Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Yet, for a brief time at the year’s end, Apollo 8 gave people a reason to look up to the heavens and hope. The mission was hailed around the world. Ten Soviet cosmonauts sent a congratulatory cable, and Pravda called it “an outstanding achievement.” Even Radio Havana, which had never broadcast anything from the Voice of America, the U.S. external radio and TV service, replayed a VOA description of the flight. Much of the American public’s apathy toward spaceflight disappeared, in large part because of the live TV transmissions, which allowed the nation to share in the adventure. President Johnson, nearing the end of his presidency and more than anyone the driving force behind the American space program, felt vindicated. Time magazine named Borman, Lovell, and Anders its Men of the Year. One anonymous telegram received by Borman summed it up: “To the crew of Apollo 8. Thank you. You saved 1968.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Amiable Strangers”

  Both Neil and Buzz had more than the Right Stuff—they were magicians of confidence.

  Albert Jackson, LM simulation instructor

  You didn’t have to like the men you crewed with; that had been the case for eons, whether the craft was a boat or a wagon or a tank or a spaceship. But you’d better be able to trust them with your life in a dangerous situation, and that all-important element of trust usually increased if there was friendship involved.

  For the better part of a year—and in addition to their duties as backup to another mission—members of an Apollo crew spent countless hours together preparing and training for their flight, their days often stretching into fourteen-hour marathons that barely gave them enough time to eat and sleep. Their families were the poorer for it, since an astronaut was rarely home for more than one weekend night a week. And since the men were on the road so much—at the various contractors that were spread across the country designing and fabricating their spacecraft and spacesuits and, over the last few months of training, at the Cape—they usually spent their few off-hours together also. If they weren’t close before they were crewmates, they became close after.

  Some crews took it to the extreme. The Apollo 12 crew, close friends and navy pilots, were Pete Conrad, spacewalker Dick Gordon, and rookie Alan Bean. As a show of solidarity, all drove matching Corvettes, gold ’69 coupes with the initials CDR, CMP, or LMP (commander, command module pilot, and lunar module pilot) painted on the front fender in a red, white, and blue panel. (Even the Apollo 12 wives occasionally dressed alike, once parading out of the Conrads’ house in identical off-white pantsuits with red, white, and blue sashes.) The Apollo 15 crew also owned matching Corvettes—one red, one white, one blue. Each car had red, white, and blue stripes down its center. Their choices were made easier by the fact that the sports cars were leased from an admiring local dealer for one dollar annually—and each man got a new model every year. Apollo 10 was another Three Musketeers crew: “We were old friends and had total confidence in each other,” observed Gene Cernan.

  Not the crew of Apollo 11. When the men didn’t have to spend time together, they went their separate ways. They were, as Mike Collins described them later, “amiable strangers.” As much as they had in common—they were all superb test or fighter pilots, with engineering skills to match—each was his own man. And none of them was what you’d call “one of the boys.” Except for the occasional Astronaut Wives Club get-togethers, their spouses weren’t close either.

  Six years after he’d become an astronaut, thirty-eight-year-old Neil Armstrong still looked younger than his age. In spite of his soft-faced, youthful appearance, Armstrong had been highly respected from the beginning by both NASA officials and other astronauts. In meetings, he was rarely one of the first to talk; when he did, he usually began with “In my view.” When people heard that, they all paid extra attention. And he was dependable: “If you had to ask somebody and then count on it,” said Alan Bean, “he would be the guy.” He wasn’t a gung-ho leader like Frank Borman, and he never raised his voice. He led by example and inspired his crewmates in other ways. No one in the astronaut corps was surprised when Deke selected him to command an Apollo mission.

  This mission commander, curiously, had little actual command experience. When he’d reported for flight training in 1949, he’d chosen single-engine fighters, not multi-engine bombers and their crews, because, as he’d told his mother, “I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else.” As a young fighter pilot during the Korean War and then a test pilot over the next decade, he’d had virtually no opportunity to command anyone. NASA was a civilian agency, and no one was going to be court-martialed for disobedience, but crews were still expected to observe the command structure, and because all the astronauts were military or ex-military, it was second nature for them. Starting with his selection as backup commander on Gemini 5, Armstrong had begun to develop a low-key, unforced leadership style that inspired respect and cooperation from his crews and approval from his superiors.

