First Man

by James R. Hansen

  “After all, the Earth itself is a spacecraft. It’s an odd kind of spacecraft, since it carries its crew on the outside instead of the inside. But it’s pretty small. And it’s cruising in an orbit around the Sun. It’s cruising in an orbit around the center of a galaxy that’s cruising in some unknown orbit, in some unknown direction and at some unspecified velocity, but with a tremendous rate of change, position, and environment.

  “It’s hard for us to get far enough away from this scene to see what’s happening. If you’re in the middle of a crowd, the crowd appears to extend in every direction as far as you can see. You have to step back and look down from the Washington Monument or something like that to see that you’re really pretty close to the edge of the crowd, and that the whole picture is quite a bit different from the way it looks when you are in the middle of all those people.

  “From our position on the Earth it is difficult to observe where the Earth is and where it’s going, or what its future course might be. Hopefully, by getting a little farther away, both in the real sense and the figurative sense, we’ll be able to make some people step back and reconsider their mission in the universe, to think of themselves as a group of people who constitute the crew of a spaceship going through the universe. If you’re going to run a spaceship, you’ve got to be pretty cautious about how you use your resources, how you use your crew, and how you treat your spacecraft.

  “Hopefully the trips we will be making in the next couple of decades will open up our eyes a little. When you are looking at the Earth from the lunar distance, its atmosphere is just unobservable. The atmosphere is so thin, and such a minute part of the Earth, that it can’t be sensed at all. That should impress everyone. The atmosphere of the Earth is a small and valuable resource. We’re going to have to learn how to conserve it and use it wisely. Down here in the crowd you are aware of the atmosphere and it seems adequate, so you don’t worry about it too much. But from a different vantage point, perhaps it is possible to understand more easily why we should be worrying.”

  Few people ever accused Neil of being a philosopher. In the months following Columbia’s return to Earth, Armstrong and his two crewmates would be asked almost endlessly to express themselves about the Moon landing and its meaning for history and the global community. By all accounts, Neil, center stage, performed superbly well. Even today his first wife Janet, who accompanied him on all the immediate post–Apollo 11 goodwill trips, proudly relates that Neil was “never comfortable speaking…but he did it, and he did a great job of it.”

  Post-quarantine, Neil stayed at home one full day to take refuge from reporters. As a matter of courtesy, the legitimate press had agreed to leave all three of the astronauts alone until Wednesday, though casual onlookers and paparazzi continued to stake out the crew’s homes. One carload of photographers pursued Aldrin and his wife, en route to buy him a new suit for what was to be a one-day, coast-to-coast Apollo 11 celebration tour, even after Aldrin diverted into Ellington Air Force Base. “It’s an open base and we can’t restrict anyone,” said the gate guard. Neil spent that Monday indoors, catching up on personal mail, visiting with the family, and watching Janet get herself and the boys ready to join the cross-country trip. The next day he returned to his office at the Manned Spacecraft Center, where huge bags of mail awaited some reply.

  That same afternoon the first postlanding press conference was held in the MSC auditorium. Computer program alarms, the fuel situation during the lunar descent, and the other problems involved in the landing dominated the questions, which then turned to Neil’s unique experiences. Asked if there was ever a moment on the Moon when he was “just a little spellbound by what was going on,” Neil replied with a smile, “about two and a half hours.” Asked about the primary difficulty during the EVA, he offered, “We had the problems of a five-year-old boy in a candy store. There were just too many things to do.” Asked what he thought about the imminent three-cities-in-one-day tour to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Neil shook his head slowly and admitted it was “certainly the last thing we’re prepared for.”

