CHAPTER 27

Outward Bound

For Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, going into space actually commenced back in the crew quarters three and a half hours before liftoff, shortly after 6:00 A.M., when technicians snapped the astronauts’ helmets down onto their neck rings and locked them into place. From that moment on, the crew of the first Moon landing breathed no outside air. They heard no human voice other than that piped in electronically through the barrier of their pressure suits. They saw the world only through the veneer of their face-plates, and could smell, hear, feel, or taste nothing but that which modern technology manufactured for them inside their protective cocoon.

For Armstrong, the isolation was in some ways more familiar than it was for his mates. As a test pilot back at Edwards, he had grown accustomed to the confinement of pressurized flight suits. In comparison to the partial pressure suits and headgear he had donned for flying zooms in the F-104 or going to the edge of space in the X-15, the Apollo suit was downright roomy and easy to maneuver.

Still, as the crew of Apollo 11 left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building at 6:27 A.M. and paraded in their protective yellow galoshes into the air-conditioned transfer van that was to transport them eight miles to Launchpad 39A, every tissue of their being, every nerve fiber, every brain cell, every recess of their inner space, acknowledged that they had left the ordinary, commonsense realm of nature and had entered the totally artificial environment that would sustain them in outer space.

As best as they could manage for the past weeks and months, the three astronauts had ignored the steady buildup around their mission. “We were running on a pretty fast track,” relates Armstrong. “There were so many things to do, and reading newspapers and watching television was not high on our list.”

Going into the mission, Neil, Mike, and Buzz possessed great confidence in the Saturn rocket, but one could never be sure about any rocket’s performance—not even the massive machine designed by von Braun’s accomplished team of rocketeers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. “It was certainly a very high-performance machine,” Armstrong asserts. “It was not perfect, though. Indeed, in the flight after ours, there would be problems.” A lightning strike thirty-six seconds after Apollo 12’s liftoff resulted in a complete, albeit temporary, electrical failure inside the spacecraft. The failure was not the fault of the rocket except for the fact that an ionized plume from the rocket made the entire vehicle more electromagnetically attractive.

Another concern about the rocket lay in the fact that the Saturn V had come to life so quickly. The phenomenally fast pace of its development resulted from the strategy of “all-up testing,” a new NASA R&D philosophy championed by Dr. George Mueller, the associate administrator for manned space flight. Mueller put the development of the Saturn V on the fast track by having the rocket tested from the very start with all three of its stages “live” and ready to go, rather than having the stages incrementally tested one at a time and then mating the three of them together only after each had proven itself independently.

The von Braun team was not a big fan of all-up testing—nor was Neil Armstrong: “I viewed it as a good approach for unmanned tests but as a somewhat dangerous approach in manned flight. I’d been brought up in step-by-step testing; that was the old NACA/NASA method of doing things. I knew the value of the incremental approach, and this one was quite different. All-up testing was a subject of conversation among the astronauts, particularly at four o’clock in the morning when we were inside the spacecraft running some test in order to make the schedule for an upcoming all-up test on the pad. On the other hand, the development of the Saturn V tended to be more operational than research oriented, so the motivations were different.” Without all-up testing, Neil recognized, Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for the Moon landing just could not be met. Still, it was not the surest way to assure the development of a sound rocket, particularly one that was such a vast and complex piece of novel machinery—producing an enormous 7.6 million pounds of thrust.

By the time the crew sat on top of the monumentally powerful rocket waiting for it to fire, they were past pondering its dangers. Moreover, there was always the chance that something minor would go wrong at the last minute in one of the several hundred subsystems associated with the rocket, the spacecraft, or the launch complex and cancel the launch. “These things were canceled more often than they were launched,” Neil explains. “We’d climb out, go back, and get ready for another day.” That possibility—perhaps probability—“softened the intensity” of an astronaut’s emotions, Neil relates, as he headed to the launchpad.

The first astronaut into Columbia the morning of the launch was not Armstrong, Collins, or Aldrin; it was Fred Haise, Aldrin’s backup as lunar module pilot. “Freddo,” as he was known, preceded the crew into the spacecraft by some ninety minutes in order to run through a 417-step checklist designed to ensure that every switch was set in its proper position. At 6:54 A.M. local time, Haise and the rest of the pad “close-out crew” gave the spacecraft their thumbs-up. Having taken the elevator up the 320 feet to the level of the waiting spacecraft, Armstrong grasped the overhead handrail of the capsule with both hands and swung himself through the hatch. Prior to climbing in, Neil received a small gift from Guenter Wendt, the pad leader: it was a crescent moon that Wendt had carved out of Styrofoam and covered with metal foil. Wendt told him “it’s a key to the Moon,” and a smiling Neil asked Wendt to hold on to the token for him until he got back. In exchange Neil gave Wendt a small card he had been keeping under the wristband of his Omega watch. It was a printed ticket for a ride in a “space taxi,” reading “good between any two planets.”

Inside the command module Armstrong settled into the commander’s seat to the far left. Five minutes later, after pad technician Joe Schmitt hooked up Neil’s lines and hoses for communication, respiration, and all the rest, Collins, the command module pilot, climbed into the right seat, followed by Aldrin, the lunar module pilot, in the center. (Aldrin was in the center seat because he had trained for that position on Apollo 8. Collins had been out for a while with his neck spur, so rather than retrain Buzz for ascent, NASA just left him in the center and trained Mike for the right seat.)

To Neil’s left hand was the abort handle. One twist of the handle would trigger the solid rocket escape tower that was attached to the top of the command module to blast Apollo 11 clear of trouble. In the Gemini program, the spacecraft had possessed ejection seats rather than an escape tower, but the Gemini’s Titan booster used hypergolic fuels that could not explode the way the Saturn could, and would—in a huge fireball—because the Saturn was fueled with kerosene, hydrogen, and oxygen. With Apollo, ejection seats could not have worked because they would not throw the astronauts far enough away from a Saturn explosion. Armstrong does not recall second-guessing the wisdom of the Apollo escape-tower system: “It gave us the only chance we would have had, and we certainly wanted to have some option for any emergency that might happen.” As for the possibility of an abort, “I felt our training was excellent and adequate to handle almost any situation that we could envision in booster malfunctions. We would know what to do. We thought we had a very high probability of being successful in an abort throughout the launch sequence.”

The Saturn V’s ascent was especially suited to Neil’s background in research, in that the booster rocket was controllable from the cockpit: “You could not fly the earlier models of the Saturn rocket from the spacecraft. Had there been a failure on the Saturn’s inertial system on Apollo 9, for example, McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart would have had to splash down into the Atlantic or maybe land in Africa, with a high risk of physical injury. For our flight we had added an alternate guidance system in the command module’s gear so that if there were a failure of some kind on the Saturn we could switch to the alternate systems and fly the rocket from the spacecraft.

“I never had much to do with booster development, but I was very interested in getting this guidance capability,” Neil relates. Back in 1959 and 1960 at Edwards (as mentioned in an earlier chapter), Armstrong and research engineer Ed Holleman had conducted a study that showed the feasibility of flying a large booster manually. Many simulations were done at Edwards and at the Johnsville centrifuge in Pennsylvania to confirm that the effects of acceleration on a pilot doing the “guiding task” from atop a rocket were not traumatic. If the autopilot went out, the pilot could fly the booster into orbit manually just as a pilot could fly a large supersonic airplane to altitude. Though ready for Apollo 10, the alternative guidance system did not fly until Apollo 11.

“It’s nice to see one of your ideas become reality,” Neil states, “but it was fortunate that the concept never had to prove itself.”

The powered ascent of Apollo 11 from its launchpad into orbit involved a number of discrete phases, and within each of these phases there were discrete changes in abort technique. “You have to do things right away and do them properly, so that was the focus,” Armstrong explains. “It was a complete concentration on getting through each phase and being ready to do the proper thing if anything went wrong in the next phase.” His most important cues during the fiery ascent came, in his words, from “a combination of looking at the attitude indicator, following the flight performance on the computer, and listening to indications over the radio as to which phase you were in or were about to enter.”

•   •   •

In the time it took for just a small fraction of the heavy automobile traffic to crawl its way clear of Cape Kennedy’s environs, Apollo 11 went around the world one and a half times and was on its way to the Moon. On the front lawn of their Ohio home, Neil’s parents had already been interviewed by a small horde of media: “Mr. Armstrong, what did you think of that launch?” and “Mrs. Armstrong, what were your feelings when you saw that rocket disappear into the sky?” Viola exclaimed, “I’m thankful beyond words.” Projecting her religious beliefs onto her son as she always did, she asserted, “Neil believes God is up there with all three of those boys. I believe that, and Neil believes that.” Steve remarked, “It’s a tremendous, most happy time. We’ll stay glued to the television for the entire flight.” Viola’s mother, eighty-two-year-old Caroline Korspeter, remarked before the TV cameras: “I think it’s dangerous. I told Neil to look around and not to step out if it didn’t look good. He said he wouldn’t.”

