Fortunately, the pole, with its funny curly flag, stayed standing. With his camera, Neil took the memorable picture of Aldrin saluting the flag. According to Aldrin, he and Neil were just about to change positions and transfer the camera so that Buzz could take a picture of him when Mission Control radioed that President Nixon was on the line and wanted to talk to them. This distracted them from taking the picture, Buzz relates, so a photo of Neil never got taken.
However, the sequence of events as evidenced in the NASA communications transcript shows that the first word of Nixon’s call did not come to the astronauts until well after Neil took the picture of Aldrin saluting the flag; the picture was taken during a break in communications very shortly after 04:14:10:33 elapsed time whereas the news that Nixon wanted to talk to them came at 04:14:15:47. During most of that five-minute-and-fourteen-second interval, the two men were no longer even together. Following the flag planting, Armstrong moved back to the LM, the camera still with him. There, at the MESA, he prepared to collect his first rock samples. Aldrin moved out westward from the LM a distance of some fifty feet before rejoining Neil at the MESA.
A long pause indicated that Nixon had finished. The astronauts saluted—Buzz for the second time during the conversation—and then they both headed back to the MESA.
There is no question that President Nixon’s phone call came as a surprise to Aldrin. In his autobiography, Buzz recalled: “My heart rate, which had been low throughout the entire flight, suddenly jumped. Later Neil said he had known the president might be speaking with us while we were on the Moon, but no one had told me. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. The conversation was short and, for me, awkward. I felt it somehow incumbent on me to make some profound statement, for which I had made no preparation whatsoever. I took the handiest possible refuge. Neil was the commander of the flight, so I let him do the responding. I conveniently concluded that any observation I might make would look as though I was butting into the conversation, so I kept silent.”
Armstrong attests, “Deke had told me shortly before the flight that we might expect some special communication. He didn’t say it would be the president necessarily, but just to expect some special communication that would come through the CapCom. It was just a heads-up, to tell me that something might come through that seems unusual, but Deke didn’t tell me exactly what it was. I didn’t know it was going to be the president, and I’m not sure Deke knew exactly who or what it was going to be, either, but apparently he had gotten wind of something, maybe through Bob Gilruth. If I’d known it was going to be the president, I might of tried to conjure some kind of an appropriate statement, but I didn’t know.”
A written comment from Viola supports Neil’s assertion that he did not know in advance that Nixon would call. “I have never asked Neil if he knew the president was planning to call, but I must admit that I could sense our son was emotionally shaken. I could hear the tremor in his voice. God love him, and Buzz too, how could they be otherwise? It truly was a touching time for all of us watching. The tears were trickling down our cheeks.”
Aldrin has plainly stated in the years since Apollo 11 his desire to have been given the courtesy of the same heads-up that Neil got—specifically from his own commander. “I don’t think I even thought about it,” Armstrong states today. “Whatever it was, it was going to be a surprise. And maybe it wasn’t even going to happen.”
Without question, it was a highly unusual relationship between two men who had to work so closely together—one of amiable (read neutral)—strangers. But the strangeness went in both directions, not just from Neil to Buzz.
Consider the fact that, while Armstrong took dozens of wonderful photographs of Aldrin, Buzz took not a single explicit picture of Neil. The only pictures of Neil were one with a reflection of him in Aldrin’s helmet visor in a picture Neil took, or a very few where Neil was standing in the dark shadow of the LM with his back to the camera or only partially shown.*
It is one of the minor tragedies of Apollo 11 that posterity benefits from no photos of the First Man on the Moon. Not of him saluting the American flag. Not of him climbing down the ladder. Not of him stepping on the Moon. Not of him standing by the LM. Not of him with the Earth in the background. Not of him next to a crater. Not of him directly anywhere. Sure, there are the grainy, shadowy, black-and-white TV pictures of Armstrong on the Moon, and they are remarkable and forever memorable. There are also a number of frames from the 16mm movie camera. But, very regrettably, there are no high-resolution color photographic images of the First Man with the spectacular detail provided by the Hasselblad.
Why not? The answer, according to Aldrin, was that he simply did not think to take any—except at that moment when they were planting the American flag and President Nixon’s call allegedly ended what would have been a Buzz-at-Neil photo shoot.
In his autobiography, Aldrin excuses what he failed to do. “As the sequence of lunar operations evolved, Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of the pictures taken on the Moon that include an astronaut are of me [author’s emphasis]. It wasn’t until we were back on Earth and in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory looking over the pictures that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault perhaps, but we had never simulated this during our training.”
“We didn’t spend any time worrying about who took what pictures,” Armstrong graciously recalls. “It didn’t occur to me that it made any difference, as long as they were good.
“I don’t think Buzz had any reason to take my picture, and it never occurred to me that he should. I have always said that Buzz was the far more photogenic of the crew.”
