Somewhere on the southwestern shores of the Sea of Tranquility, on a level, rock-strewn plain, two men in a small spaceship clapped each other on the shoulders and shook hands. Then they got back to work.
There was no time to waste. Several steps needed to be taken in case the LM had been damaged during the landing and they had to take off. Kranz’s White team would decide that, but the spacecraft had to be ready.
In Mission Control, the unflappable Gene Kranz found himself overwhelmed with emotion and unable to speak. He knew he needed to do something to get himself and his team focused. With the exception of his flight controllers, all the people in the building, even the ones in the staff support rooms, were cheering and celebrating the moment. But decisions had to be made, and quickly, so he slammed his right forearm down on his console, flipping a pen in the air in the process. It did the trick.
Kranz said, “Okay, everybody, T one. Stand by for T one.” Time-1, or T1, was the first opportunity for an emergency liftoff, and it would occur immediately. A minute later, he said, “Okay, all flight controllers, about forty-five seconds to T one—stay/no-stay.” It was Bob Tindall who had pointed out that go and no-go didn’t make sense when the spacecraft was sitting on another world. Go could be interpreted in different ways—continue the mission and stay on the moon, or leave immediately. So stay/no-stay it was.
If the crew had to make an emergency liftoff due to a major problem—a leaking fuel tank, a damaged engine, a compromised environmental system, the sun’s heat affecting the LM’s fluids adversely, or a footpad sinking into that deep layer of moondust—Eagle could launch in two minutes and rendezvous with Columbia before it got too far away.
Each controller scrambled to assess the telemetry on his screen and the state of his system. Thirty seconds later, when Kranz polled them for T1, each one answered, “Stay.” Then they started evaluating more thoroughly for T2, eight minutes after landing. When Kranz polled them, there was another unanimous round of stays. Eagle would remain on the surface for now. It would be another two hours before Columbia was overhead again.
Just sixteen minutes later, a problem was detected by Bob Carlton’s backroom team. The pressure in the descent engine’s fuel line was rising. In the subzero temperatures in the shade—about negative 250 degrees—some of the fuel had frozen into a solid plug after the engine shutdown. The other end of the line was blocked by the engine-shutoff valve, so the pressure could cause the fuel to explode or a relief disk to blow. It could be catastrophic either way.
“Flight, the descent engine helium tank is rising rapidly,” said Carlton. “The back room expects the burst disk to rupture. We want the crew to vent the system.”
They decided to ask the crew to “burp” the engine—that is, flick the engine on and then off again quickly to relieve the pressure. CapCom Charlie Duke was just about to relay the order to Eagle when the ice plug melted by itself, and the pressure dropped to zero.
From his position sixty miles overhead and two hundred miles west of the landing site, Mike Collins had listened intently to the air-to-ground transmission, hanging on every word. He had stood in Columbia’s lower equipment bay with his right eye at the sextant, trying to keep the LM in view as it slowly dwindled to a dot and then disappeared. At the first 1202 alarm, he grabbed his checklist and began looking through it, but before he could find the right page he heard Duke’s “Go.” He froze when he heard him say, “Thirty seconds,” and exulted a moment later when he heard Armstrong announce, “The Eagle has landed.”
Although TV commentators emphasized how lonely Collins must be, especially when he disappeared behind the far side of the moon, Collins didn’t feel that way at all—he was quite content despite his unprecedented solitude. He only wished he could sight the LM whenever he passed over it. Knowing where Eagle was would supply valuable information to the Apollo Guidance Computer to calculate rendezvous maneuvers for the next day. He continued to listen in as the Eagle’s crew described the sights around them while preparing for their return in less than twenty-four hours.
At the Armstrong home in El Lago, Jan Armstrong retreated to her bedroom during the descent, leaving family, neighbors, and guests, including Bill Anders, one of the backup crew members, in the living room watching CBS’s coverage with Walter Cronkite and his on-air partner that day, Wally Schirra. One of the Armstrongs’ guests was a Catholic priest, in case the landing went bad, though neither of the Armstrongs was Catholic or especially religious.
She sat at the foot of the bed and studied a lunar map. Her son Rick came in and sat on the floor, and they listened to one of the two squawk boxes installed in her house. Every astronaut home had a speaker transmitting the air-to-ground loop. Jan was fairly knowledgeable about the descent, more so than most of the other wives, and she was frustrated by the freewheeling speculation, much of it pessimistic, by the commentators. Since there was no live camera feed of the landing, models were used to illustrate it to television viewers. Anders came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed with Jan next to the moon map and provided technical clarification. As her husband guided the LM down the last few hundred feet, Jan sank to the floor and hugged Rick, murmuring, “Good…good…good.”
