First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Mostly the rocks brought back from the Sea of Tranquility were basalt: a dense, dark-gray, fine-grained igneous rock composed chiefly of calcium-rich plagioclase feldspar and pyroxene; on Earth, basalt is the commonest type of solidified lava. The oldest basalts brought back by Apollo 11 had been formed some 3.7 billion years ago. Later flights brought back a greater variety of specimens, including lighter-colored igneous rocks that were even older, called gabbros and anorthosite.

  Some critics in the years following Apollo 11 were disappointed that the Moon rocks proved less valuable in unlocking as many secrets of the universe as hoped, but not Armstrong. “I have never been disappointed about the rocks. I am persuaded that they produced an extraordinary proof of the constituency of the regolith, the layer of loose rock atop the lunar mantle. They also demonstrated the different kinds of rock types, while confirming their plutonic character, their deep igneous or magmatic origin. Many of the rock types also revealed evidence of valuable metallic ores.

  “The geology community had hoped we would provide what they called ‘documented samples,’ that is, samples whose emplacement was photographed prior to and after lifting the samples. Time did not permit our doing as much of that as we had hoped. Without documenting photographs, I selected and collected a number of different rock types of various sizes, perhaps as large as softballs, but mostly somewhat smaller. Samples of the ground mass were extracted from the surface using a scoop as per the plan. I do not remember what the relative weights of volumes of the types of samples were, rocks versus soil, but they were probably about equal.”

  Less than 10 percent of the Moon rocks collected by the Apollo missions have yet even been studied, Armstrong emphasizes today. By 1975, the total841.6-pound mass of Moon rocks collected by all the Apollo missions had been split into 35,600 samples, with only 11 pounds (5 kilograms) of them consigned for public viewing in museums around the world. By 1997, only42.5 pounds (19.3 kilograms), or a little over 5 percent of the total, had been allocated for scientific study. “Today geologists are still actively studying the Moon rocks and writing scientific papers about them,” Neil notes. Several of the samples have become so famous within the international geoscience community that they are recognizable by their given names, such as the “Genesis Rock,” “The Black and White Breccia,” “Big Bertha,” “Rusty Rock,” “Great Scott,” and “The First Apollo 11 Sample Analyzed.” Well over 90 percent of the samples have been placed untouched in archival reserve for the benefit of posterity.

  Besides the rock sampling, the astronauts had a number of experiments to conduct, and precious little time to conduct them, as surface activity for Apollo 11 was limited to two hours and forty minutes. There were six experiments in all, each one selected by a NASA scientific panel after rigorous peer review.

  The most generic of the experiments was a soil mechanics investigation with core samples (taken primarily by Aldrin) measuring soil density, grain size, strength, and compressibility as a function of depth. Near the end of the EVA, Buzz hammered a couple of core tubes into the surface, the Moon’s tightly locked soil grains yielding only about six inches. The objective here was not just to improve scientific knowledge of the Moon, but to provide engineering data toward the design of an astronaut-carrying lunar vehicle, the later Lunar Rover, which motored electrically across the Moon’s hills and dales like a dune buggy starting with Apollo 15.

  The Solar Wind Composition Experiment was designed to trap evidence of the flux of electrically charged particles emitted by the Sun. With Armstrong’s help, it took Aldrin five minutes to deploy the solar wind instrument (a small banner of thin aluminum foil 11.7 inches [30 centimeters] wide by 54.6 inches [140 centimeters] that unrolled downwards from a reel to face the Sun) early in the EVA, starting at 04:13:58:32 elapsed time. This was right after he and Neil had unveiled the plaque on the LM ladder leg. Exposed on the lunar surface for a total of seventy-seven minutes, the foil collector effectively entrapped ions of helium, neon, and argon, expanding scientists’ knowledge of the origin of the solar system, the history of planetary atmospheres, and solar wind dynamics.