  In early 1969, the moon landing was just in the planning phases. The LM hadn’t been tested in space yet, and there were those at NASA who thought Apollo 10 should give it a try if Apollo 9 went well. Nobody at the agency—not Bob Gilruth, not Chris Kraft, not Deke Slayton—knew for sure which mission would be the one to land on the moon. If Gus Grissom had still been alive, all agreed that he would have been the one to command it. But he wasn’t, so for potential commanders, Deke favored McDivitt, Borman, Stafford, Armstrong, and Conrad, and those five, in that order, would helm Apollo 8 through Apollo 12.

  “You’re it.”

  That’s what Slayton said to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on January 6, 1969, after he called them into his office at MSC and closed the door. He told them they would constitute the crew of Apollo 11, scheduled to make the first lunar landing in July. Aldrin and Collins were both surprised, especially Collins. Aldrin had been on the Apollo 8 backup crew; he knew Slayton’s usual selection process, and half-expected it. Armstrong had known for weeks.

  Two weeks before, on the afternoon of December 23, Neil had been in Mission Control while Apollo 8 was halfway through its translunar coast to the moon. As backup commander for the flight, he’d been at the Cape for the launch and had flown back to Houston later that day. He’d spent most of his time since then in Mission Control, monitoring the progress of the flight, fielding questions from the flight controllers about the crew. Then Slayton had led him to a back room to discuss his next assignment.

  As he usually did, Slayton got right to the point. He told Neil he was going to command Apollo 11. Was Neil okay with Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin as his crew? Deke was a fan of the hardworking Collins, and he wanted to get him back in the mix on the next possible crew. Collins already had extensive training as a command-module pilot and had served in that role on Apollo 8 until a spine injury had taken him off active status and threatened to end his astronaut career.

  Collins had first noticed the problems in the summer of 1968, during handball games. Many of the astronauts played the sport for an intense hour-long workout. Before the January 1967 fire, Grissom had been the best handball player of the Mercury Seven—though there was a rumor that he’d let Shepard win once, just to keep him happy. But since his selection in October 1963 with the Fourteen group, Collins, easygoing, nonaggressive Mike Collins, had been the acknowledged champ of the astronaut corps. Ed White, the natural athlete, had been his toughest competitor before the fire, and there were other good players—Al Worden, Walt Cunningham, Rusty Schweickart—but no one had managed to dethrone him. (Some suggested that his being left-handed gave Collins an advantage.)

  During a game one day that summer, Collins noticed weakness in his legs. Then other physical difficulties arose, and soon he felt the weakness spreading up his left side. Finally, in July, he told the NASA flight surgeon. A visit with a specialist revealed a herniated disc between his fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae that was pressing on his spinal cord. Surgery was the only answer. He underwent the operation nine days later, but it meant months of recuperati
on even though the operation was successful. The tight Apollo schedule waited for no one, and Jim Lovell took his place on Apollo 8.

  By November, Collins was back on full flight status, and Deke wanted him on Apollo 11. Deke had a hard-and-fast rule that the command-module pilot had to be a spaceflight veteran—he would, after all, be flying an extremely complicated spacecraft all alone around the moon for more than a day—and Collins would be a perfect fit. Fred Haise was currently on Armstrong’s crew as the backup LM pilot, but he hadn’t flown yet, and Deke had some reservations, since this might be the first landing. Anyway, Collins had seniority, so Deke planned to bump Haise off Apollo 11 to a later flight if Armstrong agreed to the switch. He did.

  Aldrin had been the other member of Armstrong’s Apollo 8 backup crew, though as command-module pilot. He’d move to LM pilot if Armstrong accepted him. Then Deke told Neil that he knew Aldrin wasn’t that easy to work with, and he said that if Armstrong wanted, he could have the reliable and affable Jim Lovell, at that moment on his way to the moon, instead of Buzz.