In the living room of the Aldrin home in Nassau Bay, Joan Aldrin stood leaning against a door frame, tears in her eyes, unable to look at the TV screen. When Eagle landed, she collapsed onto the floor in relief while everyone else applauded. She got up to throw kisses at the TV screen and pass around a box of cigars, then she went into her bedroom to collect herself. In the Collins home one street over, Pat sat on her living-room couch, nervously smoking, with friends and family. A reporter and photographer from Life magazine were there to capture the personal side of the story, as was usually the case during a flight; a team was at each of the other houses as well. At touchdown, Pat smiled for the first time in a long while and watched as the usually eloquent Cronkite became inarticulate. He took off his glasses and said, “Man on the moon! Whew…boy!” Next to him, an overwhelmed Schirra just wiped his eyes.
After the landing, each of the wives gave an interview in her front yard, all of them offering variations on the “proud, thrilled, happy” speech every veteran astronaut wife was accustomed to giving. But they knew there was another critical go/no-go point—a big one—coming up the next day. None of them would sleep well that night.
Once they received the okay to stay, Armstrong and Aldrin went through a simulated countdown for the next day’s liftoff; they hadn’t practiced it for a week, and they wanted to make sure the launch-prep procedures worked in the real world. That went fine, and after they both gave detailed descriptions of their views of the lunar surface—and, through a small window above them, the gibbous Earth, hanging in the velvet-black sky like a blue-and-white moon—they told Houston what controllers there had half expected to hear: they wanted to go outside sooner than planned.
Even if the astronauts had taken off immediately after landing, John F. Kennedy’s goal would have been met. But a full day’s stay, including a two-hour-and-twenty-minute EVA, had been scheduled, chiefly to gather moon rocks, set up several experiments—and see what it was like to walk on the moon. Science had not been the prime factor behind the moon landing or, indeed, behind the entire Apollo program, and this mission was about getting there and getting back, but NASA had agreed to a few experiments for the science guys. Just in case the crew was tired from the descent, the timeline called for a meal and then four hours of rest.
But the two astronauts weren’t tired—they were pumped and probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep so soon after landing on the moon. They had discussed it with Chris Kraft and Deke Slayton, and all had agreed beforehand that they might forgo the rest period. So, just after four p.m. Houston time, they requested official permission to skip it. Mission Control gave them a go.
First, they quickly prepared a meal. Just before they ate, Aldrin pulled out from his PPK a tiny vial of wine no larger than the tip of his pinkie, a silver chalice about the same size, and a wafer, all given to him by his Presbyterian minister. He radioed to Houston and, with the whole world listening, asked for a few moments of silence. He said, “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.” Then he poured the wine into the chalice, ate the wafer, and drank the wine in a private Communion ceremony no one but Slayton and Armstrong had known about beforehand.
It took a few hours to prepare for the EVA. They were especially careful about securing their suits, helmets, gloves, and various connections; one less-than-perfect joining could mean a quick death. Their heavy-duty spacesuits were twenty-one layers thick and, like the Apollo Guidance Computer, had been fabricated using the “little old lady” method. Each suit would be pressurized to 3.5 pounds per square inch, making it bulky and not very flexible. Each clear bubble helmet had a special outer helmet equipped with a gold-plated visor to reflect the glare of the blinding sun, unfiltered by an atmosphere. Gloves were heavy gauntlets and, like the helmets, were locked and double-locked. The self-contained backpack each man would wear—the personal life-support system, or PLSS—could provide enough oxygen, cooling water, and electric power to keep him alive in the moon’s vacuum and extreme temperatures for four hours. The hundred-and-ninety-pound suits weighed only thirty pounds on the moon’s surface, but the tight confines of the LM complicated any movement in a fully pressurized suit, as did Eagle’s thin skin, which could be pierced by a pen or any other pointed object and lead to a major pressure leak. A good part of the astronauts’ prep time was spent storing the dozens of items that were scattered around the cabin, from food packages to checklists. Finally, at 9:39 p.m., they finished depressurizing the LM and pulled open the hatch at their feet, which hinged on the right. It was clear that it would have been nearly impossible for the lunar pilot on the right side to get around the commander and go out first.