  The other five experiments came as part of EASEP, the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package. Actually, EASEP consisted of two units about the size of small backpacks. The PSEP, or Passive Seismometer Experiment, deployed by Aldrin, was designed to analyze lunar structure and to detect moonquakes. Supplemental to it was a lunar dust detector experiment—attached to the back side of the PSEP—that monitored the effects of lunar dust on all the EASEP experiments.

  At the same time Aldrin was deploying the seismic experiment (from 04:15:53:00 to 04:16:09:50, a duration of roughly seventeen minutes), Armstrong assembled the LRRR, or “LR-cubed.” Designed to measure precisely the distance between the Moon and Earth, the LRRR device consisted of a series of corner-cube reflectors, essentially a special mirror that reflected an incoming light beam back in the direction it came—in this case from a laser aimed at the Sea of Tranquility from inside a large telescope at the University of California’s Lick Observatory, east of San Jose. Though the laser beam remained tightly focused over a very large distance, by the time it traveled the quarter of a million miles from Earth, its signal was widely dispersed, to a signal something in the range of two miles in diameter. To maximize reception of the signal, it was necessary for Armstrong to align the reflector quite accurately.

  Speaking in the collective although the LR-cubed setup was all his, Neil recalls: “We wanted to make sure that all the mirrors were pointed at Earth, and we wanted to make certain that the reflector was mounted on a fairly stable surface where it wouldn’t be likely to get shifted later. We aligned it with the local vertical by means of a circular bubble—like the bubble in a level, except it was in a circle—so once you got the bubble in the middle of the circle the platform was level. Then we also had to align the whole platform by turning it until the mirrors were pointed directly at the Earth. For that we used simply a shadow stick—a gnomon—where the shadow made by the stick created the alignment. Always on the Earth when we had practiced it, this bubble was fairly stable; it would meander to a point, adjust, and stop. To our great surprise in the lunar gravity environment the bubble just kept circling around. It was just a matter of the low gravity there.”

  Mysteriously, the bubble (actually its inverse, the shape of a concave dish) finally did stabilize. Not only did the laser reflector experiment work, it ended up being one of the most scientifically productive of all the Apollo experiments, deployed not just on Apollo 11 but on Apollo 14 and 15 as well. Together, the three LRRR instruments deployed by the Apollo missions produced many important measurements. These included an improved knowledge of the Moon’s orbit, of variations in the Moon’s rotation, of the rate at which the Moon is receding from Earth (currently 1.5 inches or 3.8 centimeters per year), as well as of the Earth’s own rotation rate and precession of its spin axis. Scientists in the United States and abroad have used data from the laser reflectors to test Einstein’s theory of relativity. For those few misguided souls who still cling to the belief that the Moon landings never happened, examination of the results of five decades of LRRR experiments should evidence how delusional their rejection of the Moon landing really is.

  Armstrong recalls the decision against utilizing the large S-band dish antenna, which was stowed in LM Quad 1 to the right of the ladder. “We didn’t have to erect it as the signal for the LM antenna was strong enough to transmit the TV to Earth.” From a mission efficiency viewpoint, Neil was happy that the S-band antenna, which was roughly eight feet across, did not need to be deployed. It took about twenty minutes to assemble and he and Buzz were already running thirty minutes behind schedule. On the other hand, “It was really fun putting that thing together. I would have enjoyed doing it if I had had to, and finding out if it really worked. I’d done that quite a few times on the ground, and I was always amazed watching that thing bloom like a flower.”

  According to Armstrong, the overall
plan for the entire EVA was well conceived. “We had a plan. We had a substantial number of events to complete that were all in a proper order. We had built that plan based on the relative importance of the different events and the convenience and practicality of doing them in a certain order. We’d gone through a lot of simulations and developed the plan over a period of time. We knew it forwards, backwards, and blindfolded. That wasn’t going to be any trouble. I didn’t feel any restriction against violating a plan or drifting away from a plan somehow if the situation warranted.”

