First Man

by James R. Hansen

  TEI took place on the back side of the Moon, out of contact with Earth. Along with Earth reentry, it was the only truly nervous moment left to face. As complicated as the whole mission had been, what the astronauts had to make absolutely sure of when they did deorbit the Moon was that they were pointed in the right direction. They relieved the tension with humor:

  Actually, there was a very remote chance that the astronauts could have shot themselves off in the wrong direction. “I wouldn’t put it at zero,” Armstrong admits. “There was certainly a chance—particularly when you are in the dark, without external references, and dependent on your instruments. Is it possible to get that attitude wrong? I would say it’s possible. You’ve got three guys inside trying to make sure it wasn’t wrong, so I think it’s very unlikely. In the Russian space program, there was at least one occasion when a retrofire didn’t have the proper alignment. Jim Lovell made the memorable statement, ‘There is a Santa Claus,’ when their Apollo 8 TEI went off properly. It’s something that Mission Control always worried about because they can’t see you on the far side and they don’t have any data. They are completely in the dark, and that worries them a lot when they don’t have any numbers in front of them.”

  As soon as the spacecraft peeked around the disk of the Moon half an hour later, Houston wanted to know what had happened:

  As Collins recalls, all three men next took turns with the cameras, pointing them alternately at the Moon and the Earth. “The Moon from this side is full, a golden brown globe glorying in the sunshine. It is an optimistic, cheery view, but all the same, it is wonderful to look out the window and see it shrinking and the tiny Earth growing.” Not only seeing it from this distance but knowing they were coming back home to it made the sight of Planet Earth “unforgettable.”

  The remainder of the two-and-a-half-day trip home was relatively routine. The first night’s sleep after the reunion was the deepest and most satisfying of the entire trip, and lasted some eight and a half hours, until noon Houston time, Tuesday, July 22. The spacecraft passed the point where Earth’s gravity took over and began drawing the astronauts progressively homeward—a point 38,800 nautical miles from the Moon and 174,000 from the Earth—shortly after they woke up. Later that afternoon, they made their only midcourse correction, slightly adjusting their flight path for the best trajectory into Earth orbit. By midafternoon of the next day, Columbia reached the midway point of the journey home, 101,000 nautical miles from splashdown. So relaxed was the crew and so uneventful their duties that they created a little mischief by playing over their radio to Houston a special tape of sound effects they had brought along. On it were sounds of dogs barking and of a speeding diesel locomotive.

  What everyone back on Earth most remembered about the return home were the two evening prime-time color television transmissions. “The TV broadcasts served a useful purpose,” Neil believes. “It was news, and I have always believed that when there is news, you should report it. We were in a good position to report what was really news, for which there was a great deal of interest. The only caveat that I would add is that I don’t think you should ever jeopardize the safety of a flight in order to do television. You should do it only at such times that it doesn’t interfere with your principal duties. I think we were successful at only having them at times when it was convenient. That was not always true on some other flights. On some the commander rightfully had to change the TV schedule and even cancel a transmission, because it just wasn’t an appropriate time to be doing that.”

  In the final TV transmission from Apollo 11, each astronaut explained what the Moon landing meant to him within the grander scheme of things. At 7:03 P.M. EDT (07:09:32:24 elapsed time), Armstrong opened the broadcast:

  Good evening. This is the commander of Apollo 11. A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow.First, Mike Collins.

  At Mission Control, Janet and her boys, Pat Collins and her youngsters, as well as one of the Aldrin children, were taking in the show from the viewing room.

  Mike Collins:

  Roger. This trip of ours to the Moon may have looked, to you, simple or easy.I’d like to assure you that has not been the case. The Saturn V rocket which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked flawlessly. This computer up above my head has a 38,000-word vocabulary, each word of which has been very carefully chosen to be of the utmost value to us, the crew. This switch, which I have in my hand now, has over 300 counterparts in the command module alone—this one single switch design. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuit breakers, levers, rods, and other associated controls. The SPS engine, our large rocket engine on the aft end of our service module, must have performed flawlessly or we would have been stranded in lunar orbit. The parachutes above my head must work perfectly tomorrow or we will plummet into the ocean. We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work, and workproperly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of the flight. All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of people. First, the American workmen who put these pieces of machinery together in the factory. Second, the painstaking work done by the various test teams during the assembly and retest after assembly.And finally, the people at the Manned Spacecraft Center, both in management, in mission planning, in flight control, and last but not least, in crew training. This operation is somewhat like the periscope of a submarine.All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all those, I would like to say, thank you very much.

