Armstrong thanked him, and both men saluted the flag. Then it was back to the checklist sewn onto each man’s left gauntlet. Armstrong continued to photograph while Aldrin set up the other two experiments: a passive seismometer, which would detect and transmit any lunar tremors, and a set of panels that would reflect lasers aimed from Earth and, when received back, would measure the exact distance from the Earth to the moon. Armstrong decided to visit a crater about sixty-five yards east, and he picked up some interesting-looking rocks around its edge. They would prove to be the most geologically fascinating moon material the mission would return to Earth.
Then it was time to return to the LM. Aldrin was halfway up the ladder when Armstrong called up to him. “Buzz? How about that package out of your sleeve? Get that?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll get it. When I get up there.”
“Want it now?”
“Guess so.”
Aldrin pulled out a small white cloth pouch and tossed it down. They didn’t want to make a big deal out of its contents, but there was one last thing they needed to do. Inside the pouch was an Apollo 1 patch that had belonged to Scott Grissom, Gus’s oldest son; a metal case containing a half-dollar-size silicon disk with goodwill messages from seventy-three countries etched into it; two medals commemorating Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin, a nod of respect to their rivals; and a tiny gold olive branch.
The pouch landed in the lunar dust near Armstrong. With his right boot, Armstrong nudged it under the ladder. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Aldrin said, thinking about Ed White, his squadron mate in Germany who had talked to him about becoming an astronaut. Then Aldrin clambered up to the porch and went through the hatch. After shuttling up the cameras and two airtight rock boxes, Armstrong followed him. Eleven minutes after midnight, he closed and secured the hatch. They pressurized the cabin and stowed the moon rocks—forty-eight pounds of them—then depressurized, reopened the hatch, and tossed out everything they wouldn’t need again: backpacks, heavy boots, a spare Hasselblad, and any refuse they could find, though they couldn’t do much about all the lunar dust they had dragged in on their suits. It looked like charcoal and smelled like wet ashes or spent gunpowder. For what they hoped would be the last time, they secured the hatch and repressurized.
Then it was time for dinner—cocktail sausages and fruit punch—followed by bedtime. Mission Control signed off at 3:24 a.m.
The lunar module was designed for many purposes, but sleeping wasn’t one of them. The two astronauts kept their helmets on to avoid breathing in the moondust, which seemed to be everywhere. Aldrin curled up on the floor, his head on the right side. In the light gravity, he was fairly comfortable, though he couldn’t stretch out fully. Armstrong sat on the ascent-engine cover behind their stations a few feet above Aldrin, leaned his head back on a shelf, and rigged a sling for his feet from a waist tether that hung from the instrument panel. The position was tolerable, and he thought he could sleep there. They were both tired. It had been a long day, but a good one.
Neither of them slept well. They might have if it weren’t for all the warning and caution lights, the many illuminated switches, the light seeping in through the covered windows, and a small telescope that focused a bright light on Armstrong’s face. It was too cold, somewhere around sixty-one degrees, and adjusting the temperature controls only seemed to make it colder. And somewhere near Armstrong’s head there was a loud glycol oxygen pump.
While they drifted in and out of sleep, their thoughts were on the next day. There were several more go/no-go decision points to come in the flight, all of them dangerous, but only one hadn’t been attempted on a previous mission: the liftoff from the lunar surface. And unlike virtually every other system in the LM, there was no redundancy, no backup, for the ascent engine. Its thirty-five hundred pounds of thrust had to work tomorrow or they would be stuck on the moon and die when their oxygen ran out—about another twenty-four hours. The sixteen thrusters, clustered in four groups of four, could muster only one hundred pounds of thrust apiece, and only four of them provided lift; four hundred pounds was not nearly enough to get the five-ton LM off the lunar surface, even in the moon’s minimal gravity. But the engine had been designed to work as simply and reliably as possible. There were only four moving parts and no ignition system or fuel pumps; small explosive charges would open the valves to the tanks, and a pressurized helium system would force the hypergolic fuels together, at which point they would ignite spontaneously, even in the vacuum of space. In tests, this particular engine had never failed—but that was on Earth.