  The most noteworthy change in the plan came late in the EVA when Armstrong decided he wanted to go over and take a look at the sizable crater about sixty-five yards east of the LM (thus known today to Apollo 11 afficionados as East Crater). “When I went over to look at the crater, that was something that wasn’t on the plan, but I didn’t know the crater was going to be there. I thought seeing and photographing it was a worthwhile addition, although I did have to give up some documented-sample time to do that. But it looked to me like that could be a piece of evidence that people would be interested in.” There were guidelines but no specific mission rules as to how far away from the LM a crew member could go. If he or Buzz strayed too far from the LM, Mission Control would have definitely reined them back in. “In fact, I had some personal reservations in taking the time to go over and snap a picture of the crater. But I thought it was of sufficient interest that it was worth getting.”

  With EVA time running out, Neil hustled to get to the crater and back. Based on subsequent analysis of the TV footage showing him running there and back (he used a loping, foot-to-foot stride), his speed appears to have been about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) per hour. Later crews achieved speeds of over 3 miles (5 kilometers) per hour, but they benefited from additional gait training as well as more time on the Moon to try out their running skills. In all, Neil’s little expedition took three minutes and fifteen seconds. While there he took eight Hasselblad shots showing various features of East Crater. What most interested him about the crater once he got there were the outcroppings in its sidewalls: “Not spectacular outcroppings, but they certainly showed that there was a certain layering in there that I thought might be of interest to the geology guys.”

  The moment Armstrong had headed toward the crater, Houston informed Buzz that it was time for him to start thinking about heading back into the LM.

  Neil would follow Aldrin up the ladder some ten minutes later. Before either headed up the ladder, though, they needed to finish up and cap the final core samples, and Neil, with a pair of long-handed tongs, had to complete his final rock sampling. Everything that was to be returned to Earth needed to be brought to the ladder for loading. That included the camera film magazines, the solar wind experiment, and all the rock boxes.

  As Armstrong explained in a postmission press conference, “There was just far too little time to do the variety of things that we would have liked to have done. There were rocks in a boulder field that we had photographed out of Buzz’s window before going out that were three to four feet in size. Very likely they were pieces of lunar bedrock. It would have been very interesting to go over and get some samples of those. There were just too many interesting things to do.

  “When you are in a new environment, everything around you is new and different and you have the tendency to look a little more carefully at ‘What is this?’ and ‘Is this important?’ or ‘Let me look at it from a different angle,’ which you would never do in a simulation. In a simulation, you just picked up the rock and threw it in the pot.

  “So it doesn’t surprise me that it took us somewhat longer to get through things. We didn’t have that presidential call either—that was never in our simulations. And there were questions coming from the ground. We were responding to those, which took a little extra time. No one was asking us questions when we went through this in our practice sessions.

  “It would have been nice from our point of view to have had more time to ourselves so that we could have gone out and looked around a little bit. But a lot of people had needs based on whatever discipline they belonged to, and these people had spent a lot of time getting ready to have their experiments done. I felt that we had a substantial obligation to try to honor those needs as best we could, and in a most timely fashion. I didn’t mind breaking the rules if it seemed like the right thing to do.

  “I do remember thinking, ‘Gee I’d like to stay out a little longer, because there are other things I would like to look at and do.’ It wasn’t an overpowering urge. It was just something that I felt, that I’d like to stay out longer. But I recognized that they wanted us to go back in.” Back on Earth, it was approaching 1:00 A.M. EDT.

  According to the mission plan, Armstrong was supposed to take the time to dust off Buzz’s suit before Buzz went back inside the LM, but the act of hygiene was forgotten, perhaps because it seemed pointless. “The dust was so fine that you couldn’t have got rid of all of it,” explains Neil. There was a hypothesis going into the mission that, if a lot of dust was brought back on their suits into the LM, the suits could actually ignite. “I don’t know how seriously that was considered by anyone. But dust in an oxygen environment can be flammable. It was not something that had been presented to us as being a serious concern.”

