For Viola Armstrong, her son’s touching down on the Moon was among life’s most holy moments: “We were told that most of the world was watching, at least over fifty percent, pulling for them, and praying for them. If I told you that I could feel the power of millions of prayers, you might not believe me, and I could not blame you. But waves of these prayers were coming to me, and I was being gently and firmly supported by God’s invisible strength.
“We watched them with keen interest, listening to Cronkite’s every word. We were as still as death, the boys were so near the surface of the Moon. The spot where they intended to stop was so rugged with boulders and deep craters, so Neil took over the controls and safely guided their LM to smoother and safer grounds before landing. They gently touched down. At our house there was dead silence. We heard Neil’s voice saying, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ Prayers of thanksgiving were in our hearts, and our reverend, Pastor Weber, offered them upward. We listened so intently.
“I’m sure that never in their lives had they been so excited. Their hearts were racing a mile a minute. Neil’s heartbeat had risen from a normal 77 to 156. This heavenly body had illumined our Earth for millions of years, but remained untouched by human hands. This is where they were—250,000 miles away from home.”
Outside of Neil’s parents’ home in Wapakoneta, TV reporters had interviewed Viola and Steve shortly after the landing:
VIOLA: I was afraid that the floor of the Moon was going to be so unsafe for them. I was worried that they might sink in too deep. But no, they didn’t. So it was wonderful.
REPORTER: Mr. Armstrong, what were your feelings?
STEVE: I was really concerned the way I understood that Neil had guided the craft to another area. And that would signify that the original was not exactly as they had planned.
REPORTER: What about his voice? Did it sound any different? Or did it sound calm and normal to you?
VIOLA: I could tell that he was pleased and tickled and thrilled. He was much like he always has been.
STEVE: I had the same feeling, that it was the same old Neil.
In El Lago at home with her two boys, Janet Armstrong’s experience of the landing, and her reaction to it, was distinctly different from her in-laws’, in particular her mother-in-law’s, as one might guess, given that the two women’s personalities lay, in Janet’s own words, “at opposite ends of the spectrum.” For one thing, Janet preferred not to watch the television coverage. Instead, she hovered near one of two NASA squawk boxes. She had placed one of the boxes in her living room for all of her houseguests to hear and the other back in her master bedroom so she could listen privately.
“Watching TV was not something that I did during the flight. Now it’s true that we watched TV during the landing, for the landing, and while the men were walking on the lunar surface, because that was a good way to hear and see, because they had the cameras there. The speculation by the TV commentators—the drama of things that could happen if there was a problem along the way—I didn’t need to hear all that. That just drove me nuts. That’s exactly what had happened in Gemini VIII; there was speculation. Well, they didn’t know! What I wanted to know, I wanted to really know.”
Even more so than at Steve and Viola’s, Janet’s house was packed full of neighbors and guests, not all of them invited. Her sisters Carolyn Trude and Nancy “Nan” Thiessen were there, the latter with her husband Scotty, an IBM district manager for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and their children. A big guy, Scotty ran interference whenever Janet needed to get through the swarm of reporters waiting outside the house. Inside were the ubiquitous folks from Life magazine, notably Dodie Hamblin. Neil’s brother Dean and his wife Marilyn and their son Jay were there; the couple’s two daughters had stayed back at home in Anderson, Indiana. A local Catholic priest, Father Eugene Cargill, was there at Janet’s invitation. Though she herself was neither Catholic nor a formally religious woman, Janet felt that Father Cargill “was just a wonderful man. I didn’t care whether he was Catholic or whatever. He was just a good person, a people person I appreciated having there,” especially if something went wrong during the landing. Janet’s mother had come to Houston for the launch but afterwards returned home to Southern California because, in Janet’s words, there was going to be “too much confusion in the house for her.”
People came and went throughout the day. Neil’s mate from Korea, Ken Danneberg, the intelligence officer for Fighter Squadron 51, now a successful oilman, popped in from Denver totally unannounced, as did a few others. Figuring “I probably won’t remember all that’s going on tonight,” Janet stuck a clipboard on her front door with a sign-up sheet and a ballpoint pen hanging from it. Otherwise, if people arrived, she would not have known it. “I was paying attention to the flight, and that was most important. It was not a social occasion as far as I was concerned. Well, it was and it wasn’t. It was a great tense time.”
As always, the other astronauts and their wives came around to lend the families of the crew their emotional support. Barbara Young, Marilyn Lovell, Tom Stafford, Bill Anders, and Ron Evans were among the many who stopped in for a visit.
“People in the program would go from one crew member’s house to another,” Janet explains. “Sometimes you’d split up. It’s like when Apollo 8 flew. I went to Fred Haise’s house and Neil went to the Lovells’. We welcomed other people, especially the guys. They were wonderful at explaining what was going on if we didn’t understand.”
Janet was quite savvy about the mission, not that she tried to fathom the intricacies of such technical details as AGS and PNGS. In her bedroom, she kept maps of the Moon and other technical material that Neil had given her. She studied graphs indicating the stages of the powered descent, and pencil in hand she checked off landmarks—Dry Gulch, Apollo Ridge, Twin Peaks (better known as Mount Marilyn)—as radio communications made clear that Eagle was passing over them. One indication of her dedication to the science of flight was that just after NASA named the Apollo 11 crew she took some pilot training, in part so that when her family was flying in the Beech Bonanza that Neil had just bought a part-ownership in she would have a better idea of how to bring the plane down in an emergency. Not necessarily seeking to gain a license, she also sought to better understand and communicate what her husband was doing before the press and to her boys.
“Rick was twelve, five years older than Mark. He was interested, but Mark was too young. Mark doesn’t remember much about it—any of it.” At the time the little boy repeated, “My daddy’s going to the Moon. It will take him three days to get there. I want to go to the Moon someday with my daddy.”
Janet remembers “talking to Neil just before he left for the Apollo flight, asking him to talk to the boys and explain to them what he was doing. . . . I said to Neil, there is a possibility you might not come back. It was right in front of the boys when I said that. I said, ‘I’d like you to tell the boys.’
“I don’t think that went very far. . . . Rick didn’t ask many questions because he couldn’t bring himself to ask.
“I don’t know what he might have said to them. . . . Rick would have understood; Mark probably wouldn’t have understood. He was off in another world.”
For the boys on the day of the landing, with their house so full of people, it was a big party. Because her sisters and sister-in-law were there, Janet had help. “I had people in the house. I didn’t really have to worry too much about the boys. They would go swimming, and people would watch them. They had some friends over. I tried to keep life as normal as possible for them, but that day probably wasn’t very normal.”
During the crew’s TV transmissions during the outbound journey, she would urge, “Mark, hurry up. We’re going to see Daddy.” When Neil’s arm came into view on the screen, she quickly pointed it out: “That must be Daddy right there. There he is! There he is!” But while Rick stayed very attentive, Mark was preoccupied with other things, like a baby bird he had found in the yard earlier that morning. Later seeing her six-year-old covered with dirt, Janet asked, “Where have you been?” “I was behind the dresser thing in the garage,” Mark replied. “I had to get him. Do you have some bird food?”
With all the preparations for houseguests, Janet had barely slept the night before the landing. Instead of going out to dinner with her family and guests, Janet chose to stay home alone, sending Rick with the family and Mark to a friend’s house. When he timidly asked permission to camp overnight in his friend’s backyard tent, Janet surprised him by granting him permission. “You mean I can?” he asked. Janet knew she wouldn’t be sleeping either that night or the following one when the men made their EVA. “I caught some catnaps here and there, but you know, my sleep wasn’t really important at that point.”
No doubt the pressure of it all wore on her, and she lit cigarette after cigarette to ease the tension. The afternoon before the landing, when Mission Control seemed to be a little late in reporting the acquisition of Columbia’s signal, Janet banged her fist on a coffee table.
By the time PDI came, it had already become a very long day in the Armstrong home. For the terrors of the landing, Janet again needed to be alone, so she retired to the privacy of her bedroom. Bill Anders decided to join her. Bill and Janet together had given Pat White the bad news that awful night in January 1967 when her husband Ed died in the Apollo fire, and Bill felt he should stay with Janet right through the touchdown. Rick, a very intelligent and sensitive boy, also wanted to be with his mother. She and Rick had been following the NASA flight map step by step, now with Anders’s help. Rick settled on the floor near the squawk box, while Janet and Bill sat on the foot of the bed. (Long after the Moon landing, this led to one of Bill Anders’s favorite quips, “Where was I when the first Moon landing occurred? I was in bed with Janet Armstrong!”) But Janet was too nervous to stay seated. She hunched down on her knees next to Rick, putting her arm around her son tightly as Eagle dropped its final 250 feet.
What Janet recalls about her emotions at the moment of the landing was issuing a big sigh of relief. Other people came in, hugged her, kissed her, and offered her congratulations. Returning to the living room, she and her entire company enjoyed a celebratory drink. Yet Janet was still wary. The worry was far from over.
“I really wasn’t too concerned about the landing. I felt Neil could do that, if at all possible. But, God, you didn’t know if that ascent engine was going to fire the next day. If you listened to the TV, as I did later that evening, the drama was on the landing. Well, forget the landing! Are they going to be able to get off of there?!”
A beaming Dean Armstrong, a cocktail in hand in his brother’s living room that Sunday afternoon, knew exactly what Neil would say when asked how difficult it had been for him to make the Moon landing: “When we ask him about it later, he’ll say, ‘a piece of cake.’ ”
To his uncle’s humorous comment, a proud Rick Armstrong added, with just a tinge of hurt in his voice, “Usually when you ask him something, he just doesn’t answer.”
• • •
In retrospect, two items may seem curious about Apollo 11’s technical situation immediately following touchdown. First, no one in NASA knew exactly where Eagle had landed. “One would have thought that their radar would have been good enough to pinpoint us more quickly than it did,” remarks Neil. When a spacecraft was in a trajectory or when it was in orbit, with all the optical and radar measurements being taken, both the ground and the crew had a pretty good idea of where the flight vehicle was, but it was a different problem when the object was sitting in one spot and all that anyone was getting was the same single measurement over and over again. “There was an uncertainty in that that was bigger than I would have guessed it would have been.”
04:07:02:03 |
Armstrong: |
Houston, the guys that said we wouldn’t be able to tell precisely where we are, are the winners today. We were a little busy worrying about our program alarms and things like that in the part of the descent where we would normally be picking out our landing spot, and aside from a good look at several of the craters we came over in the final descent, I haven’t been able to pick out the things on the horizon as a reference as yet. |
Up in Columbia, which was passing over Tranquility Base at a height of sixty miles, Collins peered hard through his sextant trying to spot the LM. Over his radio he had heard the whole thing and rightfully felt he shared in the achievement. “Tranquility Base, it sure sounded great from up here,” Mike had radioed to his mates. “You guys did a fantastic job.” “Thank you,” Neil replied warmly. “Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there.” “Will do,” answered Collins. With his right eye straining through his eyepiece, Mike had tracked them as long as he could during their descent until they disappeared from his view as a “miniscule dot” about 115 miles from the landing site. Now even with the ground sending up tracking numbers for him to input on his DSKY (display-keyboard) unit so that the command module’s guidance computer could accurately point his sextant, it frustrated Mike that he could not see them.
04:07:07:13 |
Collins: |
[To Houston] Do you have any idea whether they landed left or right of centerline? Just a little bit long—is that all you know? |
04:07:07:19 |
CapCom |
Apparently that’s about all we can tell, over. |
The limited information provided by Houston was no help to Mike: “I can’t see a darn thing but craters. Big craters, little craters, rounded ones, sharp ones, but no LM anywhere among them. The sextant is a powerful optical instrument, magnifying everything it sees twenty-eight times, but the price it pays for this magnification is a very narrow field of view, only 1.8 degrees wide (corresponding to 0.6 miles on the ground), so that it is almost like looking down a gun barrel. The LM might be close by, and I swing the sextant back and forth in a frantic search for it, but in the very limited time I have, it is possible to study only a square mile or so of lunar surface, and this time it is the wrong mile.”
Collins never did locate Eagle down on the surface, not on any of his passes, which was more of a concern to Mike than it was to anyone else. The main concern at Mission Control over the LM’s exact location did not come from the geologists—they were happy enough that Apollo 11 had landed anywhere in the mare. “They just wanted us to get out there and get some stuff!” Yet the question of where exactly the LM had come down did bother Mission Control, as Neil explains: “A lot of people were interested in where we landed, particularly those people who were involved in the descent guidance trajectory controls. After all, in later flights, we were going to try to go to specific spots on the surface and we needed to get all the information we could regarding methods that might help precision. However, not knowing exactly where the LM had landed did not affect what we did very much. Nor did people on the ground think that this was a disastrous occurrence. But the fact was, they didn’t know exactly where we were and they did want to know if they could.”