Armstrong got down as low as he could. With Aldrin guiding him, he began to slowly back out of the thirty-two-inch-square opening. It was a tight squeeze with the bulky PLSS and its communications system antenna. He reached the small porch outside, grabbed its side rails, then climbed slowly down the nine-rung ladder attached to the forward left leg. Halfway down, he pulled on a lanyard that deployed a desk-like storage unit to the left of the ladder and activated a Mylar-wrapped TV camera that would be trained on him. Aldrin powered it up, and it began transmitting ghostly black-and-white images to the estimated 530 million people watching—one of every six Earthlings, the largest TV audience in history.
The landing had been so soft, the LM legs hadn’t compressed more than an inch or two, so the end of the ladder was still three feet from the ground. Armstrong dropped onto the saucer-like pad at the bottom of the leg. “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” he said. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. The ground mass is very fine.
“I’m going to step off the LM now,” he said, still holding on to the rail with his right hand.
At 9:56:15 p.m. Houston time, he reached out with his booted left foot, hesitated a moment—scientist Thomas Gold’s insistence that the moon was covered with a deep layer of dust, though obviously discounted by the landing, was still in the back of his mind—then gingerly stepped onto the surface of the moon.
He said, “That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind.”
Armstrong hadn’t spent much time before or during the flight thinking about what his first words would be—only after the landing did he decide. Several people, including his crewmates on the way to the moon, had asked him if he knew what he’d say, but he’d deflected the question. “Not yet, I’m thinking it over” was his usual reply. He’d meant to say “one small step for a man,” since without the indefinite article, the line didn’t make sense—man and mankind meant essentially the same thing. But he either forgot or misspoke. In any case, his statement would be both praised for its elegance and criticized for its blandness. Armstrong would later express the hope that “history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended,” since without it, the statement was, he said, “inane.”
On CBS’s telecast, where the words FIRST STEP ON THE MOON hung above Armstrong’s shadowy TV image, Cronkite didn’t seem to notice the omission. “Well,” he said, “for thousands of years now, it’s been man’s dream to walk on the moon. Right now, after seeing it happen—knowing that it happened—it still seems like a dream.”
All over the world, people stopped what they were doing and watched the images from space, vicariously experiencing the adventure. In casinos in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and elsewhere, gamblers and dealers at blackjack tables gazed at TVs set up just for the broadcast. At airports throughout the world and many train stations, hurrying commuters paused. In New York’s Central Park, ten thousand watched on giant screens; bars and restaurants throughout the United States and in much of the free world showed the broadcast. In Warsaw, several hundred Poles crammed into the lobby of the U.S. embassy to see it. Even the pope, at his summer villa, sat mesmerized in front of a TV. Despite the turmoil of the time, for one day, the billions of inhabitants of Earth shared the same sense of yearning and wonder as a human walked on the satellite above them, so far away.
Though several Communist countries aired the live telecast, including Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, it wasn’t shown publicly in the USSR, China, North Korea, or North Vietnam. But in a Soviet military center in Moscow, ten cosmonauts gathered early in the morning to listen to radio transmissions, watch it on TV, and, with a mixture of envy and admiration, applaud Armstrong as he stepped onto the surface. A few days later, they would drink a toast to the safe return of the Apollo 11 crew.
In the harsh light of the lunar dawn, Armstrong moved his right foot onto the surface and stood fully on the ground. “The surface is fine and powdery,” he said, “and I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It adheres in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots.”
He bounced up and down a few times, then finally let go of the LM’s handrail and began walking, tentatively. He assured Mission Control that there was no problem adjusting to the moon’s low gravity; no one had been sure of what it would be like to get around in the cumbersome suits. He found that the best method of moving was a slow lope. Visibility was not a problem; with the low, blinding sun to the east and the bright Earth above, the lighting was “like being on a sandy athletic field at night that is very illuminated with flood lights,” Armstrong would write later.
Using a “Brooklyn clothesline” pulley, Aldrin sent down a Hasselblad color camera to Armstrong, who began taking photos. Then Armstrong used a handled scooper with a bag on the end to collect some rocks and soil, a contingency sample in case the EVA had to be cut short.
Twenty minutes after Armstrong’s first step, Aldrin descended the ladder and joined him. “Beautiful view!” he said, standing on the footpad. The former pole vaulter jumped back up to the last rung just to show how easy it was.
“Isn’t that something? Magnificent sight out here,” Armstrong said.
