First Man

by James R. Hansen

  The problem is, Armstrong has absolutely no recall of the memo. As hauntingly similar as the phrase “forward step for all mankind” seems to be, he does not remember getting a copy of it or ever hearing about it. It seems to be another example—like Cronkite’s TV comment about “a giant leap” on the morning of the landing—of a similar statement having been made independently of the thought process behind Armstrong’s own words.

  “My guess is that you can take almost any statement, and if you look around for a while, you can find other statements that were made similarly by other people.”

  One example of that is President Kennedy’s quotation, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” A statement very much like Kennedy’s was made by Warren Harding when he was running for president—and before that, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Following the Russian launch of Sputnik in October 1957, President Eisenhower, in fact, used the phrase, “a giant leap into outer space,” but Armstrong had no previous conscious knowledge of that statement, either.

  “So, in your mind, Neil, there was never any particular context for your coming up with the phrase? It did not connect back to any other quotation or experience?”

  “Not that I know of or can recall. But you never know subliminally in your brain where things come from. But it certainly wasn’t conscious. When an idea runs for the first time through your own mind, it comes out as an original thought.”

  For the first few minutes after stepping off the LM, Armstrong kept his exploring close to the ladder. He was intrigued by the peculiar properties of the lunar dust. He told Houston: “The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” As was expected, motion posed no problem. “It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It’s absolutely no trouble to walk around.”

  Back in Ohio, his mother took immense pleasure in seeing Neil move without the slightest sign of difficulty. “He seemed to have a buoyancy,” she later wrote, “almost floating as he walked…I knew his suit was bulky, and I hoped so much that he would not fall. Falling could cause a puncture, and a puncture could cause his life-support to fail. I knew this was dangerous.”

  Still in close proximity to the LM, Neil saw that the descent engine had not left a crater of any marked size. “It has about one foot clearance on the ground. We’re essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of [exhaust-induced erosion] rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.”

  He was anxious to have the mission’s photographic camera, a 70-millimeter Hasselblad, sent down to him. To do that, Buzz, just inside the hatch, needed to hook the camera to a device known as the Lunar Equipment Conveyor, or LEC.* The astronauts nicknamed it the “Brooklyn Clothesline” because it worked pretty much the same way as the line in New York apartment buildings used to hang out and dry wash. The idea for the LEC came along not so much to solve the problem of bringing the camera and other things down from the LM but for taking things back up from the lunar surface at the conclusion of the EVA. “We had done some practice sessions on the final segment of the lunar surface work where we brought all the rock boxes, cameras, and various equipment that needed to go inside. It was very cumbersome. We found it very difficult to manhandle all that stuff around and get it in the proper position so that the other person—the top man—could pick it up. I think it was my suggestion that we try the clothesline technique. So we did that, and it seemed to work out all right.”

  Unhooking the camera from the LEC, Armstrong set it in the bracketing framework of the Remote Control Unit, or RCU, which was built according to his own design right into the front of his suit. Neil believes that whoever had comprised the first crew, facing such practical problems, would have come up with something very similar, because the Hasselblad was a rather large camera.

  “It was not an automatic camera; everything was manual—shutter speed, f-stop, focus, everything. It was very obvious that it was a two-handed operation and that if you were doing anything else at the time you needed another hand. Secondly, there was the problem of when you were doing other things with other equipment, what were you to do with the camera? You didn’t want to set it down in the dirt. So it was just immediately obvious that we needed something else. I suggested, why don’t we put a mounting bracket for it on the backpack control unit, which was mounted on our chests. That would be a convenient place to locate it. We would be able to see the marks on the camera, and we could probably take many of the pictures we wanted right from the bracket location, essentially making our bodies into a bipod to hold the camera. That seemed to work out well. Everybody ended up using that technique.”

  As soon he got the camera mounted, Armstrong was so intent on taking a few pictures that he neglected to scoop up the contingency sample of lunar dirt, a higher priority item that he was supposed to accomplish first in case something went wrong and he quickly needed to get back into the LM. NASA did not want to get all the way to the Moon and then not be able to bring back any lunar sample for scientific study. Houston had to remind Neil, never one to be rushed, a couple of times to get the sample.

  “First thing you are at the surface. The camera is all ready after you get that mounted. It was very easy to take a few pictures. They were very important, too, but, of course, the contingency sample guys wanted to make sure that that was the first thing we got done. It was going to take somewhat more effort to get that sample—to get the equipment and the container for that sample—than it was to get a few pictures. My thought was just that I was going to get a few quick pictures—a panoramic sequence of the LM’s surroundings—while I was there, and then I was going to get the sample.”

