I am far from certain that we will be able to fly the mission as planned. I think we will escape with our skins, or at least I will escape with mine.
Michael Collins
The day of the trip to the moon started like any other day, with a quick shave and shower. To ensure the three astronauts were healthy and record their vitals one last time, nurse Dee O’Hara, every astronaut’s favorite pulse-taker, gave each one a quick final physical. She’d been the personal nurse to all astronauts since before the first Mercury flight, and when she’d moved with them to Houston in 1962, she extended her services to their families as well. After all these years, O’Hara had an easy rapport with the men, and they appreciated her warmth, cheerfulness, and professionalism. A devout Catholic, she prayed the rosary on her beads during every mission, and she would for this one also.
Next was the traditional launch breakfast—steak, eggs, toast, juice, and coffee, as prepared by Lew Hartzell—with Deke Slayton and Bill Anders, the backup LM pilot. Paul Calle, part of NASA’s art program, sat quietly in a corner sketching them. Then it was back to their rooms to brush their teeth and pack their belongings, after which they headed upstairs to the suit room. There they donned long johns and urine-collection devices before being helped into their spacesuits by Joe Schmitt’s four-man team. Schmitt had handled these duties for Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and virtually every NASA manned flight since. Each astronaut carefully snapped his plastic bubble helmet down into the neck ring and locked it in place, then he plugged into a portable oxygen ventilator that he carried like a briefcase. This purged his body of any nitrogen, which prevented the bends when the cabin pressure was reduced soon after liftoff. The watch each man wore on his suit’s wrist, an Omega Speedmaster, was set to Houston time.
Slayton, Joe Schmitt, and the three astronauts passed well-wishers as they walked down the corridors and out of the building, where a crowd of TV crews and photographers waited. They all got in the transfer van together, but Slayton was dropped off at the control center, where he wished the astronauts, who were fully suited and unable to hear anything but their ventilator fans, good luck. The crew was driven the eight miles to the launchpad. The sun was about to rise as they arrived at pad 39A. Sheets of frost slid off the Saturn where air had condensed and frozen against the super-cold fuel tanks. The astronauts and Schmitt and his assistant took an elevator to the base of the launch tower and then another to level nine, where they were met by Pad Führer Guenter Wendt. The three seats in the craft were positioned side by side below the hatch opening; since Aldrin would sit in the center seat, he would be the last one to enter the command module, so he was let off on the level below, where he waited near the elevator. Armstrong and Collins walked over the creaking thirty-foot swing arm into the small White Room surrounding the side hatch, where technicians began the elaborate process of buckling them in and connecting them to the ship’s life-support system.
Wendt and his closeout crew had been busy for hours, and in the White Room there was now a brief pause while he and the astronauts exchanged gag gifts, a tradition that had developed over the years in an attempt to ease some of the pressure. He gave the crew a large key to the moon made of Styrofoam and aluminum foil. From his watchband, Armstrong pulled out a card that read Space Taxi. Good Between Any Two Planets and gave it to Wendt. While Schmitt helped Armstrong into the cabin, Collins, who had been carrying a brown paper bag, pulled out a wooden plaque with Wendt’s name on it and the inscription TROPHY TROUT. To the plaque was nailed a frozen (but rapidly thawing) trout all of seven inches long. Wendt was an avid fisherman, and Collins had been out on the water with him many times.
While he waited, Aldrin drank in the view: the reddish sun just rising above the azure-blue ocean half a mile to his left, the crowded highways and beaches in the distance, Cape Kennedy and the Vehicle Assembly Building to his right. Thirty feet away was the booster, frost dropping from it and liquid oxygen boiling off. “I could see the massiveness of the Saturn V rocket below and the magnificent precision of Apollo above,” he remembered with typical scientific appreciation. Then one of Schmitt’s assistants tapped Aldrin on the shoulder, and it was his turn. Gifts were usually lighthearted, but Aldrin gave Wendt, a fellow Presbyterian, a copy of Good News for Modern Man, a condensed version of the Bible. Schmitt helped him into the cabin and got him secured.
Fred Haise was still in the command module, in the space below the cloth-and-canvas seats called the equipment bay. He had been busy for hours reviewing switch positions and running through a checklist 417 steps long so that when the crew entered, they would have little to do besides throw a few more switches on the wraparound instrument panel. Haise finished up, wriggled out of the hatch behind the center couch, then reached back in and shook each man’s hand. When it was time, Wendt tapped Aldrin on the helmet and wished the crew luck, and the hatch was closed and locked. A few minutes before eight a.m., the Pad Führer and his team descended to the ground, and the swing arm was pulled away. The crew was alone atop the thirty-six-story rocket with its six million pounds of fuel.
