First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “It was unanimous. Collectively, we said, ‘Change it.’ ‘Change it so the lunar module pilot is no longer going to be the first one out.’ Bob Gilruth passed our decision to George Mueller and Sam Phillips at NASA Headquarters, and Deke told the crew. In our meeting, we had told Deke to do that. He did not argue with us. He did it, and I’m sure he did it in his most diplomatic way.

  “Buzz Aldrin was crushed, but he seemed to take it stoically. Neil Armstrong accepted his role with neither gloating nor surprise. He was the commander, and perhaps it should always have been the commander’s assignment to go first onto the Moon. Buzz probably thought that he was a better-trained man for the EVA job and had more capabilities than Neil to do the job on the lunar surface—and frankly, he may have been right. In the end, Neil gave Buzz a lot of the responsibility for surface activities. He expected Buzz to do them well and knew that Buzz could do them better than he. But nothing about performing surface activities had anything to do with the reason why we made the decision about who should be first out.”

  At no time in talking over the situation from every angle did Slayton, Gilruth, Low, or Kraft express the first word about the LM’s interior layout or its hatch design. As Kraft attests, that was “an engineering side to it that we hadn’t considered. That was a fortuitous excuse.” Slayton, in particular, wanted the decision explained in technical terms. “That was Deke,” Kraft explains. “He didn’t want to be known as the guy that had made the decision that Buzz was not going to do it and that Neil was.”

  In fact, none of the four men present at the March 1969 meeting ever felt very comfortable confessing the truth about what was said there. For example, in a memorandum for the record prepared by George Low in September 1972 following a personal meeting in his office with Buzz Aldrin, Low wrote, “Aldrin asked me whether the decision as to who would be the first man on the Moon had been made by NASA Houston, NASA Headquarters, or whether it was an externally imposed decision on NASA. I told him that this was a Bob Gilruth decision based on a Deke Slayton recommendation.” Obviously, Low’s version of events does not precisely match up with the story subsequently told in Chris Kraft’s 2001 autobiography, Flight: My Life in Mission Control.

  Understandably, it has been hard for Aldrin to let it all go. As late as 1972, Buzz was still bothered enough by it to ask George Low how the “first out” decision had actually been made. That can only mean that Buzz was not totally convinced that the technical reasons he had been given back in 1969 were really as determinative as he and the rest of the world had been led to believe. No doubt part of the reason for Buzz’s subsequent emotional distress and alcohol abuse lies in how difficult it was for him, the son of Gene Aldrin, to be the second man on the Moon.

  Buzz never knew the first thing about the Gilruth-Slayton-Low-Kraft meeting until Chris Kraft wrote about it in his autobiography, nor did Armstrong. Even after becoming aware of the behind-the-scenes, nontechnical factors in the decision making, Neil has remained convinced that engineering considerations related to the interior layout of the LM played a primary role in determining who should be the first man out: “It just seems to me that the fact that all six Moon landings were done the same way is pretty strong evidence that that was the proper way to do it. Otherwise, they would have changed it. I can’t imagine the other commanders, especially someone like Al Shepard [commander of Apollo 14], agreeing to something if it wasn’t the right way to do it. Knowing their nature, the other commanders would have done it or certainly attempted to do it differently, if they had thought there was a better way. I would have felt the same about it myself.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Dialectics of a Moon Mission

  Buzz Aldrin’s concern over who should be the first out did nothing to help the working relationship of the Apollo 11 crew. At the same time his sour feelings never seriously impaired the crew’s training for its historic mission because Armstrong’s stoic personality did not allow it to. If the commander had been a confrontational sort like Frank Borman or Alan Shepard, the situation with Aldrin might easily have turned highly injurious to the mission.

