by Robert Stone
As Armstrong and Aldrin stood on the barren lunar terrain, they knew that every other living person was now hundreds of thousands of miles away, except for Michael Collins, who regularly passed overheard in Columbia. Yet they could never escape a conscious awareness that they were being observed the entire time. After mounting the small Westinghouse camera on a tripod to offer a long shot of their working area in front of the lunar module, Aldrin decided to give viewers a spontaneous demonstration. He realized everyone was curious to know what walking in one-sixth gravity was like and how easily he could maneuver on the lunar surface while wearing his bulky pressure suit. He positioned himself in the camera’s field of view to demonstrate a few moves, all the while providing a verbal commentary. First he walked at a regular pace, then he tried a kangaroo hop; he followed that with a maneuver in which he moved rapidly and then attempted to change direction by countering his momentum, putting his foot out to the side and making a cutting motion, which he likened to a football player dodging down a field. As he performed all these motions he found he had to compensate for the way in which his large life-support backpack affected his center of gravity. Never forgetting the small television camera watching him, Aldrin made an effort to remain within the lens’s field of view. The demonstration was entirely spontaneous on his part, and the earthbound viewers loved it. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the moonwalk.
Before Armstrong and Aldrin deployed a small array of scientific instruments, there were two other ceremonial duties to perform. The first was the erection of the American flag, which had been outfitted with a simple metallic support to fully display it in the windless lunar environment. The second was a live telephone call from President Richard Nixon in the White House. As Armstrong and Aldrin stood next to the American flag, the president engaged in what he described as “the most historic telephone call ever to be made from the White House” with a message of goodwill penned by Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire.
Despite the presence of the American flag, there was once again a conscious effort to balance nationalism with a more global message. “As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility,” Nixon said, “it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.” The White House had originally wanted the astronauts to remain standing at attention for another few minutes while “The Star-Spangled Banner” was performed. When he learned of this plan, Frank Borman forcefully advised the president against it, arguing that it would only waste precious time that could be better spent on scientific and exploratory activities.
Armstrong and Aldrin spent most of the next hour collecting lunar samples and deploying the scientific instruments. Near the end of their moonwalk, the astronauts performed another ceremony, which received little notice. When Frank Borman had been in the Soviet Union, he received two Soviet medals, one commemorating Yuri Gagarin and the other Vladimir Komarov. Just days before the liftoff, Borman had given the medals to Armstrong and Aldrin, who placed them on the lunar surface along with an Apollo 1 patch memorializing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
Much of the time, they were outside the television camera’s field of view, prompting the majority of Americans to retire to bed long before the astronauts managed to transport the 47.7 pounds of lunar rock and soil samples into the module’s ascent stage and return inside. In total, Armstrong spent more than two hours on the lunar surface, Aldrin about an hour and three-quarters.
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SCIENCE-FICTION AUTHOR RAY Bradbury was walking alone through the streets of London as the sun began to rise. He had been up the entire night. The previous evening, he’d departed the hotel where he was vacationing with his wife and children to be interviewed on live television by British broadcaster David Frost, as part of a marathon ten-hour “Moon Party” on the nation’s commercial network ITV. (The BBC’s news and science reporters were broadcasting coverage closer to what American television viewers were seeing.) Bradbury stood by and watched as Frost introduced a series of musical performances by Engelbert Humperdinck, Lulu, and Cliff Richard. Concluding that the program was too frivolous, Bradbury located the producer and told him he was walking out. “That idiot in there has ruined the greatest night in the history of the world! Get me a cab and get me out of here.”
Bradbury found a taxi and took it across London to another television studio, where he recorded a brief conversation with CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, which was transmitted via satellite and broadcast with Cronkite’s introduction a few hours later. In less than six minutes, Bradbury placed the moon landing in the context of humanity’s eternal questions about the existence of God, the human need for religion, our existential search for meaning, the elimination of war, and prolonging the life of the species. “I believe firmly, excitingly, that we are God himself coming awake in the universe,” he said. Space travel was humanity’s existential effort to discover its place in the universe and would eventually result in traveling out to the stars after our sun died, millions of years from then. Furthermore, he argued, space travel had now given a new purpose for living and would eventually result in the elimination of war.
“The rocket and the exploration of space [are a]…wonderful moral substitute for war,” he said. Men and boys actually loved war, even though they pretended not to, he confided. Now humanity should band together to ensure the species’ existence. “All of the universe doesn’t care whether we exist or not, but we care if we exist….This is the proper war to fight.”
