First Man

by James R. Hansen

  So, in turn, the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own incredible contradictions and yet release some of the untold energies of the earth. A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction. It was the first century in history whichpresented to sane and sober minds the end of its span. It was a world half convinced of the future death of our species yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us. So it was a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend. The itch was to accelerate—the metaphysical direction unknown.

  There was no denying the brilliance of Mailer’s exposé. Yet Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity. What Mailer wrote in his chapter “The Psychology of Astronauts” was highly provocative and insightful as social criticism, but as history, biography, or real psychology, it shed considerably more heat than light.

  The mythologizing and iconography had only just begun. Fifteen days after the press conference, Armstrong would step onto the Moon. He would no longer be just a man, not for any of us. He would be First Man.

  PART SEVEN

  ONE GIANT LEAP

  He who would bring back the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.

  —INSCRIPTION ON THE FAÇADE OF UNION STATION, WASHINGTON DC

  Did he take something of Karen with him to the Moon? Oh, I dearly hope so.

  —JUNE ARMSTRONG HOFFMAN

  CHAPTER 27

  Outward Bound

  For Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, going into space actually commenced back in the crew quarters three and a half hours before liftoff, shortly after 6:00 A.M., when technicians snapped the astronauts’ helmets down onto their neck rings and locked them into place. From that moment on, the crew of the first Moon landing breathed no outside air. They heard no human voice other than that piped in electronically through the barrier of their pressure suits. They saw the world only through the veneer of their faceplates, and could smell, hear, feel, or taste nothing but that which modern technology manufactured for them inside their protective cocoon.

  For Armstrong, the isolation was more familiar than it was for his mates. As a test pilot back at Edwards, he had grown accustomed to the confinement of pressurized flight suits. In comparison to the partial pressure suits and headgear he had donned for flying zooms in the F-104 or going to the edge of space in the X-15, the Apollo suit was downright roomy and easy to maneuver.

  Still, as the crew of Apollo 11 left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building at 6:27 A.M. and paraded in their protective yellow galoshes into the air-conditioned transfer van that was to transport them eight miles to Launchpad 39A, every tissue of their being, every nerve fiber, every brain cell, every recess of their inner space, acknowledged that they had left the ordinary, commonsense realm of nature and had entered the totally artificial environment that would sustain them in outer space.

  As best as they could manage for the past weeks and months, the three astronauts had ignored the steady buildup around their mission. “We were running on a pretty fast track,” relates Armstrong. “There were so many things to do, and reading newspapers and watching television was not high on our list.”

  Going into the mission, Neil, Mike, and Buzz possessed great confidence in the Saturn rocket, but one could never be sure about any rocket’s performance—not even the massive machine designed by von Braun’s accomplished team of rocketeers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. “It was certainly a very high-performance machine,” Armstrong asserts. “It was not perfect, though. Indeed, in the flight after ours, there would be problems.” A lightning strike thirty-six seconds after Apollo 12’s liftoff resulted in a complete, albeit temporary, electrical failure inside the spacecraft. The failure was not the fault of the rocket except for the fact that an ionized plume from the rocket made the entire vehicle more electromagnetically attractive.

  Another concern about the rocket lay in the fact that the Saturn V had come to life so quickly. The phenomenally fast pace of its development resulted from the strategy of “all-up testing,” a new NASA R&D philosophy championed by Dr. George Mueller, the associate administrator for manned space flight. Mueller put the development of the Saturn V on the fast track by having the rocket tested from the very start with all three of its stages “live” and ready to go, rather than having the stages incrementally tested one at a time and then mating the three of them together only after each had proven itself independently.

  The von Braun team was not a big fan of all-up testing—nor was Neil Armstrong: “I viewed it as a good approach for unmanned tests but as a somewhat dangerous approach in manned flight. I’d been brought up in step-by-step testing; that was the old NACA/NASA method of doing things. I knew the value of the incremental approach, and this one was quite different. All-up testing was a subject of conversation among the astronauts, particularly at four o’clock in the morning when we were inside the spacecraft running some test in order to make the schedule for an upcoming all-up test on the pad. On the other hand, the development of the Saturn V tended to be more operational than research oriented, so the motivations were different.” Without all-up testing, Neil recognized, Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for the Moon landing just could not be met. Still, it was not the surest way to assure the development of a sound rocket, particularly one that was such a vast and complex piece of novel machinery—producing an enormous 7.6 million pounds of thrust.

  By the time the crew sat on top of the monumentally powerful rocket waiting for it to fire, they were past pondering its dangers. Moreover, there was always the chance that something minor would go wrong at the last minute in one of the several hundred subsystems associated with the rocket, the spacecraft, or the launch complex and cancel the launch. “These things were canceled more often than they were launched,” Neil explains. “We’d climb out, go back, and get ready for another day.” That possibility—perhaps probability—“softened the intensity” of an astronaut’s emotions, Neil relates, as he headed to the launchpad.