  “Neil would have regarded that kind of infighting as sort of beneath him,” explains Mike Collins. Even if he had known about the behind-the-scenes campaigning by Buzz’s father, “Neil was not the sort that would have gotten into the fray and presented counterarguments. He always rose above internecine warfare of that kind.” Not only that, as Collins testifies. “I never heard Neil say a bad thing about Buzz. Never. I mean, what Neil thought about Buzz, God only knows. But their working relationship, as I saw it, was always extremely polite and, from Neil to Buzz, in no way critical.”

  The training for the first Moon landing was intense enough to challenge the patience and goodwill of the entire NASA team, not just the Apollo 11 crew. Not only did the astronauts need to be made ready, so too did the entire NASA ground apparatus, including the Mission Control Center, the tracking network, the quarantine facility to house a crew that might bring back lunar “bugs,” not to mention the Saturn V rocket, Command Module No. 107, and Lunar Module No. 5. Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin trained fourteen-hour days, six days a week for six full months. They often worked another eight hours on Sundays.

  Beginning January 15, 1969, until July 15, 1969, the day before the launch, the crew of Apollo 11 logged a total of 3,521 actual training hours. That equates to 126 hours per week, or 42 hours per crew member, in specified training programs and exercises. Roughly another 20 hours per week were taken up by reading, studying, doing paperwork, poring over mission plans and procedures, talking to colleagues, traveling to training facilities, suiting up and getting suits off, and other routine work. Armstrong and Aldrin logged 1,298 and 1,297 training hours, respectively, while Collins recorded some 370 hours less. Half of Collins’s hours came inside the CSM simulator, where he worked physically apart from Armstrong and Aldrin (though for special integrated simulations all three astronauts in the two different simulators would be connected to Mission Control). On the other hand, there were very few hours when Neil and Buzz were not working side by side. Nearly a third of their training time was inside the cramped quarters of the LM simulator, practicing the Moon landing they were about to make as a duo.

  The overriding objective of Apollo 11 was to get the Moon landing done. Training for surface activities represented less than 14 percent of the astronauts’ time. That included preparing Armstrong and Aldrin to collect geological samples and to set up all the planned lunar surface experiments, as well as to learn how to handle the Extravehicular Mobile Unit (EMU). This vital piece of equipment, the EMU, was composed of all the protective apparel and paraphernalia worn during lunar surface work, including suit, helmet, gloves, outer boots, backpack, remote control, hoses, cables, liquid-cooled garment (LCG), outer visor, and so forth. During EMU training, the astronauts “checked out” every part of this assembly.

  “We practiced the lunar surface work until we were reasonably confident in our ability to carry out the surface plan,” Armstrong states. “If the descent and the final approach to landing were rated a nine on a ten-point scale of difficulty, I would put the surface work down at a two. Not that there weren’t some high risks involved with it, because there were. Certainly, we were completely dependent on the integrity of our pressure suits, and there were significant questions about the thermal environment—whether we would have overheating problems, because it was going to be warm out there on the lunar surface, over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We did some of our surface simulation work in the altitude chamber, with thermal simulation, and those had worked well. So we reached a confidence level that it was going to work fine. I didn’t have a lot of concern whether we were getting enough lunar surface practice because we got plenty of practice on operating defective equipment. The only real concerns involved the unknowns that we couldn’t simulate, because we didn’t know what they were.

  “In the end, the ground simulations proved to be pretty good even though the lunar g
ravity conditions could not be matched,” Armstrong continues. “The suits were pressurized and, when suits were inflated, they carried a lot of the weight, so the fact that we were going around with a hundred pounds or so of equipment on our backs wasn’t a problem. As for simulating the nature of the lunar terrain itself, despite photographs and data from the Surveyor spacecraft that had made soft landings on the Moon, no one knew precisely what the lunar surface would be like. Our guess was okay but not very much like the actual surface when we got there.”

  Ever since the selection of the New Nine in 1962, “All of us were exposed over several years to Geology 101. We had very fine instructors who were very knowledgeable about astrogeology and selenology, the astronomical study of the Moon. We went to Hawaii, to Iceland, great places to focus on volcanic rocks. The assumption was that on the Moon we would encounter tectonic formations principally, or remnants of volcanic and tectonic lava flows, that sort of thing. I was very tempted to sneak a piece of limestone up there with us on Apollo 11 and bring it back as a sample. That would have upset a lot of apple carts! But we didn’t do it.”

  Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a Harvard-trained geologist who had worked for the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, Montana, and Alaska, did a lot to prepare Armstrong and Aldrin for their lunar rock collecting. “Jack worked diligently and endlessly to make things a bit easier for us and tell us what was important,” Neil relates.

  “There was little chance for Neil and Buzz to be trained in a systematic way,” Jack Schmitt explains. “Some of the geologists in NASA claimed that by the end of the training the astronauts received the equivalent of a master’s degree in geology. Well, even if they did, that’s not what you wanted. You wanted people to be able to be very focused on a particular set of tasks that had to be done, and you wanted them as knowledgeable as you could possibly make them in a short amount of time about the relevant geological aspects of their mission.”

  Armstrong agrees that his geological training could have been more effective: “I don’t think we had much specific geological preparation for Apollo 11 itself, which differs from some of the later flights when crews were going into specific areas of the Moon with very specific geological goals. We were going into a mare, a lunar ‘sea,’ an area where the principal feature would just be the regolith and the accumulation of debris on the surface around the craters.”

  Another reality for Apollo 11 was that Armstrong and Aldrin would not have much time to spend out on the lunar surface. “That was principally dictated by the fact that we didn’t know how long our supply of water for the cooling of our suits would last,” Armstrong explains. “Neither that nor our metabolic rate could be duplicated on Earth in a lunar gravity. The only way you could try to do it was in the zero-g airplane, the KC-135, but the flight times in those were so limited that we could not get realistic data. So it was just an unknown. The mission planners wanted to be conservative in their estimate. As it turned out, we were able to stay out a little bit longer than our plan stipulated. After getting back in the craft we drained the water tanks to see how much water remained. From that we got a useful data point against the time that we had been out.”

  Though Armstrong enjoyed geology, he found the nature of the discipline a bit puzzling: “The geologists had a wonderful theory they called the ‘theory of least astonishment.’ According to the theory, when you ran into a particular rock formation, you hypothesized how it might have occurred and created as many scenarios as you could think of as to how it might have gotten there. But the scenario that was the least astonishing was the one you were supposed to accept as the basis for further analysis. I found that fascinating. It was an approach to logic that I had never experienced in engineering.” Yet it is precisely Armstrong’s engineering approach that Jack Schmitt connects with Neil’s geologic capabilities, citing Neil’s collection of rock samples as “the best that anybody did on the Moon.”

  All of the Apollo training was important, but no aspect of it was more critical to mission success than the work done in the flight simulators. “They taught us to fly these incredible machines with subtleties and complexities that even their flying counterparts did not possess,” Mike Collins explains. “Their job was to duplicate, insofar as they could, the spacecraft and the space environment.”

  The two main simulators were the command module simulator, built (as the CSM itself was) by North American, and the lunar module simulator, built by the LM designer, Grumman. Collins spent the lion’s share of time in the former, Armstrong and Aldrin in the latter. Apollo 10 and Apollo 16 astronaut John Young dubbed the command module simulator “The Great Train Wreck” for its jumbled array of differently shaped boxes and compartments built around a full-size mockup of the command module’s interior, down to the identical dials, controls, switches, equipment, and even color schemes in the genuine article. With all of the controls and instruments hooked up to a bank of computers in a back room as well as to consoles in Mission Control, the CSM simulator was dynamic and totally interactive. Looking out the windows as they were making their “flights,” the astronauts saw rough displays of the Earth, sky, Moon, and stars. “Here the fidelity broke down,” as Collins notes, explaining that, for training purposes, “It didn’t matter that in the simulator the star Antares was not precisely its true shade of red, only that it be in the proper position for a measurement with the sextant.”