Related to the question of where exactly they had landed was the mystery of how mascons might have affected Eagle’s pathway down to the surface. Though NASA had figured out how perturbations caused by mascons in the vicinity of the Moon’s equator might affect a spacecraft, at the time of Apollo 11, as Armstrong notes, “Perturbations by the mascons were still a concern.” NASA was “trying to reduce the error from these uncertainties to the point that we could have increasing confidence about going to a particular point on the surface.”
Much more pressing in the first few minutes of landing than not knowing the LM’s exact location was the question of whether Neil and Buzz should even be staying on the surface for any time at all. There was always a chance that some spacecraft system was not operating properly, requiring a quick takeoff by Eagle’s ascent stage. “If we had problems that indicated that it was not safe to continue staying on the surface,” Neil relates, “we would have had to make an immediate takeoff.”
Within the lifetime of the electrical power system on the LM, there were three early times that the LM could lift off and get into a satisfactory trajectory to rendezvous with the command module. The first of these times, designated T-1, came a mere two minutes after landing. T-2 followed eight minutes later, with T-3 not coming until Columbia completed another orbit in two hours’ time. If there was an emergency that absolutely forced Eagle to leave at any other time than these three, it would be up to Armstrong and Aldrin in the LM and Collins in the CSM to find some way, any way, to get in a decent position for joining up.
From a quick initial look at the LM systems, everything seemed to be okay. Gene Kranz’s White Team quickly assented to a “Stay/NoStay” decision, which Charlie Duke passed on to Neil and Buzz.
04:06:47:06 |
CapCom: |
Eagle, you are Stay for T-1. |
04:06:47:12 |
Armstrong: |
Roger. Understand. Stay for T-1. |
Five minutes later, after more checks of spacecraft systems had been made, Duke relayed to Eagle, “You are Stay for T-2.” The astronauts were going to remain on the Moon at least until the final Stay/NoStay decision.
A major technical concern in the first minutes after landing was the possibility that too much pressure was building up in the LM’s fuel lines due to the high daylight temperature on the lunar surface. “Those fuel lines were not a new subject,” Armstrong remembers. In the last days before launch, hydraulics experts had discussed with the crew what could happen if the tanks became too hot and lines overpressurized. “If we closed all valves and trapped fluid in certain lines,” Neil explains, “then we were sitting on a two-hundred-degree surface of sunlight with a lot of reflected heat coming up towards the bottom of the LM, and it’s heating up the pipes. The fluid pressure might really build in that line, and then we’d have a problem. It was a thing we talked about before launch in terms of optimum procedures, and we knew it was something to pay attention to when we landed, but it wasn’t an uncontrollable situation. We had a couple of options of how to handle the situation, and we knew the guys on the ground were going to be doing their job, so we were not too concerned about it.”
Just as predicted, immediately after engine shutdown, there was a sharp rise in pressure inside the fuel lines of the LM’s descent engine. “Within two minutes after landing,” as Neil tells it, “we vented both fuel and oxidizer tanks as planned. But the pressure still subsequently rose, probably due to evaporation of residual propellant in the tank as a consequence of the high surface temperature. Then we vented again. The ground was getting a different reading than we were, due to a different transducer location; I think theirs was in a trapped line. It was my view that the worst that could happen was a line or a tank could split open. As we would no longer be using the descent stage, it was less than a serious problem, in my opinion. I wasn’t too worried about it.”
Houston considered the situation dangerous, however. If fuel sprayed onto what was still a hot descent engine, a fire could result, though unlikely in a vacuum. Fortunately, the venting eased the pressure and the problem soon resolved itself.
For Armstrong and Aldrin there certainly was no time to savor the landing. Even after getting the stays for T-1 and T-2, even before they could look out at their windows and take their first close look at the lunar landscape, they had to go through a complete dress rehearsal for the next day’s takeoff from the lunar surface. According to Neil, “The intention was to go through all the procedures for a normal takeoff and find out if they all worked okay. This required aligning the LM platform [its inertial reference], which was a first because no one had ever done a surface platform alignment before. We used gravity to establish the local vertical and a star ‘shot’ to establish an azimuth; in that way we got the platform aligned and ready for takeoff. Even though everyone considered it a simulation, we still went through all the systems checks just the way we would have if we had been going to make a real takeoff.”
As Neil looked at it, the simulation run time allowed Mission Control to make a thorough evaluation of mission progress. “Our data resources on the lunar surface were limited. If we found there was some problem, we needed to maximize the time available for the people at Mission Control to work the problem and figure out what we might do about it. So I think it was a good strategy to get that simulated takeoff out of the way, first thing.”
Only after Collins passed overhead a second time and Buzz and Neil could cease their simulated countdown following the Stay for T-3 did the two LM crewmen breathe easier: “We relaxed a little bit once we got through all the systems checks and found that everything was working okay, that the LM was fine, that we had no reason to believe that we had any major problems on our hands, and that we were going to be able to go ahead with our planned activities. There was certainly a degree of relaxation there.”
During the first two hours on the Moon, while Aldrin was painstakingly communicating back to Earth a variety of measurements and alignments that he was making for navigational purposes, Armstrong took his first opportunities to describe what he saw outside:
04:07:03:55 |
Armstrong: |
The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters of the five-to-fifty-foot variety, and some ridges that are small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little, one-and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile. |
04:07:04:54 |
CapCom: |
Roger, Tranquility. We copy, over. |
04:07:05:02 |
Collins: |
Sounds like it looks a lot better than it did yesterday at that very low Sun angle. It looked rough as a [corn] cob then. |
04:07:05:11 |
Armstrong: |
It really was rough, Mike. Over the targeted landing area, it was extremely rough, cratered, and large numbers of rocks that were probably—some, many—larger than five or ten feet in size. |
04:07:05:32 |
Collins: |
When in doubt, land long. |
04:07:05:38 |
Armstrong: |
That’s what we did. |
Neil then returned to documenting the Moon’s color: “I’d say the color of the local surface is very comparable to that we observed from orbit at this Sun angle—about ten degrees Sun angle. It’s pretty much without color. It’s gray, and it’s very white, chalky gray, as you look into the zero-phase line. And it’s considerably darker gray, more like ashen gray, as you look out ninety degrees to the Sun. Some of the surface rocks in close here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket-engine plume are coated with this light gray on the outside, but where they’ve been broken, they display a very dark gray interior, and it looks like it could be country basalt.”
“Whatever I saw, I wasn’t going to be too disappointed,” Aldrin said in a 1991 interview for Eric M. Jones’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. “I think both of us were trying to just describe what we saw whenever we had a little free time.” Armstrong added during that same interview, “Anything that might be helpful to the science teams on the ground. They’d been waiting a long time for this information.”
According to the flight plan, the takeoff simulation was followed by meal time and then, officially, by a four-hour rest period. Aldrin recalls, “It was called a rest period, but it was also a built-in time pad in case we had to make an extra lunar orbit before landing, or if there was any kind of difficulty which might delay the landing. Since we landed on schedule and weren’t overly tired, as we had thought we might be, we opted to skip the four-hour rest period. We were too excited to sleep anyway.”
The idea of skipping the rest period had actually been fully discussed and strategized about prior to the launch. “From our early discussions of how we would organize our time line of activities,” Neil relates, “we concluded that the best thing to do, if everything was going well, was to go ahead outside as soon as we could and do the surface work before we took our sleep period. We recognized that the chances for even getting down safely—having things go well enough with all the systems to allow a landing—were problematical. If we scheduled the surface activity immediately for as soon as we could after Columbia’s first revolution and after the practice takeoff and so on—immediately after that—and then didn’t make it on time, the public and the press would crucify us. That was just the reality of the world. So we tried to finesse things by saying that we were going to sleep and then we would do the EVA.
“But we never had any plan to do it that way. We had discussed it with Slayton and Kraft—and a few other people. My recollection was that they all thought it was a reasonable thing to do. And so everyone agreed we’d do it that way if we could. We knew it would create a change that people weren’t expecting, but we thought that was the better of the two evils.”
With everything in order, at 5:00 P.M. Eastern time, Armstrong radioed a recommendation that they plan to start the EVA earlier than originally scheduled. Aware of the prearranged deal, Charlie Duke, just about ready to pass over the CapCom duties to astronaut Owen Garriott of the Maroon Team, took only a few seconds to get approval:
Armstrong: |
Houston, Tranquility. |
|
04:08:39:09 |
Duke: |
Go, Tranquility. Over. |
04:08:39:14 |
Armstrong: |
Our recommendation at this point is planning an EVA, with your concurrence, starting about eight o’clock this evening, Houston time. That is about three hours from now. |
04:08:39:31 |
Duke: |
Stand by. |
04:08:39:35 |
Armstrong: |
Well, we’ll give you some time to think about that. |
04:08:39:40 |
Duke: |
Tranquility Base, Houston. We thought about it. We will support it. We’re Go at that time. Over. |
04:08:39:48 |
Armstrong: |
Roger. |
They did eat a meal as scheduled, but not before Aldrin first reached into his Personal Preference Kit, or PPK, and pulled out two small packages given to him by his Presbyterian minister, Reverend Dean Woodruff, back in Houston. One package contained a vial of wine, the other a wafer. Pouring the wine into a small chalice that he also pulled from his kit, he prepared to take Holy Communion.
At 04:09:25:38 mission elapsed time, Buzz radioed, “Houston, this is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever or whoever he may be, to contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.” Then, with his mike off, Buzz read to himself from a small card on which he had written the portion of the Book of John (John 15:5) traditionally used in the Presbyterian communion ceremony.
I am the vine, you are the branches,
He who abides in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit,
For apart from me, you can do nothing.
It had been Buzz’s intention to read the beautiful passage back to Earth, but at the last minute Slayton had advised him not to do it and Buzz reluctantly agreed. Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis had generated sufficient controversy to make the space agency shy away from overt religious messages. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the celebrated American atheist, had sued the federal government over the Bible reading by Borman, Lovell, and Anders. By the time of Apollo 11, O’Hair had added a complaint that NASA was purposefully withholding “facts” about Armstrong being an atheist. Though the U.S. Supreme Court eventually rejected O’Hair’s lawsuit, NASA understandably did not want to risk getting embroiled in another battle of this type. Regrettably to NASA, the word of Aldrin’s religious ceremony quickly made its way to the press. CBS’s Cronkite passed advance word to his viewers: “Buzz Aldrin did take something most unusual with him today, and it has become public—made public by the pastor at his church outside of Houston. He took part of the Communion bread loaf, so that during his evening meal tonight he will, in a sense, share communion with the people of his church, by having a bit of that bread up there on the surface of the Moon. The first Communion on the Moon.”
Characteristically, Neil greeted Buzz’s religious ritual with polite silence. “He had told me he planned a little celebratory communion,” Neil recalls, “and he asked if I had any problems with that, and I said, ‘No, go right ahead.’ I had plenty of things to keep busy with. I just let him do his own thing.”
As for Mrs. O’Hair’s assertion pertaining to Armstrong’s religious beliefs or lack thereof, Neil really never knew much, or cared much, about it. “I can’t say I was very familiar with that. I don’t remember that ever being mentioned to me until sometime in the aftermath of the mission.”
• • •
After eating their meal and performing a few housekeeping chores, the astronauts turned all their attention to gearing up for the EVA. No matter how much they had practiced their EVA preparation inside the LM mockup back in Houston, doing it for real was much more difficult and time-consuming. “When you do simulations of EVA Prep,” Neil explained in NASA’s technical debriefing following the mission, “you have a clean cockpit and you have all the things that you’re going to use there in the cockpit and nothing else. But in reality, you have a lot of checklists, data, food packages, stowage places filled with odds and ends, binoculars,28 stopwatches, and assorted things, each of which you feel obliged to evaluate as to whether its stowage position is satisfactory for EVA and whether you might want to change anything from the preflight plans. . . . We followed the EVA preparation checklist pretty much to the letter, just the way we had done during training exercises—that is, the hookups and where we put equipment—and the checks were done precisely as per our checklist. That was all good. It was these other little things that you didn’t think about and didn’t consider that took more time than we thought.”