  The first astronaut into Columbia the morning of the launch was not Armstrong, Collins, or Aldrin; it was Fred Haise, Collins’s backup as command module pilot. “Freddo,” as he was known, preceded the crew into the spacecraft by some ninety minutes in order to run through a 417-step checklist designed to ensure that every switch was set in its proper position. At 6:54 A.M. local time, Haise and the rest of the pad “close-out crew” gave the spacecraft their thumbs-up. Having taken the elevator up the 320 feet to the level of the waiting spacecraft, Armstrong grasped the overhead handrail of the capsule with both hands and swung himself through the hatch. Prior to climbing in, Neil received a small gift from Guenter Wendt, the pad leader: it was a crescent moon that Wendt had carved out of Styrofoam and covered with metal foil. Wendt told him “it’s a key to the Moon,” and a smiling Neil asked Wendt to hold on to the token for him until he got back. In exchange Neil gave Wendt a small card he had been keeping under the wristband of his Omega watch. It was a printed ticket for a ride in a “space taxi,” reading “good between any two planets.”

  Inside the command module Armstrong settled into the commander’s seat to the far left. Five minutes later, after pad technician Joe Schmitt hooked up Neil’s lines and hoses for communication, respiration, and all the rest, Collins, the command module pilot, climbed into the right seat, followed by Aldrin, the lunar module pilot, in the center. (Aldrin was in the center seat because he had trained for that position on Apollo 8. Collins had been out for a while with his neck spur, so rather than retrain Buzz for ascent, NASA just left him in the center and trained Mike for the right seat.)

  To Neil’s
left hand was the abort handle. One twist of the handle would trigger the solid rocket escape tower that was attached to the top of the command module to blast Apollo 11 clear of trouble. In the Gemini program, the spacecraft had possessed ejection seats rather than an escape tower, but the Gemini’s Titan booster used hypergolic fuels that could not explode the way the Saturn could, and would—in a huge fireball—because the Saturn was fueled with kerosene, hydrogen, and oxygen. With Apollo, ejection seats could not have worked because they would not throw the astronauts far enough away from a Saturn explosion. Armstrong does not recall second-guessing the wisdom of the Apollo escape-tower system: “It gave us the only chance we would have had, and we certainly wanted to have some option for any emergency that might happen.” As for the possibility of an abort, “I felt our training was excellent and adequate to handle almost any situation that we could envision in booster malfunctions. We would know what to do. We thought we had a very high probability of being successful in an abort throughout the launch sequence.”

  The Saturn V’s ascent was especially suited to Neil’s background in research, in that the booster rocket was controllable from the cockpit: “You could not fly the earlier models of the Saturn rocket from the spacecraft. Had there been a failure on the Saturn’s inertial system on Apollo 9, for example, McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart would have had to splash down into the Atlantic or maybe land in Africa, with a high risk of physical injury. For our flight we had added an alternate guidance system in the command module’s gear so that if there were a failure of some kind on the Saturn we could switch to the alternate systems and fly the rocket from the spacecraft.

  “I never had much to do with booster development, but I was very interested in getting this guidance capability,” Neil relates. Back in 1959 and 1960 at Edwards (as mentioned in an earlier chapter), Armstrong and research engineer Ed Holleman had conducted a study that showed the feasibility of flying a large booster manually. Many simulations were done at Edwards and at the Johnsville centrifuge in Pennsylvania to confirm that the effects of acceleration on a pilot doing the “guiding task” from atop a rocket were not traumatic. If the autopilot went out, the pilot could fly the booster into orbit manually just as a pilot could fly a large supersonic airplane to altitude. Though ready for Apollo 10, the alternative guidance system did not fly until Apollo 11.

  “It’s nice to see one of your ideas become reality,” Neil states, “but it was fortunate that the concept never had to prove itself.”

  The powered ascent of Apollo 11 from its launchpad into orbit involved a number of discrete phases, and within each of these phases there were discrete changes in abort technique. “You have to do things right away and do them properly, so that was the focus,” Armstrong explains. “It was a complete concentration on getting through each phase and being ready to do the proper thing if anything went wrong in the next phase.” His most important cues during the fiery ascent came, in his words, from “a combination of looking at the attitude indicator, following the flight performance on the computer, and listening to indications over the radio as to which phase you were in or were about to enter.”

  In the time it took for just a small fraction of the heavy automobile traffic to crawl its way clear of Cape Kennedy’s environs, Apollo 11 went around the world one and a half times and was on its way to the Moon. On the front lawn of their Ohio home, Neil’s parents had already been interviewed by a small horde of media: “Mr. Armstrong, what did you think of that launch?” and “Mrs. Armstrong, what were your feelings when you saw that rocket disappear into the sky?” Viola exclaimed, “I’m thankful beyond words.” Projecting her religious beliefs onto her son as she always did, she asserted, “Neil believes God is up there with all three of those boys. I believe that, and Neil believes that.” Steve remarked, “It’s a tremendous, most happy time. We’ll stay glued to the television for the entire flight.” Viola’s mother, eighty-two-year-old Caroline Korspeter, remarked before the TV cameras: “I think it’s dangerous. I told Neil to look around and not to step out if it didn’t look good. He said he wouldn’t.”

