First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Launch came just a few minutes later than scheduled, at 7:51 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. The first manned flight of the Saturn V “Moon Rocket” was something to behold. Neil watched the slow, fiery ascent of the gigantic booster from the big window inside Launch Control Center in the company of Buzz Aldrin and Fred W. Haise Jr., his fellow backup crew members.

  Into the early afternoon, Armstrong monitored the progress of the flight, through its two Earth orbits, through its translunar injection, and well on its way toward the Moon. Then, along with Aldrin and Haise, Neil boarded a NASA Gulfstream and headed back to Houston, arriving there at about 7:00 P.M. In the plane with them were their three wives, Janet, Joan Aldrin, and Mary Haise. The women had watched the launch from the VIP viewing stands, providing moral support for Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell, and Valerie Anders, who were also in attendance at the historic launch.

  After a quick trip home to El Lago to shower and change clothes, Neil drove over to Mission Control. Though he stayed there late, the next morning, a Sunday, he returned early: “I was in Mission Control all the time I could be. If I was not at the CapCom spot next to Jerry Carr, Mike Collins, or Ken Mattingly, I’d be off talking to FIDO [Flight Dynamics Officer] or people in Experiments or GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Control]. Sometimes they’d have questions for me about what the crew would be doing at this point in the flight or how the crew would be looking at a particular problem.”

  Spotting Armstrong in the big room full of consoles, Deke Slayton approached with a pressing topic: Neil’s next assignment.

  Of course, no one at this point in time could be sure what the mission for Apollo 11 would be. For Apollo 11 to become the first lunar landing mission not only would Apollo 8 need to complete its bold around-the-Moon flight successfully, but Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 would also have to come off without a hitch. If something, anything, went wrong, the G mission, the first landing, could easily fall back to Apollo 12 or even to Apollo 13. If the deadline got too tight, NASA might even move the landing up to Apollo 10. In the wake of Apollo 8’s audacity, even something as daring as that lived in the realm of possibility. Still, Armstrong’s assignment to Apollo 11 looked fortuitous. He left the brief meeting with Slayton knowing there was a chance that he was going to be commanding the first Moon landing attempt.

  It took an extraordinary turn of events for the Apollo missions to line up the way they did. In the original schedule that Slayton in April 1967 had first outlined to the Apollo astronauts, there was to be no such circumlunar flight. Following the first manned Apollo flight, or C mission—handled in October 1968 by Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham in Apollo 7—the D mission was supposed to test the combined operations of the CSM and LM in Earth orbit. But Grumman’s LM was not ready to fly. Wanting to keep the momentum of the program going, a few risk takers in NASA, notably George Low, proposed a radical stopgap. Since the LM was not yet ready, why not expedite the flight sequence by flying the CSM around the Moon?

  The idea was so bold that NASA leadership in Washington strongly resisted it. Armstrong remembers, “It took a while to convince the headquarters people that this was doable and safe. There had only been two Saturn V flights, both unmanned. The first one [Apollo 4, November 9, 1967] had gone pretty well. It experienced a small pogo—a potentially serious vibration in a rocket caused by combustion instability—and it had some other small problems. The second Saturn flight [Apollo 6, April 4, 1968] was not a disaster, but it was far from a successful operation. It had major pogo. It also experienced a premature engine shutdown. So for NASA management to agree and say, ‘On the next Saturn V, we’re not only going to put men on it, we are also going to send them around the Moon,’ that was enormously bold.”

  Yet as soon as Apollo 7 in October 1968 proved to be an unqualified success, that is exactly what NASA management decided to do. The fact that the Soviet Union in September 1968 had just sent Zond 5 on a lunar flyby, and was preparing Zond 6 for the same sort of flight in November, helped cure the indecision. Zond was known to be large enough to carry a cosmonaut, and the idea in the American mind ever since Sputnik was that the Soviets would do everything they could to keep upstaging America in space, so we better not risk waiting around. Inside NASA, the intrepid move of a circumlunar flight met with significantly less than universal acceptance. “I cannot imagine NASA management in any subsequent period of time being willing to take that kind of a step,” Armstrong has asserted. In this case, geopolitical circumstances dictated NASA’s willingness.

  Armstrong supported the radical redirection of Apollo 8, as did virtually all of the astronauts, but not until he was convinced that the problems with the Saturn V were fixed: “There was a process during which technical people from the Saturn V program convinced everyone that they understood the problems, they were fixing them, and the problems wouldn’t happen again. And as long as NASA was going to put any astronauts at risk riding on that big monster, we might as well do something as useful as we can, because the time schedule was becoming an overbearing issue. To get the job done by the end of the decade, we needed to take giant steps and really make lots of progress on each flight, and this was the only way.

  “Now, had the lunar module been available on schedule, the idea of a circumlunar flight probably would never have come up. We no doubt would have gone ahead with the combined CSM-LM flight into high Earth orbit, which was in keeping with the original sequence of flight plans. As it was, there was not much time to get all our ducks in a row and get really serious about all the navigation issues and data processing that Apollo 8 required. Those became of paramount importance, to be really confident that we could do it. We did not have all that figured out at the time the circumlunar decision was made, but we sure had the motivation to get it done.”

