After each of them had a quick shower and shave, the three astronauts walked to the rear of the Airstream trailer, where the president was waiting outside to talk to them through a small window. “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” he said, and on a hopeful note, he added, “As a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together.” Then it was on to Pearl Harbor, where a cargo plane waited to take the astronauts to Houston.
The second evening on the carrier, Collins entered the command module through the tunnel connecting it to their trailer, and with a ballpoint pen, above the sextant mount on the wall of the lower equipment bay, he scrawled this legend:
Spacecraft 107—alias Apollo 11
alias “Columbia”
The Best Ship to Come Down the Line
God Bless Her
Michael Collins
CMP
Back in Houston, Steve Bales had left after the ascent shift, his last one on Apollo 11. He went home and slept for a long time. The next day, he drove back to work and walked into the staff support room. Jack Garman was there. Bales walked over to Garman, shook his hand, and said, “Jack, thanks for everything.”
Then the two engineers got back to their jobs. At that point, the Apollo 11 crew was still in space, and Garman was providing backroom support for the onboard computer. Bales had to start preparing for the next mission, Apollo 12, which was scheduled for a moon landing in November. But before he did, he called his parents in Iowa. They were enormously proud of the part he’d played in the flight, but his mother said what made her the happiest was that they’d finally been able to see him in some of the live TV shots of Mission Control. Until the landing, they’d never been able to spot their boy.
The night of the splashdown, there were parties up and down NASA Road 1 and at almost every bar and restaurant in the vicinity. The flight controllers gathered at the Singing Wheel. At the Nassau Bay Resort, three thousand NASA workers gathered around the large swimming pool, drinking and feasting on barbecue while bikini-clad go-go dancers gyrated to the accompaniment of a rock band called the Astronauts. Many of the guests ended up in the pool, fully dressed; at some point late in the festivities, the hotel piano was thrown in. At four a.m., police officers gently rounded up the last of the revelers.
The Fagets, Gilruths, Lows, and Krafts had dinner together at one of their favorite restaurants, Mike’s Rendezvous, in the nearby town of Algoa, southwest of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Along with other NASA folks there, they celebrated the successful mission—and the successful answer to President Kennedy’s challenge issued eight years ago. America, and the NACA-nuts, had triumphed.
On Sunday, July 27, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins arrived in the large quarantine facility at the Manned Spacecraft Center to find a flood of goodwill letters and messages from around the world. One telegram of congratulations began “Dear Colleagues” and was signed by every living cosmonaut who had flown in space. The Cold War had been thawing for a while and would continue to do so.
The astronauts and a dozen or so others—doctors, chefs, technicians, a NASA PR officer, a journalist, even a janitor—spent the next two weeks there. Between daylong debriefs and endless postflight reports and reviews, they unwound in various ways, from making phone calls and having window visits with their families to watching recent Hollywood movies shown on a large screen. During their stay, several mice had been injected with lunar soil to test for negative reaction; when none of them died and the astronauts and the dozen or so other people in the facility with them didn’t get sick, it was determined there was no risk of contamination. At nine p.m. on Sunday, August 10, they were all allowed to leave the facility and resume their lives.
After spending some quiet time reuniting with their families at home, the astronauts couldn’t avoid the spotlight. There were parades galore, including the traditional ticker-tape celebration down Broadway, and countless parties, dinners, and celebrations, with interviews and press conferences sandwiched in. In mid-September, the crew addressed a joint session of Congress. Then it was a round-the-world goodwill tour with their wives: twenty-eight cities in twenty-five countries in thirty-eight days, meeting kings and queens, shahs and dictators, presidents and prime ministers. By the time the crew returned home, they understood that their lives would never be the same.