Joyful and in tears, Bradbury left the studio and spent the rest of the night walking through the city, arriving at his hotel at breakfast time. Passing a news dealer, he saw the first papers with front pages displaying pictures of the moonwalk. One paper trumpeted the headline ARMSTRONG WALKS ON THE MOON, while inside ran a much smaller headline: BRADBURY WALKS OUT ON FROST.
Reactions to the achievement of Apollo 11 were coming in from all over the globe. CBS invited into the studio novelist Kurt Vonnegut, journalist Gloria Steinem, and science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The BBC interviewed author Vladimir Nabokov, who had rented a television for the occasion and described his thrill at watching Armstrong and Aldrin dance with grace “to the tune of lunar gravity.” He expressed surprise that English magazine journalists appeared to have “ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one’s spine the shiver and wonder of it.”
Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand’s hatred for big government and socialism didn’t quell her enthusiasm for Apollo 11 as a great heroic and technological triumph, even though The New York Times pointedly observed that the American “moon program was as socialistic in its central direction and financing as its rival Soviet effort.” Although Rand had attended the launch and been among the notables in the VIP viewing area, she said she would have preferred Apollo as a private free-enterprise initiative. “If the government deserves any credit for the space program,” she grudgingly conceded, “it is only to the extent that it did not act as a government—i.e., did not use coercion in regard to its participants.”
There were also a few apathetic voices in the mix. Reached in France, Pablo Picasso told The New York Times, “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”
Due to the Apollo coverage, conflicts around the globe briefly disappeared from the front pages of the world’s newspapers. During the moon-landing weekend, Egyptian and Israeli planes engaged in combat over the Suez Canal, with aircraft lost on both sides. On the East Coast of the United States, journalists were dispatched to the island of Martha’s Vineyard to cover an unusual developing political story.
When news of the situation reached the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Tom Paine couldn’t avoid thinking of his tense luncheon with Kennedy three weeks earlier. It seemed incredibly ironic that NASA was now “flying cover” for the senator by keeping his personal scandal off the front pages.
In the Soviet Union, the newspaper front pages were in stark contrast to those of the rest of the world. Pravda accorded Apollo 11 a two-paragraph story on the bottom of page five, and by the time that Izvestiya was issued in the evening, the moon landing was given a little more space, along with an illustration. As it had since its break from Stalinist Russia in 1948, Marshal Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia followed its own path. The state public television network allowed full live coverage of an Apollo mission for the first time. As CBS’s Bill McLaughlin reported from Belgrade, “Yugoslavia in fact has adopted the three American astronauts as its own heroes….This morning, anyone who could get near a television set did not do much work.”
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SOME OF THE nervous suspense surrounding Apollo 11’s mission had dissipated: Eagle had successfully touched down on the initial attempt, despite the computer alarms and last-minute maneuvers; the world had heard Armstrong’s first words and seen a live image of a human walking on the surface of the Moon; and Luna 15’s mission had come to an abrupt end. Now all attention was focused on the lunar module’s powered ascent from the surface, a procedure that had never been attempted, even by an automated spacecraft. There existed no contingency backup should the lunar module’s ascent engine fail to operate properly. If it didn’t work, Michael Collins would be forced to return alone. At the New York Daily News, a typesetter had already prepared a special disaster edition of the paper if the astronauts were stranded on the Moon. It was a stark front page with a one-word headline: MAROONED! It would to go to press and be on the streets in minutes if news from Tranquility Base turned tragic.
The White House was ready for disaster as well. When discussing the president’s Apollo 11 preparations with speechwriter William Safire a few weeks before launch, Frank Borman asked about what the White House had planned should the astronauts fail to return. Safire was startled, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t considered that possibility, and drafted a memo titled “In the Event of Moon Disaster,” with a suggested presidential statement. Safire gave the memo to the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, who showed it to no one. He folded it and placed it in his suit pocket, at the ready until Apollo 11 was safely home.
Fortunately, Eagle’s launch countdown proceeded as flawlessly as had the Saturn launch the previous week at the Cape. The ascent engine worked perfectly, and the subsequent rendezvous and docking with the command module in lunar orbit was almost routine. Once again there was no live television, of either the lunar liftoff or the rendezvous in lunar orbit. The live voices of the astronauts provided the drama, with the television networks supplementing the visual storytelling with animation or simulations.
All that remained was leaving lunar orbit and reentry. Eight months earlier, the idea of executing both of these procedures had been fraught with suspense. Now, compared to what had just been accomplished, they seemed business as usual.
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FRANK BORMAN AND Tom Paine joined Richard Nixon on the bridge of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to view the return and recovery of Columbia. All three had flown on Air Force One to Johnson Island, southwest of Hawaii, where they then took helicopters to the Hornet. This was the first leg of an extended round-the-world presidential trip to countries in the Far East and Eastern Europe, including Romania, which would be newsworthy as the first visit by an American president to a communist country since the start of the Cold War. Nixon was hoping the world’s excitement about the moon landing might work to the advantage of the United States and strengthen international relations—a likely reason the White House had code-named the trip “Operation Moonglow.”
