by Dan Parry
In addition to his work in the LM simulator, Neil spent a further 34 hours practising descent trajectories, both at the research facility at Langley and in the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle.20 He continued to believe that the LLTV provided the best training despite his accident in May 1968, which prompted modifications to the machine's control system. But after Houston's chief test pilot Joe Algranti was forced to eject from the improved version in December, Chris Kraft and MSC director Bob Gilruth were ready to bar anyone else from flying it.21 Once again the astronauts fought back, Armstrong as keen as anyone to fly it. As the next commander to go into space, and the first to attempt a lunar landing, his opinion could not be overlooked. After further modifications, by June 1969 a new LLTV was ready, and Neil was among the first to fly it.22
Kraft asked him to justify his use of such a hazardous vehicle.
'It's absolutely essential,' Armstrong told him, 'by far the best training for landing on the Moon.'
'It's dangerous, damn it,' snapped Kraft.
'Yes, it is,' Neil replied. 'I know you're worried, but I have to support it. It's just darned good training.'
Kraft received the same response from other astronauts, so 'with our fingers crossed, we let them keep it', but a compromise was reached in that only the commanders of lunar missions were to fly it.23 Neil flew the machine a total of 27 times, more than any other astronaut.24 Buzz never got the chance.
After the flight readiness review of 17 June, Neil, Buzz and Michael transferred to the Cape where they could work at maximum capacity with minimum interference. Having been cleared for launch, Collins moved to Florida 'with my bottle of gin and my bottle of vermouth, and a heavy load removed from either shoulder'.25 Hidden away on the fourth floor of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, the crew were given small, windowless bedrooms that were joined to a shared living room, exercise room, sauna, dining room, kitchen and briefing room. After a hurried breakfast, each morning they would go to the simulators awaiting them in a nearby building and work until lunchtime, when they would attend to piles of sandwiches and phone messages. In returning his calls Michael found that many of the conversations followed a similar theme: '"Oh really, Mrs —, you haven't received an invitation to the launch? Why, I can't understand that, anyone as dedicated to the space program as you have been!" Who the hell is in charge of this anyway,' he would ask himself, 'and why is this broad calling me?'26 His brief lunch over, Collins would climb back into the couch for the next rendezvous workout, knowing that no matter how rickety the simulator computers were, Neil and Buzz probably had it worse.
Difficulties with the LM simulator, and its connections to Houston, began to put Armstrong and Aldrin behind in their tight training schedule. 'The amount of work seemed endless,' Buzz later wrote, 'and, at times, practically insurmountable.'27 There was more talk of delaying the launch to August but neither man openly supported the idea. Yet nor did they seem eager to commit to July. Collins wondered whether they needed time simply to complete minor things or whether they were genuinely unprepared. With several mandatory simulations yet to be completed, it was hard to escape a growing sense of pressure as they tried to get everything done. When the hardware was working satisfactorily, Armstrong tried to wring as much as he could from each training session. He had been involved in the design of simulators since his days at Edwards, and knew that by actively encouraging problems there were useful lessons to be learned.28 Neil wanted to use the LM simulator to do something more than just 'win', as others did. 'They tried to operate perfectly all the time and avoid simulator problems,' he said. 'I did the opposite.'29 Armstrong knew that the occasional 'crash' would reveal useful information about difficult parts of the trajectory. For Buzz, however, a crash wasn't the kind of thing he felt they should be striving to achieve. Aldrin believed they should be mastering not the simulator but the mission.30
Collins recalled that, late one night, Buzz angrily told him they had been replicating a landing when a thruster had stuck open and they had been ordered to abort. Neil did not react immediately, and by the time he tried to take action the computer showed that the LM had already fatally crashed. Michael remembered that Buzz was incensed and, accompanied by a bottle of Scotch, 'kept me up far past my bedtime complaining about it'. Suddenly Neil emerged from his bedroom and entered the debate, at which point Michael crept off to bed, grateful for the fact that in the command module it was just him and the computer, 'and if that son-of-a-bitch mouthed off, I would turn off its power supply'.31 Buzz found that what he referred to as Armstrong's 'communication reticence' was compounded by his own inability to penetrate it.32 At breakfast the following morning, Michael noticed that neither of his crew-mates appeared ruffled after what he assumed to have been a 'frank and beneficial discussion, as they say in the State Department'.33
