutdown.”

  Armstrong later said he neither saw the contact light illuminate nor heard Aldrin announce it. The landing was so smooth, Armstrong couldn’t even tell the precise moment when they were on the surface. This was the climax of the mission, in Armstrong’s mind. The first step and moonwalk to come a few hours later were secondary.

  Then from the Moon came the official word as Armstrong announced, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

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  IT BEING A summer Sunday afternoon in the United States, not every American was watching television. Sunbathers at swimming pools and beaches listened to the voices from Houston and the Moon on portable transistor radios. Eight major-league baseball games were in progress when the Eagle landed at 4:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time. There was a brief interruption in the play to announce the news, followed by sustained cheering. In many ball parks, a performance of either “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful” was played before the game was resumed.

  The original flight plan called for Armstrong and Aldrin to rest before emerging from the lunar module at roughly 2:20 A.M. Eastern time on the early morning of Monday, July 21. However, before the flight there had been talk that the crew might be given an option to proceed onto the lunar surface five hours earlier. And about ninety minutes after landing, Armstrong indeed sent word that he would prefer to exit the lunar module at roughly 9:00 P.M. EDT.

  Some Americans made a point of saying that they wouldn’t bother to watch any coverage of Apollo 11. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s leading intellectuals, described the Apollo program as “a symbolic act of war [by a] megatechnic power system, in the lethal grip of the ‘myth of the machine.’ ” Only a few minutes after the Eagle had touched down, Walter Cronkite wondered aloud how young Americans dismissive of the space program were reacting to the news. “How can anybody turn off from a world like this?”

  Secretly, most of those who had expressed their disdain among their friends were also affected by the magnitude of the accomplishment. If one was human and curious, it was impossible not to be impressed and touched with a sense of awe.

  Armstrong’s innate piloting skill during the final minutes of the landing had provided a convincing argument for a human presence on crucial space missions. Eric Sevareid, a veteran CBS News journalist and commentator, told Cronkite, “As an old-fashioned humanist, it seemed to me a little reassuring that in those last seconds the human hand and eye had to take over from the computers…if it had all been computerized to the last second, we might have wrecked this Santa Maria on a rock.”

  Sevareid’s comment proved to be uncannily apt. Russia’s Luna 15, which the world press had been following for days, was secretly being readied for its automated lunar descent as Sevareid spoke. However, during Luna 15’s final approach, it was unable to be slowed sufficiently to make a soft landing, and its telemetry transmissions halted abruptly at the moment it made impact with the side of a mountain. From the Soviet Union came only a brief announcement that Luna 15’s mission had ended.

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  ALTHOUGH THE ASTRONAUTS deemed the moonwalk of secondary importance, the intense public curiosity surrounding Armstrong’s first words and the promise of witnessing the historic moment as it happened on live television transformed the first steps on the lunar surface into a media event of greater magnitude than the landing itself.

  How much advance thought Armstrong gave his first words remains open to conjecture half a century later. When questioned about it during the crew’s press conference in Houston in early July, he grinned and merely said he hadn’t given it any consideration. However, for a pilot routinely used to checking out an aircraft before taking it into the air, such lack of preparation appeared out of character.

  Unlike Borman, Armstrong had decided not to entrust the assignment to a professional wordsmith. In fact, one story indicates that, contrary to what he attested, he did do some advance preparation. Armstrong’s brother, Dean, recalls that during a lull in a board game they were playing a few weeks before the launch, Neil handed his brother a piece of paper on which he had written a few words. He didn’t explain the context, but none was necessary. Dean Armstrong sensed his brother wanted some feedback. He
responded with one word: “Fabulous.” In magazines and newspapers, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Sexton, Sun-Ra, Joseph Heller, Timothy Leary, Leonard Nimoy, William Safire, and scores of other noted writers and celebrities offered their suggestions, ranging from the heavy-handed and the banal to the flippant and corny.

  Truly the whole world would be watching and listening.

