Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Aldrin said, “Thank you.”

  In Mission Control, a few arms were thrust in the air, but the White team stayed in their chairs; there was still work to do. On the top row, Gilruth wiped his eyes and shook hands with Kraft, who then walked down to the GUIDO console and clapped Bales on the shoulder. The viewing room erupted in cheers as people stood or drummed their feet. The instructors did the same in the simulation control area on the right. In the back rooms, men jumped to their feet, screaming and shouting. Von Braun, with tears in his eyes, turned to Houbolt, the man who had crusaded so tirelessly for the lunar-orbit rendezvous. He gave him an okay sign and said, “Thank you, John.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Moondust

  We were lucky.

  Flight controller Glynn Lunney

  Somewhere on the southwestern shores of the Sea of Tranquility, on a level, rock-strewn plain, two men in a small spaceship clapped each other on the shoulders and shook hands. Then they got back to work.

  There was no time to waste. Several steps needed to be taken in case the LM had been damaged during the landing and they had to take off. Kranz’s White team would decide that, but the spacecraft had to be ready.

  In Mission Control, the unflappable Gene Kranz found himself overwhelmed with emotion and unable to speak. He knew he needed to do something to get himself and his team focused. With the exception of his flight controllers, all the people in the building, even the ones in the staff support rooms, were cheering and celebrating the moment. But decisions had to be made, and quickly, so he slammed his right forearm down on his console, flipping a pen in the air in the process. It did the trick.

  Kranz said, “Okay, everybody, T one. Stand by for T one.” Time-1, or T1, was the first opportunity for an emergency liftoff, and it would occur immediately. A minute later, he said, “Okay, all flight controllers, about forty-five seconds to T one—stay/no-stay.” It was Bob Tindall who had pointed out that go and no-go didn’t make sense when the spacecraft was sitting on another world. Go could be interpreted in different ways—continue the mission and stay on the moon, or leave immediately. So stay/no-stay it was.

  If the crew had to make an emergency liftoff due to a major problem—a leaking fuel tank, a damaged engine, a compromised environmental system, the sun’s heat affecting the LM’s fluids adversely, or a footpad sinking into that deep layer of moondust—Eagle could launch in two minutes and rendezvous with Columbia before it got too far away.

  Each controller scrambled to assess the telemetry on his screen and the state of his system. Thirty seconds later, when Kranz polled them for T1, each one answered, “Stay.” Then they started evaluating more thoroughly for T2, eight minutes after landing. When Kranz polled them, there was another unanimous round of stays. Eagle would remain on the surface for now. It would be another two hours before Columbia was overhead again.

  Just sixteen minutes later, a problem was detected by Bob Carlton’s backroom team. The pressure in the descent engine’s fuel line was rising. In the subzero temperatures in the shade—about negative 250 degrees—some of the fuel had frozen into a solid plug after the engine shutdown. The other end of the line was blocked by the engine-shutoff valve, so the pressure could cause the fuel to explode or a relief disk to blow. It could be catastrophic either way.

  “Flight, the descent engine helium tank is rising rapidly,” said Carlton. “The back room expects the burst disk to rupture. We want the crew to vent the system.”

  They decided to ask the crew to “burp” the engine—that is, flick the engine on and then off again quickly to relieve the pressure. CapCom Charlie Duke was just about to relay the order to Eagle when the ice plug melted by itself, and the pressure dropped to zero.

  From his position sixty miles overhead and two hundred miles west of the landing site, Mike Collins had listened intently to the air-to-ground transmission, hanging on every word. He had stood in Columbia’s lower equipment bay with his right eye at the sextant, trying to keep the LM in view as it slowly dwindled to a dot and then disappeared. At the first 1202 alarm, he grabbed his checklist and began looking through it, but before he could find the right page he heard Duke’s “Go.” He froze when he heard him say, “Thirty seconds,” and exulted a moment later when he heard Armstrong announce, “The Eagle has landed.”