Back on the Banana River, Janet Armstrong and her boys stayed on the yacht listening to transmissions from the spacecraft on a NASA squawk box until the crowds dispersed. Though greatly relieved the launch had gone off smoothly, at Janet’s request no bottles of champagne or boxes of cigars were opened on board; she preferred that celebrating be reserved for after the mission when the men were home safely. Before departing Patrick Air Force Base, south of Cocoa Beach, for home, Janet agreed to meet briefly with journalists. “We couldn’t see the rocket right away,” Rick shyly reported, “and I was kind of worried at first. All of a sudden, we could see it and it was beautiful.” Janet told the press, “It was a tremendous sight. I was just thrilled,” though her main feeling was simply relief that the launch had gone off safely. “This, too, shall pass” was what she was actually thinking. She had gotten almost no sleep the night before. Overly tired, she tossed and turned until her wakeup call came at 4:00 A.M.—the same time that Neil, Mike, and Buzz got up. On the yacht, Janet kept saying to people, “I wish they would hurry up and get this off so I can get some sleep!” At one point the boat’s skipper asked her if all the years of living through the anxious moments of test flights and space shots had not begun to affect her. Pointing to a few streaks of gray in her hair, Janet replied, laughing, “I haven’t aged a day.”

When she got home to Houston late that afternoon, the press waited in her yard. “I don’t feel historic,” Janet succinctly told them, ushering her boys into the house. What she and the boys mainly felt was worn out. Rick did not participate in his Little League All-Star game that night: “I think you’re too tired,” his mother told him, and Rick did not argue. Not playing baseball was another part of the price the boy paid for his father’s going to the Moon.

The vigil for the crew had just begun. It would be two and a half more days before the astronauts even made it to lunar orbit, a day after that before Neil and Buzz descended to the landing, and four days beyond that before they returned to Earth.

So much could still go wrong.

•   •   •

At 10:58 Houston time, two hours and twenty-six minutes after liftoff, Mission Control gave Apollo 11 the “go” for TLI. In the patois of spaceflight, TLI meant “translunar injection”—leaving Earth orbit and heading into deep space. The astronauts accomplished TLI by firing the Saturn V’s third-stage engine, the only stage still attached to the command service module. This burn, lasting some five and a half minutes, accelerated Apollo 11 to over 24,200 miles per hour, the speed required to escape the hold of Earth’s gravity.

Everything from the moment of the launch to this point had gone very well. “That Saturn gave us a magnificent ride,” Armstrong reported after leaving Earth orbit. “We have no complaints with any of three stages of that ride. It was beautiful.”

Privately, Armstrong would have liked the ride to have been smoother: “In the first stage, the Saturn V noise was enormous, particularly when we were at low altitude because we got the noise from seven and a half million pounds of thrust plus the echo of that noise off the ground that reinforced it. After about thirty seconds, we flew out of that echo noise and the volume went down substantially. But in that first thirty seconds it was very difficult to hear anything over the radio—even inside the helmet with the earphones. It was considerably louder than the Titan. In the first stage, it was also a lot rougher ride than the Titan. It seemed to be vibrating in all three axes simultaneously.” During the worst of it, which came shortly after liftoff, Armstrong’s heart rate rose to 110 beats per minute, compared to Collins’s 99 and Aldrin’s 88—all within the satisfactory range. Neil’s heart rate always seemed a little higher than most of the other astronauts’, though the cardiac numbers for all three members of the Apollo 11 crew were lower than what they had been during their Gemini launches, which for Armstrong had been 146 beats per minute, for Collins 125, and for Aldrin 110.

With the burnout of the first stage, the flight smoothed out and quieted down considerably, so much so that the astronauts could not feel any vibration or even hear the engines running. Rocketing upward on the second and third stages of the Saturn proved superior to any stage of the Titan. Mike Collins later described the herky-jerky early ascent of the Saturn V: “It was like a nervous novice driving a wide car down a narrow alley and jerking the wheel back and forth spasmodically.” Then on the upper stages the Saturn V turned into “a gentle giant,” with the climb out of the atmosphere as “smooth as glass, as quiet and serene as a rocket ride can be.”

Out their windows the astronauts could see nothing until three minutes into their ride, when the spacecraft reached sixty miles high. At that altitude, the Apollo 11 crew jettisoned their unused escape rocket and let loose the protective shield that had been covering the command module. Still pointing up, though not straight up following a pitch-over maneuver some three minutes into the ascent, there was nothing for the crew to see except for what Collins called “a small patch of blue sky that gradually darkens to the jet black of space.”

Earth orbit was achieved twelve minutes into the flight when the first burn of the Saturn’s single third-stage engine pushed the Apollo 11 spacecraft (while over the Canary Islands tracking station in the eastern Atlantic) up to the required speed of 17,500 miles per hour. In an ellipse described in astronaut shorthand as 102.5 by 99.7 nautical miles, the trio now had an orbit and a half in which to make sure all their equipment was operating properly before they reignited their third-stage engine and committed themselves to leaving the Earth’s gravitational field.

According to Armstrong, “The purpose of doing the orbit and a half was twofold. One, it allowed a little more flexibility in launch time, and second, it gave us the opportunity to check out all the principal systems of the spacecraft—the command module, not the lunar module—prior to leaving the Earth’s orbit on a translunar trajectory. So systems checkout was the principal reason that we were in this holding orbit, and the responsibility was shared between the crew on board and the people on the ground. The people on the ground could see a good bit more detail of systems operations and the orbit and a half gave them a long enough time to look at it. If something went wrong on the spacecraft, we would have the time to decide whether we should forget the whole thing and abort.”

Initially, the crew found only brief moments to take in the spectacular view of the Earth below. Their first sunrise one hour and nineteen minutes into the flight prompted a hunt for the Swedish-made Hasselblad camera. “Look at that horizon!” Collins exclaimed. Neil replied, “Isn’t that something?!” Mike continued, “Damn, that’s pretty. It’s unreal.” “Get a picture of that,” Neil urged. But the camera could not be found. “I’ve lost a Hasselblad,” Collins jested. “Has anyone seen a Hasselblad floating by? It couldn’t have gone very far, big son of a gun like that. . . . Everybody look for a floating Hasselblad. I see a pen floating loose down here, too. Is anybody missing a ballpoint pen? . . . I mean, felt tip. . . . I’ve looked everywhere over here for that Hasselblad, and I just don’t see it.” “It’s too late for sunrise now, anyway,” Neil noted. “But you want to get it before TLI,” warned Aldrin, because the acceleration of the spacecraft out of orbit could launch the bandit camera into someone’s head, or worse, into the spacecraft’s control panel. “Let me go on a little expedition here,” Collins said. In less than fifteen seconds he found the camera floating in the aft bulkhead. “Beautiful,” said Neil.

For the first time since their respective Gemini flights, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin again experienced the wonder of weightlessness, though there was too much to do to make ready for TLI to enjoy it—if enjoying it was even what would happen. In weightlessness, the fluid in the inner ear sloshed freely. Motion sickness could happen more easily in the Apollo spacecraft than in the Gemini because Apollo was more commodious. On the way to the Moon in Apollo 8, Frank Borman got ill from the motion, causing quite a stir in Mission Control. The mission planners for the subsequent Apollo flights told the crews to move around as slowly and gingerly as possible and not to wiggle their heads back and forth too much, until they got used to being in weightless conditions. Armstrong was intently aware of the potential problem. One hour and seventeen minutes into the flight, he asked Mike and Buzz: “How does zero g feel? Your head feel funny, anybody, or anything like that?” Mike answered, “No. It just feels like we’re going around upside down.” Buzz: “I don’t even feel that.”

According to Neil, “We were very fortunate that none of the crew came down with the malady at any point in the flight. [The same was true for he and Dave Scott in Gemini VIII.] I don’t know how you predict that. Some of the people that were best known to have an iron gut ended up getting space sickness. No one was sure at the time what exactly was causing it. They were trying various things.” As for his own proclivity for nausea, “I was sensitive to motion sickness when I was small, in automobiles and boats. I grew out of it, but I could still make myself queasy by doing a lot of aerobatics. So I was a candidate. But, curiously, the predisposition does not correlate with what goes on in space. Space sickness does not correlate to motion sickness on Earth. It involves sensitivity to other motion situations.”

Convinced that the ship was ready to leave Earth orbit, Mission Control gave Apollo 11 the go for TLI some two hours and fifteen minutes after the spacecraft reached orbit. Flight procedures required that the crew, for their protection during the burn, put their helmets and gloves back on; the idea was that if the Saturn third stage, known as the S-IVB, exploded, the astronauts might benefit from some protection inside their sealed pressure suits. “The problem with that thinking,” as Collins has explained it, was that “any explosion massive enough to crack our ship’s hull would also result in multiple equipment failures, and we would never get back in one piece. Still, a rule was a rule, so we sat there, helmet and gloves on, ready to be propelled to another planet.”

Privately Armstrong also questioned the rationale for putting the helmets and gloves back on: “There was the viewpoint that whenever you were in powered flight you were being exposed to more risk than when you were just in free-floating flight. However, the disadvantage of helmets and gloves was that you were less able, less mobile, and less facile. You couldn’t hear or see as well, so you actually gave up a lot of safety when you had the helmets and gloves on. It was always a balance trying to figure out what was absolutely required.”

Approaching the point for translunar injection halfway around its second Earth orbit, a preprogrammed sequence fired the Saturn’s third-stage engine for one final time, accelerating Apollo 11 to the escape velocity. The TLI burn took just under six minutes. At the moment of ignition, the spacecraft was over the Pacific Ocean; circling more than ninety miles beneath it, a formation of KC-135 aircraft—converted air force tankers carrying a large array of electronic gear—relayed telemetry data from the spacecraft back to Houston. The data indicated that the Saturn V had performed its last job well. Speeding away from the home planet at a rate of six miles per second—faster than a rifle bullet—the astronauts discovered the true meaning of “outward bound.”

