First Man

by James R. Hansen

  What Aldrin was explaining to Collins when Neil came out to quiet them down was that “I thought we were playing a game and we should make an attempt to do everything we could to win the game, and the sooner we did it when we saw that things were going bad for us, the better off we’d be and the more in keeping with what we’d actually do in a real situation like that.” The most important thing in every situation, Aldrin said to Collins, was not to crash. “I felt analyzing this and that system and whatever was not playing the game properly as far as the simulator people were concerned. If they threw a failure at us and we were losing control of the LM, would we in real flight actually go on and land? I’m not sure we would. The same way that if something disabled the commander, or disabled the primary guidance, or disabled the landing radar, why, we wouldn’t land on the first try, we’d abort and come back. Clearly, there was a difference between Neil and I in how we reacted to the simulation. Neil had his reason for doing what he did. It was between him and the simulator people to decide what he got out of that. As for me, I was there to support what was going on in the training, almost as an observer. Thus my answer to Mike’s question about my evaluation of what had happened.”

  Some versions of the simulation story that have been told over the years suggest that Aldrin also urged Armstrong to abort, but Neil states, “I don’t recall that Buzz asked me to abort—ever—I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that the descent trajectory that we were on during the simulation and the information we had available to us had become seriously degraded, and I thought that it was a great time to test the Mission Control center, ‘Okay, guys, let’s see what you can do with this.’

  “I knew that I could abort at any time—and probably successfully—but then you lose the mission, the rest of the simulation. This was a chance to test the control center. Buzz took that as a black mark against us. He thought it was a mark against his ability to perform, a mark against both of us and against our crew ability. I didn’t look at it that way at all. It was a complete difference of opinion, and he expressed his concern to me later that night.”

  As for precisely what went on during that late-night exchange between him and Aldrin, “I don’t really remember the details of that, but I do remember that Buzz expressed his displeasure. He had a different way of looking at the sims. He never liked to crash in a real simulation, while I thought it was a learning experience for all of us. Not just for the crew but also for the control center personnel. We were all in it together.”

  Interestingly, this story of the simulation-that-Armstrong-would-not-abort is reminiscent of Neil’s April 1962 flight in the X-15, the one in which his aircraft ballooned up and ended up dangerously over Pasadena. In both cases, Neil was trying to promote technological learning through dialectical experimentation. “If we couldn’t come up with a solution or the ground controllers couldn’t come up with a solution, that was an indication to me that, for one, I needed to understand that part of the flight trajectory better.” As a matter of fact, as a result of his crashing into the lunar surface during the particular simulation under review, Neil “constructed a plot of altitude versus descent rate with bands on it that I hadn’t had before, so that I could tell when I was getting into a questionable area. If I had aborted when everyone wanted me to, I probably would not have bothered to even make that.” At the same time, the “botched” simulation caused the flight director and his people to reevaluate how they had analyzed the situation. “I’m sure they improved their approach to understanding it, too, and knowing when they were getting into a dangerous area,” Armstrong states. “So it did serve a valuable purpose. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t figure it out soon enough, but you learn through the process. These were the most extensive simulations I had ever encountered—and they needed to be. The Moon landing was a bigger project, a more extensive project, with more people involved, than any of us had ever encountered.”

  Four months into training, Apollo 10 flew to the Moon. Launched on May 18, 1969, with a crew composed of three veterans of Gemini rendezvous missions—commander Tom Stafford, command module pilot John Young, and lunar module pilot Gene Cernan—the eight-day mission was a very successful full-dress rehearsal of the Moon landing. Apollo 10 achieved a number of space firsts, including the first CSM-LM operations in the cislunar and lunar environment, the first CSM-LM docking in translunar trajectory, the first LM undocking in lunar orbit, the first LM staging in lunar orbit, and the first manned LM-CSM docking in lunar orbit. About the only thing Apollo 10 did not accomplish was the lunar landing itself, though its LM—nicknamed Snoopy—did swoop down to within a mere 50,000 feet of the proposed Apollo 11 landing site before shooting back to orbit and redocking with Charlie Brown, the command module.

  Apollo 10 aided preparations for Apollo 11 in a number of ways. First, as Armstrong explains, “There was the matter of lunar module handling qualities, LM responsiveness, and LM engine operations. These had been studied initially in Earth orbit during Apollo 9, with Jim McDivitt doing some very good work. We had a good, solid foundation from Apollo 9, but we were very interested in learning everything we could from Apollo 10 and the experiences of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan in operating the LM and in how well they were able to control the machine’s attitude in flight. We wanted to know, for example, how similar or different was flying the actual LM from flying the simulator and from flying the LLTV? Could we expect it to be like our experience on the ground had led us to believe it would be? What were the characteristics of the engine operation? We wanted to learn anything we could about that, and Apollo 10 turned out to be very helpful there; it told us a lot.”