  “On balance, the simulations were quite good,” echoes Armstrong. “They would certainly be better today with the improvements in technology that have occurred over the past thirty-five years, but for the time they were certainly the best, most advanced simulators ever constructed anywhere. They did a good enough job to give us the level of confidence that we needed, and I think that is evident by the fact that six out of six lunar landings that were attempted all turned out successfully.”

  During his Apollo 11 training, Armstrong spent 164 hours in the CSM simulator, which was only about one-third of the time that Collins, the CM pilot, spent in it. Naturally, given his primary responsibility in the mission, Neil spent considerably more time practicing lunar landings, 383 hours in the LM simulator and 34 in the LLTV or LLRF, for a total of 417 hours of Moon landing simulation. His grand total of 581 hours in a simulator equates to over 72 days—more than 10 full weeks—of 8-hour days in a simulator. Aldrin compiled even more time in simulators than did Neil: 18 more in the CM simulator and 28 more in the LM simulator. Unlike Neil, Buzz did not fly either the LLTV or LLRF during the six-month-long preparation for Apollo 11.

  “You are trying to build simulators to be exactly like the real thing, but they never are able to get it to the degree of reality that it flies as easily as a real machine.” In the case of a Moon landing, they could not simulate such difficulties as a cloud of dust agitated by the LM’s descent rockets. “If you could fly the simulations with confidence,” Neil remarks, “then you could be quite confident that you’d be able to handle the real vehicle.

  “People who had not been involved in simulator development during their career usually just tried to ‘win.’ They tried to operate perfectly all the time and avoid simulator problems. I did the opposite. I tried actively to encourage simulator problems so I could investigate and learn from them.

  “I’m sure that some of the guys were well aware of my approach,” surely more so following what has become a rather notorious incident involving Armstrong and Aldrin’s particularly taxing “run” in the LM simulator. The source for the story is Mike Collins.

  “Neil and Buzz had been descending in the LM [simulator] when some catastrophe had overtaken them, and they had been ordered by Houston to abort. Neil, for some reason, either questioned the advice or was just slow to act on it, but in any event, the computer printout showed that the LM had descended below the altitude of the lunar surface before starting to climb again. In plain English, Neil had crashed the LM and destroyed the machine, himself, and Buzz.

  “That night in the crew quarters Buzz was ince
nsed and kept me up far past my bedtime complaining about it. I could not discern whether he was concerned about his actual safety in flight, should Neil repeat this error, or whether he was simply embarrassed to have crashed in front of a roomful of experts in Mission Control. But no matter, Buzz was in fine voice, and as the scotch bottle emptied and his complaints became louder and more specific, Neil suddenly appeared in his pajamas, tousle-haired and coldly indignant, and joined the fray. Politely I excused myself and gratefully crept off to bed, not wishing to intrude in an intercrew clash of technique or personality.

  “Neil and Buzz continued their discussion far into the night, but the next morning at breakfast neither appeared changed, ruffled, nonplussed, or pissed off, so I assume it was a frank and beneficial discussion, as they say in the State Department. It was the only such outburst in our training cycle.”

  Aldrin’s version of the late-night exchange is a little different. “The three of us often ate dinner quite late in our quarters. Afterwards, Mike and I sat around having a drink and talking while Neil had gone off to bed. Mike said something like, ‘Well, how did it go? What did you guys do in the simulator today?’ and I said, ‘Well, we lost control during an abort.’ [Neil insists that Mission Control did not order an abort.] Now just how loud I said that, I can’t really say. But what I said, I felt was between the two of us, between Mike and me. I didn’t feel I needed to express my feelings about this to Neil, because that was just not Neil’s and my relationship. In the normal course of what we were doing, I did not critique him. But Mike asked me a question about the simulation, so I told him what happened. It was a surprise to both of us when Neil came out of his bedroom and said, ‘You guys are making too much noise. I’m trying to sleep.’” Neil did not say a word at the time to defend what he had done in the simulation, why he chose not to abort. “That wouldn’t have been Neil,” explains Aldrin.