The Apollo 11 astronauts (from left to right): Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.
FIRST LANDING ON THE MOON
Between July 16 and 24, 1969, the world held its breath and watched spellbound as one of humankind’s most significant and audacious endeavors took place—the first attempt to land a human being on another celestial body. Despite the setbacks and concerns of earlier missions, Apollo 11 was a triumph for all involved. Yet even during this momentous event, the Soviet Union put in place a plan to try to upstage the American effort.
Neil Armstrong was told that his mission, Apollo 11, would be the first to attempt a lunar landing. He recalls:
During the flight of Apollo 8 I had three or four meetings with Deke Slayton about, first, would I take the third one down to the surface and then we had a lot of talks about who might be available and be right to be on that crew, that sort of thing.
The crew of Apollo 11—Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins—were introduced to the press on January 9, 1969, and immediately the assembled reporters got down to the big question: “Which of you gentlemen will be the first man to step out onto the lunar surface?” Over the years Aldrin has said that he would have preferred to have flown on a later mission. Writing in Return to Earth he said:
I would have preferred to go on a later flight. Not only would there be considerably less public attention, but the flight would have been more complicated, more adventurous, and a far greater test of my abilities than the first landing.
The Apollo 11 astronauts (from left to right): Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.
It is clear that for the first few months of 1969 Aldrin believed he would be first out of the Lunar Module. He said he had never given it much thought and that he had naturally presumed that he would be first. After all there were precedents, beginning with Ed White’s spacewalk, when the commander of the flight stayed in the spacecraft while his partner carried out the excursions. Aldrin was perhaps right to believe it; NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight told several people, including several members of the press, that he would be the first on the Moon.
Word began to filter out, however, that it would be Armstrong. Armstrong was a civilian. Buzz was angry, considering it an insult to the service. He was technically still a member of the air force, although he had not served for ten years except to maintain his flying hours. So Aldrin approached Armstrong about the issue. Aldrin wrote later (although he claimed it was done by his coauthor):
He equivocated a minute or so, then with a coolness I had not known he possessed he said that the decision was quite historical and he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of going first.
Armstrong says he cannot remember that conversation. Aldrin talked to his colleagues, but for some of them that was seen as lobbying behind the scenes to be the first. Gene Cernan, quoted in Armstrong’s biography, says:
He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spaceflight Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious—that he, the Lunar Module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil Armstrong, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since learning that Apollo 11 would attempt the first Moon landing, Buzz had pursued this peculiar effort to sneak his way into history, and was met at every turn by angry stares and muttered insults from his fellow astronauts. How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making such a fool of himself is beyond me.
Later Aldrin said he had given the wrong impression and that he really did not want to be first. It was up to Deke Slayton to put a stop to the talk. Slayton said that as Armstrong was a member of the second intake of astronauts, the group before Aldrin joined, he should have priority. Aldrin later said he was fine with that but felt uncomfortable that nobody else knew.
On April 14 the speculation came to an end. At a press conference George Low said: “The plans call for Mr. Armstrong to be the first man out after the Moon landing. A few minutes later Colonel Aldrin will follow.” Aldrin later said he believed that the physical layout of the Lunar Module dictated that Armstrong went out first. Aldrin, the Lunar Module pilot, was on the right. But that was not the case. The layout was not the reason. In his biography Armstrong said:
In my mind the important thing was that we got four aluminum legs safely down on the surface of the Moon while we were still inside the craft. But it could technically have been Buzz. Just move before you put the backpacks on.
Later Chris Kraft explained NASA’s thinking. He said that they knew damn well that the first guy on the Moon was going to be a Lindbergh. Neil was calm, quiet and had absolute confidence:
We knew he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego. The most he ever said about walking on the Moon was that it might have been that he wanted to be the first test pilot to walk upon the Moon. If you would have said to him, you are going to be the most famous human being on Earth for the rest of your life, he would have answered that he didn’t want to be the first man on the Moon. On the other hand, Aldrin desperately wanted the honor and wasn’t quiet in letting it be known. Neil said nothing.
Kraft said that nobody criticized Buzz but that they did not want him to be the man who would become legend: “The hatch design didn’t come into it. That was a rationalization, a solace for Buzz.”
“Buzz” Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Behind him is the Lunar Module Eagle. To his right, the Solar Wind Composition experiment has been deployed.
The Lunar Module—Eagle—with Armstrong and Aldrin on board, separated from the Command Module—Columbia—with Michael Collins on board, on the far side of the Moon 100 hours and 12 minutes into the Apollo 11 mission. Armstrong said: “The Eagle has wings.” Shortly afterward they fired the Eagle’s descent engine for 30 seconds to put them on the path to the surface.
