Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  It was about then when Collins looked over and noticed that the abort handle at Armstrong’s left side, now powered up and ready, was dangerously close to a large pocket on Armstrong’s suit. Just one counterclockwise twist would fire the three rockets of the escape tower above them and jerk the command module up and away from the stack below it. A slight movement of his left leg could snag the handle, so Collins pointed it out to Armstrong, who quickly pulled the pocket as far to the right as he could.

  Unlike Apollo 9 and Apollo 10, Apollo 11 fascinated the entire country—actually, the entire world. People from every state in the Union and many countries outside it had begun descending on the area a week before the launch, and by the morning of July 16, there were almost a million of them. There were no motel rooms available within a fifty-mile radius of Cape Kennedy, so some motels allowed extra guests to sleep in the lobby or on deck chairs around the pool. The rest of the visitors congregated along U.S. Highway 1 and the beaches that ran parallel to it, setting up camp in their tents, crude shelters, vans, trailers, and cars. Every public park in the area was converted into a campground. There seemed to be a lot more kids around than usual for a launch, likely because parents wanted their children to witness history in the making.

  Sequestered three miles away near the VAB were the six thousand special guests NASA had invited: nineteen governors, forty mayors, sixty-nine foreign ambassadors, thirty-three senators, two hundred congressmen, untold numbers of senior NASA employees and Apollo contractors, and plenty of other dignitaries and celebrities, including former President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. Jim Webb was also there, ready to witness his first rocket launch. Charles Lindbergh, who had inspired so many of the astronauts and engineers, was there, sitting next to an old friend named Claude Ryan. In 1927, Ryan’s small California aviation company had built a plane to Lindbergh’s specifications for an ocean flight the young pilot had planned. The Spirit of St. Louis had flown from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. Fifty years later, Ryan’s firm had built the landing radar for Apollo 11’s LM.

  That morning, a few buses had dropped off about a hundred more special guests, among them the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, a civil rights leader and close friend of the late Martin Luther King Jr.; the two had led the Poor People’s Campaign to DC the previous summer to focus the nation’s attention on problems of hunger and poverty. Abernathy had not originally been invited, but the day before the launch, he had arrived at the Cape with two hundred and fifty followers and two mule-drawn farm wagons to protest the billions of dollars spent on space exploration while those same problems existed. At Cape Kennedy’s visitors’ center, they were met by Thomas Paine, a Democrat whom President Nixon had decided to keep on as NASA’s acting administrator after a fruitless search for a qualified Republican. Abernathy tried to make clear that he was proud of the space program’s accomplishments. Paine told him that he was a member of the NAACP and sympathetic to their cause. “If we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push the button,” he said. He invited the reverend and a delegation of his protesters to watch the liftoff the next morning from the VIP viewing area. The group spent the night at a nearby trailer park. Early in the morning, buses had picked up Abernathy and a hundred of his people. Now they were here to watch the launch with NASA’s other invited guests.

  Nearby, at the press site on the shore of the barge canal, there were 3,493 American journalists and 812 reporters from fifty-five countries. Three thousand boats of varying sizes floated in the Banana River to the east and the Indian River to the west. On one of them, a motor cruiser owned by North American Aviation that was moored three miles from the launch site, Jan Armstrong would watch the launch with her boys, Rick, twelve, and Mark, six. The Aldrin and Collins families had elected to remain in Houston to avoid the mad crush at the Cape.

  About a hundred and seventy-five miles off the coast were uninvited guests with a different agenda. While the vessels the Soviets usually deployed to monitor launches from Cape Kennedy were fishing trawlers bristling with radar and antennas, now they’d sent a flotilla that included a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers, two submarines, and a sub tender, all of them spread out over an area of twelve square miles, their heavy instrumentation a sure sign they were ready to track Apollo 11 from liftoff to orbit.