  Armstrong had been working with Aldrin for several months, and he hadn’t had a problem with him. Armstrong’s quiet, nonconfrontational manner didn’t require much social interaction and buddy-buddy camaraderie—not Aldrin’s strong suit—and that probably helped. But Neil understood what Slayton meant. He asked for some time to think about it. The next day, December 24, he told Deke that he’d rather keep Buzz. Besides, Lovell deserved a command of his own. Collins had been training to pilot the command module and knew it well. The lunar-module pilot was the number-three position in an Apollo crew, since he wouldn’t actually do any piloting; the commander would handle that. He would instead act more as a systems engineer, monitoring the spacecraft. Buzz was perfectly suited for that job.

  It was settled; the Apollo 11 crew would be Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, with Lovell, Anders, and Haise backing them up. Borman had decided to retire from astronaut duty rather than endure the exhausting training for, first, a backup crew, then prime. Some claimed that Susan Borman had put her foot down. She knew how dangerous a trip to the moon was—before her husband’s Apollo 8 flight, Chris Kraft had terrified her by describing it as “the riskiest one to date.” That ordeal had been enough, and she didn’t want him risking his life once more and forcing her and their children to go through that emotional wringer again.

  After the aborted flight of Gemini 8 in March 1966, Armstrong had been named to the backup crew for Gemini 11—his third Gemini assignment. When that mission was over, he switched to Apollo. Years earlier, as a test pilot, he had been involved in the early developmental work on the lunar-landing research vehicle (LLRV), an odd-looking contraption built by Bell Aerosystems that was designed to mimic, as closely as possible, a landing on the moon and its one-sixth gravity. Once the LM began taking on its final shape, NASA decided to use the LLRV and an improved version, the lunar-landing training vehicle (LLTV), as trainers for the planned lunar landing. Armstrong was heavily involved in the transformation, making the LLTV as close as possible to the LM itself, at least in its basic handling and control features. By early 1967, both models—two LLRVs and three LLTVs—had been shipped to Houston and installed at Ellington Field, near the Manned Spacecraft Center, and were in use by potential moon-landing astronauts. Though a helicopter didn’t provide a very good simulation, there were some similarities between helicopters and the trainers, mostly in trajectory and visual fields, and each astronaut attended a crash course on helicopters and spent time in a ground simulator before taking a flight in one of the trainers.

  Armstrong had been flying the LLRV since March 27, 1967, soon after it was shipped to Houston. Over the next year and a half, he would make many flights in it. Nicknamed the “flying bedstead” for its ungainly appearance—basically a conglomeration of aluminum-alloy struts with a pilot’s seat, a jet engine underneath, and a fuel tank on each side of the vehicle—the machine was extremely dangerous, since the pilot had to take it up to five hundred feet for its six-minute flight. The engine would provide enough steady lift to simulate one-sixth gravity, and small side-mounted thrusters powered by hydrogen peroxide approximated the LM’s descent-control characteristics. If the main engine or the thrusters failed, the LLRV had no wings to provide lift, so it could not glide to a landing. In an emergency, the rocket-powered seat would eject the pilot and allow him to parachute to the ground. But there was little room for error, and the vehicle could turn deadly in many ways.

  On the windy afternoon of May 6, 1968, Armstrong was at Ellington piloting an LLRV for the twenty-first time. In the final one hundred and fifty feet of a descent, his thruster system malfunctioned, leaving him unable to control the machine’s attitude. It began to sway from side to side—“Like a kid’s balloon at a party, where they blow it up and let it go,” remembered Anders, who had just finished his turn on the machine—then turned and plunged toward the pavement below. Over the loudspeaker Armstrong said, “Got to leave the vehicle,” and ejected at about fifty feet, a second before the LLRV crashed to the ground and exploded in a fireball. The ejection seat blasted him a few hundred feet into the air at about two hundred miles an hour and with a force of fifteen g’s. After automatic separation from the seat and deployment of the parachute, Armstrong floated safely down into the tall grass bordering the area, the brisk wind wafting him away from the flames. He landed, stood up, and walked away, his only injury a bloody tongue where he’d bit it and a large bruise on the base of his buttocks. After a debriefing, Armstrong got in his car and drove over to his office. He had just escaped death, and he was disappointed that he’d lost an expensive machine, but he had work to do.