Aldrin looked around and drank in the alien landscape. “Magnificent desolation,” he said. Then he peed in his pants—a lunar first, he would claim later. Fortunately, he was wearing a urine-collection device.
While Armstrong set up the TV camera on a tripod sixty feet from the LM, Aldrin began experimenting with various kinds of gaits: a two-legged kangaroo hop, a long, stiff-legged skip, and the easy lope Armstrong had settled on. They examined the LM for any fuel leakage or damage but saw none. Armstrong read aloud the words on the plaque attached to the LM leg, then they got back to work. They had several jobs scheduled and not much time to do them—and Mission Control didn’t want them to tax themselves; the memory of those exhausting Gemini space walks was still vivid. Armstrong collected more rocks while Aldrin set up one of the three main experiments, a solar-wind collector.
Next up was an American flag, placed thirty feet in front of the LM. They pounded in the metal staff about six inches—just enough to keep it standing—then pulled out the telescoping crossbar on top to keep the banner extended. They couldn’t get it out all the way, which lent the flag a wavy appearance. Buzz stood back and saluted it. Five minutes later, there was an interruption to their schedule—a surprise.
CapCom Bruce McCandless said, “The president of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”
Richard Nixon had been watching the TV broadcast with Frank Borman. He’d had little to do with the Apollo program, which had come about because of two of his bitter rivals, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, though he’d been gracious enough to phone and congratulate Johnson and Mamie Eisenhower, the late president’s widow. NASA had asked him if he would make a call to the astronauts if they could work it out, and no politician would have refused this stage and this audience. “Hello, Neil and Buzz,” Nixon said. “I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made.” The president kept it short; he congratulated them and ended with “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.”
Armstrong thanked him, and both men saluted the flag. Then it was back to the checklist sewn onto each man’s left gauntlet. Armstrong continued to photograph while Aldrin set up the other two experiments: a passive seismometer, which would detect and transmit any lunar tremors, and a set of panels that would reflect lasers aimed from Earth and, when received back, would measure the exact distance from the Earth to the moon. Armstrong decided to visit a crater about sixty-five yards east, and he picked up some interesting-looking rocks around its edge. They would prove to be the most geologically fascinating moon material the mission would return to Earth.
Then it was time to return to the LM. Aldrin was halfway up the ladder when Armstrong called up to him. “Buzz? How about that package out of your sleeve? Get that?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll get it. When I get up there.”
“Want it now?”
“Guess so.”
Aldrin pulled out a small white cloth pouch and tossed it down. They didn’t want to make a big deal out of its contents, but there was one last thing they needed to do. Inside the pouch was an Apollo 1 patch that had belonged to Scott Grissom, Gus’s oldest son; a metal case containing a half-dollar-size silicon disk with goodwill messages from seventy-three countries etched into it; two medals commemorating Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin, a nod of respect to their rivals; and a tiny gold olive branch.
The pouch landed in the lunar dust near Armstrong. With his right boot, Armstrong nudged it under the ladder. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Aldrin said, thinking about Ed White, his squadron mate in Germany who had talked to him about becoming an astronaut. Then Aldrin clambered up to the porch and went through the hatch. After shuttling up the cameras and two airtight rock boxes, Armstrong followed him. Eleven minutes after midnight, he closed and secured the hatch. They pressurized the cabin and stowed the moon rocks—forty-eight pounds of them—then depressurized, reopened the hatch, and tossed out everything they wouldn’t need again: backpacks, heavy boots, a spare Hasselblad, and any refuse they could find, though they couldn’t do much about all the lunar dust they had dragged in on their suits. It looked like charcoal and smelled like wet ashes or spent gunpowder. For what they hoped would be the last time, they secured the hatch and repressurized.
Then it was time for dinner—cocktail sausages and fruit punch—followed by bedtime. Mission Control signed off at 3:24 a.m.
The lunar module was designed for many purposes, but sleeping wasn’t one of them. The two astronauts kept their helmets on to avoid breathing in the moondust, which seemed to be everywhere. Aldrin curled up on the floor, his head on the right side. In the light gravity, he was fairly comfortable, though he couldn’t stretch out fully. Armstrong sat on the ascent-engine cover behind their stations a few feet above Aldrin, leaned his head back on a shelf, and rigged a sling for his feet from a waist tether that hung from the instrument panel. The position was tolerable, and he thought he could sleep there. They were both tired. It had been a long day, but a good one.
