First Man

by James R. Hansen

  They had time only for a quick shower before seeing the president. “There were the Nixon ceremonial activities to attend to,” Neil reflects. “We needed to do [that] and get it behind us so that we could celebrate.” Following the playing of the National Anthem, President Nixon, nearly dancing a jig of pleasure, addressed the astronauts via intercom at 2:00 P.M. CDT. Crouching behind a picture window at the back end of the trailer the three tired but exhilarated crew members arranged themselves, Neil to the president’s left, Buzz to the right, and Mike in the middle.

  Neil, Buzz, and Mike. I want you to know that I think I’m the luckiest man in the world. I say this not only because I have the honor of being the president of the United States, but particularly because I have the privilege of speaking for so many in welcoming you back to Earth. I could tell you about all the messages we received in Washington. Over one hundred foreign governments, emperors, and presidents and prime ministers and kings have sent the most warm messages that we have ever received. They represent over two billion people on this Earth—all of them who have had the opportunity through television to see what you have done. And then I also bring you messages from members of the Cabinet and members of the Senate and members of the House, and Space Agency.

  But most important, I made a telephone call yesterday. The toll wasn’t, incidentally, as great as the one I made to you fellows on the Moon. I made that collect, just in case you didn’t know. I called, in my view, three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the world today, your wives.And from Jan and Joan and Pat, I bring their love and their congratulations.We think that it is just wonderful that they could have participated at least through television in this return; we’re only sorry they couldn’t be here. And also, I’ve got to let you in on a little secret—I made a date with them. I invited them to dinner on the thirteenth of August, right after you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The governors of all the fifty states will be there, the ambassadors, others from around the world and in America. And they told me that you would come too. And all I want to know—will you come? We want to honor you then.

  “We’ll do anything you say. Just anything,” answered Armstrong. After brief banter with Nixon and with Frank Borman, NASA’s special presidential adviser for Apollo 11, the president closed his remarks with one of the most memorable phrases of his administration. He called the eight days of Apollo 11 “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” It proved to be a controversial statement, especially for many Christians, but not for Neil’s mother watching in Ohio, who loved it. Neil himself has always regarded Nixon’s statement as hyperbolic: “It was an exciting time. A lot of times when you are exuberant, you tend to be a little exaggerative.”

  On her front lawn in El Lago, Janet thanked all of the people who helped make the flight successful: “We thank you for everything—your prayers, your thoughts, just everything. And if anyone were to ask me how I could describe this flight, I can only say that it was out of this world!”

  In Wapakoneta, a crowd of newsmen waited for Viola and Steve to make some comments. “I wanted to cry out and say, ‘Oh, thank you dear heavenly Father,” Viola wrote later, “but when the words came out I said, ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” I forget what Steve said, but I remember the TV man asking the questions grabbed our hand and said, ‘Oh, thank you, only six million people have just heard your voices.’ That sent another chill up my back.” Later that afternoon, the local high school band marched down Neil Armstrong Drive, playing some of Viola’s favorite hymns. “That was too much for me, my tears spilled all over. Stephen came to my rescue and kissed me right in front of the entire group. We were so happy, we loved everybody, and surely loved our God.”

  As the Hornet steamed toward Honolulu, the astronauts could not yet fully relax, as there were still more postflight medical exams to undergo. One thing the doctor spotted with Neil was an accumulation of fluid in one of his ears; caused by the stress of reentry, it cleared up by the next day. With the doctors interested in how eight days in zero g had affected their bodies, it almost seemed like the mission was still occurring. “It was part of the deal to do that,” Neil understood. “We knew it going in, and the tests weren’t anything surprising, basically checking on the extent of the deterioration in our physical condition. We were glad we were in that position because it was confirmation that all that had gone before was okay. Of course, we were in isolation and couldn’t see day or night outside.”

  With the tests over, an impromptu cocktail hour broke out inside the small living room of the mobile quarantine facility; Neil drank scotch. Then came a dinner of grilled steaks and baked potatoes.