If it failed…Armstrong and Aldrin hadn’t discussed that turn of events, but if it happened, Aldrin had already decided that he’d work on the problem until the lack of oxygen caused him to fall asleep. There were other, much quicker, ways to die: they could depressurize the cabin or go outside, then unplug their spacesuits’ oxygen-inlet hoses or unlock their helmets. In the airless vacuum, they would lose consciousness in fifteen seconds at most, and death would follow a few minutes after as the gases in their bodies quickly expanded and liquids vaporized, leaving shriveled, bone-dry corpses.
Another problem—one that could have been calamitous—was being addressed. As Aldrin had prepared to retire, he’d noticed a small piece of black plastic on the floor. He looked at the rows of circuit breakers on his side and found the broken one. It was part of the ascent-engine arming circuit breaker, which would supply electricity to the engine before they pushed the final button to start it. If this circuit breaker was not pushed in and engaged—and right now it wasn’t—the engine could not be activated. Aldrin realized he must have hit it with his backpack at some point. He told Mission Control. When he was informed that they’d find a work-around for it, he told them he had a plastic felt-tip pen he could use to push the remaining part of the breaker in; it would fit right into the slot. Mission Control told him to hold off until morning.
After the landing the previous day, Kranz had asked Steve Bales and a few other flight controllers to join him in the regular post-shift press conference. Bales almost nodded off in it. He got out as fast as he could and went up to the flight controller lounge, sat down in a chair, and didn’t move for thirty minutes. Then the rest of the descent team started showing up. A few hours later, they all watched the EVA on TV. Once the flag was planted, Bales headed across the hall to the bunk room and quickly fell asleep.
He was on console again for the ascent—he was the only controller on both the descent and ascent phases—and after breakfast in the cafeteria, he walked down to Mission Control to join Glynn Lunney’s Black team. The MOCR was already filling up; so was the VIP viewing room. No one had yet figured out the cause of the 1201 and 1202 alarms, which meant that they might recur during ascent through docking—the onboard computer would be even busier than yesterday. Bales and his team had prepared backup procedures for several computer-failure scenarios. He hoped they wouldn’t be needed.
Twenty minutes before liftoff, Jack Garman, in the staff support room, got on the GUIDO loop. A large MIT team in Boston had studied the problem all night and thought they had the answer—the rendezvous radar. To avoid risking a similar alarm scenario during the ascent, the crew would need to put the radar in the manual position, not the automatic position it had been in during the descent.
All flight controllers hated last-minute changes, but Bales hated them more than most. He said, “What the hell, Jack? Now? Here we are twenty minutes before liftoff, this is our procedure. And we’re gonna change a thing now?”
Garman said, “Steve, they don’t have time to discuss the details. They feel this is absolutely the best way to do it.”
Bales said, “Well…I gotta believe them.” He passed the message on to Lunney. The flight director wasn’t pleased about the late input, but he told the CapCom to share the message with the crew.
At 9:32 a.m., six hours after Mission Control had signed off for the night, the shift CapCom, Ron Evans, gave them
a wakeup call. Liftoff was scheduled for a little after noon, when Columbia would be close overhead. Eagle’s crew spent the next couple of hours preparing, going over checklists, and verifying that the many circuit breakers and switches were in the correct positions. The first change to the schedule was an important one: Evans told them to turn off the rendezvous radar—they didn’t want to take the chance that it would overload the computer again. Then Aldrin used his felt-tip pen to push in the ascent-engine arming circuit breaker. Moments later, Mission Control confirmed that the circuitry was fine.
