Somehow, the possibility of germs did not worry me. Maybe that was because I had plenty of other things to think about. Newspaper reporters frequently asked us what the most dangerous part of our trip to the moon would be, and I usually answered, “That part which we have overlooked in our preparations.” In other words, if we knew something was really dangerous, we would spend more time practicing that, but in the meantime we might overlook some little detail that no one had thought about, and which could be most dangerous of all. When I thought about our eight-day voyage, it seemed to me that there were eleven major events along the way:
1. LAUNCH. Obviously a hazardous time, with gigantic engines spewing out high-temperature exhaust gases, and terrific wind blasts as the rocket ascended.
2. TLI. Trans-lunar injection meant firing the Saturn V’s engine for the final time, putting us on a course which would barely miss the moon three days later.
3. T&D. Transposition and docking was the process by which I would fly the command module out in front of the Saturn V, turn around and dock with the lunar module nestled in the Saturn’s nose, and pull the lunar module free.
4. LOI. Lunar-orbit insertion was the process of slowing down enough to be captured by the moon’s gravity, but not slow enough to crash into it.
5. LUNAR-MODULE DESCENT. This was a tricky time for Neil and Buzz, to make sure they came down at exactly the right spot on the moon.
6. LANDING. Could be very dangerous; we simply didn’t know. Fuel tanks would be near empty. Dust might make it hard to see. The surface might be too rough.
7. EVA. Extra-vehicular activity—walking on the moon—might be very tiring. Neil or Buzz might fall down and injure himself or his equipment. There might even be potholes or underground weaknesses which would cause the surface to collapse under their weight.
8. LIFT-OFF. Neil and Buzz’s engine had better work, or they were stranded forever.
9. RENDEZVOUS. The most complicated part of all. There were eighteen different types of rendezvous which could result if various things went wrong. A lot of them involved my rescuing Neil and Buzz.
10. TEI. Trans-earth injection meant igniting the command module’s engine to cause us to speed up enough to break the moon’s tug of gravity and send us on our way back to earth.
11. ENTRY. We had to dive into the earth’s atmosphere at precisely the right angle. If the angle was too shallow, we might skip back out of the atmosphere and miss the earth entirely. If too steep, we could burn up.
These eleven were the major events, and they were hooked together like a fragile daisy chain looped around the moon. If one broke, the whole chain was useless. Of course, our friends on the earlier flights had tried out as many of them as possible. Wally Schirra’s crew on Apollo 7 had checked out the command module. Frank Borman on Apollo 8 had taken the command module all the way to the moon. Jim McDivitt and his Apollo 9 crew had test flown the lunar module. Finally, Tom Stafford and Apollo 10 had conducted a rehearsal in lunar orbit, including everything but a landing.
The thing that made our flight different, in addition to the landing itself, was that this was what the whole world had been waiting for, ever since President Kennedy had said, eight years before, that we were going to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. Flying in space was spooky enough, and I had been nervous before Gemini
10. But this time it was a different feeling. Gemini 10 had felt like a small local event compared to Apollo 11. This time I felt a great pressure on me, a pressure to not make any mistakes, because the whole world was watching. If the crew made mistakes, we would make not only ourselves look ridiculous, but also our whole country. I felt this pressure very keenly, as our launch day of July 16, 1969, approached.
And, of course, I continued to make mistakes, as all humans do. I remember one night flying from Dover, Delaware, to Houston, Texas. As I passed over the familiar terrain, I glanced down at the twin cities of Baltimore and Washington, where I had gone to high school and where my mother still lived. I tried to find my old school and just about had it located when I suddenly realized I wasn’t looking at Washington at all, but at Baltimore. Somehow I had turned the two cities around in my mind. And this guy, who couldn’t tell Washington from Baltimore when directly overhead, was about to navigate to the moon and back. No harm done, of course, but still … it made you wonder.
