The crew of Borman, Stafford and Collins who originally trained together weren’t kept together. Tom Stafford was given a new crew of John Young and Gene Cernan and they were assigned to be the backup crew for Apollo 7. Later they would be the prime crew for Apollo 10 – the last mission before the first landing. Frank Borman and Michael Collins were promoted to the prime crew of Apollo 8 along with Bill Anders. But the changes meant that Collins lost his chance to be considered for one of the first Moon landings as he was in his own words ‘promoted’ from Lunar Module pilot to Command Module pilot. This was because Deke Slayton had a rule that on all flights the Command Module pilot had to have flown in space before. Collins then suffered a slipped disc so Jim Lovell replaced him.
Jim Lovell recalled how he heard he was going to the Moon for the first time:
We were going to go out to 4,000 miles so that we could test the lunar module, the command module, and then come back at a high rate of speed so that, you know, we could test the heatshield and things like that. I recall this very vividly. The three of us were out at Downey at North American testing our spacecraft; and Frank got a call to go back to Houston. So Bill Anders and I still stayed out there. We were working out there. And Frank came back again, back to Downey, and said, ‘Things have changed.’ And we said, ‘Viz. a what?’ He said, ‘If everything goes all right with Apollo 7, we’ll – Apollo 8 will go to the Moon.’ I was elated! I thought, ‘Man, this is great!’ I mean, I had already spent two weeks in space in Gemini VII with Frank Borman. I didn’t want to spend another eleven days, or something like that, you know, going around the Earth again. I said, ‘This is fantastic!’
Gene Kranz says:
Most of the people give the credit for Apollo 8 to a decision in August where George Low came down and said, ‘Hey, you know, I think, in order to keep this program on track – we’ve got problems in the lunar module; it’s behind schedule, it’s overweight, there are software problems there – I think that we’ve got to go to the Moon.’
Well, if I go back into the March/April timeframe, Chris Kraft at one of the staff meetings was concerned about the same types of things. And we had what we called an E-mission. It was one where we were just taking and putting a very large 4,000-mile orbit mission into this package. And this was going to test the command and service module and lunar module, but in a very high elliptic orbit. I don’t think anybody in the program thought that made much sense, but it was there. So Kraft started playing games with this mission.’
He kept saying, ‘Well, Johnny, how big could we make that orbit?’ And Johnny Mayer would say, ‘Hell, we could make it so big we’d go around the Moon if we wanted to!’ And Kraft said, ‘Gee, we ought to develop some kind of an alternate for this E-mission.’ He said, ‘Johnny, why don’t you look at it?’ So that was in the April timeframe. Come May, Johnny Mayer and – Mayer loved to have work for his conceptual flight planners. You know, the conceptual flight planners were sort of like the mobile strike force; they were sort of the eggheads in a very eggheady division. But boy, the one thing they could do is figure out how to do difficult and complex things in a trajectory sense. In May, they now came back in and provided a series of briefings. And in these briefings now, this 4,000-mile orbit had grown to encompass the Moon! But it still had a Command and Service Module and Lunar Module in it. So now comes June. Kraft says, ‘Look, what happens if the LM can’t make it? What do we get out of it?’ And the obvious one, ‘Well, gee we figure out whether all of our navigation works, our tracking works, and all these kinds of things.’ The bottom line of this thing was, I really think it was either Kraft planted the seed very strongly in George Low’s mind or George Low had some good mission staff engineers that knew what the mission planners were doing. And I think if you really think about it, that’s a very short turnaround to come up with such a monumental decision, to have all the data on the table ready to go.
By early November, the Russians were still planning two more automated L1 lunar missions, one in mid-November and one in early December, to be followed by a manned circumlunar flight in January. But once they heard of the Apollo 8 lunar orbit idea they must have realized that they had an advantage if they could but use it. The Apollo 8 launch window opened on 21 December but because of different lunar trajectories undertaken from the two launch sites the circumlunar launch window for a Soviet launch from central Asia would occur earlier, around 8–10 December. But despite much press speculation in the West and an increase in tension approaching 8 December, they were just not in a position to take advantage of the difference. An automated L1 launch did take place in November, sending the spacecraft, designated Zond 6, towards the Moon. As soon as it was on its way, controllers discovered that an antenna boom had not deployed. Despite this, the mission went very well, with Zond 6 flying around the far side of the Moon two days later at a closest distance of 2,420 km. After it had circled the Moon, controllers had to refine its trajectory for it to perform a guided re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and land on Soviet territory. The first correction was successfully accomplished and it looked as if everything was on track until controllers detected a disastrous problem: the air pressure within the descent apparatus had dropped, indicating a compromise of the spacecraft’s structural integrity. Despite the partial depressurization, later found to be the result of a faulty rubber gasket, the critical systems on the ship remained operational, and the controllers were able to carry out the third and final mid-course correction, just eight and a half hours prior to re-entry, at a distance of 120,000 km from Earth.
