Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  “CapCom, this is Flight.” Kranz’s words to Duke were firm and steady. “You’d better remind them there ain’t no damn gas stations on the moon.”

  Charlie nodded and keyed his mike. A timer stared at him. “Thirty seconds.”

  “Light’s on.”

  This time the announcement was from Buzz Aldrin as he watched an amber light blink balefully at him from the master caution-and-warning panel. It was the low-fuel signal.

  Buzz then intoned the numbers like a priest, steady and clear, voicing the final moments flashing away.

  “Seventy-five feet,” he called out.

  “Six forward . . .

  “Light’s on . . . down two and a half . . . forty feet, down two and a half . . . ”

  Eagle was now slipping downward fifty feet above the moon. Men and machine embraced a new level of potential danger. This close to the surface, they had no margin for error. If their space vessel failed them, or if they ran out of fuel, they would not have time to abort. If they ran into any problem this close, there would be no time for circuits and solenoids and explosive charges to separate the Eagle from its lifeless descent stage, no time for fuel to stream through lines into the ascent stage’s combustion chamber beneath their boots, no time for the fuel to ignite and hurl them upward before they crashed.

  Time was their enemy.

  “Thirty feet . . .

  “Two and a half down . . . ”

  Then, the magic words!

  “Kicking up some dust . . .

  “Faint shadow . . . ”

  So close now! So close!

  There was no turning back! The door behind them had closed.

  “Four forward . . .

  “Drifting to the right a little . . . ”

  Everyone in Mission Control, and in the visitors’ viewing gallery, and throughout the vast halls of NASA, everyone anywhere who knew what was happening just above the moon was hoping, praying, straining.

  Fuel flashed away. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle with the smooth touch of a naval aviator landing a jet on a tossing carrier.

  Millions of hearts pounded madly.

  Then, Buzz spoke these words on the moon. “Contact light! Okay, engine stop. Descent engine command override off . . . ”

  In Houston, CapCom Charlie Duke was choking with relief. But he still needed voice confirmation. He wanted to hear the words.

  “We copy you down, Eagle,” he radioed. Then waited.

  Three seconds for the voices to rush back and forth, earth to moon and moon back to earth.

  Those three incredible seconds, and then came the call.

  “Houston . . . ”

  Buzz Aldrin wasn’t taking any chances. He studied the lights on the landing panel to be certain of what they’d just accomplished.

  Four lights gleamed brightly—four marvelous lights welcoming them to another world where no human had ever been. Four lights banished all doubt. Four round landing pads at the end of the Eagle’s legs rested, level, in lunar dust.

  Neil allowed himself the luxury of a long, deep breath as he stared through his helmet visor at the alien world before him. He was surprised at how quickly the dust, hurled away by the final thrust of the engine, had settled back on the surface. Within seconds again the moon looked as if it had never been disturbed. Buzz stared at the rocks and shadows of the moon, marveled at the horizon that curved into velvety blackness just a mile away.

  Neil’s voice was calm, confident, most of all clear.

  “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

  It was 4:17:42 P.M. EDT, Sunday, July 20, 1969.

  Charlie Duke spoke above the bedlam of cheering and applause in Mission Control.

  “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

  “Thank you . . . ”

  Deke was exuberantly pounding on the back of and shaking hands with anyone he could reach. His eyes sought out his friend Alan Shepard, who was doing the same. Intuitively Alan looked at Deke. Again they exchanged a thumbs-up. There would be time later to celebrate.

  The words flashed across space to Houston.

  “That may have seemed like a very long final phase.” Neil Armstrong was all business again. “The auto targeting was taking us into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around it, and it required flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.”

  Charlie Duke had a grin like a mule eating briars. “Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility,” he sang out. “Be advised there’s lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.”

  Desolation surrounded the first two humans on the moon as they studied the lunar landscape. No birds. No wind. No clouds. A black sky instead of blue.

  Two days from Earth Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on a ghost world—a land that had never known the caress of seas. Never felt life stirring in its soil. Never known a leaf to drift to its surface. No small creatures to scurry from rock to rock. Not a single blade of green. Not even the slightest whisper of a breeze. They were on a world where a thermonuclear fireball would sound no louder than a falling snowflake.

  Geologists and astrophysicists would learn from samples Armstrong and Aldrin and five more lunar-landing teams would bring back the moon is very similar to Earth—born in searing heat from a collision between Earth and a Mars-size planetoid. Its infancy was one of boiling lava and shattering space collisions before it died geologically.

  Today, in the year 2011, Neil Armstrong and those who walked the lunar surface will tell you if humankind is to survive a finite Earth, it must colonize the moon. Humans must learn how to survive in the radiation and danger-laden vacuum that is space before they can set out for homes on other Earth-like planets.

  On this our species depend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Boots on the Moon

  ON JULY 20, 1969, EIGHT years after President John F. Kennedy had promised to put a man on the moon, Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11’s lunar module and climbed down Eagle’s ladder to the moon’s surface. There was no hurry. Moving into the unknown demanded patience, caution, and readiness for the unexpected.

