First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “There is some truth to what Gene is saying, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that even if there was only a remote chance to land…I wouldn’t have accepted that. I would have said, as long as there is a good chance of landing, I would proceed.” Not that Armstrong ever explicitly verbalized his perspective on this crucial matter to Kranz or anyone else. “I probably didn’t, unless it came out in the context of a specific rule which I thought was irrational for some reason. Then I might have argued against it.”

  Like Kranz, a nervous Chris Kraft was also bothered by the fact that he could not be sure what Armstrong might do to override mission rules and force a lunar landing to happen. “In the last month, we’d had Neil in Mission Control to go over the rules for lunar descent, landing, surface operations, and takeoff,” Kraft explains. “Mission rules could leave the ultimate decision to the astronaut, but that wasn’t something we encouraged. Now I wanted to make certain that all of us understood exactly where we were. We got down to the finest details—descent-engine performance, computer bugs that we knew about, landmarks on the lunar surface, even talking through the most unlikely events we could imagine during the landing.

  “The computer and the landing radar got particular attention. We’d be sending last-minute updates to the computer on the lunar module’s trajectory, its engine performance, and location over the Moon. Until Eagle was about ten thousand feet high, its altitude was based on Earth radars, and its guidance system could be off by hundreds of thousands of feet. Then the LM’s own landing radar was supposed to kick in and provide accurate readings.

  “That led to some heated discussion. Neil worried that an overzealous flight controller would abort a good descent, based on faulty information. ‘I’m going to be in a better position to know what’s happening than the people back in Houston,’ Neil said over and over.

  “And I’m not going to tolerate any unnecessary risks,” Kraft retorted. “That’s why we have mission rules.”

  Arguing about the specifics of the landing radar, Kraft insisted that if the landing radar failed, an abort was mandatory: “I didn’t trust the ability of an astronaut, not even one as tried and tested as Neil Armstrong, to accurately estimate his altitude over a cratered lunar surface. It was unfamiliar terrain, and nobody knew the exact size of the landmarks that would normally be used for reference.” Finally, Kraft and Armstrong agreed. “That mission rule stayed as written,” Kraft recalls. “But I could tell from Neil’s frown that he wasn’t convinced. I wondered then if he’d overrule all of us in lunar orbit and try to land without a radar system.

  “Those conversations came back to me when I saw Neil a few days before the launch,” Kraft relates. “‘What can we do?’ I asked Neil. ‘Is there anything we’ve missed?’ ‘No, Chris, we’re ready. It’s all done except the countdown.’ He was right. If there was anything undone, none of us could say what it was…. We had come to this last point, and for a moment I felt my legs shake.”

  Because he, too, was worried that the crew might take unnecessary risks in order to make the landing, Dr. Thomas Paine, the NASA administrator, even got into the act. In the week before the launch, he made a point of speaking to Armstrong. According to Neil, Paine told him, “If we didn’t get a chance to land and came back, he would give us the chance to go again, on the very next flight. I believe he meant it at that point.”

  The truth was, Paine told every subsequent Apollo crew the very same thing. It was his way of encouraging the crews not to try anything stupid, thinking it would be their only chance. If Apollo 11’s landing had been aborted, Armstrong was ready to take the NASA administrator up on his offer. “Had that circumstance happened, my guess is I would have said, ‘Yeah, let’s go again.’ We were all trained. The requirements would not be burdensome at all to go through the same process. We’d love to have another flight, and we would have done it.”

  Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin trained up to the very last moment. This fact led to a concern that was picked up on—and mostly misinterpreted—by the news media, that the astronauts were being rushed to get in all of the training necessary for the flight. “The reason that was of concern,” Armstrong explained to reporters at the time, was because “the final training for a crew is the last thing that takes place.” Before final training of a crew can take place, “the procedures must be developed in the simulations after they are completely set up and ready to ‘fly’ with all the pertinent checklists and so on. These were the intermediate, pacing items leading to the final training. There was a good deal of concern in our own minds and the minds of many in the organization that all these things for the descent to and ascent from the surface would fall into place in time.” By the time they left Houston in late June for their final days of training at Cape Kennedy, the crew, in Neil’s words, felt “very fortunate” that all the mission rules, techniques, and checklists had, in fact, been worked out and were fully based on a thorough series of highly integrated flight simulations.

  The crew moved into their astronaut living quarters at the Cape on June 26. Beginning at the stroke of midnight on the twenty-seventh, they participated in a weeklong trial countdown. Simulated launch came on the morning of July 3 precisely at 9:32 A.M., the exact time scheduled for the real launch. Before the trial started, the three men entered a strict physical quarantine that was to last for two weeks before the flight and endure for three more weeks after the flight. The quarantine was invoked in order to limit the astronauts’ exposure to infectious organisms. Dr. Charles E. Berry, chief astronaut physician, gave them their last head-to-toe going-over the day the simulated countdown began. Besides checking on their health (Dr. Berry reported to the press that the crew was “in excellent physical shape” and looked “amazingly relaxed”), the doctor wanted to catalog all organisms that were apparently normal to the three men’s systems. A growing fear from the scientific community that hostile, alien organisms might accompany the astronauts and their rock samples back to Earth—a concern hyped by the publication of the sensational Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, a June 1969 Book-of-the-Month Club selection—had persuaded (even forced) NASA to take every possible preventive measure against contamination from extraterrestrial life.

