by Jay Barbree
Neil studied the rugged surface rising toward them. He had made so many simulated runs that he suddenly realized they had overshot their landing mark by four miles. (NASA)
Scientifically it would be great to land next to and explore a crater gouged into lunar soil but Neil quickly ascertained the slope around it was too steep. If Eagle landed on a tilt they could never launch back into orbit.
With not a second to waste Neil realized he was on his own. This was where experience and training came into play and he looked beyond the crater. Landing Eagle was a matter of piloting skills he’d been honing. Against the wishes of Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft, he had spent more time in the Bedstead, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, than any astronaut and now it was paying off. He needed to bring Eagle in to a smooth surface not by hovering and dropping, but by flying, by scooting across the lunar landscape as he had trained in the LLTV. There was only this one chance.
He gripped Eagle’s maneuvering handle and translator in his gloved fists with a touch honed by years of flying the smallest and the largest, the slowest and the fastest—Neil knew the “thin edge” well, hell he had written it, and he had to fly as he’d never flown before. Knowledge, experience, touch—the skill of flying the Gemini 8 emergency from orbit, bringing the X-15 rocket plane in from its Pasadena flyover, ejecting from his crippled jet fighter over Korea, and ejecting from the lunar landing trainer itself seconds before crashing—all of it, everything, came to this one moment.
Neil’s fingers alternately tightened and eased on the maneuvering handle and translator as they sailed downward at 20 feet per second. He nudged the power, slowing to nine feet per second.
He attuned his senses to the rocking motions and the skids, sixteen small attitude thruster rockets kept Eagle aligned throughout its descent. A level touchdown was their ticket to safety, survival, and the return home.
Mission Control listened. They were mesmerized. They were in awe of the voices closing in on the lunar surface. Neil flew. Buzz watched the landing radar, called out the numbers that represented split-second judgment and flying skills.
Buzz was no novice. Jet-speed combat in his F-86 with Chinese fighters over the ugly mountains of Korea had brought him to this point. He had no questions about the pilot next to him. He was most aware of how Neil thought things through thoroughly and then did what he thought was right and he usually had arrived at the correct decision. Of all the pilots he had met and flown with, Buzz knew, without question none came close to Neil Armstrong. He was simply the best pilot Buzz had ever seen.
“700 feet, 21 down, 33 degrees,” chanted Buzz.
“600 feet, down at 19.
“540 feet, down at—30.
“At 400 feet, down at 9.”
“Eagle, looking great,” Charlie Duke chimed in from Mission Control. “You’re Go.”
Despite the confidence of the astronauts’ voices, there was still a problem: No place to land. Rocks, more boulders, surface debris strewn everywhere.
Neil fired Eagle’s left bank of maneuvering thrusters. The larger rockets scooted the lunar module across rubble billions of years old. Beyond the eons of lunar debris, a smooth, flat area.
“On one minute, a half down,” Buzz told him.
“70,” Neil answered.
“Watch your shadow out there.
“50, down at two-and-a-half, 19 forward.
“Altitude velocity light.
“Three-and-a-half down, 220 feet, 13 forward.”
“Eleven forward. Coming down nicely,” Buzz told him.
Mission Control was dead silent. What the hell could they tell Neil Armstrong? Had they tried Deke Slayton would have killed them.
“200 feet, four-and-a-half down.
“Five-and-a-half down.
“120 feet.
“100 feet, three-and-a-half down, nine forward, five percent.”
“Okay, 75 feet. There’s looking good,” Buzz told him as he stared at the obvious place Neil had chosen to land.
“60 seconds,” Charlie Duke, told them.
Eagle had 60 seconds of fuel left in its tanks and no one wanted to think about it. If the descent engine gulped its last fuel before Eagle touched down, they would crash, falling to the surface without power.
What those in Mission Control did not know was that Neil wasn’t all that concerned about fuel. He felt that once under 50 feet it didn’t really matter. If the engine did quit, from that height at one-sixth the gravity, they would settle safely to the ground.
Neil calmly aimed for his new landing spot. He kept one thought uppermost in his mind: Fly. Eagle swayed gently from side to side as the thrusters responded.
Far away, in Mission Control, flight controllers were almost frantic with their inability to do anything more to help Neil and Buzz.
Deke Slayton knew they had to leave the landing to the pilots. But the clock was ticking away precious fuel. Charlie Duke looked at Deke and held up both hands, palms out. He didn’t need to voice the question. Gene Kranz did it for him.
“CapCom, you’d better remind Neil there ain’t no damn gas stations on that moon.”
Charlie nodded and keyed his mike. A timer stared at him. “30 seconds.”
“Light’s on,” Buzz told Neil as he watched an amber light blink the low-fuel signal.
Buzz then intoned the numbers like a priest, steady and clear, “30 feet, faint shadow.”
“Forward drift?” Neil asked wanting to be sure he was moving toward known surface.
“Yes.
“Okay.
“Contact light.”
Eagle’s probe had touched lunar soil.
“Okay, engine stop.
“ACA out of Detent.”
“Out of Detent,” Neil confirmed. The engine throttle was out of notch and firmly in idle position.
“We copy you down, Eagle,” Charlie Duke told them, and then waited.
Three seconds for the voices to rush back and forth, Earth to the moon and moon back to Earth.
Neil had to be certain. He studied the lights on the landing panel to be sure of what they’d just accomplished.
Four lights gleamed brightly—four marvelous lights welcoming them to another world where no human had ever been. Four lights banished all doubt. Four round landing pads at the end of the Eagle’s legs rested, level, in lunar dust.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon. (Composite photograph, NASA)
Neil’s voice was calm, confident, most of all clear, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
It was 4:17:42 P.M. EDT, Sunday, July 20th, 1969 (20:17:39 Greenwich Mean Time).
Charlie Duke spoke above the bedlam of cheering and applause in Mission Control.
“Roger, twainquility—Tranquility,” a shaken and happy Charlie Duke answered. “We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
“Thank you.” Neil permitted himself a grin even though he was doing his best to suppress whatever emotions he felt.
Pure, happy bedlam in Mission Control. (NASA)
In their excitement of the moment Eagle’s crew simply shook hands. It was a defining moment in Neil and Buzz’s lives—possibly in the historic significance of what had just happened.
“As the man who jumped off the top of the Empire State Building was heard to say as he passed each floor, ‘So far, so good,’” Neil told Buzz, turning back to their checklists and their chores. They had no way of knowing how long it was going to take them to settle all of Eagle’s fluids and systems, make their moon lander safe for its lunar stay.
To keep from worrying the public, NASA had hoodwinked the media by scheduling a four-hour rest and sleep period for the moon’s sudden population. But the first two people inside a spacecraft on the lunar landscape would not be sleeping. They would be working feverishly to ensure they could stay long enough to take a stroll on the moon, and Neil looked at Buzz, “Okay, let’s get
going.”
From 218,000 nautical miles Earth watches over Eagle on the moon. (NASA)
TWENTY
MOONWALK
Neil stared out at the alien world beyond his lunar lander’s window. He was surprised at how quickly the dust, hurled away by the final thrust of Eagle’s descent rocket, had settled back on the surface. Within the single blink of an eye the moon had reclaimed itself as if it had never been disturbed, and Neil studied the desolation surrounding himself and Buzz. No birds. No wind. No clouds. A black sky instead of blue.
They had indeed landed on a dead world. A land that had never known the caress of seas, never felt life stirring in its soil, never felt the smallest leaf drift to its surface. No small creatures to scurry from rock to rock. Not a single blade of green. Not even the slightest whisper of a breeze. They were on a world where a thermonuclear fireball would sound no louder than a falling snowflake.
But there was no time for savoring it, or appreciating the science of it all. They had much to do very quickly, and they got busy. Surprisingly in only half the time they anticipated, Eagle had settled gently into its perch on the moon with all its systems purring. Neil and Buzz were ready to open the hatch. That plan to hoodwink the media with a scheduled four-hour sleep and rest period wasn’t needed.
“Of course we wanted to get outside as soon as possible,” Neil told me. “We needed the contingency sample to show we had been there, but we were convinced we’d need several hours to get Eagle’s fluids and systems settled. With all that time passing and nothing happening,” he explained further, “you reporters would have been speculating, guessing about possible problems, and we didn’t want you guys inventing stories.” Again that one-of-a-kind grin. “We wanted you thinking we were sleeping.”
“Guilty,” I acknowledged.
* * *
Neil and Buzz were ready to step onto the lunar landscape, and this reporter believed they were resting. The NBC News team was having dinner, celebrating, when we received the call, “They’re coming out early.”
With Texas beef and delicacies from Galveston Bay left on tables, we beat a path back to our microphones. We were in place to report the first human step on the moon when the last discernible bits of Eagle’s atmosphere rushed pass its hatch’s edges and we heard Neil tell an estimated billion plus listeners, “The hatch is coming open.”
It was obvious NASA had made the correct decision regarding who would be first to leave the lunar lander. Outfitted in his bulky spacesuit, boots, and backpack there was no way Buzz could have maneuvered around Neil to the hatch. The commander simply had to be the first to leave and the last to return. Neil leaned forward, backing out, stopping on the porch with its large handrails leading to the ladder. Before he could begin descending to the moon’s surface, he had to pull a D-ring, which lowered an equipment tray holding things needed for their moonwalk. It was called the MESA, and Neil told Mission Control, “The MESA came down all right.”
“This is Houston. We copy, standing by for your TV.”
The primitive, low-grade black-and-white television camera was located on the MESA, but the billion plus watching back on Earth didn’t care about its quality. They wanted to see anything they could, and an excited CapCom Bruce McCandless told the astronauts, “Man, we’re getting a picture.”
“You got a good picture. Huh?” Buzz questioned.
“There’s a great deal of contrast in it, and currently it’s upside down on our monitor,” CapCom explained. “But we can make out a fair amount of detail.”
