First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Eleven hours into the flight—stomachs full and housekeeping duties taken care of—the crew was ready for its first sleep period. In fact, at 7:52 P.M. CDT, two hours before the scheduled time, Houston wished its tired crew good night and signed off. The urge to sleep had actually come on the astronauts quite a bit earlier. Just two hours into the flight, before preparations for TLI began, Neil yawned to his mates, “Gee, I almost went to sleep then,” to which Collins replied, “Me, too. I’m taking a little rest…. You need to get out the alarm clock.” Buzz said, “It’s going to be a long day…. Wake me up at TLI, somebody.” For the next nine hours, they fought sporadic drowsiness until it was time to sleep.

  Collins took the first watch. As much thinking as had been done to preplan every detail of the Apollo 11 mission, there was no way to simulate sleeping three-dimensionally in weightless conditions. “Although you could install the sleep devices in a spacecraft mockup here on Earth,” relates Armstrong, “you couldn’t sleep in them here on Earth. It required a weightless condition for that. I don’t recall us having any difficulty, however. How we established the places for the 3-D cots, I also don’t remember, but we all seemed to find our own all the time. All of the sleeping arrangements were identical in configuration, so the disadvantages of one spot might be that one was closer to noise or light or something like that. But I don’t remember any discussion of dissatisfaction with any individual location. I think all the Apollo 11 crew slept well.”

  The three-dimensional cots referred to by Armstrong were light mesh hammocks, very much like sleeping bags, which were stretched and anchored beneath the left and right couches—the center couch having been folded down, still covering the crews’ space suits. “It kept our arms from floating around and from inadvertently actuating switches,” Neil explains. The man on watch—Collins the first night out—slept not in a hammock but floated above the left couch, a lap belt keeping him from floating off and with a miniature headset taped to his ear in case Houston called during the “night.” “It was a strange but pleasant sensation to doze off with no pressure points falling anywhere on your body,” Collins relates. It was like being “suspended by a cobweb’s light touch—just floating and falling all the way to the Moon.” Buzz got to experience the feeling, but Neil did not, as he always slept in his hammock.

  With adrenaline levels still fairly high from the excitement of liftoff and TLI, the men slept only five and a half hours that first night. When CapCom Bruce McCandless of Mission Control’s Green Team (headed by Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth) called to wake the crew at 7:48 CDT, all three were already alert. As the astronauts went over their “postsleep checklist,” following updates on the flight plan and on consumables, McCandless gave them a brief review of the morning news, much of which concerned the world’s enthusiastic reaction to their successful launch.

  The very first news item relayed to the crew that morning concerned the flight of the Soviet Union’s Luna 15: according to the story read to the astronauts, the USSR’s robotic spacecraft had just reached the Moon and started around it. What had happened was this. In a last-ditch effort to steal thunder from America’s Moon landing, the Russians had launched the small unmanned spacecraft toward the Moon on July 13, three days prior to Apollo 11’s liftoff; its objective was not just to land on the Moon but to scoop up a sample of lunar soil and return it to Earth before Apollo 11 got back. Newspapers in the United States editorialized (accurately) that the Russians were purposefully trying to upstage the Americans with their “mystery probe” and speculated (inaccurately) that they might also be trying to interfere technically with the American flight. U.S. space officials worried that Soviet operations and communications with Luna 15 (Soviet designation ? e-8-5) might, in fact, interfere with Apollo—over the years that had happened occasionally when the Russians operated at or near NASA’s radio frequencies.

  MSC’s Chris Kraft spoke critically of Luna 15 at a NASA press conference on July 14. Then Kraft telephoned Colonel Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 commander, who was just back from a nine-day tour of the USSR, the first U.S. astronaut ever to visit the country. “The best thing to do is just ask ’em,” Borman told Kraft. So, with Nixon’s permission, over the famed hotline used by President Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to avert nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Borman sent a message to the head of the USSR Academy of Sciences, sixty-eight-year-old Mstislav V. Keldysh. Dr. Keldysh was a leading Soviet academician and the chief of his country’s Institute of Applied Mathematics. For over fifteen years, Keldysh had been one of Russian’s lead officials in the area of missile and spacecraft design. Borman had met Keldysh during Borman’s trip to Moscow. His message asked Keldysh for the exact orbital parameters of the Russian probe. Keldysh complied, assuring Borman, “The orbit of probe Luna 15 does not intersect the trajectory of Apollo 11 spacecraft announced by you in flight program.”

  True to his word, nothing about Luna 15, in fact, would bother Apollo. Not just that, the Soviet mission failed miserably. Instead of landing on the Moon as scheduled, Luna 15 crashed into the Moon on July 21, the day after Apollo 11’s successful landing. Tass, the Soviet news agency, asserted that Luna 15 had “reached the Moon’s surface” after flying fifty-two revolutions around it, but American and British sources quickly confirmed that the robotic craft had in fact crashed.

  As for the Apollo 11 crew itself, they were never very worried about the Soviet probe. Collins later remarked that the chances of the Russians being able to fly a trajectory that intersected with either Columbia or with Eagle were “equivalent to my high school football team beating the Miami Dolphins.” Armstrong and Aldrin felt similarly. “I wasn’t thinking about Luna 15,” Neil asserts. “I had too many of my own things to think about.”

