Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure

by Dan Parry

  While preparing the two backpacks, Neil and Buzz discovered each had a control button that in all their simulations they had never encountered before. Worse, the remote control unit on the front of Neil's suit could not be secured to his PLSS. The 50- pin connecting cable had always proved tricky in training. Now that he was doing it for real, to Neil 'it began to look like we would never get those connectors made'.27 On Earth the backpacks were worn with protective shoulder pads – but even without these, in reduced gravity they were still comfortable. Eagle's small cabin had been tricky to operate in at the best of times. Now that Armstrong and Aldrin were wearing their PLSSs on top of their bulky suits, there was barely room to move. To Buzz, it felt like they were 'two fullbacks trying to change positions in a tent'.28 They couldn't afford to damage anything in the fragile spacecraft so every move had to be made with great care.

  Collins: 'Houston, Columbia on the high gain. How do you read?'

  Mission Control: 'Roger, Columbia. Reading you loud and clear on the high gain. We have enabled the one-way MSFN relay that you requested. The crew of Tranquility Base is currently donning PLSSs. The LMP [lunar module pilot] has his PLSS on, comm checks out, and the CDR [commander] is checking his comm out now. Over.'

  Collins: 'Sounds good. Thank you kindly.'

  Eventually the men were ready to disconnect their suits from Eagle's oxygen and water supplies. While preparing to switch over to their backpacks, they found that the PLSS cooling units were taking longer to start working than they had estimated. Depressurising the LM also took longer than expected. By the time they finished their preparations it was 9.36pm and they were more than an hour and a half over the time they had estimated for the beginning of their EVA. TV networks around the world were forced to wait for the sensational pictures they had promised their viewers. Without knowing what was holding things up it was hard to know when the moonwalk would actually start. Janet Armstrong suggested the delay was caused by Neil thinking of something suitable to say. Joan passed the time listening to music. Pat Collins found the process frustrating and compared the uncertainty to labour pains. When someone pointed out that Michael would be behind the Moon when the door finally opened, Rusty Schweickart said he'd be back around again, then added, 'It's going to be a long night for these guys if he isn't.'29

  Finally, Buzz was ready to open the hatch, down to the left of his knees. Given its narrow width it would have been impossible for the men to carry the TV camera, tools, flag and package of experiments with them, so these had been stored in compartments on the outside of the LM. Moving about in the awkward, stiff suit, Buzz was surrounded by scores of switches and circuit breakers, each set in a deliberate position. With a great deal of effort he bent down but found the hatch wouldn't open. Having not completely vented the oxygen from the cabin they found that pressure of just a tenth of a pound per square inch was still pushing the hatch shut against the vacuum outside.30 Only by tugging on it could Buzz break its seal and allow the remaining oxygen to escape. Glittering ice crystals were instantly formed, vanishing through the broken seal as quickly as they were created.31 Having successfully turned the handle, Buzz pulled the hatch in towards him – and there, outside, lay the surface of the Moon, now theirs to explore.

  Chapter 14

  A WALK ON THE MOON

  By the time Apollo 11 was ready to launch, few people still believed that heavy objects settling on the Moon would sink into the dust. Yet in preparing to step on to the unfamiliar surface, Neil took the precaution of securing himself to the LM.1 Before sliding through the hatch, he set up the lunar equipment conveyor (LEC), a strap and pulley system that would allow a camera, and other awkward items, to be hoisted to and from the cabin. With one end of the LEC secured to the cockpit and the other to his suit, Neil faced the rear of the cabin. Kneeling down, he pushed his feet out through the hatch until he found the porch at the top of the ladder. After testing his ability to pull himself back inside, Armstrong got down again and began to slide out backwards. Guided by comments from Aldrin, he moved slowly to avoid snagging his PLSS.

  Aldrin: 'OK. You're not quite squared away. Roll right a little. Now you're even.'

  Armstrong: 'OK, that's OK.'