It was back to the days of fiddling with early television but Mission Control quickly readjusted the view and an excited McCandless reported, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder.”
Viewers worldwide saw a strange, black-and-white image of Eagle’s front leg with its ladder slanted across a totally dark sky. Below and in the background was a very bright lunar surface. On the ladder was a ghost. The ghost was Neil Armstrong. (NASA)
He moved slowly and steadily as if he had no place to go. The moon had been waiting for 4.6 billion years and Neil was in no hurry. Every move had to be precise, correct, no problems.
Soon he was a step above lunar dirt and he paused, staring at Eagle’s landing footpads and legs. They had been designed to compress with the force of landing, making the ship more stable, bringing its ladder closer to the moon’s surface. But Neil’s piloting skills proved to be the problem. He sat Eagle on the moon so gently there was no collapsing of the pads and legs, and the bottom rung of the ladder was still three-and-a-half feet up.
Way to go, Armstrong, he scolded himself as he dangled a foot over the rung and fell slowly to the footpad beneath him. But before he would take another step, he wanted to be sure he could get back up to the ladder. In the low gravity he sprang with such force he almost missed the bottom rung. He steadied himself. Satisfied he could handle the extra long step, he descended back onto the footpad.
“Okay, I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It’s not collapsed too far, but it’s adequate to get back up.”
“Roger. We copy,” acknowledged CapCom.
“It takes a pretty good little jump,” Neil told them before turning his attention to his dilemma. For some time he had been thinking about what he would say when he actually stepped on the moon. He had thought about one statement he judged had meaning and fit the historic occasion and he ran it by his brother Dean and others close. Neil had not made up his mind.
He told me he was undecided until he was faced with the moment.
He reached up with his gloved hand grasping the ladder, and then turned left, leaning outward. “I’m going to step off the LM now,” he said, lifting his left boot over the footpad and setting it down in moon dust that shot up and outward in a fine spray—a spray that lasted only a quick instant in the absence of an atmosphere. “That’s one small step for man,” Neil said with a momentary pause, “One giant leap for mankind.”
What most didn’t know was that Neil had meant to say, “That’s one small step for a man,” and the loss of the “a” set off an argument for years to come. Had a beep in the transmission covered the a or some other loss of transmission wiped it from our ears, or had Neil nervously skipped the word?
Knowing Neil’s struggles with public speaking, I believe the latter, and with all the excitement and emotions of the moment, I’ve never been convinced Neil himself really knew for sure.
* * *
His mother had told him her only real concern for his safety on the moon was that the lunar crust might not support him. Again Neil tested his weight. Then he told Mission Control, “The surface is fine and powdery. I can pick 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.”
“Neil, this is Houston. We’re copying.”
He stood there rock solid, boots braced for balance, enclosed in the elaborate pressurized exoskeleton that sustained his life in this inhospitable place. It was filled with energy, with supplies of heat and cooling, water, oxygen pressure—a capsule of life created by his Apollo colleagues, and Neil Armstrong stood looking long and hard at this small, untouched world.
He was overwhelmed; his sense and his thoughts set afire with the miracle of being on the lunar surface. He believed that he and Buzz and those who would follow were there for far more than just walking through lunar dust and measuring solar winds, magnetic fields, and radiation levels; all that was window dressing for their real purpose for coming.
It all condensed into every view they had of their fragile, beautiful Earth.
It was suddenly clear to this son of the land once walked by Orville and Wilbur Wright that he was on the moon to look back—to give every single human a clear look at spaceship Earth. In this neighborhood of the universe it was life’s only world. It was encased in
diamond-hard blackness and Neil recognized it mattered little if we were Republican, Democrat, Independent, apolitical, Christian, Jew, Muslin, Hindu, Buddhist, or whomever the hell we liked or disliked. We lived on a vulnerable world and we needed to take care of its very definite resources; on a world where we all would suffer terrifying consequences if we destroyed its ability to sustain us, its ability to foster and nurture the very life we now threatened to contaminate. Neil knew no matter how diligent, how great our effort to protect Earth, it was finite and one day if humans were to survive they would have to move on to new worlds. Helping to achieve that was what he and Buzz and all those who would follow were doing walking on the moon.
Neil stopped his thoughts, forced himself out of his introspection.
He and Buzz had much to do before they could catch a few hours rest and he turned and began walking farther away from the security of Eagle.
He knew with every step he was moving farther from the safety of his landing craft. The longer it would take him to get back the greater the risk, but with every halting step he was gaining confidence.
In one sense it was like learning to walk again—shuffling, stiff-legged yet buoyant, like wading through chin-deep water with his feet striking bottom—floating in low gravity within his spacesuit.
On Earth his exoskeleton weighed 348 pounds. Now on the moon it only weighed 58 pounds, and he told Mission Control, “There seems to be no difficulty in moving around, as we suspected. It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations at 1⁄6G that we performed. It’s actually no trouble to walk,” he told them, adding, “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.”