The responsibility for the Luna 15 mission fell on the shoulders of First Deputy Minister of General Machine Building Georgi Tyulin, a 54-year-old retired artillery general. Tyulin, as chair of Luna 15’s State Commission, ran into trouble with the spacecraft after only one day of flight. Controllers detected unusually high temperatures in the propellant tanks that were to be used for take-off from the lunar surface after the collection of the lunar sample. Tyulin assembled all the senior program engineers, including Chief Designer Babakin. After a quick analysis, some participants proposed a seat-of-the-pants method of turning the spacecraft in such a way as to keep the suspect tank in the Sun’s shadow at all times.
Luna 15 would fire its main engine to enter lunar orbit at 13.00 Moscow Time on 17 July, one day after the lift-off of Apollo 11. A second orbit correction on 19 July would position it over its landing corridor. If all went to plan, the lander would touch down on the Moon’s surface within a couple of hours of the Apollo lander.
At breakfast a few days before the Apollo launch, Thomas Paine, NASA’s new Administrator, told Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins that their own safety must govern all their actions, and if anything looked wrong they were to abort the mission. He then made a most surprising and unprecedented statement: if they were forced to abort, they would be immediately recycled and assigned to the next landing attempt. The crew were somewhat puzzled by this and didn’t take it seriously. Astronauts assigned to future missions would have had something to say if they had to forgo a landing attempt if Apollo 11 failed.
So the day came. At 04.15 in the Spartan crew quarters in KSC Building 4, Deke Slayton tapped on three doors. ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he said. The day started like most others, a shower and a shave. A quick medical from Nurse Dee O’Hara who had been the astronauts’ personal nurse since Mercury. It was the traditional breakfast before a mission: steak, eggs, orange juice, coffee and toast. Deke Slayton was there, and Bill Anders the backup LM pilot. A NASA artist sketched them as they ate.
They went upstairs to be suited up and, amid the waves and cheers of well-wishers, got into the van to be driven the eight miles to the launch pad, dropping Deke Slayton off along the way. The Sun was rising.
Buzz later said that while Mike and Neil were going through the complicated business of being strapped in and connected to the spacecraft’s life-support system, he waited near the elevator on the floor below, as being in the middle seat he was the last to enter the capsule. Alone for fifteen minutes or so in what he described as a ‘serene limbo’. He could see there were people and cars lining the beaches and highways and the surf was just beginning to rise out of an azure-blue ocean. ‘I could see the massiveness of the Saturn 5 rocket below and the magnificent precision of Apollo above. I savoured the wait and marked the minutes in my mind as something I would always want to remember.’
At this point Michael Collins was thankful that he had flown before, and that the period of waiting atop a rocket was nothing new:
I am just as tense this time, but the tenseness comes mostly from an appreciation of the enormity of our undertaking rather than from the unfamiliarity of the situation. I am far from certain that we will be able to fly the mission as planned. I think we will escape with our skins, or at least I will escape with mine, but I wouldn’t give better than even odds on a successful landing and return. There are just too many things that can go wrong.
Fred Haise, the backup astronaut had checked the commandmodule switch positions and was running through a checklist 417 steps long. Collins at this time had only a few things to do:
I have plenty of time to think, if not daydream. Here I am, a white male, age 38, height 5 feet 11 inches, weight 75 kg, salary $17,000 per annum, resident of a Texas suburb, with black spot on my roses, state of mind unsettled, about to be shot off to the Moon. Yes, to the Moon.
The most important control was on Armstrong’s side, alongside his left knee – the abort handle, and it was now powered, so if he were to rotate it 30 degrees counter-clockwise, three solid-fuelled rockets above the capsule on the escape tower would fire and yank it free of the Service Module and everything below it. A large bulky pocket had been added to his left suit leg, and it looked as though he was going to snag the abort handle. Collins pointed this out to Neil, and he grabbed the pocket and pulled it as far over to the inside of his thigh as he could, but it still didn’t look secure to either one of them. Collins could imagine the newspaper headlines: ‘MOONSHOT FALLS INTO OCEAN. Mistake by crew. Last transmission from Armstrong prior to leaving the pad reportedly was “Oops”.’
