First Man

by James R. Hansen

  I am the vine, you are the branches,

  He who abides in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit,

  For apart from me, you can do nothing.

  It had been Buzz’s intention to read the beautiful passage back to Earth, but at the last minute Slayton had advised him not to do it and Buzz reluctantly agreed. Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis had generated sufficient controversy to make the space agency shy away from overt religious messages. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the celebrated American atheist, had sued the federal government over the Bible reading by Borman, Lovell, and Anders. By the time of Apollo 11, O’Hair had added a complaint that NASA was purposefully withholding “facts” about Armstrong being an atheist. Though the U.S. Supreme Court eventually rejected O’Hair’s lawsuit, NASA understandably did not want to risk getting embroiled in another battle of this type. Regrettably to NASA, the word of Aldrin’s religious ceremony quickly made its way to the press. CBS’s Cronkite passed advance word to his viewers: “Buzz Aldrin did take something most unusual with him today, and it has become public—made public by the pastor at his church outside of Houston. He took part of the Communion bread loaf, so that during his evening meal tonight he will, in a sense, share communion with the people of his church, by having a bit of that bread up there on the surface of the Moon. The first Communion on the Moon.”

  Characteristically, Neil greeted Buzz’s religious ritual with polite silence. “He had told me he planned a little celebratory communion,” Neil recalls, “and he asked if I had any problems with that, and I said, ‘No, go right ahead.’ I had plenty of things to keep busy with. I just let him do his own thing.”

  As for Mrs. O’Hair’s assertion pertaining to Armstrong’s religious beliefs or lack thereof, Neil really never knew much, or cared much, about it. “I can’t say I was very familiar with that. I don’t remember that ever being mentioned to me until sometime in the aftermath of the mission.”

  After eating their meal and performing a few housekeeping chores, the astronauts turned all their attention to gearing up for the EVA. No matter how much they had practiced their EVA preparation inside the LM mockup back in Houston, doing it for real was much more difficult and time-consuming. “When you do simulations of EVA Prep,” Neil explained in NASA’s technical debriefing following the mission, “you have a clean cockpit and you have all the things that you’re going to use there in the cockpit and nothing else. But in reality, you have a lot of checklists, data, food packages, stowage places filled with odds and ends, binoculars,* stopwatches, and assorted things, each of which you feel obliged to evaluate as to whether its stowage position is satisfactory for EVA and whether you might want to change anything from the preflight plans…. We followed the EVA preparation checklist pretty much to the letter, just the way we had done during training exercises—that is, the hookups and where we put equipment—and the checks were done precisely as per our checklist. That was all good. It was these other little things that you didn’t think about and didn’t consider that took more time than we thought.”

  It took an hour and a half before Buzz and Neil were ready to start the EVA prep procedures and then three hours to do the preps, which were expected to take two hours. Much of the time involved getting their backpacks on, donning helmets and gloves, and getting everything configured for going outside. “We had tried to simulate the care with which we were going to perform each operation. When you are putting together the suit and making all the connections, you are really putting your life on the line with those connections, so you try to take the proper amount of time and care to make sure they are done properly. We had tried to simulate that. I don’t know that we timed them necessarily, if so, I don’t remember the numbers. But doing it for real on the lunar surface took quite a bit longer.”

  One of the main reasons why it took so long was because it was so cramped inside the LM. Aldrin recalls: “We felt like two fullbacks trying to change positions inside a Cub Scout pup tent. We also had to be very careful of our movements. Weight in the LM was an even more critical factor than in the Columbia. The LM structure was so thin one of us could have taken a pencil and jammed it through the side of the ship.”

  The tight fit confirmed for Neil—though he did not think about it at the time—that it did in fact make much better sense to stay where they were for suiting up and have the commander go out of the hatch first rather than do a two-step around each other just so the lunar module pilot could make the first egress. “It was pretty close in there with the suits inflated. It was certainly a larger cockpit than the Gemini, so there was more room than I was used to. Nevertheless, in Gemini we were strapped down and couldn’t move around except during EVA periods. In the LM you were free to roam around, but you had to be very careful and move slowly. It was very easy to bump things. That backpack [Portable Life Support System, or PLSS, pronounced “Pliss”] was sticking out behind you almost a foot and it had a hard surface; if you made a quick motion, you could easily bang into something.” And things were, in fact, banged into. For example, the outer knob of an ascent engine-arming circuit breaker broke off, which Buzz was able to depress prior to liftoff with a felt-tipped pen. “We were certainly very aware of the cumbersome nature of operating in our suits,” Neil concludes.

  Proceeding with great care, the two men used all the estimated time for suiting up and then some. Then it also took longer than anticipated to get the cooling units in their PLSS backpacks operating and even more time than expected to depressurize the LM for egress. According to Neil, “We had to depressurize the cabin and we wanted to protect the lunar surface from Earth germs so we had filters on all the vents. We had never done the tests with the filters on and it took a much longer time to depressurize the cabin than we had anticipated.” They were ready to swing open the hatch and for Neil to step out onto the surface an hour later than estimated, though that was still five hours ahead of the original schedule.