Occasionally the three of them would train as a team on the elements of the mission they would perform together, such as the launch. By the end of the training schedule, Neil had accumulated 383 hours in the LM simulator, and a further 164 hours in the command module. Aldrin's figures were even higher, at 411 and 182 respectively. As was to be expected, Collins focused almost exclusively on the command module, spending three times as long as Armstrong in studying as many aspects of the spacecraft as he could.34
The final simulation, late on the afternoon of Saturday 5 July, was expected to be a simple confidence-boost for the controllers. Armstrong and Aldrin did not take part and the Mission Control team trained instead with the Apollo 12 backup crew, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. According to Kranz, things were going smoothly when three minutes into the landing Dick Koos triggered a series of computer alarms that had never been seen before. Steve Bales, the 26-year-old guidance officer, suddenly discovered the LM's computer was reporting a 1201 alarm code. A glossary of the LM software showed that 1201 meant 'executive overflow, no vacant areas' – and Bales realised the computer was overloaded. He had no mission rules on how to react to a 1201 alarm, and as more warnings appeared he called his software expert Jack Garman, who was in one of the backroom offices. Both knew the computer was unable to complete some of its tasks, but Bales couldn't tell which of them were being neglected and he urgently advised Kranz to abandon the landing. Kranz quickly agreed. 'If there was one word guaranteed to get your attention in Mission Control,' he wrote, 'it is the word abort.'35
Kranz believed he had given the correct order, but Koos knew otherwise. Whatever the computer's difficulties were, everything else had been working properly. 'This was not an abort. You should have continued the landing,' he told Kranz's team during a subsequent debriefing. Bales was devastated: on the last simulation before launch he had needlessly halted the mission. At first Kranz was angry that they had ended on a failure but he knew the lesson had been necessary.36 That night Bales investigated the problem, and the following morning he worked with various alarm codes in hastily arranged simulations. He added a new entry to the mission rules book, listing a dozen alarms that could prompt an abort. They did not include 1201. The changes were included in the final edition of the book, which was published just five days before the launch. While the crew were familiar with its key points, no-one could be expected to memorise the whole book, and since they were not required to commit the many alarm codes to memory they were not told about the new rule.37
With the training schedule now largely complete, Chris Kraft asked Neil, 'Is there anything we've missed?'
'No, Chris,' Armstrong replied, 'we're ready. It's all done except the countdown.'38
Lingering in the back of Kraft's mind, he later wrote, were memories of the conversation about who would have the final say, the astronauts or Mission Control. But by then he knew there was nothing left to be said. 'We had come at last to this point,' he recalled, 'and for a moment I felt my legs shake.'39
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Armstrong: 'Burning; we're looking good.'
Collins: 'Pitch trim is up at 1.5 degrees, cycling about that, which is a little bit off the simu
lation value. Yaw trim is cycling about zero. Chamber pressure is 95.'
The lunar orbit insertion (LOI) burn began precisely on time. With the service module's engine silently ejecting a bright streak of flame, the spacecraft began to slow and the crew found themselves pushed against their seats as a reassuring sense of gravity briefly replaced weightlessness. When the pressure in the combustion chamber began to rise above its predicted level of 95lb per square inch, the crew realised that the engine was working harder than expected. This meant it would operate for less than the predicted time of six minutes and two seconds, and would be shut down early by the computer. While keeping an eye on the chamber pressure, Collins was also watching the two flight director attitude indicators. Each featured a ball display that allowed the crew to monitor the vehicle's attitude in space.
Collins: 'OK, she's steering like a champ; chamber pressure sneaking up to 100.'