The trip out started far busier for Collins than it did for Armstrong or Aldrin. As command module pilot, it was Mike’s job (assisted by Neil and Buzz) to separate Columbia from the S-IVB and turn the command service module around. Mike would then maneuver the CSM into a docking with Eagle, the lunar module, which, to survive the launch—with its spindly legs, thrusters and antennae stuck out at odd angles, and extremely fragile pressure shell of a body—had flown up to this point tightly secured inside a strong boxlike container attached atop the S-IVB. It was a critical maneuver in the flight plan. “If the separation and docking did not work,” Aldrin has explained, “we would return to Earth. There was also the possibility of an in-space collision and the subsequent decompression of our cabin, so we were still in our spacesuits as Mike separated us from the Saturn third stage.”

Neither Aldrin nor Armstrong felt any great apprehension about the maneuver. “Mike did this docking maneuver,” Neil relates, “as he would need to make a similar docking with the LM after we returned from the lunar surface. This had been done before on both Apollo 9 and 10, so I was pretty confident about Mike being able to pull it off without any problems.”

The maneuver came off perfectly. Explosive bolts blew apart the upper section of the large container, giving access to the LM in its garage atop the rocket. Collins controlled rocket thrusters that moved the CSM out and away some one hundred feet from the landing craft. Turning the spacecraft around, he inched forward gently to a successful head-to-head docking. Columbia and Eagle were now mated; when the time came, Neil and Buzz could enter the LM through an internal tunnel and hatch arrangement. To complete the separation maneuver, the LM had to be released from its mounting points and the CSM/LM stack had to be backed away from the S-IVB. Then all that remained was to slingshot the S-IVB out of the way. A command sent over to the S-IVB from Apollo 11 caused it to dump all of its leftover fuel, resulting in a propulsive reaction that sent the rocket tumbling off on a long solar-orbit trajectory that would keep it far out of Apollo 11’s way.

The time was 1:43 P.M. CDT, which was Houston time, only five hours and eleven minutes into the flight. Apollo 11 was traveling at 12,914 feet per second and approaching 22,000 nautical miles from Earth.

Well in excess of five hours was an awfully long time to be living inside a bulky, sweaty space suit. With the separation, docking, and evasive post-TLI maneuvers behind them, the astronauts stripped down and pulled on their considerably more comfortable two-piece white Teflon fabric jumpsuits. In weightlessness, some things were easier to do than in a gravity field, but three men changing out of space suits—in a compartment equivalent in interior space to a small station wagon—was not one of them. Undressing, folding their stiff heavy suits into storage bags, and then stuffing the filled bags under the couch of the spacecraft was a laborious process that, in Aldrin’s words, brought about “a great deal of confusion, with parts and pieces floating about the cabin as we tried to keep logistics under control.” Collins compared it to “three albino whales inside a small tank, banging into the instrument panel despite our best efforts to move slowly. . . . Every time we pushed against the spacecraft our bodies tended to carom off in some unwanted direction and we had to muscle them back into place.”

With their clothes finally off, the crew blissfully removed the gadgets affixed to their private parts. Because the astronauts might need to urinate or have a bowel movement before their suits could be taken off, devices for excreting had been connected to them preliminary to suiting up. Aldrin recalls the nitty-gritty details: “We rubbed our behinds with a special salve and pulled on what were euphemistically called fecal-containment garments.” The modified diaper kept the odor of despoiled briefs to a minimum, and the salve kept the men’s rear ends from chafing too badly. Urinating was accomplished through prophylactic-like devices from which a connector led to a sack resembling a bikini secured around the hips. To function without leaking, the rubber condom catheter had to fit quite snugly, an uncomfortable reality for male plumbing that the crew joked about privately. Once cleaned up and in their jumpsuits with fresh underwear, going to the bathroom was easier and more palatable. Feces got stowed in special containers, and urine was vented out of the spacecraft where it crystallized into bright particles before vanishing from view.

Safely, and now comfortably and hygienically, on their way Moonward, the astronauts relaxed for the first time. As Collins explains, there was no way to prepare oneself for the novel, Twilight Zone–like experience of cislunar space, the region between the Earth and the Moon: “Unlike the roller-coaster ride of the Earth orbit, we are entering a slow-motion domain where time and distance seem to have more meaning than speed. To get a sensation of traveling fast, you must see something whizzing by: the telephone poles along the highway, another airplane crossing your path. . . . In space, objects are too far from each other to blur or whiz, except during a rendezvous or a landing and in those cases the approach is made slowly, very slowly. But if I can’t sense speed out my window, I can certainly gauge distance, as the Earth gets smaller and smaller. Finally the whole disk can be seen.”

This cosmic vision of “Spaceship Earth” would deeply move every lunar astronaut. “It was a slowly changing panorama as you went from just the horizon to a large arc, to a larger and larger arc, and finally a whole sphere,” Armstrong describes. “And depending on what the flight attitude requirements of the vehicle were at any given moment, you may not have been able to see all of that all the time. But we certainly saw the Earth become a sphere. I don’t know if we all saw it at the same instant, nor do I remember the exact instant that it occurred. It was a striking event, leaving the planet and realizing that there was no logical reason that you were ever going to fall back to that planet at some point. It was a commitment to excellence, in terms of what you had to do to get back.”

Looking back at what would come to be known as the “Whole Earth,” Armstrong reveled in his knowledge of geography, a subject at which he had excelled since boyhood. He radioed at three hours and fifty-three minutes into the flight, “You might be interested that out of our left-hand window right now, I can observe the entire continent of North America, Alaska, and over the Pole, down to the Yucatán Peninsula, Cuba, northern part of South America, and then I run out of window.” An hour later, he continued the lesson, adding weather reports: “The weather was good just about everywhere. There was one cyclonic depression in northern Canada, in the Athabasca, probably east of the Athabasca area. Greenland was clear, and it appeared to be we were seeing just the icecap in Greenland. All North Atlantic was pretty good; and Europe and northern Africa seemed to be clear. Most of the United States was clear. There was what looked like a low front stretching from the center of the country up across north of the Great Lakes and into Newfoundland.” Kidding Neil about his geographical expertise, Collins facetiously reported, “I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I sure did like it.”

In order to make sure that the spacecraft’s pipes did not freeze on one side while tank pressures increased from too much heat on the other, Apollo 11 began a slow rotation to ensure that solar rays were absorbed as evenly as possible by all sides of the spacecraft. “We were like a chicken on a barbecue spit,” Collins explained. “If we stopped in one position for too long, all kinds of bad things could happen.” Visually, the rotisserie action resulted in an incredible panorama, with stunning views of the Sun, Moon, and Earth cycling into the spacecraft’s windows every two minutes. Aiding the sightseeing was a simple viewing device called a monocular—half of a set of binoculars. Using it like a magnifying glass, the astronauts took turns getting close looks at different features of their home planet.

It has since become one of the legends of spaceflight that there are only two man-made objects on Earth that can be seen from outer space—the Great Wall of China and the gigantic Fort Peck Dam in Montana. “I would challenge both,” Neil states. In cislunar space, “We could see the continents; we could see Greenland. Greenland stood out, just as it does on the globe in your library, all white. Antarctica we couldn’t see because there were clouds over it. Africa was quite visible, and we could see sun glint off of a lake. It might have been Lake Chad. . . . But I do not believe that, at least with my eyes, there was any man-made object that could be seen. I have not yet found anyone who has told me they’ve seen the Great Wall of China even from Earth orbit. I’m not going to say there aren’t people, but I personally haven’t talked to them. I’ve asked various people, particularly [Space] Shuttle guys, that have been many orbits around China in the daytime, and the ones I’ve talked to didn’t see it.”

Whether it was with the naked eye or with the monocular, Neil could not help but contemplate how fragile the Earth looked: “I don’t know why you have that impression, but it is so small. It’s very colorful, you know. You see an ocean and gaseous layer, a little bit—just a tiny bit—of atmosphere around it, and compared with all the other celestial objects, which in many cases are much more massive and more terrifying, it just looks like it couldn’t put up a very good defense against a celestial onslaught.” Buzz and Mike felt likewise, with Buzz thinking how crazy it was for the globe to be so politically and culturally divided: “From space it has an almost benign quality. Intellectually one could realize there were wars under way on Earth, but emotionally it was impossible to understand such things. The thought occurred and reoccurred that wars are generally fought for territory or are disputes over borders; from space the arbitrary borders established on Earth cannot be seen.”

Their first urge for serious sightseeing satisfied, the astronauts moved to satiate their belly hunger. Nutritionally, it was important for them during the voyage to consume a sufficient amount of water and calories per day (between 1,700 and 2,500 calories), whether the food in its various dehydrated and freeze-dried preparations was savory or not. Already before their first full meal—scheduled for midafternoon of the first day, following the slingshot of the S-IVB and getting out of their suits—the crew munched down a sandwich or two, made from four types of tubed spread: ham salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and cheddar cheese. They also made the first raid into their snack pantry, filled with peanut cubes, caramel candy, bacon bites, barbecue beef bites, as well as dried apricots, peaches, and pears.

For the first time in a U.S. lunar spaceflight, the beverage list included not just juice and water but ample servings of coffee (Wally Schirra had made a big fuss to bring a couple of servings of freeze-dried coffee crystals aboard Apollo 7, but neither Apollo 8 nor Apollo 9 carried coffee, only cocoa): fifteen black coffees (for Neil), fifteen with sugar (for Mike), and fifteen with cream and sugar (for Buzz). As blasphemous as it may sound, the juice aboard Apollo 11 was not Tang, the famous orange juice made from powder that its manufacturer, General Foods, advertised as the special drink of the astronauts. “I can’t speak for the other flights,” Aldrin confesses, “but before ours, the three of us dutifully sampled the orange drink and instead chose a grapefruit-orange mixture as our citrus drink. If Tang was on our flight I was unaware of it.”