Neither of them slept well. They might have if it weren’t for all the warning and caution lights, the many illuminated switches, the light seeping in through the covered windows, and a small telescope that focused a bright light on Armstrong’s face. It was too cold, somewhere around sixty-one degrees, and adjusting the temperature controls only seemed to make it colder. And somewhere near Armstrong’s head there was a loud glycol oxygen pump.
While they drifted in and out of sleep, their thoughts were on the next day. There were several more go/no-go decision points to come in the flight, all of them dangerous, but only one hadn’t been attempted on a previous mission: the liftoff from the lunar surface. And unlike virtually every other system in the LM, there was no redundancy, no backup, for the ascent engine. Its thirty-five hundred pounds of thrust had to work tomorrow or they would be stuck on the moon and die when their oxygen ran out—about another twenty-four hours. The sixteen thrusters, clustered in four groups of four, could muster only one hundred pounds of thrust apiece, and only four of them provided lift; four hundred pounds was not nearly enough to get the five-ton LM off the lunar surface, even in the moon’s minimal gravity. But the engine had been designed to work as simply and reliably as possible. There were only four moving parts and no ignition system or fuel pumps; small explosive charges would open the valves to the tanks, and a pressurized helium system would force the hypergolic fuels together, at which point they would ignite spontaneously, even in the vacuum of space. In tests, this particular engine had never failed—but that was on Earth.
If it failed…Armstrong and Aldrin hadn’t discussed that turn of events, but if it happened, Aldrin had already decided that he’d work on the problem until the lack of oxygen caused him to fall asleep. There were other, much quicker, ways to die: they could depressurize the cabin or go outside, then unplug their spacesuits’ oxygen-inlet hoses or unlock their helmets. In the airless vacuum, they would lose consciousness in fifteen seconds at most, and death would follow a few minutes after as the gases in their bodies quickly expanded and liquids vaporized, leaving shriveled, bone-dry corpses.
Another problem—one that could have been calamitous—was being addressed. As Aldrin had prepared to retire, he’d noticed a small piece of black plastic on the floor. He looked at the rows of circuit breakers on his side and found the broken one. It was part of the ascent-engine arming circuit breaker, which would supply electricity to the engine before they pushed the final button to start it. If this circuit breaker was not pushed in and engaged—and right now it wasn’t—the engine could not be activated. Aldrin realized he must have hit it with his backpack at some point. He told Mission Control. When he was informed that they’d find a work-around for it, he told them he had a plastic felt-tip pen he could use to push the remaining part of the breaker in; it would fit right into the slot. Mission Control told him to hold off until morning.
After the landing the previous day, Kranz had asked Steve Bales and a few other flight controllers to join him in the regular post-shift press conference. Bales almost nodded off in it. He got out as fast as he could and went up to the flight controller lounge, sat down in a chair, and didn’t move for thirty minutes. Then the rest of the descent team started showing up. A few hours later, they all watched the EVA on TV. Once the flag was planted, Bales headed across the hall to the bunk room and quickly fell asleep.
He was on console again for the ascent—he was the only controller on both the descent and ascent phases—and after breakfast in the cafeteria, he walked down to Mission Control to join Glynn Lunney’s Black team. The MOCR was already filling up; so was the VIP viewing room. No one had yet figured out the cause of the 1201 and 1202 alarms, which meant that they might recur during ascent through docking—the onboard computer would be even busier than yesterday. Bales and his team had prepared backup procedures for several computer-failure scenarios. He hoped they wouldn’t be needed.
Twenty minutes before liftoff, Jack Garman, in the staff support room, got on the GUIDO loop. A large MIT team in Boston had studied the problem all night and thought they had the answer—the rendezvous radar. To avoid risking a similar alarm scenario during the ascent, the crew would need to put the radar in the manual position, not the automatic position it had been in during the descent.
All flight controllers hated last-minute changes, but Bales hated them more than most. He said, “What the hell, Jack? Now? Here we are twenty minutes before liftoff, this is our procedure. And we’re gonna change a thing now?”
Garman said, “Steve, they don’t have time to discuss the details. They feel this is absolutely the best way to do it.”
Bales said, “Well…I gotta believe them.” He passed the message on to Lunney. The flight director wasn’t pleased about the late input, but he told the CapCom to share the message with the crew.