  For a long time, NASA had suspected that the Soviets were jamming communications during missions. Just in case they tried this time, a massive surveillance dish was hoisted onto the roof of the VAB. If a disrupting signal was detected, the dish could pinpoint the location. The countdown would be halted and corrective action taken—hopefully, a simple change in frequency would do the job.

  The Soviets had all but conceded the prize hanging in the sky 240,000 miles away. But they had one more trick up their sleeves.

  After Premier Nikita Khrushchev had been deposed and the Gemini program began to pull the Americans ahead in the space race, Sergei Korolev was able to convince the USSR’s new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, of the importance of a lunar landing. But the Soviet moon program had started late and never caught up. It faced many obstacles, including severe underfunding, inefficiency, insufficient testing, the Marxist state’s distrust of science, and the military’s penchant for siphoning off funds from politically motivated space projects toward newer and better strategic systems. Korolev’s death, in January 1966, had dealt a severe blow to the project.

  But Vasily Mishin and his team had plowed ahead, still hopeful that they could beat the Americans. The Soviet cadre of cosmonauts picked for the lunar missions hadn’t begun training until January 1968. Their insufficient funding precluded proper simulators, so they practiced landings with jury-rigged copters. Spacewalker Alexei Leonov was the front-runner for the honor of commanding the first mission.

  They were aiming for a late 1969 or early 1970 lunar landing and had believed it unlikely that the U.S. program could recover from the Apollo 1 tragedy quickly and then pull off the series of highly complicated step missions required to make a landing by the end of the decade. But their own frequent failures—due in large part to poor quality control and a singular lack of strong ground-testing—colored their opinion; they didn’t know how well engineered and how thoroughly ground-tested Apollo was.

  In the summer of 1969, the West had little information about the Soviet plans for space other than what scientists could gather from the photographs of Webb’s Giant. Earlier in the year, there had been statements from academicians and cosmonauts, including Leonov, indicating they were working on a moon landing. No one outside the USSR knew that the Soviets had already had a trial run of the huge moon rocket; the CIA’s spy-plane surveillance missed it. Although the N1 had never been ground-tested, on February 21, Mishin’s team was confident it was ready, and an unmanned stack had been launched at Baikonur. The rocket lifted off, but sixty-nine seconds later, severe pogo problems resulted in a fuel leak that started a fire, causing all thirty of the N1’s first-stage engines to shut off. At seventeen miles up, it turned earthward and crashed thirty-one miles from the launch site, though the launch escape system pulled the spacecraft mock-up away to safety.

  The problems were considered fixable, and a second N1 was prepared for launch. Almost five months later, at 11:18 p.m. on July 3, they tried again. This time, the rocket barely cleared the gantry before it collapsed onto the launchpad and exploded into a sun-bright fireball that quickly became a purple-black mushroom cloud. Large white-hot pieces of debris rained down as far as six miles away, and windows twenty-five miles away shattered in the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in the history of rocketry. Miraculously, no one was killed.

  The CIA had missed the February failure and would not discover the July 3 disaster until mid-August, when spy-plane photos revealed that a large launch complex had been destroyed. It didn’t matter. With the N1’s failure died any Soviet hope of beating the Americans to a manned lunar landing. />
  On Sunday, July 13, three days before the Apollo 11 liftoff, the USSR launched another of its Luna probes toward the moon. With characteristic reticence, TASS, the Soviet news agency, noted only that its mission was to conduct experiments around the moon and near it. The probe was widely seen as a final desperate attempt to upstage the Americans; possibly the Soviets meant it to land, scoop up some soil, and return to Earth, thus achieving a couple more lunar firsts. Others postulated a more sinister purpose: maybe the Soviets would try to observe Apollo 11…or interfere with it, or even shoot it down.

  By the morning of the Apollo launch, the three-ton Luna 15 was nearing the moon on a minimum-energy trajectory, and Chris Kraft was incensed. The possibility of a collision with Apollo 11 was remote, but he was convinced that the Soviets had more than once deliberately operated their communications at or near American radio frequencies during missions. He mentioned the Russian probe during a press conference to put some pressure on them, but that hadn’t seemed to do any good. He couldn’t exactly ask the Soviets for their mission trajectory and communication details. But he knew someone who could.