  That night, in soft beds with real pillows, the crew slept hard for nearly nine hours. Their rest was timed to restore a regular sleeping pattern, soon to be disrupted by the loss of six hours traveling east from Hawaii to Houston. Buzz remembers, “We kept right on taking our leisure until we were totally off schedule but more and more rested.”

  After a hearty breakfast of crêpes, link sausages, pecan rolls, and coffee, there was work to do. Columbia had been brought on board and its precious rock boxes and other treasures needed to be unloaded. Through a plastic tunnel Neil, Buzz, and Mike walked to their grizzled spacecraft, scarred as it now was from the heat of reentry, and with the help of John Hirasaki, a Japanese-American recovery engineer assigned to assist the crew while staying in the MQF, they took the boxes out of the back wall of the command module and loaded them in a special sterilization unit. A few hours later, the boxes were flown off the aircraft carrier to Houston.

  That afternoon witnessed another shipboard ceremony. The captain, Carl J. Seiberlich, presented each of them a plaque, a set of inscribed drinking mugs, and caps with their names, “Apollo 11,” and “USS Hornet.” Food was sent in through the MQF’s air-lock sterilizer, but, due to the quarantine precautions, the astronauts did not get to eat any of the large decorated cake. Commander Armstrong continued to act as the crew spokesman, as he would in all public events. Someone in the trailer innocently remarked, “And now it begins,” a comment that would become the astronauts’ refrain in the coming weeks.

  For two nights the Apollo 11 crew stayed on the Hornet, an experience Neil alone was accustomed to from his days in the navy. He passed some of the time by playing a marathon game of gin rummy with Mike, while Buzz read or played solitaire. Under Hirasaki’s direction, they also started autographing pictures earmarked for NASA and White House VIPs.

  The scene was wild as they arrived at Pearl Harbor on Saturday morning, July 26. The first time Neil had steamed into Pearl was aboard the Essex, as a midshipman, eighteen years earlier. People were cheering, a band was playing, and flags were waving. A broomstick was flying from the Hornet’s mast, the symbol of a mission well done. But, as Neil relates, “We weren’t in a very good position to see all that stuff.” Commander of Pacific Forces Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr., the father and namesake of the future U.S. senator from Arizona, greeted the crew upon their arrival, as Nixon had on the Hornet, through the rear window of their trailer. “You lucky sons of bitches,” he said. “I’d have given anything to go with you.”

  They stayed at Pearl only long enough to transfer to an airplane for their flight to Houston. Their trailer got lifted onto a flatbed truck and was then driven, at a speed of ten miles per hour, to nearby Hickam Field. The Apollo 11 crew could not understand why the truck had to be driven so slowly. Buzz remembers that they asked about the speed a number of times, but received no explanation. “Somebody somewhere had made the decision and that was that.” Crowds of people lined the streets. A young boy crippled from polio ran alongside the truck much of the way.

  Finally reaching Hickam, the MQF was loaded into the cavernous belly of a C-141 Starlifter transport. The long flight to Houston meant just that much more time inside the MQF. According to Neil, “It was pretty much like everything else. Here we were confined to a
very small place—but a bigger place than we had been in for quite a while. We had more room. We had hot food. We had cocktail hour. We had lots of things to do. Anytime we had spare time there were lots of things we wanted to write down or talk about.”

  Arriving at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston around midnight, they got rolled onto another flatbed truck. The off-loading at Pearl and the loading at Hickam had both gone well, but, as Buzz recalls, not here. “First one method of getting onto the truck bed failed, then another wouldn’t work, and finally on the third try in more than an hour, we bumped and swayed down onto the truck bed and were driven slowly into a brightly lit area and backed up window-first to another platform.” At the window with the astronauts, Dr. Bill Carpentier gently quipped, “They can send men safely to the Moon and back, but they can’t get the men off the airplane.”

