First Man

by James R. Hansen

  According to Armstrong, “The purpose of doing the orbit and a half was twofold. One, it allowed a little more flexibility in launch time, and second, it gave us the opportunity to check out all the principal systems of the spacecraft—the command module, not the lunar module—prior to leaving the Earth’s orbit on a translunar trajectory. So systems checkout was the principal reason that we were in this holding orbit, and the responsibility was shared between the crew on board and the people on the ground. The people on the ground could see a good bit more detail of systems operations and the orbit and a half gave them a long enough time to look at it. If something went wrong on the spacecraft, we would have the time to decide whether we should forget the whole thing and abort.”

  Initially, the crew found only brief moments to take in the spectacular view of the Earth below. Their first sunrise one hour and nineteen minutes into the flight prompted a hunt for the Swedish-made Hasselblad camera. “Look at that horizon!” Collins exclaimed. Neil replied, “Isn’t that something?!” Mike continued, “Damn, that’s pretty. It’s unreal.” “Get a picture of that,” Neil urged. But the camera could not be found. “I’ve lost a Hasselblad,” Collins jested. “Has anyone seen a Hasselblad floating by? It couldn’t have gone very far, big son of a gun like that…. Everybody look for a floating Hasselblad. I see a pen floating loose down here, too. Is anybody missing a ballpoint pen?…I mean, felt tip…. I’ve looked everywhere over here for that Hasselblad, and I just don’t see it.” “It’s too late for sunrise now, anyway,” Neil noted. “But you want to get it before TLI,” warned Aldrin, because the acceleration of the spacecraft out of orbit could launch the bandit camera into someone’s head, or worse, into the spacecraft’s control panel. “Let me go on a little expedition here,” Collins said. In less than fifteen seconds he found the camera floating in the aft bulkhead. “Beautiful,” said Neil.

  For the first time since their respective Gemini flights, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin again experienced the wonder of weightlessness, though there was too much to do to make ready for TLI to enjoy it—if enjoying it was even what would happen. In weightlessness, the fluid in the inner ear sloshed freely. Motion sickness could happen more easily in the Apollo spacecraft than in the Gemini because Apollo was more commodious. On the way to the Moon in Apollo 8, Frank Borman got ill from the motion, causing quite a stir in Mission Control. The mission planners for the subsequent Apollo flights told the crews to move around as slowly and gingerly as possible and not to wiggle their heads back and forth too much, until they got used to being in weightless conditions. Armstrong was intently aware of the potential problem. One hour and seventeen minutes into the flight, he asked Mike and Buzz: “How does zero g feel? Your head feel funny, anybody, or anything like that?” Mike answered, “No. It just feels like we’re going around upside down.” Buzz: “I don’t even feel that.”

  According to Neil, “We were very fortunate that none of the crew came down with the malady at any point in the flight. [The same was true for he and Dave Scott in Gemini VIII.] I don’t know how you predict that. Some of the people that were best known to have an iron gut ended up getting space sickness. No one was sure at the time what exactly was causing it. They were trying various things.” As for his own proclivity for nausea, “I was sensitive to motion sickness when I was small, in automobiles and boats. I grew out of it, but I could still make myself queasy by doing a lot of aerobatics. So I was a candidate. But, curiously, the predisposition does not correlate with what goes on in space. Space sickness does not correlate to motion sickness on Earth. It involves sensitivity to other motion situations.”

  Convinced that the ship was ready to leave Earth orbit, Mission Control gave Apollo 11 the go for TLI some two hours and fifteen minutes after the spacecraft reached orbit. Flight procedures required that the crew, for their protection during the burn, put their helmets and gloves back on; the idea was that if the Saturn third stage, known as the S-IVB, exploded, the astronauts might benefit from some protection inside their sealed pressure suits. “The problem with that thinking,” as Collins has explained it, was that “any explosion massive enough to crack our ship’s hull would also result in multiple equipment failures, and we would never get back in one piece. Still, a rule was a rule, so we sat there, helmet and gloves on, ready to be propelled to another planet.”

  Privately Armstrong also questioned the rationale for putting the helmets and gloves back on: “There was the viewpoint that whenever you were in powered flight you were being exposed to more risk than when you were just in free-floating flight. However, the disadvantage of helmets and gloves was that you were less able, less mobile, and less facile. You couldn’t hear or see as well, so you actually gave up a lot of safety when you had the helmets and gloves on. It was always a balance trying to figure out what was absolutely required.”