It was about then when Collins looked over and noticed that the abort handle at Armstrong’s left side, now powered up and ready, was dangerously close to a large pocket on Armstrong’s suit. Just one counterclockwise twist would fire the three rockets of the escape tower above them and jerk the command module up and away from the stack below it. A slight movement of his left leg could snag the handle, so Collins pointed it out to Armstrong, who quickly pulled the pocket as far to the right as he could.
Unlike Apollo 9 and Apollo 10, Apollo 11 fascinated the entire country—actually, the entire world. People from every state in the Union and many countries outside it had begun descending on the area a week before the launch, and by the morning of July 16, there were almost a million of them. There were no motel rooms available within a fifty-mile radius of Cape Kennedy, so some motels allowed extra guests to sleep in the lobby or on deck chairs around the pool. The rest of the visitors congregated along U.S. Highway 1 and the beaches that ran parallel to it, setting up camp in their tents, crude shelters, vans, trailers, and cars. Every public park in the area was converted into a campground. There seemed to be a lot more kids around than usual for a launch, likely because parents wanted their children to witness history in the making.
Sequestered three miles away near the VAB were the six thousand special guests NASA had invited: nineteen governors, forty mayors, sixty-nine foreign ambassadors, thirty-three senators, two hundred congressmen, untold numbers of senior NASA employees and Apollo contractors, and plenty of other dignitaries and celebrities, including former President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. Jim Webb was also there, ready to witness his first rocket launch. Charles Lindbergh, who had inspired so many of the astronauts and engineers, was there, sitting next to an old friend named Claude Ryan. In 1927, Ryan’s small California aviation company had built a plane to Lindbergh’s specifications for an ocean flight the young pilot had planned. The Spirit of St. Louis had flown from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. Fifty years later, Ryan’s firm had built the landing radar for Apollo 11’s LM.
That morning, a few buses had dropped off about a hundred more special guests, among them the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, a civil rights leader and close friend of the late Martin Luther King Jr.; the two had led the Poor People’s Campaign to DC the previous summer to focus the nation’s attention on problems of hunger and poverty. Abernathy had not originally been invited, but the day before the launch, he had arrived at the Cape with two hundred and fifty followers and two mule-drawn farm wagons to protest the billions of dollars spent on space exploration while those same problems existed. At Cape Kennedy’s visitors’ center, they were met by Thomas Paine, a Democrat whom President Nixon had decided to keep on as NASA’s acting administrator after a fruitless search for a qualified Republican. Abernathy tried to make clear that he was proud of the space program’s accomplishments. Paine told him that he was a member of the NAACP and sympathetic to their cause. “If we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push the button,” he said. He invited the reverend and a delegation of his protesters to watch the liftoff the next morning from the VIP viewing area. The group spent the night at a nearby trailer park. Early in the morning, buses had picked up Abernathy and a hundred of his people. Now they were here to watch the launch with NASA’s other invited guests.
Nearby, at the press site on the shore of the barge canal, there were 3,493 American journalists and 812 reporters from fifty-five countries. Three thousand boats of varying sizes floated in the Banana River to the east and the Indian River to the west. On one of them, a motor cruiser owned by North American Aviation that was moored three miles from the launch site, Jan Armstrong would watch the launch with her boys, Rick, twelve, and Mark, six. The Aldrin and Collins families had elected to remain in Houston to avoid the mad crush at the Cape.
About a hundred and seventy-five miles off the coast were uninvited guests with a different agenda. While the vessels the Soviets usually deployed to monitor launches from Cape Kennedy were fishing trawlers bristling with radar and antennas, now they’d sent a flotilla that included a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers, two submarines, and a sub tender, all of them spread out over an area of twelve square miles, their heavy instrumentation a sure sign they were ready to track Apollo 11 from liftoff to orbit.
For a long time, NASA had suspected that the Soviets were jamming communications during missions. Just in case they tried this time, a massive surveillance dish was hoisted onto the roof of the VAB. If a disrupting signal was detected, the dish could pinpoint the location. The countdown would be halted and corrective action taken—hopefully, a simple change in frequency would do the job.
The Soviets had all but conceded the prize hanging in the sky 240,000 miles away. But they had one more trick up their sleeves.