At 9:32 a.m., six hours after Mission Control had signed off for the night, the shift CapCom, Ron Evans, gave them a wakeup call. Liftoff was scheduled for a little after noon, when Columbia would be close overhead. Eagle’s crew spent the next couple of hours preparing, going over checklists, and verifying that the many circuit breakers and switches were in the correct positions. The first change to the schedule was an important one: Evans told them to turn off the rendezvous radar—they didn’t want to take the chance that it would overload the computer again. Then Aldrin used his felt-tip pen to push in the ascent-engine arming circuit breaker. Moments later, Mission Control confirmed that the circuitry was fine.
An hour and fifty-seven minutes before Eagle’s liftoff, Luna 15, the Russian probe, crashed about seven hundred miles northeast of Tranquility Base into the Sea of Crises, under which a mascon lay. According to Soviet plans, a lone cosmonaut was supposed to have landed in the vicinity in the not-too-distant future on a mission that would never happen. Though TASS quickly announced that the research probe had been successful, few in the West believed it. Whether the crash was due to faulty hardware, incorrect or out-of-date lunar-altitude information, or the mascon, no one—not even the Soviets—would ever know.
At 12:37 p.m., after some adjustments had been made to make sure the fuel tanks were properly pressurized, Evans told Eagle’s crew, “You’re cleared for takeoff.”
“Roger, understand,” said Aldrin. “We’re number one on the runway.”
Seventeen minutes later, at 12:54 p.m., Aldrin said, “Nine, eight, seven, six, five”—and then, as both he and Armstrong began to push buttons and flick switches—“Abort stage, engine arm, ascent, proceed.”
Explosive devices separated the ascent stage, the top half of the lunar module, from the descent stage, and the engine fired and lifted them away as dust, debris, and shredded Mylar flew in every direction. Aldrin looked out his window just long enough to see the flag fall to the ground. The liftoff was smooth and swift, and a few seconds later, Armstrong said, “The Eagle has wings,” and the LM pitched over forty-five degrees to begin moving horizontally. “We’re going right down U.S. One,” he said as they passed over crater after crater.
Seven minutes after liftoff, the engine cut off. It had done its job, which was to get Eagle up high enough and going fast enough to overcome the moon’s meager gravity and reach orbit.
Above them, Collins caught sight in his sextant of a small blinking light in the darkness of space: Eagle. Just before Apollo 11 had launched on July 16, he’d received a telegram from a friend: BEST WISHES FOR A SAFE JOURNEY. DON’T FORGET TO WAIT FOR YOUR PASSENGERS WHILE THEY ARE OUT WALKING. He hadn’t forgotten. The thought of having to leave his shipmates and return home alone had terrified him for the past six months. He’d been waiting almost a full day for their return, and he’d been trying not to think about the thousand things that could go wrong with the LM. Fortunately, he’d had little time to worry; there were eight hundred and fifty separate computer keystrokes necessary to effect rendezvous with Eagle, and he’d been busy since breakfast. He’d hardly breathed during their seven-minute ascent. Now, a couple of hours later, he was still on edge. Just in case, he kept his notebook containing the eighteen options available if it failed close at hand. He prayed he wouldn’t have to consult it.
Rendezvous had been successfully performed several times in Gemini and Apollo, but it still demanded several tricky maneuvers and perfectly timed acceleration and braking burns. But Armstrong had achieved the very first docking in space, in Gemini 8, and he had practiced rendezvous and docking many more times for this mission. Over the next three hours, both he and Collins carefully maneuvered their spacecraft to allow Eagle to catch up with Columbia.
As they approached, their relief at the successful launch—and their confidence in the rest of the flight—was evident.
“One of those two bright spots is bound to be Mike,” Armstrong said.
“How about picking the closest one?” said Aldrin.
“Good idea,” said Armstrong.
The alignment looked good, so he engaged the three small capture latches and flipped a switch to draw the two spacecraft together. But the alignment had been off, maybe by fifteen degrees, and the LM started yawing dangerously to Collins’s right. The automatic retraction cycle took six to eight seconds, and Collins couldn’t stop it or release the LM. If Eagle continued to twist around, the docking equipment might be damaged, and they’d have to try a tricky EVA of both crewmates from Eagle to Columbia. Collins worked his right-hand controller and managed to swing Columbia around with Eagle until they were aligned and he heard a bang and the docking latches slammed shut. They were safely docked.