  In Buzz’s time on camera, he presented the first of his many future statements on behalf of the spirit of exploration:

  Good evening. I’d like to discuss with you a few of the more symbolic aspects of the flight of our mission, Apollo 11. As we’ve been discussing the events that have taken place in the past two or three days here on board our spacecraft, we’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the Moon; more still than the efforts of a government and industry team; more even than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Neil’s statement the other day upon first setting foot on the surface of the Moon, ‘This is a small step for a man, but a great leap for mankind,’ I believe sums up these feelings very nicely. We accepted the challenge of going to the Moon; the acceptance of this challenge was inevitable. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission, I believe, is a tribute to the timeliness of that acceptance. Today, I feel we’re fully capable of accepting expanded roles in the exploration of space. In retrospect, we have all been particularly pleased with the call signs that we very laboriously chose for our spacecraft, Columbia and Eagle. We’ve been particularly pleased with the emblem of our flight, depicting the U.S. eagle bringing the universal symbol of peace from the Earth, from the planet Earth, to theMoon—that symbol being the olive branch. It was our overall crew choice to deposit a replica of this symbol on the Moon. Personally, in reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from Psalms come to mind to me: “When I consider the heavens, the word of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him.”

  The man of the fewest words, Commander Armstrong, closed the broadcast eloquently. His mood was as reflective as it would ever be in public:

  The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next, to four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that wi
ll; and then to the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft: the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the space suit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people tonight, we give a special thank-you. And to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night fromApollo 11.

  For everyone who was watching at home in their living rooms that midsummer night’s eve, these were proud moments. Wrapping up the broadcast on CBS, Cronkite called the crew’s closing statements “a heartwarming vote of appreciation from those three astronauts who have done the incredible—gone to the Moon and walked upon it.” Total success for Apollo 11 now hinged upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, splashing down, and being safely recovered.

  But back on Earth unforeseen danger threatened the final moments of Apollo 11. A bad storm was brewing over the Pacific that a couple of fast-thinking meteorologists saw was moving right over the splashdown point. At work in his “secure vault” at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, Captain Hank Brandli, an air force officer charged with tracking weather systems for the top-secret National Reconnaissance Office’s ultra-classified Corona spy satellite program, had detected the early formation of a deadly “Screaming Eagle” thunderstorm with tops at 50,000 feet forming over exactly where he knew the Apollo 11 astronauts were supposed to come down. Though his work was strictly classified, Brandli arranged to meet Captain Willard (Sam) Houston Jr., the commanding officer of Fleet Weather Central–Pearl Harbor, in a nearby parking lot, and then took the navy weatherman back to his vault. Shown the classified photographic images, Captain Houston convinced Rear Admiral Donald C. Davis, commander of Task Force 30, in charge of retrieving Apollo 11, that he needed to get NASA to change the landing site, which he did. Early on the morning of Thursday, July 24, the prime recovery ship, the USS Hornet, a carrier built in 1943, with President Nixon aboard, was ordered to move northwesterly a distance of some 250 miles to an area where the forecast was for calmer seas.

  Columbia then had to change its inbound trajectory. “We used a slightly altered skip maneuver for reentry that moved our splashdown point the necessary distance. Otherwise, the entry part was routine.” As always, Mission Control fretted about the possibility of a fundamental oversight:

  At 11:35 Houston time on the twenty-fourth, Apollo 11 started down through the Earth’s atmosphere. It slammed into the first fringes of air at some 400,000 feet when the spacecraft was northeast of Australia. Collins, at the controls, graphically detailed the reentry: “We are scheduled to hit our entry corridor at an angle of six and a half degrees below the horizon, at a speed of 36,194 feet per second, nearly 25,000 miles per hour. We are aimed at a spot eight miles southwest of Hawaii. We jettison our Service Module, our faithful storehouse still half full of oxygen, and turn around so that our heat shield is leading the way.”

  “Deceleration begins gradually and is heralded by the beginnings of a spectacular light show. We are in the center of a sheath of protoplasm, trailing a comet’s tail of ionized particles and heat shield material. The ultimate black of space is gone, replaced by a wispy tunnel of colors: subtle lavenders, light blue-greens, little touches of violet, all surrounding a central core of orange-yellow.” Dropping fast but feeling as if they are in a state of suspended animation, the three astronauts see the first earthly forms, a big bank of gorgeous stratocumulus clouds. Then their three huge drogue chutes blast open, “beautiful orange-and-white blossoms of reassurance.” Soon the astronauts were able to make out the wide expanse of ocean below. At 08:03:09:45 elapsed time, Air Boss, the head of the interservice recovery team, radioed it had visual contact with the descending capsule. Dawn was just breaking over the southwestern Pacific.

  Eight minutes and thirty-three seconds later, at 11:51 A.M. CDT, the spacecraft, with its chutes tilting in the wind, hit the water like a ton of bricks, forcing a grunt out of each astronaut. Armstrong radioed to Air Boss, “Everyone okay inside. Our checklist is complete. Awaiting swimmers.” Air Boss verified an on-target landing, 940 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu and 230 miles south of Johnston Island. The Hornet was only thirteen miles away. Navy helicopters were in the immediate area.