It took an hour and a half before Buzz and Neil were ready to start the EVA prep procedures and then three hours to do the preps, which were expected to take two hours. Much of the time involved getting their backpacks on, donning helmets and gloves, and getting everything configured for going outside. “We had tried to simulate the care with which we were going to perform each operation. When you are putting together the suit and making all the connections, you are really putting your life on the line with those connections, so you try to take the proper amount of time and care to make sure they are done properly. We had tried to simulate that. I don’t know that we timed them necessarily, if so, I don’t remember the numbers. But doing it for real on the lunar surface took quite a bit longer.”
One of the main reasons why it took so long was because it was so cramped inside the LM. Aldrin recalls: “We felt like two fullbacks trying to change positions inside a Cub Scout pup tent. We also had to be very careful of our movements. Weight in the LM was an even more critical factor than in the Columbia. The LM structure was so thin one of us could have taken a pencil and jammed it through the side of the ship.”
The tight fit confirmed for Neil—though he did not think about it at the time—that it did in fact make much better sense to stay where they were for suiting up and have the commander go out of the hatch first rather than do a two-step around each other just so the lunar module pilot could make the first egress. “It was pretty close in there with the suits inflated. It was certainly a larger cockpit than the Gemini, so there was more room than I was used to. Nevertheless, in Gemini we were strapped down and couldn’t move around except during EVA periods. In the LM you were free to roam around, but you had to be very careful and move slowly. It was very easy to bump things. That backpack [Portable Life Support System, or PLSS, pronounced “Pliss”] was sticking out behind you almost a foot and it had a hard surface; if you made a quick motion, you could easily bang into something.” And things were, in fact, banged into. For example, the outer knob of an ascent engine-arming circuit breaker broke off, which Buzz was able to depress prior to liftoff with a felt-tipped pen. “We were certainly very aware of the cumbersome nature of operating in our suits,” Neil concludes.
Proceeding with great care, the two men used all the estimated time for suiting up and then some. Then it also took longer than anticipated to get the cooling units in their PLSS backpacks operating and even more time than expected to depressurize the LM for egress. According to Neil, “We had to depressurize the cabin and we wanted to protect the lunar surface from Earth germs so we had filters on all the vents. We had never done the tests with the filters on and it took a much longer time to depressurize the cabin than we had anticipated.” They were ready to swing open the hatch and for Neil to step out onto the surface an hour later than estimated, though that was still five hours ahead of the original schedule.
Opening the hatch proved to be a chore. “It was an effort in patience more than anything else,” Neil explains. “It was a pretty good-sized hatch—five or six hundred square inches or something like that. So when we got the cabin pressure down to a very low psi, it took something like two hundred pounds of pressure to open that up. You can’t put two hundred pounds of pressure into pulling on a handle very easily—not in those cumbersome suits. So we had to wait until we got to a very low-pressure difference between the inside of the door and the outside of the door before it would break free. We tried a number of times to open it up, but we didn’t want to bend or break anything. Mostly it was Buzz doing the pulling because the door opened his direction; it was easier for him to pull toward himself than it was for me to push.”
The hatch finally opened, Neil began backing through a fairly tiny opening. Peering down and around, Buzz helped navigate. According to Neil, “Egress required you go through the hatch backward, feet first. The technique was to get the door wide open and face the rear of the lunar module cabin, then kneel down and slide backwards, allowing your feet to go out through the hatch first. Then you had to get around the backpack. The backpack extended quite a long way above your back. You needed to get quite low but then you also had things on the front of you that you didn’t want to damage. So it was a matter of doing that kind of awkward procedure with as much care as possible so as not to damage.”
“Having said that, getting through the hatch proved to be no more difficult than a lot of other maneuvers that we had been required to do back in the Gemini spacecraft or in the Apollo command module, so it worked well. To my knowledge all the crew on all the Apollo flights used the same approach, and as far as I know there was never any significant damage.”
So intent was Armstrong on his egress technique that when he got out onto the small porch of the LM, he forgot to pull the lanyard just north of the ladder rigged to deploy the swing-action Modular Equipment Storage Assembly. The MESA lanyard also activated the television camera that was to transmit to Earth images of Neil’s descent down the ladder and his first step onto the lunar surface. Quickly noticing the omission, Houston reminded him about it, and Neil moved back a bit to pull the deployment handle.
The television camera was black and white. “We did have a color camera in the command module,” explains Neil, “but it was quite big and bulky and for the LM we were very concerned about weight. Principally, weight and electrical power were the factors that required the much smaller black-and-white-image orthicon TV camera.” Essentially, the orthicon was a pickup tube that used a low-velocity electron beam to scan a photoactive mosaic.
“When I first exited the lunar module out onto the porch and pulled the handle to release the MESA table, as I remember it, Buzz turned a circuit breaker powering the camera. I asked Houston if they were getting a picture and they said, yes, they were, but it was upside down. I was the most surprised guy probably of anybody listening to that conversation, because I did not expect them to get a picture [none had been obtained during any preflight simulation].”
Standing at the top of the ladder seemed not at all precarious. “You are so light up there and you fall so slowly that, if you have anything to hold on to anywhere, you are going to be able to control yourself. So I was not ever concerned about falling from the ladder.”
In the CapCom seat, astronaut Bruce McCandless had taken over from Owen Garriott for the EVA:
04:13:22:48 |
McCandless: |
Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now. |
04:13:22:59 |
Armstrong: |
Okay, I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. The strut isn’t collapsed too far, but it’s adequate to get back up. |
04:13:23:10 |
McCandless: |
Roger. We copy. |
Armstrong: |
It takes a pretty good little jump [to get back up to the first rung]. |
|
04:13:23:38 |
Armstrong: |
I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. [The] ground mass is very fine. |
04:13:24:13 |
Armstrong: |
I’m going to step off the LM now. |
Every one of the global millions who watched what next happened on their television sets will never forget the moment that Armstrong took his first step out onto the surface of the Moon. Watching the shadowy black-and-white TV pictures coming back from a quarter of a million miles away, it seemed like an eternity before Neil, his right hand on the ladder, finally stepped off onto the Moon, leading with his booted left foot.
The historic first step took place at 10:56:15 P.M. EDT, which was 02:56:15 Greenwich Mean Time. In terms of mission elapsed time, the step came, according to NASA’s official press statement, at four days, thirteen hours, twenty-four minutes, and twenty seconds.
In the United States, the largest share of the television audience, including everyone at the Armstrong homes in Wapakoneta and El Lago, were watching CBS and listening to Cronkite, who for one of the very few times in his broadcasting career was virtually speechless. Having taken his eyeglasses off, and rubbing tears from his eyes, Cronkite declared, “Armstrong is on the Moon! Neil Armstrong, a thirty-eight-year-old American, standing on the surface of the Moon! On this July twentieth, nineteen hundred and sixty-nine.”
What also so impressed Cronkite, as it did everybody else, was that the world was watching something that was happening so far away, at a place no human being had ever been before, via a live television feed. “Boy! Look at those pictures!” the veteran newsman exclaimed. “It’s a little shadowy, but he [Neil] said he expected that in the shadow of the lunar module.”
Television pictures afforded the audience the virtual sensibility of being there with Armstrong when he stepped out onto the Moon. Without them, the human experience of the First Man’s first step would still have been meaningful, sensational, and immortal, yet surely very different. “How different it is hard to say,” Neil reflects today. “The pictures were surreal, not because the situation was actually surreal, but just because the television technique and picture quality gave it sort of a superimposed unreal image.” As dangerous as it is to say today given all the ridiculous conspiracy theories over the past four decades about the Moon landing having been a faked telecast from a remote movie studio location somewhere out in the Arizona or Nevada desert, even Armstrong must confess, “I have to say that it almost looked contrived.
“That certainly wasn’t planned. Had we had the ability to make a much clearer picture, we certainly would have opted to do so.” The only way that Neil and Buzz could have improved the TV picture with the orthicon camera system was to move from the small antenna to the large S-band erectable antenna that was stored on the LM. “It is possible that with the big antenna [a dish model] we might have produced a better picture, I don’t know. We might have accomplished that.
“From a technical standpoint, the TV was still valuable,” Armstrong recalls, “to various individuals in and around NASA.” But no piece of information carried a greater worth, or was more closely guarded, than what words Armstrong would say when he stepped out onto the lunar surface. No one knew, not even his crewmates. Buzz recalls: “On the way to the Moon, Mike and I had asked Neil what he was going to say when he stepped out on the Moon. He had replied that he was still thinking it over.”
Armstrong maintains he spent no time thinking about what he would say until sometime after he had successfully executed the landing.
At 04:13:24:48 mission elapsed time, which was a few seconds before 10:57 P.M. EDT, Neil spoke his eternally famous words29:
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
In El Lago, Janet reportedly said as Neil was coming down the ladder, “I can’t believe it’s really happening,” then when Neil stepped off, “That’s the big step!” As he began to walk upon the Moon, she coaxed him, “Be descriptive now, Neil.” In Wapakoneta, Viola, clutching the arms of her chair ever so tightly, thanked God that her son was not sinking into the lunar dust, a fear that many people still harbored even after the LM had landed.
In El Lago, Janet kept telling her company that she had absolutely no idea what her husband would say when he stepped onto the Moon. An hour earlier, she had jested, as everyone grew more impatient for Neil and Buzz to begin the EVA, “It’s taking them so long because Neil’s trying to decide about the first words he’s going to say when he steps out on the Moon. Decisions, decisions, decisions!”
Janet’s joke was not too far from the truth, as Neil testifies: “Once on the surface and realizing that the moment was at hand, fortunately I had some hours to think about it after getting there. My own view was that it was a very simplistic statement: what can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. It just sort of evolved during the period that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff and the EVA prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. I didn’t think it was particularly important, but other people obviously did. Even so, I have never thought that I picked a particularly enlightening statement. It was a very simple statement.”
Then there was the matter of the missing “a”—the fact that Neil fully intended to say, “That’s one small step for a man,” but, in the rush of the moment, forgot to say, or just did not say, the “a.”
In terms of memory, “I can’t recapture it. For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps it was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time there for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said—although it actually might have been.”
When asked how he prefers for historians to quote his statement, Neil answers only somewhat facetiously, “They can put it in parentheses.”
“As for what I did say on the Moon, I took a small step—so that part of it came real easy. Then it wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare that with.”
One theory is that Armstrong came across the idea for his statement while reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In one scene of the book, the protagonist Bilbo Baggins, while invisible, jumps over the villainous Gollum in a leap that Tolkien described as “not a great leap for a man, but a leap in the dark.” Reinforcing this suggestion is the fact that Armstrong, when he moved his family to a farm in Lebanon, Ohio, after leaving NASA in 1971, named his farm Rivendell, which is the name of the idyllic secluded valley of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings and the abode (“the last homely house”) of noble Elrond, who is half elf and half human. In the Rings trilogy Rivendell is the last place where elves live before leaving Middle Earth and returning to “the immortal lands” over the sea. Adding spice to this theory is the fact, known to many of Neil’s friends, that in the 1990s Neil also based his e-mail address on a Tolkien theme.
Regrettably for Tolkien fans, Armstrong’s reading of the classic books could not have influenced what he said when he stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969. Indeed, he did come to read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but not until well after Apollo 11. “My boys made me read the series years later when we were living on the farm. I read all the books, but I don’t remember bumping into anything even then that made me think about what I had said.”
A far less chimerical theory is that a high NASA official gave him the idea. This hypothesis is based on the existence of an April 19, 1969, memorandum from Willis Shapley, an associate deputy administrator at NASA Headquarters, to Dr. George Mueller, head of the Office of Manned Space Flight. Shapley’s three-page memo, entitled “Symbolic Items for the First Lunar Landing,” addressed what sorts of items should be left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew as well as what commemorative articles should be taken to the lunar surface and returned. Early in the memo, in talking about what sort of message the Moon landing should present to the world, Shapley wrote: “The intended overall impression of the symbolic activities and of the manner in which they are presented to the world should be to signalize [sic] the first lunar landing as an historic step forward for all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States of America. . . . The ‘forward step for all mankind’ aspect of the landing should be symbolized primarily by a suitable inscription to be left on the Moon and by statements made on Earth, and also perhaps by leaving on the Moon miniature flags of all nations.” As the story goes, Mueller passed this memo on to Deke Slayton who shared it with Armstrong, thus planting the seed for the idea that led to Neil’s historic statement.