  Back on the Banana River, Janet Armstrong and her boys stayed on the yacht listening to transmissions from the spacecraft on a NASA squawk box until the crowds dispersed. Though greatly relieved the launch had gone off smoothly, at Janet’s request no bottles of champagne or boxes of cigars were opened on board; she preferred that celebrating be reserved for after the mission when the men were home safely. Before departing Patrick Air Force Base, south of Cocoa Beach, for home, Janet agreed to meet briefly with journalists. “We couldn’t see the rocket right away,” Rick shyly reported, “and I was kind of worried at first. All of a sudden, we could see it and it was beautiful.” Janet told the press, “It was a tremendous sight. I was just thrilled,” though her main feeling was simply relief that the launch had gone off safely. “This, too, shall pass” was what she was actually thinking. She had gotten almost no sleep the night before. Overly tired, she tossed and turned until her wakeup call came at 4:00 A.M.—the same time that Neil, Mike, and Buzz got up. On the yacht, Janet kept saying to people, “I wish they would hurry up and get this off so I can get some sleep!” At one point the boat’s skipper asked her if all the years of living through the anxious moments of test flights and space shots had not begun to affect her. Pointing to a few streaks of gray in her hair, Janet replied, laughing, “I haven’t aged a day.”

  When she got home to Houston late that afternoon, the press waited in her yard. “I don’t feel historic,” Janet succinctly told them, ushering her boys into the house. What she and the boys mainly felt was worn out. Rick did not participate in his Little League All-Star game that night: “I think you’re too tired,” his mother told him, and Rick did not argue. Not playing baseball was another part of the price the boy paid for his father’s going to the Moon.

  The vigil for the crew had just begun. It would be two and a half more days before the astronauts even made it to lunar orbit, a day after that before Neil and Buzz descended to the landing, and four days beyond that before they returned to Earth.

  So much could still go wrong.

  At 10:58 Houston time, two hours and twenty-six minutes after liftoff, Mission Control gave Apollo 11 the “go” for TLI. In the patois of spaceflight, TLI meant “translunar injection”—leaving Earth orbit and heading into deep space. The astronauts accomplished TLI by firing the Saturn V’s third-stage engine, the only stage still attached to the command service module. This burn, lasting some five and a half minutes, accelerated Apollo 11 to over 24,200 miles per hour, the speed required to escape the hold of Earth’s gravity.

  Everything from the moment of the launch to this point had gone very well. “That Saturn gave us a magnificent ride,” Armstrong reported after leaving Earth orbit. “We have no complaints with any of three stages of that ride. It was beautiful.”

  Privately, Armstrong would have liked the ride to have been smoother: “In the first stage, the Saturn V noise was enormous, particularly when we were at low altitude because we got the noise from seven and a half million pounds of thrust plus the echo of that noise off the ground that reinforced it. After about thirty seconds, we flew out of that echo noise and the volume went down substantially. But in that first thirty seconds it was very difficult to hear anything over the radio—even inside the helmet with the earphones. It was considerably louder than the Titan. In the first stage, it was also a lot rougher ride than the Titan. It seemed to be vibrating in all three axes simultaneously.” During the worst of it, which came shortly after liftoff, Armstrong’s heart rate rose to 110 beats per minute, compared to Collins’s 99 and Aldrin’s 88—all within the satisfactory range. Neil’s heart rate always seemed a little higher than most of the other astronauts’, though the cardiac numbers for all three members of the Apollo 11 crew were lower than what they had been during their Gemini launches, which for Armstrong had been 146 beats per minute, for Collins 125, and for Aldrin 110.

  With
the burnout of the first stage, the flight smoothed out and quieted down considerably, so much so that the astronauts could not feel any vibration or even hear the engines running. Rocketing upward on the second and third stages of the Saturn proved superior to any stage of the Titan. Mike Collins later described the herky-jerky early ascent of the Saturn V: “It was like a nervous novice driving a wide car down a narrow alley and jerking the wheel back and forth spasmodically.” Then on the upper stages the Saturn V turned into “a gentle giant,” with the climb out of the atmosphere as “smooth as glass, as quiet and serene as a rocket ride can be.”

  Out their windows the astronauts could see nothing until three minutes into their ride, when the spacecraft reached sixty miles high. At that altitude, the Apollo 11 crew jettisoned their unused escape rocket and let loose the protective shield that had been covering the command module. Still pointing straight up, however, there was nothing for the crew to see except for what Collins called “a small patch of blue sky that gradually darkens to the jet black of space.”

  Earth orbit was achieved twelve minutes into the flight when the first burn of the Saturn’s single third-stage engine pushed the Apollo 11 spacecraft (while over the Canary Islands tracking station in the eastern Atlantic) up to the required speed of 17,500 miles per hour. In an ellipse described in astronaut shorthand as 102.5 by 99.7 nautical miles, the trio now had an orbit and a half in which to make sure all their equipment was operating properly before they reignited their third-stage engine and committed themselves to leaving the Earth’s gravitational field.