  Armstrong and his mates had each taken an anti-motion-sickness pill before reentry, only to discover they should have taken two.

  “The seas weren’t supposed to be too bad,” Neil remembers, “but it was good preventive maintenance. Why take a chance?” The swell turned out to be worse than expected. Aldrin suffered most from the nausea: “Air Boss announced to us that the wave height was between three and four feet, but it looked more like thirteen or fourteen. And it felt like it too.” Worse yet, the waves had turned the command module over, so it was floating small-end down. Mike owed Neil a beer, payment for Neil betting that the module would, in fact, topple over.

  Technically, it was called the “stable two” position—the CM’s hatch underwater and the astronauts hanging from their straps. Armstrong remembers, “It was unusual being upside down looking into the water while hanging from the straps. Everything looked completely different because gravity had now established an orientation that had been missing for a long time. All of a sudden you had a gravity vector that you could identify with, but it was not like anything you’d ever seen before! Everything looked like it was in the wrong spot.”

  Quickly the crew acted to put themselves aright, starting the motorized pumps to inflate three small spherical brown and white airbags that changed the spacecraft’s buoyancy center of gravity and turned it back over big end down. It took almost ten minutes for the float motors to fill the bags.

  Waiting for the team of three navy frogmen, they sat in silence, willing themselves not to be seasick, especially Aldrin. “It was one thing to land upside down,” Buzz later remarked, “it would be quite another to scramble out of the spacecraft in front of television cameras tossing our cookies all over the place.”

  The swimmers attached the orange flotation collar, then opened the spacecraft’s hatch; it was 12:20 P.M. CDT, 6:20 in the morning Hawaii time. The astronauts sensed they had been in the water for eternity, but only twenty-nine minutes had elapsed. Into the command module the head of the water rescue team, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Clancy Hatleberg, threw the Biological Containment Garments, or BIGs. Grayish-green in color, these were the rubberized, zippered, hooded, and visored containment suits meant to save the world from “Moon germs.” Each rescue swimmer himself wore a special BIG topped by a side-filtered face mask. Swimming in the garment was nothing compared to the astronauts’ having to put them on inside the command module. Dealing with gravity for the first time in eight days, they were so light-headed, and their feet and legs so swollen, they could barely stand, especially against eighteen-knot winds.

  The BIGs finally donned, the astronauts squeezed through the small hatch; as the commander, Neil came out last. Before they were escorted one by one into the raft bobbing alongside, the frogmen sprayed them with a precautionary disinfectant against lunar microbes. Once inside the dinghy, they were then given cloths and two different doses of chemical detergent to continue the scrub-down. When they were finished, the frogmen tied the cloths to weights and dropped them into the ocean, as if banishing them to the deep would eliminate any chance of a biological Armageddon brought on by an Andromeda Strain. Supposedly the BIGs were airtight, but within minutes moisture began seeping into them. Virtually nothing was said by the astronauts during any of this, mostly because the visors and headgear of their BIGs made it almost impossible to be heard, especially with four helicopters beating their rotors overhead.

  Again they sat, for fifteen minutes, until a helicopter got the order to drop down and pick them up. The Hornet was now in view, less than a quarter of a mile away. With TV cameras on board a couple of
the helicopters, every moment of the recovery was being broadcast live around the world. Waiting for them inside the helicopter was Dr. William R. Carpentier, their flight surgeon from the Manned Spacecraft Center. They gave him the thumbs-up sign as they entered. He reminded them, “Don’t take off your BIGs till we’re on the ship, in the quarantine facility, and I’ve got all the swabs.”

  At 12:57 P.M CDT, the helicopter landed on the Hornet’s flight deck. A brass band was playing. Cheering sailors crowded on deck. A big grin on his face and his hands crossed atop a rail, President Nixon stood on the bridge along with Secretary of State William P. Rogers and NASA Administrator Dr. Thomas O. Paine, who were accompanying the president on a twelve-day, round-the-world trip that included a stop in Vietnam.

  The astronauts could barely see the hoopla. Still inside the chopper they rode one of the ship’s elevators down to the hangar deck. Disembarking, they walked down a newly painted line through a cheering crowd of seamen and VIPs into the mobile quarantine facility—a thirty-five-foot-long modified house trailer—in which they were to remain until they arrived at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston on July 27.

  Neil remembers what it was like landing on the ship and getting up on his feet. “I was wondering how physiologically well we might feel, but we all felt pretty good. We didn’t have any seasickness kinds of problems.” They were able to go right into the quarantine trailer where they immediately sat down in easy chairs to undergo the microbiology sampling and a preliminary medical exam by Dr. Carpentier.