  There was also the matter of the lunar environment itself, especially the possibly significant gravitational effects that mascons might have on the flight paths of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. “I was very interested in additional information about the mascons based on the Apollo 10 experience,” relates Armstrong. Mascons were areas beneath the visible lunar surface, generally in the mares, that because the interior rock was of greater density than that of the surrounding area, exerted a slightly higher gravitational force. From the flights of the five unmanned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft of 1966 and 1967 (all of them enormously successful), telemetry data indicated that the Moon’s gravitational pull was not uniform. Perturbations likely caused by mascons had led to slight dips in the paths of the Lunar Orbiters. Data from the circumlunar flight of Apollo 8 left the mascon effects in question.

  “So, clearly, the guys who were trying to map these gravity anomalies were very interested in all the data they could get concerning these perturbations to the orbit,” Armstrong states. “The fact that Apollo 10, flying the same orbit that we were going to be flying, was documenting the influence of the mass concentrations on our own exact trajectory was very important to us, because mascons could affect how well we would be able to get to our desired landing point. Naturally, we wanted do that as accurately as we could.*

  “Stafford and Cernan did a superb job flying almost precisely the same track over the lunar surface that Apollo 11 would be flying. They took superb pictures of the descent and landing areas all the way down to before the time of engine ignition. So that was very useful. As a result of all the fine photographs from Apollo 10, Buzz and I developed a very high level of confidence in our ability to recognize our flight path and principal landmarks along the way. By the time we launched in July, we knew all the principal landmarks on our descent path by heart and, equally importantly, we knew all the landmarks on our way prior to the point at which we would ignite our descent engines. That was important as a cross-check, to be able to determine that we were, in fact, geographically—or more precisely, selenographically—over the exact place we wanted to be over—and as close to the scheduled time on the flight plan as possible.”

  Finally, the success of Apollo 10 meant that Apollo 11 would certainly be the first landing mission. The only uncertainty was the date of the launch. A few weeks after Apollo 10, De
ke Slayton asked Armstrong, “Well, how do you feel? What’s your assessment of how you stand? Are you ready?” Armstrong answered: “Well, Deke, it would be nice to have another month of training, but I cannot in honesty say that I think we have to have it. I think we can be ready for a July launch window.” It is Armstrong’s assumption that Slayton, on the basis of that conversation, went to his gathering with Bob Gilruth, George Low, and Chris Kraft and announced, “Well, I’ve talked to Neil, and he says they are going to be ready.”

  On June 11, 1969, NASA announced that the Apollo 11 astronauts had received the go-ahead for the landing attempt. Their launch would come on July 16 with the historic landing scheduled for Sunday afternoon, July 20.

  The conscientious, highly professional, and vigorous manner in which Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin pursued every item on their six-month training agenda gave NASA great confidence in the crew. Yet the Apollo 11 mission was replete with unknowns, uncertainties, and unexplored risks—some technological, others human. How would individual astronauts perform in the clutch, during a crisis moment when some instinct or impulse of personality might supersede the rational mind? In Commander Neil Armstrong, NASA managers took a calculated risk that, in order to achieve the landing, he might push the envelope, his luck, or his abilities a little too far.

  NASA established its “mission rules” as a system of preventive checks. The genesis of the concept had come early in the Mercury program from Chris Kraft, Walt Williams, Bob Gilruth, and other veteran engineers who together had made the transition from NACA aeronautical flight research to the NASA Space Task Group. Early on, they decided they had better formally record every one of their important thoughts and observations about the Mercury capsule, about the Redstone (and later Atlas) rocket that was to launch Mercury, about each flight control system, and every possible flight situation. As Kraft relates, “We noted a large number of what-ifs, too, along with what to do about them. Then we printed the whole bunch in a booklet and called it our mission rules.” It was an unprecedented type of publication based on some unprecedented thinking.

  As Gemini came on the heels of Mercury, and Apollo in his chariot took over from Gemini’s twins, the booklets of mission rules became books of mission rules. In preparation for Apollo 11, it took many months for teams of mission planners, flight directors, simulation experts, engineers, and astronauts to talk over, debate, write down, review, redraft, and finalize the rules for what was to be the first Moon landing. The first complete set of rules for Apollo 11 was not published until May 16, 1969, two months before launch. Rules were then updated weekly as ongoing simulations revealed where new rules or changes to rules had to be made.

  The mission rules book for Apollo 11 came to span more than 330 pages, evolving from “Initial Rules” (white paper, May 16, 1969) through an “A Revision” (pink paper, June 20, 1969), “B Revision” (yellow paper, July 3,1969), and ending in the “C Revision” (blue paper, July 11, 1969). Each revision came printed on a different color paper so that the flight directors could see that their flight controllers had incorporated the changes properly into their books. Even though the C Revision came out only five days before the launch, it was not the end to the changes. On the day of the launch (July16) itself, Flight inserted seven “write-in” changes to the rules. One of the last-minute changes, unknown to the crew of Apollo 11 itself, stated that there was no need to abort the landing if the LM’s onboard computer experienced a specific series of program alarms.

  Inside the mission rules book were thirty-one topical sections and three appendices. The longest section was section two, “Flight Operations Rules,” concerning the overall policy for mission conduct, the treatment of risk by mission phases, and redundancy management. In the other thirty sections could be found all the rules for launch, for trajectory and guidance, for communications, for engine burns, for docking, for EVA, for electrical systems, and for aeromedical emergencies. There were rules to cover every conceivable problem, situation, and contingency.