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  IN NEW YORK’S Central Park, a crowd had gathered in the Sheep Meadow on Sunday night to watch the moonwalk broadcast on a large screen. Unfortunately, it was beginning to rain gently, and preparations for the EVA and depressurizing the lunar module’s cabin took far longer than expected. Movement inside the small cabin while wearing the stiffened pressure suits and large backpack life-support units was proving cumbersome. Rather than 9:00 P.M., it was a little after 10:30 P.M. when the door of the lunar-module was pulled inward to open.

  A few blocks away from Central Park, Arthur C. Clarke joined others in a viewing area of CBS’s Studio 41, anxiously waiting to see if the small television camera stored in an equipment bay on the LM would begin transmitting pictures. When Clarke looked around the room, he was amused to see not every eye on the television—one of the studio grips was deeply studying a racing form, oblivious to what was about to happen. Meanwhile, Wernher von Braun and other NASA managers were gathered in an observation room not far from Mission Control. Former administrator James Webb was watching the event on the television in his Washington home.

  Though it was approaching 11:00 P.M. on the East Coast, few were worried about getting sufficient sleep before the workday. President Nixon had proposed that Monday, July 21, be a National Day of Participation, allowing Americans a day off, and asked employers to comply. The early editions of Monday’s The New York Times and New York Daily News were already on sale. The Times had photo-enlarged its biggest available typeface to create the even-larger ninety-six-point headline MEN LAND ON MOON.

  In southeast Australia, the Parkes Observatory dish antenna began to receive spectral, shadowy images from a small Westinghouse television camera, which Armstrong had deployed by pulling a release mechanism as he inched feetfirst out of the lunar module. The television camera had been added to the lander very late in its development, and only after Julian Scheer had learned that the only broadcast camera scheduled to fly to the Moon was the one designed exclusively for the command module. Initially, Houston told Scheer his request to put a television camera on board the lunar module was impossible because the LM’s entire electrical and communications system had already been approved and certified. Besides, he was told, the Hasselblad still photography and 16mm movie film brought back by the astronauts would be sufficient. Undaunted, Scheer marched into James Webb’s office and said, “I need you to issue an order to Houston that they will put a television camera on the lunar module.” Webb agreed and made the call, and within a few months the engineers had redesigned the systems to accommodate the Westinghouse camera.

  The black-and-white picture broadcast on American television sets was somewhat degraded from what was received in Australia. To transmit the signal, a television camera in Australia was positioned to shoot a monitor at the observatory, which was then relayed via the Intelsat satellite above the Pacific to a California receiving station and then over cables to Houston, where it was relayed to the television networks and to the rest of the world. The process also involved converting the image through various international television broadcasting standards, which further reduced the clarity. Nevertheless, the small eight-pound camera worked as planned, providing the first images ever seen from another world.

  The picture was ghostly, but Armstrong could be seen descending the ladder of the lunar module. From a position at the bottom of the lander’s footpad, Armstrong provided an initial report. “The surface appears to be very, very fine grained…It’s almost like a powder.” And then, after an extended pause, Armstrong delivered the words for which he will be forever known: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Unfortunately, that moment was surrounded with a little confusion when it was broadcast on live television. On CBS, Walter Cronkite wasn’t certain what Armstrong had said. “ ‘One small step for man,’ but I didn’t get the second phrase,” he confessed. Over at NBC, things weren’t much better. Frank McGee was anchoring the network’s moonwalk coverage and could only offer, “I think he said, ‘One small step for man, but one giant leap for man’…I’m not certain I got that all right.” Within a few minutes, both Cronkite and McGee were provided with the full quotation.

  More than a half billion people around the world watched the live television broadcast as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. At the time the ghostly black-and-white television pictures from the Westinghouse camera seemed remarkable. Within three years these TV images were much better: they were transmitted in color, and taken with an improved camera that could be operated by a technician sitting at a desk in Houston.

  As with Borman on Apollo 8, Julian Scheer had no advance knowledge what Armstrong would say. He was somewhat surprised at Armstrong’s words but admitted he shouldn’t have been. He thought Armstrong’s reputation for being inarticulate was undeserved and attributed it to his penchant for saying only what was on his mind. When Scheer later confessed his surprise to Armstrong, the astronaut just shrugged and said, “You’re not the only person who can speak the English language.”