The problem is, Armstrong has absolutely no recall of the memo. As hauntingly similar as the phrase “forward step for all mankind” seems to be, he does not remember getting a copy of it or ever hearing about it. It seems to be another example—like Cronkite’s TV comment about “a giant leap” on the morning of the landing—of a similar statement having been made independently of the thought process behind Armstrong’s own words.
“My guess is that you can take almost any statement, and if you look around for a while, you can find other statements that were made similarly by other people.”
One example of that is President Kennedy’s quotation, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” A statement very much like Kennedy’s was made by Warren Harding when he was running for president—and before that, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Following the Russian launch of Sputnik in October 1957, President Eisenhower, in fact, used the phrase, “a giant leap into outer space,” but Armstrong had no previous conscious knowledge of that statement, either.
“So, in your mind, Neil, there was never any particular context for your coming up with the phrase? It did not connect back to any other quotation or experience?”
“Not that I know of or can recall. But you never know subliminally in your brain where things come from. But it certainly wasn’t conscious. When an idea runs for the first time through your own mind, it comes out as an original thought.”
• • •
For the first few minutes after stepping off the LM, Armstrong kept his exploring close to the ladder. He was intrigued by the peculiar properties of the lunar dust. He told Houston: “The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” As was expected, motion posed no problem. “It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It’s absolutely no trouble to walk around.”
Back in Ohio, his mother took immense pleasure in seeing Neil move without the slightest sign of difficulty. “He seemed to have a buoyancy,” she later wrote, “almost floating as he walked . . . I knew his suit was bulky, and I hoped so much that he would not fall. Falling could cause a puncture, and a puncture could cause his life-support to fail. I knew this was dangerous.”
Still in close proximity to the LM, Neil saw that the descent engine had not left a crater of any marked size. “It has about one foot clearance on the ground. We’re essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of [exhaust-induced erosion] rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.”
He was anxious to have the mission’s photographic camera, a 70-millimeter Hasselblad, sent down to him. To do that, Buzz, just inside the hatch, needed to hook the camera to a device known as the Lunar Equipment Conveyor, or LEC.30 The astronauts nicknamed it the “Brooklyn Clothesline” because it worked pretty much the same way as the line in New York apartment buildings used to hang out and dry wash. The idea for the LEC came along not so much to solve the problem of bringing the camera and other things down from the LM but for taking things back up from the lunar surface at the conclusion of the EVA. “We had done some practice sessions on the final segment of the lunar surface work where we brought all the rock boxes, cameras, and various equipment that needed to go inside. It was very cumbersome. We found it very difficult to manhandle all that stuff around and get it in the proper position so that the other person—the top man—could pick it up. I think it was my suggestion that we try the clothesline technique. So we did that, and it seemed to work out all right.”
Unhooking the camera from the LEC, Armstrong set it in the bracketing framework of the Remote Control Unit, or RCU, which was built according to his own design right into the front of his suit. Neil believes that whoever had comprised the first crew, facing such practical problems, would have come up with something very similar, because the Hasselblad was a rather large camera.
“It was not an automatic camera; everything was manual—shutter speed, f-stop, focus, everything. It was very obvious that it was a two-handed operation and that if you were doing anything else at the time you needed another hand. Secondly, there was the problem of when you were doing other things with other equipment, what were you to do with the camera? You didn’t want to set it down in the dirt. So it was just immediately obvious that we needed something else. I suggested, why don’t we put a mounting bracket for it on the backpack control unit, which was mounted on our chests. That would be a convenient place to locate it. We would be able to see the marks on the camera, and we could probably take many of the pictures we wanted right from the bracket location, essentially making our bodies into a bipod to hold the camera. That seemed to work out well. Everybody ended up using that technique.”
As soon he got the camera mounted, Armstrong was so intent on taking a few pictures that he neglected to scoop up the contingency sample of lunar dirt, a higher priority item that he was supposed to accomplish first in case something went wrong and he quickly needed to get back into the LM. NASA did not want to get all the way to the Moon and then not be able to bring back any lunar sample for scientific study. Houston had to remind Neil, never one to be rushed, a couple of times to get the sample.
“First thing you are at the surface. The camera is all ready after you get that mounted. It was very easy to take a few pictures. They were very important, too, but, of course, the contingency sample guys wanted to make sure that that was the first thing we got done. It was going to take somewhat more effort to get that sample—to get the equipment and the container for that sample—than it was to get a few pictures. My thought was just that I was going to get a few quick pictures—a panoramic sequence of the LM’s surroundings—while I was there, and then I was going to get the sample.”
04:13:30:53 |
Armstrong: |
I’ll step out and take some of my first pictures here. |
04:13:31:05 |
McCandless: |
Roger, Neil, we’re reading you loud and clear. We see you getting some pictures and the contingency sample. |
COMM BREAK |
||
04:13:32:19 |
McCandless: |
Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample? Over. |
04:13:32:26 |
Armstrong: |
Roger. I’m going to get to that just as soon as I finish these . . . this picture series. |
04:13:33:25 |
Aldrin: |
Okay. Going to get the contingency sample there, Neil? |
04:13:33:27 |
Armstrong: |
Right. |
04:13:33:30 |
Aldrin: |
Okay. That’s good. |
In the technical debrief following the mission, Neil explained his conservative reasoning for changing the order of doing these first two things by saying that he was at first standing in the shadow of the LM, where good pictures could be taken. “I wanted to get that camera down and hooked up while I was over there in the shadow because, to do the contingency sample, I was going to have to stow the LEC and go over into the area out of the shadow. Since I wanted to do it on the right side [north of the ladder] where the [movie] camera was mounted [in Buzz’s window], I was going to have to make a trip of about ten or fifteen feet before I started the contingency sample. That’s the reason we [I] changed the order.” Subsequent Moon landing crews, building on Apollo 11’s experience, would consider moving ten or fifteen feet a trivial distance, but not the First Man. Having been on the lunar surface for all of eight minutes at this point, everything about his initial movements were done incrementally and with great caution.
To take the contingency sample Neil had to assemble a pooper-scooper-like device with a collapsible handle that had a removable bag at the end. After he scooped up a small amount of soil sample, he deposited the bag inside a special strap-on pocket on his left thigh. Digging into the top surface was no problem at all, as the soil was very loose. Though the contingency sample did not require him to take anything from any real depth, he did try digging an inch or more into the surface only to find that it quickly became very hard. He also made sure to get a couple of small rocks into his bag before closing it up. He also conducted a little soil mechanics experiment by pushing the handle-end of his sampler down into the surface from four to six inches.
His sample completed, Neil took a moment just to gaze out at the lunar landscape. “It has a stark beauty of its own,” he reported. “It’s much like the high desert of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.” Then, still thinking about what he could do to experiment, he detached the ring that had been holding the collection bag on to the contingency sample and threw it sidearm to see how far it would go. “Didn’t know you could throw so far,” Aldrin teased, watching out his window. Chuckling, Neil answered, “You can really throw things a long way up here!” Curiously, Neil today has no recollection of making the throw, the Moon’s first pitch. “I don’t remember that.”
“You don’t remember doing that at all?”
“No, not at all.”
• • •
Sixteen minutes into the EVA, it was time for Aldrin to egress, something he was just itching to do:
04:13:38:41 |
Aldrin: |
Okay, are you ready for me to come out? |
04:13:38:42 |
Armstrong: |
Yeah. Just stand by a second. I’ll move this [LEC] over the handrail. [Long pause] Okay. |
04:13:39:07 |
Aldrin: |
All right. That’s got it. Are you ready? |
04:13:39:11 |
Armstrong: |
All set. Okay, you saw what difficulties I was having. I’ll try to watch your PLSS from underneath here. |
Standing southwest of the ladder, Neil used the Hasselblad to snap a series of remarkable photographs of Buzz slowly emerging from the hatch, studiously coming down the ladder, kneeling on the porch, moving down to the last rung, jumping down to the footpad, and hopping off onto the lunar surface. These are the pictures that people would later see and forever remember in terms of the first human stepping onto the Moon: Buzz doing it rather than Neil, for whom no photographs from below could be taken because he went out first. Actually, Buzz climbed down to the last rung twice before stepping off—the first time just as rehearsal.
04:13:41:28 |
Aldrin: |
Okay. Now I want to go back up and partially close the hatch. [Long pause] Making sure not to lock it on my way out! |
04:13:41:53 |
Armstrong: |
[Laughing] A particularly good thought. |
Not that the two men were actually worried that they could lock themselves out, as the hatch could be opened from the outside, if necessary. According to Neil, “That was just a joke, perhaps to avoid somebody saying, ‘Were you born in a barn?’ ” Aldrin’s reason for partially closing the hatch was apparently to prevent radiative cooling of the LM cabin:
04:13:41:56 |
Aldrin: |
That’s our home for the next couple of hours, and we want to take good care of it. |
As a matter of fact, though Buzz and Neil did not think of it at the time, there was a way that they could have locked themselves out, if the hatch’s pressure valve had somehow gone awry and started repressurizing. “Did we really ever investigate that problem?” Aldrin has asked, chuckling. “It probably would have been a good idea to use a brick or a camera to keep it from closing. Somebody must have thought through that. . . . We had a handle [on the outside] to unlatch it, but, considering the difficulty we had, if you had a couple of psi [in the cabin], you’d never get it open. Well, you’d get it open, but you’d never get the bent hatch closed again!”
Down on the surface, it was at this moment that Buzz referred to the Moon’s unique beauty as “magnificent desolation.” Leaning toward Buzz so close that their helmets almost touched, Neil clapped his gloved hand on his mate’s shoulder. According to Buzz’s autobiography, Neil then said to him, “Isn’t it fun?” But Neil insists today that “‘fine’ is definitely what I said,” in reference to the very fine powder that the two astronauts were still in the midst of examining.
After that, they moved off their separate ways and began testing their mobility. Though their substantial number of hours in one-sixth g had not been spent moving very far or very fast, inside the LM they had been standing, bending, and leaning and, in Neil’s words, had “a pretty good appreciation of what the one-sixth g environment felt like before we ever got out.”
What they were not accustomed to were major and very rapid body movements. In ground simulations and in the one-sixth g airplane, they had practiced a number of different possible lunar gaits. In one of the ground simulations, Neil remembers, “You were suspended sideways against an incline plane and walked sideways while hooked to an assembly of cables.” Although a truer feeling came in the one-sixth g airplane—a converted KC-135, flying parabolas—that only gave them a few seconds each flight to polish their techniques.
During the EVA, it was Aldrin’s job specifically to test all the different lunar gaits. These included a “loping gait” (Neil’s preference) in which the astronaut alternated feet, pushed off with each step, and floated forward before planting the next foot; a “skipping stride,” in which he kept one foot always forward, hit with the trailing foot just a fraction of a second before the lead foot, then pushed off with each foot, launching into the next glide; as well as a “kangaroo hop,” which few Apollo astronauts ever employed, except playfully, because its movements were so stilted.
With their big backpack and heavy suit on, the astronauts would have weighed 360 pounds apiece on Earth; on the Moon, in one-sixth gravity, they each weighed merely sixty pounds. Since they felt so lightweight, special care in all movements did need to be taken, primarily because of their backpacks, whose mass effects on their balance, they quickly discovered, pitched their walk slightly forward. When looking out in any direction toward the horizon, both men felt a bit disoriented. Because the Moon was so much smaller a sphere than Earth, the planetoid curved much more visibly down and away than they were accustomed to. Also, because the terrain varied a good bit relative to their ability to move over it, they had to be constantly alert. “On Earth, you only worry about one or two steps ahead,” Buzz has recalled. “On the Moon, you have to keep a good eye out four or five steps ahead.” Mostly, the two astronauts, trained as they were to be very conservative in their EVA mobility, walked flat-footed, with one foot always firmly planted into the lunar surface.
Armstrong did try making some fairly high jumps straight up off the ground. What he found was a tendency to tip over backwards upon landing. “One time I came close to falling and decided that was enough of that.” After he and Buzz stretched out the TV cable so the television camera could be moved to its position some fifty feet away from the LM, Neil also tripped over the cable a couple of times. “The TV cable was coiled in storage, so when we stretched it out we had a spiral on the ground that was lifting up, and with the low gravity that was accentuated a little bit. It was very easy to trip over that cable, which I did a few times.” Exacerbating the problem was the fact that the astronauts really could not see their feet very well. “Because of our suits, it was hard to see anything right below you. It was hard to see your feet; they were pretty far down there.” The fact that the cables got dusty almost immediately also contributed to the problem.