We also had a hundred little things to take care of before we flew, such as designing a mission emblem and naming our spacecraft. NASA wasn’t too fond of names for spacecraft, and during the Gemini program we had used numbers only (like Gemini 10), but now we had two spacecraft, and we couldn’t call them both Apollo 11 on the radio, so we needed names. Apollo 9 had called theirs Gumdrop and Spider, which I thought were neat names because the command module was shaped like a gumdrop and the lunar module did look sort of like a spider. But for Apollo 11 we wanted something which sounded a little more important. We also wanted an emblem which didn’t show the spacecraft themselves but which somehow said our country was making a peaceful landing on the moon. Our country’s symbol is the eagle, and one night I traced a landing eagle out of a bird book, and sketched the moon underneath the bird, with the earth in the background. I made a mistake about the direction from which sunshine would be striking the earth. The earth should have looked like
but I drew it like
, and nobody discovered the mistake until after the flight. We all liked the eagle, but he didn’t look too peaceful until someone suggested we put an olive branch, the symbol of peace, in its claws. Now we had our emblem. From here it was an easy step to name our lunar module Eagle, but the command module was a more difficult choice. Finally we settled on Columbia, after Christopher Columbus, who discovered America.
When July arrived, Neil, Buzz, and I moved from Houston to Cape Kennedy, where we stayed in special rooms prepared for us. The idea was that we could stay away from most people and not catch their germs, so we wouldn’t get sick at the last minute. Of course, we still had to be near a lot of people every day as we worked. We also had our own cook, who tried to get us as fat as possible before launch day. One time President Nixon wanted to come have dinner with us, but a NASA doctor said he shouldn’t because we might catch his germs, and he didn’t come. I thought that was pretty silly.
The last couple of days before launch I also had some fun, flying a T-38. The purpose was not to have fun but to do some aerobatics and cause the fluid in my inner ears to slosh around. This sloshing was to imitate space, where weightlessness would cause the fluid in our inner ears to float. It wasn’t a very good imitation, but it was better than nothing, and we wanted to do whatever we could to accustom our bodies to space. Occasionally an astronaut had become sick to his stomach in space, and we thought that doing aerobatics might help prevent this. Anyway, I did a lot of loops and rolls, and I felt fine. I was ready to go to the moon.
11
Deke Slayton woke me up at four o’clock on the morning of July 16, 1969. Gemini 10 had been launched in the afternoon, but Apollo 11 was scheduled for an 8:32 a.m. departure, and we had a lot of things to do before then. I started with a quick shave and a shower, followed by a very brief physical exam. Then I joined Neil and Buzz and a couple of friends for the astronaut’s traditional launch-day breakfast of steak and eggs. It was a bigger breakfast than I normally eat, but steak is good any time. After breakfast, I returned to my bedroom and brushed my teeth really well. I also finished packing up my clothes. Some of them were to be delivered to my home in Houston and others were going into the germ-proof laboratory in which we would live for two weeks if we really did bring back some moon rocks.
The next step was to get dressed in our pressure suits and make sure the suits weren’t leaking. This procedure took nearly an hour, and then we were ready to make the eight-mile trip to the launch pad. As we left our building, several hundred people who had worked on our spacecraft were there to say goodbye, waving and shouting. Inside our sealed bubble helmets, we co
uldn’t hear what they were saying, but we did smile and wave back. Then we climbed aboard a small van and headed for the launch pad. Tourist traffic was bumber-to-bumper and barely moving, but our van was in a special lane and we sailed on past the tourists and turned off the highway onto a small access road. We could tell from the blue sky that it was a pretty day, and we knew (because it was July in Florida) that it was hot, but inside our suits all we could feel was the cool flow of oxygen. As we approached the Saturn V, I got my usual feeling of awe as I looked up at it. It was a monster! Over three times as tall as a Gemini-Titan, taller than a football field set on end, as tall as the largest redwood tree, it was really impressive, and the closer we got, the bigger it seemed.
