First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Back inside Eagle with the hatch closed, Armstrong and Aldrin repressurized their cabin, doffed their PLSSs, and looked at control panel readings to ensure the safety of the LM. They started to fill up a trash bag with unnecessary gear to be left on the lunar surface to save weight. From a historical perspective, the “trash” included a lot of valuable items. “There was a full truckload of equipment inside that cockpit at the end of the EVA,” Armstrong relates. “It was just a bunch of stuff.” The astronauts again hooked up to the LM’s environmental control system, and they took their helmets and visors off, partly so the two tired and hungry men could eat.

  Before their meal, they used up the rest of their film. The EVA Hasselblad had been purposefully left outside after retrieving its finished film magazines. They trained the spare Hasselblad that had remained in the LM through the portals, snapping pictures of the American flag, the TV stand, and the faraway Earth. (The EVA Hasselblad photos are distinctive in the absence of grid-patterned reseau crosses.) Buzz finally got around to taking pictures of Neil, two of them, showing the commander, tired and relieved, in what the astronauts had come to call their “Snoopy cap,” the stretchable black and white cap with foam ear covers that looked like the head and ears of the famous canine from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon. Neil returned the favor, taking one shot of Buzz.

  While they were eating, a delighted Slayton sent his congratulations in the masculine style germane to the astronauts corps:

  To achieve jettison, the astronauts had to depressurize their cabin once again, refitting their helmets so they could open the hatch. It was almost like performing another EVA prep, though this prep took less than twenty minutes and did not involve any hose-swapping or donning of the PLSSs.

  In an act some might regard as lunar littering, they threw it all out. First came the PLSSs, their cooling water drained into a plastic bag that was then stowed. “We could get down far enough in our pressurized suits to reach the backpacks with our gloves and then tossed them rather than kicked them out as later crews did,” Neil offers. “Each PLSS bounced on the porch before it went down,” adds Aldrin.

  On TV, both backpacks could be seen tumbling down. The exact moment they hit the ground was detected back on Earth thanks to the seismometer experiment Buzz had put out during the EVA.

  Neil tossed out both pairs of dust-covered boots, a bagful of empty food packages, and the LM urine and fecal containment bags. He threw out the spare Hasselblad, minus the exposed film. He jettisoned the lithium hydroxide canister that he and Buzz had changed out as planned to refresh the LM’s environmental control system (the canister had been in use since they powered up the LM in orbit prior to descent). According to Aldrin, “We were able to jettison everything without any problems. I didn’t notice Neil having any difficulty giving the packages the heave-ho.”

  “Only one thing did not make it all the way down onto the surface,” Neil reports. “That was a small part of the left-hand-side storage container, which did not make it off the porch. That was the last item jettisoned.

  “I was glad that we were able to get rid of a lot of these things and finish the jettison before we started our sleep period. With all that stuff in the cockpit, there really was no place for people to relax.”

  Though less cluttered, the cockpit was hardly clean. It was incredible how much dust the men had picked up while out on the surface. When they returned to zero g, some of it began to float around inside the cabin. It even affected the way they sounded due to the angularity of the Moon particles they had breathed into their noses and sinuses. Neil remembers, “We were aware of a new scent in the air of the cabin that clearly came from all the lunar material that had accumulated on and in our clothes. I remember commenting that we had the scent of wet ashes.” “There was a hint of something,” Buzz recalls, “like it was going to catch fire.”

  Members of the science and engineering teams at Mission Control were itching to ask Neil and Buzz questions about what they had seen during the EVA. “I guess we can take a couple of them now,” Armstrong offered. After answering eight or nine questions, though, Neil was ready to take a break. When asked for a more lengthy and detailed description of the geology they had observed, Neil put a stop to it. “Yeah, let’s…We’ll postpone our answer to that one until tomorrow. Okay?”

  At 2:50 A.M. CDT, July 21, Mission Control finally signed off and told the men to get a good night’s sleep. Up in Columbia, Collins had fallen soundly asleep shortly after hearing his mates had gotten back into the LM okay.

  Armstrong and Aldrin had been up for nearly twenty-two hours. “I couldn’t tell if I was tired or not,” Neil relates. “It would be hard to determine that in those circumstances unless you were really, really tired. The adrenaline had been pumping for quite a while.”

  What Neil and Buzz felt mostly was relief. “There are always some regrets that you didn’t do more or accomplish everything that you wanted, but we had gotten a pretty fair share of stuff done. There is always the great satisfaction of getting things behind you and getting things accomplished. That satisfaction outweighed any regrets we might have had. Also, we were thinking, ‘That’s another couple hundred pages of checklist items we no longer have to remember and worry about.’”

  It was their first and only night’s sleep in the LM, and it was not at all pleasant. According to Neil, “The floor was adequate for one person—not to stretch out, but to lay halfway between a fetal position and a stretched-out position. That was where Buzz slept. The only other place to rest was the engine cover, which was a circular table some two and a half feet in diameter. To support my legs from it we configured a sling from one of our waist tethers. We attached that to a pipe structure that was hanging down. It was a good structure to hang a sling from, so I stuck my legs in there and kept the center part of my body on the engine cover. That kept my legs suspended. Behind the cover there was a flat shelf where I could sort of rest my head. It was a jerry-rigged operation and not very comfortable.”