On the morning of 17 November, Zond 6 separated into its two component modules prior to re-entry, passing through its 9,000-km-long re-entry corridor. It skipped out of the atmosphere, having reduced velocity down to 7.6 km per second, and began a second re-entry that further lowered velocity to only 200 m per second. The complex re-entry was a remarkable demonstration of the precision of the L1 re-entry profile designed to reduce G forces. However, during part of the descent, pressure in the descent apparatus reduced further, killing any biological specimens. No doubt, a crew within the ship would have perished as well. Then the parachute system failed and it plummeted to the ground and smashed into pieces. Remarkably, the impact occurred only 16 km from the Proton launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome where Zond 6 had lifted off just six days and nineteen hours previously. Among the items recovered intact from the wreckage was the exposed film from the camera, which provided beautiful pictures of both Earth and the Moon.
Because of the crash, Mishin postponed any plans for a piloted L1 mission in the near future: the dreams of Soviet engineers and scientists of circling the Moon prior to the United States were over. As the historic Apollo 8 launch grew closer, Soviet spokespersons began to neutralize what was undoubtedly a public relations disaster. Veteran cosmonaut Titov, on a trip to Bulgaria, told journalists the day before the Apollo 8 launch, ‘It is not important to mankind who will reach the Moon first and when he will reach it – in 1969 or 1970.’
But it did matter. It meant everything.
When Apollo 8 lifted off from Cape Kennedy on 21 December 1968, the eyes of the world were upon the three astronauts who were embarking on a journey as important as any in history – to break the bonds of Earth and head out into deep space. Kamanin wrote in his diary:
The flight of Apollo 8 to the Moon is an event of worldwide and historic proportions. This is a time for festivities for everyone in the world. But for us, the holiday is darkened with the realization of lost opportunities and with sadness that today the men flying to the Moon are not named Valeri Bykovski, Pavel Popovich, or Aleksei Leonov, but rather Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders.
Borman says:
I didn’t […] want the mission to get fouled up because we really weren’t certain that the Russians weren’t breathing down our backs. So I wanted to go on time. […] Saturn V was a unique vehicle. And of course, it was powerful and noisy and vibrated, and the stagings were really kind of violent. But when you got on the third stage it was smooth and quiet and was just like the upper stage of the Gemini. Actually, it was less demanding than Gemini from a G standpoint, because it didn’t reach the high Gs. I don’t think there was any fear. The main fear was that somehow we’d screw up.
William Anders’ first ride into space was the first manned flight of the mighty Saturn V:
I mean it was like violent sideways movement and massive noise that … nowhere near had been simulated properly in our simulations. For about the first ten, seemed like forty, but probably the first ten seconds we could not communicate with each other. Had there been a need to abort detected on my instruments I could not have relayed that to Borman. So we were all out of it for the first ten or twenty seconds.
The next most impressive thing was that as we burned out on the first stage we were hitting about six or eight G’s and we were back in our seats. You could hardly lift your arms, you have trouble breathing, but you’re not blacked out because the way your blood was flowing from your legs down into your torso. But try to reach up, it’s like you had a twenty pound weight in your hand.
Then the engines cut off, and just as they cut off some retro rockets fire to try to move that big first stage away from the second and third stage but slightly before it separates. So, you go from a plus 6 G to a minus one-tenth, and the fluid in your ears just goes wild. I felt like I was being catapulted right through that instrument panel. Instinctively I put my hand up in front of my face and just about the time I got my hand up the second stage cut in and whack-o, right onto the face plate with the wrist ring which left a gash. I thought, ‘Oh, damn, here I am, the rookie of the flight, and sure enough here’s this big rookie mark. When we got into orbit and I got out of my seat and we took off our suits and each guy handed me their helmet to stow and, sure enough, each one of them had a gash in it from the same thing.