  At five A.M. the next morning, Wednesday, September 13, the Armstrong family of four, the Collins family of five, and the Aldrin family of five boarded the transport jet Air Force 2, which President Nixon had sent to Houston for the trip. Mike and Neil spent the flight preparing their speeches (Buzz’s unease with extemporaneous speaking had motivated him to begin days in advance). At La Guardia Airport, Mayor John Lindsay and his wife greeted their honored guests, then flew them by helicopter to a pier near Wall Street in full view of a salute by a flotilla of fireboats. A string of open convertibles waited for them. Into the lead car went the three astronauts, followed by a security car, a car with the wives, another security car, a car with all eight of the astronauts’ children, and yet another security car. Buzz remembers, “We were advised not to reach out to shake hands because we could be pulled from cars and couldn’t be rescued easily.”

  Not even the revelry at the end of World War II or the parade for Lindbergh in 1927 matched in size the New York City celebration for the lunar astronauts. A blizzard of ticker tape enveloped their parade as it moved between the skyscrapers—the so-called Canyon of Heroes—through the Financial District, along Broadway and Park Avenue, past a Manhattan-record turnout of an estimated four million.

  “I had never seen so many people in my life,” Janet exclaims, remembering “people cheering and waving and dropping confetti that floated down from everywhere out of buildings, from out of the sky.”

  “They also threw out IBM punch cards,” Neil adds. “Sometimes they threw a whole stack of punch cards from the eighty-seventh floor of a building, and, when they didn’t come apart, it made like a brick. We had a couple of dents in our car from cards that didn’t quite open.”

  At City Hall, the handsome Mayor Lindsay presented them with keys to the city, and all three astronauts made brief remarks, Buzz saying how the footprints he and Neil had left on the Moon belonged to all mankind, and presented the city with a framed picture Neil had taken on the Moon. Then onward they went to the United Nations, where they shook hands with Secretary-General U Thant. The crew received a book of commemorative stamps representing all the UN member nations. Neil was the only astronaut to speak.

  As wild as the crowds were in New York, they were wilder in Chicago. By the time the parade of open limousines crept its way down Michigan Avenue and State Street to the Windy City’s massive new Civic Center, Aldrin recalls, “we were covered with confetti and streamers and perspiring so much that they were glued to us. We were deaf from the shouting, and jaws ached from smiling.” Following a public ceremony at Richard J. Daley’s City Hall—where the rough-mannered boss mayor directed the astronauts’ photo shoot by saying, “Hey you, over here”—the astronauts were surprised to find themselves, before heading to O’Hare International Airport, in Grant Park to address a gathering of some 15,000 young people.

  “It was exciting to be in these cities as there was electricity in the air from the joy these people were expressing on behalf of the achievement,” Janet notes. Neil explains, “That’s probably the first time we had seen such large aggregations of people…really a lot of people. It was just one event after another, big parades, ending up with the Nixon state dinner in Beverly Hills.”

  Arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, the plane was met by Mayor Sam Yorty, then helicopters took the party to the posh Century Plaza Hotel. The children of the three astronauts would not be attending the black-tie affair, instead partaking of a spread of hamburgers, French fries, and chocolate malts in front of a color TV tuned to the live telecast.

  President Nixon, his wife Patricia, and their two grown-up daughters Julie and Tricia hosted the astronauts and their wives in their presidential suite prior to joining dinner guests Mamie Eisenhower, widow of the former president; Esther Goddard, widow of rocket pioneer Robert Goddard; Chief Justice and Mrs. Warren E. Burger; former Vice President and Mrs. Hubert H. Humphr
ey (among the few Democrats invited); Arizona senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater; and current Vice President Spiro Agnew and his wife. Government notables filled the high-domed and elegantly chandeliered banquet hall: NASA and other space program officials, more Cabinet members than sometimes attended Cabinet meetings, governors of forty-four states (including California governor Ronald Reagan), members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, diplomatic corps members representing eighty-three nations, and a battery of Congressional leaders. U.S. and international aviation pioneers were represented by Jimmy Doolittle, the man who had headed the NACA when Neil began his government career in 1955, Wernher von Braun, and Willy Messerschmitt. From Hollywood and show business came entertainers Rudy Vallee, Gene Autry, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Rosalind Russell, Art Linkletter, and a score of others. Evangelist Reverend Billy Graham was there. Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh had been invited, but neither aviator came out of his self-imposed seclusion to attend. Ironically, not a single member of the Kennedy family attended, indebted as was the occasion to the inspiration of former President John Kennedy. On July 18, the day Apollo 11 approached lunar orbit, Massachusetts Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy following a party had plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha’s Vineyard, an accident that had killed twenty-eight-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.