Sometime during this initial stretching of their lunar muscles, Aldrin contributed his own “first” on the Moon. Always forthright, Buzz relates: “My kidneys, which have never been of the strongest, sent me a message of distress. Neil might have been the first man to step on the Moon, but I was the first to pee in his pants on the Moon. I was, of course, linked up with the urine-collection device, but it was a unique feeling. The whole world was watching, but I was the only one who knew what they were really witnessing.”
It is not known when or where, or whether, Armstrong experienced a similar call from nature while he was on the lunar surface. If he did, it is definitely not something he would ever have told anyone about.
Sewn to each man’s left gauntlet was an ordered checklist of EVA tasks. Even though Neil and Buzz, through repeated simulations, knew from memory the order of events, they still used the checklists consistently, as professional pilots did, no matter how well they knew the procedures.
The astronauts’ next task (another late addition) was unveiling the commemorative plaque that was mounted on the ladder leg of the LM. “For those who haven’t read the plaque,” Neil said to the world at 04:13:52:40 elapsed time, “we’ll read the plaque that’s on the front landing gear of this LM. First, there’s two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, ‘Here Men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the president of the United States.”
Though the crew played no role in developing the plaque or its inscription, they were happy to endorse the message and to put their signatures on it. Aldrin, who would later formally change his name to Buzz, felt that the plaque was one place that required his formal assignation, “Edwin E.”
Another item that was not on their checklist but that NASA wanted accomplished fairly early during their EVA was the planting of the American flag. As discussed earlier, the decision to erect an American flag on the Moon had been controversial. Armstrong remembers: “There was substantial discussion before the flight on what the flag should be. It was questioned as to whether it should be an American flag or a United Nations flag.” Once it was decided (with no input from the crew) that it should be the American flag, Neil, a former Eagle Scout, did give some thought as to how the flag should be displayed. “I thought the flag should just be draped down, that it should fall down the flagpole like it would here on Earth. It shouldn’t be made to stand out or put into any rigid framework, which it ultimately was. I soon decided that this had gotten to be such a big issue, outside of my realm and point of view, that it didn’t pay for me to even worry about it. It was going to be other people’s decision, and whatever they decided was okay. I wasn’t going to have any voice in that.”
While he and Buzz had trained in minute detail to execute virtually every other assigned task during the EVA, they had done no training at all for the flag ceremony, as it, too, like the unveiling of the plaque, was a late addition. As it turned out, planting the flag (some thirty feet in front of the LM) took a lot more effort than anyone had imagined—so much more that the whole thing nearly turned into a public relations disaster.
First there was difficulty with the small telescoping arm that was attached as a crossbar to the top end of the flagpole; its function was to keep the flag (measuring three feet by five feet) extended and perpendicular in the still, windless lunar atmosphere. Armstrong and Aldrin were able quickly enough to lock the arm in its 90-degree position, but as hard as they tried, they could not get the telescope to extend fully. Thus, instead of the flag turning out flat and fully stretched, it had what Buzz has called “a unique permanent wave.” Then, to the dismay of the two men, fully aware that the whole world was watching them through the TV camera they had just set up, they could not get the staff of the flagpole to penetrate deeply enough into the soil to support itself in an upright position. “We had trouble getting it into the surface,” recalls Neil. “It ran into the subsurface crust.” With the pole sticking barely six inches into the Moon, all the two men could think about was the dreaded possibility that the American flag might collapse into the lunar dust right in front of the global television audience.
Fortunately, the pole, with its funny curly flag, stayed standing. With his camera, Neil took the memorable picture of Aldrin saluting the flag. According to Aldrin, he and Neil were just about to change positions and transfer the camera so that Buzz could take a picture of him when Mission Control radioed that President Nixon was on the line and wanted to talk to them. This distracted them from taking the picture, Buzz relates, so a photo of Neil never got taken.
However, the sequence of events as evidenced in the NASA communications transcript shows that the first word of Nixon’s call did not come to the astronauts until well after Neil took the picture of Aldrin saluting the flag; the picture was taken during a break in communications very shortly after 04:14:10:33 elapsed time whereas the news that Nixon wanted to talk to them came at 04:14:15:47. During most of that five-minute-and-fourteen-second interval, the two men were no longer even together. Following the flag planting, Armstrong moved back to the LM, the camera still with him. There, at the MESA, he prepared to collect his first rock samples. Aldrin moved out westward from the LM a distance of some fifty feet before rejoining Neil at the MESA.
A long pause indicated that Nixon had finished. The astronauts saluted—Buzz for the second time during the conversation—and then they both headed back to the MESA.
There is no question that President Nixon’s phone call came as a surprise to Aldrin. In his autobiography, Buzz recalled: “My heart rate, which had been low throughout the entire flight, suddenly jumped. Later Neil said he had known the president might be speaking with us while we were on the Moon, but no one had told me. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. The conversation was short and, for me, awkward. I felt it somehow incumbent on me to make some profound statement, for which I had made no preparation whatsoever. I took the handiest possible refuge. Neil was the commander of the flight, so I let him do the responding. I conveniently concluded that any observation I might make would look as though I was butting into the conversation, so I kept silent.”
Armstrong attests, “Deke had told me shortly before the flight that we might expect some special communication. He didn’t say it would be the president necessarily, but just to expect some special communication that would come through the CapCom. It was just a heads-up, to tell me that something might come through that seems unusual, but Deke didn’t tell me exactly what it was. I didn’t know it was going to be the president, and I’m not sure Deke knew exactly who or what it was going to be, either, but apparently he had gotten wind of something, maybe through Bob Gilruth. If I’d known it was going to be the president, I might of tried to conjure some kind of an appropriate statement, but I didn’t know.”
A written comment from Viola supports Neil’s assertion that he did not know in advance that Nixon would call. “I have never asked Neil if he knew the president was planning to call, but I must admit that I could sense our son was emotionally shaken. I could hear the tremor in his voice. God love him, and Buzz too, how could they be otherwise? It truly was a touching time for all of us watching. The tears were trickling down our cheeks.”
Aldrin has plainly stated in the years since Apollo 11 his desire to have been given the courtesy of the same heads-up that Neil got—specifically from his own commander. “I don’t think I even thought about it,” Armstrong states today. “Whatever it was, it was going to be a surprise. And maybe it wasn’t even going to happen.”
Without question, it was a highly unusual relationship between two men who had to work so closely together—one of amiable (read neutral)—strangers. But the strangeness went in both directions, not just from Neil to Buzz.
Consider the fact that, while Armstrong took dozens of wonderful photographs of Aldrin, Buzz took not a single explicit picture of Neil. The only pictures of Neil were one with a reflection of him in Aldrin’s helmet visor in a picture Neil took, or a very few where Neil was standing in the dark shadow of the LM with his back to the camera or only partially shown.31
It is one of the minor tragedies of Apollo 11 that posterity benefits from no photos of the First Man on the Moon. Not of him saluting the American flag. Not of him climbing down the ladder. Not of him stepping on the Moon. Not of him standing by the LM. Not of him with the Earth in the background. Not of him next to a crater. Not of him directly anywhere. Sure, there are the grainy, shadowy, black-and-white TV pictures of Armstrong on the Moon, and they are remarkable and forever memorable. There are also a number of frames from the 16mm movie camera. But, very regrettably, there are no high-resolution color photographic images of the First Man with the spectacular detail provided by the Hasselblad.
Why not? The answer, according to Aldrin, was that he simply did not think to take any—except at that moment when they were planting the American flag and President Nixon’s call allegedly ended what would have been a Buzz-at-Neil photo shoot.
In his autobiography, Aldrin excuses what he failed to do. “As the sequence of lunar operations evolved, Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of the pictures taken on the Moon that include an astronaut are of me [author’s emphasis]. It wasn’t until we were back on Earth and in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory looking over the pictures that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault perhaps, but we had never simulated this during our training.”
“We didn’t spend any time worrying about who took what pictures,” Armstrong graciously recalls. “It didn’t occur to me that it made any difference, as long as they were good.
“I don’t think Buzz had any reason to take my picture, and it never occurred to me that he should. I have always said that Buzz was the far more photogenic of the crew.”
At the same time, Armstrong does offer real clarification of the situation pertaining to cameras and the photographic plan for surface activities during Apollo 11. “We always had a plan for when we were going to transfer the camera. He was going to take some pictures, and I was going to take some. And I think roughly we did it approximately like the plan called for in terms of the camera transfer. I had the camera for a large fraction of the time and I had more assigned photographic responsibilities, but Buzz did have the camera some of the time and did take pictures. It was in the flight plan.”
Besides the Hasselblad that Neil mounted on his chest bracket shortly after the EVA began, another Hasselblad was kept in the LM as a spare in case the first camera malfunctioned. This camera—an intravehicular (IV) Hasselblad—did not have the reflective outer shell (that kept the EVA camera from overheating) and didn’t have a reseau plate for putting calibration crosses on the images; it was never brought out. The only other still-photo camera that was used on the surface was the Apollo Lunar Surface Close-Up Camera (ALSCC), a stereoscopic camera—often called the “Gold camera,” as its proponent was Dr. Thomas Gold, a prominent Cornell University astronomer—that had been specially designed for taking extreme close-ups of lunar soils and rocks.32
The Gold camera was solely Neil’s responsibility, and Aldrin does not recall taking any pictures with it. But Buzz definitely took a number of pictures of his own choosing with the EVA Hasselblad. This means Neil painstakingly took the camera off his chest bracket and handed it directly and carefully over to Aldrin. Buzz does not recall whether he, in turn, ever put the camera into his own bracket; he believes he did not but rather kept it mostly in his right hand.33 Buzz does remember taking pictures, though. He took two complete 360-degree panoramas. He took pictures of the distant Earth. He took pictures of the LM. He took the famous shots of footprints (his own) in the lunar dust. But he took no purposeful shots of Neil. Not one. To be fair, all of the photos Buzz took were planned photo tasks of his; taking a picture of Neil was not part of them.
“I should have taken it upon myself to do that,” Aldrin offers today. “But, you know, when I look back at where I am now, and what I’m aware of now, compared to where I was, I hate to use the word, but I was intimidated by the enormity of the situation. At the time there was certainly a gun-barrel vision of focusing in on what you were supposed to be doing rather than being innovative and creative. Right there was an opportunity where I could have been creative and wasn’t.”
But Buzz had found other opportunities to be creative. “When I saw what my footprint looked like, I said to myself, ‘Golly, we ought to take a picture of that, but I’d better take a picture before and after.’ That was split-second. Then there was another instance when, ‘Gee, that footprint looks awful lonesome. Let’s have the boot, too. Yeah, but then, if I do that, I won’t see the footprint.’ So I took a picture with the boot slightly away from it. The rest of my picture taking was documenting going around the LM. Neil took most of the panoramas, both with the TV camera when he was first out there and then with the Hasselblad. It was just a matter of who had what when, and there was just not the opportunity for me ever to do that.
“When I got back and someone said, ‘There’s not any of Neil,’ I thought, ‘What in the hell can I do now?’ I felt so bad about that. And then to have somebody say that might have been intentional. . . . How do you come up with a nonconfrontational argument against that? I mean, that was just such a divisive observation, and Neil and I were never in the least divisive. We really were intimidated by the situation we found ourselves in on the Moon, hesitant and with an unclear idea of what to do next.”
Not even Apollo 11 crewmate Mike Collins realized it until well after the mission. “Stupid me, stupid me. We came back, the pictures got developed—they came back from the NASA photo lab. I loved them. I thought they were terrific. I thought they were great. I mean, the clarity of them, the composition, the colors, everything. I thought they were just magnificent. Never once did it occur to me, ‘Which one of them is that?’ It’s just some guy in a pressure suit. It was not until later that people said, ‘That’s Buzz,’ and ‘That’s Buzz,’ and ‘That’s Buzz,’ and the only Neil was the one where he was in Buzz’s visor. But even then, I attributed it to technical stuff—you know, the timeline, who was carrying what piece of equipment, what they were supposed to be doing at given time, experiments they were running on the surface, and so forth.”
Flight Director Gene Kranz only shakes his head sadly trying to come up with an answer: “I don’t have an explanation. In recent years I have been speaking to about 100,000 people a year. I do sixty to seventy public appearance engagements. And the only picture I can put up on the screen of Neil is his reflection in Buzz’s facemask. I find that shocking. That’s something to me that’s unacceptable. But, you know, life isn’t fair.”