As our van pulled up next to the launch-pad elevator, I noticed a strange thing. Every time I had been here before, the place had been a beehive of activity, with swarms of workmen everywhere, getting things ready. Now their work was done, and the place was deserted, with not a soul in sight. It was like visiting a deserted city. Also, the rocket looked different today. Filled with kerosene fuel now, plus the super-cool liquid oxygen and hydrogen, it was steaming in the sunshine. Its sides were coated with ice, where the moist Florida air came in contact with the freezing-cold skin of the rocket in the vicinity of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks. This steaming ice somehow made the rocket seem alive.
As our elevator finished its brief journey, I realized that our trip to the moon had already begun. We had left the surface of the earth, which of course was itself hurtling through space in its orbit around the sun. As I got off the elevator, 320 feet above the Florida sand, I could look out and see the beautiful beach and the calm blue Atlantic. If I closed my right eye, that is all I saw. But if I reversed the process, and closed my left eye, all I could see was machinery—a huge pile of it, rocket and gantry and cables and pipes all jumbled together in confusion. It was quite a contrast. I hoped someday to get back to the beach and a simpler life, but for the next eight days, part of this machinery would be my home, and I must concentrate on it.
As Neil, Buzz, and I walked across a narrow bridge between the elevator and Columbia, our command module, we were greeted by a small team of men who would help us get aboard Columbia and then lock the hatch behind us. The team leader was Guenter Wendt, and it was an astronaut tradition to play a joke on him on launch day. For the past month, Guenter had been telling me what a great fisherman he was, and how large the trout were that he was accustomed to catching. I had located a tiny trout, the smallest one to be found, and had had the smelly thing nailed to a wooden board with a sign saying “Guenter’s Trophy Trout.” I took it out of a paper bag I had been carrying and presented it to Guenter as I climbed on board, and we both had a good laugh. Years later, Guenter told me he still had it in his deep freezer, which I guess is the only place to keep an uncured fish.
Once inside Columbia, the three of us had some last-minute checks to make while Guenter and crew were departing, and then it was time for us to go. I was lying in the right-hand couch, with Buzz in the center and Neil over on the left side. If the Saturn blew up, Neil could twist a handle he held in his left hand and our spacecraft would be lifted (by three small rockets on our nose) up and away to safety. At least that was the way it was supposed to work. If during the next eight days, everything worked as advertised, then our job would be fairly simple. But I doubted that every last piece of machinery would work perfectly. There were simply too many things that could go wrong. I guessed that our chances of actually carrying off the entire flight as planned were about even. But there was no time left for worrying about such things, for now the voice on the radio was counting down to lift-off. At nine seconds before lift-off, the five first-stage engines of the Saturn ignited, and the people on the ground checked their power as it was increased to the lift-off thrust of seven and a half million pounds. When everything looked O.K., the clamps holding us to the launch pad were released, and we were on our way.
There was no doubt in my mind, either, for right away the rocket engines began jerking back and forth, swiveling to keep us in balance as we climbed. We felt this as little sideways jerks, like sometimes, when you first start out on a bicycle, you have to jerk the wheel back and forth to prevent tipping over. Once you pick up some speed, on a bicycle or in a rocket, you can steer more smoothly. But the first few seconds of the Saturn V were jerky and very noisy, and I was glad when they were over. As we climbed out over the Atlantic, I noted with satisfaction that all my dials and instruments were normal, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that Neil and Buzz were also pleased with what they saw. Buzz was checking with our computer, which indicated we were on the right flight path. After two and a half minutes, the first stage shut down and fell off into the sea, and the second stage, with its own five engines, took over. At nine minutes they, too, had finished their job and were discarded, and we were left with the single engine of the third stage to see us safely into orbit. Finally, at eleven minutes and forty-two seconds after liftoff, we arrived in orbit, one hundred miles up at a speed of 18,000 miles an hour. The first big hurdle was behind us. Only ten more to go!
