Collins felt the need to say something. “Well, I thought today went pretty well,” he said. “If tomorrow and the next day are like today, we’ll be safe.”
A half an hour later, as their spacecraft continued to circle the lifeless moon sixty miles below, they were asleep.
Chapter Sixteen
Descent to Luna
The unknowns were rampant.
Neil Armstrong
“Apollo 11. Apollo 11. Good morning from the Black team.”
It was six a.m. Collins, loosely belted and floating over the left seat with his headset on, took a while to wake up. “Good morning, Houston…you guys wake up early.”
“It looks like you guys were really sawing them away,” said CapCom Ron Evans.
A few minutes later, the spacecraft disappeared around the moon’s left side for the ninth time. None of them had slept long—six hours at most. Aldrin had had a fitful night, but the other two had slept soundly. All three ate breakfast. In Mission Control, when Evans saw their craft reappear around the right edge of the moon, he read them the day’s headlines. He reported that Miss Philippines had won the Miss Universe crown the night before, that congregations in churches around the world were including the Apollo 11 crew in their prayers, and that the Russian Luna probe was still circling the moon, though its purpose remained a mystery and its orbit far from theirs. After the crew heard the latest updates on their families, it was time to get down to business.
In Mission Control, there was about to be a changing of the guard. Glynn Lunney’s Black team had been there most of the night while the crew slept, and they were about to hand over the console to Gene Kranz’s White team. They wouldn’t go far—Black was also the ascent team and had to be present during the descent in case of an emergency liftoff, so most of them would stick around, sitting in chairs behind their replacements. The two teams compared notes, and the White team began computing numbers for the upcoming maneuvers.
Kranz arrived carrying two bags. Others in NASA, especially the younger flight controllers, had let their hair grow out, but not him; he still sported a crew cut. His sharp features and intense gaze gave his face the look of a bird of prey. The larger bag held his lunch, several snacks, and candy bars—he liked to eat his way through a shift. In the other bag was his new mission vest, made by his wife, Marta—a tradition started back in Gemini. Each one was slightly different and always a surprise for the controllers. This one, which he called his landing vest—the first—was white-and-silver brocade. Kranz made his way to his console on the second row—there were four rows in all, with preassigned consoles—and put the food in a drawer and his vest on. When Chris Kraft walked in and passed by Kranz, he patted him on the shoulder and said, “Good luck, young man.” He took a seat on the level above, management row, where he was soon joined by most of NASA’s top brass: Bob Gilruth, Robert Seamans, George Low, and Sam Phillips. Kraft and Low had determined that the overall probability of success for the entire mission was roughly 56 percent. Now Low turned to him and said, “I’ve never seen this place so tense.”
The glass-fronted viewing room overlooking the MOCR seated seventy-four. On this occasion, there were many more than that standing in the aisles, on the sides, on the steps. The gathering was an illustrious collection of NASA officials and other dignitaries, among them Wernher von Braun, Eberhard Rees, Kurt Debus, Rocco Petrone, John Houbolt, Thomas Paine, Bill Tindall, Guy Thibodaux, and several astronauts, including the first American in orbit, John Glenn. On the right side of the MOCR was the simulation-control area, where instructors lined the windows to watch. In staff support rooms throughout the building, systems experts and contractor representatives sat, ready to aid in any way they could.
As Kranz settled in at his console, he looked up into the viewing room and saw Tindall there. He waved him down into the MOCR. Tindall declined, but Kranz insisted. If anyone deserved to be there, it was Tindall; he had been instrumental in making this moment a reality. Tindall made his way in and Kranz cleared off a chair right next to him.