  While the Kennedys remained in seclusion, peace and antipoverty protestors did not, waging an orderly demonstration outside the hotel where a fleet of black limousines—glistening Cadillacs, Imperials, Continentals, and Rolls-Royces—sat in the parking lot. To the protestors the glory of Apollo 11 was temporary or shallow, or both. The mood of Vietnam-era America remained highly agitated, and these particular taxpayers were not eager to pick up the tab for Nixon’s $43,000-plus gala, with its 1,440 guests, the menu including garden peas shelled by hand to prevent bruising. The president himself had approved the menu right down to the claire de lune dessert, a sphere of dimpled ice cream topped with a tiny American flag.

  After the meal, Vice President Agnew, the chairman of the administration’s National Aeronautics and Space Council, presented the three astronauts with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for their participation in “a unique and profoundly important adventure…Their undertaking will be remembered as long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.” Flight controller Steve Bales, who, according to his citation that night, “made the decision to proceed with the lunar landing when computers failed just before Eagle’s landing on the Sea of Tranquility,” earned a Medal of Freedom of his own. As factually misleading as that citation was, Bales’s honor was an important symbolic gesture on behalf of the estimated 400,000 persons who had contributed to the Apollo program.

  When it came Armstrong’s turn to address the throng, he was, by all accounts, emotional: “Neil Armstrong choked back tears as he groped for words to tell America how the Apollo 11 astronauts feel about their country and the honor it has given them,” opened the UPI wire coverage. And Time magazine reported, “Neil Armstrong’s words to President Nixon in Los Angeles last week seemed all the more eloquent because they were unstudied, and because for once the usually phlegmatic voice of the first man on the Moon quavered with emotion.”

  “We were very privileged to leave on the Moon a plaque endorsed by you, Mr. President, saying, ‘For all mankind.’ Perhaps in the third millennium a wayward stranger will read the plaque at Tranquility Base. We’ll let history mark that this was the age in which that became a fact. I was struck this morning in New York by a proudly waved but uncarefully scribbled sign. It said: ‘Through you, we touched the Moon.’ It was our privilege today to touch America. I suspect that perhaps the most warm, genuine feeling that all of us could receive came through the cheers and shouts and, most of all, the smiles of our fellow Americans. We hope and think that those people shared our belief that this is the beginning of a new era—the beginning of an era when man understands the universe around him, and the beginning of the era when man understands himself.”

  No one in the audience was prouder of Neil than his own family. “My parents were there as guests,” Neil relates, “as well my grandmother and sister and brother and their families. I had very little time to see them, but they were there. It was an impressive occasion for everyone.”

  On Saturday, an estimated 250,000 gathered in Houston (a city of only1.2 million in 1969)—“Spacetown USA”—to throw ticker tape, confetti, and enough “Moon certificates,” fake $100 and $1,000 bills, to cover the streets in two to three feet of litter. The ultimate Texas barbecue was held in the Astrodome for a by-invitation-only crowd of 55,000. Placards in the grandstands read: “You’ve come a long way, baby. Welcome home,” and “We’re proud of y’all.” Frank Sinatra served as master of ceremonies and entertained with singer Dionne Warwick and comedians Bill (“Jose Jimenez”) Dana and Flip Wilson, all of them big stars in 1969.

  The day before the parade, Neil, Mike, and Buzz had taped NBC’s Meet the Press for Sunday morning broadcast, a morning they were also to appear live on CBS’s Face the Nation. It was in that interview that Cronkite raised with Neil Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s statements about his religious beliefs.