  Aldrin: 'That's good. You've got plenty of room to your left.'

  Armstrong: 'How am I doing?'

  Aldrin: 'You're doing fine.'

  Aldrin: 'OK. You want this bag?'

  Once outside on the porch, the first thing Neil did was throw out the bag, containing empty food trays and other equipment which couldn't be used again. After this he pulled a handle on the left of the porch which opened a compartment built into the hull of the LM beneath Buzz's window. Known as the MESA (modular equipment stowage assembly), it contained the crew's sampling tools and rock-boxes. As its door hinged down it exposed a TV camera fastened to its inside surface and aimed at the foot of the ladder. By closing a circuit breaker on the instrument panel Buzz sent power to the camera, allowing a snowy picture of Neil to be transmitted back to Earth.

  ( )

  The decision to include television cameras on the mission had been controversial from the start. Transmitting and receiving live pictures from the Moon created complications on the ground and required equipment to be added to a spacecraft that was already severely restricted in the weight it could carry. In early 1969 George Low asked Chris Kraft to look into the subject. Kraft was anxious to see 'those first steps live' and tried to do what he could to build the necessary support.2 Gene Kranz's unpredictable communications officer Ed Fendell was given the task of looking at the question in detail, with a view to producing a favourable report. 'I should have given them better direction,' Kraft later fumed.3 At a meeting attended by almost everybody with an interest in the subject, Fendell finished his report with the thought that there was no reason to have television on the Moon. Kraft erupted. 'I can't believe what I'm hearing,' he shouted above a clamour of raised voices. 'We've been looking forward to this flight – not just us, but the American taxpayers and in fact the whole world – since Kennedy put the challenge to us.'4 With the old hands leading the way, the pro-TV camp quickly gathered force and the room soon came round to their way of thinking. Once Armstrong and the crew gave them their support the matter was officially settled. But privately, reservations remained. Referring to it as 'a bloody nuisance of an afterthought', Michael Collins wrote that 'we simply didn't have time to fool around with it'.5

  There wasn't time to develop a colour camera for use on the lunar surface; instead, the LM was equipped with a Westinghouse slow-scan model that shot ten frames a second in black and white. It was fitted with a bayonet mount, designed to allow the lens to be changed by an astronaut wearing a pressure- suit. Television pictures, transmitted via the LM, would be received by the Manned Space Flight Network tracking stations at Honeysuckle Creek in eastern Australia and Goldstone Lake, California. Due to the crew's four-hour rest, as scheduled in the flight-plan, the EVA would begin twenty minutes after the Moon had set at Goldstone. This meant NASA would be principally relying on the facilities in Australia. Honeysuckle was supported by the Parkes Radio Telescope in central New South Wales, which, like Goldstone, was equipped with a giant 210-foot antenna.

  In eastern Australia the landing occurred at 6:17am local time on the morning of 21 July. Although it would be seven hours before the Moon was high enough to be seen from Parkes, this was anticipated in the flight-plan.6 So when the crew decided to drop their rest period, the Parkes technicians feared the whole thing would be over before the Moon had risen above their part of the world. They would have to give way to Goldstone. But as the preparations aboard the LM dragged on, hope returned to Parkes. By the time Neil finally emerged from the hatch, six hours and 22 minutes after the landing, the Moon was just beginning to rise above New South Wales.7 Yet now the Parkes technicians faced a new problem. Parkes scientist John Sarkissian recalled that the winds were so high the huge dish was forced to operate well outside safety limits.8

&nb
sp; The signal from Parkes was sent to Sydney, and there it was converted into a format suitable for domestic television before being distributed to the Australian TV networks. At the same time, it was relayed to a communications satellite over the Pacific and then passed to Houston, where a six-second delay was added in case anything happened to the astronauts. The pictures were then ready to be released to the rest of the world. Parkes, Honeysuckle and Goldstone received television from the Moon simultaneously and Houston briefly distributed the picture from Goldstone and Honeysuckle before deciding for technical reasons to stay with Parkes for the rest of the EVA.9

  ( )

  Before a television audience of 600 million people, a fifth of the human population, Neil slowly climbed down the ladder on the leading leg of the LM.10 The ladder stopped three feet above the ground to prevent it being bent by protruding rocks. In Mission Control the TV picture was projected on to a screen on the front wall, creating a ripple of excitement among Cliff Charlesworth's team of flight controllers.