When all the tests were completed it was time to say goodbye. The astronauts had given gifts to the so-called Pad Führer Guenter Wendt. Collins arranged to have someone bring a small fish from the Banana River the night before the launch. He had the food personnel freeze it and the morning of the launch they mounted the frozen fish onto a wooden plaque bearing the words ‘Guenter Wendt/Trophy Trout’. Collins carried the dead frozen fish in the paper bag and presented it to Wendt. Guenter later explained:
And he [Collins] says, ‘Hey, at your house I’ve never seen a big trophy trout or trophy fish on your wall. You need one.’ So now we have a trophy trout. Now there’s three things wrong: Illegal size. Not cleaned. And not preserved.
Wendt kept the fish plaque in his freezer for 22 years before getting it preserved. Aldrin gave him a copy of Good News for Modern Man, as they were both Presbyterians. Armstrong produced a card that read, ‘Space Taxi. Good Between Any Two Planets’.
Armstrong’s recollection of the launch is characteristically matter-of-fact. ‘The flight started promptly, and I think that was characteristic of all events of the flight. The Saturn gave us one magnificent ride, both in Earth orbit and on a trajectory to the Moon.’ Collins says:
This beast is best felt. Shake, rattle, and roll! We are thrown left and right against our straps in spasmodic little jerks. It is steering like crazy, like a nervous lady driving a wide car down a narrow alley, and I just hope it knows where it’s going, because for the first ten seconds we are perilously close to that umbilical tower.
Eleven minutes after lift-off they were in Earth orbit. After one and a half orbits a pre-programmed sequence fired the rocket in the Saturn 5’s third stage and sent them on their way to the Moon. After nine hours they were scheduled to make their first midcourse correction, some 91,000 km out. At rocket shutdown, Aldrin recorded their velocity as 10,844 m per second, more than enough to escape from the Earth’s gravitational field.
Next Collins had a major task, vital to the success of the mission: separate the Command Module, ‘Columbia’, from the Saturn third stage, turn around and connect with the Lunar Module, ‘Eagle’. Eagle, by now, was exposed; its four enclosing panels had been jettisoned and had drifted away. If the separation and docking did not work they would have to return to Earth. ‘Critical as the manoeuvre is, I felt no apprehension about it, and if there was the slightest inkling of concern it disappeared quickly as the entire separation and docking proceeded perfectly to completion,’ said Collins later.
Fourteen hours after lift-off, at 22.30 Houston time, they fastened covers over the windows of the slowly rotating command module to get some sleep. Days two and three were devoted to housekeeping chores, a small midcourse velocity correction, and TV transmissions back to Earth. In one news digest from Houston, the astronauts are amused to hear that Pravda has referred to Armstrong as ‘the czar of the ship’. In the preliminary flight plan Aldrin wasn’t scheduled to go to the LM until the next day, when they were in lunar orbit, but he had argued successfully to go earlier. He said he needed to have enough time to make sure its equipment had suffered no damage during the launch. By that time neither Armstrong nor Aldrin had been in the LM simulator for about two weeks.
According to Collins, day 4 of the mission had a decidedly different feel. Instead of nine hours’ sleep, he got seven – fitful ones at that. Despite their concentrated effort to conserve their energy, the mental and physical pressure was building. ‘I feel that all of us are aware that the honeymoon is over and we are about to lay our little pink bodies on the line,’ wrote Collins. ‘Our first shock comes as we stop our spinning motion and swing ourselves around so as to bring the Moon into view.’ Due to the attitude of the spacecraft, they had not been able to see the Moon for nearly a day, and the change was electrifying. Collins said, ‘The Moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen.’ It was huge, completely filling the window. And it was three-dimensional. The belly of the Moon bulged out towards them in such a pronounced fashion that they felt they could reach out and touch it. To add to the dramatic effect, they could see the stars again as they were now travelling in the shadow of the Moon.