To get water, the astronauts grabbed one of two six-foot flexible tubes that were attached to spigots—one for cold water, one for hot. At the end of each tube was a pistol probe with a push button. If the astronaut wanted a cold drink, he held the probe in his mouth, pushed the button, and out came a mouthful of water. If he was preparing food, he stuck the hot water gun into a plastic bag and squirted three blasts into it. Massaging the rehydrating food into an edible form, he ate most entrées by sucking them through a tube. Unfortunately, the device designed to ventilate hydrogen from the water before it passed from the gun to the food bag did not function well. Considerable gas came with the water and got into the food to be swallowed by the astronauts, bloating them and giving them stomach gas. “At one point on the trip back to Earth it got so bad,” Aldrin jokes, “that we could have shut down our attitude-control thrusters and done the job ourselves!”

The fare turned out to be appetizing enough, if bland. Based on a successful experiment first tried on Apollo 8, one of the dishes enjoyed by Apollo 11—a turkey dinner with gravy and dressing—could be eaten (after mixing with hot water) with a spoon. Also in the spacecraft’s pantry were “wet packs” that could be eaten just as they were, including a meal of ham and potatoes. Sometimes the crew all ate the same meal—as they did for lunch on day two of the mission, when they had hot dogs (the first genuine frankfurters to be launched into space), applesauce, chocolate pudding, and the citrus-drink-that-was-not-Tang. Other times, they ate individualized meals that had been prepared by the Manned Spacecraft Center’s chief of food and nutrition, Dr. Malcolm C. Smith Jr., after he had consulted with the astronauts’ wives about their husbands’ likes and dislikes. Neil’s favorite meal, according to the NASA’s public affairs officer who regularly gave reports on what the astronauts were eating and drinking, was spaghetti with meat sauce, scalloped potatoes, pineapple fruitcake cubes, and grape punch. Aldrin fell in love with shrimp cocktails: “The shrimp were chosen one by one to be sure they would be tiny enough to squeeze out of the food packet, and they were delicious.” Collins especially liked the cream of chicken soup and the salmon salad. They were “really delicious by anyone’s standards. . . . Ah, this salmon salad! I’ll rate it four spoons any day!”

Eleven hours into the flight—stomachs full and housekeeping duties taken care of—the crew was ready for its first sleep period. In fact, at 7:52 P.M. CDT, two hours before the scheduled time, Houston wished its tired crew good night and signed off. The urge to sleep had actually come on the astronauts quite a bit earlier. Just two hours into the flight, before preparations for TLI began, Neil yawned to his mates, “Gee, I almost went to sleep then,” to which Collins replied, “Me, too. I’m taking a little rest. . . . You need to get out the alarm clock.” Buzz said, “It’s going to be a long day. . . . Wake me up at TLI, somebody.” For the next nine hours, they fought sporadic drowsiness until it was time to sleep.

Collins took the first watch. As much thinking as had been done to preplan every detail of the Apollo 11 mission, there was no way to simulate sleeping three-dimensionally in weightless conditions. “Although you could install the sleep devices in a spacecraft mockup here on Earth,” relates Armstrong, “you couldn’t sleep in them here on Earth. It required a weightless condition for that. I don’t recall us having any difficulty, however. How we established the places for the 3-D cots, I also don’t remember, but we all seemed to find our own all the time. All of the sleeping arrangements were identical in configuration, so the disadvantages of one spot might be that one was closer to noise or light or something like that. But I don’t remember any discussion of dissatisfaction with any individual location. I think all the Apollo 11 crew slept well.”

The three-dimensional cots referred to by Armstrong were light mesh hammocks, very much like sleeping bags, which were stretched and anchored beneath the left and right couches—the center couch having been folded down, still covering the crews’ space suits. “It kept our arms from floating around and from inadvertently actuating switches,” Neil explains. The man on watch—Collins the first night out—slept not in a hammock but floated above the left couch, a lap belt keeping him from floating off and with a miniature headset taped to his ear in case Houston called during the “night.” “It was a strange but pleasant sensation to doze off with no pressure points falling anywhere on your body,” Collins relates. It was like being “suspended by a cobweb’s light touch—just floating and falling all the way to the Moon.” Buzz got to experience the feeling, but Neil did not, as he always slept in his hammock.

With adrenaline levels still fairly high from the excitement of liftoff and TLI, the men slept only five and a half hours that first night. When CapCom Bruce McCandless of Mission Control’s Green Team (headed by Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth) called to wake the crew at 7:48 CDT, all three were already alert. As the astronauts went over their “postsleep checklist,” following updates on the flight plan and on consumables, McCandless gave them a brief review of the morning news, much of which concerned the world’s enthusiastic reaction to their successful launch.

The very first news item relayed to the crew that morning concerned the flight of the Soviet Union’s Luna 15: according to the story read to the astronauts, the USSR’s robotic spacecraft had just reached the Moon and started around it. What had happened was this. In a last-ditch effort to steal thunder from America’s Moon landing, the Russians had launched the small unmanned spacecraft toward the Moon on July 13, three days prior to Apollo 11’s liftoff; its objective was not just to land on the Moon but to scoop up a sample of lunar soil and return it to Earth before Apollo 11 got back. Newspapers in the United States editorialized (accurately) that the Russians were purposefully trying to upstage the Americans with their “mystery probe” and speculated (inaccurately) that they might also be trying to interfere technically with the American flight. U.S. space officials worried that Soviet operations and communications with Luna 15 (Soviet designation e-8-5) might, in fact, interfere with Apollo—over the years that had happened occasionally when the Russians operated at or near NASA’s radio frequencies.

MSC’s Chris Kraft spoke critically of Luna 15 at a NASA press conference on July 14. Then Kraft telephoned Colonel Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 commander, who was just back from a nine-day tour of the USSR, the first U.S. astronaut ever to visit the country. “The best thing to do is just ask ’em,” Borman told Kraft. So, with Nixon’s permission, over the famed hotline between Moscow and Washington established by the two superpowers to avert nuclear holocaust following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Borman sent a message to the head of the USSR Academy of Sciences, sixty-eight-year-old Mstislav V. Keldysh. Dr. Keldysh was a leading Soviet academician and the chief of his country’s Institute of Applied Mathematics. For over fifteen years, Keldysh had been one of Russian’s lead officials in the area of missile and spacecraft design. Borman had met Keldysh during Borman’s trip to Moscow. His message asked Keldysh for the exact orbital parameters of the Russian probe. Keldysh complied, assuring Borman, “The orbit of probe Luna 15 does not intersect the trajectory of Apollo 11 spacecraft announced by you in flight program.”

True to his word, nothing about Luna 15, in fact, would bother Apollo. Not just that, the Soviet mission failed miserably. Instead of landing on the Moon as scheduled, Luna 15 crashed into the Moon on July 21, the day after Apollo 11’s successful landing. Tass, the Soviet news agency, asserted that Luna 15 had “reached the Moon’s surface” after flying fifty-two revolutions around it, but American and British sources quickly confirmed that the robotic craft had in fact crashed.

As for the Apollo 11 crew itself, they were never very worried about the Soviet probe. Collins later remarked that the chances of the Russians being able to fly a trajectory that intersected with either Columbia or with Eagle were “equivalent to my high school football team beating the Miami Dolphins.” Armstrong and Aldrin felt similarly. “I wasn’t thinking about Luna 15,” Neil asserts. “I had too many of my own things to think about.”

As for being aware of the Soviet Union’s manned lunar program, neither the Apollo 11 crew nor any other American astronauts knew much more about it than could be read in the trade press. “I don’t remember receiving any classified briefings on the Soviet program,” Armstrong comments. “In general, NASA had an unclassified program, and we were seldom burdened with classified information about ‘the other side.’ That made it substantially easier for us to remember what we could and could not say.”

Actually, no one outside the deep dark core of the Soviet space program knew just how far the USSR was falling short of launching cosmonauts to the Moon, or whether the Soviets were even pushing a manned lunar program. Not confirmed until many years later was a powerful explosion—the most powerful in the history of rocketry—on the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 3, 1969, just nine days before the launch of Luna 15 and thirteen days before the liftoff of Apollo 11. On that day, the Soviets were test firing a Moon rocket of their own: a mammoth booster designated the N-1. If the unmanned test launch of the N-1 worked, the Soviets were prepared to press on with their clandestine manned lunar program, a program that Kremlin leadership had always insisted they did not have. Seconds after the launch, however, the N-1 rocket collapsed back onto its pad and exploded—by some estimates with a strength equivalent to 250 tons of TNT, not quite the power of a nuclear explosion, but still formidable. Somehow no one was killed in the carnage, but the launchpad was completely destroyed and the steppe surrounding it “literally strewn with dead animals and birds.” Not until November 1969 did rumors of the Soviet accident surface in the Western press; by then, American intelligence knew about it. Photos taken in early August 1969 by U.S. spy satellites flying as part of the ultra-secret CORONA photoreconnaissance program clearly showed the ruin at Baikonur.

For all practical purposes, the N-1 disaster spelled the end of the Soviet Moon program; Luna 15 was a last-gasp effort to salvage a minor victory from the Moon race. Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union in August 1991 did participants in the Soviet Moon program even admit their program existed, let alone that the N-1 disaster had occurred. All evidence of the N-1’s very existence had been destroyed, with some of its casings even being used as outlying buildings at the Baikonur installation.

