First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Only six men in history had ever seen the Moon look anything like this, but neither the crew of Apollo 8 nor Apollo 10 had done more than contemplate setting down in such a forlorn-looking place. Apollo 11 had to do it. Even Collins, the one who did not have to land, privately felt a foreboding—the “cool, magnificent sphere” hanging there “ominously,” “a formidable presence without sound or motion,” issuing “no invitation to invade its domain.” Despite the fact that the crew had spent years studying photographs from the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor spacecraft, as well as from Apollo 8 and 10, it was “nevertheless a shock to actually see the Moon at firsthand,” Collins later wrote. “The first thing that springs to mind is the vivid contrast between the Earth and the Moon. One has to see the second planet up close to truly appreciate the first. I’m sure that to a geologist the Moon is a fascinating place, but this monotonous rock pile, this withered, sun-seared peach pit out my window offers absolutely no competition to the gem it orbits. Ah, the Earth, with its verdant valleys, its misty waterfalls…I’d just like to get our job done and get out of here.”

  Inside the spacecraft at the time, the astronauts searched with much less success for the right adjectives to describe for the public the incredible phenomenon they were seeing. In talking to the ground, Armstrong did his best to keep reports tangible and unemotional, but it was hard even for him to hold back the superlatives. “The view of the Moon that we’ve been having recently is really spectacular,” Neil reported. “It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window and, of course, we can see the entire circumference, even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it’s in Earthshine. It’s a view worth the price of the trip.”

  But the trip was not about looking at the Moon, it was about landing on it—and that could not happen unless Apollo 11 managed to get into a proper parking orbit from which the LM could make its descent. The vital first step in that process was making a very precise burn called “LOI-1,” the basic Lunar Orbit Insertion.

  The burn involved firing the service propulsion system engine for just under six minutes, braking Apollo 11 down to a speed that allowed the Moon’s gravity to trap the spacecraft and reel it into orbit. As Mike Collins’s explanation makes clear, it was a moment of truth: “We need to reduce our speed by 2,000 mph, from 5,000 down to 3,000, and will do this by burning our service propulsion system engine for six minutes. We are extra careful, paying painful attention to each entry on their checklist.” A lot of help with the burn came from the onboard computer and from Mission Control, but it was up to the astronauts to get it right: “If just one digit slips in our computer, and it is the worst possible digit, we could turn around backward and blast ourselves into an orbit headed for the Sun.”

  From every indication, it seemed that the LOI burn went well, but Mission Control could not know with certainty until the vehicle swung its way around the back side of the Moon and Houston, twenty-three minutes later, could once again communicate with it.

  “We don’t know if all is going well with Apollo 11,” Walter Cronkite intoned on CBS’s live coverage, which began at 1:30 P.M. EDT, “because it is behind the Moon and out of contact with Earth for the first time. Eight minutes ago they fired their large service propulsion system engine to go into orbit around the Moon. We’ll know about that in the next fifteen minutes or so. That’s when they come around the Moon and again acquire contact with the Earth and they can report. We hope that they are successfully in orbit around the Moon and that the rest of the historic mission can go as well as the first three days.”

  Inside Mission Control, a few isolated conversations were taking place, but not very many; most people were waiting in silence for the “acquisition of signal,” or AOS. On TV, Cronkite accentuated the drama, noting, “It is quiet around the world as the world waits to see if Apollo 11 is in a successful Moon orbit.”

  The anxiety ended when Houston heard a faint, indistinct signal from the spacecraft, at exactly the moment it was expected:

  Sounding about as elated as he ever got when communicating with the ground from the cockpit of a flying machine, Neil immediately provided Houston with a status report on the burn. Running through a long string of numbers on burn time and residuals,* when Houston then asked to “send the whole thing again, please,” Neil exclaimed, “It was like—like perfect!”

