First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Dropping between 200 feet and 160 feet, Armstrong found where he wanted to land, on a smooth spot just beyond another, smaller crater that lay past West Crater:

  What Neil could see below him was a layer of curiously moving lunar dust being kicked up by the LM’s descent engine; in fact, the LM’s shadow that Buzz was seeing was being cast upon this dust layer rather than on the Moon’s surface itself. According to Neil: “We started losing visibility when we got a little below a hundred feet. We started picking up dust—and not just normal dust clouds like we would experience here on Earth. Dust from the lunar surface formed a blanket that moved out and away from the lunar module in all directions. This sheet of moving dust obscured the surface almost completely, though some of the biggest boulders stuck up through it. This very fast, almost horizontally moving sheet of dust did not billow up at all; it just moved out and away in a straight radial sheet.

  “As we got lower, the visibility continued to decrease,” Neil relates. “I don’t think the visual altitude determination was severely hurt by the blowing dust, but the thing that was confusing to me was that it was hard to judge our lateral and downrange velocities. Some of the larger rocks were sticking up and out of the moving dust, and you had to look through the dust layer to pick up the stationary rocks and then base your translational velocity decisions on that. I found that to be quite difficult. I spent more time trying to arrest translational velocity than I thought would be necessary.

  “Then, after finding the area to land, it was all about lowering the LM down relatively slowly and keeping from inducing any substantial forward or sideward motions. Once I got below fifty feet, even though we were running out of fuel, I thought we’d be all right. I felt the lander could stand the impact because of the collapsible foam inside of the landing legs. I didn’t want to drop from that height, but once I got below fifty feet I felt pretty confident we would be all right.”

  From Houston’s point of view, the situation was, in fact, critical—the drama at the control consoles over the fuel supply palpable and gripping.

  Back at a height of 270 feet, just prior to Buzz’s seeing the LM’s shadow, Armstrong had asked, “How’s the fuel?” When the LM was down to 160 feet, Bob Carlton, Kranz’s control systems engineer on the White Team, reported over the flight director loop that the LM’s fuel supply had reached “Low Level.” This meant that the propellant in the tanks of the LM had fallen below the point where it could be measured, like a gas gauge in an automobile showing empty but the car still running. Kranz asserted later, “I never dreamed we would still be flying this close to empty.”

  At just under 100 feet, Aldrin had called “Quantity light,” indicating that only 5 percent of the original fuel load remained. At Mission Control, this event started a ninety-four-second countdown to a “bingo” fuel call. When “bingo” was called at the end of those ninety-four seconds, Armstrong at his rate of descent would have only twenty seconds to land. If Neil felt he could not land in that amount of time, he would have to abort immediately—something by the time he had gotten to 100 feet he had no thought of actually doing.

  At 75 feet, Bob Carlton reported to Kranz that only sixty seconds remained before bingo. Charlie Duke repeated Carlton’s call so Neil and Buzz could hear it. As Kranz remembers, “There was no response from the crew. They were too busy. I got the feeling they were going for broke. I had this feeling ever since they took over manual control: ‘They are the right ones for the job.’ I crossed myself and said, ‘Please, God.’”

  According to Armstrong, “If we were still at a hundred feet or more, then we would certainly have to abort. But if we were down lower than that, then the safest thing for us to do was to continue. We were very aware of the fuel situation. We heard Charlie make the bingo call and we had the quantity light go on in the cockpit, but we were past both of those. I knew we were pretty low by this time. But below one hundred feet was not a time you would want to abort.”

  At 04:06:45:07 mission elapsed time, Aldrin read out, “Sixty feet, down two and half. Two forward, two forward. That’s good.” “Two forward” was good because Armstrong wanted to be moving forward when he landed so he could be sure of not backing into a hole that he had not noticed or had forgotten about. “Not at touchdown but all the way through the final approach I liked to have a little forward motion because once you were going straight down you couldn’t see where you were. You couldn’t see what was immediately below you. You wanted to get pretty close to the ground so that you knew it was a pretty good area. Then you could stop the forward motion and let it settle.”