Armstrong: 'We're now predicting 5 seconds early, 05:57.'
Collins: 'Ball number 1 and ball number 2 both right on value. Roll zero, pitch 225, roughly, and yaw 348; and hold.'
Armstrong: '10 seconds.'
Collins: 'OK, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3—'
Armstrong: 'Shutdown.'
The engine cut their speed from 5,600mph to 3,700mph, allowing them to be captured by the Moon's gravity.40 They had now entered an elliptical orbit, taking them around the Moon on a great oval-shaped path that at its highest point carried them nearly 170 miles above the surface and at its lowest brought them down to 60. During the burn, the computer monitored how far they had drifted in the roll, pitch and yaw axes. They could have easily wandered off course. But the computer had successfully kept them on the straight and narrow, and they had strayed by only one tenth of a foot per second in each axis – something that impressed them all.
Collins: 'Minus 1, minus 1, plus 1. Jesus! I take back any bad things I ever said about MIT – which I never have.'
Armstrong: 'That was a beautiful burn.'
Collins: 'Well, I don't know if we're 60 miles or not, but at least we haven't hit that mother.'
Aldrin: 'Look at that! Look at that, 169.6 by 60.9.'
Collins: 'Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!'
Aldrin: 'What – what'd it say ... 60.2.'
Collins: 'You want to write that down or something? Write it down just for the hell of it, 170 by 60, like gangbusters.'
Aldrin: 'We only missed [the predicted highest orbital point] by a couple of tenths of a mile.'
Collins: 'Hello, Moon; how's the old back side?'
With the burn complete, they were free to look out of the windows at the alien landscape below. In the great void of space here was land – like home. Although baked by the Sun, the barren ground appeared coldly foreboding and anything less like home was hard to imagine. A 'withered, sun-seared peach pit' Michael called it. 'There is no comfort to it...its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only.'41 Even its colour was hard to judge. Apollo 8 reported the surface to be black-grey-white, while Apollo 10 described it as black-brown-tan-white.42 Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins had been asked to settle the issue, and to them there appeared to be truth on both sides. The colours varied according to the angle of the Sun. Immediately either side of the region of shadow the ground appeared to be a shade of grey, but once lit by bright sunlight it was more tan, fading to brown and then grey as it shrank into the darkness once more.
Coasting around the remainder of the far side, Neil, Buzz and Michael were still out of radio contact, and for a moment it felt as if the grown-ups had left the building. Free to enjoy the view, the crew looked in amazement at the enormous craters passing beneath them. Their excitement led to unguarded comments that they knew would not be broadcast to the nation – but which were captured by a tape recorder.
Armstrong: 'What a spectacular view!'
Collins: 'God, look at that Moon! Fantastic. Look back there behind us, sure looks like a gigantic crater; look at the mountains going around it. My gosh, they're monsters.'
Armstrong: 'See that real big-'
Collins: 'Yes, there's a moose down here you just wouldn't believe. There's the biggest one yet. God, it's huge! It is enormous! It's so big I can't even get it in the window. You want to look at that? That's the biggest one you ever seen in your life. Neil? God, look at this central mountain peak.'
Armstrong: 'That's kind of a foggy window.'
Collins: 'That's a horrible window. It's too bad we have to shoot through this one, but – oh, boy, you could spend a lifetime just geologising that one crater alone, you know that?'
Armstrong: 'You could.'
Collins: 'That's not how I'd like to spend my lifetime, but – picture that. Beautiful!'
Aldrin: 'Yes, there's a big mother over here, too.'
Collins: 'Come on now, Buzz, don't refer to them as big mothers; give them some scientific name.'
Aldrin: 'It sure looks like a lot of them have slumped down.' [The tops of the craters had collapsed into the pit below.]
Collins: 'A slumping big mother. Well, you see those every once in a while.'
Aldrin: 'Most of them are slumping. The bigger they are, the more they slump – that's a truism, isn't it? That is, the older they get.'