  “The National Academy of Sciences was given the task of evaluating the potential danger from lunar contaminants on the Earth,” Armstrong recalls. “The scientists said that the chances were extremely unlikely, but NASA in consultation with the academy decided to have a contamination facility and put us in a quarantine after the mission for a period of time equal to the expected incubation time of any disease that could provide an epidemic. That period lasted for twenty-one days from the time we left the surface of the Moon.”

  On July 5, the crew of Apollo 11 returned to Houston from Florida for a media day. First up in the morning was a full press conference staged in the movie theater inside the MSC visitors’ center. After that came sessions with the wire services, another with a group of magazine writers, and finally, interviews separately filmed with each of the three television networks for broadcast that evening. Before it was over, the three astronauts endured a fourteen-hour day answering questions from several hundred international reporters and journalists, a gaggle that included, according to author Norman Mailer, attending the day’s events with credentials from Life magazine, “some of the worst word-sculptors ever assembled in southeastern Texas.”

  Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin arrived at the morning press conference wearing gas masks. Knowing how silly they looked—like “razorback hogs,” as Mailer described them—the three men grinned in embarrassment but with apparent good humor as they walked onstage. A few jokers in the audience had donned white hospital masks to share the crew’s embarrassment and poke fun at NASA for the extremes of its biological wariness.

  Onstage Neil, Mike, and Buzz sat in a three-sided plastic box roughly twelve feet wide, ten feet deep, and ten feet high. To ensure that no contagion from the journalists circulated into the breathing spac
e of the astronauts, blowers located to the rear of the plastic booth blew air from behind the Apollo crew out into the audience. Once safely within the confines of their hygienic box, the astronauts took off their masks and sat down in easy chairs before a large walnut-brown desk emblazoned with NASA’s emblematic “meatball” and the Apollo 11 seal: an eagle, the symbol of America, coming in for a landing on the lunar surface; its talons bearing an olive branch, a symbol of peace. (Originally, the astronauts had the eagle carrying the olive branch in its beak, but Bob Gilruth repositioned the olive branch from the eagle’s mouth to its claws so as to make the eagle appear more peaceful and benign. The Apollo 11 crew, especially Aldrin, disagreed with Gilruth, but did not press their case.) To the rear of the astronauts’ protective booth stood an American flag, a conspicuous reminder of the congressional mandate that Apollo 11 plant the standard into the lunar soil. Mailer called the restrained jeering at Old Glory “a splash of derision” at the entire Apollo show, already sufficiently American without yet another American flag on display.

  The atmosphere in the theater felt decidedly strange. Convening to talk about a trip to the Moon still seemed a little fantastical. Naturally the astronauts were a little edgy, too, among the crowd of reporters, some of whom, as Mailer described, were so ignorant of science and engineering that they were “not just certain where laxatives ended and physics began.”

  Brian Duff, a NASA public affairs officer, opened by reading a statement from Dr. Charles Berry explaining the import of hygiene precautions. Duff warned journalists to “stay behind the ropes” demarcating the prescribed minimum of fifty feet from the Apollo crew.

  “The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes,” Mailer related. “They were comfortable in motion. As men being scrutinized by other men they had little to worry about. Still, they did not strut. Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose. Therefore they looked to enjoy the snouts [i.e., the gas masks] they were wearing, they waved at reporter friends they recognized, they grinned.”

  As mission commander, Armstrong spoke first. Mailer, like everyone else present, sensed that Neil was “ill at ease.” What Mailer might not have known was that Armstrong often paused in formal conversation, searching for the right words.

  “We’re here today to talk a little bit about the forthcoming flight, Apollo 11, hopefully the culmination of the Apollo national objective. We are here to be able to talk about this attempt because of the success of four previous Apollo command flights and a number of unmanned flights. Each of those flights contributed in a great way to this flight. Each and every flight took a large number of new objectives and large hurdles, and left us with just a very few additions—the final descent-to-the-lunar-surface work—to be completed. We’re very grateful to those large efforts of people here at MSC and across the nation who made those first flights successful, and made it possible for us to sit here today and discuss Apollo 11 with you. I’ll ask Mike first to talk about the differences you might see in the command module activities on the flight.”

  As usual, Neil was brief—a total of six sentences, 149 words. Collins talked for a little longer—ten sentences, 273 words. Mike emphasized that he was going to be alone in the command module much longer than any previous CM pilot and that rendezvous was going to happen for the first time between a stationary LM, down on the lunar surface, and a CSM “whizzing around the Moon.” Last but certainly not least in terms of how much he said—twenty sentences, 490 words—came Aldrin. Buzz outlined a complete lunar descent and landing; to be fair, those critical elements of Apollo 11 did involve so much that was new that it did take quite a bit longer to describe them.

