When Buzz got the backup assignment behind Cernan for Gemini X, his heart sank. For someone who claims total ignorance of how Slayton scheduled crews, he fathomed that “under prevailing custom I would skip two flights and be on the prime crew of Gemini XIII.” With the program to end with Gemini XII, there would be no Gemini XIII.
The tragic deaths in February 1966 of Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, the original crew for Gemini IX, altered the order and gave Aldrin his chance to fly. Jim Lovell and Buzz moved up from backup Gemini X to backup Gemini IX. With all the other shifts of assignment going on, that inked Lovell and Aldrin into the slots as the prime crew for Gemini XII, the program finale. The backyard of the Aldrin home in Nassau Bay connected to the backyard of Charlie and Jeannie Bassett. The two families and their children had become good friends. Knowing that Buzz was uncomfortable with the fact that he was, in essence, going to be making a Gemini flight because of the death of her husband, Jeannie Bassett one day took Buzz aside and, according to Buzz, reassured him that “Charlie felt you should have been in it all along. I know he’d be pleased.”
Buzz went on to make one of the most successful flights in the Gemini program, featuring his remarkable five-hour EVA.
Armstrong still did not know Aldrin very well when the two men, along with Jim Lovell, were assigned as backup for Apollo 9, the prime crew for which was originally Frank Borman, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders. Eventually, when NASA decided to make Apollo 8 the circumlunar mission, Apollo 9 became Apollo 8, and Apollo 8, scheduled as the first flight to go with the LM, became Apollo 9. Mike Collins’s back surgery then shifted the crew assignments. Lovell replaced Collins on Apollo 8, and Fred Haise took Lovell’s place on the backup crew with Armstrong and Aldrin. In Aldrin’s view, it was automatic that Buzz would stay with Armstrong when their turn came for a prime crew, probably as Apollo 11. Yet, as we have seen, that was not really the case. Slayton gave Armstrong the option of replacing Aldrin with Lovell, a choice that Neil, after much thought, did not make.
There is good reason to think that Slayton had originally teamed Aldrin with Armstrong on the backup crew for Apollo 9 (which became Apollo 8) because he felt that the other commanders would not work as well with Buzz as Neil would. Deke recognized that Aldrin’s personality grated on several of the other astronauts. For example, Frank Borman became “quite annoyed” when Aldrin took it upon himself to volunteer some suggestions to him during one preflight conference. According to Buzz, “Frank shot back that he didn’t need any suggestions from me.” In front of a number of responsible people, including Armstrong, Borman said, “Goddamn it, Aldrin, you have a reputation for screwing up other peoples’ missions with this nitpicking planning. I don’t want you screwing up my mission.”
“I’m not sure I recognized at that point in time what might be considered eccentricities,” Armstrong relates. “Buzz and I had both flown in Korea, and his flying skills, I was sure, were good. His intelligence was high. He was a creative thinker, and he was willing to make suggestions. It seemed to me that he was a fine person to work with. I really didn’t have any qualms with him at that point.”
“There was a hell of a difference between those three men,” said Guenter Wendt, the head of the White Room Crew at the Cape. As the chief technician responsible for the final sealing of the astronauts into their capsule, Wendt (nicknamed “The Launchpad Führer” for his German accent and Teutonic exactness) saw all the Apollo crews in action over the course of many training and launch days, and he never saw anything like the crew of Apollo 11. “Although they were totally competent, they just didn’t seem to gel as a team. Usually when a mission crew was named, they stuck together like glue. You saw one, you saw all three, together. But these three, they never did. When they drove up to the pad for tests, it was always in three separate cars. If we broke for lunch, they always drove away separately. There did not seem to be much camaraderie between the three men. I’ve always said that they were the first crew who weren’t really a crew.”
Aldrin does not quarrel in the least with Mike Collins’s terse description of the Apollo 11 crew.
“Buzz, do you think that the phrase amiable strangers is apt?”