Entering Earth orbit the Apollo 8 Command and Service Module and its crew had to fire the main engine that would take the spacecraft away from the Earth, making them the first men to ever leave their home world and venture towards the Moon. According to the capsule communicator for that phase of the mission, Michael Collins, soon to become a member of the historic Apollo 11 crew, Apollo 8 and the first leaving may in the long term be considered as more important than the first landing:
I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the moon. As you look back 100 years from now, which is more important, the idea that people left their home planet or the idea that people arrived at their nearby satellite? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11, even though today we regard Apollo 11 as being the showpiece and the zenith of the Apollo program but, as I say, 100 years from now, historians may say Apollo 8 is more significant; it’s more significant to leave than it is to arrive.
But what do you say when you leave the Earth for the first time? Collins says:
I can remember at the time thinking, ‘Jeez, there’s got to be a better way of saying this,’ but we had our technical jargon, and so I said, ‘Apollo 8, you’re go for TLI.’ If, again, 100 years from now you say you’ve got a situation where a guy with a radio transmitter in his hand is going to tell the first three human beings they can leave the gravitational field of Earth, what is he going to say? He’s going to say something like – he’s going to invoke Christopher Columbus or a primordial reptile coming up out of the swamps onto dry land for the first time, or he’s going to go back through the sweep of history and say something very, very meaningful, and instead he says, ‘What? Say what? You’re go for TLI? Jesus! I mean, there has to be a better way, don’t you think, of saying that?’ Yet that was our technical jargon.
Collins said later that he thought there were now three men in the Solar System who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a different place, whose motions obeyed different rules, and whose habitat had to be considered a separate planet.
During the second orbit, at two hours 27 minutes into the mission Mike Collins said, ‘You are go for TLI.’ Borman responded, ‘Roger. We understand; we are go for TLI.’ Twenty-three minutes after the on-board computer had completed its calculations, Lovell calmly said, ‘Ignition’. The S-IVB had restarted with a long burn over Hawaii that lasted five minutes 19 seconds and boosted speed to the 38,946 km per hour necessary to escape the Earth’s gravity. ‘You are on your way,’ said Chris Kraft, from the last row of consoles in Mission Control, ‘you are really on your way.’ The anticlimactic observation of the day came when Lovell said, ‘Tell Conrad he lost his record’. (During Gemini 11 Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon had set an altitude record of 1,370 km.) After the burn the S-IVB separated and was sent on its way to orbit the Sun.
In Mission Control early in the morning of 24 December, the big centre screen changed to show a scarred and pockmarked map with such labels as Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Crisium, and many craters with such names as Tsiolkovsky, Grimaldi, and Gilbert. The effect was electrifying, symbolic evidence that man had reached the vicinity of the Moon.
Capcom Gerry Carr spoke to the three astronauts more than 320,000 km away: ‘Ten seconds to go. You are GO all the way.’ Lovell replied, ‘We’ll see you on the other side’, and Apollo 8 disappeared behind the Moon, the first time in history men had been occulted. For 34 minutes there would be no way of knowing what happened. During that time the 247-second LOI (lunar orbit insertion) burn would take place that would slow down the spacecraft to enable it to go into orbit. If the SPS engine failed, Apollo 8 would whip around the Moon and head back for Earth on a free-return trajectory. During one critical half-minute, if the engine conked out the spacecraft would be sent crashing into the Moon.
‘Longest four minutes I ever spent,’ said Lovell during the burn, in a comment recorded but not broadcast in real time. At 69 hours 15 minutes Apollo 8 went into lunar orbit, whereupon Anders said, ‘Congratulations, gentlemen, you are at zero-zero.’ Said Borman, ‘It’s not time for congratulations yet. Dig out the flight plan.’ Unaware of this conversation, Mission Control buzzed with nervous chatter. Carr began seeking a signal to indicate that the astronauts were indeed in orbit: ‘Apollo 8,’ he said, ‘Apollo 8, Apollo 8.’ Then the voice of Jim Lovell came through calmly, ‘Go ahead, Houston.’
