First Man

by James R. Hansen

  As Eagle rose upwards to meet him, Collins knew “One little hiccup and they are dead men. I hold my breath for the seven minutes it takes them to get into orbit.” A Gemini veteran, he was “morbidly aware of how swiftly a rendezvous could turn sour. A titled gyro, a stubborn computer, a pilot’s error—ah, it was that last one that troubled me the most. If Neil and Buzz limped up into a lopsided orbit, would I have enough fuel and enough moxie to catch them?” Next to him in the CM was a notebook outlining eighteen different variations of what he could try to intersect the LM if the module did not manage to get up to him on its own.

  At Eagle’s controls, Armstrong drew not just on his Apollo training but also on his Gemini experience to fly to the proper rendezvous point. In terms of the piloting he needed to do and the thruster activities required, flying the LM to its rendezvous with Columbia was more like what he had done in Gemini VIII than unlike: the same relative strategy and techniques, the same size velocity changes. “That was one of the main reasons we felt comfortable in the situation.”

  The ascent was very different from the descent to landing. During much of the descent, the cockpit of the LM faced up; the crew was not able to see the lunar surface. Now, they were staring right at it. “Yes, we were looking at it now from very close range and going over it facedown where we could look at things very closely. The ascent also had a characteristic unlike any other portion of the flight. The attitude control rockets were being used to position the proper attitude of the lunar module. Normally to pitch up—to pitch the nose upward—you would fire the forward rockets upward and the aft rockets downward, both of which tended to rotate the vehicle upward. But in the ascent phase, any rockets that were pointed forward and firing actually slowed you down and fought against the action of the main ascent engine. So the forward-firing rockets were disabled for the ascent engine. To pitch the vehicle we only used half of the rockets—only the ones that were pointing downwards. The result of that, since the center of gravity was never quite on center, was those rockets would fire and move the vehicle upward. Then they would shut off, because the CG was offset, and we would be pushed the other way. Then they would kick in again. The whole thing was like a rocking chair going up and down through the entire ascent trajectory.

  “That was different than Gemini. We had tried to implement the experience of this motion in the LM simulator, but because the simulator was a stationary object, you had no sensation of that rocking motion. That was quite an unusual characteristic. I didn’t remember having it reported to me by the previous crews that had fired the ascent engine on Apollo 9 or 10. If they did report it, I had overlooked it somehow.”

  As was typical for Neil when he was piloting, he spoke sparingly during the ascent. Heading westward over the same landmarks they had been trying to identify when coming down, Neil remarked, “We’re going right down U.S. 1.” His only other comment was, “It’s a pretty spectacular ride.”

  At one o’clock in the afternoon Houston time, July 22, a NASA public affairs officer reported that Eagle had achieved lunar orbit, one with an apolune of 47.2 nautical miles and a perilune of 9.1 miles. To move from this orbit below Columbia to a docking with it would take almost another three hours. Neil, Buzz, and Mike would all be busy with a long and detailed series of rendezvous procedures, navigational maneuvers, and backup checks. “Three hours may seem like a long time,” Buzz remarks, “but we were too busy to notice.” Mike recalls that his hands were full with the “arcane, almost black-magical manipulations” called for by his notebook full of rendezvous procedures.

  Eagle needed to make three separate maneuvers to catch up with Columbia. The first, occurring at 1:53 P.M. CDT, took place on the back side of the Moon. Firing the LM’s reaction control system (RCS) engines, Armstrong brought the spacecraft into a higher orbit that was just fifteen miles below the command module. An hour later, a second burn put the LM even more in plane with its target, reducing the altitude variations as it incrementally overtook the CSM.