  COMM BREAK

  COMM BREAK

  In the technical debrief following the mission, Neil explained his conservative reasoning for changing the order of doing these first two things by saying that he was at first standing in the shadow of the LM, where good pictures could be taken. “I wanted to get that camera down and hooked up while I was over there in the shadow because, to do the contingency sample, I was going to have to stow the LEC and go over into the area out of the shadow. Since I wanted to do it on the right side [north of the ladder] where the [movie] camera was mounted [in Buzz’s window], I was going to have to make a trip of about ten or fifteen feet before I started the contingency sample. That’s the reason we [I] changed the order.” Subsequent Moon landing crews, building on Apollo 11’s experience, would consider moving ten or fifteen feet a trivial distance, but not the First Man. Having been on the lunar surface for all of eight minutes at this point, everything about his initial movements were done incrementally and with great caution.

  To take the contingency sample Neil had to assemble a pooper-scooper-like device with a collapsible handle that had a removable bag at the end. After he scooped up a small amount of soil sample, he deposited the bag inside a special strap-on pocket on his right thigh. Digging into the top surface was no problem at all, as the soil was very loose. Though the contingency sample did not require him to take anything from any real depth, he did try digging an inch or more into the surface only to find that it quickly became very hard. He also made sure to get a couple of small rocks into his bag before closing it up. He also conducted a little soil mechanics experiment by pushing the handle-end of his sampler down into the surface from four to six inches.

  His sample completed, Neil took a moment just to gaze out at the lunar landscape. “It has a stark beauty of its own,” he reported. “It’s much like the high desert of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.” Then, still thinking about what he could do to experiment, he detached the ring that had been holding the coll
ection bag on to the contingency sample and threw it sidearm to see how far it would go. “Didn’t know you could throw so far,” Aldrin teased, watching out his window. Chuckling, Neil answered, “You can really throw things a long way up here!” Curiously, Neil today has no recollection of making the throw, the Moon’s first pitch. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You don’t remember doing that at all?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Sixteen minutes into the EVA, it was time for Aldrin to egress, something he was just itching to do:

  Standing southwest of the ladder, Neil used the Hasselblad to snap a series of remarkable photographs of Buzz slowly emerging from the hatch, studiously coming down the ladder, kneeling on the porch, moving down to the last rung, jumping down to the footpad, and hopping off onto the lunar surface. These are the pictures that people would later see and forever remember in terms of the first human stepping onto the Moon: Buzz doing it rather than Neil, for whom no photographs from below could be taken because he went out first. Actually, Buzz climbed down to the last rung twice before stepping off—the first time just as rehearsal.

  Not that the two men were actually worried that they could lock themselves out, as the hatch could be opened from the outside, if necessary. According to Neil, “That was just a joke, perhaps to avoid somebody saying, ‘Were you born in a barn?’” Aldrin’s reason for partially closing the hatch was apparently to prevent radiative cooling of the LM cabin:

  As a matter of fact, though Buzz and Neil did not think of it at the time, there was a way that they could have locked themselves out, if the hatch’s pressure valve had somehow gone awry and started repressurizing. “Did we really ever investigate that problem?” Aldrin has asked, chuckling. “It probably would have been a good idea to use a brick or a camera to keep it from closing. Somebody must have thought through that…. We had a handle[on the outside] to unlatch it, but, considering the difficulty we had, if you had a couple of psi [in the cabin], you’d never get it open. Well, you’d get it open, but you’d never get the bent hatch closed again!”

  Down on the surface, it was at this moment that Buzz referred to the Moon’s unique beauty as “magnificent desolation.” Leaning toward Buzz so close that their helmets almost touched, Neil clapped his gloved hand on his mate’s shoulder. According to Buzz’s autobiography, Neil then said to him, “Isn’t it fun?” But Neil insists today that “‘fine’ is definitely what I said,” in reference to the very fine powder that the two astronauts were still in the midst of examining.

  After that, they moved off their separate ways and began testing their mobility. Though their substantial number of hours in one-sixth g had not been spent moving very far or very fast, inside the LM they had been standing, bending, and leaning and, in Neil’s words, had “a pretty good appreciation of what the one-sixth g environment felt like before we ever got out.”

  What they were not accustomed to were major and very rapid body movements. In ground simulations and in the one-sixth g airplane, they had practiced a number of different possible lunar gaits. In one of the ground simulations, Neil remembers, “You were suspended sideways against an incline plane and walked sideways while hooked to an assembly of cables.” Although a truer feeling came in the one-sixth g airplane—a converted KC-135, flying parabolas—that only gave them a few seconds each flight to polish their techniques.

  During the EVA, it was Aldrin’s job specifically to test all the different lunar gaits. These included a “loping gait” (Neil’s preference) in which the astronaut alternated feet, pushed off with each step, and floated forward before planting the next foot; a “skipping stride,” in which he kept one foot always forward, hit with the trailing foot just a fraction of a second before the lead foot, then pushed off with each foot, launching into the next glide; as well as a “kangaroo hop,” which few Apollo astronauts ever employed, except playfully, because its movements were so stilted.