  As for being aware of the Soviet Union’s manned lunar program, neither the Apollo 11 crew nor any other American astronauts knew much more about it than could be read in the trade press. “I don’t remember receiving any classified briefings on the Soviet program,” Armstrong comments. “In general, NASA had an unclassified program, and we were seldom burdened with classified information about ‘the other side.’ That made it substantially easier for us to remember what we could and could not say.”

  Actually, no one outside the deep dark core of the Soviet space program knew just how far the USSR was falling short of launching cosmonauts to the Moon, or whether the Soviets were even pushing a manned lunar program. Not confirmed until many years later was a powerful explosion—the most powerful in the history of rocketry—on the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 3, 1969, just nine days before the launch of Luna 15 and thirteen days before the liftoff of Apollo 11. On that day, the Soviets were test firing a Moon rocket of their own: a mammoth booster designated the N-1. If the unmanned test launch of the N-1 worked, the Soviets were prepared to press on with their clandestine manned lunar program, a program that Kremlin leadership had always insisted they did not have. Seconds after the launch, however, the N-1 rocket collapsed back onto its pad and exploded—by some estimates with a strength equivalent to 250 tons of TNT, not quite the power of a nuclear explosion, but still formidable. Somehow no one was killed in the carnage, but the launchpad was completely destroyed and the steppe surrounding it “literally strewn with dead animals and birds.” Not until November 1969 did rumors of the Soviet accident surface in the Western press; by then, American intelligence knew about it. Photos taken in early August 1969 by U.S. spy satellites flying as part of the ultra-secret CORONA photoreconnaissance program clearly showed the ruin at Baikonur.

  For all practical purposes, the N-1 disaster spelled the end of the Soviet Moon program; Luna 15 was a last-gasp effort to salvage a minor victory from the Moon race. Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union in August 1991 did participants in the Soviet Moon program even admit their program existed, let alone that the N-1 disaster had occurred. All evidence of the N-1’s very existence had been destroyed, wit
h some of its casings even being used as outlying buildings at the Baikonur installation.

  Armstrong did not learn about the N-1 accident until many years later: “I don’t remember any briefings on it during my astronaut days.”

  Another news item read to Apollo 11 by Mission Control that morning said that “Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on Earth. Agnew, the ranking government official at the Apollo 11 blastoff Wednesday, apparently was speaking for himself and not necessarily for the Nixon administration.” “Right on, Spiro!” was Mike Collin’s off-air reaction. For three men going to the Moon, it could not have seemed that much more fantastical that a future group of astronauts might, in the reasonably near future, be voyaging to the Red Planet. True, political support for NASA had been declining in the second half of the 1960s, but, in the heady summer days of 1969, there was reason to think that the situation would improve. There was no way to know just how lame the support for space exploration would grow under the direction of the Nixon administration and how, for the rest of the century, there would be absolutely no chance for a manned Mars program—or even for a continuation of a manned lunar program beyond 1972.

  The major flight event of day two came at 10:17 A.M. CDT when a three-second burn refined the course of Apollo 11 and tested the CSM engine, which would be needed to get the spacecraft in and out of lunar orbit. At the moment of that slight midcourse correction, Armstrong and his mates were 108,594 miles from Earth—over two-fifths of the way to the Moon—and traveling at a velocity of only 5,057 feet per second. Still in the pull of Earth’s gravity, the speed of Apollo 11 would decrease steadily until it was less than 40,000 miles from the Moon—by which point the spacecraft had slowed from its top velocity of approximately 25,000 mph to a mere 2,000 mph. Then as the Moon’s pull became dominant, it would speed up again.

  Much of the astronauts’ time during their midflight coast was taken up with the various minor tasks required to keep the CSM operating properly: purging fuel cells, charging batteries, dumping waste water, changing carbon dioxide canisters, preparing food, chlorinating drinking water, and so forth. Collins did most of the routine housekeeping so Armstrong and Aldrin could stay focused on reviewing the details of the landing to come—going over checklists, rehearsing landing procedures. “The flight plan to the Moon had several blank pages,” Aldrin remembers, “periods in which we had nothing to do. Yet I have no recollection at all of being idle. I don’t think any of us was…. Everything had to be stowed or sealed away or anchored to one of the many panels by Velcro. We each had little cloth pouches in which we kept various frequently used items, such as pens, sunglasses and, for me [as well as for Neil], a slide rule. As often or not, one or two of us would be scrambling around on the floor searching for a missing pair of sunglasses, the monocular, a film pack, or a toothbrush.” Even during the rare times when they were not performing some manual task, the astronauts were thinking about what was to come next. With Neil in command, there was little idle conversation and small talk—and what there was did not come from him.

  During rest periods they did relax to some music. It was played on a small portable tape recorder carried on the flight primarily for the purpose of recording crew comments and observations. Neil and Mike requested some specific music be preloaded onto the cassette tape; Buzz did not, later saying he “was much too busy to be bothered with selecting music and deferred to Neil and Mike, who chose mostly easy listening music.”