  Although TV commentators emphasized how lonely Collins must be, especially when he disappeared behind the far side of the moon, Collins didn’t feel that way at all—he was quite content despite his unprecedented solitude. He only wished he could sight the LM whenever he passed over it. Knowing where Eagle was would supply valuable information to the Apollo Guidance Computer to calculate rendezvous maneuvers for the next day. He continued to listen in as the Eagle’s crew described the sights around them while preparing for their return in less than twenty-four hours.

  At the Armstrong home in El Lago, Jan Armstrong retreated to her bedroom during the descent, leaving family, neighbors, and guests, including Bill Anders, one of the backup crew members, in the living room watching CBS’s coverage with Walter Cronkite and his on-air partner that day, Wally Schirra. One of the Armstrongs’ guests was a Catholic priest, in case the landing went bad, though neither of the Armstrongs was Catholic or especially religious.

  She sat at the foot of the bed and studied a lunar map. Her son Rick came in and sat on the floor, and they listened to one of the two squawk boxes installed in her house. Every astronaut home had a speaker transmitting the air-to-ground loop. Jan was fairly knowledgeable about the descent, more so than most of the other wives, and she was frustrated by the freewheeling speculation, much of it pessimistic, by the commentators. Since there was no live camera feed of the landing, models were used to illustrate it to television viewers. Anders came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed with Jan next to the moon map and provided technical clarification. As her husband guided the LM down the last few hundred feet, Jan sank to the floor and hugged Rick, murmuring, “Good…good…good.”

  In the living room of the Aldrin home in Nassau Bay, Joan Aldrin stood leaning against a door frame, tears in her eyes, unable to look at the TV screen. When Eagle landed, she collapsed onto the floor in relief while everyone else applauded. She got up to throw kisses at the TV screen and pass around a box of cigars, then she went into her bedroom to collect herself. In the Collins home one street over, Pat sat on her living-room couch, nervously smoking, with friends and family. A reporter and photographer from Life magazine were there to capture the personal side of the story, as was usually the case during a flight; a team was at each of the other houses as well. At touchdown, Pat smiled for the first time in a long while and watched as the usually eloquent Cronkite became inarticulate. He took off his glasses and said, “Man on the moon! Whew…boy!” Next to him, an overwhelmed Schirra just wiped his eyes.

  After the landing, each of the wives gave an interview in her front yard, all of them offering variations on the “proud, thrilled, happy” speech every veteran astronaut wife was accustomed to giving. But they knew there was another critical go/no-go point—a big one—coming up the next day. None of them would sleep well that night.

  Once they received the okay to stay, Armstrong and Aldrin went through a simulated countdown for the next day’s liftoff; they hadn’t practiced it for a week, and they wanted to make sure the launch-prep procedures worked in the real world. That went fine, and after they both gave detailed descriptions of their views of the lunar surface—and, through a small window above them, the gibbous Earth, hanging in the velvet-black sky like a blue-and-white moon—they told Houston what controllers there had half expected to hear: they wanted to go outside sooner than planned.

  Even if the astronauts had taken off immediately after landing, John F. Kennedy’s goal would have been met. But a full day’s stay, including a two-hour-and-twenty-minute EVA, had been scheduled, chiefly to gather moon rocks, set up several experiments—and see what it was like to walk on the moon. Science had not been
the prime factor behind the moon landing or, indeed, behind the entire Apollo program, and this mission was about getting there and getting back, but NASA had agreed to a few experiments for the science guys. Just in case the crew was tired from the descent, the timeline called for a meal and then four hours of rest.

  But the two astronauts weren’t tired—they were pumped and probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep so soon after landing on the moon. They had discussed it with Chris Kraft and Deke Slayton, and all had agreed beforehand that they might forgo the rest period. So, just after four p.m. Houston time, they requested official permission to skip it. Mission Control gave them a go.