After Premier Nikita Khrushchev had been deposed and the Gemini program began to pull the Americans ahead in the space race, Sergei Korolev was able to convince the USSR’s new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, of the importance of a lunar landing. But the Soviet moon program had started late and never caught up. It faced many obstacles, including severe underfunding, inefficiency, insufficient testing, the Marxist state’s distrust of science, and the military’s penchant for siphoning off funds from politically motivated space projects toward newer and better strategic systems. Korolev’s death, in January 1966, had dealt a severe blow to the project.
But Vasily Mishin and his team had plowed ahead, still hopeful that they could beat the Americans. The Soviet cadre of cosmonauts picked for the lunar missions hadn’t begun training until January 1968. Their insufficient funding precluded proper simulators, so they practiced landings with jury-rigged copters. Spacewalker Alexei Leonov was the front-runner for the honor of commanding the first mission.
They were aiming for a late 1969 or early 1970 lunar landing and had believed it unlikely that the U.S. program could recover from the Apollo 1 tragedy quickly and then pull off the series of highly complicated step missions required to make a landing by the end of the decade. But their own frequent failures—due in large part to poor quality control and a singular lack of strong ground-testing—colored their opinion; they didn’t know how well engineered and how thoroughly ground-tested Apollo was.
In the summer of 1969, the West had little information about the Soviet plans for space other than what scientists could gather from the photographs of Webb’s Giant. Earlier in the year, there had been statements from academicians and cosmonauts, including Leonov, indicating they were working on a moon landing. No one outside the USSR knew that the Soviets had already had a trial run of the huge moon rocket; the CIA’s spy-plane surveillance missed it. Although the N1 had never been ground-tested, on February 21, Mishin’s team was confident it was ready, and an unmanned stack had been launched at Baikonur. The rocket lifted off, but sixty-nine seconds later, severe pogo problems resulted in a fuel leak that started a fire, causing all thirty of the N1’s first-stage engines to shut off. At seventeen miles up, it turned earthward and crashed thirty-one miles from the launch site, though the launch escape system pulled the spacecraft mock-up away to safety.
The problems were considered fixable, and a second N1 was prepared for launch. Almost five months later, at 11:18 p.m. on July 3, they tried again. This time, the rocket barely cleared the gantry before it collapsed onto the launchpad and exploded into a sun-bright fireball that quickly became a purple-black mushroom cloud. Large white-hot pieces of debris rained down as far as six miles away, and windows twenty-five miles away shattered in the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in the history of rocketry. Miraculously, no one was killed.
The CIA had missed the February failure and would not discover the July 3 disaster until mid-August, when spy-plane photos revealed that a large launch complex had been destroyed. It didn’t matter. With the N1’s failure died any Soviet hope of beating the Americans to a manned lunar landing.
On Sunday, July 13, three days before the Apollo 11 liftoff, the USSR launched another of its Luna probes toward the moon. With characteristic reticence, TASS, the Soviet news agency, noted only that its mission was to conduct experiments around the moon and near it. The probe was widely seen as a final desperate attempt to upstage the Americans; possibly the Soviets meant it to land, scoop up some soil, and return to Earth, thus achieving a couple more lunar firsts. Others postulated a more sinister purpose: maybe the Soviets would try to observe Apollo 11…or interfere with it, or even shoot it down.
By the morning of the Apollo launch, the three-ton Luna 15 was nearing the moon on a minimum-energy trajectory, and Chris Kraft was incensed. The possibility of a collision with Apollo 11 was remote, but he was convinced that the Soviets had more than once deliberately operated their communications at or near American radio frequencies during missions. He mentioned the Russian probe during a press conference to put some pressure on them, but that hadn’t seemed to do any good. He couldn’t exactly ask the Soviets for their mission trajectory and communication details. But he knew someone who could.
Frank Borman and his family had just returned from a nine-day visit to the USSR, where he’d been welcomed warmly, met some cosmonauts and scientists, and drunk many vodka toasts. It was the first time an American astronaut had been allowed in the country. Kraft called Borman, still working as NASA’s White House liaison, and explained the situation. Borman put a call through to Dr. Mstislav Keldysh, president of the august Soviet Academy of Sciences. The two had hit it off and had discussed cooperation between their space programs.
He’d left Keldysh a message asking for the orbital parameters of the Luna probe and looking for reassurance that it wouldn’t interfere with Apollo 11. He hadn’t heard back by the day of the launch, but maybe the Russian would get in touch soon. Keldysh had seemed like an intelligent and reasonable man.
The morning was already sweltering, with a bright sun and the temperature near ninety degrees.