  Neil asked specifically for two recordings. One was Antonin Dvorak’s once wildly popular New World Symphony, an 1895 composition by the Czech immigrant to the United States that helped legitimize American music to the rest of a dubious world. Neil had played the piece when he was in the Purdue concert band, and he liked it. As the Moon was a new world, it also seemed appropriate to him.

  The other was a little-known piece by composer Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman (1904–1968), entitled Music out of the Moon. The featured instrument in the Hoffman composition was the theremin, an unusual device (named for Russian engineer and inventor Leo Theremin—known in his homeland as Lev Sergeivich Termen [1836–1933]) that generated tones electronically by a musician controlling the distance between his hands and two metal rods serving as antenna. (The 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound and the 1951 science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still were scored with the haunting electronic sounds of the theremin.) Life magazine reported after the flight that Neil selected Music out of the Moon for sentimental reasons, and that he chose a time to broadcast it back to Earth so his wife Janet would hear it and know he was thinking of her. Early in their marriage up in the rustic cabin at Juniper Hills, the couple had allegedly fallen in love with the theremin music. When Neil was flying experimental aircraft at Edwards, Janet listened to the recording by the hour, Life said. It was one of the many items that had been lost in their 1964 house fire. Someone found a copy of the album for Neil and taped part of it for the flight.

  Both Neil and Janet remember the music, but not quite in the way Life reported. “I can remember liking the theremin,” Janet recalls, “and may have said ‘I love that music,’ probably because it was unusual music in those days—different. However, to say that I played it all the time is incorrect.” The only record player that the couple owned while in Juniper Hills was an old Victrola that was in the cabin when they bought it, the kind with a crank-operated turntable. “I did know that, when the music was played in space, Neil selected it, because the music was so unusual and no one else would have known it. It was nice to think he was thinking of me and was able to take a moment to relax and reflect on the flight. In a sense it was a bit of the ‘home’ touch to the people of the world that these were real people up there, no robots flying the spacecraft. Good PR.” Neil remembers the music even less sentimentally: “I did have the theremin music, which I liked. I don’t remember whether Janet liked it or not and do not know if she ever played it at home. I included it because Music out of the Moon seemed appropriate for the flight. I do not remember that it had anything to do with Janet.”

  The highlight of day two was the first live television broadcast from Apollo 11, which was scheduled to begin at 7:30 P.M. EDT. Actually, it was the third TV transmission overall from the flight; the first two were conducted to check out camera functions, the picture quality of both interior and exterior shots, and the strength of signal coming into and out of the Goldstone tracking station in California. That way any glitches could be fixed before several million people around the world tuned in to see the broadcast on Thursday evening.

  The first fuzzy picture to appear on everyone’s screen was a shot looking back at the home planet, which Armstrong described as “just a little more than a half Earth.” In plain but wondrous language, Neil pointed out the “definite blue cast” of the oceans, the “white bands of major cloud formations over the Pacific,” “the browns in the landforms,” and “some greens showing along the northwestern coast of the United States and northwestern coast of Canada.” He explained that at their current distance—some 139,000 nautical miles—the depth of the colors was not as great as what they had enjoyed while in Earth orbit or even at 50,000 miles out. Collins humorously turned the camera around in his hands a full 180 degrees, saying, “Okay, world, hold on to your hat. I’m going to turn you upside down.” Mike rotated the camera a second time, a little more smoothly, then told Charlie Duke, the CapCom for Flight Director Gene Kranz’s White Team, “I’m making myself seasick, Charlie, I’ll just put you back right-side-up where you belong.”

  For thirty-six minutes, the astronauts put on a show. The model of spontaneity, Collins disavowed the use of cue cards, Aldrin did a few zero-g push-ups, and Neil even stood on his head. (Collins: “Neil’s standing on his head again. He’s trying to make me nervous.”) Head chef Collins also demonstrated how to make chicken stew when traveling at a speed of 4,400 feet per second. Neil relat
es that most of the telecast seemed improvised but Aldrin notes that “we went to great lengths” to make it look that way. “The fact is they were carefully planned in advance and for me the exact words were written down on little cards stuck on to the panel in front of us.” Neil used no written aids, having thought through what he wanted to do and say only shortly before the TV transmission.

  The transmission ended emotionally with Neil saying, “As we pan back out to the distance at which we see the Earth, it’s Apollo 11 signing off.” The crew then spent the next three hours taking care of additional housekeeping items and participating fruitlessly in a telescope experiment during which they were unable to spot a bluish-green laser light being shot at them from the McDonald Observatory near El Paso. Though the sleep period was scheduled to begin shortly before 9:00 P.M. CDT, none of them fell asleep until after 11:30, this time with Aldrin in the floating “watch” position. The sleep period was scheduled to be a long one, lasting ten hours. Data from the flight surgeon indicated that “the crew slept rather well all night”—so well, in fact, that Mission Control let them have an extra hour before waking them up to perform such chores as charging batteries, dumping waste-water, and checking fuel and oxygen reserves.