  Mission Control: 'OK. Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.'

  Armstrong: 'OK. I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It's...the strut isn't collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up.'

  Mission Control: 'Roger. We copy.'

  Armstrong: 'Takes a pretty good little jump.'

  Jumping down from the last rung, Neil found himself standing in the landing pad. Before he went any further he rehearsed the jump back on to the ladder to be sure it wouldn't be a problem later. He then jumped back down into the landing pad.

  Armstrong: 'I'm at the foot of the ladder. The LM foot-pads 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. Ground mass is very fine.'

  Armstrong: 'I'm going to step off the LM now.'

  Still tethered to the cabin by the LEC, Armstrong stepped off the landing pad, placing his left foot on the dust and tentatively shifting his weight. To Buzz it seemed like a 'small eternity' before he heard Neil say anything.11

  Armstrong: 'That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.'

  In the years after the mission, Neil's apparently tautological historic words have become the subject of much debate. Armstrong later said he intended to say 'one small step for a man' and believed he had done so. Yet, despite extended efforts by some to prove the contrary, the 'a' appears to be missing from the sound recording of Neil's transmission. Nevertheless, for most people his message was clear.12

  Armstrong: 'The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.'

  Having put both feet on the surface, for the first time Neil let go of the ladder and disconnected himself from the LEC tether. In front of him stretched an arid desert, bathed in bright daylight beneath a dark night sky. The silent wastes appeared to be tan, but their colour dissolved to shades of grey the closer he looked towards areas of shadow. Armstrong thought the ground beside his feet was a charcoal grey, 'the colour of a lead pencil'.13 Close to the spacecraft, light grey dust lay scattered across small rocks that had been thrown aside during the landing. Further away were two features that could be described as low hills, while several hundred feet to the right of the LM lay a boulder field. Without high ground or a hazy atmosphere to obscure his view Neil could see as far as the horizon, which curved away in all directions. For 360 degrees there was nothing but dust, rocks and craters. Only Eagle offered any relief from the stark landscape, its golden foil and silver-coloured components reflecting the dazzling light like a gleaming beacon of precious metal. Bathed in sunshine, the LM cast depths of shadow of breathtaking blackness.

  Armstrong: 'There seems to be no difficulty in moving around - as we suspected. It's even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It's absolutely no trouble to walk around.'

  Armstrong: 'OK. The descent engine did not leave a crater of any size. It has about one-foot clearance on the ground. We're essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.'

  The airy black and white TV pictures gave Neil a ghostlike appearance, and at first it was hard to make out what was happening. In the Armstrong household, six-year-old Mark heard his father describe the lunar dust, and asked, 'How come I can't see him?'14 But to the technicians at Parkes, the controllers in Houston and fascinated TV viewers around the world, an astronaut was definitely moving about on the surface. The Moon was now within man's reach as much as next-door's back yard. Joan Aldrin clapped her hands and cried, 'I can't believe this.'15

  While the TV pictures might have been a little murky, Neil and Buzz were equipped with a modified Hasselblad 500EL camera, capable of taking pinpoint photographs on 70mm film. Buzz used the LEC to lower the camera down to the surface, and once he had retrieved it Neil secured it to a mount on the remote control unit on his chest.

  Armstrong: 'I'll step out and take some of my first pictures here.'

  Mission Control: 'Roger. Neil, we're reading you loud and clear. We see you getting some pictures and the contingency sample.'