  Frank Borman and his family had just returned from a nine-day visit to the USSR, where he’d been welcomed warmly, met some cosmonauts and scientists, and drunk many vodka toasts. It was the first time an American astronaut had been allowed in the country. Kraft called Borman, still working as NASA’s White House liaison, and explained the situation. Borman put a call through to Dr. Mstislav Keldysh, president of the august Soviet Academy of Sciences. The two had hit it off and had discussed cooperation between their space programs.

  He’d left Keldysh a message asking for the orbital parameters of the Luna probe and looking for reassurance that it wouldn’t interfere with Apollo 11. He hadn’t heard back by the day of the launch, but maybe the Russian would get in touch soon. Keldysh had seemed like an intelligent and reasonable man.

  The morning was already sweltering, with a bright sun and the temperature near ninety degrees.

  The countdown went smoothly save for a couple of minor problems that were fixed without causing a delay. At T minus nine seconds, the five massive F-1 engines ignited, and at zero, as they reached their full thrust of 7.6 million pounds, the launch tower’s swing arms pulled back, the twenty-ton hold-down clamps at the booster’s base sprang free, and hundreds of thousands of spectators watched, transfixed, as the 6.5-million-pound spacecraft began to rise, sluggishly at first, its thrust-to-weight ratio so close that it appeared to ascend in slow motion until it finally cleared the launch tower, sheets of ice breaking off into thousands of shards. At 9:32 a.m., exactly on schedule, Apollo 11 blasted off toward the moon with three men in a small nose cone atop the largest rocket ever sent into space.

  The sound took fourteen seconds to reach the closest observers, three miles away, and when it did, the roar was deafening. The ground shook as Apollo 11 continued to soar upward on a long pillar of fire and then arced out over the Atlantic to begin its five-hundred-thousand-mile round-trip journey.

  In firing room 1 in the launch control center, beside the VAB, Wernher von Braun stood next to George Mueller in the mission managers’ row. While the last twenty seconds of the countdown ticked away, he put down his binoculars and stared out the large blast-proof windows, then bowed his head and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer to himself. As the rocket climbed, the four-hundred-man countdown team started cheering, and von Braun lifted his head and joined them.

  It was surprisingly quiet in the command module—the F-1s were a distant rumble, not unlike a commercial airliner’s engines at takeoff. The spacecraft shook as it lifted off, and the astronauts were jostled against their straps as the four outer engines swiveled back and forth, adjusting to stay balanced and straight—if the rocket came into contact with the launch tower, it would mean catastrophe. The men felt only 1.25 g’s, slightly more than normal, but far less than they had endured in training. The force steadily increased as the rocket picked up speed, and two minutes and forty seconds into the flight, at the end of the first-stage burn, the men felt four times their normal weight.

  When the rocket was forty-five miles up, the astronauts were jerked forward as the spent first stage fell away into the sea. The five smaller J-2 engines of the second stage took over, and the ride smoothed out. A few seconds later, at sixty miles altitude, the launch escape tower was jettisoned, and at a hundred and ten miles, the single J-2 of the third stage ignited, this one causing a rougher, shakier ride as the second stage released. The ascent to orbit had taken twelve minutes.

  At least fourteen danger points would occur during their flight. NASA called them go/no-go decision points, those critical events that involved complex mechanisms and split-second timing that had to transpire flawlessly for a successful mission. (There might even be a few more than fourteen, depending on how many midcourse trajectory corrections were needed.) At every point, the flight director would ask each controller whether the system he monitored was functioning properly and ready to go. The launch had been the first danger point—every rocket launch was dangerous, considering the massive amounts of fuel involved. The next point, which would occur during the second orbit at a hundred and ten miles altitude, was translunar injection (TLI). Restarting the third stage’s single J-2 engine for a five-minute-and-forty-seven-second burn would, if perfectly timed, increase the spacecraft’s speed to 24,258 miles per hour, fast enough to pull it out of Earth orbit and propel it toward the moon—or, rather, a specific point where the moon would be when Apollo 11 reached it in three days. And restarting the J-2 was risky, given the nature of its fuels; liquid oxygen at negative 297 degrees and liquid hydrogen at negative 423 degrees had to be handled extremely carefully. But Collins had practiced the burn many times. Midway through the second orbit, after checking out their spacecraft to make sure all systems were nominal, the crew donned their helmets and gloves again, in case the TLI went badly, then waited for word from Mission Control.