The countdown went smoothly save for a couple of minor problems that were fixed without causing a delay. At T minus nine seconds, the five massive F-1 engines ignited, and at zero, as they reached their full thrust of 7.6 million pounds, the launch tower’s swing arms pulled back, the twenty-ton hold-down clamps at the booster’s base sprang free, and hundreds of thousands of spectators watched, transfixed, as the 6.5-million-pound spacecraft began to rise, sluggishly at first, its thrust-to-weight ratio so close that it appeared to ascend in slow motion until it finally cleared the launch tower, sheets of ice breaking off into thousands of shards. At 9:32 a.m., exactly on schedule, Apollo 11 blasted off toward the moon with three men in a small nose cone atop the largest rocket ever sent into space.
The sound took fourteen seconds to reach the closest observers, three miles away, and when it did, the roar was deafening. The ground shook as Apollo 11 continued to soar upward on a long pillar of fire and then arced out over the Atlantic to begin its five-hundred-thousand-mile round-trip journey.
In firing room 1 in the launch control center, beside the VAB, Wernher von Braun stood next to George Mueller in the mission managers’ row. While the last twenty seconds of the countdown ticked away, he put down his binoculars and stared out the large blast-proof windows, then bowed his head and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer to himself. As the rocket climbed, the four-hundred-man countdown team started cheering, and von Braun lifted his head and joined them.
It was surprisingly quiet in the command module—the F-1s were a distant rumble, not unlike a commercial airliner’s engines at takeoff. The spacecraft shook as it lifted off, and the astronauts were jostled against their straps as the four outer engines swiveled back and forth, adjusting to stay balanced and straight—if the rocket came into contact with the launch tower, it would mean catastrophe. The men felt only 1.25 g’s, slightly more than normal, but far less than they had endured in training. The force steadily increased as the rocket picked up speed, and two minutes and forty seconds into the flight, at the end of the first-stage burn, the men felt four times their normal weight.
When the rocket was forty-five miles up, the astronauts were jerked forward as the spent first stage fell away into the sea. The five smaller J-2 engines of the second stage took over, and the ride smoothed out. A few seconds later, at sixty miles altitude, the launch escape tower was jettisoned, and at a hundred and ten miles, the single J-2 of the third stage ignited, this one causing a rougher, shakier ride as the second stage released. The ascent to orbit had taken twelve minutes.
At least fourteen danger points would occur during their flight. NASA called them go/no-go decision points, those critical events that involved complex mechanisms and split-second timing that had to transpire flawlessly for a successful mission. (There might even be a few more than fourteen, depending on how many midcourse trajectory corrections were needed.) At every point, the flight director would ask each controller whether the system he monitored was functioning properly and ready to go. The launch had been the first danger point—every rocket launch was dangerous, considering the massive amounts of fuel involved. The next point, which would occur during the second orbit at a hundred and ten miles altitude, was translunar injection (TLI). Restarting the third stage’s single J-2 engine for a five-minute-and-forty-seven-second burn would, if perfectly timed, increase the spacecraft’s speed to 24,258 miles per hour, fast enough to pull it out of Earth orbit and propel it toward the moon—or, rather, a specific point where the moon would be when Apollo 11 reached it in three days. And restarting the J-2 was risky, given the nature of its fuels; liquid oxygen at negative 297 degrees and liquid hydrogen at negative 423 degrees had to be handled extremely carefully. But Collins had practiced the burn many times. Midway through the second orbit, after checking out their spacecraft to make sure all systems were nominal, the crew donned their helmets and gloves again, in case the TLI went badly, then waited for word from Mission Control.
It finally came as they passed a hundred miles over Australia. “Apollo 11, this is Houston. You are go for TLI.”
The burn went off without a hitch. The cabin shook and the thrust pushed the astronauts back in their seats at one g. Then the engine shut down automatically and they were on their way to the moon. Von Braun’s rocket had performed flawlessly once again. “Hey, Houston, Apollo 11,” said Armstrong after shutdown. “That Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.”
A short while later, Collins separated the command-service module from the third stage, turned around, then docked with the LM, whose four-panel protective shroud had peeled away like large silver petals. Then one of the astronauts threw a switch on the control panel that released the LM from the Saturn third stage, and the odd-looking spacecraft—the command-service module secured nose to nose with the LM—continued moonward. The almost empty third stage’s trajectory would be changed to send it into an orbit around the sun.
Besides the attitudinal thrusters, they had one large engine left, the big service-module engine attached to their rear that resembled a large bell. Its thrust of 19,500 pounds would be used on several occasions during the next few days. It had to work every time. Now they started it for a three-second burn to get safely away from the third stage and fine-tune their trajectory. Its light kick—one-fifth of a g—was reassuring.