The evening before, after their short four-hour shift had ended at about nine, Steve Bales, Jay Greene, and a couple of other controllers on the descent team had gone out to Perusina’s, a good steak house on the Gulf Freeway in Dickinson. They’d returned to the Mission Control Center building and gone to sleep in the controller dormitory above the MOCR. It was large enough to sleep twenty and had its own showers. Bales had woken up refreshed, eaten at the temporary cafeteria set up in the lounge next door, and walked into the MOCR at 7:30 a.m. feeling good. It would be eight hours before the landing attempt, and he had a roomful of computer experts, including Jack Garman, standing by in a staff support room down the hall as well as a bunch of MIT engineers, the men who had created the computer, sitting in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, classroom listening in on a dedicated line. Every flight controller had a similar support network.
But Bales’s good mood was short-lived. As his team began their shift, the pressure they felt was evident. No one was smiling. He took his seat at the far right on the bottom row, near the rear-projected screens in front, with the rest of the flight dynamics team. At his right sat Granville Paules, a tall, blond guidance officer who would support Bales on the guidance systems, including the onboard computer. To their left was flight guidance officer (FIDO) Jay Greene, a pipe-smoker from Brooklyn, who would handle trajectory—where the spacecraft was and where it was going. He was not shy in making his opinions known. To his left, retrofire officer (RETRO) Chuck Deiterich, a native Texan, would manage its return, whether nominal or an emergency; he would be ready with possible abort options if necessary. Like most members of the Trench, he had an attitude that said, We’re the guys really running the show—the rest of you are just plumbers. These men thought of themselves as astronauts on the ground, the ones who really did the job of running the spacecraft.
In the next row up were the flight systems controllers. Right behind Bales, on the last console on the right, was dry, imperturbable Bob Carlton, the veteran controller in charge of the LM’s guidance, navigation, and control. At thirty-nine, he was considered the old man of the group; the average age of the rest of the White team was twenty-six. They called him the Silver Fox, for his gray hair. On the extreme left side of the row sat the flight surgeon. Next to him was the CapCom, astronaut Charlie Duke, who spoke with a light North Carolina drawl. He hadn’t been assigned to a flight yet, but he’d done such a good job in the same role for Apollo 10 that Neil Armstrong had requested him for the descent. Duke knew the LM propulsion systems well, and that wouldn’t hurt. His job was important, and difficult, for he would have to sort through several voice loops to get the information the astronauts would need and then deliver it to them on the ground-to-air loop—the only one they would communicate on. Jim Lovell and Fred Haise sat on his left, and behind Duke was Deke Slayton, drawing on a cigarillo. Pete Conrad and Dave Scott, preparing for Apollo 12, sat nearby. Three other systems controllers sat between the CapCom and Carlton.
At about seven forty-five, Kranz and his controllers donned their headsets, plugged into their consoles, and began punching up various controllers’ voice loops to monitor; depressing a foot switch or activating a control on a headset would allow them to speak on a loop. Most of them were smokers—cigarettes, cigarillos, or pipes—and one of their first orders of business was to empty the amber ashtrays, still full from the evening before, and light up.
Some members of the Black team left, wishing the White team good luck on their way out. John Hodge, the former flight director who had overseen Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott’s Gemini 8 near catastrophe three years before and then moved into management, stopped to talk to Kranz.
Apollo 11 was still completing an orbit of the moon every two hours. In the command module, all three suited up—Armstrong and Aldrin in their liquid-cooled undergarments that would keep their temperature down on the hot lunar surface, Collins in his own suit—and then attended to various housekeeping chores.
After that, Aldrin pulled himself through the tunnel and did more systems checks to Eagle while Armstrong, with Collins’s help, struggled into his EVA suit in the navigation bay. Then Aldrin and Armstrong switched places, and Aldrin put on his suit. It took each man a half an hour to fully suit up, with their helmets and gloves locked into place, though fortunately their suits were only half pressurized for now, so they weren’t as stiff as usual. About nine thirty a.m., Armstrong entered the LM. Once Collins had reinstalled the LM drogue and the command-module probe, Armstrong sealed the upper hatch.
An hour later, Duke said, “Apollo 11, Houston. We’re go for undocking.”