Armstrong did not learn about the N-1 accident until many years later: “I don’t remember any briefings on it during my astronaut days.”

Another news item read to Apollo 11 by Mission Control that morning said that “Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on Earth. Agnew, the ranking government official at the Apollo 11 blastoff Wednesday, apparently was speaking for himself and not necessarily for the Nixon administration.” “Right on, Spiro!” was Mike Collin’s off-air reaction. For three men going to the Moon, it could not have seemed that much more fantastical that a future group of astronauts might, in the reasonably near future, be voyaging to the Red Planet. True, political support for NASA had been declining in the second half of the 1960s, but, in the heady summer days of 1969, there was reason to think that the situation would improve. There was no way to know just how lame the support for space exploration would grow under the direction of the Nixon administration and how, for the rest of the century, there would be absolutely no chance for a manned Mars program—or even for a continuation of a manned lunar program beyond 1972.

•   •   •

The major flight event of day two came at 10:17 A.M. CDT when a three-second burn refined the course of Apollo 11 and tested the CSM engine, which would be needed to get the spacecraft in and out of lunar orbit. At the moment of that slight midcourse correction, Armstrong and his mates were 108,594 miles from Earth—over two-fifths of the way to the Moon—and traveling at a velocity of only 5,057 feet per second. Still in the pull of Earth’s gravity, the speed of Apollo 11 would decrease steadily until it was less than 40,000 miles from the Moon—by which point the spacecraft had slowed from its top velocity of approximately 25,000 mph to a mere 2,000 mph. Then as the Moon’s pull became dominant, it would speed up again.

Much of the astronauts’ time during their midflight coast was taken up with the various minor tasks required to keep the CSM operating properly: purging fuel cells, charging batteries, dumping waste water, changing carbon dioxide canisters, preparing food, chlorinating drinking water, and so forth. Collins did most of the routine housekeeping so Armstrong and Aldrin could stay focused on reviewing the details of the landing to come—going over checklists, rehearsing landing procedures. “The flight plan to the Moon had several blank pages,” Aldrin remembers, “periods in which we had nothing to do. Yet I have no recollection at all of being idle. I don’t think any of us was. . . . Everything had to be stowed or sealed away or anchored to one of the many panels by Velcro. We each had little cloth pouches in which we kept various frequently used items, such as pens, sunglasses and, for me [as well as for Neil], a slide rule. As often or not, one or two of us would be scrambling around on the floor searching for a missing pair of sunglasses, the monocular, a film pack, or a toothbrush.” Even during the rare times when they were not performing some manual task, the astronauts were thinking about what was to come next. With Neil in command, there was little idle conversation and small talk—and what there was did not come from him.

During rest periods they did relax to some music. It was played on a small portable tape recorder carried on the flight primarily for the purpose of recording crew comments and observations. Neil and Mike requested some specific music be preloaded onto the cassette tape; Buzz did not, later saying he “was much too busy to be bothered with selecting music and deferred to Neil and Mike, who chose mostly easy listening music.”

Neil asked specifically for two recordings. One was Antonin Dvorak’s once wildly popular New World Symphony, an 1895 composition by the Czech immigrant to the United States that helped legitimize American music to the rest of a dubious world. Neil had played the piece when he was in the Purdue concert band, and he liked it. As the Moon was a new world, it also seemed appropriate to him.

The other was a little-known piece by composer Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman (1904–1968), entitled Music out of the Moon. The featured instrument in the Hoffman composition was the theremin, an unusual device (named for Russian engineer and inventor Leo Theremin—known in his homeland as Lev Sergeivich Termen [1836–1933]) that generated tones electronically by a musician controlling the distance between his hands and two metal rods serving as antenna. (The 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound and the 1951 science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still were scored with the haunting electronic sounds of the theremin.) Life magazine reported after the flight that Neil selected Music out of the Moon for sentimental reasons, and that he chose a time to broadcast it back to Earth so his wife Janet would hear it and know he was thinking of her. Early in their marriage up in the rustic cabin at Juniper Hills, the couple had allegedly fallen in love with the theremin music. When Neil was flying experimental aircraft at Edwards, Janet listened to the recording by the hour, Life said. It was one of the many items that had been lost in their 1964 house fire. Someone found a copy of the album for Neil and taped part of it for the flight.

Both Neil and Janet remember the music, but not quite in the way Life reported. “I can remember liking the theremin,” Janet recalls, “and may have said ‘I love that music,’ probably because it was unusual music in those days—different. However, to say that I played it all the time is incorrect.” The only record player that the couple owned while in Juniper Hills was an old Victrola that was in the cabin when they bought it, the kind with a crank-operated turntable. “I did know that, when the music was played in space, Neil selected it, because the music was so unusual and no one else would have known it. It was nice to think he was thinking of me and was able to take a moment to relax and reflect on the flight. In a sense it was a bit of the ‘home’ touch to the people of the world that these were real people up there, no robots flying the spacecraft. Good PR.” Neil remembers the music even less sentimentally: “I did have the theremin music, which I liked. I don’t remember whether Janet liked it or not and do not know if she ever played it at home. I included it because Music out of the Moon seemed appropriate for the flight. I do not remember that it had anything to do with Janet.”

•   •   •

The highlight of day two was the first live television broadcast from Apollo 11, which was scheduled to begin at 7:30 P.M. EDT. Actually, it was the third TV transmission overall from the flight; the first two were conducted to check out camera functions, the picture quality of both interior and exterior shots, and the strength of signal coming into and out of the Goldstone tracking station in California. That way any glitches could be fixed before several million people around the world tuned in to see the broadcast on Thursday evening.

The first fuzzy picture to appear on everyone’s screen was a shot looking back at the home planet, which Armstrong described as “just a little more than a half Earth.” In plain but wondrous language, Neil pointed out the “definite blue cast” of the oceans, the “white bands of major cloud formations over the Pacific,” “the browns in the landforms,” and “some greens showing along the northwestern coast of the United States and northwestern coast of Canada.” He explained that at their current distance—some 139,000 nautical miles—the depth of the colors was not as great as what they had enjoyed while in Earth orbit or even at 50,000 miles out. Collins humorously turned the camera around in his hands a full 180 degrees, saying, “Okay, world, hold on to your hat. I’m going to turn you upside down.” Mike rotated the camera a second time, a little more smoothly, then told Charlie Duke, the CapCom for Flight Director Gene Kranz’s White Team, “I’m making myself seasick, Charlie, I’ll just put you back right-side-up where you belong.”

For thirty-six minutes, the astronauts put on a show. The model of spontaneity, Collins disavowed the use of cue cards, Aldrin did a few zero-g push-ups, and Neil even stood on his head. (Collins: “Neil’s standing on his head again. He’s trying to make me nervous.”) Head chef Collins also demonstrated how to make chicken stew when traveling at a speed of 4,400 feet per second. Neil relates that most of the telecast seemed improvised but Aldrin notes that “we went to great lengths” to make it look that way. “The fact is they were carefully planned in advance and for me the exact words were written down on little cards stuck on to the panel in front of us.” Neil used no written aids, having thought through what he wanted to do and say only shortly before the TV transmission.

The transmission ended emotionally with Neil saying, “As we pan back out to the distance at which we see the Earth, it’s Apollo 11 signing off.” The crew then spent the next three hours taking care of additional housekeeping items and participating fruitlessly in a telescope experiment during which they were unable to spot a bluish-green laser light being shot at them from the McDonald Observatory near El Paso. Though the sleep period was scheduled to begin shortly before 9:00 P.M. CDT, none of them fell asleep until after 11:30, this time with Aldrin in the floating “watch” position. The sleep period was scheduled to be a long one, lasting ten hours. Data from the flight surgeon indicated that “the crew slept rather well all night”—so well, in fact, that Mission Control let them have an extra hour before waking them up to perform such chores as charging batteries, dumping waste-water, and checking fuel and oxygen reserves.

In the preliminary flight plan, Aldrin and Armstrong were not scheduled to make their first inspection trip into Eagle until Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit around midday of day three, but Aldrin lobbied successfully with the mission planners to enter the LM a day early in order to make sure the lander had suffered no damage during launch and the long flight out. The sojourn began a little after 4:00 P.M. CDT, about twenty minutes into what NASA considered at the time the clearest TV transmission from space ever made. Collins did the honors of opening the hatch. Armstrong squeezed through the thirty-inch-wide tunnel and floated in through the top of the LM, followed by Aldrin. Both Neil and Buzz remember the down-up-up-down trip into Eagle as one of the oddest sensations of their entire Moon trip, crawling from the floor to the ceiling of the command module only to find themselves descending headfirst from the ceiling of the docked LM. “Though slightly disorienting,” Buzz states, “it was intriguing to move about my chores, knowing all the time that just a few feet away everyone else was, by my reckoning, upside down.”

Though Neil was the first one to take a look inside Eagle, it was Buzz as lunar module pilot who began preparing the LM for its separation from Columbia that was to come forty-five hours later. Buzz and Neil took the movie camera and television camera along with them, sending back the first pictures from inside the LM. Mission Control knew that the transmission was coming, but it surprised the TV networks, which were not expecting the next pictures from Apollo 11 until 7:30 P.M. EDT, the same time as the previous evening. Scurrying to make the necessary technical connections, CBS, for example, went on air with Cronkite and sidekick Wally Schirra at 5:50 P.M. The first images—being broadcast live to the United States, Japan, western Europe, and much of South America—showed Aldrin taking an equipment inventory in the LM. Later, Buzz gave the international television audience a look at the space suit and life support equipment that he and Neil would wear on the Moon.