  “Stand by for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds,” came Carlton’s next call, Duke echoed it on the uplink. In Mission Control, the silence became deafening; Kranz said, “You could hear a feather drop.” Everyone at the consoles and in the observation rooms swallowed hard as they strained to hear what would come next, Eagle’s landing or Carlton’s next fuel call.

  At the controls of the LM, Neil was not terribly worried about his fuel. “Typically in the LLTV it wasn’t unusual to land with fifteen seconds left of fuel—we did it all the time. It looked to me like everything was manageable. It would have been nice if I’d had another minute of fuel to fiddle around a little bit longer. I knew we were getting short; I knew we had to get it on the ground, and I knew we had to get it below fifty feet. But I wasn’t panic-stricken about the fuel.”

  The contact light went on the instant that one or more of the LM’s sensory probes hanging down from three of the four footpads touched the lunar surface.

  So focused was Neil on what he needed to be doing to touch down safely that he neither heard Aldrin expressly call “Contact light” nor did he see the blue contact light flash on. His plan had been to shut the descent engine down as soon as the contact light came on, but he did not manage to do it. “I heard Buzz say something about contact. But when he did, we were still over this moving sheet of sand, and I wasn’t completely confident at that point that we had really touched. The indicator light might have been an anomaly or something, so I wanted to feel my way down a little closer. We might have actually touched down before I shut the engine down—it was very close anyway. The only danger with that was that if we had gotten the engine belt too close to the surface when it was running, it was possible we could have damaged the engine. We wouldn’t have gotten an explosion, so it wasn’t something I was concerned about. But looking back on it, I guess there was a possibility that something bad could have happened. If we had landed right on top of a rock with the engine belt still sticking out, that would not have been good.”

  It was a very gentle touchdown, so soft that it was hard for the astronauts to tell when they were actually fully down. “There was no tendency toward tipping over that I could feel,” Neil declares. “It just settled down like a helicopter.” In actuality, it might have been helpful to land a little harder, as later Apollo crews would purposefully do. “You always try to make a soft touchdown,” Neil explains, “but by landing a little harder, engaging the clasps on the landing legs and compressing more foam, the bottom of the LM would have been a little closer to the ground and we wouldn’t have had to jump so far up and down the ladder. So there was probably some merit to landing a little bit hard.”

  Aldrin knew that Neil was going to call the landing site Tranquility Base, but Neil had not told him when he was going to say it. The same was true for Charlie Duke. Neil had told Charlie in advance of the launch about the name, but when Charlie heard it for the first time at the moment of the landing, the normally smooth-talking South Carolinian turned a little tongue-tied:

  In retrospect it seems clear that the matter of Eagle’s fuel supply was never quite as dire as Mission Control thought at the time—or as historians have made it out to be in their accounts of the Apollo 11 mission. Post-flight analysis indicated that Armstrong and Aldrin landed with about 770 pounds of fuel remaining. Of this total, about 100 pounds would have been unusable. The remainder would have been enough f
or about fifty seconds of additional hovering flight. That was some 500 pounds less usable fuel than what would be left for any of the five subsequent Apollo landings.

  Armstrong has heard various theories regarding the actual fuel situation: “I don’t know if there’s any way to know how much fuel was left. The fuel tank bottom was spherical, and it’s very difficult to have any kind of a quantity measuring system in the bottom of a spherical surface. It’s very difficult to know how much was in there, particularly if the fluid in there was wandering around. The port was supposed to tell us at typical thrust settings when we would have about thirty seconds of fuel left. I don’t know how accurate that was; if there was sloshing, you wouldn’t know whether that light went on too early or too late.

  “The important thing was that we were close enough to the surface that it didn’t really matter. We wouldn’t have lost our attitude control if we had run out of fuel. The engine would have quit but, from the distance we were at, we would have settled to the ground safely enough.”

