First Man

by James R. Hansen

  * What attracted Armstrong to the HP-115 was how its highly swept delta wing configuration, when flown in steep, unpowered, low L/D approaches and landings, could generate data useful in the design of the Dyna-Soar vehicle.

  * According to Aldrin, “I didn’t see any need to become qualified in flying the bedstead. I appreciated what it was, but I didn’t see any need to risk so many people in the machine. Clearly, Neil had to make up his mind as to what was absolutely needed to make the landing and he felt this training was essential. I agreed with his decision to fly it.” Aldrin to author, Albuquerque, NM, Mar. 17, 2003, p. 19.

  * Buzz Aldrin’s birthplace has frequently been given to be Montclair, New Jersey. In fact, he was born on the Glen Ridge wing of a hospital whose central body rested in Montclair. His birth certificate lists Glen Ridge as his birthplace.

  * In his posthumously published 2001 autobiography, Deke!, Slayton states that if Gus Grissom had not been killed in the Apollo fire, he would have chosen Grissom to be the first man on the Moon.

  * Even after Apollo 10, some of the Apollo mission planners were still concerned about the effects of mascons. For example, Howard W. “Bill” Tindall Jr., the chief of Apollo data priority coordination and one of the unsung geniuses at the MSC in Houston, asked two days before the launch of Apollo 11 in one of his highly respected internal memoranda known as “Tindallgrams,” “What do we do if one of those big damn lumps of gold is buried so near the LM that it screws up our gravity alignment on the lunar surface?” If that was the case, Tindall worried, the LM’s alignments could be in error, resulting in the processing of mistaken ground trajectory data during the flight of the LM’s ascent stage back to a docking with the command module in lunar orbit. Just in case “the various far-flung experts,” as Tindall called them, were wrong in their prediction that mascons would have no significant effect on the lunar surface gravity alignments, Tindall recommended a series of measures to ensure that the LM’s two different computer guidance systems, known as AGS (Abort Guidance System) and PNGS (Primary Navigation, Guidance, and Control System, pronounced pings ) could be effectively aligned. Howard W. Tindall Jr., Apollo Data Priority Coordination, to [a long list of individuals at the MSC], “Subject: How we will handle the effects of mascons on the LM lunar surface gravity alignments,” July 14, 1969, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, copy in Historical Archives, University of Houston—Clear Lake. There is a CD that contains most of the “Tindallgrams.”

  * Performing a timed burn with Apollo’s SPS rocket engine could produce a substantial acceleration (or deceleration) if the engine shutoff was not precise. It was critically important to know what these differences in speed, or “residuals,” amounted to, so as correct them. Corrections were made, not by firing the main engine again—that could add to the problem—but by briefly firing (the astronauts called it “tickling”) the spacecraft’s smaller maneuvering thrusters.

  † This transcript excerpt as well as the two that follow in the text were from the onboard recorder and were not transmitted to Earth. The astronauts were careful about uttering profanity when they knew that what they were saying was being transmitted home.

  * Beginning with Apollo 14, the DOI burn was performed with the CSM engine while the LM was still attached. This change was necessitated by the additional weight of the later lunar modules: they had the lunar rover onboard and stored more oxygen and dried food for longer stays on the lunar surface. Using command module fuel for the DOI maneuver also saved some of the LM’s fuel.

  * Armstrong has always discussed the landmark tracking as if he and Aldrin were doing it together, but that was not the case. “I appreciate the ‘we,’” Aldrin has commented, “but Neil did the tracking, because I wasn’t looking out the window. I could have cared less about the landmarks. If it wasn’t in the computer displays, I didn’t see it.” Aldrin quoted in “The First Lunar Landing,” Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, ed. Eric M. Jones, p. 13.

  * Experts who have listened many times to the flight recordings cannot make out with certainty what word Aldrin used here. Buzz believes he might have said “Faint shadow,” referring to a fuzzy edge of a shadow on the streaking dust layer. Others suggest it sounds more like “Great shadow.”

  * Armstrong misspoke here, as there were no binoculars on board. Rather, the LM was equipped with a monocular, made from one half of a set of commercial binoculars made by a German company, Leitz, and modified by instrument experts at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Neil and Buzz used the monocular both before and after their EVA. It thus ranks as the first telescopic viewing device (10 x 40 power) used on another celestial body.

  * Because of the Moon’s position relative to the Earth at the moment of Armstrong’s “one small step” statement, the TV downlink used by NASA came from Honeysuckle Station outside Canberra, Australia; previously the Eagle ’s TV signal had been coming from the Goldstone tracking station in California. Much of the TV downlink for the remainder of Apollo 11’s EVA came from the big radio astronomy telescope at Parkes, in New South Wales, Australia. The story of the Australian role in the first Moon landing’s navigation and communications has been detailed in Hamish Lindsay’s book Tracking Apollo to the Moon. The story of what happened at Parkes observatory and in the surrounding rural town during the Apollo 11 mission has been marvelously (and humorously) depicted—albeit with a lot of harmless inaccuracy—in the 2001 Australian film The Dish.

  * Only recently, Eric M. Jones, the Australia-based editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, has discovered evidence that, during Armstrong’s historic climb down the ladder, Neil had the Lunar Equipment Conveyor hooked to his suit and that Aldrin was playing it out as a safety tether. (Jones provides the evidence for his conjecture at http://www.nasa.gov/alsj/all/alltether.html.) To Jones, Armstrong has written, “You make a persuasive case about the LEC, but I cannot remember the detail well enough to confirm or dissent.” Eric M. Jones, e-mail to author, Mar. 27, 2005.