  Approaching the point for translunar injection halfway around its second Earth orbit, a preprogrammed sequence fired the Saturn’s third-stage engine for one final time, accelerating Apollo 11 to the escape velocity. The TLI burn took just under six minutes. At the moment of ignition, the spacecraft was over the Pacific Ocean; circling more than ninety miles beneath it, a formation of KC-135 aircraft—converted air force tankers carrying a large array of electronic gear—relayed telemetry data from the spacecraft back to Houston. The data indicated that the Saturn V had performed its last job well. Speeding away from the home planet at a rate of six miles per second—faster than a rifle bullet—the astronauts discovered the true meaning of “outward bound.”

  The trip out started far busier for Collins than it did for Armstrong or Aldrin. As command module pilot, it was Mike’s job (assisted by Neil and Buzz) to separate Columbia from the S-IVB and turn the command service module around. Mike would then maneuver the CSM into a docking with Eagle, the lunar module, which, to survive the launch—with its spindly legs, thrusters and antennae stuck out at odd angles, and extremely fragile pressure shell of a body—had flown up to this point tightly secured inside a strong boxlike container attached atop the S-IVB. It was a critical maneuver in the flight plan. “If the separation and docking did not work,” Aldrin has explained, “we would return to Earth. There was also the possibility of an in-space collision and the subsequent decompression of our cabin, so we were still in our spacesuits as Mike separated us from the Saturn third stage.”

  Neither Aldrin nor Armstrong felt any great apprehension about the maneuver. “Mike did this docking maneuver,” Neil relates, “as he would need to make a similar docking with the LM after we returned from the lunar surface. This had been done before on both Apollo 8 and 9, so I was pretty confident about Mike being able to pull it off without any problems.”

  The maneuver came off perfectly. Explosive bolts blew apart the upper section of the large container, giving access to the LM in its garage atop the rocket. Collins controlled rocket thrusters that moved the CSM out and away some one hundred feet from the landing craft. Turning the spacecraft around, he inched forward gently to a successful head-to-head docking. Columbia and Eagle were now mated; when the time came, Neil and Buzz could enter the LM through an internal tunnel and hatch arrangement. To complete the separation maneuver, the LM had to be released from its mounting points and the CSM/LM stack had to be backed away from the S-IVB. Then all that remained was to slingshot the S-IVB out of the way. A command sent over to the S-IVB from Apollo 11 caused it to dump all of its leftover fuel, resulting in a propulsive reaction that sent the rocket tumbling off on a long solar-orbit trajectory that would keep it far out of Apollo 11’s way.

  The time was 1:43 P.M. CDT, which was Houston time, only five hours and eleven minutes into the flight. Apollo 11 was traveling at 12,914 feet per second and approaching 22,000 nautical miles from Earth.

  Well in excess of five hours was an awfully long time to be living inside a bulky, sweaty space suit. With the separation, docking, and evasive post-TLI maneuvers behind them, the astronauts stripped down and pulled on thei
r considerably more comfortable two-piece white Teflon fabric jumpsuits. In weightlessness, some things were easier to do than in a gravity field, but three men changing out of space suits—in a compartment equivalent in interior space to a small station wagon—was not one of them. Undressing, folding their stiff heavy suits into storage bags, and then stuffing the filled bags under the couch of the spacecraft was a laborious process that, in Aldrin’s words, brought about “a great deal of confusion, with parts and pieces floating about the cabin as we tried to keep logistics under control.” Collins compared it to “three albino whales inside a small tank, banging into the instrument panel despite our best efforts to move slowly…. Every time we pushed against the spacecraft our bodies tended to carom off in some unwanted direction and we had to muscle them back into place.”