Three minutes later, Columbia, the command-service module, and Eagle, the lunar module, disappeared around the moon. When they reappeared at the right edge of the large map of the moon on a front screen in Mission Control, there would be two radar dots, not one. Kranz told his team to take five, and there was a mad rush to the restroom. It would be the last break before descent.
When everyone returned, Kranz directed his flight controllers to a private communications loop.
“We are about to make history,” he told them. “We have trained and prepared for this moment and we are ready. But I want you to know this—whatever happens when we walk out of this room, we walk out together as a team.” Then he switched back to the flight director’s loop, ordered the doors to the MOCR locked until the landing attempt was over, and lit up another Kent.
“You cats take it easy on the lunar surface,” said Collins on the other side of the moon. “If I hear you huffing and puffing, I’m going to start bitching at you.” He was as aware as anyone of how strenuous an EVA could be—and how dangerous.
“Okay, Mike,” said Aldrin.
Collins retracted the probe, vented the air in the tunnel connecting the two spacecraft, and, at 12:46 p.m., threw a switch that opened the capture latches. The release of the remaining air in the tunnel caused the two vehicles to gradually drift fifty feet apart. Armstrong maneuvered with his thrusters to regain the precise orbital parameters. Then he detonated explosive bolts that released Eagle’s spring-loaded landing gear. There was a shudder and a click as the four legs, including the spindly, sixty-seven-inch landing probes extending from three of them, swung out and locked into place.
They flew formation together—station-keeping—as Armstrong rotated Eagle one full revolution so that Collins in Columbia could inspect it for damage and make sure the legs and probes were in position. The twenty-three-foot-high LM consisted of two parts. The descent stage was essentially four large fuel tanks and a gimballed rocket engine encased in an octagonal metal chassis with four legs sprouting from it. Above that was the ascent stage, a hodgepodge of tanks, boxes, antennas, and radar surrounding a pressurized cabin just large enough for two astronauts in spacesuits, with another rocket engine underneath it. The cabin’s walls were an aluminum alloy skin, about twelve-thousandths of an inch thick—the width of three layers of tinfoil. Most of the bottom half and the four slender legs were wrapped with gold Mylar insulation, and the top half was black, silver, and gray. It might have been mistaken for a large alien insect from another galaxy.
Collins made sure the landing gear was down and locked. A few minutes later, he said, “I think you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact that you’re upside down.”
“Somebody’s upside down,” Armstrong said.
“There you go…you guys take care.”
“See you later,” Armstrong said, as if he and Aldrin were going out to get a bite to eat and would be back soon.
So far, things had gone as planned. Collins fired the service-module engine to move two miles away. In Eagle, more system activations and reviews followed; they checked on their spacesuits, the guidance system, the control thrusters, the descent propulsion system, and its helium fuel. The radio signal was weak and staticky, and the air-to-ground from Eagle was dropping out, so they adjusted the antennas to improve it. Though the rendezvous radar wouldn’t be needed for the descent, they powered it up so it would be ready in case they had to make a quick abort.
There were no seats in the LM, so both men stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped, gray-painted cabin. Armstrong was on the left and Aldrin on the right, their boots secured and waists tethered, an array of controls, gauges, switches, and displays before them. Each man had a hand controller on either side of him, at waist level, and a small, upside-down triangular window sixteen inches in front of his face.
In Mission Control, fifteen minutes after separation, a radar dot appeared on the right side of the large moon map. It was Columbia, in a higher orbit now than Eagle and visible first.
A few minutes later, Eagle emerged from behind the moon, moving at about four thousand miles an hour, and reestablished radio contact.
“How does it look, Neil?” said Duke.
“The Eagle has wings,” Armstrong said.
After Kranz polled his controllers, Duke said, “You’re go for DOI”—descent-orbit insertion. Seven minutes later, Eagle disappeared behind the moon’s left side again, followed by Columbia. Both would be out of contact until they reappeared thirty minutes later.