“Yes, I do. In the group of fourteen new astronauts from 1963, there wasn’t anything that particularly drew me to Mike, and Neil and I hardly knew one another.”
“Does that sort of distant relationship between one another make the crew of Apollo 11 historically unique?”
“Oh, yes, it really does. There was a distinct pairing, or tripling, in most of the other crews…. I don’t consider myself the most compatible ‘joiner.’ I always put more emphasis, rather than on building a team, on the bigger picture.”
Armstrong looks at the most famous triad in the history of space exploration quite a bit differently, as if he is not even sure what Collins means by the phrase “amiable strangers.” “In general,” Neil affirms, “all the crews I was on worked very well together. There were certainly slight differences, but the experiences were more alike than unlike each other in terms of the relative compatibility and cooperative nature, helping each other, and making sure everything got done.” Tongue in cheek, Armstrong puts the lid on the subject by saying, “As an old navy guy, I think I did remarkably well in getting along with two air force guys.”
CHAPTER 25
First Out
The very first question asked by a reporter at the Houston press conference introducing the crew of Apollo 11 on January 9, 1969, got right to the issue: “Which of you gentlemen will be the first man to step out onto the lunar surface?” As the mission commander, Armstrong began to answer, “I think I can…” then stopped himself in midsentence and turned to Deke Slayton, the director for flight crew operations, and asked plaintively, “You want to take a crack at it?” Slayton took over: “I don’t think we’ve really decided that question yet. We’ve done a large amount of simulating, and I think which one steps out will be dependent upon some further simulations that this particular crew runs.”
Somewhat uncharacteristically, Armstrong did not let the matter go without elaborating on the spot: “I’d like to say from my point of view that it would be the person whose activities for that time period would fit in best with the overall objectives on the lunar surface at that time. It’s not based on individual desire; it’s based on how the job can best be accomplished on the lunar surface and, since those lunar surface time lines are in a somewhat preliminary state and we have not yet had the opportunity to exercise them in simulation at this time, we have not decided yet on the order of exit from the spacecraft. I can say that the current plan, the preliminary plan, is fairly well laid out, that is, what activities take place on the lunar surface. The current plan involves one man on the lunar surface for approximately three quarters of an hour prior to the second man’s emergence. Now which person is which has not yet been decided up to this point.” Following up, the naïve reporter asked whether the order of the astronauts out of the LM would be decided before the mission. “Oh, yes,” Armstrong answered. “It will be decided based on the simulations prior to the mission. Every step will be firmly decided prior to flight.”
Thus emerged a critical issue in the life of Neil Armstrong, one that has provoked questioning, speculation, and controversy from 1969 to the present. How exactly did NASA decide which of the two astronauts inside the LM would be the first to step out onto the Moon?
Whereas several of his fellow astronauts over the years since 1969 have remarked on how personally desirous Buzz Aldrin was to be the first man on the Moon, Aldrin himself states that he experienced qualms about even being part of the first lunar landing team. “If I had had a choice,” Aldrin wrote in Return to Earth, “I would have preferred to go on a later lunar flight. Not only would there be considerably less public attention, but the flight would be more complicated, more adventurous, and a far greater test of my abilities than the first landing.” Buzz told no one about his preference at the time, other than his wife J
oan, because within the astronaut corps declining a flight was “tantamount to sacrilege.” “No one had ever refused a flight,” Buzz states. “If I, as one individual, refused, both Mike and Neil would likely be taken off the flight. And if I did such a thing, I would so impair my position that I’d probably never be assigned to a subsequent flight.”
On the other hand, Buzz’s autobiography shows that he was tremendously excited by the news that he was going to be part of Apollo 11. Emerging from Slayton’s office, he “telephoned Joan early and asked her to come and pick him up.” In the car on the way home, Buzz told his wife, “I am going to land on the Moon.” The day of the Houston news conference introducing the crew, according to Joan’s diary, “Buzz spent much time explaining to me the various methods planned for obtaining rocks from the Moon.”