  Twenty minutes before Apollo came coasting around the Moon and back into contact with Houston, the astronauts thrilled at achieving precisely their intended orbit:

  All across the Moon’s rocky back side, the part never visible from Earth and densely pockmarked by 4.6 billion years of meteoroid bombardment, Aldrin and Collins had excitedly pointed out one spectacular feature after another, while the “Ice Commander,” as a few astronauts privately had come to call Armstrong, was more restrained in expressing what was his own genuine enthusiasm:

  In lunar orbit, the crew tried to settle an informal controversy that had arisen from the two previous circumlunar flights. To the Apollo 8 crew, the surface of the Moon appeared to be gray, whereas it looked mostly brown to Apollo 10. As soon as they had a chance, Neil, Mike, and Buzz looked to settle the issue. “Plaster of Paris gray to me,” Collins remarked even before they got into orbit. “Well, I have to vote with the 10 crew,” Aldrin said shortly after LOI. “Looks tan to me,” Armstrong offered. “But when I first saw it, at the other Sun angle, it really looked gray,” Buzz continued, and his mates agreed, though they expatiated about the Moon’s color throughout several orbits. Ultimately, the controversy was settled in no one’s favor. Lighting conditions made all the difference. The color of the Moon shifted almost hourly from charcoal, near dawn or dusk, to a rosy tan at midday.

  The first time Armstrong had a chance to survey his approach to the landing site he took it. “Apollo 11 is getting its first view of the landing approach,” he reported to Mission Control at 11:55 A.M. Houston time. “This time we are going over the Taruntius crater, and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollo 8 and 10 have given us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and watching it on TV. There’s no substitute for actually being here.” Houston responded: “We concur, and we surely wish we could see it firsthand.”

  Apollo 11’s first television transmission from lunar orbit started at 3:56 P.M. EDT. As it was a Saturday afternoon in July, many Americans tuned to the broadcast after watching the baseball Game of the Week on NBC TV, which that day pitted the Baltimore Orioles against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. (The Red Sox won the game 5–3, but the Orioles ultimately won the American League pennant but lost the World Series to the New York “Miracle” Mets.)

  Given that an orbit circularization burn was scheduled for 5:44 EDT that afternoon, the astronauts were in no mood for a television performance; in fact, as Neil made clear to Mission Control, if they had their druthers, they would not have had a TV show then at all.

  The broadcast lasted for thirty-five minutes. Focusing the camera first out of a side window and then out of the hatch window as the spacecraft passed from west to east nearly one hundred miles above the lunar surface, the astronauts took the worldwide TV audience on a guided tour of the Moon’s visible side. Like airline pilots pointing out the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam down below, they talked their way along the path that Neil and Buzz would be taking in the LM in less than twenty-four hours. Neil indicated the “PDI point,” where powered descent would be initiated, then Collins and Aldrin spontaneously took turns noting every significant landmark that would be guiding Eagle down to its touchdown: the twin peaks of Mount Marilyn, named by Jim Lovell during Apollo 8 after his wife; the large Maskelyne Crater; the small hills dubbed Boothill and Duke Island that would be passed over just twenty seconds into descent; the washbasin that was Maskelyne W; the rilles labeled Sidewinder and Diamondback because they twisted across the surface like desert snakes; the Gashes; the Last Ridge; and finally, the landin
g site on the Sea of Tranquility, which was then barely into the darkness.

  It was the first time that the astronauts themselves caught a glimpse of the landing site, as on the previous orbit the spot had lay hidden, beyond the “terminator” line where the astronauts would pass from light into darkness. This time around, the spot was just barely visible, brightened by Earthshine.

  Everyone at home and in the spacecraft strained with Neil to take a close look. Collins, for one, did not especially like what he saw, though he kept it to himself: “It is just past dawn in the Sea of Tranquility and the Sun’s rays are intersecting the landing site at a very shallow angle. Under these conditions the craters on the surface cast long, jagged shadows, and to me the entire region looks distinctly forbidding. I don’t see anyplace smooth enough to park a baby buggy, much less a Lunar Module.”