Kranz: The spacecraft is now behind the Moon, and the control team, the adrenaline, I mean, just really was—no matter how you tried to hide it, the fact is that you were really starting to pump. It seems that every controller has a common set of characteristics, is they’ve got to go to the bathroom. I mean, it’s just to the point where you just need this break. That’s all there is to it. It’s literally a rush to get to the bathroom. You’re standing in line, and for a change, there isn’t the normal banter, no jokes, etc. I mean, the level of preoccupation in these people—and these are kids. The average age of my team was 26 years old. Basically I’m 36; I’m ten years older. I’m the oldest guy on this entire team.
This day, is either going to land, abort, or crash. Those are the only three alternatives. So it’s really starting to sink in, and I have this feeling I’ve got to talk to my people. The neat thing about the Mission Control is we have a very private voice loop that is never recorded and never goes anywhere. It’s what we call AFD (Assistant Flight Director) Conference Loop. It was put in there for very specific purposes, because we know that any of the common voice loops can be piped into any of the offices at Johnson. They can be piped into the media, they can be piped into the viewing room, and what we want is an incredibly private loop where we can talk to the controllers when we need to, but in particular it was set up for debriefing, because debriefings are brutal.
So I called the controllers, told my team: “Okay, all flight controllers, listen up and go over to AFD Conference.” And all of a sudden, the people in the viewing room are used to hearing all these people talking, and all of a sudden there’s nobody talking anymore. But I had to tell these kids how proud I was of the work that they had done, that from this day, from the time that they were born, they were destined to be here and they’re destined to do this job, and it’s the best team that has ever been assembled, and today, without a doubt, we are going to write the history books and we’re going to be the team that takes an American to the Moon, and that whatever happens on this day, whatever decisions they make, whatever decisions as a team we make, I will always be standing with them, no one’s ever going to second-guess us. So that’s it.
We can’t communicate to them; they can’t communicate to us. The telemetry is very broken. We have to call Mike Collins in the Command Module to relay data down into the Lunar Module, and immediately this mission role has come into mind because it’s decision time, go/no go time. It just continues, broken, through about the first five minutes after we’ve acquired the data, but we get enough data so the controllers can make their calls, their decisions. Are we good? Are we properly configured? Are we basically at the point in the procedures where we should be?
We move closer now to what we call the “powered descent go/no go.” This is where it’s now time to say are we going down to the lunar surface or not. Now, I have one wave-off opportunity, and just only one, and if I wave off on this powered descent, then I have one shot in the next revolution and then the lunar mission’s all over. So you don’t squander your go/no gos when you’ve only got one more shot at it.
We lose all data again. So I delay the go/no go with the team for roughly about 40 seconds, had to get data back briefly, and I make the decision to press on; we’re going to go on this one here. So I have my controllers make their go/no gos on the last valid data set that they had. I know it’s stale, but the fact is that it’s not time to wave off. So, each of the controllers goes through and assesses his systems right on down the line.
We get a go except for one where we get a qualified go, and that’s Steve Bales down at the guidance officer console, because he comes on the loop, and he says: “Flight, we’re out on our radial velocity, we’re halfway to our abort limits. I don’t know what’s caused it, but I’m going to keep watching it.” So all of a sudden, boom! We’ve sure got my attention when you say you’re halfway to your abort limits. We didn’t know this until after the mission, but the crew had not fully depressed the tunnel between the two spacecrafts. They should have gone down to a vacuum in there, and they weren’t. So when they blew the bolts, when they released the latches between the spacecraft, there was a little residual air in there, sort of like popping a cork on a bottle. It gave us velocity separating these two spacecraft. So now we’re moving a little bit faster by the order of fractions of feet per second than we should have at this time. So we don’t know it, but this is what’s causing the problem. It’s now a problem.
In the meantime, we’ve had an electrical problem show up on board the spacecraft, and we’ve determined that this is a bad meter that we’ve got for the AC instrumentation. AC, alternating current, is very important on board the spacecraft, because it powers our gyro’s landing radar right on down the line. We’re now going to be looking at this from the standpoint of the ground so that Buzz won’t have to look after it.
All through this time, my mind is really running. Is this enough data to keep going, going, going, going? Because I know what I’m going to do in this role. I’m going to be second-guessed, but that isn’t bothering me. We now get to the point where it’s time to start engines. We’ve got telemetry back again. As soon as the engine starts, we lose it again. This is an incredibly important time to have our telemetry because as soon as we get acceleration, we settle our propellants in the tanks, and now we can measure them, but the problem is, we’ve missed this point. So now we have to go with what we think are the quantities loaded prelaunch. So we’re now back to nominals. So we’re in the process of continuing down.
The capcom for the landing was Charles Duke, requested by Armstrong. Duke recalls: “The communication dropouts were a nuisance more than a danger, but a computer problem was a showstopper.”