The spacecraft rounded the Moon. They were aware that the Moon was a moving target and that they were racing through the sky just ahead of its leading edge. When they launched, the Moon had been nearly 322,000 km behind where it was now. As they passed behind the Moon, there were only eight minutes before the critical engine burn. On board, things were tense. No one wanted to make a mistake and they were checking and rechecking each step. When the moment finally arrived, the rocket sprang into action and threw them back into their seats. The acceleration was only a fraction of one G but it felt good to them; things were going well. For six minutes they peered at the instrument panel. When the engine shut down Aldrin read out the results: ‘Minus one, plus one, plus one.’ The accuracy of the overall system was remarkable: out of a total of nearly 1,000 m per second, they had velocity errors of only a few cm per second.
A second burn was to place them in a closer, circular orbit of the Moon, the orbit from which Armstrong and Aldrin would undock and begin their descent in the Eagle. Armstrong and Aldrin started preparing the LM. It was scheduled to take three hours, but because Aldrin had already started the checkout, it was completed a half-hour ahead of time. On the fourth night of the mission they were to sleep in lunar orbit. Although it was not in the flight plan, before covering the windows and dousing the lights, the two hopeful moonwalkers prepared all the equipment and clothing they would need in the morning.
Nobody slept well. Collins remembers the wake-up call: ‘Apollo 11, Apollo 11, good morning from the Black Team.’ Could they be talking to him? He’d been asleep five hours or so. ‘I had a tough time getting to sleep, and now I’m having trouble waking up,’ he thought. After breakfast Collins stuffed (his word) Neil and Buzz into the LM along with an armload of equipment. He said:
Now I have to do the tunnel bit again, closing hatches, installing drogue and probe, and disconnecting the electrical umbilical. I am on the radio constantly now, running through an elaborate series of joint checks with Eagle. I check progress with Buzz: ‘I have five minutes and fifteen seconds since we started. Attitude is holding very well.’ ‘Roger, Mike, just hold it a little bit longer.’ ‘No sweat, I can hold it all day. Take your sweet time. How’s the czar over there? He’s so quiet.’ Neil chimes in, ‘Just hanging on – and punching.’ Punching those computer buttons, I guess he means. ‘All I can say is, beware the revolution,’ and then, getting no answer, I formally bid them goodbye. ‘You cats take it easy on the lunar surface …’ ‘O.K., Mike,’ Buzz answers cheerily, and I throw the switch which releases them. With my nose against the window and the movie camera churning away, I watch them go. When they are safely clear of me, I inform Neil, and he begins a slow pirouette in place, allowing me a look at his outlandish machine and its four extended legs. ‘The Eagle has wings,’ Neil exults.
Collins made sure all four landing legs were in the correct position.
‘I think you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you’re upside down.’ ‘Somebody’s upside down,’ Neil retorts. ‘O.K., Eagle. One minute … you guys take care.’ Neil answers, ‘See you later.’ I hope so. When the one minute is up, I fire my thrusters precisely as planned and we begin to separate, checking distances and velocities as we go. This burn is a very small one, just to give Eagle some breathing room. From now on it’s up to them, and they will make two separate burns in reaching the lunar surface. The first one will serve to drop Eagle’s perilune to 15,000 m. Then, when they reach this spot over the eastern edge of the Sea of Tranquillity, Eagle’s descent engine will be fired up for the second and last time, and Eagle will lazily arc over into a twelve-minute computer-controlled descent to some point at which Neil will take over for a manual landing.
Eagle was going lower than Apollo 10, into the unknown. Aldrin says:
Neil and I were harnessed into the LM in a standing position. [Later] at precisely the right moment the engine ignited to begin the twelve-minute powered descent. Strapped in by the system of belts and cables not unlike shock absorbers, neither of us felt the initial motion. We looked quickly at the computer to make sure we were actually functioning as planned. After 26 seconds the engine went to full throttle and the motion became noticeable. Neil watched his instruments while I looked at our primary computer and compared it with our second computer, which was part of our abort guidance system.
Gene Kranz was Flight Director in Mission Control, watching everything:
The spacecraft is now behind the Moon, and the control team, the adrenaline, I mean, just really was – no matter how you tried to hide it, the fact is that you were really starting to pump. I mean, the level of preoccupation in these people – and these are kids. The average age of my team was 26 years old. Basically I’m 36; I’m ten years older. I’m the oldest guy on this entire team.