  Crossing the terminator, the crew trained its TV camera back though the window for a last look at the landing site before sign-off. “And as the Moon sinks slowly in the west,” the witty Collins remarked, “Apollo 11 bids good day to you.”

  An hour and thirteen minutes later, Apollo 11 fired the SPS engine for the second time that afternoon. Even more than with the first burn, precise timing was critical. “If we overburned for as little as two seconds,” Aldrin explains, “we’d be on an impact course with the other side of the Moon.” Concentration was intense as the astronauts, in coordination with Mission Control, made a systematic series of star checks, inertial platform alignments, and navigational calculations with the onboard computer. Collins used a stopwatch to make sure it lasted seventeen seconds, no more and no less. The burn came off perfectly. Apollo 11’s orbit dropped and stabilized from an orbit of 168.8 miles by 61.3 nautical miles, in astronomical terms an “eccentric” orbit, to one that was 66.1 by 54.4 miles, close to a perfect ellipse. It was a high degree of precision that excited even the commander:

  With Apollo 11 now snug in its orbit, it was time to prepare the LM for its designated job. Powering it up, completing a long list of communications checks, and presetting a number of switches was scheduled to take Neil and Buzz a period of three hours, but it took them thirty minutes less thanks to Aldrin’s preparatory work in the module the previous day. By 8:30 P.M. Houston time Eagle was ready. So were the two astronauts, who reluctantly headed back into Columbia for their fourth night’s sleep inside the spacecraft, the first in orbit about the Moon. The commander and his lunar module pilot carefully organized all the equipment and clothing they would need in the morning. Then they covered the windows to keep out not only direct light from the Sun but also the Moonshine—far brighter than we see on Earth—and began to settle into their sleeping positions:

  Knowing of Neil’s preference that he sleep before the landing attempt, Buzz eased, as Neil did, into one of the floating hammocks. Dousing the cabin lights, Collins put the punctuation on the day: “Well, I thought today went pretty well. If tomorrow and the next day are like today, we’ll be safe.”

  At three minutes after midnight, the on-duty PAO at Mission Control reported to the press, many of whom would themselves not get much sleep that night or the next, “The Apollo 11 crew is currently in their rest period, but we’ve received no indication that any of the crew members are actually sleeping.” Aldrin recalls sleeping fitfully; Neil remembers sleeping soundly, but not for very long. Houston’s wakeup call came at 6:00 A.M. By midmorning Aldrin and Armstrong would need to be inside the LM ready to separate Eagle from Columbia for its trip down to the Moon.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Landing

  The drama that was Apollo 11 unfolded in five acts almost as if Aeschylus or Shakespeare had staged it. Act One launched the protagonists—those “amiable strangers”—toward their lunar destiny. Act Two moved them inexorably into the brave new world of the outward bound. Bereft of the safety and security of their home planet, the astronauts probed the vastness of deep space, an alien environment into which only six human beings had ever before ventured. In that cold and unforgiving world, the intrepid crew journeyed with seeming nonchalance for three days and three nights. As it always did in classical theater, the climax came in Act Three: two of the chosen ones left a vigilant third behind, entered their fragile landing craft, and headed down to the Moon’s cratered surface. In itself, that was the astronaut’s Holy Grail. Not that stepping onto another heavenly body for the first time, the essential element of Act Four, or returning to Earth safely, the denouement of Act Five, were without grave risk, high adventure, and cosmic symbolism. But the critical turning point—certainly in Neil Armstrong’s life story—was piloting the LM down to the landing.

  It was as if everything in Neil’s life as a flier led to confronting this supreme challenge: the young boy repeatedly hand-tossing model planes to see how far they could fly; the teenager easing the little rental plane down over the telephone lines bounding his hometown’s grass airfield; the aviator flaring in over open water to drop his hurtling machine onto the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier; the test pilot coming down so low onto the desert floor that he could almost count the Joshua trees; the astronaut thrusting up, down, and sideways in a flying bedstead.

