The only “awkward encounter” that Aldrin has ever specified, however, is the one that he had with his father. One night soon after hearing from Deke Slayton on the matter, Buzz related the order of egress in a telephone conversation. The senior Aldrin “was instantly angry,” Buzz explains, “and said he intended to do something about it. It took a great deal of persuasion, but I finally got him to promise he’d stay out of it.” The promise was not delivered, however, until after Gene Aldrin had worked his connections, contacting a number of influential friends with connections to NASA and the Pentagon.
Emotionally hobbled by his father’s intrusion, Buzz felt compelled to make one last appeal for clarity: “I went finally to George Low, director of the Apollo program office, and explained what I had heard. I said I believed I understood their need for careful consideration and added I’d happily go along with whatever was decided. It was no huge problem for me personally, but it would be in the best interest of both morale and training if their decision would be made as soon as possible.” Low assured Aldrin that it would.
Monday, April 14, 1969, ended what the New York Times called “weeks of speculation” as to whether it would be Armstrong or Aldrin to first set foot on the Moon. At an MSC press conference, George Low indicated that “plans called for Mr. Armstrong to be the first man out after the Moon landing…. A few minutes later, Colonel Aldrin will follow Mr. Armstrong down the ladder.” One editorial cartoon from the day after the announcement showed Armstrong and Aldrin at the open hatch of their landing craft as comically confused Alphonse and Gaston characters, both men graciously saying that the other should go ahead first while all the time trying to shove their way ahead of each other.
It is Aldrin’s understanding that NASA, in the end, decided on the order of the astronauts’ egress based solely on the LM’s interior design and the physical positions of the two astronauts inside the LM’s cockpit. It was an engineering rationale that seemed to make total sense and which came closer to satisfying Aldrin’s sensibilities. According to Buzz, after the initial coolness, the two men began to “speculate together” as to how the decision should be made. “Our conclusion,” Aldrin explains, “was that the decision as to who would be first would be determined by the allocation of tasks on the lunar surface and by our physical positions inside the LM itself. Unless something changed, as LM pilot I’d be on the right, a pilot’s usual position, and Neil would be on the left, next to the hatch opening. It was not practical, and it was an added complication to change positions with Neil after the landing. And that, to the best of my knowledge, is how the matter was finally decided.” Aldrin claims that, as soon as the announcement was made, he was okay with the situation. Mike Collins remembers otherwise: “Buzz’s attitude took a noticeable turn in the direction of gloom and introspection shortly thereafter.” So do many other NASA officials, including the head of launch preparations at the Cape, Guenter Wendt: “Buzz had it in mind that he should be the first one to exit the LM and place the historic footprint in the lunar soil. He alienated a lot of people, management and astronauts alike, arguing his case. Neil, the mission’s commander, just plugged along, nose to the grindstone, trying to stay focused on the job.”
Typically for Armstrong, Neil, in the weeks leading up to the “first out” decision, had not spoken about the matter with anyone, not even with members of his family. “Neil was recently in Wapakoneta for the funeral of his grandfather [William Korspeter],” Stephen Armstrong told a local reporter just after hearing the exciting news. “We talked about the flight, but he didn’t say anything about being first on the Moon.” Interestingly, Neil’s father went on to say to the newspaperman, “I always thought Aldrin would be the first, because Neil is the commander.”
Armstrong’s own version of the “first out” decision differs from Aldrin’s narrative in several salient respects. First of all, Neil relates that he was never as concerned about the matter as Aldrin came to believe Neil was, as intimated in Buzz’s autobiography when he said that “the matter was weighing on him as well.” As for the answer that Neil first gave to reporters back at the initial Apollo 11 news conference in January 1969, Neil explains, “I started to answer and then realized that it wasn’t my prerogative to answer that question because we had not done the work at that point to determine what the procedure would be. I think Deke answered the question properly. He said that we were going to have to do some work to figure it out, which was true. At that time I didn’t have any knowledge about the issue, either. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t very concerned about it. That wasn’t an issue in my mind. I had no preconceived notions at that point who it would be.”
As for the conversation described by Aldrin (or Aldrin’s writer), “I can’t remember the exact conversation,” asserts Armstrong today. “I can recall one point in time—and I don’t know if this was the same time—when he asked me what I thought about it and my reply was, ‘I’m not going to take a position on that. It’s for our simulations and other people to decide.’ The reality was that it was not something that I thought was really very important. It has always been surprising to me that there was such an intense public interest about stepping onto the lunar surface, let alone who did it first. In my mind the important thing was that we got four aluminum legs safely down on the surface of the Moon while we were still inside the craft. To me, there wasn’t a lot of difference between having ten feet of aluminum leg between the bottom of the spacecraft in which we were standing and the surface of the Moon and having one inch of neoprene rubber or plastic on the bottom of our boots touching the lunar surface. That didn’t seem to me to be a big issue, but it clearly was important to the public at large.”