The passive thermal control was next. In the vacuum of space, with no atmospheric protection against the sun’s rays, the temperature was over 280 degrees on the side facing the sun and negative 280 degrees on the other side. Fuel-tank pressures could rise to dangerous levels, and radiators and other parts could freeze, so to distribute the sun’s heat evenly, Collins used his thrusters to position the spaceship broadside to the sun and then induced it to rotate slowly on its long axis—one full turn every twenty minutes, hence the nickname “barbecue mode.” Apollo 11 was now slowly spinning at an angle as it moved toward the moon.
Two delicate maneuvers were behind them with no more scheduled until they reached the moon’s vicinity in three days. The crew appeared to relax, although it was hard to tell with Collins, who tended to mask anxiety with humor anyway. Armstrong joshed with CapCom Jim Lovell, his backup, who had been teasing him about taking his place. Then Lovell and Aldrin chatted; the two had been crewmates on Gemini 12 three years before.
After their course was set, the crew changed out of their bulky spacesuits into two-piece nylon jumpsuits, a difficult chore in zero gravity. They took turns; as one man bounced around the cabin, his shipmates helped him. The suits were folded, bagged, and stowed under the center couch. No one had shown any signs of space-sickness or any other illness, and no major problems had cropped up, although there were some minor ones, like an oxygen-flow indicator that malfunctioned. It was deemed useless, irreparable, and unnecessary, since Mission Control could monitor oxygen. Everything appeared shipshape. After the crew took care of various chores, it was time for dinner. The food, packets rehydrated with a hot-water gun and eaten with a spoon, was good—their first meal of chicken salad, shrimp cocktail, and applesauce eaten with a spoon was a major improvement over the tubes they’d squirted into their mouths on Gemini flights. Each man had meals color-coordinated for him and planned out for every day, and there was a well-stocked snack pantry they could partake of. (The kitchen “cupboards” were on the left side of the cabin, making the right side, with its waste-management systems, the bathroom area.) And since the sun was always on them, there was no sunrise or sunset, so they operated on the time their watches were set to, Houston’s central daylight time. At 10:30 p.m. CDT, fourteen hours after liftoff, they turned the radio down, fastened covers over the windows, and closed their eyes.
They soon settled into a routine. They would wake up, have breakfast—including dehydrated coffee, predictably disappointing even with hot water—and clean up. The CapCom relayed the flight-plan updates, relevant telemetry readings, the news from Earth, including the baseball scores, and the latest on Luna 15 (which by Thursday had entered orbit around the moon). They would troubleshoot minor problems, and Collins would take star sightings to check location and trajectory; on the ground, Mission Control would continue to monitor telemetry and relay any necessary information.
The three Gemini vets enjoyed the experience of weightlessness, particularly in a spacious cabin with room to move about. Spacious was a relative term, though; it was roomier than either the Mercury or the Gemini spacecraft but still not much larger than the inside of a station wagon. But the lack of gravity made the area above them usable also, so the short connecting tunnel leading to the LM could serve as a cubbyhole to relax in. Below the couches in the equipment bay, one man could stand up fully, and two men could stand there after the center seat was folded up. There was room for two men to stretch out and float weightless in their zipped-up, lightweight nylon sleeping bags slung fore to aft under the left and right couches. The third crewman slept above them in the left-hand seat with its seat folded flat, loosely buckled in to keep from floating away and with his headset volume lowered—a call would come in only in an emergency. Though there was no true day or night, their bodies’ circadian rhythms kept them on the same sleep/wake schedule they had always known. With the craft’s shades pulled down over the windows and its interior lights dimmed, only the soft whirring of ventilators interrupted the unearthly quiet of cislunar space that lay just a few inches outside the gray alloy walls.
The gravitational pull of the Earth extended more than halfway to the moon, and their escape velocity of almost 25,000 miles per hour gradually diminished to a tenth of that speed. Not that the crew could tell; since there was nothing to compare their speed to—no trees or buildings or asteroids whizzing by—they had no sense of movement. Only the barbecue roll, the gauges, and the slowly shrinking Earth gave the men any indication that they were moving. Their destination couldn’t be seen yet because of its proximity to the blinding sun.