•   •   •

No account of the flight of Apollo 11 would be complete without coming to grips with subsequent tales that the crew saw a UFO.

According to the story—which over the past thirty-plus years has been told and retold in so many different versions that it is in fact wrong to call it one story—the astronauts on their way to the Moon saw something, perhaps several things, they could not identify, ranging from mysterious lights to actual formations of spaceships. One version has “a mass of intelligent energy” tailing the spacecraft all the way from the Earth to the Moon. Another has “a bright object resembling a giant snowman,” which later “proved” to be two UFOs, racing across Apollo 11’s path as it reached lunar orbit. Still another has Collins spotting a UFO as he was photographing the LM’s ascent from the surface. Allegedly, close analysis of the Apollo 11 film and photographs verified the presence of UFOs, but NASA, the Pentagon, and the entirety of the U.S. government all conspired to cover up the evidence, going so far as editing out major portions of Apollo 11’s onboard and air-to-ground audio recordings. Most incredible of all, the story has made the rounds that just as Armstrong started down the ladder to make his historic first step off the LM and onto the Moon, he saw something on the lunar surface that made him scramble back into the LM, only venturing out again several minutes later after Mission Control calmed him down and insisted that he and Aldrin make their Moon walk.

In broad sociocultural perspective, it is not at all surprising to find that people fascinated with UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life have projected their anticipations onto the astronauts and their missions. The sighting of “flying saucers” became an epidemic in the years following World War II, perhaps because, as one historian has tried to explain it, the specter of Armageddon brought on by the appearance of the atomic bomb spawned “at once an appetite for vicarious scientific adventure and a need to externalize fear.” So crazy had the belief in UFOs become in the late 1940s that the U.S. Air Force began to amass hundreds of case studies and firsthand personal testimonies about UFOs from pilots and common folk alike, in what came to be called the “Blue Book investigations”; in the end, the air force’s conclusions satisfied no one. The UFO craze crested in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the birth of the Space Age, heightened by the launch of the first satellites and space capsules. Any comment about a possible unidentified flying object, especially if made by a pilot, set off another string of reported sightings. Stories circulated that NASA test pilot Joe Walker, in April 1962, filmed five cylindrical and disk-shaped objects from his X-15 aircraft; that two radar technicians, in April 1964, watched UFOs following an unmanned Gemini capsule; that NASA installed a special instrument on Gemini IV to detect UFOs; that Borman and Lovell on Gemini VII and Conrad and Gordon on Gemini XI had spotted “bogeys.” Whatever it was that was originally factual behind the reports quickly got lost amid the illusions, gross exaggerations, and outright fabrications that fed the public’s growing appetite for news about UFOs.

It would have been astounding if something as epochal as the first Moon landing had not generated a fresh and intense new round of UFO stories even more untruthful, hyperbolic, and stubbornly persistent than what came before. On the Internet today, a search involving the words “Apollo 11” and “UFO” results in 5,410 hits, “Apollo” and “UFO” in 61,700 hits, “astronaut” and “UFO” in 46,000 hits; “pilot” and “UFO” in 136,000 hits; and “UFO” alone in 4.46 million hits. Just for “Neil Armstrong” and “UFO,” one gets directed to 3,180 different Web sites; for Buzz Aldrin, 1,700 sites; for Mike Collins only 349. Clearly, it is important to those who want to believe in alien intelligence that the First Man, even more so than his two crewmates (or any other astronaut), spotted a UFO.

As is true for many a fanciful story, the stories about Apollo 11’s UFO “sightings” have a kernel of truth. The first alleged sighting came early on day one just as the burn for TLI was starting:

00:02:44:37 elapsed time
Collins:	Flashes out window number five. I’m not sure whether that’s—it could be lightning or it could be something to do with the engine. . . . Continual flashes. . . . Look out the window. If you’re—if it looks like what I see out window 5, you don’t want to look at it [laughter].
Armstrong:	I don’t see anything.
Aldrin:	Why? [in response to Collins’s statement]
Collins:	These flashes out there . . .
Armstrong:	Oh, I see a little flashing out there, yes.
Collins:	You see that? Buzz is usually looking . . . Just watch window 5 for a second. See it?
Aldrin:	Yes, yes. Damn! Everything’s—just kind of sparks flying out there.

Why Collins jokingly said to his crewmates, “you don’t want to look at it,” can only be interpreted to mean that he worried that, if they did look, and saw what he saw, they all might feel it necessary to report that they had seen something they could not identify. And reporting anything that sounded like a UFO was not something the astronauts wanted to do. So, they said nothing to the ground about the flashing lights, even though, as Aldrin recalls, they saw the flashes “at least two or three different times,” and not just on the outbound flight.

The first time that an American astronaut said he saw something strange in space was in 1962 when John Glenn in Friendship 7 spotted what he called “fireflies” (“I see a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. . . . they look like little stars. . . . They swirl around the capsule”). As it turned out, Glenn’s fireflies were ice flakes falling off the skin of the Mercury 6 space capsule, but that discovery was not made until Carpenter’s Mercury 7 flight. By that time, the idea had circulated in the popular mind that Glenn might have run into some alien life form.

Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin knew all about John Glenn’s fireflies—as well as about every other phenomenon, physical, optical, or otherwise, that they and their fellow astronauts had experienced in the twenty manned spaceflights prior to Apollo—but what the flashes were that seemed to appear outside their windows less than three hours into their own flight they did not know.

After the astronauts were back safely on Earth, Aldrin had the most to say about the flashing lights; not surprisingly, Armstrong had the least. So anxious was Buzz to tell someone about them that he did not wait until the astrophysics part of the Apollo debriefing; he volunteered the information right in the middle of the debriefing about the astronauts’ food.

“The food guys couldn’t have cared less,” Buzz laughs today. “It wasn’t their subject, and the astrophysics guys never listened to the food debriefing, so nothing happened. At the time we were in quarantine, so I finally called up somebody but was told, ‘They are all on travel.’ Later, I was able to talk to somebody and together we began to understand what it was. I forget how many weeks later, someone from astrophysics finally called and said, ‘We’re getting more curious about this, and we’re wondering if you could help us with an experiment. We’ve designed something and would you come over and put your head in this thing for us,’ and I said, ‘No, thanks!’ ”

The phenomenon of the flashing lights was unusual enough that NASA briefed the next crew about it. When Apollo 12 went up, they too saw the lights; in fact, they came back and reported, “Guess what? We see them with our eyes closed!”

The flashing lights turned out to be a phenomenon that occurred in the especially dark conditions of outer space inside the human eyeball. “I thought I was seeing something within the cabin and outside of my body,” Buzz relates today, and so did Mike. From his few remarks to his mates about the flashes at the time, it is not clear that Neil was so sure they were not just optical phenomena—and typical of Neil, he was never fast about drawing conclusions except when he had to.

What the Apollo 11 crew eventually found out was that there was a threshold—an optical threshold tied to a psychological threshold—where a person had to want to look and see the flashing lights or he just would not observe them. Experts have since explained that some astronauts have such a sensitive threshold that they see the flashes even when flying in near space below the Van Allen radiation belt. “But six people had gone outside the Van Allen Belt before we did [the crews of Apollo 8 and 10],” Aldrin notes, “and they hadn’t seen any flashes.” So, the crew of Apollo 11 was involved in another “first.”

Less significantly from the point of view of science, but of import for those who want to believe in UFOs, was a second “sighting” that the crew could not explain—or at least be 100 percent sure of their explanation.

It took place the evening of the third day—the day of the first sojourn into the LM—shortly after 9:00 P.M. Aldrin apparently saw it first: “I found myself idly staring out of the window of the Columbia and saw something that looked a bit unusual. It appeared brighter than any star and not quite the pinpoint of light that stars are. It was also moving relative to the stars. I pointed this out to Mike and Neil, and the three of us were beset with curiosity. With the help of the monocular we guessed that whatever it was, it was only a hundred miles or so away. Looking at it through the sextant we found it occasionally formed a cylinder, but when the sextant’s focus was adjusted it had a sort of illuminated ‘L’ look to it. There was a straight line, maybe a little bump in it, and then a little something off to the side. It had a shape of some sort—we all agreed on that—but exactly what it was we couldn’t pin down.”

The crew fretted, “What are we going to say about this?” Aldrin remembers, “We sure as hell were not going to talk about it to the ground, because all that would do is raise a curiosity and if that got out, someone might say NASA needed to be commanded to abandon the mission, because we had aliens going along! Our reticence to be outspoken while it was happening was because we were just prudent. We didn’t want to do anything that gave the UFO nuts any ammunition at all, because enough wild things had been said over the years about astronauts seeing strange things.”

At first the crew speculated that what they were seeing was the shell of the Saturn S-IVB that had been slingshot away more than two days earlier. After the S-IVB’s propulsive maneuver, the astronauts had seen it traveling well out of their way, on a trajectory that would miss the Moon and send it into solar orbit. (On later Apollo missions, NASA intentionally maneuvered the S-IVB to impact the Moon for the purpose of taking seismographic readings, but it did not do that on Apollo 11.) So, at two days, twelve hours, forty-five minutes, and forty-six seconds of elapsed time into the flight, Neil radioed, “Houston, Apollo 11. Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?” The answer came back some three minutes later: “Apollo 11, Houston. The S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles away from you. Over.” “Okay. Thank you,” replied Neil.