In the three short years since Gemini 10, I had forgotten how beautiful the view was, as clouds and sea glided silently by my window in the pure sunlight. We were upside down, in that our heads were pointed toward the earth and our feet toward the black sky, but since we were weightless, it didn’t really matter which way we were pointed. We had picked this direction because it allowed our navigational instruments, which were in the belly of Columbia, to point at the stars. Before we left the relative safety of earth orbit, we wanted to make sure that our navigational equipment was working properly, and that meant using our sextant to sight on two stars. When it came time for me to make these star sightings, I remembered a bet I had made with one of the simulator instructors. If I took a perfect sighting, the computer would tell me that my error was 00000. We called this reading “five balls.” If my reading was less accurate, the computer would start adding numbers in place of the zeros. I had bet a cup of coffee that my first reading would be perfect (00000), and the instructor had bet that I would be off by two one-hundredths of a degree (00002). When I took my sighting, I got my answer: 00001, four balls one. It was a tie, and I called Houston and said, “Tell Glenn Parker down at the Cape that he lucked out. He doesn’t owe me a cup of coffee.” I’m sure the people in Houston didn’t have the vaguest idea what I was talking about, but they didn’t admit that, and said simply that they would pass the information on.
We were over Australia now, exactly one hour after liftoff, and all our machinery seemed to be working perfectly. We would have one more earth orbit to make sure, and then we would be on our way to the moon. We spent the time checking as much equipment as we could, just as we had agreed to do months before in meetings with the various experts. When the time came, on our second pass over Australia, Houston said, “You are go for TLI,” which meant that we had permission to ignite the Saturn’s third-stage engine for the second and last time. It would increase our speed from 18,000 to 25,000 miles per hour, and we would have broken the bonds of earth’s gravity. When the moment came, and the engine ignited, I felt both relief and tension. Relief because without it we would never reach the moon, and tension because now we were committed, and turning back would be almost impossible. The thirdstage engine of the Saturn had a character all its own. The first stage had been very busy, steering from side to side, while the second stage had been as smooth as glass. The third stage vibrated quite a bit, not from side to side but with a choppy fore-and-aft motion which was felt as almost a buzz. The engine’s thrust pushed us back into our couches gently, with a force of slightly less than 1 G. It was a marvelous machine, which took liquid hydrogen stored at —423° and liquid oxygen at—293° and burned them seconds later at over 4000°. For almost six minutes we enjoyed this ride, and then the engine shut down automatically, and our computer told us we were headed toward that empty point in the sky wher
e the moon would be three days from then. “Hey, Houston,” said Neil, “that Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.” It was hard to believe that we had passed our second hurdle already. I bet that many of the one million people who were at Cape Kennedy to watch our launch were still caught in the post-launch traffic jam.
Worrying about Apollo 11, before it even started
Our first glimpse of Eagle, nestled in the top of the empty Saturn
Eagle gets a chance to try its wings
Up close, the moon doesn’t look too friendly
… but it sure looked strange
A most famous picture taken by Armstrong of Aldrin. (See Armstrong’s reflection in the visor?)
A strange but beautiful setting for the American flag
A head-on view of Columbia, my happy home for eight days
The most welcome sight of my life. Neil and Buzz returning to Columbia from the surface of the moon
People usually guess wrong and say that this is a picture of the moon. It is really the earth but they are not accustomed to seeing the earth as a slim crescent
Journey’s end. The three of us inside the mobile quarantine facility, listening to the President
Inside Columbia, it was now time to switch our seats. I moved from right to left, with Neil now in the center and Buzz on the right. It was time for transposition and docking, the maneuver by which we would attach Columbia to Eagle, nose to nose. To do it, I had to fly Columbia away from the Saturn, and then turn around and come back and dock with Eagle. It was my first chance to fly Columbia, and it felt good. After separating and turning around, I approached Eagle, which looked like a mechanical spider crouched in its hole atop the Saturn. I brought the two vehicles together gently, with a slight bump as Columbia’s docking probe mated with Eagle’s drogue. Then I slipped down out of the couch and into Columbia’s tunnel, removing the docking probe as I went. I connected a couple of wires, and now Eagle was receiving electricity from Columbia. The next step was to throw a switch which separated Eagle from the Saturn and allowed Eagle and Columbia to float free. The poor old Saturn was finished now; it was an empty carcass destined to orbit the sun.
Flying to the Moon Page 10