  Opening the hatch proved to be a chore. “It was an effort in patience more than anything else,” Neil explains. “It was a pretty good-sized hatch—five or six hundred square inches or something like that. So when we got the cabin pressure down to a very low psi, it took something like two hundred pounds of pressure to open that up. You can’t put two hundred pounds of pressure into pulling on a handle very easily—not in those cumbersome suits. So we had to wait until we got to a very low-pressure difference between the inside of the door and the outside of the door before it would break free. We tried a number of times to open it up, but we didn’t want to bend or break anything. Mostly it was Buzz doing the pulling because the door opened his direction; it was easier for him to pull toward himself than it was for me to push.”

  The hatch finally opened, Neil began backing through a fairly tiny opening. Peering down and around, Buzz helped navigate. According to Neil, “Egress required you go through the hatch backward, feet first. The technique was to get the door wide open and face the rear of the lunar module cabin, then kneel down and slide backwards, allowing your feet to go out through the hatch first. Then you had to get around the backpack. The backpack extended quite a long way above your back. You needed to get quite low but then you also had things on the front of you that you didn’t want to damage. So it was a matter of doing that kind of awkward procedure with as much care as possible so as not to damage.”

  “Having said that, getting through the hatch proved to be no more difficult than a lot of other maneuvers that we had been required to do back in the Gemini spacecraft or in the Apollo command module, so it worked well. To my knowledge all the crew on all the Apollo flights used the same approach, and as far as I know there was never any significant damage.”

  So intent was Armstrong on his egress technique that when he got out onto the small porch of the LM, he forgot to pull the lanyard just north of the ladder rigged to deploy the swing-action Modular Equipment Storage Assembly. The MESA lanyard also activated the television camera that was to transmit to Earth i
mages of Neil’s descent down the ladder and his first step onto the lunar surface. Quickly noticing the omission, Houston reminded him about it, and Neil moved back a bit to pull the deployment handle.

  The television camera was black and white. “We did have a color camera in the command module,” explains Neil, “but it was quite big and bulky and for the LM we were very concerned about weight. Principally, weight and electrical power were the factors that required the much smaller black-and-white-image orthicon TV camera.” Essentially, the orthicon was a pickup tube that used a low-velocity electron beam to scan a photoactive mosaic.

  “When I first exited the lunar module out onto the porch and pulled the handle to release the MESA table, as I remember it, Buzz turned a circuit breaker powering the camera. I asked Houston if they were getting a picture and they said, yes, they were, but it was upside down. I was the most surprised guy probably of anybody listening to that conversation, because I did not expect them to get a picture [none had been obtained during any preflight simulation].”

  Standing at the top of the ladder seemed not at all precarious. “You are so light up there and you fall so slowly that, if you have anything to hold on to anywhere, you are going to be able to control yourself. So I was not ever concerned about falling from the ladder.”

  In the CapCom seat, astronaut Bruce McCandless had taken over from Owen Garriott for the EVA:

  Every one of the global millions who watched what next happened on their television sets will never forget the moment that Armstrong took his first step out onto the surface of the Moon. Watching the shadowy black-and-white TV pictures coming back from a quarter of a million miles away, it seemed like an eternity before Neil, his right hand on the ladder, finally stepped off onto the Moon, leading with his booted left foot.

  The historic first step took place at 10:56:15 P.M. EDT, which was 02:56:15 Greenwich Mean Time. In terms of mission elapsed time, the step came, according to NASA’s official press statement, at four days, thirteen hours, twenty-four minutes, and twenty seconds.

  In the United States, the largest share of the television audience, including everyone at the Armstrong homes in Wapakoneta and El Lago, were watching CBS and listening to Cronkite, who for one of the very few times in his broadcasting career was virtually speechless. Having taken his eyeglasses off, and rubbing tears from his eyes, Cronkite declared, “Armstrong is on the Moon! Neil Armstrong, a thirty-eight-year-old American, standing on the surface of the Moon! On this July twentieth, nineteen hundred and sixty-nine.”

  What also so impressed Cronkite, as it did everybody else, was that the world was watching something that was happening so far away, at a place no human being had ever been before, via a live television feed. “Boy! Look at those pictures!” the veteran newsman exclaimed. “It’s a little shadowy, but he [Neil] said he expected that in the shadow of the lunar module.”

  Television pictures afforded the audience the virtual sensibility of being there with Armstrong when he stepped out onto the Moon. Without them, the human experience of the First Man’s first step would still have been meaningful, sensational, and immortal, yet surely very different. “How different it is hard to say,” Neil reflects today. “The pictures were surreal, not because the situation was actually surreal, but just because the television technique and picture quality gave it sort of a superimposed unreal image.” As dangerous as it is to say today given all the ridiculous conspiracy theories over the past four decades about the Moon landing having been a faked telecast from a remote movie studio location somewhere out in the Arizona or Nevada desert, even Armstrong must confess, “I have to say that it almost looked contrived.