  Collins recalls their coming up the rest of the way. “The LM is fifteen miles below me now, and some forty miles behind. It is overtaking me at the comfortable rate of 120 feet per second. They are studying me with their radar and I am studying them with my sextant. At precisely the right moment, when I am up above them, twenty-seven degrees above the horizon, they make their move, thrusting toward me. ‘We’re burning,’ Neil lets me know, and I congratulate him, ‘That-a-boy!’ We are on a collision course now; our trajectories are designed to cross 130 degrees of orbital travel later (in other words, slightly over one third of the way around in our next orbit). I have just passed ‘over the hill,’ and the next time the Earth pops up into view, I should be parked next to the LM. As we emerge into sunlight on the back side, the LM changes from a blinking light in my sextant to a visible bug, gliding golden and black across the crater fields below.”

  So close yet still so far away, the amiable strangers jested over the radio about their manner of reconvening:

  Continuing to close in, even the conversation between Neil and Buzz became more lighthearted:

  For Neil, the image of the command module passing so closely overhead brought back memories of his days as a fighter pilot:

  Buzz got his first good look at Columbia as well:

  “All that remains,” Collins recalled, “was for them to brake to a halt using the correct schedule of range versus range rate…. While they are doing this, they must make certain they stay exactly on their prescribed approach path, slipping neither left nor right nor up nor down…. The sextantis useless this close in, so I close up shop in the lower equipment bay, transfer to the left couch, and wheel Columbia around to face the LM.”

  Peering out through his docking reticle, Mike marveled at the steady, centered approach of the LM as Neil and Buzz brought it home:

  Bigger and bigger the LM appeared in Collins’s window, and it was hard for him to hold back the feeling of exultation. “For the first time since I was assigned to this incredible flight six months ago, for the first time I feel that it is going to happen.” Inside Eagle, however, the commander and the lunar module pilot were nervously entertaining what still needed to be done—and what still could go wrong.

  With the LM only fifty feet away, technically the rendezvous was over. Neil having turned the LM around, Eagle’s drogue directly faced Columbia’s docking port. Collins could not contain his emotions when he caught a gorgeous view of Earthrise:

  Houston broke in at this crucial moment to learn what was going on:

  Neil’s succinct answer and sharp tone made it clear the unwelcome intrusion was barely tolerable.

  Although the alignment between Eagle and Columbia looked good, as the vehicles came together they experienced a potentially nasty phenomenon known as gimbal lock. Put simply, two of the three pivoting gimbals that were located between the inertial platform of the LM’s guidance system and the spacecraft itself accidentally got into alignment and temporarily could not move, resulting in the loss of the platform’s stability and the firing of some attitude jets. Armstrong recalls how it happened. “The docking technique was to have the lunar module stabilize itself in the vicinity of the command module and maneuver to a point where it would be convenient for the command module to go ahead with the docking. Then Mike would do the actual command module motion to engage the docking mechanism. In a way it’s similar to how the Gemini spacecraft had docked with Agena, because Mike’s position in the command module was just like the position of the commander of a Gemini. He’s looking out his front window and through his docking reticle, a device that helped him make sure the vehicles were properly aligned. We, on the other hand, were looking up. The docking hatch was in the roof of the lunar module so we are looking upward through a small flat window in the roof.

  “In trying to achieve the best attitude for the lunar module so that Mike could make an easy docking, I was looking through the top window and making the attitude corrections relative to the command module
. Unfortunately, I neglected to be looking at the attitude indicator, which would have told me that we were getting close to gimbal lock. In the process of flying through the top window I flew it right into gimbal lock.

  “Now the consequence of that was not very bad, particularly since we were finished flying the lunar module at that point. We weren’t going to be in it anymore; we were going to leave it behind. There were alternatives for stabilizing the system and [we] were approximately in the right spot at that point for Mike to complete the docking.

  “It’s not something that you would do intentionally. But we didn’t have any substantial motions or [tumbling] resulting from it.”