Armstrong: You’re always concerned when any kind of alarm comes on, but it wasn’t a serious concern because there wasn’t anything obviously wrong. The vehicle was flying well, it was going down the trajectory we expected, no abnormalities in anything that we saw, other than the computer said: “There’s a problem, and it’s not my fault.” The people here on the ground were right on top of that, and of course, the computer continued in a contrary manner periodically all the way to the surface. But my own feeling was, as long as everything was going well and looked right, the engine was operating right, I had control, and we weren’t getting into any unusual attitudes or things that looked like they were out of place, I would be in favor of continuing, no matter what the computer was complaining about.
Kranz: So now we’re fighting—we’ve got this new landing area that we’re going to be going into, we’re fighting the communications, we’ve got the problem with the communications, and we’ve got the AC problem that we’re now tracking for the crew, and now a new problem creeps into this thing, which is this series of program alarms. There’s two types of alarms. These are the exact ones that we blew in the training session on our final training day, twelve-oh-one. Twelve-oh-one is what we call a bail-out type of alarm. It’s telling us the computer doesn’t have enough time to do all of the jobs that it has to do, and it’s now moving into a priority scheme where it’s going to fire jets, it’s going to do navigation, it’s going to provide guidance, but it’s basically telling us to do something because it’s running out of time to accomplish all the functions it should.
We tell them we’re going the alarms. We tell them to accept radar, go on the alarms, you know, radar’s good, getting close—you know, we’re continuing to work our way down to the surface. Now, fortunately the communications have improved dramatically. Communications are no longer a concern of mine, but they were for about the first six or eight minutes of our descent. But now we’re about four minutes off the surface. Communications are just a dream.
Hovering above the lunar surface, Armstrong looked for a landing site. He had taken over manual control at about 152 m (500 feet), and the first thing he did was to slow the rate of descent while maintaining his forward speed. There were huge blocks and an extensive boulder field below him. They could not land there, they had to press on. Ahead there appeared to be a more open area.
Armstrong: We could have tried to land there, and we might have gotten away with it. It was a fairly steep slope and it was covered with very big rocks, and it just wasn’t a good place to go. You know, if I’d run out of fuel, why, I would have put down right there, but if I had any choice of a more promising spot, I was going to take it. There were some attractive areas far more level, far less occupied by boulders and things, a half mile ahead or so, so that’s where I went.
Duke: When they pitched over to look at the lunar surface, they didn’t recognize anything and they were going into this big boulder field and Neil was flying a trajectory that we’d never flown in the simulator. It was something we’d never seen. And, you know, we kept trying to figure out, “What was this going? What’s going on?” You know, he’s just whizzing across the surface at about 400 feet, and all of a sudden he—the thing rears back and he slows it down and then comes down. And I’m sitting there, sweating out.
Kranz: Some person—and we’ve never been able to identify it in the voice loop—comes up and says: “This is just like a simulation,” and everybody relaxes. Here you’re fighting problems that are just unbelievable and you keep working your way to the surface, to the surface, to the surface. So we get down to the point—and we know it’s tough down there, because the toe of the footprint is really a boulder field, so Armstrong has to pick out a landing site, and he’s very close to the surface. Instead of moving slowly horizontal, he’s moving very rapidly, and ten and 15 feet per second, I mean, we’ve never seen anybody flying it this way in training.
Now Carlton calls out: “Sixty seconds,” and we’re still not close to the surface yet, and now I’m thinking: “Okay, we’ve got this last altitude hack from the crew, which is about 150 feet, which now means we’ve got to average roughly about three feet per second rate of descent, and I see Armstrong’s at zero. So I say: ‘Boy, he’s going to really have to let the bottom out of this pretty soon.”
Once Armstrong had chosen his spot it was necessary to lower the Lunar Module quite slowly. They got to within 15 m (50 feet) of the surface and inwardly Armstrong knew they had done it. Later Kranz said: “I never dreamed we would still be flying this close to empty. When Duke called: ‘Thirty seconds,’ Neil wasn’t worried about the fuel. They landed the simulators with 15 seconds of fuel left all the time.”
Armstrong: There was a lot of concern about coming close to running out of fuel, and I was very cognizant of that. But I did know that if I could have my speed stabilized and attitude stabilized, I could fall from a fairly good height, perhaps maybe 40 feet or more in the low lunar gravity, the gear would absorb that much fall. So I was perhaps probably less concerned than a lot of people watching down on Earth.
Then Aldrin said: “Contact light.” These were the first words ever said on the lunar surface, spoken as a probe from one of the legs registered with the ground. A few seconds later Armstrong said: “Shutdown.”