  In regard to the crew’s future as part of the U.S. space program, Neil answered: “Oh, I have no idea what the future is going to hold for each of us, Walter, but I know that the next ten years and the next several decades are going to be even more exciting than the past decade.” Pressed for specifics, the commander of Apollo 11 continued, “We have always been poor prophets, Walter. We underestimate. We can do much more in ten years than we would expect. And if we judge that will probably be true, then I think in ten years we will be looking at the planets.”

  Presaging a recommendation early the following month by a presidentially appointed Space Task Group chaired by Vice President Agnew, Armstrong expounded, “I am quite certain that goals of the Mars variety are within our range, should we choose to decide to make that investment of our national resources. I think it is certainly possible, since a planetary trip always involves a long duration flight, that initial flights to the planets—that is, particularly circumplanetary, nonlanding, but exploratory flights—can be combined with Earth orbiting spacecraft [i.e., some sort of space station] to develop that long-term capability with the very same type of spacecraft. So that would certainly be a contender, in my view.

  “We know how to go to Mars. Clearly, our recent unmanned observations of Mars [by Mariner 6 and 7] have shown that we know how to go there, and I think we can equally well return. There are some variations in the method that might be used.”

  Armstrong elaborated: “We might very well use an intermediate point [instead of flying directly from the Earth to Mars]. I meant to imply that the navigation and the method of the traverse—the geometry of the trajectory—is known.” Asked by Howard Benedict of the Associated Press whether man can survive for months on end in space, Neil replied, “I should say, Howard, that I certainly enjoyed the entire trip, and I had no hesitation about living in that environment for a considerably longer period.

  “I would like to take a trip of [up to two years], and perhaps a considerably larger vehicle would allow us to take the families along…. Certainlythere is historical precedent…even [with] our present maritime vehicles.”

  To what had become the perennial Space Age question of how to balance the dreams of exploration with realities here on Earth, Neil raised the stakes for all: “We do have, and will continue to have, an unquenchable curiosity to understand our solar system, and I am quite sure, now that we believe that it is within our means to look, we will, and it is just a matter of time now of when you will do it, not whether you will do it.

  “Now, assuming that it will be done at some point, it is just a question of what is the order. I think it is important to say that a spacecraft that is able to fly tomorrow, that is able to transfer itself around betwee
n planets, that same spacecraft can probably go to nearly any of the planets, with the same configuration, the same type of spacecraft. So such an exploring vehicle would not be limited just to what we know about Mars but be more a truth-searching vehicle that could go to any of the planets and find out things of substance.” In other words, Armstrong was thinking of an interplanetary vehicle, no doubt unmanned, very much like the two Voyager spacecraft that would begin their “Grand Tour” of the planets in 1977.

  Ending the program, correspondent David Schoumacher of CBS News asked all three astronauts whether—and when—they would return to space. Collins announced that Apollo 11 was his last flight; Aldrin anticipated a future Apollo mission. Neil said, “I am available to serve in any capacity that they feel I can contribute best…. I would certainly hope that my technical abilities are the things that I would use most.”

  Returning to Houston, Neil had a question that the governor of Colorado ultimately answered. “I was looking for a place to get away for a week’s vacation.” That question got to Colorado governor John Love. The governor remembered a place in the remote southwestern part of the state where he had done some hunting. It was called Sleeping Indian Ranch and was owned by fifty-six-year-old Harry Combs, the chief of aircraft distributor Combs Gates Denver, Inc. (a subsidiary of Gates Aviation Corp.), who had attended the Apollo 11 launch with the governor.

  Just weeks before his death in 2004, Harry Combs recalled the governor’s telephone call: “‘How would you like to have Neil Armstrong come stay at your ranch for a week?’ And I said, ‘It was yesterday when I’d like to have him!’ And the governor said, ‘He can’t go to a dude ranch. They will mob him and murder him! I told the FBI I knew just the place.’”