  After taking a series of panoramic pictures while standing at the bottom of the ladder, Armstrong left the shadow of the LM and walked ten feet over to a sunlit area. Here, within the view of the 16mm film camera in Buzz's window, Neil took a tool from a pocket on his left leg and collected an initial sample of dust. He deposited the material into a bag, which he then returned to his pocket. If the EVA ended early, Armstrong still hoped to be able to bring home a small selection of material.

  Armstrong: 'This is very interesting. It's a very soft surface, but here and there where I plug with the contingency sample collector, I run into a very hard surface. But it appears to be a very cohesive material of the same sort. I'll try to get a rock in here. Just a couple.'

  Armstrong: 'It has a stark beauty all its own. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here. Be advised that a lot of the rock samples out here - the hard rock samples – have what appear to be vesicles [small cavities] in the surface. Also, I am looking at one now that appears to have some sort of phenocrysts [crystals].'

  Mission Control: 'Houston. Roger. Out.'

  Aldrin: 'OK. Are you ready for me to come out?'

  Armstrong: 'Yeah. Just stand by a second. I'll move this [the LEC strap] over the handrail. OK.'

  Fifteen minutes after Neil arrived on the surface, Buzz emerged from the hatch, guided and photographed by Armstrong.

  Aldrin: 'OK. Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure not to lock it on my way out.'

  Armstrong: 'A particularly good thought.'

  As Buzz paused on the ladder, television viewers saw a man apparently taking time to reflect. In fact Buzz was relieving himself before jumping down to the landing pad. 'The whole world was watching, but I was the only one who knew what they were really witnessing,' he later remarked.16 Still holding on to the ladder, Aldrin marvelled at the emptiness stretching before him.

  Aldrin: 'Beautiful view!'

  Armstrong: 'Isn't that something! Magnificent sight out here.'

  Aldrin: 'Magnificent desolation.'

  'I felt buoyant,' Buzz wrote, 'and was full of goose pimples.'17 He was intrigued by the lunar dust; comparing it to sand on a beach he found it notably different. When kicking grains of sand, some quickly fall down while others scatter a little further, but Buzz discovered that in doing the same thing on the Moon every grain travelled the same distance. Both men found that as fine as the grains of dust were they had a tendency to stick together, forming clods of material that crumpled under their
boots.18

  Together with his suit and backpack, on Earth Buzz weighed a total of 360lb. On the Moon this was cut to 60lb. Taking his first few steps away from the LM, Aldrin found that it was easier to walk if he leant forward a little. With practice, he was able to move around as comfortably as if he were at home. When Buzz tried to run he felt himself to be much lighter, and realised that if he were to stop suddenly he would topple over. Instead he had to wind down slowly, being careful to avoid rocks near the LM which were slippery with dust. Neil tried jumping a few times but found that the PLSS had a tendency to make him tip over backwards, and after nearly falling he decided 'that was enough of that'.19 In the piercing sunshine, Buzz thought that Neil's pressure-suit gleamed 'like no white I had seen before', making Armstrong stand out on the surface almost as brightly as the LM.20

  Neil found that the suit was largely comfortable and allowed him to move around freely – with the exception of bending down to pick up things from the surface. This had already been established during practice sessions at home, influencing the design of the soil-sample tools. The suits also prevented the men kneeling, and this fact, together with the difficulty of retrieving things with their hands, led to concerns about dropping things. Objects could be scooped up using tools but this was a time-consuming process. 'The suit was cumbersome and bulky and not really easy to operate,' Neil recalled, 'but on the whole, it performed remarkably well. When you think that the surface temperature was something north of 100 centigrade, in terms of the [air] flow and the cooling, it was really doing an excellent job, and allowed us to really do most of the things we planned to do – although perhaps not as quickly as we would have liked to do them.'21

  After familiarising himself with the surface and the suit, Aldrin watched Armstrong remove the cover of the commemorative plaque that was secured between the rungs of the ladder. Since the ladder was attached to the descent stage, the plaque would remain on the Moon.