The astronauts scratched their heads. At far closer than 6,000 miles, the object in sight could not be the S-IVB, but rather one of the four panels that had enclosed the LM’s launch garage. When the LM was extracted for face-to-face mating with the command module, the side panels had sprung off in different directions. Analytical studies had indicated the most likely trajectories for the four ejected panels, but NASA could not track the panels because there were no transponders on them.

The Apollo 11 crew was convinced that what they saw was one of the panels. According to Aldrin, “We could see it for about forty-five seconds at a time as the ship rotated, and we watched it off and on for about an hour. . . . Its course appeared in no way to conflict with ours, and as it presented no danger we dropped the matter there,” and went to sleep. Nothing more was said about the sighting until one portion of NASA’s classified debriefing. Armstrong is confident that no one in NASA suggested what they should or should not say in the future about the UFO. What was to be said was left to the individual crew member.

In Armstrong’s mind today, there is still no doubt that what they all saw was a detached part of their own spacecraft. “We did watch a slow blinking light some substantial distance away from us. Mission Control eventually concluded—and I agree—that it was one of the Saturn LM adapter panels. These panels were enormous and would have been given a rotation in the process of their ejection from the S-IVB. The reflection from these panels would, therefore, be similar to blinking. I do not know why we did not see the other three panels, but I suspect that the one that was directly down from the Sun from us would have provided the brightest reflection.”

How the panel had kept up with the Apollo 11 spacecraft for over two days—and in fact, was out in front of it—was a simple matter of Newtonian physics. “When the SLA panels were ejected,” Neil explains, “they had a very slight outward relative velocity, but their velocity along the flight path was essentially identical to that of the CSM-LM combination. The panels, therefore, having no atmospheric drag to slow them, traveled at the CSM-LM speed, but developed an ever-increasing lateral separation from it.” As for why the S-IVB was so far behind the spacecraft, that was explained by the fact that the S-IVB was traveling along the same velocity vector but after separation was traveling slightly slower than the CSM-LM. Over a couple days’ time, a sizable distance developed between the two.

No matter the thoroughness of the scientific explanation, however, the fact of the matter is that Apollo 11 did see what technically has to be called an unidentified flying object. “When somebody asks, ‘Did you see a UFO?’ Aldrin admits, “technically we should say we did. But given all the misstatements that would come forth from that, I’ll only tell the story if I’m given enough time. I’ll tell a complete story to somebody with the idea that, once they understand the whole story, they won’t make a big thing of it. I’ll try to manage the information in the right way. But immediately after Apollo 11 we all thought it was so, ‘No, no, no.’ ”

The third night out the Apollo 11 astronauts rested more fitfully—they knew that when they awoke, day four was going to be different. As Collins would later say, it was time for the crew “to lay their little pink bodies on the line.” Stopping their rotisserie motion and getting into lunar orbit was not automatic. If the spacecraft did not slow down sufficiently it would sail on by the Moon in a gigantic arc and make a looping return back to the vicinity of the Earth.

Arousing the astronauts that morning at 7:32 A.M. CDT, Mission Control again started the day by reading them the morning news. “First off, it looks like it’s going to be impossible to get away from the fact that you guys are dominating all the news back here on Earth,” said Bruce McCandless, taking his turn as CapCom. “Even Pravda in Russia is headlining the mission and calls Neil ‘The Czar of the Ship.’ I think maybe they got the wrong mission. . . . Back here in Houston, your three wives and children got together for lunch yesterday at Buzz’s house. And, according to Pat, it turned out to be a gabfest. The children swam and did some high jumping over Buzz’s bamboo pole.”

McCandless mentioned that a Houston astrologer by the name of Ruby Graham was reading all signs as right for Apollo 11’s trip to the Moon: “She says that Neil is clever, Mike has good judgment, and Buzz can work out intricate problems. She also says Neil tends to see the world through rose-colored glasses, but he is always ready to help the afflicted or distressed. Neil, you are also supposed to have ‘intuition that enables you to interpret life with feeling.’ ” Armstrong offered no comment, as the word of an astrologer held no interest for him—nor offered any real understanding of his personality.

With their spacecraft now only 12,486 miles from the Moon, the dawning of a spectacular and eerie view made it clear that the moment of truth would soon be at hand. With the Sun directly behind the Moon and backlighting the planetoid, Apollo 11 was flying through a giant solar eclipse, a massive lunar shadow, with the Sun’s corona cascading brilliantly around the edges of what was now a huge dark object completely filling their windows. The Earthshine shone so brightly from behind them that it cast the lunar surface as three-dimensional. Grabbing their cameras, the astronauts took numerous shots of the sensational effect, but the highly unusual lighting conditions impacted the quality of the pictures.

Only six men in history had ever seen the Moon look anything like this, but neither the crew of Apollo 8 nor Apollo 10 had done more than contemplate setting down in such a forlorn-looking place. Apollo 11 had to do it. Even Collins, the one who did not have to land, privately felt a foreboding—the “cool, magnificent sphere” hanging there “ominously,” “a formidable presence without sound or motion,” issuing “no invitation to invade its domain.” Despite the fact that the crew had spent years studying photographs from the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor spacecraft, as well as from Apollo 8 and 10, it was “nevertheless a shock to actually see the Moon at firsthand,” Collins later wrote. “The first thing that springs to mind is the vivid contrast between the Earth and the Moon. One has to see the second planet up close to truly appreciate the first. I’m sure that to a geologist the Moon is a fascinating place, but this monotonous rock pile, this withered, sun-seared peach pit out my window offers absolutely no competition to the gem it orbits. Ah, the Earth, with its verdant valleys, its misty waterfalls . . . I’d just like to get our job done and get out of here.”

Inside the spacecraft at the time, the astronauts searched with much less success for the right adjectives to describe for the public the incredible phenomenon they were seeing. In talking to the ground, Armstrong did his best to keep reports tangible and unemotional, but it was hard even for him to hold back the superlatives. “The view of the Moon that we’ve been having recently is really spectacular,” Neil reported. “It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window and, of course, we can see the entire circumference, even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it’s in Earthshine. It’s a view worth the price of the trip.”

But the trip was not about looking at the Moon, it was about landing on it—and that could not happen unless Apollo 11 managed to get into a proper parking orbit from which the LM could make its descent. The vital first step in that process was making a very precise burn called “LOI-1,” the basic Lunar Orbit Insertion.

03:03:30:46	CapCom:	Eleven, this is Houston. You are Go for LOI. Over.
03:03:30:53	Aldrin:	Roger. Go for LOI.

The burn involved firing the service propulsion system engine for just under six minutes, braking Apollo 11 down to a speed that allowed the Moon’s gravity to trap the spacecraft and reel it into orbit. As Mike Collins’s explanation makes clear, it was a moment of truth: “We need to reduce our speed by 2,000 mph, from 5,000 down to 3,000, and will do this by burning our service propulsion system engine for six minutes. We are extra careful, paying painful attention to each entry on their checklist.” A lot of help with the burn came from the onboard computer and from Mission Control, but it was up to the astronauts to get it right: “If just one digit slips in our computer, and it is the worst possible digit, we could turn around backward and blast ourselves into an orbit headed for the Sun.”

From every indication, it seemed that the LOI burn went well, but Mission Control could not know with certainty until the vehicle swung its way around the back side of the Moon and Houston, twenty-three minutes later, could once again communicate with it.

“We don’t know if all is going well with Apollo 11,” Walter Cronkite intoned on CBS’s live coverage, which began at 1:30 P.M. EDT, “because it is behind the Moon and out of contact with Earth for the first time. Eight minutes ago they fired their large service propulsion system engine to go into orbit around the Moon. We’ll know about that in the next fifteen minutes or so. That’s when they come around the Moon and again acquire contact with the Earth and they can report. We hope that they are successfully in orbit around the Moon and that the rest of the historic mission can go as well as the first three days.”

Inside Mission Control, a few isolated conversations were taking place, but not very many; most people were waiting in silence for the “acquisition of signal,” or AOS. On TV, Cronkite accentuated the drama, noting, “It is quiet around the world as the world waits to see if Apollo 11 is in a successful Moon orbit.”

The anxiety ended when Houston heard a faint, indistinct signal from the spacecraft, at exactly the moment it was expected:

03:04:15:47	CapCom:	Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. Do you read? Over.
03:04:15:59	CapCom:	Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. Do you read? Over.
03:04:16:11	Apollo 11:	[indistinct signal]
03:04:16:59	Apollo 11:	Houston, Apollo 11. Over.
03:04:17:00	CapCom:	Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. We are reading you weakly. Go ahead. Over.

Sounding about as elated as he ever got when communicating with the ground from the cockpit of a flying machine, Neil immediately provided Houston with a status report on the burn. Running through a long string of numbers on burn time and residuals,23 when Houston then asked to “send the whole thing again, please,” Neil exclaimed, “It was like—like perfect!”

Twenty minutes before Apollo came coasting around the Moon and back into contact with Houston, the astronauts thrilled at achieving precisely their intended orbit:

03:03:58:10	Armstrong:	That was a beautiful burn.
03:03:58:12	Collins:	Goddamn, I guess!24
03:03:58:37	Armstrong:	All right, let’s—Okay, now we’ve got some things to do . . .
03:03:58:48	Aldrin:	Okay, let’s do them.
03:03:59:08	Collins:	Well, I don’t know if we’re sixty miles or not, but at least we haven’t hit that mother.
03:03:59:11	Aldrin:	Look at that! Look at that! 169.6 [nautical miles] by 60.9 [nautical miles].
03:03:59:15	Collins:	Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! You want to write that down or something? Write it down just for the hell of it: 170 by 60. Like gangbusters.
03:03:59:28	Aldrin:	We only missed by a couple tenths of a mile.
03:03:59:36	Collins:	Hello, Moon!