As unlikely as the statement would sound if it was expressed by anyone with less focus on the job and more concern with astronaut politics, Armstrong claims that he knew nothing at the time about any conversations that Aldrin was having with other astronauts about how NASA was deciding who should be first out. Neil was also oblivious of any behind-the-scenes campaigning being done on Buzz’s behalf by the intemperate Gene Aldrin. “I was not aware of any of that at the time,” Neil comments. “I didn’t know that was going on, and I really can’t say anything about it.”
Not even Armstrong, though, could be unaware of the newspaper stories about him that hit the stands a few weeks before the Apollo 11 launch. With headlines such as “Did Moonman Pull Rank?” and “Armstrong Demands First-on-Moon Role,” these stories reported that Armstrong had used his “commander’s prerogative” to become the first man on the Moon, thereby reversing the traditional practice in the manned space program of having the number-two man make the EVA.
The source for the stories was Paul Haney, a former public affairs officer at the Manned Spacecraft Center who had just resigned from NASA to take a job as a space correspondent for a British TV network. Based on the practice in Gemini, Haney informed reporters that “the lunar module pilot, not the commander, was supposed to be the first on the Moon.” For almost three years, that had been NASA’s plan, “regardless of personalities.” Asked if he thought Armstrong had “pulled rank” on Aldrin, Haney remarked, “It shouldn’t be that he pulled rank, but I think he was not unaware of the importance of the first man who stepped onto the Moon and looked at it very carefully and decided that perhaps it should be the commander’s prerogative. Precisely why the change, I don’t know, but I do know it caused quite an upset. Both Armstrong and Aldrin talked to me to see if I couldn’t do something about the disquieting stories cropping up over the change in roles.”
How and why Haney instigated the story, almost all of it untrue (including Neil’s talking to Haney), is unknown. Perhaps the public affairs officer was disgruntled with NASA after being reassigned from MSC to NASA Headquarters in the spring of 1969. The most generous explanation is that Haney simply did not know better. Armstrong himself passed off the stories as a combination of misunderstanding and creative journalism: “There were journalists who were aware that the co
pilots had always been the ones to do the EVAs on Gemini, and their expectation might have been similar for Apollo.”
The story was too negative for NASA not to issue a comment. In a press statement, George Low explained that preliminary studies, indeed, had been made with the lunar module pilot as the first man on the Moon, but after dozens of rehearsals of lunar surface activities, the flight training crew at the Manned Spacecraft Center had come forward with a definitive recommendation in favor of the commander going out first. “The only firm plan ever made was the one we’re going to go with,” Low said. Deke Slayton echoed Low’s statement, declaring that the decision to have Armstrong make the first step was a management decision that in no way involved Armstrong or any of the other astronauts. Asked directly at a July 5, 1969 news conference in Houston (a press briefing at which Paul Haney was also in attendance) whether he exercised his commander’s prerogative to step out first on the Moon, Armstrong answered: “In the one article I read about this, the gentleman said that I may have, or could have, done that, or something to that effect. The facts are that my recommendation was never asked for or given.”
“In the Gemini program,” Neil relates, “the copilot had always been the guy who did the EVA, and that was principally because the commander was always so loaded with jobs that it was impractical to try to have the commander do all the work necessary to prepare himself to do it. The copilot had much more time available and it was a much more logical thing for him to do. When we first did simulations on the ground for the Apollo surface activity, that was the way we tried to do it, probably just as a result of the Gemini experience. We tried doing it the same way. Accordingly, Buzz may have felt that, because that’s the way it had been done in Gemini, that’s the way it should be done, and it would be his responsibility to do it. He may have thought that it was important to him.” However, as more and more ground simulations were done, it became clearer and clearer to everyone that it would be easier and safer for the commander to leave the LM first.
“We did a lot of simulations,” Neil recalls. “Buzz and I both actively did simulations in a mockup of the lunar module. We went through the complete package of procedures. It wasn’t just who went out of the hatch first, it was how you did it. It was not obvious what the proper way to exit through the door of the LM was, because it was quite complicated. There were a lot of considerations. In the procedures you needed to organize all the connections and hoses and the positions you’d take inside the LM. And when you were pressurized in the suit, you were like Frankenstein’s monster. You were big, bulky, and bumbling and not very adept.” If an astronaut was not careful, he could bump into circuits and switches inside the LM that could do real damage to the spacecraft’s systems.
In the end, the ground simulations showed that the technique of having the right-hand pilot, which was Aldrin, go out first just did not work very well. According to Neil, “I think that most people felt that there was an inherent risk involved in the LM pilot stepping around the commander and going out the hatch first that was avoidable doing it the other way.” When the key people in charge of the simulations, notably MSC engineers George Franklin and Raymond Zedekar, concluded that the risk was far less when the commander went out first, the mission planners scratched the Gemini procedures and wrote new ones for Apollo. “And that’s the way we did it,” Armstrong states. “On subsequent Apollo flights, where it wouldn’t matter symbolically and historically which astronaut came out first, they all did it exactly the same way, with the commander stepping out first.”
Whether Aldrin actually agreed with this finding from the lunar landing mockup simulations is not totally clear; it is only clear that he found NASA’s technical reasoning much more acceptable than the idea that Armstrong should be first out because he was a civilian.