For years even someone as close to the pulse of the Manned Space Program as Chris Kraft failed to realize that there were no pictures of Neil on the Moon. When asked about the riddle, Kraft answered: “I can’t answer that. I was taken aback by it when I first recognized it was so, but I can’t give you any reason why it didn’t happen. I think it would be an unfair judgment that Buzz intentionally did not want to take any pictures of him. No, no, no. I don’t think Aldrin would have been that devious. I would not accuse him of that.”
Nor would Mike Collins.
“It never once entered your mind, Mike, that Buzz might have not taken a picture of Neil on purpose?”
“Never. I mean, I’m not saying it couldn’t be true. I’m just saying I’m a naïve person. It never entered my mind that there was some nefarious plot on Buzz’s part to exclude Neil from the photo-documentation of the first lunar landing. It just never occurred to me. Maybe it should have.”
According to Chris Kraft and others involved in Apollo 11’s mission planning, “There were all kinds of scientific reasons to take pictures and all kinds of plans to take pictures of the lunar landscape, but I don’t think there was ever any game plan to have them take a picture of each other like you would do at the beach. I don’t recall that ever being discussed.”
Interestingly, when asked whether he thought Armstrong while on the Moon had been oblivious of the fact that Aldrin was not taking any pictures of him, Kraft asserted: “Yes, yes. I don’t think Neil cared. He may today, because he might like to have a picture of himself on the Moon, but I don’t think it crossed his mind at the time.”
In Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean’s view, the rather extensive photographic training the astronauts underwent for the mission should have led to pictures of both men. “Don’t forget, they had practiced their photography over and over again. It wasn’t that they just did this for the first time on the Moon. They practiced this in ground simulation over the course of several different days. In training you looked at all this film you had shot. Deke Slayton, for one, would have noticed if Neil wasn’t showing up in any of the pictures.”
Al Bean stops short of suggesting why Buzz failed to take pictures of Neil.
“Obviously one possibility is that Buzz just wasn’t thinking about taking a picture of Neil, and he wasn’t realizing that he wasn’t thinking about it.”
“But there is also the possibility that he was thinking about it and that is why there aren’t any pictures of Neil.”
“That’s a possibility, too.”
“That he was thinking, ‘Neil may be the first on the Moon, but I’m not taking any pictures of him.’”
“That’s a possibility, too. I don’t know. We don’t know. And we should know, because I think it’s important to the long-range issue.”
“What makes it an important long-range issue?”
“Because there should be a bunch of good pictures of Neil. This was such an historic event. I mean, think about it: I’m going along on the boat with Christopher Columbus. He’s carrying the camera at the moment, but I’m his first mate. We all know what should happen. Nobody knows the answer why it didn’t.”
But Al Bean does possess a crystal clear idea as to the motivation of Armstrong’s silence, during and after the mission, to Buzz on the matter: “He was interested in doing the job. Neil was probably saying to himself all through his training, ‘I’ve got to make this landing safe; I’ve got to get out and do a good EVA; and I’ve got to get us back to the command module.’
“I got that way myself on my Apollo 12 flight. I didn’t think about people back home. I just thought about trying to be a good astronaut and doing my job. And Neil was even more focused than I was—more than most astronauts were.
“It would have been normal for Neil to be this way—for him to focus on the flying, on the jobs that really made the historic mission successful.” Within such a tight mental framework, the idea of a personal photograph not being taken would have been totally trivial.
Gene Cernan sees it similarly. “Certainly Neil realized the significance of the moment, but he was not going to be so arrogant as to say, ‘Here, Buzz, take a picture of me.’ What I can imagine Neil thinking was, ‘Oh well, we don’t have time to take a picture of me, so I’ll take a few pictures of Buzz to show everyone we were here.’
“Myself, if I had been in Neil’s place, I would have said, ‘Buzz, take a picture of me—quick.’ ”
• • •
At the conclusion of the telephone conversation with President Nixon, Armstrong immediately returned to the MESA to gear up for his primary geological work. Up to this point the only lunar material that had been collected was the contingency sample. Now he needed to get to work on what was known as the bulk sample. “The general area in which I did that work was to the left forward quadrant of the lunar module. For the bulk sample, we were trying to get a variety of different kinds of rock forms, but the primary focus was just to get enough volume—try to make it a volume of some good stuff but mostly just get volume because lots of experimenters around the world would be getting pieces of this stuff and doing experiments with them.”
Over a period of about fourteen minutes, Armstrong made some twenty-three scoops. “We didn’t have to be too careful in getting that part. I got out the sample bags and put the material—both rocks and soil—in the bulk sample containers. That worked all right, but the containers were a little contrary in terms of getting them sealed properly. It was a vacuum-packed kind of seal designed so that the inside of the samples would stay uncontaminated. Otherwise, when the lunar materials were brought back to Earth, air would get in through the seal and contaminate the rocks. So the sampling container was not as easy to open and close as was the average shoebox; it was a bit more of a challenge. Having said that, I can’t remember that there was any particular difficulty in doing it. It just took a little more time than expected.” Part of the reason for that was the area in which Neil was working was in deep shadow, making it hard to see. More significantly, in one-sixth gravity he couldn’t apply as much force as he had been able to do in training in full Earth gravity.
In all, Apollo 11 brought back nearly 48 pounds (21.7 kilograms) of rock and soil samples, the great majority scooped up by Armstrong. Overall in the Apollo program, 841.6 pounds (381.69 kilograms) of Moon rock were returned. Understandably, given the unknown of the first landing mission and the heavy emphasis on making a successful landing and return, the load brought back by Apollo 11 was the lightest of all the landing missions. The last, Apollo 17, brought back more than five times the weight in rocks that Apollo 11 did—over 243 pounds (110.5 kilograms).
Mostly the rocks brought back from the Sea of Tranquility were basalt: a dense, dark-gray, fine-grained igneous rock composed chiefly of calcium-rich plagioclase feldspar and pyroxene; on Earth, basalt is the commonest type of solidified lava. The oldest basalts brought back by Apollo 11 had been formed some 3.7 billion years ago. Later flights brought back a greater variety of specimens, including lighter-colored igneous rocks that were even older, called gabbros and anorthosite.
Some critics in the years following Apollo 11 were disappointed that the Moon rocks proved less valuable in unlocking as many secrets of the universe as hoped, but not Armstrong. “I have never been disappointed about the rocks. I am persuaded that they produced an extraordinary proof of the constituency of the regolith, the layer of loose rock atop the lunar mantle. They also demonstrated the different kinds of rock types, while confirming their plutonic character, their deep igneous or magmatic origin. Many of the rock types also revealed evidence of valuable metallic ores.
“The geology community had hoped we would provide what they called ‘documented samples,’ that is, samples whose emplacement was photographed prior to and after lifting the samples. Time did not permit our doing as much of that as we had hoped. Without documenting photographs, I selected and collected a number of different rock types of various sizes, perhaps as large as softballs, but mostly somewhat smaller. Samples of the ground mass were extracted from the surface using a scoop as per the plan. I do not remember what the relative weights of volumes of the types of samples were, rocks versus soil, but they were probably about equal.”
Less than 10 percent of the Moon rocks collected by the Apollo missions have yet even been studied, Armstrong emphasizes today. By 1975, the total 841.6-pound mass of Moon rocks collected by all the Apollo missions had been split into 35,600 samples, with only 11 pounds (5 kilograms) of them consigned for public viewing in museums around the world. By 1997, only 42.5 pounds (19.3 kilograms), or a little over 5 percent of the total, had been allocated for scientific study. “Today geologists are still actively studying the Moon rocks and writing scientific papers about them,” Neil notes. Several of the samples have become so famous within the international geoscience community that they are recognizable by their given names, such as the “Genesis Rock,” “The Black and White Breccia,” “Big Bertha,” “Rusty Rock,” “Great Scott,” and “The First Apollo 11 Sample Analyzed.” Well over 90 percent of the samples have been placed untouched in archival reserve for the benefit of posterity.
• • •
Besides the rock sampling, the astronauts had a number of experiments to conduct, and precious little time to conduct them, as surface activity for Apollo 11 was limited to two hours and forty minutes. There were six experiments in all, each one selected by a NASA scientific panel after rigorous peer review.
The most generic of the experiments was a soil mechanics investigation with core samples (taken primarily by Aldrin) measuring soil density, grain size, strength, and compressibility as a function of depth. Near the end of the EVA, Buzz hammered a couple of core tubes into the surface, the Moon’s tightly locked soil grains yielding only about six inches. The objective here was not just to improve scientific knowledge of the Moon, but to provide engineering data toward the design of an astronaut-carrying lunar vehicle, the later Lunar Rover, which motored electrically across the Moon’s hills and dales like a dune buggy starting with Apollo 15.
The Solar Wind Composition Experiment was designed to trap evidence of the flux of electrically charged particles emitted by the Sun. With Armstrong’s help, it took Aldrin five minutes to deploy the solar wind instrument (a small banner of thin aluminum foil 11.7 inches [30 centimeters] wide by 54.6 inches [140 centimeters] that unrolled downwards from a reel to face the Sun) early in the EVA, starting at 04:13:58:32 elapsed time. This was right after he and Neil had unveiled the plaque on the LM ladder leg. Exposed on the lunar surface for a total of seventy-seven minutes, the foil collector effectively entrapped ions of helium, neon, and argon, expanding scientists’ knowledge of the origin of the solar system, the history of planetary atmospheres, and solar wind dynamics.
The other five experiments came as part of EASEP, the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package. Actually, EASEP consisted of two units about the size of small backpacks. The PSEP, or Passive Seismometer Experiment, deployed by Aldrin, was designed to analyze lunar structure and to detect moonquakes. Supplemental to it was a lunar dust detector experiment—attached to the back side of the PSEP—that monitored the effects of lunar dust on all the EASEP experiments.
At the same time Aldrin was deploying the seismic experiment (from 04:15:53:00 to 04:16:09:50, a duration of roughly seventeen minutes), Armstrong assembled the LRRR, or “LR-cubed.” Designed to measure precisely the distance between the Moon and Earth, the LRRR device consisted of a series of corner-cube reflectors, essentially a special mirror that reflected an incoming light beam back in the direction it came—in this case from a laser aimed at the Sea of Tranquility from inside a large telescope at the University of California’s Lick Observatory, east of San Jose. Though the laser beam remained tightly focused over a very large distance, by the time it traveled the quarter of a million miles from Earth, its signal was widely dispersed, to a signal something in the range of two miles in diameter. To maximize reception of the signal, it was necessary for Armstrong to align the reflector quite accurately.
Speaking in the collective although the LR-cubed setup was all his, Neil recalls: “We wanted to make sure that all the mirrors were pointed at Earth, and we wanted to make certain that the reflector was mounted on a fairly stable surface where it wouldn’t be likely to get shifted later. We aligned it with the local vertical by means of a circular bubble—like the bubble in a level, except it was in a circle—so once you got the bubble in the middle of the circle the platform was level. Then we also had to align the whole platform by turning it until the mirrors were pointed directly at the Earth. For that we used simply a shadow stick—a gnomon—where the shadow made by the stick created the alignment. Always on the Earth when we had practiced it, this bubble was fairly stable; it would meander to a point, adjust, and stop. To our great surprise in the lunar gravity environment the bubble just kept circling around. It was just a matter of the low gravity there.”
Mysteriously, the bubble (actually its inverse, the shape of a concave dish) finally did stabilize. Not only did the laser reflector experiment work, it ended up being one of the most scientifically productive of all the Apollo experiments, deployed not just on Apollo 11 but on Apollo 14 and 15 as well. Together, the three LRRR instruments deployed by the Apollo missions produced many important measurements. These included an improved knowledge of the Moon’s orbit, of variations in the Moon’s rotation, of the rate at which the Moon is receding from Earth (currently 1.5 inches or 3.8 centimeters per year), as well as of the Earth’s own rotation rate and precession of its spin axis. Scientists in the United States and abroad have used data from the laser reflectors to test Einstein’s theory of relativity. For those few misguided souls who still cling to the belief that the Moon landings never happened, examination of the results of five decades of LRRR experiments should evidence how delusional their rejection of the Moon landing really is.
Armstrong recalls the decision against utilizing the large S-band dish antenna, which was stowed in LM Quad 1 to the right of the ladder. “We didn’t have to erect it as the signal for the LM antenna was strong enough to transmit the TV to Earth.” From a mission efficiency viewpoint, Neil was happy that the S-band antenna, which was roughly eight feet across, did not need to be deployed. It took about twenty minutes to assemble and he and Buzz were already running thirty minutes behind schedule. On the other hand, “It was really fun putting that thing together. I would have enjoyed doing it if I had had to, and finding out if it really worked. I’d done that quite a few times on the ground, and I was always amazed watching that thing bloom like a flower.”