Mission Control’s viewing-room spectators broke into cheers and loud applause. ‘What does the old Moon look like?’ asked Carr. ‘Essentially grey; no colour,’ said Lovell, ‘like plaster of paris or a sort of greyish beach sand.’ The craters all seemed to be rounded off; some of them had cones within them; others had rays. Anders added: ‘We are coming up on the craters Colombo and Gutenberg. Very good detail visible. We can see the long, parallel faults of Goclenius and they run through the mare material right into the highland material.’ During the second orbit the astronauts captured black-and-white television footage of the Moon (colour would not come until Apollo 10). It proved to be a desolate place indeed, a plate of grey steel spattered by a million bullets. ‘It certainly would not appear to be an inviting place to live or work,’ Borman said later.
On the third revolution the engine fired for nine seconds to put the spacecraft into a circular orbit where it would stay for sixteen hours (each orbit lasted two hours, as against one and a half hours for Earth orbits). Soon the astronauts were on television again. First, they showed the half Earth across a stark lunar landscape. Then, from the other unfogged window, they tracked the bleak surface of the Moon. ‘The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,’ said Lovell. The pictures aroused great wonder, with an estimated half a billion people vicariously exploring what no man had ever seen before.
The astronauts got very tired and a little careless during their 20 hours in lunar orbit. Lovell had entered the wrong code into the Command Module’s computer, triggering warning alarms, and Anders was overwhelmed with his own tasks. Eventually Borman snapped at Capcom Michael Collins that he was taking an executive decision for his crew to get some rest. ‘I’ll stay up and keep the spacecraft vertical,’ he said, ‘and take some automatic pictures.’ He had to force Lovell and Anders to pry their eyes away from the windows and sleep.
*
Apollo 8. Lunar Orbit. 24 December 1968. Mission Elapsed Time 75 hours, 47 minutes, 30 seconds.
William Anders:
We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Frank Borman:
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good. And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.
*
Borman describes how the astronauts’ Christmas message came about:
Before the mission Julian Sheer, who was the head of public information for NASA in Washington, called me one day. He said, ‘You’re going to have the largest audience that’s ever listened to or seen a television picture of a human on Christmas Eve; and you’ve got five or six minutes.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, Julian. What are we doing?’ He said, ‘Do whatever’s appropriate.’ That’s the only instructions. […] And to be honest with you, we were so involved in the mission so I just kind of farmed that out to a friend of mine, Si Bourgin, and he came back, well, I guess he consulted with some of his friends and came back with the idea of reading from Genesis. And I discussed it with Bill and Jim, and we had it typed on the flight plan; and I didn’t give it any more thought than that.
‘At some point in the history of the world,’ editorialized the Washington Post, ‘someone may have read the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis under conditions that gave them greater meaning than they had on Christmas Eve. But it seems unlikely … This Christmas will always be remembered as the lunar one.’ The New York Times, which called Apollo 8 ‘the most fantastic voyage of all times’, said on 26 December: ‘There was more than narrow religious significance in the emotional high point of their fantastic odyssey.’
As Apollo 8 began its tenth and last orbit, Capcom Ken Mattingly told the astronauts: ‘We have reviewed all your systems. You have a GO to TEI’ (trans-Earth injection). This time the crew really was in thrall to the SPS engine. It had to ignite in this most apprehensive moment of the mission, else Apollo 8 would be left in lunar orbit, its passengers’ lives measured by the length of their oxygen supply. Ignite it did, in a 303-second burn that would affect touchdown in just under 58 hours. Apollo 8 re-entered at 40,000 km per hour and splashed down south of Hawaii two days after Christmas. Aboard the recovery ship, the USS Yorktown, President Johnson tried to phone the crew but couldn’t be put through for technical reasons. A few minutes later they listened to a tape of him congratulating them.
Mike Collins was however dispirited:
For me personally, the moment was a conglomeration of emotions and memories. I was a basket case, emotionally wrung out. I had seen this flight evolve in the white room at Downey, in the interminable series of meetings at Houston … into an epic voyage. I had helped it grow. I had two years invested in it – it was my flight. Yet it was not my flight; I was but one of a hundred packed into a noisy room.
The stupendous effect of Apollo 8 was strengthened by colour photographs published after the return. Not only was the technology of going to the Moon brilliantly proven; men began to view the Earth as ‘small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence’, as Archibald MacLeish put it, and to realize as never before that their planet was worth working to save. The concept that Earth was itself a kind of spacecraft needing attention to its habitability spread more widely than ever.