  With their clothes finally off, the crew blissfully removed the gadgets affixed to their private parts. Because the astronauts might need to urinate or have a bowel movement before their suits could be taken off, devices for excreting had been connected to them preliminary to suiting up. Aldrin recalls the nitty-gritty details: “We rubbed our behinds with a special salve and pulled on what were euphemistically called fecal-containment garments.” The modified diaper kept the odor of despoiled briefs to a minimum, and the salve kept the men’s rear ends from chafing too badly. Urinating was accomplished through prophylactic-like devices from which a connector led to a sack resembling a bikini secured around the hips. To function without leaking, the rubber condom catheter had to fit quite snugly, an uncomfortable reality for male plumbing that the crew joked about privately. Once cleaned up and in their jumpsuits with fresh underwear, going to the bathroom was easier and more palatable. Feces got stowed in special containers, and urine was vented out of the spacecraft where it crystallized into bright particles before vanishing from view.

  Safely, and now comfortably and hygienically, on their way Moonward, the astronauts relaxed for the first time. As Collins explains, there was no way to prepare oneself for the novel, Twilight Zone–like experience of cislunar space, the region between the Earth and the Moon: “Unlike the roller-coaster ride of the Earth orbit, we are entering a slow-motion domain where time and distance seem to have more meaning than speed. To get a sensation of traveling fast, you must see something whizzing by: the telephone poles along the highway, another airplane crossing your path…. In space, objects are too far from each other to blur or whiz, except during a rendezvous or a landing and in those cases the approach is made slowly, very slowly. But if I can’t sense speed out my window, I can certainly gauge distance, as the Earth gets smaller and smaller. Finally the whole disk can be seen.”

  This cosmic vision of “Spaceship Earth” would deeply move every lunar astronaut. “It was a slowly changing panorama as you went from just the horizon to a large arc, to a larger and larger arc, and finally a whole sphere,” Armstrong describes. “And depending on what the flight attitude requirements of the vehicle were at any given moment, you may not have been able to see all of that all the time. But we certainly saw the Earth become a sphere. I don’t know if we all saw it at the same instant, nor do I remember the exact instant that it occurred. It was a striking event, leaving the planet and realizing that there was no logical reason that you were ever going to fall back to that planet at some point. It was a commitment to excellence, in terms of what you had to do to get back.”

  Looking back at what would come to be known as the “Whole Earth,” Armstrong reveled in his knowledge of geography, a subject at which he had excelled since boyhood. He radioed at three hours and fifty-three minutes into the flight, “You might be interested that out of our left-hand window right now, I can observe the entire continent of North America, Alaska, and over the Pole, down to the Yucatán Peninsula, Cuba, northern part of South America, and then I run out of window.” An hour later, he continued the lesson, adding weather reports: “The weather was good just about everywhere. There was one cyclonic depression in northern Canada, in the Athabasca, probably east of the Athabasca area. Greenland was clear, and it appeared to be we were seeing just the icecap in Greenland. All North Atlantic was pretty good; and Europe and northern Africa seemed to be clear. Most of the United States was clear. There was what looked like a low front stretching from the center of the country up across north of the Great Lakes and into Newfoundland.” Kidding Neil about his geographical expertise, Collins facetiously reported, “I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I sure did like it.”

  In order to make sure that the spacecraft’s pipes did not freeze on one side while tank pressures increased from too much heat on the other, Apollo 11 began a slow rotation to ensure that solar rays were absorbed as evenly as possible by all sides of the spacecraft. “We were like a chicken on a barbecue spit,” Collins explained. “If we stopped in one position for too long, all kinds of bad things could happen.” Visually, the rotisserie action resulted in an incredible panorama, with stunning views of the Sun, Moon, and Earth cycling into the spacecraft’s windows every two minutes. Aiding the sightseeing was a simple viewing device called a monocular—half of a set of binoculars. Using it like a magnifying glass, the astronauts took turns getting close looks at different features of their home planet.

  It has since become one of the legends of spaceflight that there are only two man-made objects on Earth that can be seen from outer space—the Great Wall of China and the gigantic Fort Peck Dam in Montana. “I would challenge both,” Neil states. In cislunar space, “We could see the continents; we could see Greenland. Greenland stood out, just as it does on the globe in your library, all white. Antarctica we couldn’t see because there were clouds over it. Africa was quite visible, and we could see sun glint off of a lake. It might have been Lake Chad…. But I do not believe that, at least with my eyes, there was any man-made object that could be seen. I have not yet found anyone who has told me they’ve seen the Great Wall of China even from Earth orbit. I’m not going to say there aren’t people, but I personally haven’t talked to them. I’ve asked various people, particularly [Space] Shuttle guys, that have been many orbits around China in the daytime, and the ones I’ve talked to didn’t see it.”