  Armstrong stepped backward from the lunar module’s hatch. He headed for where no human had ever gone, toward the surface of a world devoid of life, a surface below with craters and endless dust—an alien world with the rubble of cosmic bombardment.

  He felt strangely comfortable. Both his booted feet touched the ladder’s rungs with confidence as billions on distant Earth were fixed on their television screen, on a ghostly figure of a space-suited human moving slowly and steadily down Eagle’s ladder.

  Suddenly he was there.

  Billions watched as Neil jumped the final three and a half feet to the moon’s surface.

  Touchdown.

  Then his left foot pressed down hard on a fine-grained surface at 10:56 P.M. American Eastern Time.

  He pushed his body slightly away. Both boots stood planted solidly beneath him.

  Immortal words spoken into his spacesuit radio for Earth to hear:

  “That’s one small step for man,” Neil said slowly, “one giant leap for mankind.”

  Then, he looked down, studied the lunar soil beneath his boots and squatted. A gloved hand gathered several ounces of rock and dirt and stuffed the small, invaluable collection of the moon in a suit pocket. If something should go wrong, and he had to scurry back inside Eagle, at least they would have a tiny sample of lunar soil.

  He managed a smile as he tucked the contingency sample safely away, and with their lunar lander systems hitting on all cylinders, Buzz was eager to follow. Fifteen minutes passed and Mission Control gave Aldrin the “Go.” He did not hesitate. He climbed down the ladder, stopping only when his boots were on the moon.

  It had happened as promised. The astronaut corps and NASA
were happy, to say the least.

  Humans were on the moon before the decade had ended.

  Neil began to move along the ground. Every step was an experiment. Every movement was an exploration. Every turn, walk, low-gravity jump was a first-time-ever adventure.

  Despite the cumbersome spacesuits, both men found moving about in one-sixth gravity exhilarating and described the experience as floating. They would be on the moon for only a short visit, and they were in a hurry to try everything planned for them. They wanted to take advantage of lightweight gravity to make leaps impossible on earth. But while they weighed less, they still possessed body mass that restricted their ability to move as freely as they liked. When they leaped up, they found their efforts produced a loping movement. If they started to jog, the mass and velocity created kinetic energy. When they jogged at the fastest speed they could attain, their momentum made quick stops impossible.

  The clock ran down swiftly. There was much to do. They needed to complete their checklist in two hours before resealing themselves inside Eagle. NASA wanted no unexpected surprises. Not on this first venture to the moon.

  “The surface is fine and powdery,” Neil reported to a fascinated world. “It adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my boots. I only go in a fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”

  Neil didn’t know it at the time it would be these highly defined footprints that would be the “proof” that some armchair physicists would use to prove the moonwalk was a fake.

  Humans would rather think the worst of themselves than the best.

  Myth believers claimed that Neil and Buzz could have only left such firm, defined boot prints in soil with moisture. But close examination of the lunar soil brought back to Earth showed it to be virgin. The grains still had their sharp edges. They had not been rounded off by wind and erosion in an atmosphere. In their vacuum the sharp edges of lunar soil cling together, leaving a smooth surface much as moist sand does on a beach.

  “Where were the stars?” the myth believers then asked. The cameras that NASA sent to the moon had to use short-exposure times to take pictures of the bright lunar surface and the moonwalkers’ white spacesuits. Stars’ images, easily seen by the moonwalkers, were too faint and underexposed to be seen as they are in photographs taken from space shuttles and the International Space Station.

  And why didn’t the descent rocket carve out a crater? Its thrust was simply too weak to make a huge dent in the lunar crust.

  The two had problems jamming the American flag into the lunar surface. Though a metal rod held the flag extended, the subsurface soil was so hard that they had to bang and push on the pole to get it to barely remain upright. Their forcible actions left the flag’s staff rocking back and forth for an unusual length of time. The myth believers believe it’s wind blowing the flag.

  There’s no wind on the moon, just vacuum. But an object forced into repeating motions in a vacuum repeats the motions many more times than it does in atmosphere. The flag’s motion was later duplicated in a vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters television show.

  With Old Glory standing, Neil moved off to take more pictures while Buzz set up various instruments. One was a multi-mirror target for returning laser beams fired from Earth—laser reflectors that have been used worldwide to determine the distance between Earth and the moon to the inch.

  Forty years after the Apollo lunar landing, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, returned images of the moon landing sites. The pictures show five of the six Apollo descent stages that served as the moonwalkers’ launch platforms for their trips home, including Apollo 11’s resting where Neil and Buzz left it on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. And the Apollo 14 landing area shows a faint trail of Alan Shepard’s and Edgar Mitchell’s two-mile round-trip walk to Cone Crater pulling their “rickshaw.”

  It’s clear that there was no fraud.

  As the clock ticked away, Neil put aside his checklist, awed by the beauty of the alien landscape. He took a long, slow look at the moon’s surface. “It’s a very soft surface,” Neil radioed back to Mission Control. “But here and there where I bored with the contingency sample collector, I ran into a very hard surface. It appears to be a very cohesive material of some sort.”