This would be Nixon’s first encounter with Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, but as with the thwarted presidential dinner on the eve of liftoff, medical precautions once again intruded. Only minutes after Columbia’s successful splashdown, the trio was required to don biological isolation garments, and the men were then helicoptered aboard the Hornet, where they quickly entered a specially prepared sealed living area constructed from a converted Airstream trailer. This would serve as a temporary quarantine facility until their return to Houston where they would spend the remainder of a planned twenty-one day period of isolation. All these precautions stemmed from the remote possibility that the astronauts could return with an unknown contagion. Few scientists believed it likely, but no one who had ever read the conclusion of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians are killed by exposure to a common earthbound virus, wanted to be wrong.
So when Nixon finally came face-to-face with the Apollo 11 crew on live television, they looked at one another through a small plate-glass window and relied on microphones and speakers. Standing outside the trailer on the Hornet’s hangar deck, Nixon awkwardly engaged in small talk about baseball’s All-Star Game before pronouncing the recent events “the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.” (President Nixon’s friend the Reverend Billy Graham later cautioned the president that the claim may have been excessive.) Nixon’s lunar telephone call had already come under criticism as an attempt to take credit for something undertaken by Kennedy and Johnson. An editorial writer likened what he saw as Nixon’s appropriation of the historical occasion to a Khrushchev-like publicity stunt unsuited to an American president.
President Richard Nixon watches the recovery of Columbia from the bridge of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. With him are astronaut Frank Borman (right) and Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command. At that moment, Admiral McCain’s son was confined in a North Vietnamese prison. Years later, after becoming Arizona’s senior senator, John McCain III would reveal how the news that America had put a man on the Moon helped raise his morale during his lengthy captivity.
At this moment in his presidency, however, Nixon was just as intoxicated by the moon landing as was much of the world. The White House correspondents noticed that, like Kennedy before him, Nixon appeared physically transformed whenever he was in the presence of the astronauts, often walking with a spring in his step, something they called the president’s “moonwalk.” As he’d gotten to know Frank Borman, Nixon began to regard the astronauts as the personification of everything great in the American spirit. “They are the sons he didn’t have, the all-star teammates he never knew,” a Life magazine writer observed. One White House staffer theorized that Nixon likely identified with their personal biographies. Much like Nixon, nearly all the astronauts had risen from modest beginnings and achieved greatness through a combination of discipline, courage, and a belief in God. He regarded them as products of the system, not rebels against it like the many student protesters on college campuses.
During their initial encounter on the Hornet, Nixon invited the crew to be honored with the largest presidential state dinner ever planned. The “Dinner of the Century,” as the Los Angeles event a month later was nicknamed, was conceived as both a national patriotic observance and a television spectacular. The White House framed it as aff
irmation of traditional—meaning conservative—values, which they believed were under siege during a time of generational division, campus unrest, and revolutionary protest. The highly partisan guest list of 1,400 invitees reflected the polarized politics of the moment. Outside the Century Plaza Hotel on August 13, 1969, three thousand orderly anti-war protesters congregated as the diners arrived in limos. Inside, NASA officials uncomfortably dined with faded Hollywood celebrities and California Republican donors. Very few Democrats were invited, not even Alan Cranston, California’s Democratic senator; Johnson’s former vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was added at the last minute on the recommendation of Frank Borman.
Massive ticker-tape parades in New York and Chicago had greeted the astronauts on the same day that they flew to the West Coast for the president’s Dinner of the Century. A long calendar of tributes, parades, formal dinners, and award ceremonies continued as the three men undertook an exhausting thirty-seven-day round-the-world “Giant Leap Goodwill Tour.” The White House had granted the use of one of the president’s 707s for an itinerary that took them to twenty-three countries and gave nearly one hundred million people an opportunity to see the first men to walk on the Moon.
The itinerary for the Giant Leap Tour included a visit to Zaire, but this was the only stop on the African continent. There had been no consideration that the crew would visit South Africa, a country that partnered with NASA to maintain a telemetry receiving station. No South African citizens had had an opportunity to watch the live televised moonwalk, due to the government’s long opposition to allowing any television broadcasting; it was deemed a corrupting influence that would lead to crime, race-mixing, and communism. A small group of wealthy South Africans went so far as to charter a “Moon Tour” flight to London in order to see the broadcast live on television at the hotel Dorchester, but their compatriots could only rely on radio and newspaper accounts.