But could the men in charge of the ground simulations have reached a different conclusion if they had approached the matter with different direction from their superiors? In the opinion of Alan Bean, the lunar module pilot for Apollo 12, the argument that the commander absolutely needed to go out first because of the hatch design and interior layout of the LM was not just overblown, it was a rationalization.
“No, no, here’s what you could have done if you were Buzz or myself,” Bean explains. “Before you put on your bulky EVA backpack, you’re standing in there and you can move wherever you want. Buzz moves from right to left and puts on his stuff over there, and Neil moves from left to right and puts on his stuff where Buzz had been. Then they exchange backpacks; Buzz takes Neil’s backpack off the rack and hands it over to him, and Neil hands Buzz’s backpack to Buzz. ‘I want to get out the door, let’s change.’ It was a nothing thing. No matter what NASA said at the time, Buzz could have gotten out first easily; it was all about where you put your backpack on.”
What Bean suggests is that NASA used the technicalities of hatch design and LM interior layout as a way of shutting the door on the entire “first out” controversy—and calming down an upset Aldrin in the process: “My opinion is, they were looking for technical reasons because they didn’t want to say directly to Buzz or anyone else that ‘we just want Neil to go out first.’
“Look, NASA knew both these guys,” Bean exclaims. “Slayton probably approached Neil at some point early on and said to him, ‘Look, we picked you to command this mission and we want the commander to go out first.’ Neil wouldn’t have told anyone about that sort of conversation, if it happened, but Deke very easily could have come to him and said, ‘I don’t want us to talk about this to anyone, but I want you out there first. And I don’t want us to ever mention this again.’ Knowing Deke and knowing Neil, neither of them ever would, or ever did, talk about it, as far as I know.”*
A version of Bean’s conjectural scenario did, in fact, take place. What is more, the technicalities of hatch design and LM interior layout were, indeed, not the primary matters that those in charge of the Manned Space Program were thinking about when it came to who was going to be first out.
Sometime in the middle of March 1969, in the heady days following the successful completion of Apollo 9 when it was becoming clear that Apollo 11 would likely be the first Moon landing, an informal meeting took place between the four men in Houston who had the most authority over the Apollo program. Getting their heads together were Deke Slayton, the director of flight crew operations; Bob Gilruth, the MSC director; George Low, the Apollo program manager (and the official who had traveled throughout South America with Armstrong in 1966); and Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations.
“Everything was happening so fast during this time period,” Chris Kraft relates. “But right around the time of Apollo 9, George Low and I had the same revelation. Just the two of us, George and I, had a discussion about it. I wasn’t close enough to the crew training to know, but my people had been telling me—and George always knew everything about everything—that the way things looked, it was going to be Aldrin out of the LM first on Apollo 11 because he was the lunar module pilot and he was doing all the training with the scientists and with the experiments package that was going to be put on the Moon, and Buzz knew about all that in detail. It looked like the lunar module pilot was going to be the first man on the Moon. And I said to myself, ‘Good God, we can’t let that happen!’” Either on his own or at Kraft’s inciting, Low had come to the same conclusion.
“When we realized that,” Kraft continues, “we called a meeting specifically to discuss the matter. For things like this in that time period, it was usually just the four of us that got together—Gilruth, Slayton, Low, and myself. I don’t think either Gilruth or Slayton felt as strongly about it as George and I did, but they didn’t disagree with us, either.
“Look, we just knew damn well that the first guy on the Moon was going to be a Lindbergh. We said that to ourselves, ‘He’s going to be a Lindbergh.’ George and I had talked about that, and we said it to Gilruth and to Slayton: ‘He’s going to be like Lindbergh. He’s going to be the guy for time
immemorial that’s going to be known as the guy that set foot on the Moon first. And who do we want that to be? The first man on the Moon would be a legend, an American hero beyond Lucky Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor.’
“It should be Neil Armstrong.
“Neil was Neil. Calm, quiet, and absolute confidence. We all knew that he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego. He was not of a mind that, ‘Hey, I’m going to be the first man on the Moon!’ That was never what Neil had in his head. The most Neil had ever said about it might have been that he wanted to be the first test pilot on the Moon or the first flier to land on the Moon. If you would have said to him, ‘You are going to be the most famous human being on Earth for the rest of your life,’ he would have answered. ‘Then I don’t want to be the first man on the Moon.’ But he probably knew it was his obligation to do so. On the other hand, Aldrin desperately wanted the honor and wasn’t quiet in letting it be known. Neil had said nothing. It wasn’t his nature to push himself into any spotlight. He was much like Bob Gilruth himself, content to do the job and then go home.
“Not once did we criticize Buzz for his strongly held positions or for his ambition. The unspoken feeling was that we admired him and that we wanted people to speak their mind. But did we think Buzz was the man who would be our best representative to the world, the man who would be legend? We didn’t. We had two men to choose from, and Neil Armstrong, reticent, soft-spoken, and heroic, was our only choice.
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