  Touchdown came at 4:17:39 P.M. EDT, Sunday, July 20, 1969 (20:17:39 Greenwich Mean Time). The instant humanity realized that a safe and successful landing had occurred—millions of Americans by watching Cronkite on TV exclaim, amid an uncharacteristic personal loss for words, “Whew, boy! Man on the Moon!”—jubilation broke out. As Cronkite himself did, people everywhere felt a tremendous emotional release. They sat speechless or wildly applauded. They laughed with tears running down their cheeks. They shouted, whooped, hollered, and cheered. They shook hands and hugged one another, clinked glasses and proposed toasts. Men lit up celebratory cigars, children banged drums, teenagers lit off firecrackers. The sincerely devout offered prayers and gave quiet thanks. In a few parts of the world, some residents remarked, “Well, the Americans finally did it.” But in every corner of the globe, most people, no matter their nationality, ethnicity, or religion, felt that the Moon landing was their achievement and exclaimed, “We did it!” Naturally, in the United States, there was a special sense of pride and accomplishment. From Alaska to the Florida Keys, from Penobscot Bay to Pearl Harbor, a nation’s multitude thanked God for the blessing of living in a country where such a lofty goal could be set and then actually achieved according to plan. Even those who were unhappy with their country, as many, many were in the anguished days of the Vietnam War, felt how extraordinary it was to be living in an age that experienced the wonder of a Moon landing.

  That evening at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington an anonymous someone placed a small bouquet of flowers on the grave of John F. Kennedy, without whom (even though his reasons for doing so were mostly political) there would have been no Moon landing program. The note on the bouquet read: “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”

  Inside the LM 240,000 miles away, Armstrong and Aldrin, in the rarefied moments after touchdown, did their best to suppress whatever emotions they felt. To their excitement the two astronauts gave in only long enough to shake hands and pat each other on the shoulder—in retrospect, it is perhaps surprising they even took time to do that.

  It was a defining moment of Armstrong’s life and possibly of humankind in the twentieth century, but for the first two men on the Moon there was no time for enjoying the moment.

  “So far, so good,” was the only reaction Neil remembers having. Turning back to his checklist, all he said to Buzz was “Okay, let’s get on with it.”

  CHAPTER 29

  One Small Step

  For Viola Armstrong, her son’s touching down on the Moon was among life’s most holy moments: “We were told that most of the world was watching, at least over fifty percent, pulling for them, and praying for them. If I told you that I could feel the power of millions of prayers, you might not believe me, and I could not blame you. But waves of these prayers were coming to me, and I was being gently and firmly supported by God’s invisible strength.

  “We watched them with keen interest, listening to Cronkite’s every word. We were as still as death, the boys were so near the surface of the Moon. The spot where they intended to stop was so rugged with boulders and deep craters, so Neil took over the controls and safely guided their LM to smoother and safer grounds before landing. They gently touched down. At our house there was dead silence. We heard Neil’s voice saying, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ Prayers of thanksgiving were in our hearts, and our reverend, Pastor Weber, offered them upward. We listened so intently.

  “I’m sure that never in their lives had they been so excited. Their hearts were racing a mile a minute. Neil’s heartbeat had risen from a normal 77 to156. This heavenly body had illumined our Earth for millions of years, but remained untouched by human hands. This is where they were—250,000 miles away from home.”

  Outside of Neil’s parents’ home in Wapakoneta, TV reporters had interviewed Viola and Steve shortly after the landing:

  VIOLA: I was afraid that the floor of the Moon was going to be so unsafe for them. I was worried that they might sink in too deep. But no, they didn’t. So it was wonderful.

  REPORTER: Mr. Armstrong, what were your feelings?

  STEVE: I was really concerned the way I understood that Neil had guided the craft to another area. And that would signify that the original was not exactly as they had planned.

  REPORTER: What about his voice? Did it sound any different? Or did it sound calm and normal to you?