According to Armstrong, the overall plan for the entire EVA was well conceived. “We had a plan. We had a substantial number of events to complete that were all in a proper order. We had built that plan based on the relative importance of the different events and the convenience and practicality of doing them in a certain order. We’d gone through a lot of simulations and developed the plan over a period of time. We knew it forwards, backwards, and blindfolded. That wasn’t going to be any trouble. I didn’t feel any restriction against violating a plan or drifting away from a plan somehow if the situation warranted.”
The most noteworthy change in the plan came late in the EVA when Armstrong decided he wanted to go over and take a look at the sizable crater about sixty-five yards east of the LM (thus known today to Apollo 11 afficionados as East Crater). “When I went over to look at the crater, that was something that wasn’t on the plan, but I didn’t know the crater was going to be there. I thought seeing and photographing it was a worthwhile addition, although I did have to give up some documented-sample time to do that. But it looked to me like that could be a piece of evidence that people would be interested in.” There were guidelines but no specific mission rules as to how far away from the LM a crew member could go. If he or Buzz strayed too far from the LM, Mission Control would have definitely reined them back in. “In fact, I had some personal reservations in taking the time to go over and snap a picture of the crater. But I thought it was of sufficient interest that it was worth getting.”
With EVA time running out, Neil hustled to get to the crater and back. Based on subsequent analysis of the TV footage showing him running there and back (he used a loping, foot-to-foot stride), his speed appears to have been about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) per hour. Later crews achieved speeds of over 3 miles (5 kilometers) per hour, but they benefited from additional gait training as well as more time on the Moon to try out their running skills. In all, Neil’s little expedition took three minutes and fifteen seconds. While there he took eight Hasselblad shots showing various features of East Crater. What most interested him about the crater once he got there were the outcroppings in its sidewalls: “Not spectacular outcroppings, but they certainly showed that there was a certain layering in there that I thought might be of interest to the geology guys.”
The moment Armstrong had headed toward the crater, Houston informed Buzz that it was time for him to start thinking about heading back into the LM.
04:15:11:15 |
McCandless: |
Buzz, this is Houston. You’ve got about ten minutes now prior to commencing your EVA termination activities. Over. |
04:15:11:31 |
Aldrin: |
Roger. I understand. |
Neil would follow Aldrin up the ladder some ten minutes later. Before either headed up the ladder, though, they needed to finish up and cap the final core samples, and Neil, with a pair of long-handed tongs, had to complete his final rock sampling. Everything that was to be returned to Earth needed to be brought to the ladder for loading. That included the camera film magazines, the solar wind experiment, and all the rock boxes.
As Armstrong explained in a postmission press conference, “There was just far too little time to do the variety of things that we would have liked to have done. There were rocks in a boulder field that we had photographed out of Buzz’s window before going out that were three to four feet in size. Very likely they were pieces of lunar bedrock. It would have been very interesting to go over and get some samples of those. There were just too many interesting things to do.
“When you are in a new environment, everything around you is new and different and you have the tendency to look a little more carefully at ‘What is this?’ and ‘Is this important?’ or ‘Let me look at it from a different angle,’ which you would never do in a simulation. In a simulation, you just picked up the rock and threw it in the pot.
“So it doesn’t surprise me that it took us somewhat longer to get through things. We didn’t have that presidential call either—that was never in our simulations. And there were questions coming from the ground. We were responding to those, which took a little extra time. No one was asking us questions when we went through this in our practice sessions.
“It would have been nice from our point of view to have had more time to ourselves so that we could have gone out and looked around a little bit. But a lot of people had needs based on whatever discipline they belonged to, and these people had spent a lot of time getting ready to have their experiments done. I felt that we had a substantial obligation to try to honor those needs as best we could, and in a most timely fashion. I didn’t mind breaking the rules if it seemed like the right thing to do.
“I do remember thinking, ‘Gee I’d like to stay out a little longer, because there are other things I would like to look at and do.’ It wasn’t an overpowering urge. It was just something that I felt, that I’d like to stay out longer. But I recognized that they wanted us to go back in.” Back on Earth, it was approaching 1:00 A.M. EDT.
04:15:24:00 |
Aldrin: |
. . . and I’ll head on up the ladder? . . . Okay. Adios, amigo. |
04:15:24:56 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. |
04:15:24:58 |
Aldrin: |
Anything more before I head on up, Bruce? |
04:15:25:04 |
McCandless: |
Negative. Head on up the ladder, Buzz. |
According to the mission plan, Armstrong was supposed to take the time to dust off Buzz’s suit before Buzz went back inside the LM, but the act of hygiene was forgotten, perhaps because it seemed pointless. “The dust was so fine that you couldn’t have got rid of all of it,” explains Neil. There was a hypothesis going into the mission that, if a lot of dust was brought back on their suits into the LM, the suits could actually ignite. “I don’t know how seriously that was considered by anyone. But dust in an oxygen environment can be flammable. It was not something that had been presented to us as being a serious concern.”
• • •
Armstrong’s last tasks on the lunar surface were labor intensive and physically demanding. To prevent contamination, the NASA contractor that built the rock boxes had cleaned their hinges rather than leaving them lubricated. To close their lids, Neil had to apply thirty-two pounds of force. After struggling to close the bulk sample box, it took “just about everything I could do,” “an inordinate amount of force,” to close the documented sample, his second box. Low gravity made for an added difficulty: the boxes felt very light and tended to skid away. In order to close the boxes, Neil placed them on the MESA table, a surface that was not very rigid. Just holding the box securely enough in place to apply the necessary force on the sealing handles caused him considerable trouble. Then he had to carry the rock boxes one by one over to the LEC, hook them to the “Brooklyn clothesline” running from the porch of the LM up to the hatch, and, with Buzz’s help, hoist them up.
In Houston, a cardiac monitor showed that Neil’s heart rate rose during the EVA close-out period to 160 beats per minute, the typical heart rate of an Indy car driver at the start of the Indianapolis 500. Five minutes before he was to head up the ladder, Houston made a disguised request for Neil to slow down for a moment, by asking him to report on the status of the tank pressure and oxygen in his EMU.
More concerned about getting every necessary object inside the LM, the astronauts almost forgot to leave a small packet of memorial items on the lunar surface. Aldrin recalls the near-oversight: “We were so busy that I was halfway up the ladder before Neil asked me if I had remembered to leave the mementos we had brought along. I had completely forgotten. What we had hoped to make into a brief ceremony, had there been time, ended almost as an afterthought. I reached into my shoulder pocket, pulled the packet out and tossed it onto the surface.” The packet contained two Soviet-made medals, in honor of deceased cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit the Earth, who died in a MiG-15 accident in March 1967; and Vladimir Komarov, killed a month after Gagarin at the conclusion of his Soyuz 1 flight when his spacecraft’s descent parachute failed to open. Also in the packet was an Apollo 1 patch commemorating Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Also inside was a small gold olive-branch pin, symbolic of the peaceful nature of the American Moon landing program. The token was identical to the pins that the three Apollo 11 astronauts were carrying as gifts for their wives.
04:15:36:38 |
Armstrong: |
How about that package out of your sleeve? Get that? |
04:15:36:53 |
Aldrin: |
No. |
Armstrong: |
Okay, I’ll get it when I get up there to the porch. |
|
04:15:37:02 |
Aldrin: |
Want it now? |
04:15:37:06 |
Armstrong: |
Guess so. |
“I don’t think we really wanted to talk totally open about what it was,” Aldrin relates. “So it was sort of guarded. I knew what Neil was talking about.” Aldrin’s packet landed just to Neil’s right. Armstrong straightened it out a little, to get some of the dust off of it, by moving it with his foot.
Immediately after doing that, at 1:09 A.M. EDT (04:15:37:32 elapsed time), Neil climbed onto the LM footpad, put his arms on the ladder arms, and, pushing with his legs and pulling his arms, jumped all the way up to the third rung of the ladder.
“The technique I used was one in which I did a deep knee bend with both legs and got my torso down absolutely as close to the footpad as I could. I then sprang vertically up and guided myself with my hands by use of the handrails. That’s how I got to the third step, which I guess was easily five or six feet above the ground.”
Characteristically, the engineer was experimenting, not showboating. “It was just curiosity. You could have really jumped high if you didn’t have that suit on. But the suit’s weight. . . . You didn’t really feel the weight of the suit because it was pressurized from the inside, so the interior pressure was holding most of the weight of the suit up. But when you jumped you had to carry that, and our lunar weight was sixty-two pounds or something like that. So if you are a sixty-two-pound man, how high can you jump? If you are unencumbered in a real stiff suit, you can probably jump pretty high. I just wanted to get an idea of how high could you go if you took a good leap up.”
Armstrong’s leap up the ladder probably stands as a lunar record, as subsequent Apollo astronauts were usually carrying something in their hands or arms when they ascended. If Neil had missed the step while making the jump—and the steps were slippery from lunar dust—there was only a slight chance he could have hurt himself. With his hands on the rails, a position both he and Buzz had checked, he could have easily guided himself to a soft landing. In addition, if Neil had fallen, he would have had no trouble getting up, having practiced that in the water tank back at the Manned Spacecraft Center. It was very unlikely that Aldrin would have had to come back down to the surface to help him up.
Aldrin’s ingress a few minutes earlier had proven relatively easy, considering that the bulky PLSS necessitated that the astronaut arch his back so as to afford the least profile going in. Navigating solo, Aldrin first brought his knees inside the cockpit, then he moved from a kneeling to an upright position. Before turning around, he had to ensure adequate allowance for the switches and other equipment immediately behind him.
Neil’s ingress, which took one minute and twenty-six seconds from the time he climbed on the LM footpad, benefited from Aldrin’s guidance:
04:15:38:08 |
Aldrin: |
Just keep your head down. Now start arching your back. That’s good. Plenty of room. Okay now, all right, arch your back a little, your head up against [garbled]. Roll right just a little bit. Head down. Getting in in good shape. |
04:15:38:26 |
Armstrong: |
Thank you. . . . Am I bumping now? |
04:15:38:33 |
Aldrin: |
No, you’re clear. You’re rubbing up against me a little bit. |
04:15:38:36 |
Armstrong: |
Okay. |
04:15:38:38 |
Aldrin: |
Turn right. That’s right. A little to the left . . . Okay. Now move your foot and I’ll get the hatch . . . |
04:15:38:58 |
Armstrong: |
Okay! |
04:15:39:13 |
Aldrin: |
Okay. The hatch is closed and latched . . . and verified secured. |
The time between the hatch opening and its closing was two hours, thirty-one minutes, and forty seconds. Earth time upon closure was 1:11 A.M. EDT. Humankind’s first direct sojourn onto the surface of the Moon was over in less time than it took to watch a football game or Broadway play.
On CBS, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite tried to sum up the momentous events. “Man has landed and man has taken his first steps. What is there to add to that?” Cronkite asked. Sevareid answered: “At this hour one can only subtract. I don’t know what one can add now. We’ve seen some kind of ‘birth’ here. And I’m sure that to many, many people the first scene of Armstrong emerging must have seemed like a birth. One’s image of this clumsy creature, half-blind, maneuvering with great awkwardness at first, and slowly learning to use its legs, until, in a rather short time it’s running.
“And in this new world, this new reality. And the quickness of the adjustment of the human body, and the nervous system. The weight of gravity on Earth. Just the other day they were at the Cape; then weightlessness of several days; and then to the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. And somehow the body adjusts with that speed and in totally different elements. This is what overwhelms you.
“And Armstrong’s words. He sounded very laconic, unemotional. His mother said as she heard them on the air that he was thrilled. And I think we’d have to take a mother’s word for that. And then when they moved around, you sensed their feeling of joy up there. I never expected to see them bound, did you? Everything we’ve been told was that they would move with great care. Foot after foot with great deliberation. We were told they might fall. And here they were, like children playing hopscotch.”
“Like colts almost,” Cronkite interjected.
“Like colts finding their legs, exactly. I must say, as somebody who loves the English language, I have such a great gratitude that the first voices that came from another celestial body were in the English tongue, which I feel is the richest language of all. I think it is the greatest vocabulary. And maybe only one million people or so on the Earth speak and understand it. But I never expected to hear that word ‘pretty.’ He said it was ‘pretty.’ What we thought was cold and desolate and forbidding—somehow they found a strange beauty there that I suppose they can never really describe to us. So we’ll never know.”