  Armstrong’s training for that first step included one bizarre precaution for a wildly unlikely scenario. Some lunar scientists theorized that the Moon’s surface might be combustible and that when Armstrong’s boot came into contact with the lunar soil, it could set off a reaction. Everyone thought the chances of this occurring highly remote, but to be safe Armstrong was advised to touch the heel of his boot gently upon the lunar surface when extending his initial step. After taking a few more steps and bending his knees in the suit, Armstrong reported that he was experiencing no trouble walking or moving around. Adjusting to maneuvering his body in the alien environment took only a few minutes.

  His initial tasks before Aldrin joined him were to obtain a soil sample and take some photographs. After the sample was placed in a pouch attached to his leg, Armstrong took a panorama of the barren, flat landscape. He reported that he found it starkly beautiful, not unlike the high desert of California. “It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.” Aldrin’s reaction when he joined Armstrong on the lunar surface was “Magnificent desolation.”

  The harsh sunlight was coming from an angle fourteen degrees above the horizon, this being a lunar morning, which would last longer than an entire earth day. The relatively low angle of the sun also meant the lunar surface hadn’t yet reached the maximum temperature of 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 Celsius).

  Armstrong and Aldrin’s first ceremonial task was to remove a protective metal cover from the memorial plaque mounted on the front leg of the LM. The Committee on Symbolic Articles intended the plaque’s message to convey to the world that the lunar landing was a human achievement rather than a national political act.

  Julian Scheer had drafted the initial text, but White House speechwriter William Safire had insisted on adding “A.D.” (anno Domini) after “July 1969” so as to subtly acknowledge God. Scheer consented and the plaque was manufactured. But the matter didn’t end there. A few days later, at another White House meeting, an assistant to President Nixon requested that “under God” be inserted after “We came in peace.”

  Astonished, Scheer asked him, “What God? This is a universal thing. What about the people on Earth who do not worship our God—Buddhists, Muslims, and…”

  “Damn it, Julian, the president is big on God!” he was told. “I’m telling you, the president will want God.”

  A White House memo with revised wording including “under God” and initialed by Richard Nixon was given to Scheer. But a
fter leaving the White House, Scheer did nothing. If a question arose, he would explain that the earlier version of the plaque had already been installed on the lunar module. When Scheer told Paine what he had decided to do, his boss simply said, “I didn’t hear that….”

  Undoubtedly, had “under God” been added, atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair would have issued a press release the next day. The lawsuit she’d filed against NASA was still in the courts when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. So sensitive had the matter become after the Genesis reading that the Apollo 11 crew attempted to avoid anything that might be interpreted as an overt religious observance. When, shortly after landing on the lunar surface, Aldrin had requested that “every person listening in…pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way,” few were aware he was in the process of taking communion with a small bit of bread, a plastic vial of wine, and a silver chalice. However, by the next day the reverend at Aldrin’s Presbyterian church had revealed to the press that he’d helped to arrange the Moon’s first communion.

  A second silent religious observance during the moonwalk may have occurred as well. Filmmaker Theo Kamecke spoke with Neil Armstrong’s grandmother shortly after the moon landing. “Neil made me a promise,” she told him. “He promised the first thing he would do when he stepped on the Moon was to say a prayer.” Kamecke concluded that this explained Armstrong’s unusually long pause when he stepped off the lunar module; he was saying a silent prayer “just between him and the universe.” The filmmaker decided not to recount that conversation until more than four decades later, worrying that during the 1960s it might be distorted and cynically retold.

  It was estimated that when Armstrong and Aldrin unveiled the plaque, one-fifth of the world’s population—600 million people—was watching, seeing themselves represented as fellow passengers on spaceship Earth, undefined by borders, languages, or religion. In comparison with the Apollo photographs of the whole Earth seen from space, the Apollo plaque made only a brief impression. But its message was the same: The people of the planet were one species, unified by universal hopes and dreams and motivated by a desire to explore and learn.