  Armstrong’s last tasks on the lunar surface were labor intensive and physically demanding. To prevent contamination, the NASA contractor that built the rock boxes had cleaned their hinges rather than leaving them lubricated. To close their lids, Neil had to apply thirty-two pounds of force. After struggling to close the bulk sample box, it took “just about everything I could do,” “an inordinate amount of force,” to close the documented sample, his second box. Low gravity made for an added difficulty: the boxes felt very light and tended to skid away. In order to close the boxes, Neil placed them on the MESA table, a surface that was not very rigid. Just holding the box securely enough in place to apply the necessary force on the sealing handles caused him considerable trouble. Then he had to carry the rock boxes one by one over to the LEC, hook them to the “Brooklyn clothesline” running from the porch of the LM up to the hatch, and, with Buzz’s help, hoist them up.

  In Houston, a cardiac monitor showed that Neil’s heart rate rose during the EVA close-out period to 160 beats per minute, the typical heart rate of an Indy car driver at the start of the Indianapolis 500. Five minutes before he was to head up the ladder, Houston made a disguised request for Neil to slow down for a moment, by asking him to report on the status of the tank pressure and oxygen in his EMU.

  More concerned about getting every necessary object inside the LM, the astronauts almost forgot to leave a small packet of memorial items on the lunar surface. Aldrin recalls the near-oversight: “We were so busy that I was halfway up the ladder before Neil asked me if I had remembered to leave the mementos we had brought along. I had completely forgotten. What we had hoped to make into a brief ceremony, had there been time, ended almost as an afterthought. I reached into my shoulder pocket, pulled the packet out and tossed it onto the surface.” The packet contained two Soviet-made medals, in honor of deceased cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit the Earth, who died in a MiG-15 accident in March 1967; and Vladimir Komarov, killed a month after Gagarin at the conclusion of his Soyuz 1 flight when his spacecraft’s descent parachute failed to open. Also in the packet was an Apollo 1 patch commemorating Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Also inside was a small gold olive-branch pin, symbolic of the peaceful nature of the American Moon landing program. The token was identical to the pins that the three Apollo 11 astronauts were carrying as gifts for their wives.

  “I don’t think we really wanted to talk totally open about what it was,” Aldrin relates. “So it was sort of guarded. I knew what Neil was talking about.” Aldrin’s packet landed just to Neil’s right. Armstrong straightened it out a little, to get some of the dust off of it, by moving it with his foot.

  Immediately after doing that, at 1:09 A.
M. EDT (04:15:37:32 elapsed time), Neil climbed onto the LM footpad, put his arms on the ladder arms, and, pushing with his legs and pulling his arms, jumped all the way up to the third rung of the ladder.

  “The technique I used was one in which I did a deep knee bend with both legs and got my torso down absolutely as close to the footpad as I could. I then sprang vertically up and guided myself with my hands by use of the handrails. That’s how I got to the third step, which I guess was easily five or six feet above the ground.”

  Characteristically, the engineer was experimenting, not showboating. “It was just curiosity. You could have really jumped high if you didn’t have that suit on. But the suit’s weight…. You didn’t really feel the weight of the suit because it was pressurized from the inside, so the interior pressure was holding most of the weight of the suit up. But when you jumped you had to carry that, and our lunar weight was sixty-two pounds or something like that. So if you are a sixty-two-pound man, how high can you jump? If you are unencumbered in a real stiff suit, you can probably jump pretty high. I just wanted to get an idea of how high could you go if you took a good leap up.”

  Armstrong’s leap up the ladder probably stands as a lunar record, as subsequent Apollo astronauts were usually carrying something in their hands or arms when they ascended. If Neil had missed the step while making the jump—and the steps were slippery from lunar dust—there was only a slight chance he could have hurt himself. With his hands on the rails, a position both he and Buzz had checked, he could have easily guided himself to a soft landing. In addition, if Neil had fallen, he would have had no trouble getting up, having practiced that in the water tank back at the Manned Spacecraft Center. It was very unlikely that Aldrin would have had to come back down to the surface to help him up.