Almost two hours later, after Armstrong and Aldrin had disabled several of the LM’s systems and prepared Eagle for its jettison, they doffed their helmets and gloves and crawled through the pressurized tunnel into the command-module cabin. Aldrin came through first. Collins floated up to meet him, and when Aldrin emerged with a big smile on his face, Collins grabbed his head and barely resisted the urge to kiss his forehead. He shook his hand, then Armstrong’s. All three were almost giddy.
They transferred the rock boxes and camera-film cartridges into Columbia and used a small vacuum to clean the moondust they had tracked in. Then Eagle’s crew bade farewell to their ship, Collins flipped a few switches, and Columbia separated from it. The LM would circle the moon until its orbit deteriorated and it smashed into the lunar surface.
At 11:10 p.m., just before Columbia disappeared around the far side of the moon for the last time, the White team’s CapCom, Charlie Duke, said, “You’re go for TEI.”
Behind the moon again, on the command-service module’s thirty-first orbit, it was time for the transearth injection burn of 2:28. It would increase their speed by 2,236 miles an hour, enough to free them from the moon’s gravity and send them back to Earth. Collins keyed in the command, counted down, and pushed the button to ignite the engine. The burn went perfectly, and when the spacecraft came in sight of Earth twenty minutes later, Armstrong said, “Hey, Charlie boy, looking good here. That was a beautiful burn. They don’t come any finer.”
Their course was set for home. Like the voyage out, the transearth coast was uneventful, almost routine. The spacecraft was put into its broadside rotisserie roll to distribute the sun’s heat. Over the next three days, the crewmen caught up on their sleep, did the usual housekeeping chores, listened to the news from Houston, put on a couple of TV shows for the folks back home, and took turns photographing the dwindling moon and the approaching Earth. The charms of weightlessness and the wonder of space were wearing off, and the crew was ready to get back. In the background they heard the steady whirring, gurgling, and humming of the spacecraft and the music cassettes they played; they talked infrequently. Even after the adventure they had just shared, there were no deep or intimate discussions. Though they had worked superbly as a team, they were still not and would never be close friends.
After a brief midcourse correction burn of just eleven seconds, all that remained was to reenter Earth’s atmosphere without burning to cinders; they would be traveling at almost 25,000 miles per hour and would have to slow significantly. That meant entering at the correct angle of attack in the command module—the service module had been jettisoned and would burn up in its own reentry.
At 11:50 a.m. Houston time on July 24, the ninth day of their journey, the eleven-thousand-pound Apollo 11 command module—all that was left of the spaceship’s massive six-and-a-half-million-pound stack of three booster stages and three modules—plummeted through the atmosphere upside down with its heat shield ablating in orange-yellow cinders, deployed its two drogue and three main parachutes, then splashed down hard in the mid-Pacific, about eight hundred and twenty-five nautical miles southwest of Hawaii and just thirteen miles from the prime recovery ship, the carrier USS Hornet. A helicopter dropped an inflatable raft and three frogmen into the water, and one of them threw three biological isolation garments into the open hatch to begin the back-contamination precautions. The astronauts donned the BIGs, jumped into the raft, and, as rehearsed, began spraying and scrubbing themselves down with disinfectant. They were reeled into the chopper one by one and flown to the carrier, where they were immediately escorted into the Airstream trailer converted into a mobile quarantine facility.
In Houston, almost two hundred people packed into Mission Control for the splashdown. When one of the side display screens showed TV coverage of the astronauts on the carrier, the MOCR doors were opened, men poured in from the other two shifts and from all the SSRs, and the room erupted as the controllers jumped to their feet and everyone cheered, many waving small American flags and puffing on cigars. Then the center screen displayed the text of Kennedy’s challenge—I BELIEVE THAT THIS NATION SHOULD COMMIT ITSELF TO ACHIEVING THE GOAL, BEFORE THIS DECADE IS OUT, OF LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON AND RETURNING HIM SAFELY TO THE EARTH—above the month and year of the speech, May 1961. On the screen to the right, the Apollo 11 emblem flashed below this legend: TASK ACCOMPLISHED…JULY 1969. Those two screens remained up long after everyone had left.
After each of them had a quick shower and shave, the three astronauts walked to the rear of the Airstream trailer, where the president was waiting outside to talk to them through a small window. “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” he said, and on a hopeful note, he added, “As a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together.” Then it was on to Pearl Harbor, where a cargo plane waited to take the astronauts to Houston.