  An investigation concluded that a badly designed thruster system had allowed propellant to leak out and cause the thrusters to shut down. The high winds had also required Armstrong to use more fuel than usual. Despite protests from Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft, the LLRV and LLTV would remain a vital part of training for the LM. Armstrong, who would fly the contraptions more than two dozen times, would later call them “absolutely essential” to the success of the mission.

  No other astronaut of the Apollo era seems to have experienced as much good luck in his flight assignments as Buzz Aldrin. He had gained a Gemini mission because of the T-38 deaths of Charlie Bassett and Elliot See; their Gemini 9 spots were immediately filled by Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, and that had allowed Aldrin and Lovell to move up from the backup crew of Gemini 10 to Gemini 9 and, eventually, to fly the last mission in the series, Gemini 12.

  But Aldrin came close to losing his seat on Gemini 12 not once but twice. During Gemini 9, he had stunned Bob Gilruth in Mission Control by loudly and insistently suggesting a dangerous solution to an in-flight problem—it involved wire cutters wielded during a space walk, and this was back before EVA had been mastered. Four days after that, Gilruth had told Slayton to replace Aldrin. But Deke stood up for Buzz and insisted to Gilruth that he had confidence in him, so Buzz remained on the crew. (Aldrin later insisted that he had only wondered if the option had been considered.) Deke’s confidence had its limits, however. When serious thought was given to using the astronaut-maneuvering unit (AMU) backpack, which would allow for untethered space walks, during an ambitious EVA planned for Gemini 12, Slayton was ready to replace Aldrin with Cernan; Aldrin had no experience with the AMU, and Cernan did. But the AMU was dropped from the mission, and Buzz kept his seat.

  Perhaps it was the gods of aviation who interfered on his behalf, for no one in the astronaut corps could claim a closer kinship to the pioneers of flight and rocketry. Buzz’s father, Edwin E. Aldrin Sr., was an aviation pioneer who had studied under Robert Goddard, taught flying during World War I, and associated with such flying legends as Orville Wright, Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Doolittle, and Billy Mitchell. He’d even traveled across the Atlantic on the Hindenburg a year before it caught fire in 1937. Like his son after him, he got the military to send him to MIT for his doctorate.

 
Aldrin Sr. was one of the early proponents of air travel, writing an occasional newspaper column called “Sagas of the Skies.” While an aide to Mitchell in the Philippines, he met his future wife, Marion Moon, the daughter of a Methodist army chaplain. During the mid-1920s, he and his new bride toured Europe in a single-engine Lockheed Vega, a trip that included skimming over the Alps at fourteen thousand feet. In 1929, after the arrival of two daughters, the Aldrins bought a three-story, seven-bedroom white stucco house in Montclair, New Jersey. On January 30, 1930, Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. was born. The family called him Brother; younger daughter Fay, only two years old, pronounced it “Buzzer.” That soon became Buzz, which stuck.

  Aldrin Sr.’s job as an executive with Standard Oil often took him away on long trips, and Buzz grew up in a household of women. Besides his mother and sisters, there was Anna, the cook, and Alice, the housekeeper, who shared the third floor with Buzz. For a good chunk of Buzz’s childhood, an aunt, uncle, and grandmother on his mother’s side also lived with them. Much of Buzz’s young life and character were shaped by his desire to please a remote but strict father who had great expectations for his only son: “He planted his goals and aspirations in me,” Buzz would write later.

  When Buzz was two, his father flew most of the family down to Florida for a vacation; the future astronaut got sick during the flight. Soon after, Edwin Aldrin Sr. drove his family the fifty miles from their Montclair home to Hopewell, New Jersey, to visit his friend Charles Lindbergh, whose child, just five months younger than little Buzz, had recently been kidnapped. When they arrived at the house, it was decided that Buzz would remain in the car with the rest of the family, lest the Lindberghs be reminded of their own toddler.