  With their big backpack and heavy suit on, the astronauts would have weighed 360 pounds apiece on Earth; on the Moon, in one-sixth gravity, they each weighed merely sixty pounds. Since they felt so lightweight, special care in all movements did need to be taken, primarily because of their backpacks, whose mass effects on their balance, they quickly discovered, pitched their walk slightly forward. When looking out in any direction toward the horizon, both men felt a bit disoriented. Because the Moon was so much smaller a sphere than Earth, the planetoid curved much more visibly down and away than they were accustomed to. Also, because the terrain varied a good bit relative to their ability to move over it, they had to be constantly alert. “On Earth, you only worry about one or two steps ahead,” Buzz has recalled. “On the Moon, you have to keep a good eye out four or five steps ahead.” Mostly, the two astronauts, trained as they were to be very conservative in their EVA mobility, walked flat-footed, with one foot always firmly planted into the lunar surface.

  Armstrong did try making some fairly high jumps straight up off the ground. What he found was a tendency to tip over backwards upon landing. “One time I came close to falling and decided that was enough of that.” After he and Buzz stretched out the TV cable so the television camera could be moved to its position some fifty feet away from the LM, Neil also tripped over the cable a couple of times. “The TV cable was coiled in storage, so when we stretched it out we had a spiral on the ground that was lifting up, and with the low gravity that was accentuated a little bit. It was very easy to trip over that cable, which I did a few times.” Exacerbating the problem was the fact that the astronauts really could not see their feet very well. “Because of our suits, it was hard to see anything right below you. It was hard to see your feet; they were pretty far down there.” The fact that the cables got dusty almost immediately also contributed to the problem.

  Sometime during this initial stretching of their lunar muscles, Aldrin contributed his own “first” on the Moon. Always forthright, Buzz relates: “My kidneys, which have never been of the strongest, sent me a message of distress. Neil might have been the first man to step on the Moon, but I was the first to pee in his pants on the Moon. I was, of course, linked up with the urine-collection device, but it was a unique feeling. The whole world was watching, but I was the only one who knew what they were really witnessing.”

  It is not known when or where, or whether, Armstrong experienced a similar call from nature while he was on the lunar surface. If he did, it is definitely not something he would ever have told anyone about.

  Sewn to each man’s left gauntlet was an ordered checklist of EVA tasks. Even though Neil and Buzz, through repeated simulations, knew from memory the order of events, they still used the checklists consistently, as professional pilots did, no matter how well they knew the procedures.

  The astronauts’ next task (another late addition) was unveiling the commemorative plaque that was mounted on the ladder leg of the LM. “For those who haven’t read the plaque,” Neil said to the world at 04:13:52:40 elapsed time, “we’ll read the plaque that’s on the front landing gear of this LM. First, there’s two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, ‘Here Men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the president of the United States.”

  Though the crew played no role in developing the plaque or its inscription, they were happy to endorse the message and to put their signatures on it. Aldrin, who would later formally change his name to Buzz, felt that the plaque was one place that required his formal assignation, “Edwin E.”

  Another item that was not on their checklist but that NASA wanted accomplished fairly early during their EVA was the planting of the American flag. As discussed earlier, the decision to erect an American flag on the Moon had been controversial. Armstrong remembers: “There was substantial discussion before the flight on what the flag should be. It was questioned as to whether it should be an American flag or a
United Nations flag.” Once it was decided (with no input from the crew) that it should be the American flag, Neil, a former Eagle Scout, did give some thought as to how the flag should be displayed. “I thought the flag should just be draped down, that it should fall down the flagpole like it would here on Earth. It shouldn’t be made to stand out or put into any rigid framework, which it ultimately was. I soon decided that this had gotten to be such a big issue, outside of my realm and point of view, that it didn’t pay for me to even worry about it. It was going to be other people’s decision, and whatever they decided was okay. I wasn’t going to have any voice in that.”

  While he and Buzz had trained in minute detail to execute virtually every other assigned task during the EVA, they had done no training at all for the flag ceremony, as it, too, like the unveiling of the plaque, was a late addition. As it turned out, planting the flag (some thirty feet in front of the LM) took a lot more effort than anyone had imagined—so much more that the whole thing nearly turned into a public relations disaster.

  First there was difficulty with the small telescoping arm that was attached as a crossbar to the top end of the flagpole; its function was to keep the flag (measuring three feet by five feet) extended and perpendicular in the still, windless lunar atmosphere. Armstrong and Aldrin were able quickly enough to lock the arm in its 90-degree position, but as hard as they tried, they could not get the telescope to extend fully. Thus, instead of the flag turning out flat and fully stretched, it had what Buzz has called “a unique permanent wave.” Then, to the dismay of the two men, fully aware that the whole world was watching them through the TV camera they had just set up, they could not get the staff of the flagpole to penetrate deeply enough into the soil to support itself in an upright position. “We had trouble getting it into the surface,” recalls Neil. “It ran into the subsurface crust.” With the pole sticking barely six inches into the Moon, all the two men could think about was the dreaded possibility that the American flag might collapse into the lunar dust right in front of the global television audience.