During the last week of 1968 the Associated Press re-polled its 1,278 newspaper editors, who overwhelmingly voted Apollo 8 the story of the year. Time discarded ‘the dissenter’ in favour of Borman, Lovell, and Anders; and a friend telegraphed Frank Borman, ‘You have bailed out 1968.’
Borman says:
It’s hard for us to fathom now. But the thing that’s interesting about that mission was that, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen of us sat in Chris Kraft’s office one afternoon and we went over the flight plan, to try to understand what would we do on the whole flight. And I’ve always thought, again, it was an example of NASA’s leadership with Kraft and their management style that we were able to hammer out, in one afternoon, the basic tenets of the mission.
In the USSR, Academician Sedov, still referred to as the ‘father of the Sputnik’, told Italian journalists a day after the Apollo 8 splashdown that the Russians had not been competing in a race to orbit or land on the Moon. Referring to Apollo 8, he added:
There does not exist at present a similar project in our program. In the near future we will not send a man around the Moon, we start from the principle that certain problems can be resolved with the use of automatic soundings. I believe that in the next ten years vehicles without men on board will be the first source of knowledge for the examination of celestial bodies less near to us. To this end we are perfecting our techniques.
The Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers issued a new decree on 8 January 1969: ‘On the Work Plans for Research of the Moon, Venus, and Mars by Automatic Stations’. Soon they would say in public that the USSR never wanted to go to the Moon at all; but behind the scenes it was different.
Apollo 8 had been a success and Apollo 9 was planned as an Earth-orbit shakedown of all of Apollo’s systems except the landing part. That was the task of Apollo 10, which was planned to go to the Moon and do everything except the landing. But would it be possible, some thought, that Apollo 10 could be the first lunar landing mission.
Early in 1969, George Mueller, NASA’s head of the Office of Space Flight, hinted that Apollo 10 might make the first lunar landing, but Tom Stafford was not very keen. ‘Tom was not so adamant about being first on the Moon,’ wrote Cernan in his autobiography. ‘He never looked at it that way. He wanted to do what was the best thing to do to have a co-ordinated, planned program.’ Stafford told Mueller that if Apollo 10 was retasked to perform the landing, ‘this flight crew won’t be on it.’ Stafford considered that there was just too much work to be done and too many unknowns at that time.
Stafford was right. One of the problems were ‘mass concentrations’ or ‘mascons’. These were regions of higher gravity caused by excess mass, on or just beneath the lunar surface. Areas affected included the impact basins of Imbrium, Serenitatis, Crisium, and Orientale. The effects of these mascons upon satellites was very strong, altering their orbits to the extent of causing them to crash. Mascons were first reported in the journal Nature in August 1968 by JPL scientists Paul Muller and William Sjogren, using data from the Lunar Orbiters. By the end of the year it was possible to compile a gravitational map of the Moon’s near side. Apollo 8 did not carry a Lunar Module, so its ability to investigate the mascons was limited. Apollo 10 was the only mission to observe how the Lunar Module’s guidance and navigation systems would be affected.
The main problem, though, was that Apollo 10’s Lunar Module was overweight. The spacecraft’s engineers knew this and LM-4, as it was designated, was meant for either an Earth-orbital or lunar-orbital test flight, not a landing. The next Lunar Module on the production line, LM-5, was built for a landing and was significantly lighter. ‘The option, then, was to postpone Apollo 10 for a couple of months until [LM-5] was ready,’ wrote Deke Slayton.’ ‘When you added up what we would gain, as opposed to what we would lose, the decision was pretty easy.’
On 24 March 1969 Neil Armstrong was told that his mission, Apollo 11, would be the first to attempt a lunar landing. He said: ‘During the flight of Apollo 8 I had three or four meetings with Deke Slayton about, first, would I take the third one down to the surface and then we had a lot of talks about who might be available and be right to be on that crew, that sort of thing.’
The crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins – were introduced to the press on 9 January 1969 and immediately the assembled reporters got down to the big question, ‘Which of you gentlemen will be the first man to step out onto the lunar surface?’