Besides sleeping, daily chores, and the near-constant chasing after floating items of all sizes—from pens and sunglasses to crumbs and cameras, each of which had to be stowed away or anchored to one of the dozens of Velcro panels affixed to the cabin walls—the astronauts did not have much to do in cislunar space once the spacecraft was set on the proper trajectory, and the computer and Mission Control were in charge. Most other flights included a long list of experiments; not this one. They could be distractions, and this crew had to be as rested and prepared as possible for their Sunday excursion, although they would set up a few experiments on the surface. But daily telecasts had been planned, and on Thursday evening, the second day out, the crew aimed a color-TV camera out the window and shot the Earth for fifteen minutes while delivering a running commentary on what they were seeing. “Hey, Houston,” Buzz said, “do you suppose you could turn the Earth a bit so we could get a little bit more than just water?” Then twenty-one minutes were spent showing the inside of the command module.
When the camera was turned off, there wasn’t a lot of conversation among the three men, especially compared to their Apollo 10 predecessors. “It’s all dead air and static,” said one NASA official. Armstrong and Aldrin were laconic by nature, and they had the descent flight plans and checklists to review and ninety-two large-scale lunar-surface photos to study. Collins was more loquacious, although not to the point that he talked to himself. But their moods had definitely lightened up; even Aldrin had shaken off his not-the-first-man disappointment and seemed to be in a fine mood, validating Slayton’s faith in him. He wasn’t even trying to communicate telepathically.
Collins took care of most of the housekeeping; he charged batteries, purged fuel cells, dumped wastewater, chlorinated drinking water, and prepared most of the meals, the solar system’s only combination pilot/cook/housekeeper/handyman. Sometimes they played music on a small cassette player, mostly easy listening and classical, including Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” and a favorite of Armstrong’s entitled Music Out of the Moon, a 1947 album of jazz instrumentals featuring the otherworldly sounds of a theremin. One day, Collins ran in place for a while, his hands above his head against the bulkhead. So did Armstrong, briefly—a mild shock to anyone aware of his avoidance-of-exercise philosophy.
On the distant blue sphere behind them, the crew’s families watched telecasts with friends and the occasional astronaut. This wasn’t their first space rodeo; each of the three women had previously endured what the wives had come to call a “death watch”—waiting and watching at home to see if their husbands would survive a mission. But the media attention for this one was off the charts. Between Life reporters and photographers in their houses, and TV crews and newspeople outside on their front lawns, there weren’t many places to avoid the spotlight. They were dutiful and gave interviews; everyone in the astro-community knew it was expected. But they tried to balance the attention with some sense of normalcy, so the three families alternated between watching the TV broadcasts and going on with ordinary activities. They ate at their favorite restaurants and snuck out, hidden in their neighbors’ cars, to shop and get their hair done (they had to look good for the cameras), though one female reporter tracked a wife to the beauty parlor and had her hair done too. On Friday, the Aldrin family, which now included Buzz’s uncle Bob Moon and his wife, hosted an afternoon pool party. The other two wives attended, and all three talked to the press on the front lawn.
On Thursday evening, Frank Borman had received a phone call from Russia. It was Keldysh’s assistant saying that the academy president had gotten his message. A little while later, Borman received a cablegram from the USSR with the precise trajectory of the Luna probe’s orbit and the assurance that it would not intersect with that of Apollo 11; Borman would be notified if there were any changes. It was signed Keldysh. For the first time, the Soviets had revealed mission details to their Cold War rivals while the mission was still in progress. There was no mention of the probe’s purpose or its radio frequencies, but Borman and Kraft took it on good faith that there would be no radio interference. Late the next morning, the two held a short press conference to announce the news; that information was relayed to Apollo 11, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Friday afternoon, the astronauts took the TV camera out again for a twenty-minute shot of Earth, then shots of the crew and the cabin, and then, for the first time, a shot of the LM. After Collins removed the probe and drogue assembly from the connecting tunnel between the LM and the command module, Aldrin and Armstrong floated up and squeezed through the yard-wide opening into the LM to begin preparing for the separation on Sunday. They followed that with a ninety-six-minute telecast during which they roamed through both modules and displayed an Earth no larger than a silver dollar and becoming even smaller.
At 11:12 p.m., traveling at a snail’s pace of 2,040 miles per hour and just 38,000 miles from their destination, the spacecraft entered the moon’s gravitational field. The craft began picking up speed, and the men woke up early on Saturday to find themselves only ten thousand miles from the moon. While they ate breakfast, they entered the moon’s shadow, and a few hours later, they stopped the barbecue mode and swung the joined spacecraft around. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, they had the opportunity to see the moon clearly. It was no longer a distant, flat-looking, grayish-white orb the size of an extended thumb but a massive, darker, and fully three-dimensional world that filled the window and brightly reflected the earthshine—four times as bright as moonshine—from their home planet behind them. The light lent a cold bluish tint to the moon’s features, adding shadows to its craters and mountains. It looked close enough to touch and cold and ominous. “It’s a view worth the price of the trip,” Armstrong said.