  Neither man slept well. Compounding their uncomfortable sleeping positions was the fact they were sleeping with their helmets and gloves on to protect their lungs from all the dust they had brought in. The filtered oxygen from the LM’s environment control system was significantly cleaner than the air circulating in the cabin.

  Then there was the temperature. Even though it was over 200 degrees Fahrenheit outside the LM, it was quite cold inside—something in the range of 61 to 62 degrees F. “When we put the window covers on so that it would be relatively dark inside,” Armstrong explains, “the temperature got quite brisk in the cockpit.”

  Another factor was the light. On the LM’s control panels were several warning lights and illuminated display switches that could not be dimmed. Also, “We were all settled down when we realized that we still had a light source coming from something outside.” Although they had the window shades down, they had forgotten about the Alignment Optical Telescope (AOT). “It was pointed right about at Earth and the Earth was very bright. That was coming right through the telescope into the cockpit.” Neil and Buzz tied a kind of cover over the top of the instrument, but it did not prevent the light from shining through.

  Most bothersome, at least to Neil atop the engine cover, was the noise. A loud glycol or water pump seriously interfered with his sleep. “It had to be in a different [lunar gravity] environment to work properly, so we had never heard this thing run.”

  Scheduled to sleep for seven hours, Neil may have gotten two restful ones, right at the very end. One hour into the rest period, medical telemetry indicated he was only dozing; during the next four hours, his heart rate occasionally dropped into the fifties—the “sleep range”—but jumped right back up. (As there was only one medical monitor on board the LM, there was no record of Buzz’s physiological status.) “The quality of sleep was poor in my case,” asserts Neil. “I’d say the same thing,” adds Buzz, though he admits he had it better than his cabin mate. “I had the better sleeping place.
I found that it was relatively comfortable on the floor, either on my back with my feet up against the side, or with my knees bent and feet on the floor. Also, I could roll over on one side or the other.”

  As the commander struggled to slumber, he thought through the geology question he had promised to answer. He did not overly worry that lack of rest might affect his flying of the LM the next day. “What was painfully obvious was that I didn’t really have any choice. The schedule was there, and I had to perform. I had to do it.” The obstacle was hardly a first. “One night. Most people can get by with a low amount of sleep—for several nights, actually,” he told himself. “I had relaxed and slept well generally in the command module. Mike said things like, ‘This part of the flight is easy. All these other guys have done it and haven’t had any trouble. So just relax and enjoy it and save yourself for when you need to be bright eyed.’ And I took it to heart.”

  Ron Evans, the capsule communicator for the night shift, made the wake-up call to the LM crew at 9:32 A.M. CDT. Liftoff from the Moon, after a stay totaling twenty-one hours, was scheduled to occur shortly after noon.

  Most of the intervening time was taken up going over checklists in preparation for the ascent, taking star sightings, establishing the proper state vector for the flight up, inputting computer code, and tracking the command module for one last hack on the LM’s precise landing location. The only significant change to the checklist was Houston wanting the LM’s rendezvous radar turned off during the ascent. As CapCom Evans told the crew, “We think that this will take care of some of the overflow of program alarms that you were getting during descent.”

  The science experts on the ground were also anxious to hear more from Neil and Buzz about what they had observed on the lunar surface. Neil was now ready to tell them. “I was excited about the experience myself and was honored and willing to share it with the guys, who I knew were really interested in what was going on. This was a very exciting day for some of those guys; they had been working for many years on what might be found. All of a sudden they had a chance to get real information. It was important to them.”

  Armstrong’s observations that morning impressed everyone with their incisiveness and clarity. “I don’t remember writing notes. I think it was just so fresh in my memory that it wasn’t hard to re-create what I’d just seen.”

  “Houston, Tranquility Base is going to give you a few comments with regard to the geology question of last night.

  “We landed in a relatively smooth crater field of elongate secondary…[correcting himself] circular secondary craters, most of which have raised rims, irrespective of their size. That’s not universally true. There are a few of the smaller craters around which do not have a discernible rim. The groundmass throughout the area is a very fine sand to a silt. I’d say the thing that would be most like it on Earth is powdered graphite. Immersed in this groundmass are a wide variety of rock shapes, sizes, textures—round and angular—many with varying consistencies. As I’ve said, I’ve seen what looked to be plain basalt and vesicular basalt. Others with no crystals, some with small white phenocrysts, maybe one to less than five percent.

  “And we are in a boulder field where the boulders range generally up to two feet with a few larger than that. Now, some of the boulders are lying on top of the surface, some are partially exposed and some are just barely exposed. And in our traverse around on the surface—and particularly working with the scoop—we’ve run into boulders below the surface; it was probably buried under several inches of the groundmass.