An hour and fifty-seven minutes before Eagle’s liftoff, Luna 15, the Russian probe, crashed about seven hundred miles northeast of Tranquility Base into the Sea of Crises, under which a mascon lay. According to Soviet plans, a lone cosmonaut was supposed to have landed in the vicinity in the not-too-distant future on a mission that would never happen. Though TASS quickly announced that the research probe had been successful, few in the West believed it. Whether the crash was due to faulty hardware, incorrect or out-of-date lunar-altitude information, or the mascon, no one—not even the Soviets—would ever know.
At 12:37 p.m., after some adjustments had been made to make sure the fuel tanks were properly pressurized, Evans told Eagle’s crew, “You’re cleared for takeoff.”
“Roger, understand,” said Aldrin. “We’re number one on the runway.”
Seventeen minutes later, at 12:54 p.m., Aldrin said, “Nine, eight, seven, six, five”—and then, as both he and Armstrong began to push buttons and flick switches—“Abort stage, engine arm, ascent, proceed.”
Explosive devices separated the ascent stage, the top half of the lunar module, from the descent stage, and the engine fired and lifted them away as dust, debris, and shredded Mylar flew in every direction. Aldrin looked out his window just long enough to see the flag fall to the ground. The liftoff was smooth and swift, and a few seconds later, Armstrong said, “The Eagle has wings,” and the LM pitched over forty-five degrees to begin moving horizontally. “We’re going right down U.S. One,” he said as they passed over crater after crater.
Seven minutes after liftoff, the engine cut off. It had done its job, which was to get Eagle up high enough and going fast enough to overcome the moon’s meager gravity and reach orbit.
Above them, Collins caught sight in his sextant of a small blinking light in the darkness of space: Eagle. Just before Apollo 11 had launched on July 16, he’d received a telegram from a friend: BEST WISHES FOR A SAFE JOURNEY. DON’T FORGET TO WAIT FOR YOUR PASSENGERS WHILE THEY ARE OUT WALKING. He hadn’t forgotten. The thought of having to leave his shipmates and return home alone had terrified him for the past six months. He’d been waiting almost a full day for their return, and he’d been trying not to think about the thousand things that could go wrong with the LM. Fortunately, he’d had little time to worry; there were eight hundred and fifty separate computer keystrokes necessary to effect rendezvous with Eagle, and he’d been busy since breakfast. He’d hardly breathed during their seven-minute ascent. Now, a couple of hours later, he was still on edge. Just in case, he kept his notebook containing the eighteen options available if it failed close at hand. He prayed he wouldn’t have to consult it.
Rendezvous had been successfully performed several times in Gemini and Apollo, but it still demanded several tricky maneuvers and perfectly timed acceleration and braking burns. But Armstrong had achieved the very first docking in space, in Gemini 8, and he had practiced rendezvous and docking many more times for this mission. Over the next three hours, both he and Collins carefully maneuvered their spacecraft to allow Eagle to catch up with Columbia.
As they approached, their relief at the successful launch—and their confidence in the rest of the flight—was evident.
“One of those two bright spots is bound to be Mike,” Armstrong said.
“How about picking the closest one?” said Aldrin.
“Good idea,” said Armstrong.
The alignment looked good, so he engaged the three small capture latches and flipped a switch to draw the two spacecraft together. But the alignment had been off, maybe by fifteen degrees, and the LM started yawing dangerously to Collins’s right. The automatic retraction cycle took six to eight seconds, and Collins couldn’t stop it or release the LM. If Eagle continued to twist around, the docking equipment might be damaged, and they’d have to try a tricky EVA of both crewmates from Eagle to Columbia. Collins worked his right-hand controller and managed to swing Columbia around with Eagle until they were aligned and he heard a bang and the docking latches slammed shut. They were safely docked.
Almost two hours later, after Armstrong and Aldrin had disabled several of the LM’s systems and prepared Eagle for its jettison, they doffed their helmets and gloves and crawled through the pressurized tunnel into the command-module cabin. Aldrin came through first. Collins floated up to meet him, and when Aldrin emerged with a big smile on his face, Collins grabbed his head and barely resisted the urge to kiss his forehead. He shook his hand, then Armstrong’s. All three were almost giddy.