They could also see stars again; the dazzling sunlight had prevented that for days. “The sky is full of stars, just like the nights on Earth,” reported Collins.
The seventy-three-hour voyage—the translunar coast—had been, in the best sense of the word, uneventful. Only one three-second burn on Thursday had been necessary to fine-tune their trajectory, and that had been so accurate that two others had been canceled. Now, as they neared the moon, another danger point approached: lunar-orbit insertion (LOI). They had to turn their ship around and apply a braking burn that would slow their speed from 5,225 miles per hour to 3,248 miles per hour, allowing the craft to be captured by the moon’s gravity and drop down to an elliptical orbit. If they didn’t get it right, Apollo 11 would sail around the moon in a huge arc and then head back toward the Earth in a free-return trajectory—or it would be carried the other way, toward the sun. If the burn was too long by just a few seconds, their reduced speed would send them crashing to the lunar surface. They had to fire up the service-module engine again for six minutes and three seconds—and they had to do it eight minutes after they disappeared behind the moon, where they’d be unable to communicate with Mission Control if a problem occurred.
The burn would be handled by the onboard Apollo Guidance Computer. After checking their numbers several times, they would have to enter the directions and figures manually. One wrong digit could mean a catastrophic change to their trajectory.
Both the LM and the command module carried an AGC, and it was up to the task. Designed by the MIT Instrumentation Lab and built by Raytheon, it was a wondrous machine. Most capable computers of the day took up a large room, like the IBM System/360 Model 75J mainframes on the first floor of the Mission Control Center in Houston, and a mini-computer was the size of a phone booth. The two carried on Apollo 11 were each the size of a briefcase—not quite portable, but the first embedded computer, and a micro-computer for its time. Computers used large, fragile disks and tapes, and they broke down frequently; this one absolutely, positively could not. To increase reliability, the AGC employed a fixed rope-core memory: thin copper-wire ropes woven by a staff of Massachusetts women whose ancestors had worked in the New England weaving industry and who would maintain their expertise between mission-software jobs by knitting and getting paid for it. (Some at NASA called this long, painstaking process the “little old lady” method.) Using looms, they would thread hundreds of these wires around and through many rows of magnetic ceramic-ferrite cores, or microchips, affixed to a board, and each one would take six weeks to build and test. It was one of the first computers to use these new miniaturized, integrated circuits. The result was a computer with a 36,864-word fixed memory and 2,040 words of erasable memory—the equivalent of seventy-two kilobytes—with a processing speed of roughly one megahertz. That was a limited amount of memory, but it was enough to perform the tasks assigned to it, such as measuring velocity changes, determining rendezvous and course corrections, and making minute adjustments to the trajectory during descent. Moreover, the AGC was nearly indestructible and would immediately recover from a crash or overload and continue right where it left off. The AGC would also prioritize jobs in case of memory overload and drop those not considered essential.
The computer’s keypad interface was an eight-inch-by-eight-inch DSKY (display and keyboard) on the control panel of each spacecraft (there were two in the command module), with a calculator-type, nineteen-pushbutton keyboard, ten indicator lights, and a digital display. The computer was capable of solving real-time problems, and though initiating tasks could be cumbersome, requiring many key presses, they were performed quickly. They had to be.
As the flight progressed, shifts came and went in Mission Control. Cliff Charlesworth’s Green team had been on console for the liftoff; six hours later, they yielded to Kranz’s White team; eight hours after that, Glynn Lunney’s Black team took over, and then it was the Green team’s turn again. The aroma of stale sandwiches, pizza, Mexican food, and burnt coffee mingled with the blue-gray haze of cigarette smoke in the subdued lighting. Kraft, Gilruth, Paine, and Mueller often watched the proceedings from the top row. An ever-changing cast of astronauts moved in and out of the room to sit and stand near the CapCom console; others watched in the first row of the glass-fronted VIP area, where people came, lingered for a while, and left. Many off-shift controllers on their way home made a stop at the Singing Wheel just a mile down the road to decompress and talk shop. Others remained at Mission Control Center, spending the night in the flight controllers’ dormitory on the floor above the MOCR.
Just before noon on Saturday morning, Charlesworth polled his flight controllers one by one on lunar-orbit insertion—the burn that would slow down the spacecraft enough to drop it into orbit—then he gave astronaut Bruce McCandless, the CapCom, the okay. At 11:58 a.m., McCandless told the crew, “You’re go for LOI.”