  Finally safely on the back of the truck, they were driven across the tarmac to an awaiting crowd of several thousand people and a host of television cameras. The mayor of Houston, Louis Welch, addressed the astronauts, as did MSC head Bob Gilruth. “Everybody was assembled to greet us,” Armstrong remembers, including the crew’s wives and children. The astronauts spoke to their loved ones through special small red telephone hookups. Neil does not recall what he said specifically to Janet or the boys, or what they said to him, except “glad to have you back.”

  Not until 1:30 A.M. did the truck leave Ellington and head slowly down NASA Road 1 to the Manned Spacecraft Center. Regardless of the late hour, people were still clamoring in the street. It was not until around 2:30 that they arrived at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where they were to spend the rest of their twenty-one-day quarantine. With its special air-conditioning system, no air was supposed to escape from the LRL without passing through a number of filters and pumps.

  The Lunar Receiving Laboratory was safe, secure, and quiet. Besides private bedrooms for each crew member, it had a kitchen and a dining area. It also had a large living room and recreation area where, besides a television, recent Hollywood movies were projected on a big screen.

  Besides those who had been in the MQF, the population of the LRL included two cooks, a NASA public relations officer, another doctor who was a lab specialist, and a janitor. It was big enough to accommodate everyone without crowding the astronauts. NASA had even agreed to embed a journalist, John Macleish, who issued a stream of communiqués. (Before the flight, the Apollo 11 crew had complained unsuccessfully to Slayton about including any member of the press.) Accidental exposure to potential contamination in an adjoining laboratory dealing with the Moon rocks drew six more individuals into the merry band—including a very pretty twenty-four-year-old woman. Buzz remembers that the appearance of the first female in what had been an all-male group caused quite a stir, especially when it was learned she was assigned the room next to Collins’s. “It turned out after her arrival that there was, well, something questionable about her contamination. The quarantined area had a special phone for families to call in and our lady arrival had not so much as entered when she got a telephone call from her boyfriend. We were all suspicious. Had she expected to be contaminated in advance?”

  On that same phone, Neil made his first calls to his family. Viola remembered, “Praise the Lord, it was so good to hear his voice. I remember our conversation went something like this, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello, Mom, this is Neil.’ ‘Oh, honey, how are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m just fine. All three of us are just fine. It was wonderful. None of us got sick, and all of the machinery worked.’ ‘You said it was pretty up there.’ ‘Oh, it was fantastically beautiful. The surface is covered with a black dust, and it got all over our nice, clean white suits and wouldn’t brush off.’ ‘I’m so sorry that Daddy isn’t here. He just left for the farm.’ ‘Tell him we are okay.’ ‘Here is Grandma.’ ‘Hello, Neil, how are you?’ ‘Hello, Grandma, I’m fine. I’ll be seeing you pretty soon. Take care.’ ‘I will. Neil, it is so good to hear your voice.’ Then I said, ‘I’ll bet it felt great to take a good bath.’” (Viola then remembered Neil saying, “As a matter of fact, Mom, we haven’t been permitted to take a bath yet. They did let us wash our faces, but we had to keep the water and the washcloth to be analyzed.” Either Viola heard him wrong or Neil was putting her on, because all three astronauts took turns taking showers as soon as they got in the MQF.) “He continued, ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you pretty soon.’ Then our exchange of ‘loves and good-byes’ and the call was over. My, my, we just thanked God in heaven right then and there.”

  Mike and Buzz eventually found the time inside the LRL almost insufferably boring, but not Neil; he welcomed the refuge from the turmoil now surrounding them. “We really needed that time to be able to do all of the debriefings and talk to all the various systems guys. The subsequent Apollo crews were very interested in this question and that question that had to do with their own mission planning—what they thought they might reasonably do and whether we had ideas on how they might improve their own flights. Mostly, the discussion revolved around what was doable on the surface, because that affected the planning substantially. So that time was very valuable to us personally, as well as to everyone else. Of course, we would have liked to have been with our families, and we were prevented from that. But we knew they were not far away. All the uncertainty was gone now.”