At the same time, Armstrong does offer real clarification of the situation pertaining to cameras and the photographic plan for surface activities during Apollo 11. “We always had a plan for when we were going to transfer the camera. He was going to take some pictures, and I was going to take some. And I think roughly we did it approximately like the plan called for in terms of the camera transfer. I had the camera for a large fraction of the time and I had more assigned photographic responsibilities, but Buzz did have the camera some of the time and did take pictures. It was in the flight plan.”
Besides the Hasselblad that Neil mounted on his chest bracket shortly after the EVA began, another Hasselblad was kept in the LM as a spare in case the first camera malfunctioned. This camera—an intravehicular (IV) Hasselblad—did not have the reflective outer shell (that kept the EVA camera from overheating) and didn’t have a reseau plate for putting calibration crosses on the images; it was never brought out. The only other still-photo camera that was used on the surface was the Apollo Lunar Surface Close-Up Camera (ALSCC), a stereoscopic camera—often called the “Gold camera,” as its proponent was Dr. Thomas Gold, a prominent Cornell University astronomer—that had been specially designed for taking extreme close-ups of lunar soils and rocks.*
The Gold camera was solely Neil’s responsibility, and Aldrin does not recall taking any pictures with it. But Buzz definitely took a number of pictures of his own choosing with the EVA Hasselblad. This means Neil painstakingly took the camera off his chest bracket and handed it directly and carefully over to Aldrin. Buzz does not recall whether he, in turn, ever put the camera into his own bracket; he believes he did not but rather kept it mostly in his right hand.* Buzz does remember taking pictures, though. He took two complete 360-degree panoramas. He took pictures of the distant Earth. He took pictures of the LM. He took the famous shots of footprints (his own) in the lunar dust. But he took no purposeful shots of Neil. Not one. To be fair, all of the photos Buzz took were planned photo tasks of his; taking a picture of Neil was not part of them.
“I should have taken it upon myself to do that,” Aldrin offers today. “But, you know, when I look back at where I am now, and what I’m aware of now, compared to where I was, I hate to use the word, but I was intimidated by the enormity of the situation. At the time there was certainly a gun-barrel vision of focusing in
on what you were supposed to be doing rather than being innovative and creative. Right there was an opportunity where I could have been creative and wasn’t.”
But Buzz had found other opportunities to be creative. “When I saw what my footprint looked like, I said to myself, ‘Golly, we ought to take a picture of that, but I’d better take a picture before and after.’ That was split-second. Then there was another instance when, ‘Gee, that footprint looks awful lonesome. Let’s have the boot, too. Yeah, but then, if I do that, I won’t see the footprint.’ So I took a picture with the boot slightly away from it. The rest of my picture taking was documenting going around the LM. Neil took most of the panoramas, both with the TV camera when he was first out there and then with the Hasselblad. It was just a matter of who had what when, and there was just not the opportunity for me ever to do that.
“When I got back and someone said, ‘There’s not any of Neil,’ I thought, ‘What in the hell can I do now?’ I felt so bad about that. And then to have somebody say that might have been intentional…. How do you come up with a nonconfrontational argument against that? I mean, that was just such a divisive observation, and Neil and I were never in the least divisive. We really were intimidated by the situation we found ourselves in on the Moon, hesitant and with an unclear idea of what to do next.”
Not even Apollo 11 crewmate Mike Collins realized it until well after the mission. “Stupid me, stupid me. We came back, the pictures got developed—they came back from the NASA photo lab. I loved them. I thought they were terrific. I thought they were great. I mean, the clarity of them, the composition, the colors, everything. I thought they were just magnificent. Never once did it occur to me, ‘Which one of them is that?’ It’s just some guy in a pressure suit. It was not until later that people said, ‘That’s Buzz,’ and ‘That’s Buzz,’ and ‘That’s Buzz,’ and the only Neil was the one where he was in Buzz’s visor. But even then, I attributed it to technical stuff—you know, the timeline, who was carrying what piece of equipment, what they were supposed to be doing at given time, experiments they were running on the surface, and so forth.”
Flight Director Gene Kranz only shakes his head sadly trying to come up with an answer: “I don’t have an explanation. In recent years I have been speaking to about 100,000 people a year. I do sixty to seventy public appearance engagements. And the only picture I can put up on the screen of Neil is his reflection in Buzz’s facemask. I find that shocking. That’s something to me that’s unacceptable. But, you know, life isn’t fair.”
For years even someone as close to the pulse of the Manned Space Program as Chris Kraft failed to realize that there were no pictures of Neil on the Moon. When asked about the riddle, Kraft answered: “I can’t answer that. I was taken aback by it when I first recognized it was so, but I can’t give you any reason why it didn’t happen. I think it would be an unfair judgment that Buzz intentionally did not want to take any pictures of him. No, no, no. I don’t think Aldrin would have been that devious. I would not accuse him of that.”
Nor would Mike Collins.
“It never once entered your mind, Mike, that Buzz might have not taken a picture of Neil on purpose?”
“Never. I mean, I’m not saying it couldn’t be true. I’m just saying I’m a naïve person. It never entered my mind that there was some nefarious plot on Buzz’s part to exclude Neil from the photo-documentation of the first lunar landing. It just never occurred to me. Maybe it should have.”