Kranz: Well, what happens, we have a three-foot-long probe stick underneath each of the landing pads. When one of those touches the lunar surface, it turns on a blue light in the cockpit, and when it turns on that blue light, that’s lunar contact, their job is to shut the engine down, and they literally fall the last three feet to the surface of the Moon. So you hear the: “Lunar contact,” and then you hear: “ACA [Attitude Control Assembly] out of Detent [out of center position].” They’re in the process of shutting down the engine at the time that Carlton says: “Fifteen seconds,” and then you hear Carlton come back almost immediately after that 15 seconds call and say: “Engine shutdown,” and the crew is now continuing this process of going through the procedures, shutting down the engine.
Duke: Everybody erupted in Mission Control and then his famous lines about, “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” And so we made it, you know, and it was really a great release. People cheering and all. I was so excited, I couldn’t get out “Tranquility Base.” It came out sort of like; “Twangquility.” And so it was: “Roger, Houston. Twangquility Base here.” Let’s see, what did I say? No, it was: “Roger, Twangquility Base. We copy you down. We’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. But we’re breathing again.” And I believe that’s true—was a true statement. It was spontaneous, but it was true. I mean, we were—I was holding my breath, you know, because we were close.’
Kranz: In the meantime we’re just busier than hell doing our stay/no stay kind of stuff. We’re in between T-two and T-three, and we use a cryogenic bottle, super critical helium, to pressurize our descent engine. Again, one of the things you can never test, the heat soak-back from the engine and the surface now is raising the pressure in that bottle very dramatically, and now we’re wondering if this damned thing’s going to explode and what the hell are we going to do about it. The fortunate thing was that they had designed some relief valves. They had a pressure disk in there. If the pressure got so high, it actually blows the disk and the valve, rather than blowing the bottle up. So we’re all sweating this thing out here. We’re trying to get everything resynced for the next liftoff, and it’s just time, which is almost two hours, between T-two and T-three stay/no stay, it just goes through incredibly quick. Throughout this whole period of time, except for the instant of hearing the cheering, you never got a chance to really think: “We’ve landed on the Moon.”
Afterward Armstrong reflected upon his choice of words for the stepping out on the surface: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”
Armstrong: I thought about it after landing, and because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on but just something that was kind of passing around subliminally or in the background. But it, you know, was a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something. Why, it wasn’t a very complex thing. It was what it was. I didn’t want to be dumb, but it was contrived in a way, and I was guilty of that.
While history was being made with Apollo 11, the Soviets were also trying to land Luna 15 on the Moon in an attempt to upstage it. The responsibility for the Luna 15 mission fell on the shoulders of First Deputy Minister of General Machine Building Georgi Tyulin, a 54-year-old retired artillery general. Tyulin ran into trouble with the spacecraft after only one day of flight. Controllers detected unusually high temperatures in the propellant tanks that would be used for take-off from the lunar surface after the collection of the lunar sample. After a quick analysis, a makeshift solution was proposed whereby the spacecraft would be turned in such a way that its suspect tank would lie in the Sun’s shadow at all times.
Luna 15 fired its main engine to enter lunar orbit at 1 p.m. Moscow Time on July 11, five days before Apollo 11 took off. Its second orbit correction on July 19 would position the craft over its landing corridor. However, Soviet scientists did not anticipate the ruggedness of the lunar surface, and mission controllers spent three or four days finding a suitable landing site. Originally, their plan was to put down the lander less than two hours after Apollo 11’s touchdown, but the delays prevented that. Controllers finally commanded Luna 15 to fire its descent engine at 6:47 p.m. Moscow Time on July 21, a little more than two hours prior to Armstrong and Aldrin’s planned liftoff from the Moon. They followed the signals from Luna 15 as it descended. Six minutes before it was scheduled to land, all data suddenly ceased. Later analysis showed that the spacecraft had hit the side of a mountain. TASS announced that Luna 15’s research program had been completed and the spacecraft had reached the Moon in the preset area. But even if Luna 15 had worked perfectly and had returned with a soil sample it would have returned to Earth two hours and four minutes after the splashdown of Apollo 11. The race was over before it had begun.
The evening after the Apollo 11 Moon landing someone placed a bouquet of flowers next to the grave of President John F. Kennedy at the Arlington National Cemetery. Attached was a note saying: “Mr. President. The Eagle has landed.”
TIMELINE
| 1969 | January 9 The US astronauts who will attempt a Moon landing—Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins—are introduced to the press |
| April 14 It is announced that Neil Armstrong will be first astronaut out of the Lunar Module after the Moon landing | |
| July 16 Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Kennedy, destined for the Moon | |
| July 20 Lunar lander Eagle sets down on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. A few hours later, Armstrong, followed by Aldrin, leave their spacecraft to walk on the surface | |
| July 21 Luna 15, an unmanned Soviet craft sent to the Moon in an attempt to upstage the American endeavor, crashes into a lunar mountain | |
| July 24 Crew of Apollo 11 return and splash down safely in the ocean |
