Early on July 5, 1969, the three astronauts returned to Houston for a media day: a morning press conference in the MSC visitors’ center theater followed by smaller sessions with wire services, magazine writers, and the three national TV networks. The men walked onto the stage wearing masks and kept them on until they were seated behind a clear plastic shield with a large fan behind them that was presumably blowing any reporter germs away. The crew found this somewhat perplexing, since every day they came into contact with dozens of NASA personnel who went home to their families and friends at night and came back to work the next morning. Using the same unclear reasoning, Dr. Charles Berry had decided that President Nixon’s request to dine with the crew the night before the launch should be denied, and that decision invited the same puzzlement, as there would be almost a dozen non-crew people at the dinner.
After a long day of interrogation by the media, the crew was whisked back to the Cape.
The last week or so of training, their workdays were limited to ten hours, not the fourteen to sixteen hours they’d been working for six months straight. If they were going to be in tiptop shape for the flight, they’d need all the rest they could get. Two nights before the launch, they did a nationally televised thirty-minute interview from their crew quarters; a panel of reporters questioned them from a NASA news facility ten miles away. The crew appeared subdued and withdrawn. When asked if he had any fears regarding the mission, Armstrong said: “Fear is not an unknown emotion to us. But we have no fear of launching out on this expedition.”
On July 15, the day before the departure, Armstrong and Aldrin spent some time in the morning in the LM simulator, but most of the day was spent relaxing, swimming, and taking it easy at a cottage on the coast that NASA had bought for the occasional use of its astronauts. Aldrin borrowed a metal detector from their personal chef, Lew Hartzell, and spent a good part of the afternoon searching for treasure he never found. Collins also took the day off, but he hung around the crew quarters. That evening, each one called home for a final talk with his family.
Dinner would be early, and simple. Hartzell, a former tugboat cook, had learned his trade in the Marines; he liked his beer and had the belly to show it. He loved cooking for the astronauts. Al Shepard had hired him before Gemini 4. After a dozen other candidates hadn’t sufficiently impressed him, the meal Hartzell prepared for him did the trick. Shepard told him the astronauts were meat-and-potatoes men, and basic fare was what he always gave them. In between missions, Hartzell worked the occasional yacht run up and down the East Coast, but when he cooked for the astronauts, he avoided the fancy touches he learned on those luxury cruises. He would always return to the Cape before a flight, and he had been providing victuals for the Apollo 11 astronauts since they’d moved into the crew quarters a month ago; he even prepared them overstuffed sandwiches that they wolfed down during their quick lunch breaks. Tonight, it was an easy dinner for less than a dozen people: Apollo 11’s prime, backup, and support crews, and Slayton. The only exception was backup LM pilot Fred Haise, who would be in the command module hours before the crew, making sure it was shipshape and that every switch and control was in the right position.
Hartzell cooked the traditional prelaunch dinner, which continued the high-residue diet the crew had been eating for almost a week: salad, broiled sirloin steak, mashed potatoes, tomato puree, asparagus, cottage cheese, a fruit bowl, and bread and butter. The prime crew partook of almost everything, it was noted, except the salad, asparagus, and fruit.
Fifty-fifty—that’s what Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins estimated the chances were of Apollo 11 making a successful landing. They thought there were still too many unknowns in the descent from lunar orbit to the surface. Something they didn’t understand was bound to go wrong. Most of the other astronauts felt the same way.
Armstrong actually liked working with unknowns. He found the process fascinating in a problem-solving way, and that was a big reason he had enjoyed test-piloting so much. This was just another test flight—only with much higher stakes.
He had decided that his crew had a 90 percent chance of making it back to Earth alive—certainly better odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-gun, but still risky. But he and his crewmates all concurred—it was a risk worth taking. And it looked like they’d be taking that risk in the morning; dark clouds had hovered overhead most of the past two days, but the forecast for the next day was broken cloud cover at fifteen thousand feet—satisfactory for a launch.