  VIOLA: I could tell that he was pleased and tickled and thrilled. He was much like he always has been.

  STEVE: I had the same feeling, that it was the same old Neil.

  In El Lago at home with her two boys, Janet Armstrong’s experience of the landing, and her reaction to it, was distinctly different from her in-laws’, in particular her mother-in-law’s, as one might guess, given that the two women’s personalities lay, in Janet’s own words, “at opposite ends of the spectrum.” For one thing, Janet preferred not to watch the television coverage. Instead, she hovered near one of two NASA squawk boxes. She had placed one of the boxes in her living room for all of her houseguests to hear and the other back in her master bedroom so she could listen privately.

  “Watching TV was not something that I did during the flight. Now it’s true that we watched TV during the landing, for the landing, and while the men were walking on the lunar surface, because that was a good way to hear and see, because they had the cameras there. The speculation by the TV commentators—the drama of things that could happen if there was a problem along the way—I didn’t need to hear all that. That just drove me nuts. That’s exactly what had happened in Gemini VIII; there was speculation. Well, they didn’t know! What I wanted to know, I wanted to really know.”

  Even more so than at Steve and Viola’s, Janet’s house was packed full of neighbors and guests, not all of them invited. Her sisters Carolyn Trude and Nancy “Nan” Thiessen were there, the latter with her husband Scotty, an IBM district manager for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and their children. A big guy, Scotty ran interference whenever Janet needed to get through the swarm of reporters waiting outside the house. Inside were the ubiquitous folks from Life magazine, notably Dodie Hamblin. Neil’s brother Dean and his wife Marilyn and their son Jay were there; the couple’s two daughters had stayed back at home in Anderson, Indiana. A local Catholic priest, Father Eugene Cargill, was there at Janet’s invitation. Though she herself was neither Catholic nor a formally religious woman, Janet felt that Father Cargill “was just a wonderful man. I didn’t care whether he was Catholic or whatever. He was just a good person, a people person I appreciated having there,” especially if something went wrong during the landing. Janet’s mother had come to Houston for the launch but afterwards returned home to Southern California because, in Janet’s words, there was going to be “too much confusion in the house for her.”

  People came and went throughout the day. Neil’s mate from Korea, Ken Danneberg, the intelligence officer for Fighter Squadron 51, now a successful oilman, popped in from Denver totally una
nnounced, as did a few others. Figuring “I probably won’t remember all that’s going on tonight,” Janet stuck a clipboard on her front door with a sign-up sheet and a ballpoint pen hanging from it. Otherwise, if people arrived, she would not have known it. “I was paying attention to the flight, and that was most important. It was not a social occasion as far as I was concerned. Well, it was and it wasn’t. It was a great tense time.”

  As always, the other astronauts and their wives came around to lend the families of the crew their emotional support. Barbara Young, Marilyn Lovell, Tom Stafford, Bill Anders, and Ron Evans were among the many who stopped in for a visit.

  “People in the program would go from one crew member’s house to another,” Janet explains. “Sometimes you’d split up. It’s like when Apollo 8 flew. I went to Fred Haise’s house and Neil went to the Lovells’. We welcomed other people, especially the guys. They were wonderful at explaining what was going on if we didn’t understand.”

  Janet was quite savvy about the mission, not that she tried to fathom the intricacies of such technical details as AGS and PNGS. In her bedroom, she kept maps of the Moon and other technical material that Neil had given her. She studied graphs indicating the stages of the powered descent, and pencil in hand she checked off landmarks—Dry Gulch, Apollo Ridge, Twin Peaks (better known as Mount Marilyn)—as radio communications made clear that Eagle was passing over them. One indication of her dedication to the science of flight was that just after NASA named the Apollo 11 crew she took some pilot training, in part so that when her family was flying in the Beech Bonanza that Neil had just bought a part-ownership in she would have a better idea of how to bring the plane down in an emergency. Not necessarily seeking to gain a license, she also sought to better understand and communicate what her husband was doing before the press and to her boys.