  On that Monday afternoon, December 23, 1968, as things were settling down following the end of the TV transmission from Apollo 8, Armstrong and Slayton retired to one of the back rooms at the Mission Control Center for what would prove to be a historic conversation.

  “Deke laid out his thinking about Apollo 11 and asked how I felt about having Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin as my crew. We talked about it a little bit, and I didn’t have any problem with that. And Deke said that Buzz wasn’t necessarily so easy to work with, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve been working with him the last few months [in the backup role for Apollo 8] and everything seems to be going all right.’ But I knew what Deke was saying. Then he said he wanted to make Jim Lovell available for Apollo 11 even though it would be a little bit out of sequence, but that’s what he’d do, if that is what I thought I needed. I would have been happy to get Lovell. Jim was a very reliable guy, very steady. I had a lot of confidence in him. It would have been highly unusual for the crew assignment to have worked out this way, but Deke offered the possibility that it would be Jim Lovell and Mike Collins as my crew.”

  Armstrong wanted a little time to think about it. He took only until the next day, Christmas Eve, to give Deke his answer. By then, the crew of Apollo 8, with Jim Lovell piloting the command module, was in orbit around the Moon. Lovell would never learn that if Armstrong’s answer had been different he would have become a member of the Apollo 11 crew. “Jim had already been commander of Gemini XII,” Neil states, “and I thought he deserved his own command. I thought it would be not right of me to pull Lovell out of line for a command, so he ended up with Apollo 13. To this day, he doesn’t know anything about that. I have never related these conversations that I had with Slayton to anyone. As far as I know, Buzz doesn’t know about them, either, unless Deke talked to him about them.” What Armstrong’s taking of Lovell for Apollo 11 would have meant for Aldrin was that he would have been pushed back to a later crew, probably in exchange for Lovell, to the ill-fated Apollo 13.

  Neil answered Slayton in the way he did because, one, he had had no trouble working with Buzz, and, two, Lovell deserved his own command. A third aspect of his thinking was more complicated. If Lovell came on board Apollo 11, it would be b
est to give him the same job he had on Apollo 8, that of command module pilot. The trouble was that Mike Collins was a CMP specialist. Mike had trained as such for the crew of Apollo 8 before being forced off that mission due to a bone spur growing between two cervical vertebrae, requiring neck surgery. If Collins was to be a part of Apollo 11, as Slayton and Armstrong both felt he deserved to be, Mike was best prepared to fly the command module.

  Armstrong reasoned: “Aldrin had been the command module pilot for the Apollo 8 backup crew. I felt uncomfortable with Mike being the lunar module pilot for Apollo 11, because the command module pilot was the number-two guy in a crew and the lunar module pilot was number three. I had a little difficulty in my own mind putting Aldrin above Collins. In talking with Deke, we decided, because the CMP had such significant responsibilities for flying the command module solo and being able to do rendezvous by himself and so forth, that Mike was best to be in that position.” In other words, Lovell could not justifiably be put in the number-three slot as the lunar module pilot, but Aldrin could. The decision was made to go with Collins and Aldrin.

  One might wonder how Fred Haise felt about the development—after all, Haise was part of Neil’s backup crew on Apollo 8 as the LM pilot. “Deke didn’t think that Fred was quite ready for a prime crew,” Armstrong recalls. “We had talked a little bit about the mission, and Deke said it could be a lunar module landing attempt—could be—though I thought that was a bit remote at that point.” If Haise had been put on Neil’s Apollo 11 crew, then Aldrin would have remained in the job of CM pilot.

  The critical factor was that Slayton wanted to get Collins back in the sequence. “He’d been out for a while due to his neck,” Neil states, “and Deke wanted to get him back. Deke was always trying to get all the feeds into the sequence that he could so that he would have maximum flexibility in covering all the missions. I was not aware of any disappointment on Fred Haise’s part, though certainly there could have been.”

  Prior to their assignment as backup for Apollo 8, Armstrong had not had much interaction with either Aldrin or Haise. They had never served on a crew together before. Neil had worked on Gemini XI at the same time that Lovell and Aldrin were working on Gemini XII, so Neil and Buzz were at the Cape together a lot and saw each other frequently even though they were doing different things. Fred Haise he had seen even less. As part of his collateral responsibilities, Haise worked a lot on the lunar modules, and it was clear to Neil that Fred knew a lot about that area: “I was comfortable with him, although we did not have a lunar module on Apollo 8, so that expertise wasn’t applicable.” Haise became the LM pilot for the Apollo 11 backup crew. Providing the rest of the backup crew was Apollo 8’s Jim Lovell, the backup commander, and Bill Anders, the backup command module pilot. Following Apollo 8, Frank Borman had decided to retire as an active astronaut.

  All in all, Armstrong was quite content with the meeting of minds between himself and Slayton that Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin would serve with him on Apollo 11.