All across the Moon’s rocky back side, the part never visible from Earth and densely pockmarked by 4.6 billion years of meteoroid bombardment, Aldrin and Collins had excitedly pointed out one spectacular feature after another, while the “Ice Commander,” as a few astronauts privately had come to call Armstrong, was more restrained in expressing what was his own genuine enthusiasm:

03:04:05:32	Aldrin:	Oh, golly, let me have that camera back. There’s a huge, magnificent crater over here. I wish we had the other lens on but, God, that’s a big beauty. You want to look at that guy, Neil?
03:04:05:43	Armstrong:	Yes, I see him. . . . You want to get the other lens on?
03:04:06:07	Collins:	Don’t you want to get the Earth coming up? It’s going to be nine minutes.
03:04:06:11	Aldrin:	Yes. Let’s take some pictures here first.
03:04:06:15	Collins:	Well, don’t miss that first one. . . .
03:04:06:27	Armstrong:	You’re going to have plenty of passes.
03:04:06:30	Aldrin:	Yes, right.
03:04:06:33	Collins:	Plenty of Earthrises, I guess.
03:04:06:37	Armstrong:	Yes, we are. Boy, look at that . . . crater. You can probably see him right there. . . . What a spectacular view!
03:04:08:48	Collins:	Fantastic. Look back there behind us. Sure looks like a gigantic crater. Look at the mountains going around it. My gosh, they’re monsters!
03:04:09:58	Armstrong:	See that real big—
03:04:10:01	Collins:	Yes, there’s a moose down here you just wouldn’t believe. There’s the biggest one yet. God, it’s huge! It’s enormous! It’s so big I can’t even get it in the window. You want to look at that?! That’s the biggest one that you ever seen in your life, Neil? God, look at this central mountain peak! Isn’t that a huge one?
03:04:11:01	Aldrin:	Yes, there’s a big mother over here, too.
03:04:11:07	Collins:	Come on now, Buzz, don’t refer to them as big mothers. Give them some scientific name . . . Golly damn, a geologist up here would just go crazy.

In lunar orbit, the crew tried to settle an informal controversy that had arisen from the two previous circumlunar flights. To the Apollo 8 crew, the surface of the Moon appeared to be gray, whereas it looked mostly brown to Apollo 10. As soon as they had a chance, Neil, Mike, and Buzz looked to settle the issue. “Plaster of Paris gray to me,” Collins remarked even before they got into orbit. “Well, I have to vote with the 10 crew,” Aldrin said shortly after LOI. “Looks tan to me,” Armstrong offered. “But when I first saw it, at the other Sun angle, it really looked gray,” Buzz continued, and his mates agreed, though they expatiated about the Moon’s color throughout several orbits. Ultimately, the controversy was settled in no one’s favor. Lighting conditions made all the difference. The color of the Moon shifted almost hourly from charcoal, near dawn or dusk, to a rosy tan at midday.

The first time Armstrong had a chance to survey his approach to the landing site he took it. “Apollo 11 is getting its first view of the landing approach,” he reported to Mission Control at 11:55 A.M. Houston time. “This time we are going over the Taruntius crater, and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollo 8 and 10 have given us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and watching it on TV. There’s no substitute for actually being here.” Houston responded: “We concur, and we surely wish we could see it firsthand.”

Apollo 11’s first television transmission from lunar orbit started at 3:56 P.M. EDT. As it was a Saturday afternoon in July, many Americans tuned to the broadcast after watching the baseball Game of the Week on NBC TV, which that day pitted the Baltimore Orioles against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. (The Red Sox won the game 5–3, but the Orioles ultimately won the American League pennant but lost the World Series to the New York “Miracle” Mets.)

Given that an orbit circularization burn was scheduled for 5:44 EDT that afternoon, the astronauts were in no mood for a television performance; in fact, as Neil made clear to Mission Control, if they had their druthers, they would not have had a TV show then at all.

03:05:34:24	CapCom:	Eleven, this is Houston. [The CapCom at AOS after the LOI burn and through the first pass over the landing site was Bruce McCandless.] We have about six minutes remaining until LOS [loss of signal], and in order that we may configure our ground lines, we’d like to know if you’re still planning to have the TV up with the beginning of the next pass. Over.
03:05:34:48	Armstrong:	Roger, Houston. We’ll try to have it ready.
03:05:34:50	CapCom:	This is Houston. We are inquiring if it is your plan to. Over.
03:05:35:00	Armstrong:	It never was our plan to, but it’s in the flight plan, so I guess we’ll do it.
03:05:35:07	CapCom:	Houston. Roger. Out.

The broadcast lasted for thirty-five minutes. Focusing the camera first out of a side window and then out of the hatch window as the spacecraft passed from west to east nearly one hundred miles above the lunar surface, the astronauts took the worldwide TV audience on a guided tour of the Moon’s visible side. Like airline pilots pointing out the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam down below, they talked their way along the path that Neil and Buzz would be taking in the LM in less than twenty-four hours. Neil indicated the “PDI point,” where powered descent would be initiated, then Collins and Aldrin spontaneously took turns noting every significant landmark that would be guiding Eagle down to its touchdown: the twin peaks of Mount Marilyn, named by Jim Lovell during Apollo 8 after his wife; the large Maskelyne Crater; the small hills dubbed Boothill and Duke Island that would be passed over just twenty seconds into descent; the washbasin that was Maskelyne W; the rilles labeled Sidewinder and Diamondback because they twisted across the surface like desert snakes; the Gashes; the Last Ridge; and finally, the landing site on the Sea of Tranquility, which was then barely into the darkness.

It was the first time that the astronauts themselves caught a glimpse of the landing site, as on the previous orbit the spot had lay hidden, beyond the “terminator” line where the astronauts would pass from light into darkness. This time around, the spot was just barely visible, brightened by Earthshine.

Everyone at home and in the spacecraft strained with Neil to take a close look. Collins, for one, did not especially like what he saw, though he kept it to himself: “It is just past dawn in the Sea of Tranquility and the Sun’s rays are intersecting the landing site at a very shallow angle. Under these conditions the craters on the surface cast long, jagged shadows, and to me the entire region looks distinctly forbidding. I don’t see anyplace smooth enough to park a baby buggy, much less a Lunar Module.”

Crossing the terminator, the crew trained its TV camera back though the window for a last look at the landing site before sign-off. “And as the Moon sinks slowly in the west,” the witty Collins remarked, “Apollo 11 bids good day to you.”

An hour and thirteen minutes later, Apollo 11 fired the SPS engine for the second time that afternoon. Even more than with the first burn, precise timing was critical. “If we overburned for as little as two seconds,” Aldrin explains, “we’d be on an impact course with the other side of the Moon.” Concentration was intense as the astronauts, in coordination with Mission Control, made a systematic series of star checks, inertial platform alignments, and navigational calculations with the onboard computer. Collins used a stopwatch to make sure it lasted seventeen seconds, no more and no less. The burn came off perfectly. Apollo 11’s orbit dropped and stabilized from an orbit of 168.8 miles by 61.3 nautical miles, in astronomical terms an “eccentric” orbit, to one that was 66.1 by 54.4 miles, close to a perfect ellipse. It was a high degree of precision that excited even the commander:

03:08:13:47	Armstrong:	66.1 by 54.4—now you can’t beat that.
03:08:13:52	Collins:	That’s right downtown.
03:08:14:00	Aldrin:	We’re more elliptic now, huh?
03:08:14:05	Collins:	That’s about as close as you’re going to get.

With Apollo 11 now snug in its orbit, it was time to prepare the LM for its designated job. Powering it up, completing a long list of communications checks, and presetting a number of switches was scheduled to take Neil and Buzz a period of three hours, but it took them thirty minutes less thanks to Aldrin’s preparatory work in the module the previous day. By 8:30 P.M. Houston time Eagle was ready. So were the two astronauts, who reluctantly headed back into Columbia for their fourth night’s sleep inside the spacecraft, the first in orbit about the Moon. The commander and his lunar module pilot carefully organized all the equipment and clothing they would need in the morning. Then they covered the windows to keep out not only direct light from the Sun but also the Moonshine—far brighter than we see on Earth—and began to settle into their sleeping positions:

03:13:52:25	Aldrin:	Why don’t you guys sleep underneath tonight? I’ll sleep top deck.
03:13:52:34	Armstrong:	You’re going to sleep underneath tonight, aren’t you?
03:13:52:36	Aldrin:	Yes, that’s right; I remember.
03:13:52:40	Collins:	Unless you’d rather sleep up top, Buzz. I like . . . You guys ought to get a good night’s sleep, going in that damn LM. How about . . . Which would you prefer? . . . Take your druthers.

Knowing of Neil’s preference that he sleep before the landing attempt, Buzz eased, as Neil did, into one of the floating hammocks. Dousing the cabin lights, Collins put the punctuation on the day: “Well, I thought today went pretty well. If tomorrow and the next day are like today, we’ll be safe.”

At three minutes after midnight, the on-duty PAO at Mission Control reported to the press, many of whom would themselves not get much sleep that night or the next, “The Apollo 11 crew is currently in their rest period, but we’ve received no indication that any of the crew members are actually sleeping.” Aldrin recalls sleeping fitfully; Neil remembers sleeping soundly, but not for very long. Houston’s wakeup call came at 6:00 A.M. By mid-morning Aldrin and Armstrong would need to be inside the LM ready to separate Eagle from Columbia for its trip down to the Moon.