  “I suspect this boulder field may have some of its origin with this large, sharp-edged, blocky-rim crater that we passed over in final descent. Now, yesterday, I said that was about the size of a football field, and I have to admit it was a little hard to measure coming in. But I thought that it might just fit in the Astrodome as we came by it. And the rocks in the vicinity of this blockyrim crater are much larger than these in this area. Some are ten feet or so and perhaps bigger, and they are very thickly populated out to about one crater diameter beyond the crater rim. Beyond that, there is some diminishing, and even out in this area [around the LM], the blocks seem to run out in rows and irregular patterns, and then there are paths between them where there are considerably less surface evidence of hard rocks. Over.”

  Heading into the countdown for lunar liftoff, Neil’s mind-set was that of a typical test pilot: pragmatic and hard-nosed. “The LM’s ascent engine was a single chamber. The tanks and the propellants and the oxidizer were what they were. We did have various means of controlling the circuitry to the valves—opening the flow of propellants to the engine. So that was an alternative. I had proposed many months earlier—maybe even years earlier—that we just put a big manual valve in there to open those propellant valves rather than, or in addition to, having all the electronic circuitry. But management didn’t think that that was up to NASA’s standards of sophistication. So I really knew that circuitry very well. But it wasn’t really a problem, because if we fired the engine and it didn’t fire, we weren’t out of time. We had a lot of time to think about the problem to figure out what else we could do. When pilots really get worried is when they run out of options and run out of time simultaneously.

  “The ascent was a very simple trajectory. We were on PNGS. If we had PNGS malfunction we could have gone to AGS and got into a safe orbit—at least in that point in time we thought we could. How could Houston help? Maybe if PNGS was acting up or there were questions, they would certainly have been able to do more analysis of the problem down there than we could. We were in a pretty good position. We were on the eastern side of the Moon and we were moving west, so during that ascent phase we were going right through the center of the Moon and should be getting pretty good data from Earth’s radars there. Maybe they could tell us that we needed to switch to AGS. But other than that, there was not a lot that they could do. They were going to be watching other things, too—systems problems, batteries, environmental systems, and various things. I’m sure if they saw anything funny they would want to know about it and we would have to work out what should be done. But the ascent trajectory itself was pretty straightforward. All through our rendezvous we were calculating the different trajectory changes—the burns—we needed to make. They were doing the same thing using different sources of information on Earth.”

  At 05:04:04:51 elapsed time, Ron Evans cleared them for takeoff. “Understand,” Aldrin answered. “We’re number one on the runway.” Some seventeen minutes later, at 12:37 P.M. CDT, it was time for that single, nonredundant engine to fire for its first time. Next to the landing itself, there was no more tense moment in the entire Apollo 11 mission—correct that: in the history of the entire U.S. manned space program.

  On CBS, Cronkite uttered to Schirra, “I don’t suppose we’ve been this nervous since back in the early days of Mercury.”

  In Wapakoneta, even the ever-faithful Viola questioned whether things would work out. “What if that burner would not ignite? What if it simply would not ignite? I was silently in deep concentration with our Lord. It seemed to take a while for the boys to get ready to leave. They seemed to be making sure they were doing it all just right. There were many last things to do.”

  In El Lago, Janet naturally had the very same fears. Exhausted by the pressure and exhilaration of it all, she desperately wanted the next moments to be over.

  In his autobiography, Buzz eloquently described the liftoff: “The ascent stage of the LM separated from the descent stage with its chunky body and spindly legs, sending out a shower of brilliant insulation particles which had been ripped off from the ascent of the ascent engine.”

  Again from Buzz: “There was no time to sightsee. I was concentrating intently on the computers, and Neil was studying the attitude indicator, but I looked up long enough to see the American flag fall over. Seconds after liftoff, the LM pitched forward about forty-five degrees, and though we had anticipated it would be an abrupt and maybe even a frightening maneuver,
the straps and springs securing us in the LM cushioned the tilt so much and the acceleration was so great it was barely noticeable.”

  Neil’s mother was hardly the only person in tears as she heard Cronkite exclaim. “Oh, boy! Their words ‘beautiful’…‘very smooth’…‘very quiet ride.’ Armstrong and Aldrin, just short of twenty-four hours on the Moon’s surface, on their way back now to rendezvous with Mike Collins orbiting the Moon.”

  For the past six months Mike Collins’s “secret terror” had been that he might have to leave his mates on the Moon and return to Earth alone. “Columbia has no landing gear; I cannot help them if they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it.” If either tragedy happened, Mike was coming home, but he knew he would be a marked man for life. “It would almost be better not to have that option,” he sometimes thought.

  The ascent stage had to fire for slightly over seven minutes to achieve the requisite altitude and speed to reach orbit. In the command module, Collins followed their progress very carefully. More than anyone, he knew the precariousness of “rendezvous day.” As soon as he awoke that morning, there had been a “a multitude of things to keep me busy,” including approximately 850 separate computer keystrokes, “eight hundred fifty chances for me to screw it up.” If all went well with Eagle, then he would just serve “as a sturdy base-camp operator and let them find me in my constant circle. But if…if…if any one of a thousand things goes wrong with Eagle, then I become the hunter instead of the hunted.” At the instant of LM liftoff, Mike was “like a nervous bride.” He had been flying for seventeen years, had circled the Earth forty-four times in Gemini X, but had “never sweated out any flight” like he was sweating out the LM.