  “That certainly wasn’t planned. Had we had the ability to make a much clearer picture, we certainly would have opted to do so.” The only way that Neil and Buzz could have improved the TV picture with the orthicon camera system was to move from the small antenna to the large S-band erectable antenna that was stored on the LM. “It is possible that with the big antenna [a dish model] we might have produced a better picture, I don’t know. We might have accomplished that.

  “From a technical standpoint, the TV was still valuable,” Armstrong recalls, “to various individuals in and around NASA.” But no piece of information carried a greater worth, or was more closely guarded, than what words Armstrong would say when he stepped out onto the lunar surface. No one knew, not even his crewmates. Buzz recalls: “On the way to the Moon, Mike and I had asked Neil what he was going to say when he stepped out on the Moon. He had replied that he was still thinking it over.”

  Armstrong maintains he spent no time thinking about what he would say until sometime after he had successfully executed the landing.

  At 04:13:24:48 mission elapsed time, which was a few seconds before 10:57 P.M. EDT, Neil spoke his eternally famous words*:

  That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

  In El Lago, Janet reportedly said as Neil was coming down the ladder, “I can’t believe it’s really happening,” then when Neil stepped off, “That’s the big step!” As he began to walk upon the Moon, she coaxed him, “Be descriptive now, Neil.” In Wapakoneta, Viola, clutching the arms of her chair ever so tightly, thanked God that her son was not sinking into the lunar dust, a fear that many people still harbored even after the LM had landed.

  In El Lago, Janet kept telling her company that she had absolutely no idea what her husband would say when he stepped onto the Moon. An hour earlier, she had jested, as everyone grew more impatient for Neil and Buzz to begin the EVA, “It’s taking them so long because Neil’s trying to decide about the first words he’s going to say when he steps out on the Moon. Decisions, decisions, decisions!”

  Janet’s joke was not too far from the truth, as Neil testifies: “Once on the surface and realizing that the moment was at hand, fortunately I had some hours to think about it after getting there. My own view was that it was a very simplistic statement: what can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. It just sort of evolved during the period that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff and the EVA prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. I didn’t think it was particularly important, but other people obviously did. Even so, I have never thought that I picked a particularly enlightening statement. It was a very simple statement.”

  Then there was the matter of the missing “a”—the fact that Neil fully intended to say, “That’s one small step for a man,” but, in the rush of the moment, forgot to say, or just did not say, the “a.”

  In terms of memory, “I can’t recapture it. For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps it was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time there for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said—although it actually might have been.”

  When asked how he prefers for historians to quote his statement, Neil answers only somewhat facetiously, “They can put it in parentheses.”

  “As for what I did say on the Moon, I took a small step—so that part of it came real easy. Then it wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare that with.”

  One theory is that Armstrong came across the idea for his statement while reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In one scene of the book, the protagonist Bilbo Baggins, while invisible, jumps over the villainous Gollum in a leap that Tolkien described as “not a great leap for a man, but a leap in the dark.” Reinforcing this suggestion is the fact that Armstrong, whe
n he moved his family to a farm in Lebanon, Ohio, after leaving NASA in 1971, named his farm Rivendell, which is the name of the idyllic secluded valley of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings and the abode (“the last homely house”) of noble Elrond, who is half elf and half human. In the Rings trilogy Rivendell is the last place where elves live before leaving Middle Earth and returning to “the immortal lands” over the sea. Adding spice to this theory is the fact, known to many of Neil’s friends, that in the 1990s Neil also based his e-mail address on a Tolkien theme.

  Regrettably for Tolkien fans, Armstrong’s reading of the classic books could not have influenced what he said when he stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969. Indeed, he did come to read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but not until well after Apollo 11. “My boys made me read the series years later when we were living on the farm. I read all the books, but I don’t remember bumping into anything even then that made me think about what I had said.”

  A far less chimerical theory is that a high NASA official gave him the idea. This hypothesis is based on the existence of an April 19, 1969, memorandum from Willis Shapley, an associate deputy administrator at NASA Headquarters, to Dr. George Mueller, head of the Office of Manned Space Flight. Shapley’s three-page memo, entitled “Symbolic Items for the First Lunar Landing,” addressed what sorts of items should be left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew as well as what commemorative articles should be taken to the lunar surface and returned. Early in the memo, in talking about what sort of message the Moon landing should present to the world, Shapley wrote: “The intended overall impression of the symbolic activities and of the manner in which they are presented to the world should be to signalize [sic] the first lunar landing as an historic step forward for all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States of America…. The ‘forward step for all mankind’ aspect of the landing should be symbolized primarily by a suitable inscription to be left on the Moon and by statements made on Earth, and also perhaps by leaving on the Moon miniature flags of all nations.” As the story goes, Mueller passed this memo on to Deke Slayton who shared it with Armstrong, thus planting the seed for the idea that led to Neil’s historic statement.