Armstrong might not have been so optimistic if he’d seen the mission risk assessment that had been submitted to Paine in a briefing on July 10. One chart, entitled “Certain Loss of Crew,” listed the many possible catastrophic developments at each crucial phase of the mission, from “space vehicle breakup” and “failure to jettison launch escape tower” during launch to “overturning on lunar surface” and “ascent propulsion system failure” during powered descent, and several others. Another chart, “Possible Loss of Crew,” listed many more, most of them under “Powered Descent.” Armstrong and his crewmates might not have been dwelling on such things, but there were plenty of others at NASA who were.
Bill Tindall, for instance, was still so worried about the mascons that just two days before the launch, he’d sent out a memo about them; Apollo 10 had helped map the dozen they knew about, but no one could be sure that there weren’t more, and if there were, that might affect the LM’s descent or ascent. Cosmic radiation was another concern. The Earth’s atmosphere provided adequate protection, and the continuous low dose received beyond it would be tolerable, particularly within the fairly thick walls of the command module. But solar flares were something else; at any moment, the sun might blast massive clouds of atomic particles that could reach the moon in eight to ten hours, and spacesuits or the paper-thin walls of the LM would be no defense against such a radioactive tsunami. The result would be radiation poisoning and possibly even death. Such flares were impossible to predict, though they did occur in eleven-year cycles, and this year was a peak year during this cycle. Fortunately, NASA had a network of seven observatories to detect and report dangerous flares, which meant that if Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface, they would have time to halt their EVA and blast off to rendezvous and dock with Collins.
But Armstrong avoided worrying about circumstances he couldn’t control. He believed his crew was sufficiently prepared. It had been tight, and he and Aldrin particularly had barely gotten in the amount of training deemed necessary, but they’d done it—although Riley McCafferty, simulator chief at the Cape, believed they were unprepared for anything but a nominal mission and that they would run into trouble if anything unexpected occurred. But the three astronauts knew the machines and systems well and were confident that the hundreds of thousands of people involved in readying the three million parts of the Saturn V, the two million parts of the command-service module, and the one million parts of the LM could not have been more conscientious if their own children were going to be aboard. There was still tremendous pressure on the three men, and each prayed that he wouldn’t be the one to screw up and possibly endanger the mission or his shipmates. They were all aware that any kind of failure during the next eight days would tarnish America’s image.
Collins, especially, worried about the many things that could go wrong when the LM separated from the command-service module and descended to the lunar surface and, later, when the astronauts rendezvoused. There were eighteen variations on the procedure in case of emergency, and some of them required complicated operations performed flawlessly. One of the mission phases he had to practice in the simulator was making the burn that would send him back to Earth if his two crewmates had to be left on the moon to die. He had developed tics in both eyes at the thought of being unable to retrieve his two comrades and having to turn homeward and leave them on the moon or circle it until they perished… (“Of such possibilities are nightmares bred,” he later wrote.) He would carry a small notebook listing the eight
een variations on the procedure and keep it clipped to the front of his spacesuit. All three men knew that the nation’s hopes rested on their faultless performance. Despite the pressure, there was a certain relief just before the launch—not just because they had finished the many months of nonstop training and studying, but because they were finally getting on with it. Beyond doing their duty for the country, they were looking forward with great anticipation to returning to space. It was an exhilarating experience that each man—and every astronaut—had relished.
They might have been amiable strangers, but they were the perfect crew for the first attempt at a moon landing. Armstrong—with his wealth of experience in the Korean War, as a test pilot, and on a treacherous Gemini 8 mission—would get the LM down to the surface if anyone could. He could handle any unknowns that arose with his skill, knowledge, and nerve, and if that didn’t work, there was always his luck. Aldrin, Dr. Rendezvous, would do a damn good job as LM navigator, and if communications with Mission Control broke down or if the LM’s onboard computer failed, he’d use his slide rule to get them back to the command-service module. And Collins, as good and knowledgeable a command-module pilot as there was in the astronaut corps, would get them home if it was humanly possible.