  Perhaps because Collins was controlling the actual docking from his end, and perhaps because Mike had waited so long, all alone, to master this critical final maneuver, his reaction to the gimbal lock was more extreme. As soon as the two spacecraft were engaged by the small capture latches, he flipped a switch that fired a nitrogen bottle to pull the two vehicles together. As soon as he flipped it, he got what he later called “the surprise of my life”: “Instead of a docile little LM, suddenly I find myself attached to a wildly veering critter that seems to be trying to escape.” Specifically, the LM yawed to his right, instigating a misalignment of about fifteen degrees. Working with his right hand to swing Columbia around, there was nothing he could do to stop the automatic retraction cycle designed to pull Eagle into a deep embrace. “All I can hope for is no damage to the equipment, so that if this retraction fails, I can release the LM and try again.”

  Wrestling with his controller, the two vehicles veered back into proper alignment. The docking was sealed. Later, when Neil and Buzz reentered the command module, Mike sought to explain. “That was a funny one. You know, I didn’t feel a shock, and I thought things were pretty much steady. I went to retract there, and that’s when all hell broke loose.” Armstrong offered Mike his own explanation: “It seemed to happen at the time I put the plus-X thrust to it, and apparently it wasn’t centered, because, somehow or other, I accidentally got off in attitude and then the attitude-hold system started firing.” “I was sure busy there for a couple seconds,” Mike declared.

  It was 4:38 P.M. CDT. It then took well over an hour for Armstrong and Aldrin to disable the specified LM systems (some were left on), snare and stow floating items, and get Eagle into configuration for its final jettisoning.

  At 6:20 P.M., Collins opened the hatch mechanism from the other side, and Neil and Buzz, still very dusty, made their way up, down, and into Columbia’s cockpit. “The first one through is Buzz, a big smile on his face,” Collins noted. “I grab his head, a hand on each temple, and am about to give him a big smooch on the forehead, as a parent might greet an errant child; but then, embarrassed, I think better of it and grab his hand, and then Neil’s. We cavort about a little bit, all smiles and giggles about our success, and then it’s back to work as usual, as Neil and Buzz prepare the LM for its final journey.” Viola later remarked, “My, what a feeling they must have had when they were back in the Columbia with Mike! How happy and thankful I’m sure they were…Our boys were together and on their way home.”

  On CBS, Cronkite brought the historic thirty-two hours to an end with the following thoughts that he had no doubt prepared in advance:

  Man has finally visited the Moon after all the ages of waiting and waiting. Two Americans with the alliterative names of Armstrong and Aldrin have spent just under a full Earth day on the Moon. They picked at it and sampled it, and they deployed experiments on it, and they packed away some of it to pack with them and bring home.

  Above the men on the Moon, satellite over satellite, orbited the third member of the Apollo team, Michael Collins. His bittersweet mission was to guide and watch over the Command Service Module whose power and guidance system provided the only means of getting home, and it still does.

  Now at this point in the journey with the lunar lander reunited with the mother ship and the astronauts preparing for the rocket burn which will send them back home here, certain times and images remain that I’ve noted here:4:17:40 P.M., seventeen minutes and forty seconds after four Eastern time, yesterday—Sunday, July 20, 1969—the moment the Lunar Module touched down on the Moon’s surface; 10:56P.M., Sunday, the moment that Armstrong’s foot first touched the lunar crust; and 1:54P.M. today, the instant of liftoff from that newly named Tranquility Base camp.

  There were the ghostly television pictures we all saw of Aldrin and Armstrong on the Moon. Armstrong’s first words, “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.” And Aldrin’s two-word description, “Magnificent desolation…” And left behind, a plaque with the words: “HereMan from Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon. July 1969A.D. WeCame in Peace for All Mankind.”

  And they left the flag of the United States flying there, too. [Naturally, the crew did not report that the flag had fallen over during liftoff.] Left behind were hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras and hardware and equipment, discarded for the return flight; a small disk with messages microscopically reduced in size from the leaders of the world; an olivebranch—symbolically at least; and two medals in memory of the threeAmericans and the two Russians who died in man’s recent quest for theMoon.