  First, they quickly prepared a meal. Just before they ate, Aldrin pulled out from his PPK a tiny vial of wine no larger than the tip of his pinkie, a silver chalice about the same size, and a wafer, all given to him by his Presbyterian minister. He radioed to Houston and, with the whole world listening, asked for a few moments of silence. He said, “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.” Then he poured the wine into the chalice, ate the wafer, and drank the wine in a private Communion ceremony no one but Slayton and Armstrong had known about beforehand.

  It took a few hours to prepare for the EVA. They were especially careful about securing their suits, helmets, gloves, and various connections; one less-than-perfect joining could mean a quick death. Their heavy-duty spacesuits were twenty-one layers thick and, like the Apollo Guidance Computer, had been fabricated using the “little old lady” method. Each suit would be pressurized to 3.5 pounds per square inch, making it bulky and not very flexible. Each clear bubble helmet had a special outer helmet equipped with a gold-plated visor to reflect the glare of the blinding sun, unfiltered by an atmosphere. Gloves were heavy gauntlets and, like the helmets, were locked and double-locked. The self-contained backpack each man would wear—the personal life-support system, or PLSS—could provide enough oxygen, cooling water, and electric power to keep him alive in the moon’s vacuum and extreme temperatures for four hours. The hundred-and-ninety-pound suits weighed only thirty pounds on the moon’s surface, but the tight confines of the LM complicated any movement in a fully pressurized suit, as did Eagle’s thin skin, which could be pierced by a pen or any other pointed object and lead to a major pressure leak. A good part of the astronauts’ prep time was spent storing the dozens of items that were scattered around the cabin, from food packages to checklists. Finally, at 9:39 p.m., they finished depressurizing the LM and pulled open the hatch at their feet, which hinged on the right. It was clear that it would have been nearly impossible for the lunar pilot on the right side to get around the commander and go out first.

  Armstrong got down as low as he could. With Aldrin guiding him, he began to slowly back out of the thirty-two-inch-square opening. It was a tight squeeze with the bulky PLSS and its communications system antenna. He reached the small porch outside, grabbed its side rails, then climbed slowly down the nine-rung ladder attached to the forward left leg. Halfway down, he pulled on a lanyard that deployed a desk-like storage unit to the left of the ladder and activated a Mylar-wrapped TV camera that would be trained on him. Aldrin powered it up, and it began transmitting ghostly black-and-white images to the estimated 530 million people watching—one of every six Earthlings, the largest TV audience in history.

  The landing had been so soft, the LM legs hadn’t compressed more than an inch or two, so the end of the ladder was still three feet from the ground. Armstrong dropped onto the saucer-like pad at the bottom of the leg. “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” he said. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. The ground mass is very fine.

  “I’m going to step off the LM now,” he said, still holding on to the rail with his right hand.

  At 9:56:15 p.m. Houston time, he reached out with his booted left foot, hesitated a moment—scientist Thomas Gold’s insistence that the moon was covered with a deep layer of dust, though obviously discounted by the landing, was still in the back of his mind—then gingerly stepped onto the surface of the moon.

  He said, “That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind.”

  Armstrong hadn’t spent much time before or during the flight thinking about what his first words would be—only after the landing did he decide. Several people, including his crewmates on the way to the moon, had asked him if he knew what he’d say, but he’d deflected the question. “Not yet, I’m thinking it over” was his usual reply. He’d meant to say “one small step for a man,” since without the indefinite article, the line didn’t make sense—man and mankind meant essentially the same thing. But he either forgot or misspoke. In any case, his statement would be both praised for its elegance and criticized for its blandness. Armstrong would later express the hope that “history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended,” since without it, the statement was, he said, “inane.”

  On CBS’s telecast, where the words FIRST STEP ON THE MOON hung above Armstrong’s shadowy TV image, Cronkite didn’t seem to notice the omission. “Well,” he said, “for thousands of years now, it’s been man’s dream to walk on the moon. Right now, after seeing it happen—knowing that it happened—it still seems like a dream.”