Over the years, Aldrin has said that he would have preferred to have flown on a later mission. Writing in Return to Earth he said: ‘I would have preferred to go on a later flight. Not only would there be considerably less public attention, but the flight would have been more complicated, more adventurous, and a far greater test of my abilities than the first landing.’ It is clear that for the first few months of 1969 Aldrin believed that he would be the first out of the Lunar Module. He said he had never given it much thought and that he had naturally presumed that he would be first. After all, there were precedents, beginning with Ed White’s spacewalk when the commander of the flight stayed in the spacecraft while his partner did the excursions. Aldrin was perhaps right to believe it; NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight told several people, including some members of the press, that he would be the first on the Moon.
Word began to filter out, however, that it would be Armstrong. Buzz was angry: Armstrong was a civilian. It would be an insult to the service. He himself was technically still a member of the Air Force, though he had not served for ten years except to maintain his flying hours. So Aldrin approached Armstrong. Aldrin wrote later (although he claimed it was done by his co-author): ‘He equivocated a minute or so, then with a coolness I had not known he possessed he said that the decision was quite historical and he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of going first.’ Armstrong says he cannot remember the conversation. Aldrin talked to his colleagues but for some that was seen as lobbying behind the scenes to be first. Gene Cernan says:
He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious – that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil Armstrong, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since learning that Apollo 11 would attempt the first Moon landing, Buzz had pursued this peculiar effort to sneak his way into history, and was met at every turn by angry stares and muttered insults from his fellow astronauts. How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making such a fool of himself is beyond me.
That was not the way Buzz saw it. Writing some 40 years later in his book Magnificent Desolation, he said that during training in early 1969 he recognized that the great responsibility would fall upon his shoulders. In all the previous Gemini and Apollo missions, the spacewalks, were taken by the junior officer, while the commander remained inside the space capsule. As of February, 1969 that was their plan as well, Aldrin maintained. On 26 February the Chicago Daily News reported that the first man on the Moon had been selected and it was Aldrin. It read:
The choice for one of the most momentous events in mankind’s history falls to the brainy 39-year-old Air Force colonel by virtue of his role as Lunar Module commander. The disclosure of Aldrin as the choice comes as a surprise to many who had speculated that the top commander, Neil Armstrong, would be entitled to pull rank and take his place in the history books as the first man to set foot on a satellite of the earth. But a space agency official said that the decision is not Armstrong’s to make. The flight plan controls the mission and it calls for the lunar module pilot to make the egress … it could be changed but it is not likely to be.
Aldrin said that he hadn’t been soliciting the older astronauts’ support. He was simply behaving as a competitive Air Force pilot would. ‘In truth I didn’t really want to be the first person to step on the Moon. I knew the media would never let that person alone.’
On 14 April the speculation came to an end. At a press conference George Low said that the ‘plans called for Mr Armstrong to be the first man out after the Moon landing; a few minutes later Colonel Aldrin will follow’. Aldrin later said he believed that the physical layout of the LM dictated that Armstrong went out first. Aldrin, the LM pilot was on the right. But that was not the case. In his biography Armstrong said, ‘In my mind the important thing was that we got four aluminium legs safely down on the surface of the moon while we were still inside the craft. But it could technically have been Buzz. Just move before you put the backpacks on.’
Later Chris Kraft explained NASA’s thinking. He said that they knew damn well that the first guy on the Moon was going to be a modern-day Charles Lindbergh (the pioneering intercontinental aviator). Neil was calm, quiet and had absolute confidence.
We knew he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego. The most he ever said about walking on the Moon was that it might have been that he wanted to be the first test pilot to walk upon the Moon. If you would have said to him, you are going to be the most famous human being on Earth for the rest of your life, he would have answered that he didn’t want to be the first man on the Moon. On the other hand Aldrin desperately wanted the honor and wasn’t quiet in letting it be known. Neil said nothing.
Kraft said that nobody criticized Buzz but that they did not want him to be humanity’s ambassador, the man who would be legend. ‘The hatch design didn’t come into it. That was a rationalization, a solace for Buzz.’
In early March 1969 Apollo 9 on Pad A was ready for launch – delayed by three days because the astronauts caught colds – and the team of 500 engineers and technicians was working twelve or thirteen-hour days. Apollo 10 was ready to be rolled out of the 140-m hangar doors of the VAB for two months of intensive checkout on Pad B. The components of Apollo 11 had already arrived and were undergoing tests in the VAB and in the vacuum chambers of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. Apollo 11 would roll out at 12.30, 20 May, one month and 26 days before it was to lift off for the Moon.