  All this comes rushing back to us now as we think of the roundtrip Moon flight still in progress and still some critical maneuvers yet to perform.

  And with this flight, man has really begun to move away from the Earth.But with this flight, some new challenges for mankind. A challenge to determine yet, whether in coming to the Moon, we turn our centuries-old friend in the sky into an enemy, that we invaded, conquered, exploited, and perhaps someday left as a desolate globe once more. Or will we make the most of it, as perhaps a way station on beyond the stars. Apollo 11 still has a long way to go—and so do we.

  Thus concluded the longest continuous scheduled broadcast in the history of television.

  Back in lunar orbit, Collins helped his mates transfer all their gold and spices into the mother ship, including the camera film and rock boxes, “shiny little metal caskets about two feet long.” “Get ready for those million-dollar boxes,” Buzz advised. “Got a lot of weight. Now watch it.” Neil and Buzz then enclosed the boxes inside white fiberglass fabric containers that zipped up. That done, they tried to clear Columbia of Moon dust. They extracted from storage a small vacuum cleaner head, as directed by the microbe people. “The vacuum didn’t take off much of the dust at all,” Buzz states. “We got more off by dusting each other by hand, but even that didn’t do the job.”

  Before closing the hatch, Neil and Buzz tidied things up in the LM. It was very hard to say good-bye to the machine. Eagle had done absolutely everything it had been asked to do, and then some.

  At 6:42 P.M. CDT, it was time to send the LM on its way. “It was a fond farewell,” Armstrong remembers. On all subsequent Apollo lunar missions, the LM would be purposefully impacted into the Moon for seismographical measurements, but not Eagle. It simply floated for the next few years as a piece of debris until its orbit deteriorated and the noble craft crashed ignominiously into the lunar surface. Buzz and Neil were both glad it was Collins who flipped the switches to release it. Settling into its own orbit some miles behind the command module, it seemed almost as if the little LM was trying to catch up and rejoin its masters.

  “Neil, did NASA ever figure out where on the Moon that Eagle hit?”

  “I don’t know the answer. That is something I have wondered about myself.”

  “After impact how big could some of its pieces have been?”

  “Not too large since the velocity would have been on the order of five thousand feet a second.”

  “When we someday return to the Moon, won’t there be an interest in getting parts of the Eagle back to Earth for museum exhibition?”

  “Yes, that’s no doubt going to be true for any of the missions—any components from any of the spacecraft. I’m not good at predicting the results of a cr
ash, and what might survive and what might not. But I think whatever’s left would be of interest no matter what size.”

  During the subsequent meal, Collins started throwing question after question at his mates: “How was liftoff? How did liftoff feel?…Well, do the rocks—do the rocks all look the same? They’re different? Good, great. I’m glad to hear it…. Luckily, you were able to get a little bit of everything. I mean, were the rocks…I mean, how did you—did you go around and just pick up rocks, put them in—in…. Great, great. Man, that’s beautiful…. That’s great. Fantastic! That’ll keep the geologists jumping for years…. What was that thing that you said it was supposed to be concave but it was convex…? But there’s all different kinds of rocks, huh, or at least several different kinds?…Well, did—when you look—when you’re walking around or just looking out the window of the LM, did it appear very homogenous? Everything sort of the same color and all, or did it look…? It’s that dark battleship gray like?…How big are the rocks that you just scurried around and picked up with tongs? Good gravy! Beautiful!”

  At 11:10 P.M. Houston time, still Monday, July 21, Mission Control gave Columbia the go-ahead for Trans-Earth Injection. Collins later called TEI “the get us out of here, we don’t want to be a permanent Moon satellite” maneuver. What it amounted to was a two-and-a-half-minute burn of the service propulsion engine that was to send them home by increasing their velocity to 6,188 miles per hour, the speed necessary to escape lunar orbit. If TEI did not go well, as Neil explains, “we would have been in for a long, lonely ride.”