A few years after he walked on the moon, Neil Armstrong agreed to appear in a documentary. The filmmakers shot his scenes one afternoon at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center museum in Huntsville, Alabama, where von Braun, his Peenemünde team, and fifteen thousand other Americans had developed the Saturn V that took Armstrong and his shipmates to the moon. After the film crew had interviewed Armstrong and packed up and left, museum director Ed Buckbee, whom Armstrong had known from the days when Buckbee was a public affairs official with NASA, asked him what he’d like to do: Hold a press conference, sign some books, meet the press? Armstrong said he just wanted to look through the museum. Buckbee took him around.
When they got to the lunar-module simulator, which the museum had received from NASA—the same one Armstrong had trained on for Apollo 11 at the Manned Spacecraft Center—Armstrong stopped. He said, “Can I get in?”
“Sure,” Buckbee said.
Armstrong stepped in, moved over to the commander’s position, and looked over the control panel. He flicked on the power. “Let me see if I remember my procedures,” he said, and for the next forty minutes, he flipped switches, pushed buttons, and maneuvered his hand controllers as he went through a few simulations. When he was done, he turned the power off, got out, thanked Buckbee, looked through the rest of the museum, and headed home.
Epilogue
Max, they’re going to go back there one day, and when they do they’re going to find out it’s tough.
Bob Gilruth to Max Faget
In the three and a half years after Apollo 11, NASA sent six more manned spaceflights to the moon. They all came back, though the crew of Apollo 13 never landed. In fact, they barely escaped with their lives after an oxygen tank exploded during the translunar leg and critically damaged the service module. It wound up being NASA’s finest hour, as Mission Control came up with ingenious solutions to one life-threatening problem after another.
By December of 1972, when the last Apollo flight lifted off from the lunar surface, the American public had become bored with moon trips. Not only had the national goal—to beat the Soviets to the moon—been reached, but NASA’s extraordinary preparation and readiness resulted in increasingly fewer problems and perceived dangers. They’d made each of the last few missions seem like a walk in the park. Funding for the agency had been falling for years, and after the Apollo 11 mission, it plummeted dramatically. From a high of 4.41 percent of the total U.S. budget in 1966, it dropped to under 1 percent in 1975, and down to under half a percent in 2013.
Despite its meager budgets, and though the agency’s accomplishments never matched its dreams and formal proposals, NASA continued to launch men—and, eventually, women and minorities—into orbit to conduct research. So did the Soviets, who established the first space station, Salyut, in 1971; the United States answered with Skylab in 1973. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1975) was the first joint U.S.-USSR space mission (and it allowed Deke Slayton, his heart problem resolved, to finally fly into space). Both nations, along with three other space agencies, united to launch the International Space Station in 1998. There was also NASA’s space-shuttle program, consisting of five operational Orbiters that flew 135 flights from 1982 through 2011. (The Columbia and Challenger tragedies in 1986 and 2003, respectively, were grim reminders of the dangers of space flight.) In 1974, China launched its own space station, Tiangong, and beginning in 2003, it sent humans into space aboard several Shenzhou spacecraft.
Because it’s safer and cheaper, unmanned space flight has become the standard mode of exploration beyond Earth. Robotic probes have flown by, around, and sometimes onto every planet in the solar system a
nd some of its moons and asteroids. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 made the grand tour of the four large outer planets with flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012; its sibling will do the same soon.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, interest in space and human space flight began to increase. NASA announced a new launch system, plans for a crewed mission to orbit the moon in 2022, and eventually a lunar-orbiting space station from which it will send a manned mission to Mars sometime in the early 2030s. (NASA may partner with other nations to do this.) Several commercial space ventures have also been started, the most prominent being SpaceX, which has announced its own Mars expedition. The future of the space industry—including tourism, mining for rare metals on planets and asteroids, and other potentially profitable businesses—appears limitless.
“Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time,” wrote Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan in 1999. “President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s.” History has supported his observation; in the half a century since he climbed into his lunar module, no one has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. But a new spirit of space exploration is in the air. “Man has always gone where he has been able to go,” Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins told Congress in 1969. As long as some part of us remains human, we always will.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bill Barry and his superb group of historians at the NASA History Office, particularly Liz Suckow, who went above and beyond the call of duty; Sam Cavanaugh at SMU’s Fondren Library; Brian McNerney at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum; Jennifer Manger at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Lauren Rose Meyers at the University of Houston–Clear Lake; Fordyce Williams at the Clark University Archives; Sultana Vest, Crystal Brooks, and Sylvia Aguillon at the Dallas Public Library; and Aaron Purcell and his excellent Special Collections staff at Virginia Tech, particularly Laurel Rozema, for their help with the Robert R. Gilruth Papers and the Christopher Kraft Jr. Papers.
I’m especially indebted to all the people formerly of NASA and otherwise whom I interviewed either in person or on the phone; all were unfailingly gracious and helpful: John Aaron, Buzz Aldrin, Steve Bales, Alan Bean, Ed Buckbee, Bob Carlton, Jerry Carr, Maurice Carson, Mike Collins, Maddie Crowell, Walt Cunningham, Jerry Elliott, Chuck Friedlander, Jack Garman, Dick Gordon, Fred Haise, Bill Helms, Albert Jackson, Sy Liebergot, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Edgar Mitchell, Sam Ruiz, Joe Schmitt, Rusty Schweickart, Reuben Taylor, Tom Weichel, and Al Worden.
Individuals to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude are Jenny Arkinson and Mary Garman, Steve Bales, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Rebecca Wright, Asif Siddiqi, Carol Faget, Walt Cunningham, Bob Carlton, Glynn Lunney, Bob Carlton, Albert Jackson, David Whitehouse, and Mike Collins. Brent Howard planted the idea for this book; when it refused to leave my head, I knew it was the right one.
Thanks to Alex Shultz and Rachel Donovan for interview transcriptions; Todd Hansen, Ellen Kadin, Kathleen and John Wainio, and Marcia Cunningham for reading and commenting on chapters, and Marcia for her excellent research; Matt Polomik and Dave Hamon, who read for accuracy—I can’t think of anyone who knows more about NASA history; and Melissa Shultz for reading every word and helping to make this so much better.
My literary agent, B. J. Robbins, is as good as they get and a friend to boot. At Rain Management Group, Michael Prevett is a longtime friend and film-rights facilitator—no one in Hollywood is better. Publicist Nicole Dewey’s team at Shreve Williams was a joy to work with.
At Little, Brown, thanks to publisher Reagan Arthur and editor John Parsley for believing in this from the start; editor Philip Marino for taking over and steering the book to completion and his assistant Anna Goodlett for her help; assistant publicity director Lena Little, marketing director Pamela Brown, and rights director Laura Mamelok and their respective staffs (especially Ira Boudah, Katharine Myers, and Nel Malikova) for all their invaluable work; copyeditor extraordinaire Tracy Roe, who put the final polish on the text; designer Gregg Kulick for the wonderful cover; Marie Mundaca for the fine interior design; proofreaders Katie Blatt and Holly Hartman; indexer Anne Holmes; and Ben Allen, production editor, who wrangled all these critters together. It’s not an easy job, and Ben does it superbly.
Notes
Prologue
“called a rocket”: Leonard, Flight into Space, 10–11.
One: Cossacks in Space
“Our aim from the beginning”: Dornberger, V-2, 140.
reach the moon: Wernher von Braun appeared in three Walt Disney Tomorrowland specials: “Man in Space,” March 1955; “Man in the Moon,” December 1955; and “Mars and Beyond,” December 1957.
“almost alien”: Quoted in McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, 141.
“wars of liberation”: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, January 6, 1961.
“anyone could launch”: New York Times, October 5, 1957.
“outer-space arms”: Ibid., October 7, 1957.
“leap into space”: Ibid.
“in the world”: Ibid.
“democracy or slavery”: Missiles and Rockets, November 1957.
back to Russia: Ibid., August 1957.
were “irrelevant”: Quoted in Wasser, “LBJ’s Space Race: What We Didn’t Know Then.”