In the middle of Eagle’s passage across the far side, Armstrong maneuvered the LM so that its rocket engine was aimed forward, in the direction it was traveling. That meant he and Aldrin were looking down, so they could track their progress by landmarks they had studied for months. He fired the descent engine just about opposite the landing area on the near side. The burn, like the others, had to be precise, twenty-eight and a half seconds; a few seconds too long could cause the LM to crash into the moon. This one went perfectly and slowed Eagle enough to allow the moon’s gravity to pull it down to fifty thousand feet. Columbia remained sixty miles above them and behind. Armstrong and Aldrin could feel a slight gravitational pull—maybe a third of a g. The glycol pumps circulating coolant were loud and constant.
The altitude of fifty thousand feet was not arbitrarily chosen. Since the moon has no atmosphere and little gravity, an orbit could theoretically be set for any altitude, as close to the ground as possible—but that was theoretically. An orbit was never perfectly circular, and the moon was not a perfect, smooth sphere; lunar terrain altitudes could vary by twenty thousand feet or so, and uncertainties in the guidance system by another fifteen thousand. To be on the safe side, fifty thousand feet had been chosen for the LM’s beginning orbit altitude.
From that altitude, the descent to the lunar surface two hundred and sixty miles downrange—powered-descent initiative (PDI)—was planned to take twelve minutes. The braking phase would come first, a steady burn of eight and a half minutes to drop them down to about seven thousand feet and slow them to four hundred miles per hour while covering all but four and a half miles. Then the short final approach of one minute and forty seconds would begin, during which they would travel the remaining distance, drop to five hundred feet, and further slow their speed, to about twenty miles per hour. The last minute or so, mostly a vertical drop to the surface two thousand feet downrange, would be the landing phase. The onboard computer was programmed to land the LM, but the crew could take control at any time. It was expected that Armstrong would assume control as Eagle came within a few hundred feet of the surface.
Collins in Columbia came around the left edge of the moon first. He had been visually monitoring Eagle continually since separation in case there was an emergency.
“How did it go?” said Duke, the CapCom in Mission Control.
“Listen, babe. Everything’s going swimmingly. Beautiful,” Collins said. It was the first report of the LM burn.
“Great. We’re standing by for Eagle,” said Duke.
“Okay. He’s coming along.”
Two minutes later, Eagle acquired signal—sixteen minutes to PDI. In Mission Control, telemetry began to pour in, and flight controllers scanned through the constantly moving green numbers on their CRT screens to make sure it was safe to begin powered desce
nt. Tindall scooted his chair closer to Kranz. The flight director realized his palms were sweating, but he said to his crew, “We’re off to a good start. Play it cool.”
Slayton, sitting next to Duke, told the astronauts hanging around the CapCom station to find other consoles for the rest of the flight—it was too crowded, and Duke didn’t need any distractions. Conrad moved down next to Greene at the FIDO console in the first row and plugged in his headset. Scott sat on a step over on the left.
As Eagle came into view and radio communications were restored, Aldrin confirmed a quality burn. A minute later, the signal was lost, and both voice and telemetry were glitchy. Eagle’s high-gain antenna must have been pointed toward Earth, but it was out of position, and the spacecraft itself was interfering. As Eagle descended, the LM system back room scrambled to find an alternate antenna. Without the exact altitude, Mission Control would be unable to precisely compute the descent engine ignition point.
Communications improved briefly, just enough for the LM crew to provide the data. Duke struggled to maintain radio contact and suggested Armstrong change Eagle’s attitude slightly to improve reception but couldn’t tell if Eagle had received his suggestion. Some telemetry data managed to get through, just enough for Kranz to decide to go forward—to try a landing. He polled his team for PDI, five minutes away. Each one responded with a “Go.” “You’re go for powered descent,” Duke said, but he was unable to speak directly to Eagle, so he relayed the go order through Collins in Columbia, fifty-five miles above his crewmates. The signal was lost again, then reacquired after Eagle made the change Duke had suggested.
The landing radar locked onto the surface and began transmitting info, and Bales knew right away that something was wrong.
Shoot for the Moon Page 34