The second evening on the carrier, Collins entered the command module through the tunnel connecting it to their trailer, and with a ballpoint pen, above the sextant mount on the wall of the lower equipment bay, he scrawled this legend:
Spacecraft 107—alias Apollo 11
alias “Columbia”
The Best Ship to Come Down the Line
God Bless Her
Michael Collins
CMP
Back in Houston, Steve Bales had left after the ascent shift, his last one on Apollo 11. He went home and slept for a long time. The next day, he drove back to work and walked into the staff support room. Jack Garman was there. Bales walked over to Garman, shook his hand, and said, “Jack, thanks for everything.”
Then the two engineers got back to their jobs. At that point, the Apollo 11 crew was still in space, and Garman was providing backroom support for the onboard computer. Bales had to start preparing for the next mission, Apollo 12, which was scheduled for a moon landing in November. But before he did, he called his parents in Iowa. They were enormously proud of the part he’d played in the flight, but his mother said what made her the happiest was that they’d finally been able to see him in some of the live TV shots of Mission Control. Until the landing, they’d never been able to spot their boy.
The night of the splashdown, there were parties up and down NASA Road 1 and at almost every bar and restaurant in the vicinity. The flight controllers gathered at the Singing Wheel. At the Nassau Bay Resort, three thousand NASA workers gathered around the large swimming pool, drinking and feasting on barbecue while bikini-clad go-go dancers gyrated to the accompaniment of a rock band called the Astronauts. Many of the guests ended up in the pool, fully dressed; at some point late in the festivities, the hotel piano was thrown in. At four a.m., police officers gently rounded up the last of the revelers.
The Fagets, Gilruths, Lows, and Krafts had dinner together at one of their favorite restaurants, Mike’s Rendezvous, in the nearby town of Algoa, southwest of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Along with other NASA folks there, they celebrated the successful mission—and the successful answer to President Kennedy’s challenge issued eight years ago. America, and the NACA-nuts, had triumphed.
On Sunday, July 27, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins arrived in the large quarantine facility at the Manned Spacecraft Center to find a flood of goodwill letters and messages from around the world. One telegram of congratulations began “Dear Colleagues” and was signed by every living cosmonaut who had flown in space. The Cold War had been thawing for a while and would continue to do so.
The astronauts and a dozen or so others—doctors, chefs, technicians, a NASA PR officer, a journalist, even a janitor—spent the next two weeks there. Between daylong debriefs and endless postflight reports and reviews, they unwound in various ways, from making phone calls and having window visits with their families to watching recent Hollywood movies shown on a large screen. During their stay, several mice had been injected with lunar soil to test for negative reaction; when none of them died and the astronauts and the dozen or so other people in the facility with them didn’t get sick, it was determined there was no risk of contamination. At nine p.m. on Sunday, August 10, they were all allowed to leave the facility and resume their lives.
After spending some quiet time reuniting with their families at home, the astronauts couldn’t avoid the spotlight. There were parades galore, including the traditional ticker-tape celebration down Broadway, and countless parties, dinners, and celebrations, with interviews and press conferences sandwiched in. In mid-September, the crew addressed a joint session of Congress. Then it was a round-the-world goodwill tour with their wives: twenty-eight cities in twenty-five countries in thirty-eight days, meeting kings and queens, shahs and dictators, presidents and prime ministers. By the time the crew returned home, they understood that their lives would never be the same.
A few years after he walked on the moon, Neil Armstrong agreed to appear in a documentary. The filmmakers shot his scenes one afternoon at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center museum in Huntsville, Alabama, where von Braun, his Peenemünde team, and fifteen thousand other Americans had developed the Saturn V that took Armstrong and his shipmates to the moon. After the film crew had interviewed Armstrong and packed up and left, museum director Ed Buckbee, whom Armstrong had known from the days when Buckbee was a public affairs official with NASA, asked him what he’d like to do: Hold a press conference, sign some books, meet the press? Armstrong said he just wanted to look through the museum. Buckbee took him around.
When they got to the lunar-module simulator, which the museum had received from NASA—the same one Armstrong had trained on for Apollo 11 at the Manned Spacecraft Center—Armstrong stopped. He said, “Can I get in?”
“Sure,” Buckbee said.
Armstrong stepped in, moved over to the commander’s position, and looked over the control panel. He flicked on the power. “Let me see if I remember my procedures,” he said, and for the next forty minutes, he flipped switches, pushed buttons, and maneuvered his hand controllers as he went through a few simulations. When he was done, he turned the power off, got out, thanked Buckbee, looked through the rest of the museum, and headed home.