They transferred the rock boxes and camera-film cartridges into Columbia and used a small vacuum to clean the moondust they had tracked in. Then Eagle’s crew bade farewell to their ship, Collins flipped a few switches, and Columbia separated from it. The LM would circle the moon until its orbit deteriorated and it smashed into the lunar surface.
At 11:10 p.m., just before Columbia disappeared around the far side of the moon for the last time, the White team’s CapCom, Charlie Duke, said, “You’re go for TEI.”
Behind the moon again, on the command-service module’s thirty-first orbit, it was time for the transearth injection burn of 2:28. It would increase their speed by 2,236 miles an hour, enough to free them from the moon’s gravity and send them back to Earth. Collins keyed in the command, counted down, and pushed the button to ignite the engine. The burn went perfectly, and when the spacecraft came in sight of Earth twenty minutes later, Armstrong said, “Hey, Charlie boy, looking good here. That was a beautiful burn. They don’t come any finer.”
Their course was set for home. Like the voyage out, the transearth coast was uneventful, almost routine. The spacecraft was put into its broadside rotisserie roll to distribute the sun’s heat. Over the next three days, the crewmen caught up on their sleep, did the usual housekeeping chores, listened to the news from Houston, put on a couple of TV shows for the folks back home, and took turns photographing the dwindling moon and the approaching Earth. The charms of weightlessness and the wonder of space were wearing off, and the crew was ready to get back. In the background they heard the steady whirring, gurgling, and humming of the spacecraft and the music cassettes they played; they talked infrequently. Even after the adventure they had just shared, there were no deep or intimate discussions. Though they had worked superbly as a team, they were still not and would never be close friends.
After a brief midcourse correction burn of just eleven seconds, all that remained was to reenter Earth’s atmosphere without burning to cinders; they would be traveling at almost 25,000 miles per hour and would have to slow significantly. That meant entering at the correct angle of attack in the command module—the service module had been jettisoned and would burn up in its own reentry.
At 11:50 a.m. Houston time on July 24, the ninth day of their journey, the eleven-thousand-pound Apollo 11 command module—all that was left of the spaceship’s massive six-and-a-half-million-pound stack of three booster stages and three modules—plummeted through the atmosphere upside down with its heat shield ablating in orange-yellow cinders, deployed its two drogue and three main parachutes, then splashed down hard in the mid-Pacific, about eight hundred and twenty-five nautical miles southwest of Hawaii and just thirteen miles from the prime recovery ship, the carrier USS Hornet. A helicopter dropped an inflatable raft and three frogmen into the water, and one of them threw three biological isolation garments into the open hatch to begin the back-contamination precautions. The astronauts donned the BIG
s, jumped into the raft, and, as rehearsed, began spraying and scrubbing themselves down with disinfectant. They were reeled into the chopper one by one and flown to the carrier, where they were immediately escorted into the Airstream trailer converted into a mobile quarantine facility.
In Houston, almost two hundred people packed into Mission Control for the splashdown. When one of the side display screens showed TV coverage of the astronauts on the carrier, the MOCR doors were opened, men poured in from the other two shifts and from all the SSRs, and the room erupted as the controllers jumped to their feet and everyone cheered, many waving small American flags and puffing on cigars. Then the center screen displayed the text of Kennedy’s challenge—I BELIEVE THAT THIS NATION SHOULD COMMIT ITSELF TO ACHIEVING THE GOAL, BEFORE THIS DECADE IS OUT, OF LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON AND RETURNING HIM SAFELY TO THE EARTH—above the month and year of the speech, May 1961. On the screen to the right, the Apollo 11 emblem flashed below this legend: TASK ACCOMPLISHED…JULY 1969. Those two screens remained up long after everyone had left.
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