Radio contact with Mission Control was imminent, and not wanting their initial public exchange with Houston to begin with a conversation about ageing mothers, slumped or otherwise, Armstrong changed the subject: 'Well, we're at 180 degrees, and now we're going to want to stop that and start a slow pitch-down.'
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The far side of the Moon had eluded man's curiosity until October 1959 when the first eye-opening pictures were sent home by a Russian probe. Astronomers were taken aback by the far side's heavily cratered landscapes, devoid of seas and strewn with what Collins later described as an 'uninterrupted jumble of tortured hills'.43 Anxious to demonstrate prowess in the emerging space-race, in December 1959 NASA commissioned its own series of probes, named Ranger. Rangers 1 and 2, however, never got beyond short-lived low-Earth orbits, and Ranger 3 missed in its attempt to reach the Moon. Ranger 4 suffered electrical failure, 5 also missed, and for good measure also suffered electrical failure, and 6 was disabled at launch; but Ranger 7 proved, five years later, that NASA could also snap pictures of the Moon. Deliberately plunging towards the lunar surface, before it was destroyed on impact Ranger 7 briefly transmitted TV images that were a thousand times sharper than anything that had been seen through a telescope.44 They revealed not the jagged mountains that appeared in the speculative paintings by Chesley Bonestell, but rolling hills and open spaces. Since boulders littered the ground, it appeared the surface was capable of supporting a spacecraft.
Following Kennedy's challenge to land on the Moon, NASA commissioned the Surveyor series of probes. Designed to carefully examine the nature of the surface, the information they would send home was urgently needed by Tom Kelly's team working on the lunar module. In May 1966, Surveyor 1 gently landed in the Ocean of Storms; equipped with a television camera, it sent back images of a flat area pockmarked by rocks and craters. Surveyor 2 was lost en route to the Moon, but in April 1967 the third Surveyor also successfully landed in the Ocean of Storms. Fitted with a mechanical arm, it managed to dig into the surface, unearthing details about the material below. Surveyor 4 was also lost, but the fifth probe reached the Sea of Tranquility where it investigated the chemical properties of the lunar dust, work that was later extended by Surveyor 6 in the Meridian Bay.
As well as discovering general details about the surface, NASA also needed to identify places that might serve as landing sites for manned missions. The ideal spot would be within easy reach of a spacecraft that was travelling on a free-return trajectory and had little fuel to spare. In practice, this meant finding an area within a narrow band stretching horizontally across much of the middle of the near side of the Moon. The site would have to be away from high hills and deep craters, which might send misleading altitude signals to the landing
radar. It would have to be largely smooth and predominantly flat, and would have to receive a consistent level of sunlight in case the launch were delayed. A lunar day lasts two weeks, and during the Moon's lingering dawn the long shadows cast by the Sun made it easier to spot rocks and craters when looking from above. All of this meant that ideally the landing would be attempted just after local sunrise at a suitable site near the eastern half of the equator. This way, as the Sun moved further west, areas in the western region of the equator would become available once the shadows began to shorten at the first location.
Using telescopes, the Apollo Site Selection Board initially produced a list of 30 potential landing grounds. These were to be photographed from a height of 35 miles by the Lunar Orbiter missions, NASA's third series of probes. In August 1966 Lunar Orbiter 1 sent home medium-resolution pictures of nine of the targets. These included an area in the Sea of Tranquility, later labelled Apollo Landing Site 2 (ALS-2). Lunar Orbiter 2 later photographed a further 11 sites, and also sent back high-resolution images of some of the places inspected by its predecessor, among them ALS-2.45 Some of the pictures were given to the press, and a spectacular image of the crater Copernicus appeared on front pages around the world. Released from the flat pictures taken with telescopes, for the first time the Moon was exposed as a three-dimensional place where towering mountains overshadowed haunting valleys, and empty stretches of wilderness extended for miles in all directions. The photograph gave millions of people a chance to see for themselves what it might be like to study the surface from a pilot's perspective.