Aldrin said, “Roger. Go for LOI.”
“All your systems are looking good going around the corner,” said the CapCom, “and we’ll see you on the other side.”
Fifteen minutes later, the spacecraft disappeared behind the moon, just 309 nautical miles from its surface, and Mission Control became noticeably quieter. A few groups of men stood chatting in low voices. Flight controllers stared at their consoles or the big TV monitors in the front of the room. On the large lunar map, the radar dot representing the spaceship had moved to the left edge and then vanished. If all went well, it would reappear on the right side of the map after about thirty-five minutes.
In their craft behind the moon, the crew entered the numbers, and then Collins punched in the command to start the service-module engine again. It fired right up and burned five minutes and fifty-seven seconds, placing the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit that ranged from sixty to one hundred and seventy nautical miles above the moon’s pockmarked far side—a near-perfect burn and orbit insertion.
Using the thruster jets, Collins maneuvered the spacecraft so the moon was visible in the front windows, and they spent the next twenty minutes gazing down at it and taking photos. The rugged surface, completely covered with craters of all sizes, was even more forbidding than the near side. The satellite’s cold, stark visage contrasted with the vibrant blues and greens of the Earth they’d left behind. Like the crew of Apollo 8, they argued over its color and came to the same conclusion: various shades of gray, with some browns here and there, depending on the angle and the light. Three days after leaving Earth, they finally experienced a sense of movement as they made a complete circle of the moon every two hours.
The crew was mesmerized by what they saw. Though Collins had taken far fewer geology lessons than his shipmates, he became excited over one area below them. “Oh, boy, you could spend a lifetime just geologizing that one crater alone, you know that?”
Armstrong said, with little enthusiasm, “You could…”
“That’s not how I’d like to spend my lifetime,” Collins said, “but picture that. Beautiful!”
Aldrin had been quiet for a while. He said, “Yes, there’s a big mother over here too.”
“Come on now, Buzz,” said Collins. “Don’t refer to them as big mothers. Give them some scientific name.”
A few minutes later, they edged around the moon’s right side.
“There it is,” Aldrin said. “It’s coming up!”
Collins said, “What?”
“The Earth. See it?”
“Yes,” said Collins. “Beautiful.”
As they took it all in, there had been nothing but static from Mission Control. Then, right on schedule, they heard McCandless’s voice.
“Apollo 11, Apollo 11, do you read? Over.”
“Yes, we sure do, Houston,” replied Aldrin. “The LOI burn just nominal as all get-out, and everything’s looking good.”
It took a minute or two before communications were fully restored. Then McCandless inquired about how the burn figures looked.
With a grin, Collins said, “It was like—it was like perfect!”
In Mission Control, the tension dissipated, the volume increased, and many onlookers began to filter out.
A couple of hours later, at 2:56 p.m., the crew began a thirty-five-minute TV broadcast. From a side window, they focused the camera on the moon below, pointing out the LM’s planned flight path and the landmarks along it highlighted by the sun’s long shadows. The crew took turns commenting on what they saw. Then they got their first view of their landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. They swiveled the camera to keep it in the frame as they ended the broadcast.
“And as the moon sinks slowly in the west,” said Collins, “Apollo 11 bids good day to you.”
About an hour later, they made a second burn on the far side—this one only seventeen seconds—to drop Apollo 11 down to a slightly lower and almost perfectly circular orbit of fifty-four by sixty-six nautical miles. Two more danger points had passed—now six in all. There were several more to come.
Armstrong and Aldrin floated up into the LM to give it another once-over and prepare for the next day. They spent two and a half hours powering it up, presetting switches, and working a long communications checklist. Then the three gathered in the command-module cabin to eat dinner as soft music played on the small tape recorder. Afterward, Collins tended to the usual housekeeping while his crewmates got their suits and equipment ready. They prepared to retire. Collins would sleep top-deck on the left seat, with his headset on in case of emergency. Armstrong and Aldrin would be in their sleeping bags below; they both needed a good night’s rest. The temperature inside was sixty-nine degrees, a few hundred degrees cooler than outside in the sunlight. It was almost midnight on Sunday—the day they would attempt what they had come all this way for.
Collins felt the need to say something. “Well, I thought today went pretty well,” he said. “If tomorrow and the next day are like today, we’ll be safe.”
A half an hour later, as their spacecraft continued to circle the lifeless moon sixty miles below, they were asleep.