Cronkite: “It may not be a beauty that one can pass on to future beholders, either. These first men on the Moon can see something that men who follow will miss.”
Sevareid: “We’re always going to feel, somehow, strangers to these men. They will, in effect, be a bit stranger, even to their own wives and children. Disappeared into another life that we can’t follow. I wonder what their life will be like, now. The Moon has treated them well, so far. How people on Earth will treat these men, the rest of their lives, that gives me more foreboding, I think, than anything else.”
One of the gaps in the record of Apollo 11 concerns the personal items and mementos Armstrong and his crewmates took with them to the Moon. All three men had a Personal Preference Kit stowed on board for them at launch. A PPK was a beta-cloth pouch about the size of a large brown lunch sack, with a pull-string opening at the top, coated with fireproof Teflon.
Exactly how many PPK pouches were taken by each Apollo 11 astronaut to the Moon is unknown. Apparently at least one belonging to each stayed for the entire flight in the left side lower equipment stowage compartment of the command module; these CM PPKs could weigh no more than five pounds per astronaut. At least two other PPKs, one for Neil and one for Buzz, were stowed inside the LM, in compartment cabinets located underneath the control and display panels to the right and left of Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s flight stations, respectively. These LM PPKs—it is likely there were only two of them, one for each of them—were limited to half a pound per astronaut. Anything in excess of those amounts would have required a special waiver from the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Dr. George Low. (The weights of Apollo 11’s PPKs are unknown.) Sometime before or after the flight, Neil, Mike, and Buzz agreed to authenticate all items on board Apollo 11 as “carried to the Moon,” whether they went to the lunar surface or stayed in the CSM, so as not to devalue the symbolic importance of the items carried by Collins only in lunar orbit.
None of the three astronauts has ever shared an inventory of the souvenirs that were in those six bags. (In addition to the bags mentioned above, the astronauts also took another PPK for frequently used personal items, such as pens, razors, and sunglasses.) What is known about them has been based solely on what the astronauts over the years have said or written and on what they have released and identified from their private holdings for sale or display. In Armstrong’s case, this has amounted to almost nothing, since Neil has never spoken about what he took to the Moon—and, unlike Buzz and Mike, has never put any of his items up for auction.
All attempts to discover the contents of the PPKs have failed. Even before the launch of Apollo 11, rumors circulated, but NASA refused to shed any light upon the subject. “The astronauts don’t have to tell anyone around here what is in those kits because they are their own personal items,” one MSC official declared prior to the Apollo 11 launch. It was not quite the whole truth. As astronaut Alan Bean has explained, “You had to make a list, so that Deke Slayton and everybody could have it. But as long as it didn’t get too heavy, you could carry lots of stuff.”
Janet Armstrong, in reply to a persistent newsman on hand for her public greeting two hours after her husband landed on the Moon, admitted that Neil had taken something to the Moon for her, but she refused to reveal what it was. On air with CBS, Cronkite quickly commented on the news clip: “While we heard a minute ago from Janet Armstrong that Neil had taken a little packet of something memorable for her along with him, we know that the others have as well. And they’re also being secretive about what it is, as all of the astronauts have from the first flight of Alan Shepard in 1961.”
Indeed, it was NASA’s policy to keep the astronauts’ personal belongings strictly confidential. Souvenir items carried by Shepard and other Mercury astronauts did not even have to be manifested formally. When PPKs came into existence during Project Gemini (when they were known as APKs, or Astronaut Preference Kits), only the astronauts themselves and Deke Slayton as head of the Astronaut Office had access to their manifest. Aldrin remembers how loose the PPK procedure actually was: “NASA had requested that we furnish them with a list of everything we were taking, and we quickly obliged. It was of such small import that NASA’s official compilation of what I took was not even deemed worthy of being typed up. The confirming list they gave me back was handwritten and complete.”
Changes to the relaxed souvenir policy, as well as to the physical makeup of the PPKs, came only after two scandals broke in 1971. The first was a minor scandal involving a deal between the Apollo 14 astronauts and the Franklin Mint in Philadelphia. A Federal Trade Commission investigation ensued when the Franklin Mint began marketing mini-coins that contained “silver that actually landed on the moon,” which were in fact made from silver medallions carried by the Apollo 14 crew to lunar orbit only
The second scandal generated significant negative publicity, brought on by revelations of an unfortunate decision by the Apollo 15 astronauts. In exchange for transporting one hundred first-day postal covers, German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger paid each of the three astronauts $7,000, depositing the money into individual Swiss bank accounts as trust funds for the astronauts’ children. Instead of withholding sale of the covers until after the Apollo program was over, which was the astronauts’ understanding of how the deal would be handled, Sieger immediately began selling them—for $1,500 each. When all one hundred were sold, the dealer would enjoy a total return equivalent in today’s dollars to some three-quarters of a million. Much more bothersome in the mind of the American public were reports that the Apollo 15 astronauts had carried three hundred additional covers for themselves. Critics assumed that the men were planning to sell theirs off as well. The story infuriated Congress and led NASA to conduct an internal investigation, one that turned into something of a witch hunt and resulted in a firm reprimand for the astronauts. It was a sad and complicated affair, with the three astronauts—Dave Scott, Al Worden, and Jim Irwin—unfairly bearing the brunt of the blame for a questionable practice involving personal mementos that had been going on ever since the early days of Mercury.34
So cautious was NASA about releasing what its astronauts carried as souvenirs that it is not known with certainty even today what Apollo 11 was carrying in its OFK, or Official Flight Kit. An OFK manifest for Apollo 11 was never released publicly, and none has ever been located. The only proof that one even existed is a 1974 memorandum from NASA Associate Administrator Rocco A. Petrone to NASA Administrator Dr. James C. Fletcher dealing with the proposed future distribution of American flags flown on U.S. space missions, stating that an OFK had flown on Apollo 11. (The memo informed Fletcher that the remaining U.S. flags that had been flown on Apollo 11 and not yet given away were being reserved for future U.S. presidents and vice presidents only.)
Apollo 11’s OFK might not even have been an actual bag or pouch. It is possible that OFK items for the first Moon landing were simply stowed in one or more of the cabinets inside the command module. A NASA document from 1972 would later indicate that “the total weight of this kit shall not exceed 53.3 pounds per mission.” Clearly, the contents of the OFK comprised a much larger stash of souvenir items than what went into the astronauts’ PPKs. As official NASA souvenirs, OFK items were meant for distribution, either by the astronauts or by leading NASA officials, to VIPs and organizations. As none of these items were transferred over to the LM prior to its separation in lunar orbit, it seems clear that nothing from the OFK, whether one physically existed or not, was carried to the surface.
Thus, the only items taken to the surface of the Moon was whatever was in the PPKs that had been stowed in the LM—and we do not know what was in them. To wit:
• Four hundred fifty silver medallions that had been minted by the Robbins Company of Massachusetts. These had been divided equally between the three astronauts and stowed in their PPKs. How many of the medallions were in the PPKs that were stowed aboard the Eagle and taken down to the surface, however, is unknown.
• Three gold medallions, also minted by the Robbins Company, one for each astronaut. One can assume that these medals were in the LM PPKs.
• An unknown number of miniature (4 x 6-inch) flags of the United States; of the fifty U.S. states, District of Columbia, and U.S. territories; of the nations of the world; and of the United Nations. According to a NASA press release of July 3, 1969, “These flags will be carried in the lunar module and brought back to Earth. They will not be deployed on the Moon. The small flags are to be carried in a plastic vacuum cloth and stowed in a beta cloth pouch with a Teflon outer wrap.” What this seems to mean is that all these miniature flags were stowed aboard the LM in a special, third PPK that did not belong to either Neil or Buzz. As part of the OFK kept inside the command module, there were a great many additional miniature American flags. There were also two full-size (5 x 8-foot) American flags, which were to be presented to the two houses of Congress upon return to Earth. These exact flags had been flown over the U.S. Capitol prior to the Apollo 11 mission and were to be flown again there after the mission. It is also known that Aldrin carried miniature U.S. flags in his PPK, some of which he later sold. As Buzz has only specified that these flags were “carried to the Moon,” it is not certain whether they went to Tranquility Base or just stayed in orbit.
• A commemorative Apollo 11 envelope issued by the U.S. Post Department. On it was a newly issued ten-cent stamp also commemorating Apollo 11. It is not known whether these items were in Neil’s or in Buzz’s LM PPK. While on the lunar surface, they were supposed to cancel the cover, but they forgot to do so. (That was not done until July 24 when the crew was together in the quarantine facility. Nonetheless, the cancellation read July 20.) In the command module, in either Collins’s PPK or the OFK, the crew also brought along the die from which the commemorative stamp had been printed. In his CM PPK, Aldrin carried 101 philatelic covers on behalf of the Manned Spacecraft Center’s Stamp Club. Another 113 envelopes, perhaps more, were also carried onboard the command module, all of them in the PPKs (with the possible exception of the one carried for the United States Postal Service, which might have been in the OFK). Each member of the crew signed all of the covers carried. In later years, Aldrin and Collins initialed some of their covers, in the upper left corner, and some were put up for sale. No one has ever seen a cover initialed by Armstrong, because he has never initialed one.
• An unknown number of Apollo 11 “beta cloth” patches, so named by their manufacturer, Owen-Corning Fiberglass of Ashton, Rhode Island, because they were made of tightly woven and fireproof glass fiber. Each astronaut may have had a small number of beta patches in his PPK, but how many of them went to the surface, if any, is unknown.
• An unknown number of embroidered Apollo 11 patches. Most of these were likely part of the OFK, but a few might have been taken in PPKs, though few if any of them traveled to the lunar surface.
• Three gold olive-branch pins, exact replicas of the gold olive branch in the packet that Aldrin tossed down at the last minute to the lunar surface during the EVA. After the flight, the crew presented the pins to their wives as gifts. Presumably, each LM astronaut carried his own wife’s pin in his respective PPK, with either Neil or Buzz carrying the pin that Collins was to give his wife Patricia.
• A vial filled with wine and a miniature chalice, in Aldrin’s LM PPK.
• Pieces of jewelry for his wife and family, in Aldrin’s LM PPK.
As for Armstrong specifically, he has never released any information about the contents of his PPK. He agreed to do so for publication in this book, but reported that he was unable to find the manifest among his many papers. All he had to say about what he took with him to the Moon was, “In my PPK I had some Apollo 11 medallions, some jewelry for my wife and mother [simply the gold olive branch pin for each], and some things for other people.” He is most clear about, and most proud of, the pieces of the historic Wright Flyer that he took to the Moon. Under a special arrangement with the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, he took in his LM PPK a piece of wood from the Wright brothers’ 1903 airplane’s left propeller and a piece of muslin fabric (8 x 13 inches) from its upper left wing.
Armstrong also took along his college fraternity pin from Purdue, which he later donated for display at Phi Delta Theta’s headquarters in Oxford, Ohio. Contrary to published stories, he did not take Janet’s Alpha Chi Omega sorority pin.
“I didn’t bring anything else for myself,” Neil states today. “At least not that I can remember.” As for Janet, the only thing taken to the Moon for her was the olive branch pin. “He didn’t ask me if I wanted to send anything.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Armstrong took nothing else for family members—not even for his two boys, a fact that still distresses Janet. “I assumed he had taken things to give to the boys later, but I don’t believe he has ever given them anything.
“Neil can be thoughtful, but he does not give much time to being thoughtful, or at least to expressing it.”
Another loved one that Neil apparently did not remember by taking anything of hers to the Moon was his daughter Karen. What could have made the first Moon landing more meaningful “for all mankind” than a father honoring the cherished memory of his beloved little girl, by taking a picture of the child, dead now over seven years (she would have been a ten-year-old), one of her toys, an article of her clothing, a lock of hair? Astronaut Gene Cernan, just before he left the lunar surface on Apollo 17, had done something touching for his healthy nine-year-old daughter Tracy: at the end of his final EVA, Gene had written her initials in the dust. For his part, Buzz Aldrin carried photos of his children to the Moon. Charlie Duke left a picture of his family on the surface (which reportedly began to blacken from the heat soon after Duke took the photo of his photo).
What if Neil had done something like that but had never told anyone about it, not even Janet, because it was of such an intensely personal nature? How much more would posterity—fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—value and esteem the character and actions of the First Man? It would have elevated the Moon landing to an even higher level of significance. Among those who feel so are Neil’s sister June, who knows her brother as well as anyone. “Did he take something of Karen with him to the Moon?” ran June’s rhetorical question. “Oh, I dearly hope so.”