  Whether it was with the naked eye or with the monocular, Neil could not help but contemplate how fragile the Earth looked: “I don’t know why you have that impression, but it is so small. It’s very colorful, you know. You see an ocean and gaseous layer, a little bit—just a tiny bit—of atmosphere around it, and compared with all the other celestial objects, which in many cases are much more massive and more terrifying, it just looks like it couldn’t put up a very good defense against a celestial onslaught.” Buzz and Mike felt likewise, with Buzz thinking how crazy it was for the globe to be so politically and culturally divided: “From space it has an almost benign quality. Intellectually one could realize there were wars under way on Earth, but emotionally it was impossible to understand such things. The thought occurred and reoccurred that wars are generally fought for territory or are disputes over borders; from space the arbitrary borders established on Earth cannot be seen.”

  Their first urge for serious sightseeing satisfied, the astronauts moved to satiate their belly hunger. Nutritionally, it was important for them during the voyage to consume a sufficient amount of water and calories per day (between 1,700 and 2,500 calories), whether the food in its various dehydrated and freeze-dried preparations was savory or not. Already before their first full meal—scheduled for midafternoon of the first day, following the slingshot of the S-IVB and getting out of their suits—the crew munched down a sandwich or two, made from four types of tubed spread: ham salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and cheddar cheese. They also made the first raid into their snack pantry, filled with peanut cubes, caramel candy, bacon bites, barbecue beef bites, as well as dried apricots, peaches, and pears.

  For the first time in a U.S. spaceflight, the beverage list included not just juice and water but also coffee: fifteen black coffees (for Neil), fifteen with sugar
(for Mike), and fifteen with cream and sugar (for Buzz). As blasphemous as it may sound, the juice aboard Apollo 11 was not Tang, the famous orange juice made from powder that its manufacturer, General Foods, advertised as the special drink of the astronauts. “I can’t speak for the other flights,” Aldrin confesses, “but before ours, the three of us dutifully sampled the orange drink and instead chose a grapefruit-orange mixture as our citrus drink. If Tang was on our flight I was unaware of it.”

  To get water, the astronauts grabbed one of two six-foot flexible tubes that were attached to spigots—one for cold water, one for hot. At the end of each tube was a pistol probe with a push button. If the astronaut wanted a cold drink, he held the probe in his mouth, pushed the button, and out came a mouthful of water. If he was preparing food, he stuck the hot water gun into a plastic bag and squirted three blasts into it. Massaging the rehydrating food into an edible form, he ate most entrées by sucking them through a tube. Unfortunately, the device designed to ventilate hydrogen from the water before it passed from the gun to the food bag did not function well. Considerable gas came with the water and got into the food to be swallowed by the astronauts, bloating them and giving them stomach gas. “At one point on the trip back to Earth it got so bad,” Aldrin jokes, “that we could have shut down our attitude-control thrusters and done the job ourselves!”

  The fare turned out to be appetizing enough, if bland. Based on a successful experiment first tried on Apollo 8, one of the dishes enjoyed by Apollo 11—a turkey dinner with gravy and dressing—could be eaten (after mixing with hot water) with a spoon. Also in the spacecraft’s pantry were “wet packs” that could be eaten just as they were, including a meal of ham and potatoes. Sometimes the crew all ate the same meal—as they did for lunch on day two of the mission, when they had hot dogs (the first genuine frankfurters to be launched into space), applesauce, chocolate pudding, and the citrus-drink-that-was-not-Tang. Other times, they ate individualized meals that had been prepared by the Manned Spacecraft Center’s chief of food and nutrition, Dr. Malcolm C. Smith Jr., after he had consulted with the astronauts’ wives about their husbands’ likes and dislikes. Neil’s favorite meal, according to the NASA’s public affairs officer who regularly gave reports on what the astronauts were eating and drinking, was spaghetti with meat sauce, scalloped potatoes, pineapple fruitcake cubes, and grape punch. Aldrin fell in love with shrimp cocktails: “The shrimp were chosen one by one to be sure they would be tiny enough to squeeze out of the food packet, and they were delicious.” Collins especially liked the cream of chicken soup and the salmon salad. They were “really delicious by anyone’s standards…. Ah, this salmon salad! I’ll rate it four spoons any day!”