Through the first months of 1969, there is no doubt that Aldrin believed he would be the first to step out onto the lunar surface. As Buzz explains, “Throughout the short history of the space program, beginning with Ed White’s space walk and continuing on all subsequent flights, the commander of the flight remained in the spacecraft while his partner did the moving around. I had never given it much thought and had presumed that I would leave the LM and step onto the Moon ahead of Neil.”
Newspaper stories reinforced this thinking. In late February 1969, the Chicago Daily News, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and other leading metropolitan papers ran a story by space-beat correspondent Arthur J. Snider whose headline read “Aldrin to Be First Man on the Moon.” During the Apollo 9 mission a few weeks later (March 3 to 13, 1969), Dr. George E. Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for manned space flight, told a number of people, including some reporters, that Aldrin would be the first out on Apollo 11.
Buzz felt confident about the situation until he heard rumors of a literally different “outcome” in the days following Apollo 9’s splashdown. The key task for Apollo 9 during its complicated ten-day flight (done in Earth rather than lunar orbit) had been to put men (Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart) into a LM (nicknamed Spider) for the first time, separate them from the CSM (flown by Dave Scott), and get them to complete a rendezvous, one that simulated the maneuvers of an actual lunar landing mission. Although NASA would persist in its plan to have Apollo 10, scheduled for May 1969, make a full-dress rehearsal of a landing (in actual flight around the Moon), most of the mission planners felt, after the unqualified success of Apollo 9, that Apollo 11 would, indeed, be the first attempt to land. The matter of which astronaut would step out first became a subject of real import as it had not been when the Apollo 11 crew was first announced back in January.
In the days following the Apollo 9 success, Aldrin heard through the MSC grapevine that it had been decided that Armstrong would go out first rather than he. Initially, the news only puzzled him. When he heard that NASA wanted Neil to do it because he was a civilian, however, Buzz became angry: “Such a move, I thought, was an insult to the service. I understood that my country wanted to make this moment look like a triumph for all mankind in the cause of peace, but the implication was that the military service, by being denied the right to be first, was some sort of warmonger. As to any differences between Neil and myself, there simply were none. Neil had learned to fly in the service, just as I had. Well before he was chosen for the astronaut corps, he had left the service and become a civilian. When I was selected I had just completed my doctoral studies at MIT. My salary was paid by the air force, but it had been ten years since I had served in any capacity other than maintaining my flying hours.”
For a few days, a chagrined Aldrin mulled over the situation, consulting only with his wife. Feeling that “the subject was potentially too explosive for even the subtlest maneuvering,” Buzz decided to take the direct approach. He went to Neil.
If Aldrin expected a definitive resolution from Armstrong, he was sadly mistaken. “Neil, who can be enigmatic if he wishes, was just that,” Buzz recalls. “Clearly, the matter was weighing on him as well, but I thought by now we knew and liked each other enough to discuss the matter candidly.” In Return to Earth, Aldrin wrote that Neil, “equivocated a minute or so, then with a coolness I had not known he possessed he said that the decision was quite historical and he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of going first.”
Aldrin has since claimed that the description of this incident in his autobiography was exaggerated by his 1973 coauthor Wayne Warga. “If I had been given the pen and paper, I probably wouldn’t have written it that way. I understood that it was typical not to get anything decisive on this from Neil, particularly when it was really not his decision to make. His observation about the historical significance of stepping out first, which he did make, was perfectly valid, and I understood it as such. It was also clear to me that Neil did not want to discuss the matter further. There was absolutely no indication from him of, ‘Yes, I think you’re right. I think I’ll push someone to make a decision.’ There was no indication at all that that was going to happen.”