  As was true even for seasoned pilots, not every one of Neil’s landings had been good ones. The rough ground of an Ohio farm field had left his Purdue University airplane in such bad shape that the machine had to be trucked back to West Lafayette in pieces aboard his grandfather’s hay wagon. His porpoising after touchdown at Edwards had broken the X-1B’s nose gear. Then there was the day he stuck the T-33 deep in the mud while doing touch-and-go’s on a not-so-dry lake with Yeager, and the time he fouled the runway at Nellis when the arresting hook of his F-104 snared an anchor chain and sent big chunks of steel careening here and yon. Twice in his career, the machines he piloted became so dysfunctional that coaxing the craft down to a landing proved impossible, and his only choice was to eject.

  Indeed, going back all the way to his boyhood fall from a backyard tree, most of the high drama in Armstrong’s life lay more in his “comings down” than his “goings up.” Not that his ascents did not take extreme concentration and skill. Still, it was the descents that ultimately posed the greatest challenge and danger—and defined his destiny.

  The day of the first Moon landing was a Sunday for Americans, Europeans, Africans, and some Asians, a fact that did not pass unnoticed by millions of devout believers; in fact, of all the lunar landings, only Apollo 11 landed on the Christian Sabbath.

  Getting up at 5:30 A.M., even earlier than her son did that morning, Viola Armstrong put on a bathrobe and went outside to water her flowers before the reporters could get to her. Then she dressed for a 7:30 church service. She wanted to be home in plenty of time to follow on television her son’s separation from the command module.

  All around the world the devout prayed for Apollo 11. The worship service at the Nixon White House was dedicated to the mission: astronaut Frank Borman read once more from the Book of Genesis, reprising the narration that he and his fellow Apollo 8 crew members had performed so memorably from lunar orbit the previous Christmas Eve. A few days previous to the Apollo 11 launch, one of the people attending the worship service, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, the White House chief of staff and Nixon’s primary aide and gatekeeper, had arranged for journalist William Safire, a senior speechwriter for Nixon, to draft statements for use by the president in case something major went wrong during the mission. One of Safire’s statements covered the hypothetical scenario of the astronauts managing to land on the Moon but then not being able to get off it.

  In Event of Moon Disaster:

  Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

  These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

  These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth an
d understanding.

  They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

  In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

  In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

  Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

  For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

  In his memo to Haldeman, Safire also recommended that, prior to issuing the statement, the president “should telephone each of the widows-to-be.” After the statement and at the point when NASA ended communication with the men, “a clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to the deepest-of-the-deep, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.” Sitting that morning in the White House chapel, Bob Haldeman’s mind could not have helped but wander to the Safire statements resting in a locked drawer of his office desk.

  At 10:05 A.M. EDT, following a five-minute progress report on the Apollo 11 mission from anchorman Walter Cronkite (Cronkite’s first TV appearance that morning), CBS aired a religious broadcast, Nearer to Thee. The program featured a discussion of the religious meaning of Apollo 11 by a theologian, a sculptor, an aerospace executive, and a physicist. The voice of CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt followed promptly at eleven, beginning the live coverage of what the network called Man on the Moon: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11. Providing a voice-over to dramatic pictures of the Earth and the Moon that had been taken by the previous Apollo flights and by the unmanned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, Kuralt also took Genesis as Apollo’s spiritual theme yet elucidated its cosmic meaning with insights from modern science, including the Big Bang Theory. Kuralt, who in the coming years would become one of Armstrong’s favorite TV journalists for his wistful human-interest stories drawn from the back roads and small towns of America, set a humanistic tone for the universal achievement to unfold that day. His essay reflected nearly perfectly how Armstrong himself felt about the Moon, its history, and its sibling relationship with the Earth: