Buzz Aldrin’s concern over who should be the first out did nothing to help the working relationship of the Apollo 11 crew. At the same time his sour feelings never seriously impaired the crew’s training for its historic mission because Armstrong’s stoic personality did not allow it to. If the commander had been a confrontational sort like Frank Borman or Alan Shepard, the situation with Aldrin might easily have turned highly injurious to the mission.
“Neil would have regarded that kind of infighting as sort of beneath him,” explains Mike Collins. Even if he had known about the behind-the-scenes campaigning by Buzz’s father, “Neil was not the sort that would have gotten into the fray and presented counterarguments. He always rose above internecine warfare of that kind.” Not only that, as Collins testifies. “I never heard Neil say a bad thing about Buzz. Never. I mean, what Neil thought about Buzz, God only knows. But their working relationship, as I saw it, was always extremely polite and, from Neil to Buzz, in no way critical.”
The training for the first Moon landing was intense enough to challenge the patience and goodwill of the entire NASA team, not just the Apollo 11 crew. Not only did the astronauts need to be made ready, so too did the entire NASA ground apparatus, including the Mission Control Center, the tracking network, the quarantine facility to house a crew that might bring back lunar “bugs,” not to mention the Saturn V rocket, Command Module No. 107, and Lunar Module No. 5. Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin trained fourteen-hour days, six days a week for six full months. They often worked another eight hours on Sundays.
Beginning January 15, 1969, until July 15, 1969, the day before the launch, the crew of Apollo 11 logged a total of 3,521 actual training hours. That equates to 126 hours per week, or 42 hours per crew member, in specified training programs and exercises. Roughly another 20 hours per week were taken up by reading, studying, doing paperwork, poring over mission plans and procedures, talking to colleagues, traveling to training facilities, suiting up and getting suits off, and other routine work. Armstrong and Aldrin logged 1,298 and 1,297 training hours, respectively, while Collins recorded some 370 hours less. Half of Collins’s hours came inside the CSM simulator, where he worked physically apart from Armstrong and Aldrin (though for special integrated simulations all three astronauts in the two different simulators would be connected to Mission Control). On the other hand, there were very few hours when Neil and Buzz were not working side by side. Nearly a third of their training time was inside the cramped quarters of the LM simulator, practicing the Moon landing they were about to make as a duo.
The overriding objective of Apollo 11 was to get the Moon landing done. Training for surface activities represented less than 14 percent of the astronauts’ time. That included preparing Armstrong and Aldrin to collect geological samples and to set up all the planned lunar surface experiments, as well as to learn how to handle the Extravehicular Mobile Unit (EMU). This vital piece of equipment, the EMU, was composed of all the protective apparel and paraphernalia worn during lunar surface work, including suit, helmet, gloves, outer boots, backpack, remote control, hoses, cables, liquid-cooled garment (LCG), outer visor, and so forth. During EMU training, the astronauts “checked out” every part of this assembly.
“We practiced the lunar surface work until we were reasonably confident in our ability to carry out the surface plan,” Armstrong states. “If the descent and the final approach to landing were rated a nine on a ten-point scale of difficulty, I would put the surface work down at a two. Not that there weren’t some high risks involved with it, because there were. Certainly, we were completely dependent on the integrity of our pressure suits, and there were significant questions about the thermal environment—whether we would have overheating problems, because it was going to be warm out there on the lunar surface, over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We did some of our surface simulation work in the altitude chamber, with thermal simulation, and those had worked well. So we reached a confidence level that it was going to work fine. I didn’t have a lot of concern whether we were getting enough lunar surface practice because we got plenty of practice on operating defective equipment. The only real concerns involved the unknowns that we couldn’t simulate, because we didn’t know what they were.
“In the end, the ground simulations proved to be pretty good even though the lunar gravity conditions could not be matched,” Armstrong continues. “The suits were pressurized and, when suits were inflated, they carried a lot of the weight, so the fact that we were going around with a hundred pounds or so of equipment on our backs wasn’t a problem. As for simulating the nature of the lunar terrain itself, despite photographs and data from the Surveyor spacecraft that had made soft landings on the Moon, no one knew precisely what the lunar surface would be like. Our guess was okay but not very much like the actual surface when we got there.”
Ever since the selection of the New Nine in 1962, “All of us were exposed over several years to Geology 101. We had very fine instructors who were very knowledgeable about astrogeology and selenology, the astronomical study of the Moon. We went to Hawaii, to Iceland, great places to focus on volcanic rocks. The assumption was that on the Moon we would encounter tectonic formations principally, or remnants of volcanic and tectonic lava flows, that sort of thing. I was very tempted to sneak a piece of limestone up there with us on Apollo 11 and bring it back as a sample. That would have upset a lot of apple carts! But we didn’t do it.”
Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a Harvard-trained geologist who had worked for the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, Montana, and Alaska, did a lot to prepare Armstrong and Aldrin for their lunar rock collecting. “Jack worked diligently and endlessly to make things a bit easier for us and tell us what was important,” Neil relates.
“There was little chance for Neil and Buzz to be trained in a systematic way,” Jack Schmitt explains. “Some of the geologists in NASA claimed that by the end of the training the astronauts received the equivalent of a master’s degree in geology. Well, even if they did, that’s not what you wanted. You wanted people to be able to be very focused on a particular set of tasks that had to be done, and you wanted them as knowledgeable as you could possibly make them in a short amount of time about the relevant geological aspects of their mission.”
Armstrong agrees that his geological training could have been more effective: “I don’t think we had much specific geological preparation for Apollo 11 itself, which differs from some of the later flights when crews were going into specific areas of the Moon with very specific geological goals. We were going into a mare, a lunar ‘sea,’ an area where the principal feature would just be the regolith and the accumulation of debris on the surface around the craters.”
Another reality for Apollo 11 was that Armstrong and Aldrin would not have much time to spend out on the lunar surface. “That was principally dictated by the fact that we didn’t know how long our supply of water for the cooling of our suits would last,” Armstrong explains. “Neither that nor our metabolic rate could be duplicated on Earth in a lunar gravity. The only way you could try to do it was in the zero-g airplane, the KC-135, but the flight times in those were so limited that we could not get realistic data. So it was just an unknown. The mission planners wanted to be conservative in their estimate. As it turned out, we were able to stay out a little bit longer than our plan stipulated. After getting back in the craft we drained the water tanks to see how much water remained. From that we got a useful data point against the time that we had been out.”
Though Armstrong enjoyed geology, he found the nature of the discipline a bit puzzling: “The geologists had a wonderful theory they called the ‘theory of least astonishment.’ According to the theory, when you ran into a particular rock formation, you hypothesized how it might have occurred and created as many scenarios as you could think of as to how it might have gotten there. But the scenario that was the least astonishing was the one you were supposed to accept as the basis for further analysis. I found that fascinating. It was an approach to logic that I had never experienced in engineering.” Yet it is precisely Armstrong’s engineering approach that Jack Schmitt connects with Neil’s geologic capabilities, citing Neil’s collection of rock samples as “the best that anybody did on the Moon.”
• • •
All of the Apollo training was important, but no aspect of it was more critical to mission success than the work done in the flight simulators. “They taught us to fly these incredible machines with subtleties and complexities that even their flying counterparts did not possess,” Mike Collins explains. “Their job was to duplicate, insofar as they could, the spacecraft and the space environment.”
The two main simulators were the command module simulator, built (as the CSM itself was) by North American, and the lunar module simulator, built by the LM designer, Grumman. Collins spent the lion’s share of time in the former, Armstrong and Aldrin in the latter. Apollo 10 and Apollo 16 astronaut John Young dubbed the command module simulator “The Great Train Wreck” for its jumbled array of differently shaped boxes and compartments built around a full-size mockup of the command module’s interior, down to the identical dials, controls, switches, equipment, and even color schemes in the genuine article. With all of the controls and instruments hooked up to a bank of computers in a back room as well as to consoles in Mission Control, the CSM simulator was dynamic and totally interactive. Looking out the windows as they were making their “flights,” the astronauts saw rough displays of the Earth, sky, Moon, and stars. “Here the fidelity broke down,” as Collins notes, explaining that, for training purposes, “It didn’t matter that in the simulator the star Antares was not precisely its true shade of red, only that it be in the proper position for a measurement with the sextant.”
“On balance, the simulations were quite good,” echoes Armstrong. “They would certainly be better today with the improvements in technology that have occurred over the past thirty-five years, but for the time they were certainly the best, most advanced simulators ever constructed anywhere. They did a good enough job to give us the level of confidence that we needed, and I think that is evident by the fact that six out of six lunar landings that were attempted all turned out successfully.”
During his Apollo 11 training, Armstrong spent 164 hours in the CSM simulator, which was only about one-third of the time that Collins, the CM pilot, spent in it. Naturally, given his primary responsibility in the mission, Neil spent considerably more time practicing lunar landings, 383 hours in the LM simulator and 34 in the LLTV or LLRF, for a total of 417 hours of Moon landing simulation. His grand total of 581 hours in a simulator equates to over 72 days—more than 10 full weeks—of 8-hour days in a simulator. Aldrin compiled even more time in simulators than did Neil: 18 more in the CM simulator and 28 more in the LM simulator. Unlike Neil, Buzz did not fly either the LLTV or LLRF during the six-month-long preparation for Apollo 11.
“You are trying to build simulators to be exactly like the real thing, but they never are able to get it to the degree of reality that it flies as easily as a real machine.” In the case of a Moon landing, they could not simulate such difficulties as a cloud of dust agitated by the LM’s descent rockets. “If you could fly the simulations with confidence,” Neil remarks, “then you could be quite confident that you’d be able to handle the real vehicle.
“People who had not been involved in simulator development during their career usually just tried to ‘win.’ They tried to operate perfectly all the time and avoid simulator problems. I did the opposite. I tried actively to encourage simulator problems so I could investigate and learn from them.
“I’m sure that some of the guys were well aware of my approach,” surely more so following what has become a rather notorious incident involving Armstrong and Aldrin’s particularly taxing “run” in the LM simulator. The source for the story is Mike Collins.
“Neil and Buzz had been descending in the LM [simulator] when some catastrophe had overtaken them, and they had been ordered by Houston to abort. Neil, for some reason, either questioned the advice or was just slow to act on it, but in any event, the computer printout showed that the LM had descended below the altitude of the lunar surface before starting to climb again. In plain English, Neil had crashed the LM and destroyed the machine, himself, and Buzz.
“That night in the crew quarters Buzz was incensed and kept me up far past my bedtime complaining about it. I could not discern whether he was concerned about his actual safety in flight, should Neil repeat this error, or whether he was simply embarrassed to have crashed in front of a roomful of experts in Mission Control. But no matter, Buzz was in fine voice, and as the scotch bottle emptied and his complaints became louder and more specific, Neil suddenly appeared in his pajamas, tousle-haired and coldly indignant, and joined the fray. Politely I excused myself and gratefully crept off to bed, not wishing to intrude in an intercrew clash of technique or personality.
“Neil and Buzz continued their discussion far into the night, but the next morning at breakfast neither appeared changed, ruffled, nonplussed, or pissed off, so I assume it was a frank and beneficial discussion, as they say in the State Department. It was the only such outburst in our training cycle.”
Aldrin’s version of the late-night exchange is a little different. “The three of us often ate dinner quite late in our quarters. Afterwards, Mike and I sat around having a drink and talking while Neil had gone off to bed. Mike said something like, ‘Well, how did it go? What did you guys do in the simulator today?’ and I said, ‘Well, we lost control during an abort.’ [Neil insists that Mission Control did not order an abort.] Now just how loud I said that, I can’t really say. But what I said, I felt was between the two of us, between Mike and me. I didn’t feel I needed to express my feelings about this to Neil, because that was just not Neil’s and my relationship. In the normal course of what we were doing, I did not critique him. But Mike asked me a question about the simulation, so I told him what happened. It was a surprise to both of us when Neil came out of his bedroom and said, ‘You guys are making too much noise. I’m trying to sleep.’ ” Neil did not say a word at the time to defend what he had done in the simulation, why he chose not to abort. “That wouldn’t have been Neil,” explains Aldrin.
What Aldrin was explaining to Collins when Neil came out to quiet them down was that “I thought we were playing a game and we should make an attempt to do everything we could to win the game, and the sooner we did it when we saw that things were going bad for us, the better off we’d be and the more in keeping with what we’d actually do in a real situation like that.” The most important thing in every situation, Aldrin said to Collins, was not to crash. “I felt analyzing this and that system and whatever was not playing the game properly as far as the simulator people were concerned. If they threw a failure at us and we were losing control of the LM, would we in real flight actually go on and land? I’m not sure we would. The same way that if something disabled the commander, or disabled the primary guidance, or disabled the landing radar, why, we wouldn’t land on the first try, we’d abort and come back. Clearly, there was a difference between Neil and I in how we reacted to the simulation. Neil had his reason for doing what he did. It was between him and the simulator people to decide what he got out of that. As for me, I was there to support what was going on in the training, almost as an observer. Thus my answer to Mike’s question about my evaluation of what had happened.”
Some versions of the simulation story that have been told over the years suggest that Aldrin also urged Armstrong to abort, but Neil states, “I don’t recall that Buzz asked me to abort—ever—I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that the descent trajectory that we were on during the simulation and the information we had available to us had become seriously degraded, and I thought that it was a great time to test the Mission Control center, ‘Okay, guys, let’s see what you can do with this.’
“I knew that I could abort at any time—and probably successfully—but then you lose the mission, the rest of the simulation. This was a chance to test the control center. Buzz took that as a black mark against us. He thought it was a mark against his ability to perform, a mark against both of us and against our crew ability. I didn’t look at it that way at all. It was a complete difference of opinion, and he expressed his concern to me later that night.”
As for precisely what went on during that late-night exchange between him and Aldrin, “I don’t really remember the details of that, but I do remember that Buzz expressed his displeasure. He had a different way of looking at the sims. He never liked to crash in a real simulation, while I thought it was a learning experience for all of us. Not just for the crew but also for the control center personnel. We were all in it together.”
Interestingly, this story of the simulation-that-Armstrong-would-not-abort is reminiscent of Neil’s April 1962 flight in the X-15, the one in which his aircraft ballooned up and ended up dangerously over Pasadena. In both cases, Neil was trying to promote technological learning through dialectical experimentation. “If we couldn’t come up with a solution or the ground controllers couldn’t come up with a solution, that was an indication to me that, for one, I needed to understand that part of the flight trajectory better.” As a matter of fact, as a result of his crashing into the lunar surface during the particular simulation under review, Neil “constructed a plot of altitude versus descent rate with bands on it that I hadn’t had before, so that I could tell when I was getting into a questionable area. If I had aborted when everyone wanted me to, I probably would not have bothered to even make that.” At the same time, the “botched” simulation caused the flight director and his people to reevaluate how they had analyzed the situation. “I’m sure they improved their approach to understanding it, too, and knowing when they were getting into a dangerous area,” Armstrong states. “So it did serve a valuable purpose. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t figure it out soon enough, but you learn through the process. These were the most extensive simulations I had ever encountered—and they needed to be. The Moon landing was a bigger project, a more extensive project, with more people involved, than any of us had ever encountered.”
• • •
Four months into training, Apollo 10 flew to the Moon. Launched on May 18, 1969, with a crew composed of three veterans of Gemini rendezvous missions—commander Tom Stafford, command module pilot John Young, and lunar module pilot Gene Cernan—the eight-day mission was a very successful full-dress rehearsal of the Moon landing. Apollo 10 achieved a number of space firsts, including the first CSM-LM operations in the cislunar and lunar environment, the first CSM-LM docking in translunar trajectory, the first LM undocking in lunar orbit, the first LM staging in lunar orbit, and the first manned LM-CSM docking in lunar orbit. About the only thing Apollo 10 did not accomplish was the lunar landing itself, though its LM—nicknamed Snoopy—did swoop down to within a mere 50,000 feet of the proposed Apollo 11 landing site before shooting back to orbit and redocking with Charlie Brown, the command module.
Apollo 10 aided preparations for Apollo 11 in a number of ways. First, as Armstrong explains, “There was the matter of lunar module handling qualities, LM responsiveness, and LM engine operations. These had been studied initially in Earth orbit during Apollo 9, with Jim McDivitt doing some very good work. We had a good, solid foundation from Apollo 9, but we were very interested in learning everything we could from Apollo 10 and the experiences of Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan in operating the LM and in how well they were able to control the machine’s attitude in flight. We wanted to know, for example, how similar or different was flying the actual LM from flying the simulator and from flying the LLTV? Could we expect it to be like our experience on the ground had led us to believe it would be? What were the characteristics of the engine operation? We wanted to learn anything we could about that, and Apollo 10 turned out to be very helpful there; it told us a lot.”
There was also the matter of the lunar environment itself, especially the possibly significant gravitational effects that mascons might have on the flight paths of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. “I was very interested in additional information about the mascons based on the Apollo 10 experience,” relates Armstrong. Mascons were areas beneath the visible lunar surface, generally in the mares, that because the interior rock was of greater density than that of the surrounding area, exerted a slightly higher gravitational force. From the flights of the five unmanned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft of 1966 and 1967 (all of them enormously successful), telemetry data indicated that the Moon’s gravitational pull was not uniform. Perturbations likely caused by mascons had led to slight dips in the paths of the Lunar Orbiters. Data from the circumlunar flight of Apollo 8 left the mascon effects in question.
“So, clearly, the guys who were trying to map these gravity anomalies were very interested in all the data they could get concerning these perturbations to the orbit,” Armstrong states. “The fact that Apollo 10, flying the same orbit that we were going to be flying, was documenting the influence of the mass concentrations on our own exact trajectory was very important to us, because mascons could affect how well we would be able to get to our desired landing point. Naturally, we wanted do that as accurately as we could.22
“Stafford and Cernan did a superb job flying almost precisely the same track over the lunar surface that Apollo 11 would be flying. They took superb pictures of the descent and landing areas all the way down to before the time of engine ignition. So that was very useful. As a result of all the fine photographs from Apollo 10, Buzz and I developed a very high level of confidence in our ability to recognize our flight path and principal landmarks along the way. By the time we launched in July, we knew all the principal landmarks on our descent path by heart and, equally importantly, we knew all the landmarks on our way prior to the point at which we would ignite our descent engines. That was important as a cross-check, to be able to determine that we were, in fact, geographically—or more precisely, selenographically—over the exact place we wanted to be over—and as close to the scheduled time on the flight plan as possible.”
Finally, the success of Apollo 10 meant that Apollo 11 would certainly be the first landing mission. The only uncertainty was the date of the launch. A few weeks after Apollo 10, Deke Slayton asked Armstrong, “Well, how do you feel? What’s your assessment of how you stand? Are you ready?” Armstrong answered: “Well, Deke, it would be nice to have another month of training, but I cannot in honesty say that I think we have to have it. I think we can be ready for a July launch window.” It is Armstrong’s assumption that Slayton, on the basis of that conversation, went to his gathering with Bob Gilruth, George Low, and Chris Kraft and announced, “Well, I’ve talked to Neil, and he says they are going to be ready.”
On June 11, 1969, NASA announced that the Apollo 11 astronauts had received the go-ahead for the landing attempt. Their launch would come on July 16 with the historic landing scheduled for Sunday afternoon, July 20.
• • •
The conscientious, highly professional, and vigorous manner in which Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin pursued every item on their six-month training agenda gave NASA great confidence in the crew. Yet the Apollo 11 mission was replete with unknowns, uncertainties, and unexplored risks—some technological, others human. How would individual astronauts perform in the clutch, during a crisis moment when some instinct or impulse of personality might supersede the rational mind? In Commander Neil Armstrong, NASA managers took a calculated risk that, in order to achieve the landing, he might push the envelope, his luck, or his abilities a little too far.
NASA established its “mission rules” as a system of preventive checks. The genesis of the concept had come early in the Mercury program from Chris Kraft, Walt Williams, Bob Gilruth, and other veteran engineers who together had made the transition from NACA aeronautical flight research to the NASA Space Task Group. Early on, they decided they had better formally record every one of their important thoughts and observations about the Mercury capsule, about the Redstone (and later Atlas) rocket that was to launch Mercury, about each flight control system, and every possible flight situation. As Kraft relates, “We noted a large number of what-ifs, too, along with what to do about them. Then we printed the whole bunch in a booklet and called it our mission rules.” It was an unprecedented type of publication based on some unprecedented thinking.
As Gemini came on the heels of Mercury, and Apollo in his chariot took over from Gemini’s twins, the booklets of mission rules became books of mission rules. In preparation for Apollo 11, it took many months for teams of mission planners, flight directors, simulation experts, engineers, and astronauts to talk over, debate, write down, review, redraft, and finalize the rules for what was to be the first Moon landing. The first complete set of rules for Apollo 11 was not published until May 16, 1969, two months before launch. Rules were then updated weekly as ongoing simulations revealed where new rules or changes to rules had to be made.
The mission rules book for Apollo 11 came to span more than 330 pages, evolving from “Initial Rules” (white paper, May 16, 1969) through an “A Revision” (pink paper, June 20, 1969), “B Revision” (yellow paper, July 3, 1969), and ending in the “C Revision” (blue paper, July 11, 1969). Each revision came printed on a different color paper so that the flight directors could see that their flight controllers had incorporated the changes properly into their books. Even though the C Revision came out only five days before the launch, it was not the end to the changes. On the day of the launch (July 16) itself, Flight inserted seven “write-in” changes to the rules. One of the last-minute changes, unknown to the crew of Apollo 11 itself, stated that there was no need to abort the landing if the LM’s onboard computer experienced a specific series of program alarms.
Inside the mission rules book were thirty-one topical sections and three appendices. The longest section was section two, “Flight Operations Rules,” concerning the overall policy for mission conduct, the treatment of risk by mission phases, and redundancy management. In the other thirty sections could be found all the rules for launch, for trajectory and guidance, for communications, for engine burns, for docking, for EVA, for electrical systems, and for aeromedical emergencies. There were rules to cover every conceivable problem, situation, and contingency.
Shorthand written instructions laid out how each contingency was to be handled by everyone involved. For example, in section twenty-two of the document pertaining to “LM Electrical Power,” more than two dozen rules covered what should happen in the event that the lunar module experienced electrical power problems anytime during its descent to the surface, while on the surface, or when leaving the surface of the Moon. A mission rule from part five of section three of the book required an abort if the radar data was not obtained before the LM descended to 10,000 feet. In each section of the mission rules book there was a summary of all the “Go/NoGo” situations (or “Stay/NoStay” situations, in the case of whether to stay or abort immediately after landing on the lunar surface). This was the plain-spoken and impossible-to-mistake terminology used by the flight director in a final systems check to make sure that his controllers were confident about proceeding on to the next phase of the mission.
Another very critical mission rule—one that became a matter of grave urgency during the descent of Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface—stated that once the warning light came on inside the LM showing a low level of fuel for descent, the astronauts had one minute either to commit to the landing or abort.
So many mission rules were written for Apollo 11 and for the subsequent Apollo missions that they had to be organized according to a numerical code. To wit, Item 11 under Rule 5-90 dictated that “powered descent will be terminated for the following primary guidance system failures—105, 214, 402 (continuing), 430, 607, 1103, 1107, 1204, 1206, 1302, 1501, and 1502.” There was no way any single person could remember all the mission rules, let alone the number and content of every computer program alarm; it would have been like memorizing the dictionary. During a spaceflight, flight controllers had to keep their copies of the rules book very close by.
For many of the rules, there was a defined margin, some leeway, a little give. Yet, not until all mission rule requirements were met to the satisfaction of the flight director—known in Houston’s Mission Control simply as “Flight”—could any vital decision about the flight be made and acted upon. Some mission rules could be interpreted so as to leave an ultimate decision in the hands of the astronauts, but that sort of independent, on-the-spot judgment was not something that NASA managers wanted to encourage, not even for someone as solidly dependable and experienced as Armstrong.
According to Gene Kranz, one of Mission Control’s flight directors, “Buzz Aldrin was the crewman usually involved in discussing mission rules, demonstrating his knowledge of a variety of subjects, and generally dominating the crew side of the conversations. Neil Armstrong seemed more the observer than the participant, but when you looked at his eyes, you knew he was the commander and had all the pieces assembled in his mind. I don’t think he ever raised his voice. He just saved his energy for when it was needed. He would listen to our discussions, and if there was any controversy, he and Aldrin would try out our ideas in the simulators and then give feedback through Charlie Duke to the controllers. [Astronaut Duke served as one of the CapComs for Apollo 11.] Mike Collins used a different tactic. He worked directly with the Trench and system guys.” (“The Trench” was the nickname for the men in Mission Control who worked as the flight dynamics team, led by the Flight Dynamics Officer, or FIDO.)
Armstrong accepts Kranz’s characterization: “It is true that Buzz was talkative and very involved in conversations, and I was probably more reserved. I think that was just our nature.”
Almost all the mission rules were written down and formally agreed upon; a very few were not. The most important unwritten rules for Apollo 11 concerned the landing.
“To get a handshake on the unwritten rules for the landing,” Kranz remembers, “I had a final strategy session before simulation startup with Neil, Buzz, Mike, and Charlie Duke. It was in this session that I outlined the landing strategy. We had only two consecutive orbits to try to land on the Moon. If we had problems on the first orbit, we would delay to the second. If we still had problems, we would start the lunar descent to buy five additional minutes to solve the problem. If we couldn’t come up with answers, we would abort the landing and start a rendezvous to recover the LM, then jettison it and head back home. If problems surfaced beyond five minutes, we would try to land and then lift off from the surface after a brief stay. We would try for the landing even if we could only touch down and then lift off two hours later when the CSM passed overhead in lunar orbit with proper conditions for rendezvous.
“I knew Armstrong never said much,” Kranz continues, “but I expected him to be vocal on the mission rule strategy. He wasn’t. At that time he was silent. It took time to get used to his silence. As we went through the rules, Neil would generally smile and/or nod. I believe that he had set his own rules for the landing, I just wanted to know what they were. My gut feeling said he would press on, accepting any risk as long as there was even a remote chance to land. I believed we were well in sync, since I had a similar set of rules. I would let the crew continue as long as there was a chance.”
Again, Armstrong today does not quarrel with Kranz’s interpretation: “I had high respect for mission rules and how they were developed and their usefulness and the advantage of everyone agreeing on what was the proper thing to do. But I would admit that if everything seemed to be going well and there was a mission rule that interrupted and said we have to do such and such, I would have been willing to use my commander’s prerogative on the scene and overrule the mission rule if I thought that was the safest route. After all, aborts were not very well understood phenomenon—no one had ever done an abort. You were shutting off engines, firing pyrotechnic separation devices, igniting other engines in midflight. Doing all of that in close proximity to the lunar surface was not something in which I had a great deal of confidence.
“There is some truth to what Gene is saying, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that even if there was only a remote chance to land . . . I wouldn’t have accepted that. I would have said, as long as there is a good chance of landing, I would proceed.” Not that Armstrong ever explicitly verbalized his perspective on this crucial matter to Kranz or anyone else. “I probably didn’t, unless it came out in the context of a specific rule which I thought was irrational for some reason. Then I might have argued against it.”
Like Kranz, a nervous Chris Kraft was also bothered by the fact that he could not be sure what Armstrong might do to override mission rules and force a lunar landing to happen. “In the last month, we’d had Neil in Mission Control to go over the rules for lunar descent, landing, surface operations, and takeoff,” Kraft explains. “Mission rules could leave the ultimate decision to the astronaut, but that wasn’t something we encouraged. Now I wanted to make certain that all of us understood exactly where we were. We got down to the finest details—descent-engine performance, computer bugs that we knew about, landmarks on the lunar surface, even talking through the most unlikely events we could imagine during the landing.
“The computer and the landing radar got particular attention. We’d be sending last-minute updates to the computer on the lunar module’s trajectory, its engine performance, and location over the Moon. Until Eagle was about ten thousand feet high, its altitude was based on Earth radars, and its guidance system could be off by hundreds or even thousands of feet. Then the LM’s own landing radar was supposed to kick in and provide accurate readings.
“That led to some heated discussion. Neil worried that an overzealous flight controller would abort a good descent, based on faulty information. ‘I’m going to be in a better position to know what’s happening than the people back in Houston,’ Neil said over and over.
“And I’m not going to tolerate any unnecessary risks,” Kraft retorted. “That’s why we have mission rules.”
Arguing about the specifics of the landing radar, Kraft insisted that if the landing radar failed, an abort was mandatory: “I didn’t trust the ability of an astronaut, not even one as tried and tested as Neil Armstrong, to accurately estimate his altitude over a cratered lunar surface. It was unfamiliar terrain, and nobody knew the exact size of the landmarks that would normally be used for reference.” Finally, Kraft and Armstrong agreed. “That mission rule stayed as written,” Kraft recalls. “But I could tell from Neil’s frown that he wasn’t convinced. I wondered then if he’d overrule all of us in lunar orbit and try to land without a radar system.
“Those conversations came back to me when I saw Neil a few days before the launch,” Kraft relates. “ ‘What can we do?’ I asked Neil. ‘Is there anything we’ve missed?’ ‘No, Chris, we’re ready. It’s all done except the countdown.’ He was right. If there was anything undone, none of us could say what it was. . . . We had come to this last point, and for a moment I felt my legs shake.”
Because he, too, was worried that the crew might take unnecessary risks in order to make the landing, Dr. Thomas Paine, the NASA administrator, even got into the act. In the week before the launch, he made a point of speaking to Armstrong. According to Neil, Paine told him, “If we didn’t get a chance to land and came back, he would give us the chance to go again, on the very next flight. I believe he meant it at that point.”
The truth was, Paine told every subsequent Apollo crew the very same thing. It was his way of encouraging the crews not to try anything stupid, thinking it would be their only chance. If Apollo 11’s landing had been aborted, Armstrong was ready to take the NASA administrator up on his offer. “Had that circumstance happened, my guess is I would have said, ‘Yeah, let’s go again.’ We were all trained. The requirements would not be burdensome at all to go through the same process. We’d love to have another flight, and we would have done it.”
• • •
Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin trained up to the very last moment. This fact led to a concern that was picked up on—and mostly misinterpreted—by the news media, that the astronauts were being rushed to get in all of the training necessary for the flight. “The reason that was of concern,” Armstrong explained to reporters at the time, was because “the final training for a crew is the last thing that takes place.” Before final training of a crew can take place, “the procedures must be developed in the simulations after they are completely set up and ready to ‘fly’ with all the pertinent checklists and so on. These were the intermediate, pacing items leading to the final training. There was a good deal of concern in our own minds and the minds of many in the organization that all these things for the descent to and ascent from the surface would fall into place in time.” By the time they left Houston in late June for their final days of training at Cape Kennedy, the crew, in Neil’s words, felt “very fortunate” that all the mission rules, techniques, and checklists had, in fact, been worked out and were fully based on a thorough series of highly integrated flight simulations.
The crew moved into their astronaut living quarters at the Cape on June 26. Beginning at the stroke of midnight on the twenty-seventh, they participated in a weeklong trial countdown. Simulated launch came on the morning of July 3 precisely at 9:32 A.M., the exact time scheduled for the real launch. Before the trial started, the three men entered a strict physical quarantine that was to last for two weeks before the flight and endure for three more weeks after the flight. The quarantine was invoked in order to limit the astronauts’ exposure to infectious organisms. Dr. Charles E. Berry, chief astronaut physician, gave them their last head-to-toe going-over the day the simulated countdown began. Besides checking on their health (Dr. Berry reported to the press that the crew was “in excellent physical shape” and looked “amazingly relaxed”), the doctor wanted to catalog all organisms that were apparently normal to the three men’s systems. A growing fear from the scientific community that hostile, alien organisms might accompany the astronauts and their rock samples back to Earth—a concern hyped by the publication of the sensational Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, a June 1969 Book-of-the-Month Club selection—had persuaded (even forced) NASA to take every possible preventive measure against contamination from extraterrestrial life.
“The National Academy of Sciences was given the task of evaluating the potential danger from lunar contaminants on the Earth,” Armstrong recalls. “The scientists said that the chances were extremely unlikely, but NASA in consultation with the academy decided to have a contamination facility and put us in a quarantine after the mission for a period of time equal to the expected incubation time of any disease that could provide an epidemic. That period lasted for twenty-one days from the time we left the surface of the Moon.”
On July 5, the crew of Apollo 11 returned to Houston from Florida for a media day. First up in the morning was a full press conference staged in the movie theater inside the MSC visitors’ center. After that came sessions with the wire services, another with a group of magazine writers, and finally, interviews separately filmed with each of the three television networks for broadcast that evening. Before it was over, the three astronauts endured a fourteen-hour day answering questions from several hundred international reporters and journalists, a gaggle that included, according to author Norman Mailer, attending the day’s events with credentials from Life magazine, “some of the worst word-sculptors ever assembled in southeastern Texas.”
Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin arrived at the morning press conference wearing gas masks. Knowing how silly they looked—like “razorback hogs,” as Mailer described them—the three men grinned in embarrassment but with apparent good humor as they walked onstage. A few jokers in the audience had donned white hospital masks to share the crew’s embarrassment and poke fun at NASA for the extremes of its biological wariness.
Onstage Neil, Mike, and Buzz sat in a three-sided plastic box roughly twelve feet wide, ten feet deep, and ten feet high. To ensure that no contagion from the journalists circulated into the breathing space of the astronauts, blowers located to the rear of the plastic booth blew air from behind the Apollo crew out into the audience. Once safely within the confines of their hygienic box, the astronauts took off their masks and sat down in easy chairs before a large walnut-brown desk emblazoned with NASA’s emblematic “meatball” and the Apollo 11 seal: an eagle, the symbol of America, coming in for a landing on the lunar surface; its talons bearing an olive branch, a symbol of peace. (Originally, the astronauts had the eagle carrying the olive branch in its beak, but Bob Gilruth repositioned the olive branch from the eagle’s mouth to its claws so as to make the eagle appear more peaceful and benign. The Apollo 11 crew, especially Aldrin, disagreed with Gilruth, but did not press their case.) To the rear of the astronauts’ protective booth stood an American flag, a conspicuous reminder of the congressional mandate that Apollo 11 plant the standard into the lunar soil. Mailer called the restrained jeering at Old Glory “a splash of derision” at the entire Apollo show, already sufficiently American without yet another American flag on display.
The atmosphere in the theater felt decidedly strange. Convening to talk about a trip to the Moon still seemed a little fantastical. Naturally the astronauts were a little edgy, too, among the crowd of reporters, some of whom, as Mailer described, were so ignorant of science and engineering that they were “not just certain where laxatives ended and physics began.”
Brian Duff, a NASA public affairs officer, opened by reading a statement from Dr. Charles Berry explaining the import of hygiene precautions. Duff warned journalists to “stay behind the ropes” demarcating the prescribed minimum of fifty feet from the Apollo crew.
“The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes,” Mailer related. “They were comfortable in motion. As men being scrutinized by other men they had little to worry about. Still, they did not strut. Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose. Therefore they looked to enjoy the snouts [i.e., the gas masks] they were wearing, they waved at reporter friends they recognized, they grinned.”
As mission commander, Armstrong spoke first. Mailer, like everyone else present, sensed that Neil was “ill at ease.” What Mailer might not have known was that Armstrong often paused in formal conversation, searching for the right words.
“We’re here today to talk a little bit about the forthcoming flight, Apollo 11, hopefully the culmination of the Apollo national objective. We are here to be able to talk about this attempt because of the success of four previous Apollo command flights and a number of unmanned flights. Each of those flights contributed in a great way to this flight. Each and every flight took a large number of new objectives and large hurdles, and left us with just a very few additions—the final descent-to-the-lunar-surface work—to be completed. We’re very grateful to those large efforts of people here at MSC and across the nation who made those first flights successful, and made it possible for us to sit here today and discuss Apollo 11 with you. I’ll ask Mike first to talk about the differences you might see in the command module activities on the flight.”
As usual, Neil was brief—a total of six sentences, 149 words. Collins talked for a little longer—ten sentences, 273 words. Mike emphasized that he was going to be alone in the command module much longer than any previous CM pilot and that rendezvous was going to happen for the first time between a stationary LM, down on the lunar surface, and a CSM “whizzing around the Moon.” Last but certainly not least in terms of how much he said—twenty sentences, 490 words—came Aldrin. Buzz outlined a complete lunar descent and landing; to be fair, those critical elements of Apollo 11 did involve so much that was new that it did take quite a bit longer to describe them.
According to Armstrong today, “the media attention would have been a burden if we really had had the time to notice it. Fortunately we didn’t have to fight that battle ourselves. Deke was probably the principal person in building barriers that allowed us to get our training done and then negotiating with NASA’s public affairs branch to give the press a few opportunities to photograph our training activities in certain selected venues. During our simulated lunar surface activity, for example, they allowed the press in so they could cover that. NASA set that up specially where we had lights and platforms and other props. But as far as the media’s interest affecting what we were doing, we didn’t have to worry that much about answering questions or posing for pictures. We just did our work. Even when the press was there, we did the same thing we’d be doing if they weren’t there.”
At the morning press conference on July 5, the Apollo 11 crew responded to a total of thirty-seven questions. Armstrong answered twenty-seven of them. Nine of the newsmen specifically asked for Neil to answer their questions; the other eighteen questions were of a nature that Armstrong, as commander, felt it was his responsibility to answer. Twice, Neil turned and asked Buzz to respond to a question directed specifically at Neil; on two other occasions, Buzz, unsolicited, added to Neil’s comments. Collins, like Aldrin, answered only three questions directed at him. A few questions called for responses from all three astronauts. It was an overall pattern that would long outlast the Apollo program. People most wanted to hear from the commander, the First Man who would step out onto the Moon.
Armstrong announced for the first time the nicknames for the Apollo command and lunar modules: “Yes, we do intend to use call signs other than those you may have heard in simulation. The call sign for the lunar module will be ‘Eagle.’ The call sign for the command module will be ‘Columbia.’ Both names were suggested by a number of people, very many. A large number of other names were also submitted for our consideration, many of which were quite good. We selected these as being representative of the flight, the nation’s hope. Columbia is a national symbol. Columbia stands on top of our Capitol and, as you all know, it was the name of Jules Verne’s spacecraft that went to the Moon in his novel of one hundred years ago.”
Actually, Verne named his Moon rocket Columbiad, a fact that Armstrong knew from his own reading of the book, done in his late teens. “We thought that Columbia was better,” Neil explains today. “Columbia was well known in the American lexicon. It had been a candidate for the name of our country, so it was a natural.”
“Was Verne one of your favorite authors?”
“No, I don’t think so, but I had certainly read the book. Verne’s story definitely had a role in our deliberations.” The entire crew participated in naming the spacecraft. “We had a lot of those little things, which we considered to be nonoperational decisions. Many of them were kind of a pain to have to deal with, but we had to do it.” Choosing Columbia and Eagle was one of the few nonoperational decisions they actually enjoyed.
Neil states that Mike Collins more than himself or Aldrin played the major role in choosing both the call names: “Mike was certainly as convincing as anyone that these would be the names to use. We all participated, but Mike was especially thoughtful about it. Some of his ideas were the principal ones.” Aldrin remembers it a little differently: “Neil and I asked Mike to choose a name for the command ship. He replied instantly; he’d done his thinking in advance and had chosen Columbia. Neil and I considered a long list of possibilities for naming our LM and settled on Eagle, the symbol of America.”
Naturally, the press, eleven days before Apollo 11’s launch, was curious as to what Armstrong would say when he first stepped out of the LM and onto the Moon. “For Neil Armstrong,” a reporter rose to his feet to ask. “By the nature of your assignment if you carry it out successfully, you’re destined to become a historical personage of some consequence. I’m wondering if, in that light, you have decided on something suitably historical and memorable to say when you perform this symbolic act of stepping down on the Moon for the first time?”
Not even those few who knew Armstrong personally or who exercised authority over the manned space program had been able to get Neil to disclose any of his thoughts about the historic first words he would utter from afoot on the lunar surface. At one point, the internal pressures inside of NASA motivated Julian Scheer, the chief of NASA’s public affairs office, to write a terse internal memo that asked, in effect, did King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain tell Christopher Columbus what to say when he reached the New World? Among the rumors that Aldrin heard at the time was that Simon Bourgin, a United States Information Agency official in frequent contact with the astronauts—and who allegedly had advised Frank Borman to read from Genesis during Apollo 8—tried to advise Armstrong. If Bourgin did make any suggestions, they had no effect on Neil.
George Low had tried. In late June, when Armstrong was brought to Mission Control for the final run-through of the mission rules for the lunar landing, Low broke in, “Have you thought about what you’re going to say, Neil, when you step off the ladder?” According to Chris Kraft, who was part of the conversation, Neil was quiet for a moment and then answered, enigmatically true to form, “Sure, George, I’ve been thinking about it.” Then, characteristically, Neil changed the subject. “Tell everybody thanks for all of us. We know how hard everybody’s been working.”
Kraft remembers that Low was “taken aback” by Neil’s refusal to share any of his thoughts on the matter; Kraft himself was not surprised by it. “There was no way Neil was going to tell George Low or myself or anyone else,” Kraft relates. “I wouldn’t have asked Neil that question, to be perfectly honest, because I figured it was his business. But George was one of those guys who wanted to know what everybody was up to so, if necessary, he could tell people what they ought to do. George also probably had a better feel for the worldwide impact and symbolic meaning of Apollo.” Low thought about pressing Armstrong but chose not to. Kraft never gave it another thought: “Whatever Neil said would be something that none of us were likely ever to forget. He’d say the right thing.”
In response to the reporter’s question about choosing his first words from on the lunar surface, Armstrong simply answered, “No, I haven’t.” As hard as it may be to believe, that was the plain truth. “The most important part of the flight in my mind was the landing,” Armstrong explains today. “I thought that if there was any statement to have any importance, it would be whatever occurred right after landing, when the engine stopped. I had given some thought to what we would call the landing site. I had also thought about what I would say right at the landing; I thought it was the one that history might note. But not even that was something that I had given a great deal of thought to, because, statistics aside, my gut feeling was that, whereas we had a ninety percent chance of returning safely to Earth, our chances were only even money of actually making the landing.”
In fact, Neil had already chosen Tranquility Base as the name of the spot on the Sea of Tranquility where he and Aldrin would land; privately, he had told Charlie Duke about the name, since Duke would serve as CapCom during the landing and Neil did not want Charlie to be caught unawares when Neil used the phrase immediately upon touchdown. “In the absence of official names for the various locations and landmarks on the lunar surface,” he told the press, “we have chosen to use some unofficial names for our recognition purposes and for our training purposes, and we’ll continue to do that.” No one else in NASA besides Charlie Duke knew about Tranquility Base until Eagle landed.
A special high-level government committee had decided that Armstrong and Aldrin should leave three items on the surface as symbolic of humankind’s arrival. The first was a plaque mounted on the leg of the LM that held the ladder down which the astronauts would climb. This plaque depicted the Earth’s two hemispheres; on it was inscribed the statement, HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH SET FOOT UPON THE MOON, JULY 1969 A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND. The second item was a small disk, less than one and a half inches in diameter, upon which had been electronically recorded a microminiaturized photo-print of goodwill letters from various heads of states around the world. The third item was the American flag.
“I would like to ask Neil Armstrong if he agrees with the congressional mandate which specifies that the U.S. flag and only the U.S. flag will be implanted on the Moon on Apollo 11,” a foreign reporter asked at the prelaunch press conference on July 5.
“Well, I suspect that if we asked all the people in the audience and all of us up here,” answered Neil, “all of us would give different ideas on what they would like to take to the Moon and think should be taken, everyone within his own experience. I don’t think that there is any question what our job is. Our job is to fly the spacecraft as best as we can. We never would suggest that it is our responsibility to suggest what the U.S. posture on the Moon should be. That decision has been made where it should be made, namely in the Congress of this country. I wouldn’t presume to question it.
“Some people thought a United Nations flag should be there,” Armstrong explains today, “and some people thought there should be flags of a lot of nations. In the end, it was decided by Congress that this was a United States project. We were not going to make any territorial claim, but we ought to let people know that we were here and put up a U.S. flag. My job was to get the flag there. I was less concerned about whether that was the right artifact to place. I let other, wiser minds than mine make those kinds of decisions.”
Later at the press conference, Armstrong responded to another question from a foreign correspondent as to whether there was not some legal importance to the United States’ landing first on the Moon. As so often was the case, there was a simple eloquence in the offhanded directness of Neil’s answer: “I think we might refer to this plaque again, in the last line. It says we came in peace for all mankind. I think that is precisely what we mean.”
Reporters tried hard—and mostly in vain—to get Armstrong to philosophize about the historical significance of the Moon landing. “What particular gain do you see in going to the Moon for yourselves as human beings, for your country, and for mankind as a whole?” “Do you think that eventually the Moon will become part of the civilized world just as the Antarctic is now, which was also once a removed and unacceptable place?”
“First, let me repeat something that you have all heard before, but probably addresses itself to your question,” Armstrong answered. “That is, the objective of this flight is precisely to take man to the Moon, make a landing there, and return. That is the objective. There are a number of peripheral secondary objectives including some of those you mentioned early in the question that we hope very highly to achieve in great depth. But the primary objective is the ability to demonstrate that man, in fact, can do this kind of job. How we’ll use that information in the centuries to come, only history can tell. I hope that we’re wise enough to use the information that we get on these early flights to the maximum advantage possible, and I would think that in the light of our experience over the past decade that we can indeed hope for that kind of result.”
Nor did the journalists have much luck in provoking Armstrong into giving anything other than unemotional, engineering answers about the grave risks inherent to the flight.
“What would, according to you, be the most dangerous phase of the flight of Apollo 11?”
“Well, as in any flight, the things that give one most concern are those which have not been done previously, things that are new. I would hope that in our initial statement that we gave to you an idea, at least, of what the new things on this flight are. Now, there are other things that we always concern ourselves about greatly, and those are the situations where we have no alternative method to do the job, where we have only one. You, when you ride in an airliner across the Atlantic, depend on the wing of the airplane to stay on the fuselage; without it, you could not have made the trip, see? We have on recent flights had some of those kinds of situations. In our earlier lunar flights, the rocket engine for the service module must operate for us to return from the Moon. There are no alternatives. Similarly, in this flight, we have several situations like that. The LM engine must operate to accelerate us from the Moon’s surface into lunar orbit, and the service module engine, of course, must operate again to return us to Earth. As we go farther and farther into spaceflight, there will be more and more of the single-point systems that must operate. We have a very high confidence level in those systems, incidentally.”
“What will your plans be in the extremely unlikely event that the lunar module does not come up off the lunar surface?”
“Well, that’s an unpleasant thing to think about and we’ve chosen not to think about that up to the present time. We don’t think that’s at all a likely situation. It’s simply a possible one, but at the present time we’re left without recourse should that occur.”
“What is the longest time, if the ascent stage doesn’t fire . . . I think Mike Collins said in an earlier interview that he would then have to just leave and go back to the Earth. What is the longest time you can wait between the not-firing and the time when Mike Collins would have to go back, the time you would have to work on the LM or fix whatever was wrong or try to fix it?”
“I don’t have the numbers. Probably it would be a matter of a couple of days.”
It was such seemingly passionless answers to questions about the human dimensions of spaceflight and about the historical and existential meanings of going to the Moon that piqued Norman Mailer’s razor-sharp acumen for disdainful insight. Like other reporters, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Naked and the Dead and Armies of the Night wanted more from Armstrong, a lot more. Mailer wrote that Armstrong “surrendered words about as happily as a hound allowed meat to be pulled out of his teeth”; that Armstrong “answered with his characteristic mixture of modesty and technical arrogance, of apology and tight-lipped superiority”; that Armstrong had “the sly privacy of a man whose thoughts may never be read”; that Armstrong, like a trapped animal, seemed to be looking for “a way to drift clear of any room like this where he was trapped with psyche-eaters, psyche-gorgers, and the duty of responding to questions heard some hundred of times.” At the same time, Armstrong was “a professional” who had “learned how to contend in a practical way with the necessary language,” always choosing words and phrases that “protected him.”
It intrigued Mailer (in narrating his book, Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer called himself Aquarius, in reference to the hopeful spirit of a future Age of Aquarius) that Armstrong exuded such an “extraordinarily remote,” almost mystical quality that made him appear different from other men. “He was a presence in the room,” Mailer noted, “as much a spirit as a man. One hardly knew if he were the spirit of the high thermal currents or that spirit of neutrality which rises to the top in bureaucratic situations, or both. . . . Indeed, contradictions lay subtly upon him—it was not unlike looking at a bewildering nest of leaves: some are autumn fallings, some the green of early spring.” Of all the astronauts, Armstrong seemed “the man nearest to being saintly.” As a speaker, Neil was “all but limp.” Still, the overall impression Armstrong made on Mailer was not unremarkable. “Certainly the knowledge he was an astronaut restored his stature,” Mailer realized, “yet even if he had been a junior executive accepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting. . . . He would have been more extraordinary in fact if he had been just a salesman making a modest inept dull little speech, for then one would have been forced to wonder how he had ever gotten his job, how he could sell even one item, how in fact he got out of the bed in the morning. Something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air. If he had been a young boy selling subscriptions at the door, one grandmother might have warned her granddaughter never to let him in the house; another would have commented, ‘That boy will go very far.’ ”
Mailer continued his dogged pursuit of the puzzle-that-was-Armstrong into the press conference organized exclusively for the magazine writers and beyond that into the studio where NBC filmed its interview of the astronauts. As the journalists kept pushing hard for the crew of Apollo 11 to disclose personal feelings and emotions, Mailer watched and listened as Armstrong entrenched himself ever deeper in his engineer’s protective cloak, the armor of “a shining knight of technology.” Armstrong replied in “a mild and honest voice” to a question about the role of intuition in his flying by remarking that intuition had “never been my strong suit” and by asserting, like a logical positivist, Mailer noted, that the best approach to any problem was to “interpret it properly, then attack it.”