  According to Armstrong today, “the media attention would have been a burden if we really had had the time to notice it. Fortunately we didn’t have to fight that battle ourselves. Deke was probably the principal person in building barriers that allowed us to get our training done and then negotiating with NASA’s public affairs branch to give the press a few opportunities to photograph our training activities in certain selected venues. During our simulated lunar surface activity, for example, they allowed the press in so they could cover that. NASA set that up specially where we had lights and platforms and other props. But as far as the media’s interest affecting what we were doing, we didn’t have to worry that much about answering questions or posing for pictures. We just did our work. Even when the press was there, we did the same thing we’d be doing if they weren’t there.”

  At the morning press conference on July 5, the Apollo 11 crew responded to a total of thirty-seven questions. Armstrong answered twenty-seven of them. Nine of the newsmen specifically asked for Neil to answer their questions; the other eighteen questions were of a nature that Armstrong, as commander, felt it was his responsibility to answer. Twice, Neil turned and asked Buzz to respond to a question directed specifically at Neil; on two other occasions, Buzz, unsolicited, added to Neil’s comments. Collins, like Aldrin, answered only three questions directed at him. A few questions called for responses from all three astronauts. It was an overall pattern that would long outlast the Apollo program. People most wanted to hear from the commander, the First Man who would step out onto the Moon.

  Armstrong announced for the first time the nicknames for the Apollo command and lunar modules: “Yes, we do intend to use call signs other than those you may have heard in simulation. The call sign for the lunar module will be ‘Eagle.’ The call sign for the command module will be ‘Columbia.’ Both names were suggested by a number of people, very many. A large number of other names were also submitted for our consideration, many of which were quite good. We selected these as being representative of the flight, the nation’s hope. Columbia is a national symbol. Columbia stands on top of our Capitol and, as you all know, it was the name of Jules Verne’s spacecraft that went to the Moon in his novel of one hundred years ago.”

  Actually, Verne named his Moon rocket Columbiad, a fact that Armstrong knew from his own reading of the book, done in his late teens. “We thought that Columbia was better,” Neil explains today. “Columbia was well known in the American lexicon. It had been a candidate for the name of our country, so it was a natural.”

  “Was Verne one of your favorite authors?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I had certainly read the book. Verne’s story definitely had a role in our deliberations.” The entire crew participated in naming the spacecraft. “We had a lot of those little things, which we considered to be nonoperational decisions. Many of them were kind of a pain to have to deal with, but we had to do it.” Choosing Columbia and Eagle was one of the few nonoperational decisions they actually enjoyed.

  Neil states that Mike Collins more than himself or Aldrin played the major role in choosing both the call names: “Mike was certainly as convincing as anyone that these would be the names to use. We all participated, but Mike was especially thoughtful about it. Some of his ideas were the principal ones.” Aldrin remembers it a little differently: “Neil and I asked Mike to choose a name for the command ship. He replied instantly; he’d done his thinking in advance and had chosen Columbia. Neil and I considered a long list of possibilities for naming our LM and settled on Eagle, the symbol of America.”

  Naturally, the press, eleven days before Apollo 11’s launch, was curious as to what Armstrong would say when he first stepped out of the LM and onto the Moon. “For Neil Armstrong,” a reporter rose to his feet to ask. “By the nature of your assignment if you carry it out successfully, you’re destined to become a historical personage of some consequence. I’m wondering if, in that light, you have decided on something suitably historical and memorable to say when you perform this symbolic act of stepping down on the Moon for the first time?”

  Not even those few who knew Armstrong personally or who exercised authority over the manned space program had been able to get Neil to disclose any of his thoughts about the historic first words he would utter from
afoot on the lunar surface. At one point, the internal pressures inside of NASA motivated Julian Scheer, the chief of NASA’s public affairs office, to write a terse internal memo that asked, in effect, did King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain tell Christopher Columbus what to say when he reached the New World? Among the rumors that Aldrin heard at the time was that Simon Bourgin, a United States Information Agency official in frequent contact with the astronauts—and who allegedly had advised Frank Borman to read from Genesis during Apollo 8—tried to advise Armstrong. If Bourgin did make any suggestions, they had no effect on Neil.

  George Low had tried. In late June, when Armstrong was brought to Mission Control for the final run-through of the mission rules for the lunar landing, Low broke in, “Have you thought about what you’re going to say, Neil, when you step off the ladder?” According to Chris Kraft, who was part of the conversation, Neil was quiet for a moment and then answered, enigmatically true to form, “Sure, George, I’ve been thinking about it.” Then, characteristically, Neil changed the subject. “Tell everybody thanks for all of us. We know how hard everybody’s been working.”

  Kraft remembers that Low was “taken aback” by Neil’s refusal to share any of his thoughts on the matter; Kraft himself was not surprised by it. “There was no way Neil was going to tell George Low or myself or anyone else,” Kraft relates. “I wouldn’t have asked Neil that question, to be perfectly honest, because I figured it was his business. But George was one of those guys who wanted to know what everybody was up to so, if necessary, he could tell people what they ought to do. George also probably had a better feel for the worldwide impact and symbolic meaning of Apollo.” Low thought about pressing Armstrong but chose not to. Kraft never gave it another thought: “Whatever Neil said would be something that none of us were likely ever to forget. He’d say the right thing.”