And if it wasn’t possible and they didn’t come back, there was a plan for that too. Frank Borman, who had retired from the astronaut corps to become NASA’s liaison with the White House, suggested to Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire that he prepare a speech for the president in case the mission went badly and Armstrong and Aldrin were left stranded on the moon. Safire composed a short address that began, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace”; it ended with an homage to lines written by Rupert Brooke, a British poet who fought in World War I: “For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”
The president would telephone each of the new widows before the statement. Afterward, a clergyman would treat their deaths as a burial at sea and commend their souls to “the deepest of the deep.”
In his room at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn, Wernher von Braun, now gray-haired and fleshier than the Peenemünde wunderkind of thirty years ago but still handsome, sat on the floor, cross-legged and in his shirtsleeves, looking over the launch schedule one more time. On Sunday, he and his wife, Maria, had flown down from Huntsville with his deputy director Eberhard Rees, and he had spent the previous few days in endless management meetings and press conferences. Earlier in the evening, he had been the keynote speaker at a gala dinner for industry bigwigs, astronauts, and other luminaries. Despite the host mentioning von Braun’s Nazi affiliation in his introduction, the crowd had given him a standing ovation. Now von Braun called his old friend Kurt Debus, the director of Kennedy Space Center, to wish him luck the next day. The launch would be a reunion of sorts for the Peenemünde group; in addition to the many German engineers at the Cape and in Huntsville, their old boss Walter Dornberger, recently retired after many profitable years with Bell Aerospace, would be there, as would Hermann Oberth, the rocketry pioneer who had inspired them all. After calling Debus, von Braun said some prayers for the next day’s flight and then went to bed, though he didn’t sleep well. His thoughts were on the launch tomorrow of his Saturn V, which would be making the most important flight of its—and his—life.
It seemed as if almost all of the million people outside Cape Kennedy’s gates were partying (the Cocoa Beach bars, which usually closed at three a.m., had received special permission to stay open till five a.m.), but the Apollo 11 crew retired to their individual rooms by nine p.m. By ten o’clock, all three were asleep. While they slumbered, a light rain fell, and flashes of lightning could be seen far to the north.
Earlier in the evening, Collins had managed a quick look at the Saturn V, which was “suspended,” he later wrote, “by a crossfire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky.” Launchpad crews cooled down the fuel systems and began transferring the cryogenic fuels—liquid hydrogen and oxygen—into the Saturn V and preparing the spacecraft. Mission specialists entered the command and lunar modules to ink in last-minute updates to the checklists and flight plans. Guenter Wendt and his crew were everywhere with their clipboards, reviewing every last detail before the skyscraper-size rocket hurled its human payload into the airless void of space.
At 4:15 a.m., on the third floor of the operations and checkout building eight miles away, Deke Slayton walked down the crew-quarters hall and knocked on each astronaut’s door. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “You’re GO.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Translunar Express
I am far from certain that we will be able to fly the mission as planned. I think we will escape with our skins, or at least I will escape with mine.
Michael Collins
The day of the trip to the moon started like any other day, with a quick shave and shower. To ensure the three astronauts were healthy and record their vitals one last time, nurse Dee O’Hara, every astronaut’s favorite pulse-taker, gave each one a quick final physical. She’d been the personal nurse to all astronauts since before the first Mercury flight, and when she’d moved with them to Houston in 1962, she extended her services to their families as well. After all these years, O’Hara had an easy rapport with the men, and they appreciated her warmth, cheerfulness, and professionalism. A devout Catholic, she prayed the rosary on her beads during every mission, and she would for this one also.