Armstrong had mastered “computerese.” Instead of saying “we,” Neil convoluted the English language and said, “A joint exercise has demonstrated.” Instead of saying “other choices,” he referred to “peripheral secondary objectives.” Rather than “doing our best,” it was “obtaining maximum advantage possible.” To “turn on” and “turn off” became “enable” and “disable.” Mailer, who had rejected in disgust his own college education as an engineer, saw in Neil’s vernacular proof not only that “the more natural forms of English had not been built for the computer” but that Armstrong represented “either the end of the old or the first of the new men.”
“If not me, another,” Neil stated, to Mailer’s mind disclaiming “large reactions, large ideas” behind media comparisons of his own journey as commander of Apollo 11 to Christopher Columbus’s adventure in 1492. Armstrong’s concern was “directed mainly to doing the job,” one that could be done by no fewer than ten other astronauts. And hundreds of people were backing up his crew in Houston, at the Cape, at the other NASA centers, and tens of thousands had been working in industrial firms all around the country to enable Apollo to blaze its course. “It’s their success more than ours,” Neil humbly told the media.
Armstrong was no common hero, Mailer realized. “If they would insist on making him a hero,” the author noted, “he would be a hero on terms he alone would make clear.”
From Collins and Aldrin, the reporters were able to get a few remarks about family and personal background (Buzz mentioned the family jewelry he was taking with him to the Moon). Nothing of the sort came from Armstrong. “Will you take personal mementos to the Moon, Neil?”
“If I had a choice, I would take more fuel.”
“Will you keep a piece of the Moon for yourself?”
“At this time, no plans have been made” came the stiff response.
“Will you lose your private life after this achievement?”
“I think a private life is possible within the context of such an achievement.”
Neil left them with very few opportunities for discursive follow-ups. When the rare chance came, a member of the media rushed through the hole like a fullback plunging off-tackle to the goal line. Following a comment from Neil about the economic benefits to the nation of the space program, a writer jumped in to ask, “So, are we going to the Moon only for economic reasons, only to get out of an expensive hole of a sluggish economy? Don’t you see any philosophical reason why we might be going?”
It was exactly the sort of open-ended question that Armstrong had tried hard all day—in fact, all his life—not to answer. Yet it was a question that Neil could not avoid without looking like a “spiritual neuter,” to use Mailer’s phrase. “I think we’re going to the Moon,” Armstrong offered tentatively, “because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul. We’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”
What precisely was in Armstrong’s own deep inner soul about the Moon landing, or about anything else that happened in his life—his true feelings about his father, his religious beliefs, the effects of little Karen’s death—was hardly laid bare by the remark, or by any other verbal statement he ever made. It was just not his way. Perhaps, his extraordinarily judicious restraint of expression was a deeply inculcated outcome of the avoidance strategy he had developed in childhood. Or perhaps it derived, as his first wife Janet today hesitantly suggests, from a feeling of social inferiority based on his humble family background in rural Ohio.
What Armstrong on the eve of becoming the First Man did not and would not define or explain about himself, others now sought, almost desperately in the days before the launch, to explain and define for him. All the humanistic and cosmic meanings that he would not fill in, others felt compelled to fill in for him. On the eve of humankind’s great adventure to set foot on another heavenly body, Armstrong had become like an oracle of ancient times, a medium, wise, prophetic, mysterious, by which fortunes and misfortunes were told, deities consulted, prayers answered.
Not until he constructed his own myth out of Armstrong could the creative mind of Norman Mailer be satisfied. It did not matter that Mailer would never meet Neil face to face, never once talk to him directly, never ask him a single question of his own. Mailer, too, had sat before the oracle, “the most saintly of the astronauts,” someone who was “simply not like other men,” who was “apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play.” It was up to Mailer, up to Aquarius, to decode Armstrong.
Like Mailer, we were to be the author of our own Moon landing.
Mailer conjured the makings of his own Armstrong while sitting in on NBC correspondent Frank McGee’s interview with Neil near the end of the day on July 5. In the interview McGee referred to a story in Life by Dodie Hamblin in which Armstrong told of the recurring boyhood dream in which he hovered over the ground. Mailer had read Hamblin’s story when it appeared but dismissed its importance until he heard Armstrong, after a day filled with Neil’s engineer-speak, corroborate that, indeed, as a boy, he had such dreams. Mailer was taken with the beauty of the dream: “It was beautiful because it might soon prove to be prophetic, beautiful because it was profound and it was mysterious, beautiful because it was appropriate to a man who would land on the moon.” For Mailer, it was a type of epiphany, one by which he could construct “The Psychology of Astronauts” and interpret the entire Space Age: “It was therefore a dream on which one might found a new theory of the dream, for any theory incapable of explaining this visitor of the night would have to be inadequate, unless it were ready to declare that levitation, breath, and the moon were not proper provinces of the dream.”
The idea that such a nonwhimsical man as Armstrong, as a young boy, dreamed of flight “intoxicated” Mailer, “for it dramatized how much at odds might be the extremes of Armstrong’s personality.” On the one hand, consciously, Armstrong, the archetypal astronaut-engineer, was grounded in the “conventional,” the “practical,” the “technical,” and the “hardworking.” He resided at the very “center of the suburban middle class.” On the other hand, what Armstrong and the other astronauts were doing in space was “enterprising beyond the limits of the imagination.” Their drive and ambition simply had to have a subconscious element.
It was in this union of opposites, the impenetrable fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, that one found in the modern technological age “a new psychological constitution to man.” More than any of the other astronauts, Neil’s personality stemmed from the core of that “magnetic human force called Americanism, Protestantism, or Waspitude.” He was the Lancelot of the silent majority, “the Wasp emerging from human history in order to take us to the stars.” Never mind that Mailer knew almost nothing about Armstrong’s family background, personal history, married life, religious beliefs, friends, or genuine psychological state. Aquarius’s object was not to understand Armstrong; it was to understand the comings and wrong-goings of humankind in the twentieth century:
On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality . . . yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the country itself. The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
So, in turn, the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own incredible contradictions and yet release some of the untold energies of the earth. A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction. It was the first century in history which presented to sane and sober minds the end of its span. It was a world half convinced of the future death of our species yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us. So it was a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend. The itch was to accelerate—the metaphysical direction unknown.
There was no denying the brilliance of Mailer’s exposé. Yet Mailer really did not care about Armstrong, the man, on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity. What Mailer wrote in his chapter “The Psychology of Astronauts” was highly provocative and insightful as social criticism, but as history, biography, or real psychology, it shed considerably more heat than light.
The mythologizing and iconography had only just begun. Fifteen days after the press conference, Armstrong would step onto the Moon. He would no longer be just a man, not for any of us. He would be First Man.