  That Christmas Eve was extraordinary, not just for Armstrong but for everyone who was glued to their television sets watching the live transmission from Apollo 8 in lunar orbit. It was a Christmas Eve the likes of which people would remember for the rest of their lives.

  During their live broadcast that evening, Borman, Lovell, and Anders took turns reading the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis while television viewers watched wondrous pictures of the Moon’s surface passing surreally underneath, in an almost godlike view. The astronauts next pointed their lightweight TV camera back at the home planet to show the awesome and delicate beauty of a waxing Earth “rising” gloriously above the lunar surface. Only when seen in such stark contrast to the Moon’s dead surface and amid the infinite blackness of space could people the world over fully appreciate the extraordinarily fragile oasis of life that was “Spaceship Earth.” American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know they are truly brothers.”

  The astronauts concluded their lunar vigil with the hopeful message “Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.” A few hours later, at 1:10 A.M. EST on Christmas morning, Apollo 8 ignited its service propulsion system (SPS), the main rocket engine of the command and service module, and accelerated out of lunar orbit. Delighted to be homeward bound, Lovell remarked as the spacecraft came around the back side of the Moon, “Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.”

  Apollo 8 splashed down safely on the morning of December 27, six days and three hours, two Earth orbits, and ten lunar orbits after launch. It had been a truly historic flight. Not only were Borman, Lovell, and Anders the first humans to break the bonds of Earth’s gravity, their journey proved that astronauts could travel the nearly quarter of a million miles separating the home planet from its nearest neighbor. Their mission proved that course-correction maneuvers could be done out of line of sight and out of communications with Earth, that a craft could be tracked from an immense distance, and that it could successfully orbit the Moon and return.

  “It was a remarkably trouble-free flight,” Armstrong comments, “considering all the difficulties that we might have anticipated could happen in the first lunar flight. It really came off superbly well.”

  The year 1968 had been extraordinarily traumatic for America, not that 1967 had been much better. The paroxysms started in January 1968 when North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, claiming the American ship had violated its territorial waters while spying. (When it was seized, the ship was off Wonsan, the port city that Armstrong knew well from his months of combat off the eastern coast of North Korea.) A week after the Pueblo incident, the Vietcong launched a massive series of surprise attacks in South Vietnam. Known as the Tet Offensive, the bloody attacks made it abundantly clear that the war in Vietnam was not going to end anytime soon. Then in March, the world learned of the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers killed at least 175 Vietnamese woman and children, a tragedy that seriously aggravated public feelings against the war. On the last day of the same month, a war-weary and broken president, Lyndon Johnson, announced that he would not seek or accept the nomination of his party for reelection.

  The convulsions were just beginning. In April, student protesters at Columbia University in New York City took over campus administration buildings and shut down the college. In a span of nine weeks that spring, two of the country’s leading antiwar and civil rights spokesmen were assassinated: Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, Mayor Richard Daly’s police department clashed with angry crowds of demonstrators as antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy went down to defeat at the hands of Hubert H. Humphrey’s supporters. Two months later, on the victory stand at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-American athletes who had won gold and bronze medals respectively, raised their gloved fists in a black power salute in support of civil rights and antiwar causes.

  Internationally, the disquiet of 1968 was just as bad. Israel and Jordan clashed in a border dispute. Violence ignited between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, initiating “The Troubles,” which the following year would bring the country to the brink of civil war. In Paris, a coalition of protesting students and workers nearly brought down the French government. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, then part of the USSR-led Warsaw Pact, ending a brief period of liberalization known as the Prague Spring. On the eve of the Olympics, a student demonstration at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City ended in a bloodbath that killed hundreds.

  Amidst such chaos and upheaval, spending billions on trips to the Moon, in the view of many people, seemed a terribly misguided a
nd misplaced priority. A popular saying began: “If we can go to the Moon, why can’t we” and finished with any of a number of universally wholesome objectives: end injustice, eradicate poverty, cure cancer, abolish war, clean up the environment.

  So noisy did the anti-Establishment outcries become in 1968 that no astronaut, however apolitical, including Armstrong, could have lived unaware of the criticisms being directed at NASA and the space program. To the limited extent the astronauts engaged the critics, they valued what they were doing in space, in immediate terms by beating the Russians to the Moon and, more permanently, in terms of civilization taking its inevitable step off the planet. “We were aware of the controversies,” Armstrong comments. “I doubt that they had any pronounced or even noticeable effect on the performance of any of the guys on any of our flights. We were just doing our jobs—trying to, anyway, and happy to be doing them.”

  Even amid the clamor, criticism, and declining support for the space program, evidenced for more than two years in polling numbers and in congressional votes, the astronauts remained the object of the American public’s adulation. “I don’t know that I gave much thought to what turned out to be the public’s extraordinary reaction to Apollo 8,” Armstrong admits. “Not that I was surprised by it, because breaking the chains of the Earth’s gravity for the first time and going to another world was extremely important—in many ways more important than the achievements of Apollo11. But we were enveloped in an aura of public interest all the time, and in a way we got hardened to it.”