  All over the world, people stopped what they were doing and watched the images from space, vicariously experiencing the adventure. In casinos in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and elsewhere, gamblers and dealers at blackjack tables gazed at TVs set up just for the broadcast. At airports throughout the world and many train stations, hurrying commuters paused. In New York’s Central Park, ten thousand watched on giant screens; bars and restaurants throughout the United States and in much of the free world showed the broadcast. In Warsaw, several hundred Poles crammed into the lobby of the U.S. embassy to see it. Even the pope, at his summer villa, sat mesmerized in front of a TV. Despite the turmoil of the time, for one day, the billions of inhabitants of Earth shared the same sense of yearning and wonder as a human walked on the satellite above them, so far away.

  Though several Communist countries aired the live telecast, including Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, it wasn’t shown publicly in the USSR, China, North Korea, or North Vietnam. But in a Soviet military center in Moscow, ten cosmonauts gathered early in the morning to listen to radio transmissions, watch it on TV, and, with a mixture of envy and admiration, applaud Armstrong as he stepped onto the surface. A few days later, they would drink a toast to the safe return of the Apollo 11 crew.

  In the harsh light of the lunar dawn, Armstrong moved his right foot onto the surface and stood fully on the ground. “The surface is fine and powdery,” he said, “and I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It adheres in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots.”

  He bounced up and down a few times, then finally let go of the LM’s handrail and began walking, tentatively. He assured Mission Control that there was no problem adjusting to the moon’s low gravity; no one had been sure of what it would be like to get around in the cumbersome suits. He found that the best method of moving was a slow lope. Visibility was not a problem; with the low, blinding sun to the east and the bright Earth above, the lighting was “like being on a sandy athletic field at night that is very illuminated with flood lights,” Armstrong would write later.

  Using a “Brooklyn clothesline” pulley, Aldrin sent down a Hasselblad color camera to Armstrong, who began taking photos. Then Armstrong used a handled scooper with a bag on the end to collect some rocks and soil, a contingency sample in case the EVA had to be cut short.

  Twenty minutes after Armstrong’s first step, Aldrin descended the ladder and joined him. “Beautiful view!” he said, standing on
the footpad. The former pole vaulter jumped back up to the last rung just to show how easy it was.

  “Isn’t that something? Magnificent sight out here,” Armstrong said.

  Aldrin looked around and drank in the alien landscape. “Magnificent desolation,” he said. Then he peed in his pants—a lunar first, he would claim later. Fortunately, he was wearing a urine-collection device.

  While Armstrong set up the TV camera on a tripod sixty feet from the LM, Aldrin began experimenting with various kinds of gaits: a two-legged kangaroo hop, a long, stiff-legged skip, and the easy lope Armstrong had settled on. They examined the LM for any fuel leakage or damage but saw none. Armstrong read aloud the words on the plaque attached to the LM leg, then they got back to work. They had several jobs scheduled and not much time to do them—and Mission Control didn’t want them to tax themselves; the memory of those exhausting Gemini space walks was still vivid. Armstrong collected more rocks while Aldrin set up one of the three main experiments, a solar-wind collector.

  Next up was an American flag, placed thirty feet in front of the LM. They pounded in the metal staff about six inches—just enough to keep it standing—then pulled out the telescoping crossbar on top to keep the banner extended. They couldn’t get it out all the way, which lent the flag a wavy appearance. Buzz stood back and saluted it. Five minutes later, there was an interruption to their schedule—a surprise.

  CapCom Bruce McCandless said, “The president of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”

  Richard Nixon had been watching the TV broadcast with Frank Borman. He’d had little to do with the Apollo program, which had come about because of two of his bitter rivals, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, though he’d been gracious enough to phone and congratulate Johnson and Mamie Eisenhower, the late president’s widow. NASA had asked him if he would make a call to the astronauts if they could work it out, and no politician would have refused this stage and this audience. “Hello, Neil and Buzz,” Nixon said. “I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made.” The president kept it short; he congratulated them and ended with “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.”