Aldrin tried in vain to curb his mounting frustration, “all the time struggling not be angry with Neil.” Buzz then approached a few of his fellow astronauts, particularly those like Alan Bean and Gene Cernan whom he imagined might be sympathetic because they were in the same position as he, as lunar module pilots for Apollo 10 and Apollo 12. “I felt that I owed it to the people who were following me,” Aldrin explains, “because whatever was decided for Apollo 11 was going to be a precedent for all the rest of the crews. I felt that consulting some of the other guys, maybe they had a thought or two about it that they would share since it was going to affect them, too.”
Instead of a constructive reaction to his overtures, however, Aldrin’s private conversations led to the general notion that Buzz was lobbying behind the scenes to be first. According to Gene Cernan, Aldrin had “worked himself into a frenzy” over who was going to be the first man to walk on the Moon. “He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious—that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since learning that Apollo 11 would attempt the first Moon landing, Buzz had pursued this peculiar effort to sneak his way into history, and was met at every turn by angry stares and muttered insults from his fellow astronauts. How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making a fool of himself is beyond me.”
Apollo 11 crewmate Mike Collins recalls a similar incident. “Once Buzz tentatively approached me about the injustice of the situation,” Collins remembers, “but I quickly turned him off. I had enough problems without getting into the middle of that one…. Although Buzz never came out and said it in so many words, I think his basic beef was that Neil was going to be the first to set foot on the Moon.” With Collins and the other astronauts whom he approached, Aldrin did not make the case that he should be first out because he could do a better job of articulating the cosmic significance of the historic moment. “It’s a good question why Buzz didn’t get into those areas,” Collins relates, “because he was presenting his own case and he should therefore have presented all facets of his own case, but I don’t recall that he ever got into anything like that. Why he didn’t—whether it was because he didn’t believe it, or didn’t think of it—I don’t know. But, as I recall, everything Buzz presented—as most things with Buzz—was very technical, related to the checklist, the procedures, and so on.”
Aldrin insists that his fellow astronauts misinterpreted his motive. “I didn’t really want to be first,” claims Buzz, “but I knew that we had to have a decision.” On the other hand, Buzz admits that he was bothered to know that “every navy carrier test pilot was going to be in there charging hard for everything they could possibly get. It was a little different when you were an
egghead from MIT like me.”
With highly unflattering talk building inside the MSC about what many believed to be an Aldrin lobbying campaign, Slayton tried to put an end to it. Deke dropped by Buzz’s office to say that it would probably be Neil who would be out first. At least Slayton gave Buzz a more palatable reason for the pecking order. “Neil was a member of the second group of astronauts, the group ahead of the group to which I belonged,” Aldrin relates. “As such, it was only right that he step onto the Moon first, as Columbus and other historical expedition commanders had done…. For the decision to have been the other way, to have the commander sitting up there watching the junior guy go out, kicking up the dust, picking up the contingency sample, saying the famous words and all that, the mission would have been so criticized by all sorts of people. It would have been so inappropriate.”
According to Aldrin, he was okay with Slayton saying it would be Neil; what had frustrated him all along were the effects of everyone’s not knowing. “Whether or not I was going to be the first to step onto the Moon was personally no great issue. From a technical standpoint, the great achievement was making the first lunar landing, and two of us would be doing that. We all expected the actual surface activities to be relatively easy, a deduction based on detailed study and on the space walks of the Gemini program. It would probably even be simpler than the Gemini space walks because they were made in zero gravity and the lunar surface has one-sixth the Earth’s gravity. It might even seem a bit familiar.” Buzz fully understood that “the larger share of acclaim and attention would go to whichever of us actually made the step,” and, according to his own testimony, that was fine with him if it was to be Neil, because he was not after the acclaim. What he did resent, however, was how “the decision was stalled and stalled, until finally it was the subject of gossip, speculation, and awkward encounters” in which friends, family, and reporters kept asking him, “Who is going to be first?” Armstrong possessed the type of stoic personality that easily handled such ambiguity and uncertainty, whereas Aldrin did not.
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