October 1957: New York Times, October 5, 1957.
“slough away”: Quoted in Baker, History of Manned Space Flight, 87.
part of the Cold War: A half a century later, long after the height of the Cold War, this worry over prestige may appear extreme—a tempest in a teapot. At the time, however, it was a legitimate concern. After the Gagarin flight, the New York Times opined: “The neutral nations may come to believe the wave of the future is Russian; even our friends and allies could slough away.” After John F. Kennedy’s election, an October 27, 1960, article in the New York Times headlined “Post-Summit Trends in British and French Opinion of the US and the USSR” cited a study showing that “current confidence is low in America’s capacity for leadership in dealing with present world problems.” The study stated that both British and French opinion put the USSR “overwhelmingly ahead.” A story in the October 29, 1960, Washington Post on world reaction to the U.S. and Soviet space programs reported, based on polls in Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and Norway, that “in anticipation of future US-USSR standing, foreign public opinion…appears to have declining confidence in the US as the ‘wave of the future’ in a number of critical areas of competition.” For more evidence that the U.S. national prestige was a major concern, see Callahan and Greenstein, “The Reluctant Racer,” 30–31, and Lewis, Appointment on the Moon, 159. For a detailed argument confirming America’s loss of prestige, see McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, 240–41.
damaged America’s: “Reaction to the Soviet Satellite—A Preliminary Evaluation,” Eisenhowerarchives.gov.
“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”: Quoted in Dethloff, Suddenly, Tomorrow Came, 1.
asked Time magazine: Time, January 19, 1959.
immediately after Sputnik: Launius and McCurdy, Spaceflight, 74.
end of the war: Quoted in Caidin, Red Star in Space, 87.
Lutheran boys: Time, February 17, 1958.
“intellectual capabilities”: Neufeld, Von Braun, 97.
“the spaceship has been born”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, 29.
Hitler had hoped for: Two other miracle weapons in early development were the hundred-ton A-10 rocket (which would have been able to reach New York and Washington, DC, and cause terrible destruction) and a “sun gun”—a giant, radio-controlled orbiting mirror that would focus the sun’s rays on Earth and destroy cities.
top scientists died: Neufeld, Von Braun, 154–56; Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, 33; Dornberger, V-2, 168. Dornberger said the 735 killed included “178 of the 4000 inhabitants of the settlement”; his total is repeated by Bergaust, Wernher von Braun,
29, but he gives no source for it. Neufeld wrote that there were 600 workers and 135 Germans killed.
disease, beatings, or execution: Though von Braun was not directly responsible for the use of slave labor, he knew all about it, for by his own admission and the testimony of others, he visited the Mittelwerk many times. But he denied knowledge of the catastrophic living and working conditions. It would be decades before the full truth of his awareness of those conditions—and the fact that he’d visited the Buchenwald camp to pick skilled slave laborers—was revealed publicly. He would also misrepresent his involvement with the SS, insisting that he was forced to join in 1940 by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself (which might have been true), that he wore his SS uniform only once (which was not true), and that his regular promotions (three; he was eventually promoted to major) were routine and that he was notified of them by mail. He and others who knew him—most of them friends—claimed that his refusal to join would have meant his abandoning the work of his life, an argument hard to refute.
“on the winning side”: Daniel Lang, “A Reporter at Large: A Romantic Urge,” New Yorker, April 21, 1951, 82.
his British nanny: Stuhlinger interview, December 8, 1997, JSC Oral History Project.
von Braun and a hundred and twenty-six: Von Braun and Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel, 118.
no entry permits: Lang, “A Reporter at Large,” 76; Stuhlinger interview.
would fail: Time, October 21, 1957.
“no turning back”: Quoted in Schefter, The Race, 34.
Two: Of Monkeys and Men
“It doesn’t really require”: Quoted in Slayton and Cassutt, Deke!, 82.
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