First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “Rick was twelve, five years older than Mark. He was interested, but Mark was too young. Mark doesn’t remember much about it—any of it.” At the time the little boy repeated, “My daddy’s going to the Moon. It will take him three days to get there. I want to go to the Moon someday with my daddy.”

  Janet remembers “talking to Neil just before he left for the Apollo flight, asking him to talk to the boys and explain to them what he was doing…. I said to Neil, there is a possibility you might not come back. It was right in front of the boys when I said that. I said, ‘I’d like you to tell the boys.’

  “I don’t think that went very far…. Rick didn’t ask many questions because he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  “I don’t know what he might have said to them…. Rick would have understood; Mark probably wouldn’t have understood. He was off in another world.”

  For the boys on the day of the landing, with their house so full of people, it was a big party. Because her sisters and sister-in-law were there, Janet had help. “I had people in the house. I didn’t really have to worry too much about the boys. They would go swimming, and people would watch them. They had some friends over. I tried to keep life as normal as possible for them, but that day probably wasn’t very normal.”

  During the crew’s TV transmissions during the outbound journey, she would urge, “Mark, hurry up. We’re going to see Daddy.” When Neil’s arm came into view on the screen, she quickly pointed it out: “That must be Daddy right there. There he is! There he is!” But while Rick stayed very attentive, Mark was preoccupied with other things, like a baby bird he had found in the yard earlier that morning. Later seeing her six-year-old covered with dirt, Janet asked, “Where have you been?” “I was behind the dresser thing in the garage,” Mark replied. “I had to get him. Do you have some bird food?”

  With all the preparations for houseguests, Janet had barely slept the night before the landing. Instead of going out to dinner with her family and guests, Janet chose to stay home alone, sending Rick with the family and Mark to a friend’s house. When he timidly asked permission to camp overnight in his friend’s backyard tent, Janet surprised him by granting him permission. “You mean I can?” he asked. Janet knew she wouldn’t be sleeping either that night or the following one when the men made their EVA. “I caught some catnaps here and there, but you know, my sleep wasn’t really important at that point.”

  No doubt the pressure of it all wore on her, and she lit cigarette after cigarette to ease the tension. The afternoon before the landing, when Mission Control seemed to be a little late in reporting the acquisition of Columbia’s signal, Janet banged her fist on a coffee table.

  By the time PDI came, it had already become a very long day in the Armstrong home. For the terrors of the landing, Janet again needed to be alone, so she retired to the privacy of her bedroom. Bill Anders decided to join her. Bill and Janet together had given Pat White the bad news that awful night in January 1967 when her husband Ed died in the Apollo fire, and Bill felt he should stay with Janet right through the touchdown. Rick, a very intelligent and sensitive boy, also wanted to be with his mother. She and Rick had been following the NASA flight map step by step, now with Anders’s help. Rick settled on the floor near the squawk box, while Janet and Bill sat on the foot of the bed. (Long after the Moon landing, this led to one of Bill Anders’s favorite quips, “Where was I when the first Moon landing occurred? I was in bed with Janet Armstrong!”) But Janet was too nervous to stay seated. She hunched down on her knees next to Rick, putting her arm around her son tightly as Eagle dropped its final 250 feet.

  What Janet recalls about her emotions at the moment of the landing was issuing a big sigh of relief. Other people came in, hugged her, kissed her, and offered her congratulations. Returning to the living room, she and her entire company enjoyed a celebratory drink. Yet Janet was still wary. The worry was far from over.

  “I really wasn’t too concerned about the landing. I felt Neil could do that, if at all possible. But, God, you didn’t know if that ascent engine was going to fire the next day. If you listened to the TV, as I did later that evening, the drama was on the landing. Well, forget the landing! Are they going to be able to get off of there?!”

  A beaming Dean Armstrong, a cocktail in hand in his brother’s living room that Sunday afternoon, knew exactly what Neil would say when asked how difficult it had been for him to make the Moon landing: “When we ask him about it later, he’ll say, ‘a piece of cake.’”

  To his uncle’s humorous comment, a proud Rick Armstrong added, with just a tinge of hurt in his voice, “Usually when you ask him something, he just doesn’t answer.”

  In retrospect, two items may seem curious about Apollo 11’s technical situation immediately following touchdown. First, no one in NASA knew exactly where Eagle had landed. “One would have thought that their radar would have been good enough to pinpoint us more quickly than it did,” remarks Neil. When a spacecraft was in a trajectory or when it was in orbit, with all the optical and radar measurements being taken, both the ground and the crew had a pretty good idea of where the flight vehicle was, but it was a different problem when the object was sitting in one spot and all that anyone was getting was the same single measurement over and over again. “There was an uncertainty in that that was bigger than I would have guessed it would have been.”