  * Besides the famous picture that has his reflection in Aldrin’s visor, Armstrong is shown on the lunar surface in pictures 5886, 5895, 5903, and 5916. In all but 5886, Neil is either in deep shadow or only partially shown. Photo 5895 shows Neil’s legs and 5916 shows the back of his suit from close-up (it is a frame from one of Buzz’s pans). Another image, AS11-40-5894, would have provided a good view of Armstrong at the MESA, if only the exposure would have been more appropriate.

  * The man who pushed the use of the ALSCC stereoscopic camera on Apollo 11 was Dr. Thomas “Tommy” Gold (1920–2004), a brilliant Viennese gadfly of an astronomer who taught at Cornell University. “I didn’t know Professor Gold,” relates Armstrong. “He got his device on Apollo 11 pretty much at the last minute. It was an inconvenience and a new addition that we had to work into the timeline, and we felt uncomfortable with the situation. Nevertheless, we took some pictures with his stereo camera. I took some pictures of some small rocks with it that I thought would be of particular interest to him.” NAA to author, Sept. 19, 2003, p. 16.

  * In the first Armstrong-to-Aldrin camera transfer, Neil put the Hasselblad on the MESA at about 4:14:12:32 as Neil got ready to do the bulk sample. Buzz got the camera off the MESA at about 4:14:25:09. The second Neil-to-Buzz transfer came at 4:44:43:18 and the TV image of it is very inconclusive about how the transfer was made. This appears to have been the moment when Neil handed the camera carefully to Buzz.

  * By the time the first Space Shuttle launched in 1981, NASA was grudgingly accommodating legitimate press requests for PPK manifests, but only after its own people had cleared every item and completed a thorough postflight inventory. Even today, Freedom of Information Act requests for PPK manifests are fulfilled with a copy of an October 22, 1968, letter from Deke Slayton, who died in 1993, stating that the contents of PPKs were not to be made public. In that memo to NASA Headquarters, Slayton wrote: “The only list of PPK contents is retained by me. I certify to the Mission Director on each mission that the contents meet flammability and toxicity
requirements and are noncontroversial in nature. We do not intend to make this list available to anyone else at any time. It is the crew’s prerogative to discuss the contents after the flight if they wish. Since these items are personal in nature, we do not feel that NASA has any other official prerogative on the issue.” Slayton to NASA Headquarters, Attn: Mr. Julian Scheer, Oct. 22, 1968. Carbon copies of this memo were sent to George Mueller, Bob Gilruth, and Alan Shepard.

  * Armstrong had started taking courses while a NACA test pilot, at a night school on Edwards AFB run by the University of Southern California. Under the direction of Professor Ken Springer, he had started his thesis, concerning a method for simulation of hypersonic flight, before he moved to Houston. After Neil left the Apollo program, Springer, still at USC, contacted him and asked if he wanted to finish up the thesis. Springer made it easy for him, “We have concluded,” the professor said, “that, if you would give us a presentation on certain aspects of Apollo, we would consider that an acceptable substitute for finishing the thesis work you have done up to this point.” Neil told him it would, in fact, be difficult to finish the thesis as originally conceived since all of the data had been generated in analog, and analog computers were not much available anymore. “To redo my research in digital would have been a very challenging thing for which I wasn’t really qualified. So anyway, I prepared a paper and they deemed that acceptable for completion.”

  † Armstrong currently holds no less than nineteen honorary doctorates, including (besides the three mentioned above), Ohio State University (1971), University of Notre Dame (1971), University of Maryland–Heidelberg (1971), Butler University (1972), Drake University (1972), University of Dublin–Trinity College (1976), Brown University (1979), University of Cincinnati (1982), Lafayette College (1983), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1986), Weber State University (1988), Cranfield University (1996), Xavier University (1999), College of Mount St. Joseph (2000), Tufts University (2004), and University of Southern California (2005). Twelve of them conferred a Doctor of Science, two a Doctor of Engineering, one a Doctor of Laws, two a Doctor of Humane Letters, one a Doctor of Humanities, and one an LLD.

  * Armstrong’s tax form for 1979 showed that he earned an income of $18,196 from the University of Cincinnati. From his own personal service corporation that year, he earned $168,000. Beyond that, he earned about $50,000 in fees for serving on boards of directors for various companies.

  * Contrary to some published reports, Armstrong did not drive himself, with his severed fingertip, to Cincinnati’s Bethesda North Hospital; he traveled by life squad van. From there he was flown by a friend to the then-world-famous microsurgery unit at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital. Drs. Joseph Kutz, Tse-Min Tsai, and Thomas Wolff performed the delicate surgery. Two major arteries and five veins had to be rejoined. Following the surgery, the finger became fully functional except for the last joint nearest the tip.

  * Three different secretaries worked for Armstrong while he was at the University of Cincinnati: Ruta Bankovikis (1971–73), Luanna Fisher (1974–76), and Elaine Moore (1977–79).

  † The Armstrong office on Broadway in downtown Lebanon, Ohio, lasted for roughly six years, until 1986. After that, for a while, the office was at Neil’s farm on Route 123 north of town. Then the office moved briefly to a building on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati. For the last dozen years, the mail has been handled at a Columbus Avenue office back in Lebanon. Letters always came to Armstrong through this entire twenty-five-year period though a Lebanon post office box number.