  Shorthand written instructions laid out how each contingency was to be handled by everyone involved. For example, in section twenty-two of the document pertaining to “LM Electrical Power,” more than two dozen rules covered what should happen in the event that the lunar module experienced electrical power problems anytime during its descent to the surface, while on the surface, or when leaving the surface of the Moon. A mission rule from part five of section three of the book required an abort if the radar data was not obtained before the LM descended to 10,000 feet. In each section of the mission rules book there was a summary of all the “Go/NoGo” situations (or “Stay/NoStay” situations, in the case of whether to stay or abort immediately after landing on the lunar surface). This was the plainspoken and impossible-to-mistake terminology used by the flight director in a final systems check to make sure that his controllers were confident about proceeding on to the next phase of the mission.

  Another very critical mission rule—one that became a matter of grave urgency during the descent of Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface—stated that once the warning light came on inside the LM showing a low level of fuel for descent, the astronauts had one minute either to commit to the landing or abort.

  So many mission rules were written for Apollo 11 and for the subsequent Apollo missions that they had to be organized according to a numerical code. To wit, Item 11 under Rule 5-90 dictated that “powered descent will be terminated for the following primary guidance system failures—105, 214, 402 (continuing), 430, 607, 1103, 1107, 1204, 1206, 1302, 1501, and1502.” There was no way any single person could remember all the mission rules, let alone the number and content of every computer program alarm; it would have been like memorizing the dictionary. During a spaceflight, flight controllers had to keep their copies of the rules book very close by.

  For many of the rules, there was a defined margin, some leeway, a little give. Yet, not until all mission rule requirements were met to the satisfaction of the flight director—known in Houston’s Mission Control simply as “Flight”—could any vital decision about the flight be made and acted upon. Some mission rules could be interpreted so as to leave an ultimate decision in the hands of the astronauts, but that sort of independent, on-the-spot judgment was not something that NASA managers wanted to encourage, not even for someone as solidly dependable and experienced as Armstrong.

  According to Gene Kranz, one of Mission Control’s flight directors, “Buzz Aldrin was the crewman usually involved in discussing mission rules, demonstrating his knowledge of a variety of subjects, and generally dominating the crew side of the conversations. Neil Armstrong seemed more the observer than the participant, but when you looked at his eyes, you knew he was the commander and had all the pieces assembled in his mind. I don’t think he ever raised his voice. He just saved his energy for when it was needed. He would listen to our discussions, and if there was any controversy, he and Aldrin would try out our ideas in the simulators and then give feedback through Charlie Duke to the controllers. [Astronaut Duke served as one of the CapComs for Apollo 11.] Mike Collins used a different tactic. He worked directly with the Trench and system guys.” (“The Trench” was the nickname for the men in Mission Control who worked as the flight dynamics team, led by the Flight Dynamics Officer, or FIDO.)

  Armstrong accepts Kranz’s characterization: “It is true that Buzz was talkative and very involved in conversations, and I was probably more reserved. I think that was just our nature.”

  Almost all the mission rules were written down and formally agreed upon; a very few were not. The most important unwritten rules for Apollo 11 concerned the landing.

  “To get a handshake on the unwritten rules for the landing,” Kranz remembers, “I had a final strategy session before simulation startup with Neil, Buzz, Mike, and Charlie Duke. It was in this session that I outlined the landing strategy. We had only two consecutive orbits to try to land on the Moon. If we had problems on the first orbit, we would delay to the second. If
we still had problems, we would start the lunar descent to buy five additional minutes to solve the problem. If we couldn’t come up with answers, we would abort the landing and start a rendezvous to recover the LM, then jettison it and head back home. If problems surfaced beyond five minutes, we would try to land and then lift off from the surface after a brief stay. We would try for the landing even if we could only touch down and then lift off two hours later when the CSM passed overhead in lunar orbit with proper conditions for rendezvous.

  “I knew Armstrong never said much,” Kranz continues, “but I expected him to be vocal on the mission rule strategy. He wasn’t. At that time he was silent. It took time to get used to his silence. As we went through the rules, Neil would generally smile and/or nod. I believe that he had set his own rules for the landing, I just wanted to know what they were. My gut feeling said he would press on, accepting any risk as long as there was even a remote chance to land. I believed we were well in sync, since I had a similar set of rules. I would let the crew continue as long as there was a chance.”

  Again, Armstrong today does not quarrel with Kranz’s interpretation: “I had high respect for mission rules and how they were developed and their usefulness and the advantage of everyone agreeing on what was the proper thing to do. But I would admit that if everything seemed to be going well and there was a mission rule that interrupted and said we have to do such and such, I would have been willing to use my commander’s prerogative on the scene and overrule the mission rule if I thought that was the safest route. After all, aborts were not very well understood phenomenon—no one had ever done an abort. You were shutting off engines, firing pyrotechnic separation devices, igniting other engines in midflight. Doing all of that in close proximity to the lunar surface was not something in which I had a great deal of confidence.