  Up in Columbia, which was passing over Tranquility Base at a height of sixty miles, Collins peered hard through his sextant trying to spot the LM. Over his radio he had heard the whole thing and rightfully felt he shared in the achievement. “Tranquility Base, it sure sounded great from up here,” Mike had radioed to his mates. “You guys did a fantastic job.” “Thank you,” Neil replied warmly. “Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there.” “Will do,” answered Collins. With his right eye straining through his eyepiece, Mike had tracked them as long as he could during their descent until they disappeared from his view as a “miniscule dot” about 115 miles from the landing site. Now even with the ground sending up tracking numbers for him to input on his DSKY (display-keyboard) unit so that the command module’s guidance computer could accurately point his sextant, it frustrated Mike that he could not see them.

  The limited information provided by Houston was no help to Mike: “I can’t see a darn thing but craters. Big craters, little craters, rounded ones, sharp ones, but no LM anywhere among them. The sextant is a powerful optical instrument, magnifying everything it sees twenty-eight times, but the price it pays for this magnification is a very narrow field of view, only 1.8 degrees wide (corresponding to 0.6 miles on the ground), so that it is almost like looking down a gun barrel. The LM might be close by, and I swing the sextant back and forth in a frantic search for it, but in the very limited time I have, it is possible to study only a square mile or so of lunar surface, and this time it is the wrong mile.”

  Collins never did locate Eagle down on the surface, not on any of his passes, which was more of a concern to Mike than it was to anyone else. The main concern at Mission Control over the LM’s exact location did not come from the geologists—they were happy enough that Apollo 11 had landed anywhere in the mare. “They just wanted us to get out there and get some stuff!” Yet the question of where exactly the LM had come down did bother Mission Control, as Neil explains: “A lot of people were interested in where we landed, particularly those people who were involved in the descent guidance trajectory controls. After all, in later flights, we were going to try to go to specific spots on the surface and we needed to get all the information we could regarding methods that might help precision. However, not knowing exactly where the LM had landed did not affect what we did very much. Nor did people on the ground think that this was a disastrous occurrence. But the fact was, they didn’t know exactly where we were and they did want to know if they could.”

  Related to the question of where exactly they had landed was the mystery of how mascons might have affected Eagle’s pathway down to the su
rface. Though NASA had figured out how perturbations caused by mascons in the vicinity of the Moon’s equator might affect a spacecraft, at the time of Apollo 11, as Armstrong notes, “Perturbations by the mascons were still a concern.” NASA was “trying to reduce the error from these uncertainties to the point that we could have increasing confidence about going to a particular point on the surface.”

  Much more pressing in the first few minutes of landing than not knowing the LM’s exact location was the question of whether Neil and Buzz should even be staying on the surface for any time at all. There was always a chance that some spacecraft system was not operating properly, requiring a quick takeoff by Eagle’s ascent stage. “If we had problems that indicated that it was not safe to continue staying on the surface,” Neil relates, “we would have had to make an immediate takeoff.”

  Within the lifetime of the electrical power system on the LM, there were three early times that the LM could lift off and get into a satisfactory trajectory to rendezvous with the command module. The first of these times, designated T-1, came a mere two minutes after landing. T-2 followed eight minutes later, with T-3 not coming until Columbia completed another orbit in two hours’ time. If there was an emergency that absolutely forced Eagle to leave at any other time than these three, it would be up to Armstrong and Aldrin in the LM and Collins in the CSM to find some way, any way, to get in a decent position for joining up.

  From a quick initial look at the LM systems, everything seemed to be okay. Gene Kranz’s White Team quickly assented to a “Stay/NoStay” decision, which Charlie Duke passed on to Neil and Buzz.

  Five minutes later, after more checks of spacecraft systems had been made, Duke relayed to Eagle, “You are Stay for T-2.” The astronauts were going to remain on the Moon at least until the final Stay/NoStay decision.

  A major technical concern in the first minutes after landing was the possibility that too much pressure was building up in the LM’s fuel lines due to the high daylight temperature on the lunar surface. “Those fuel lines were not a new subject,” Armstrong remembers. In the last days before launch, hydraulics experts had discussed with the crew what could happen if the tanks became too hot and lines overpressurized. “If we closed all valves and trapped fluid in certain lines,” Neil explains, “then we were sitting on a two-hundred-degree surface of sunlight with a lot of reflected heat coming up towards the bottom of the LM, and it’s heating up the pipes. The fluid pressure might really build in that line, and then we’d have a problem. It was a thing we talked about before launch in terms of optimum procedures, and we knew it was something to pay attention to when we landed, but it wasn’t an uncontrollable situation. We had a couple of options of how to handle the situation, and we knew the guys on the ground were going to be doing their job, so we were not too concerned about it.”

  Just as predicted, immediately after engine shutdown, there was a sharp rise in pressure inside the fuel lines of the LM’s descent engine. “Within two minutes after landing,” as Neil tells it, “we vented both fuel and oxidizer tanks as planned. But the pressure still subsequently rose, probably due to evaporation of residual propellant in the tank as a consequence of the high surface temperature. Then we vented again. The ground was getting a different reading than we were, due to a different transducer location; I think theirs was in a trapped line. It was my view that the worst that could happen was a line or a tank could split open. As we would no longer be using the descent stage, it was less than a serious problem, in my opinion. I wasn’t too worried about it.”