According to Chris Kraft and others involved in Apollo 11’s mission planning, “There were all kinds of scientific reasons to take pictures and all kinds of plans to take pictures of the lunar landscape, but I don’t think there was ever any game plan to have them take a picture of each other like you would do at the beach. I don’t recall that ever being discussed.”
Interestingly, when asked whether he thought Armstrong while on the Moon had been oblivious of the fact that Aldrin was not taking any pictures of him, Kraft asserted: “Yes, yes. I don’t think Neil cared. He may today, because he might like to have a picture of himself on the Moon, but I don’t think it crossed his mind at the time.”
In Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean’s view, the rather extensive photographic training the astronauts underwent for the mission should have led to pictures of both men. “Don’t forget, they had practiced their photography over and over again. It wasn’t that they just did this for the first time on the Moon. They practiced this in ground simulation over the course of several different days. In training you looked at all this film you had shot. Deke Slayton, for one, would have noticed if Neil wasn’t showing up in any of the pictures.”
Al Bean stops short of suggesting why Buzz failed to take pictures of Neil.
“Obviously one possibility is that Buzz just wasn’t thinking about taking a picture of Neil, and he wasn’t realizing that he wasn’t thinking about it.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“But there is also the possibility that he was thinking about it and that is why there aren’t any pictures of Neil.”
“That’s a possibility, too.”
“That he was thinking, ‘Neil may be the first on the Moon, but I’m not taking any pictures of him.’”
“That’s a possibility, too. I don’t know. We don’t know. And we should know, because I think it’s important to the long-range issue.”
“What makes it an important long-range issue?”
“Because there should be a bunch of good pictures of Neil. This was such an historic event. I mean, think about it: I’m going along on the boat with Christopher Columbus. He’s carrying the camera at the moment, but I’m his first mate. We all know what should happen. Nobody knows the answer why it didn’t.”
But Al Bean does possess a crystal clear idea as to the motivation of Armstrong’s silence, during and after the mission, to Buzz on the matter: “He was interested in doing the job. Neil was probably saying to himself all through his training, ‘I’ve got to make this landing safe; I’ve got to get out and do a good EVA; and I’ve got to get us back to the command module.’
“I got that way myself on my Apollo 12 flight. I didn’t think about people back home. I just thought about trying to be a good astronaut and doing my job. And Neil was even more focused than I was—more than most astronauts were.
“It would have been normal for Neil to be this way—for him to focus on the flying, on the jobs that really made the historic mission successful.” Within such a tight mental framework, the idea of a personal photograph not being taken would have been totally trivial.
Gene Cernan sees it similarly. “Certainly Neil realized the significance of the moment, but he was not going to be so arrogant as to say, ‘Here, Buzz, take a picture of me.’ What I can imagine Neil thinking was, ‘Oh well, we don’t have time to take a picture of me, so I’ll take a few pictures of Buzz to show everyone we were here.’
“Myself, if I had been in Neil’s place, I would have said, ‘Buzz, take a picture of me—quick.’”
At the conclusion of the telephone conversation with President Nixon, Armstrong immediately returned to the MESA to gear up for his primary geological work. Up to this point the only lunar material that had been collected was the contingency sample. Now he needed to get to work on what was known as the bulk sample. “The general area in which I did that work was to the left forward quadrant of the lunar module. For the bulk sample, we were trying to get a variety of different kinds of rock forms, but the primary focus was just to get enough volume—try to make it a volume of some good stuff but mostly just get volume because lots of experimenters around the world would be getting pieces of this stuff and doing experiments with them.”
Over a period of about fourteen minutes, Armstrong made some twenty-three scoops. “We didn’t have to be too careful in getting that part. I got out the sample bags and put the material—both rocks and soil—in the bulk sample containers. That worked all right, but the containers were a little contrary in terms of ge
tting them sealed properly. It was a vacuum-packed kind of seal designed so that the inside of the samples would stay uncontaminated. Otherwise, when the lunar materials were brought back to Earth, air would get in through the seal and contaminate the rocks. So the sampling container was not as easy to open and close as was the average shoebox; it was a bit more of a challenge. Having said that, I can’t remember that there was any particular difficulty in doing it. It just took a little more time than expected.” Part of the reason for that was the area in which Neil was working was in deep shadow, making it hard to see. More significantly, in one-sixth gravity he couldn’t apply as much force as he had been able to do in training in full Earth gravity.
In all, Apollo 11 brought back nearly 48 pounds (21.7 kilograms) of rock and soil samples, the great majority scooped up by Armstrong. Overall in the Apollo program, 841.6 pounds (381.69 kilograms) of Moon rock were returned. Understandably, given the unknown of the first landing mission and the heavy emphasis on making a successful landing and return, the load brought back by Apollo 11 was the lightest of all the landing missions. The last, Apollo 17, brought back more than five times the weight in rocks that Apollo 11 did—over 243 pounds (110.5 kilograms).
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