  The days in the LRL also gave them plenty of time to review batch after batch of mission photographs that were being developed and printed by a special MSC photo lab. “Those were dribbling in to us a few at a time,” Neil recollects. “They would run one roll of film and, as soon as that was ready, they would get copies of them to us. As we went through the pictures themselves, a lot of questions also came up that the other flight crews were interested in having answers to. The photos helped them ask their questions and helped us answer them.” Some of the debriefings required the astronauts to write out long pilot reports covering their special responsibilities in the mission; other debriefings were filmed in a room resembling a TV control booth, the astronauts sitting at a table opposite questioners behind a glass wall. The mission was documented down to the minutest detail, resulting in 527 pages of single-spaced transcripts.

  On August 5, the LRL chef surprised Neil with a cake on his thirty-ninth birthday.

  Near the end of their stay, each astronaut, as federal government employees, was asked to fill out an expense report for their flight to the Moon. Filled out for them to sign, the forms read: “From Houston, Tex., to Cape Kennedy, Fla., to the Moon, to the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and return to Houston, Tex.” The astronauts had traveled by “Government Aircraft, Government Spacecraft, USN Hornet, USAF Plane.” Their total reimbursement was for $33.31.

  Only one time during the quarantine did any tension simmer between the three astronauts. It came when Aldrin, during the debriefings, elaborated at extensive lengths on the phenomenon of the flashing lights that all three of them had seen during the outbound journey. Buzz sensed Neil’s growing irritation. “Neil began to look doubtful and annoyed whenever the flashes were discussed…. When the feeling finally became apparent to me in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, I quickly suppressed it. Although it was never stated officially, it went without saying that rivalries or arguments within the astronaut corps were not discussed in public because it would tarnish both our image as individuals and the image of the space program.”

  As busy as they were with the debriefings, day after day in seclusion gave Armstrong and his mates plenty of time to think about their future with the space program; one day Deke even directed them to consider whether or not they wanted to return to flight status. Neil thought it was too early to come to any conclusion, though he hoped he would be able to fly again.

  The men also considered how all the glamour and publicity would affect their personal and professional lives, and the lives of their families. Just prior to reentry, Jim Lovell had warned the Apollo 11 astronauts, “Backup crew is still standing by. I just want to remind you that the most difficult part of your
mission is going to be after recovery.”

  Armstrong understood Lovell’s message, as he thinks back to it today: “We were not naïve, but we could never have guessed what the volume and intensity of public interest would turn out to be. It certainly was going to be more than anything any of us had experienced before in previous activities of flight. And it was.”

  Their quarantine blissfully came to an end at 9:00 on Sunday evening, August 10. By then, even Neil was very ready for it to be over. Going back to the restrictions the crew had been placed under days prior to the launch, they had been in physical seclusion for over a month. Outside the LRL, a NASA staff car and driver waited to drive them home individually. The crew of Apollo 11 went their separate ways, but not for long.

  Their short trips home that night presaged the astronauts’ lot for years to come. The moment each car passed through the NASA gate, a different TV crew pulled behind to follow the famous passengers. Reporters and photographers awaited them in front of their residences.

  Neil wanted none of it, certainly not then. As soon as his NASA car pulled into his driveway, he bolted for the front door. Janet was waiting to shut it quickly behind him.

  Armstrong’s life on the dark side of the Moon had begun.

  CHAPTER 31

  For All Mankind

  A month or so before the launch of Apollo 11, Armstrong, at the request of Life magazine, reflected on the meaning of the Moon landing:

  “It would be presumptous of me to pick out a single thing that history will identify as a result of this mission. But I would say that it will enlighten the human race and help us all to comprehend that we are an important part of a much bigger universe than we can normally see from the front porch. I would hope that it will help individuals, the world over, to think in a proper perspective about the various endeavors of mankind as a whole. Perhaps going to the Moon and back in itself isn’t all that important. But it is a big enough step to give people a new dimension in their thinking—a sort of enlightenment.