  Houston considered the situation dangerous, however. If fuel sprayed onto what was still a hot descent engine, a fire could result, though unlikely in a vacuum. Fortunately, the venting eased the pressure and the problem soon resolved itself.

  For Armstrong and Aldrin there certainly was no time to savor the landing. Even after getting the stays for T-1 and T-2, even before they could look out at their windows and take their first close look at the lunar landscape, they had to go through a complete dress rehearsal for the next day’s takeoff from the lunar surface. According to Neil, “The intention was to go through all the procedures for a normal takeoff and find out if they all worked okay. This required aligning the LM platform [its inertial reference], which was a first because no one had ever done a surface platform alignment before. We used gravity to establish the local vertical and a star ‘shot’ to establish an azimuth; in that way we got the platform aligned and ready for takeoff. Even though everyone considered it a simulation, we still went through all the systems checks just the way we would have if we had been going to make a real takeoff.”

  As Neil looked at it, the simulation run time allowed Mission Control to make a thorough evaluation of mission progress. “Our data resources on the lunar surface were limited. If we found there was some problem, we needed to maximize the time available for the people at Mission Control to work the problem and figure out what we might do about it. So I think it was a good strategy to get that simulated takeoff out of the way, first thing.”

  Only after Collins passed overhead a second time and Buzz and Neil could cease their simulated countdown following the Stay for T-3 did the two LM crewmen breathe easier: “We relaxed a little bit once we got through all the systems checks and found that everything was working okay, that the LM was fine, that we had no reason to believe that we had any major problems on our hands, and that we were going to be able to go ahead with our planned activities. There was certainly a degree of relaxation there.”

  During the first two hours on the Moon, while Aldrin was painstakingly communicating back to Earth a variety of measurements and alignments that he was making for navigational purposes, Armstrong took his first opportunities to describe what he saw outside:

  Neil then returned to documenting the Moon’s color: “I’d say the color of the local surface is very comparable to that we observed from orbit at this Sun angle—about ten degrees Sun angle. It’s pretty much without color. It’s gray, and it’s very white, chalky gray, as you look into the zero-phase line. And it’s considerably darker gray, more like ashen gray, as you look out ninety degrees to the Sun. Some of the surface rocks in close here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket-engine plume are coated with this light gray on the outside, but where they’ve been broken, they display a very dark gray interior, and it looks like it could be country basalt.”

  “Whatever I saw, I wasn’t going to be too disappointed,” Aldrin said in a 1991 interview for Eric M. Jones’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. “I think both of us were trying to just describe what we saw whenever we had a little free time.” Armstrong added during that same interview, “Anything that might be helpful to the science teams on the ground. They’d been waiting a long time for this information.”

  According to the flight plan, the takeoff simulation was followed by meal time and then, officially, by a four-hour rest period. Aldrin recalls, “It was called a rest period, but it was also a built-in time pad in case we had to make an extra lunar orbit before landing, or if there was any kind of difficulty which might delay the landing. Since we landed on schedule and weren’t overly tired, as we had thought we might be, we opted to skip the four-hour rest period. We were too excited to sleep anyway.”

  The idea of skipping the rest period had actually been fully discussed and strategized about prior to the launch. “From our early discussions of how we would organize our time line of activities,” Neil relates, “we concluded that the best thing to do, if everything was going well, was to go ahead outside as soon as we could and do the surface work before we took our sleep period. We recognized that the chances for even getting down safely—having things go well enough with all the systems to allow a landing—were problematical. If we scheduled the surface activity immediately for as soon as we could after Columbia’s first revolution and after the practice takeoff and so on—immediately after that—and then didn’t make it on time, the public and the press would crucify us. That was just the r
eality of the world. So we tried to finesse things by saying that we were going to sleep and then we would do the EVA.

  “But we never had any plan to do it that way. We had discussed it with Slayton and Kraft—and a few other people. My recollection was that they all thought it was a reasonable thing to do. And so everyone agreed we’d do it that way if we could. We knew it would create a change that people weren’t expecting, but we thought that was the better of the two evils.”

  With everything in order, at 5:00 P.M. Eastern time, Armstrong radioed a recommendation that they plan to start the EVA earlier than originally scheduled. Aware of the prearranged deal, Charlie Duke, just about ready to pass over the CapCom duties to astronaut Owen Garriott of the Maroon Team, took only a few seconds to get approval:

  They did eat a meal as scheduled, but not before Aldrin first reached into his Personal Preference Kit, or PPK, and pulled out two small packages given to him by his Presbyterian minister, Reverend Dean Woodruff, back in Houston. One package contained a vial of wine, the other a wafer. Pouring the wine into a small chalice that he also pulled from his kit, he prepared to take Holy Communion.

  At 04:09:25:38 mission elapsed time, Buzz radioed, “Houston, this is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever or whoever he may be, to contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.” Then, with his mike off, Buzz read to himself from a small card on which he had written the portion of the Book of John (John 15:5) traditionally used in the Presbyterian communion ceremony.