Next was the traditional launch breakfast—steak, eggs, toast, juice, and coffee, as prepared by Lew Hartzell—with Deke Slayton and Bill Anders, the backup LM pilot. Paul Calle, part of NASA’s art program, sat quietly in a corner sketching them. Then it was back to their rooms to brush their teeth and pack their belongings, after which they headed upstairs to the suit room. There they donned long johns and urine-collection devices before being helped into their spacesuits by Joe Schmitt’s four-man team. Schmitt had handled these duties for Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and virtually every NASA manned flight since. Each astronaut carefully snapped his plastic bubble helmet down into the neck ring and locked it in place, then he plugged into a portable oxygen ventilator that he carried like a briefcase. This purged his body of any nitrogen, which prevented the bends when the cabin pressure was reduced soon after liftoff. The watch each man wore on his suit’s wrist, an Omega Speedmaster, was set to Houston time.
Slayton, Joe Schmitt, and the three astronauts passed well-wishers as they walked down the corridors and out of the building, where a crowd of TV crews and photographers waited. They all got in the transfer van together, but Slayton was dropped off at the control center, where he wished the astronauts, who were fully suited and unable to hear anything but their ventilator fans, good luck. The crew was driven the eight miles to the launchpad. The sun was about to rise as they arrived at pad 39A. Sheets of frost slid off the Saturn where air had condensed and frozen against the super-cold fuel tanks. The astronauts and Schmitt and his assistant took an elevator to the base of the launch tower and then another to level nine, where they were met by Pad Führer Guenter Wendt. The three seats in the craft were positioned side by side below the hatch opening; since Aldrin would sit in the center seat, he would be the last one to enter the command module, so he was let off on the level below, where he waited near the elevator. Armstrong and Collins walked over the creaking thirty-foot swing arm into the small White Room surrounding the side hatch, where technicians began the elaborate process of buckling them in and connecting them to the ship’s life-support system.
Wendt and his closeout crew had been busy for hours, and in the White Room there was now a brief pause while he and the astronauts exchanged gag gifts, a tradition that had developed over the years in an attempt to ease some of the pressure. He gave the crew a large key to the moon made of Styrofoam and al
uminum foil. From his watchband, Armstrong pulled out a card that read Space Taxi. Good Between Any Two Planets and gave it to Wendt. While Schmitt helped Armstrong into the cabin, Collins, who had been carrying a brown paper bag, pulled out a wooden plaque with Wendt’s name on it and the inscription TROPHY TROUT. To the plaque was nailed a frozen (but rapidly thawing) trout all of seven inches long. Wendt was an avid fisherman, and Collins had been out on the water with him many times.
While he waited, Aldrin drank in the view: the reddish sun just rising above the azure-blue ocean half a mile to his left, the crowded highways and beaches in the distance, Cape Kennedy and the Vehicle Assembly Building to his right. Thirty feet away was the booster, frost dropping from it and liquid oxygen boiling off. “I could see the massiveness of the Saturn V rocket below and the magnificent precision of Apollo above,” he remembered with typical scientific appreciation. Then one of Schmitt’s assistants tapped Aldrin on the shoulder, and it was his turn. Gifts were usually lighthearted, but Aldrin gave Wendt, a fellow Presbyterian, a copy of Good News for Modern Man, a condensed version of the Bible. Schmitt helped him into the cabin and got him secured.
Fred Haise was still in the command module, in the space below the cloth-and-canvas seats called the equipment bay. He had been busy for hours reviewing switch positions and running through a checklist 417 steps long so that when the crew entered, they would have little to do besides throw a few more switches on the wraparound instrument panel. Haise finished up, wriggled out of the hatch behind the center couch, then reached back in and shook each man’s hand. When it was time, Wendt tapped Aldrin on the helmet and wished the crew luck, and the hatch was closed and locked. A few minutes before eight a.m., the Pad Führer and his team descended to the ground, and the swing arm was pulled away. The crew was alone atop the thirty-six-story rocket with its six million pounds of fuel.
Shoot for the Moon Page 31