  It finally came as they passed a hundred miles over Australia. “Apollo 11, this is Houston. You are go for TLI.”

  The burn went off without a hitch. The cabin shook and the thrust pushed the astronauts back in their seats at one g. Then the engine shut down automatically and they were on their way to the moon. Von Braun’s rocket had performed flawlessly once again. “Hey, Houston, Apollo 11,” said Armstrong after shutdown. “That Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.”

  A short while later, Collins separated the command-service module from the third stage, turned around, then docked with the LM, whose four-panel protective shroud had peeled away like large silver petals. Then one of the astronauts threw a switch on the control panel that released the LM from the Saturn third stage, and the odd-looking spacecraft—the command-service module secured nose to nose with the LM—continued moonward. The almost empty third stage’s trajectory would be changed to send it into an orbit around the sun.

  Besides the attitudinal thrusters, they had one large engine left, the big service-module engine attached to their rear that resembled a large bell. Its thrust of 19,500 pounds would be used on several occasions during the next few days. It had to work every time. Now they started it for a three-second burn to get safely away from the third stage and fine-tune their trajectory. Its light kick—one-fifth of a g—was reassuring.

  The passive thermal control was next. In the vacuum of space, with no atmospheric protection against the sun’s rays, the temperature was over 280 degrees on the side facing the sun and negative 280 degrees on the other side. Fuel-tank pressures could rise to dangerous levels, and radiators and other parts could freeze, so to distribute the sun’s heat evenly, Collins used his thrusters to position the spaceship broadside to the sun and then induced it to rotate slowly on its long axis—one full turn every twenty minutes, hence the nickname “barbecue mode.” Apollo 11 was now slowly spinning at an angle as it moved toward the moon.

  Two delicate maneuvers were behind them with no more scheduled until they re
ached the moon’s vicinity in three days. The crew appeared to relax, although it was hard to tell with Collins, who tended to mask anxiety with humor anyway. Armstrong joshed with CapCom Jim Lovell, his backup, who had been teasing him about taking his place. Then Lovell and Aldrin chatted; the two had been crewmates on Gemini 12 three years before.

  After their course was set, the crew changed out of their bulky spacesuits into two-piece nylon jumpsuits, a difficult chore in zero gravity. They took turns; as one man bounced around the cabin, his shipmates helped him. The suits were folded, bagged, and stowed under the center couch. No one had shown any signs of space-sickness or any other illness, and no major problems had cropped up, although there were some minor ones, like an oxygen-flow indicator that malfunctioned. It was deemed useless, irreparable, and unnecessary, since Mission Control could monitor oxygen. Everything appeared shipshape. After the crew took care of various chores, it was time for dinner. The food, packets rehydrated with a hot-water gun and eaten with a spoon, was good—their first meal of chicken salad, shrimp cocktail, and applesauce eaten with a spoon was a major improvement over the tubes they’d squirted into their mouths on Gemini flights. Each man had meals color-coordinated for him and planned out for every day, and there was a well-stocked snack pantry they could partake of. (The kitchen “cupboards” were on the left side of the cabin, making the right side, with its waste-management systems, the bathroom area.) And since the sun was always on them, there was no sunrise or sunset, so they operated on the time their watches were set to, Houston’s central daylight time. At 10:30 p.m. CDT, fourteen hours after liftoff, they turned the radio down, fastened covers over the windows, and closed their eyes.