  What he described astounded and fascinated listeners around the world.

  “It has a very stark beauty all its own,” he said slowly. “It’s like much of the high desert areas of the United States. It’s different, but it’s pretty out here.”

  To Buzz, the moon’s surface was: “Beautiful, beautiful! Magnificent desolation.” He was struck with the shocking contrasts of color. There were many shades of gray, a pale tan, and areas of utter black where rocks cast their shadows along the airless surface.

  Standing back from Eagle, they saw the silvery ascent stage and the gleaming crinkle-gold coating on the descent stage, the splayed spidery landing legs, and the wide semi-rounded footpads resting in gray dust.

  The earth was a resplendent oasis of shifting colors, appearing far larger than the moon. And many times brighter as sunlight splashed off clouds and oceans.

  There were protocols to meet for the historic occasion. On the lunar dust they placed mementoes for the five-deceased American and Soviet spacemen, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Vladimir Komarov, and Yuri Gagarin (who died in a plane crash in 1968). They unsheathed a metal disc on the descent stage with engraved messages to future moon visitors.

  As Neil Armstrong read the plaque’s words, his voice carried throughout the world. “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”

  There was yet another small cargo—private and precious—carried by Neil Armstrong to the moon. It was not divulged at the time, but he carried the diamond-studded astronaut pin made especially for Deke Slayton by the three Apollo 1 astronauts and presented to him by their widows after that dreadful fire.

  The two astronauts gathered fifty pounds of lunar soil samples, dust, and rocks, packed their precious find in sealed containers, and used a hand-powered pulley system to send the boxes up to the ascent stage. Working with untried equipment in vacuum, they struggled to get the boxes aboard their ship, kicking up a cloud of moon dust.

  It was time to shut down the first moonwalk. They worked their way to the ladder and squeezed into their “flight deck,” and sealed and pressurized their cabin. They stowed gear not necessary for flight and went through their long checklist, following every procedure worked out before leaving their launch pad. Buzz had walked and jogged about the moon for one hour and forty-four minutes, Neil for two hours and fourteen minutes.

  Houston reminded them they needed to sleep for five hours before starting the countdown to liftoff. Easier said than done. They were cold in Eagle. Whatever had been set up to keep them warm on the airless world left much to be desired. Their available space was cramped and austere, and they were wound up tighter than alarm clocks with elation and excitement. At best, they slept fitfully.

  Twenty-one hours after touchdown, Armstrong fired up the engine, and Eagle blasted free of its launch platform—the bottom half of the lunar module.

  Insulation material torn free by the rocket blast scattered widely in a shower of debris. Neil Armstrong, watching the surface, saw the first American flag deployed on the moon yield to the whoosh of dust and debris and fall slowly over on its side.

  That was all the time the astronauts had for sightseeing as they manned controls and computers and radar systems for the three-and-a-half-hour trip to rendezvous with Mike Collins and the command ship orbiting sixty miles overhead. They flew Eagle skillfully and precisely. Collins watched the LM drive “steady as a rock” and “right down the center line of final approach” toward linkup. Ten minutes later Eagle was firmly docked with Columbia. The
two ships were once again one.

  Buzz and Neil floated back into the command module, which soon echoed to the wild cheers of three astronauts whose flight would forever change man’s view of his planet. At such a joyous moment, Collins related, these responsible, highly trained, extremely skilled men, who had just carried out the impossible, were “all smiles and giggles over our success.”

  Armstrong and Aldrin transferred their lunar booty into the command ship and then discarded their faithful Eagle, leaving it to orbit the moon for several weeks before lunar gravity tugged it down to a crash landing.

  It would take sixty hours to make the return trip home. But by now Mission Control and the three men in Columbia knew the highway.

  Just follow the trail locked into the computers by Apollos 8 and 10.

  Meanwhile, the back rooms at Houston were the scene of intense planning and no small controversy.

  One man was determined, come hell or high water, to get to that desolate little world of “stark beauty” 240,000 miles away. No one gave him much of a chance of succeeding.

  If it was possible to hate an inanimate object, then Alan Shepard hated his desk. Fighter pilots dread orders from higher command that chain a man to a desk which has no chance of getting off the ground. Clip the wings of an eagle, and you wind up with a turkey.

  And no matter what else he might be, Shepard in his heart and mind was and always would be an eagle born to fly. Even all the way to the moon and back.

  Alan’s grounding for almost five insufferable years remained strictly a medical problem. Ménière’s syndrome had finally explained the sudden onset of dizziness, the giddy and helpless feeling of a room spinning before his eyes. Vertigo had been a constant threat. A pilot without balance doesn’t fly. It’s a one-way ticket to disaster.

  More than a year before Apollo 11’s history-making landing on the moon, Alan was going from bad to worse. As chief of the Astronaut Office he fought off melancholy as one by one he sent astronaut teams off to the launch pad to soar into space. By the summer of 1968 the hearing in his left ear had decreased and his balance had degenerated. While before that there had been some hope for recovery, medical teams now told him he’d never fly again.