This day, is either going to land, abort or crash. Those are the only three alternatives. So it’s really starting to sink in, and I have this feeling I’ve got to talk to my people. The neat thing about the Mission Control is we have a very private voice loop that is never recorded and never goes anywhere. It’s what we call AFD [Assistant Flight Director] Conference Loop. It was put in there for a very specific set of purposes, because we know that any of the common voice loops can be piped into any of the offices at Johnson.
So I called the controllers, told my team, ‘Okay, all flight controllers, listen up and go over to AFD Conference.’ And all of a sudden, the people in the viewing room are used to hearing all these people talking, and all of a sudden there’s nobody talking anymore. But I had to tell these kids how proud I was of the work that they had done, that from this day, from the time that they were born, they were destined to be here and they’re destined to do this job, and it’s the best team that has ever been assembled, and today, without a doubt, we are going to write the history books and we’re going to be the team that takes an American to the Moon, and that whatever happens on this day, whatever decisions they make, whatever decisions as a team we make, I will always be standing with them, no one’s ever going to second-guess us. So that’s it.
The problems begin. Mission Control can’t communicate with Eagle. They have to call Mike Collins to relay data down to them. Going through Kranz’s mind is the question of if they’ve acquired enough data. Is it good enough data so the controllers can make their calls? Are we good? Are we properly configured? The tension mounts at both ends of a 240,000-mile communication loop. Kranz continues:
We move closer now to what we call the ‘powered descent go/no go.’ This is where it’s now time to say are we going down to the lunar surface or not. Now, I have one wave-off opportunity, and only one, and if I wave off on this powered descent, then I have one shot in the next revolution and then the lunar mission’s all over. So you don’t squander your go/no go’s when you’ve only got one more shot at it.
We lose all data again. So I delay the go/no go with the team for roughly forty seconds, had to get data back briefly, and I make the decision to press on; we’re going to go on this one here. So I have my controllers make their go/no go’s on the last valid data set that they had. I know it’s stale, but the fact is that it’s not time to wave off. So, each of the controllers goes through and assesses his systems right on down the line.
We get a go except for one where we get a qualified go, and that’s Steve Bales down at the guidance officer console, because he comes on the loop, and he says, ‘Flight, we’re out on our radial velocity, we’re halfway to our abort limits. I don’t know what’s caused it, but I’m going to keep watching it.’ So all of a sudden, boom! We’ve sure got my attention when you say you’re halfway to your abort limits. We didn’t know this until after the mission, but the crew had not fully depressed the tunnel between the two spacecrafts. They should have gone down to a vacuum in there, and they weren’t. So when they blew the bolts, when they released the latches between the spacecraft, there was a little residual air in there, sort of like popping a cork on a bottle. It gave us velocity separating these two spacecrafts. So now we’re moving a little bit faster by the order of fractions of feet per second than we should have at this time. So we don’t know it, but this is what’s causing the problem.
In the meantime, we’ve had an electrical problem show up on board the spacecraft, and we’ve determined that this is a bad meter that we’ve got for the AC instrumentation. AC, alternating current, is very important on board the spacecraft, because it powers our gyro’s landing radar right on down the line. We’re now going to be looking at this from the standpoint of the ground so that Buzz won’t have to look after it.
All through this time, my mind is really running. Is this enough data to keep going, going, going, going? Because I know what I’m going to do in this role. I’m going to be second-guessed, but that isn’t bothering me. We now get to the point where it’s time to start engines. We’ve got telemetry back again. As soon as the engine starts, we lose it again. This is an incredibly important time to have our telemetry because as soon as we get acceleration, we settle our propellants in the tanks, and now we can measure them, but the problem is, we’ve missed this point. So now we have to go with what we think are the quantities loaded pre-launch. So we’re now back to nominals. Instead of having actuals, we’ve got our nominals in there. So we’re in the process of continuing down.
The communication dropouts were a nuisance more than a danger, but the 1201 and 1202 computer alarms could be a showstopper. Armstrong says:
You’re always concerned when any kind of alarm comes on, but it wasn’t a serious concern because there wasn’t anything obviously wrong. The vehicle was flying well, it was going down the trajectory we expected, no abnormalities in anything that we saw, other than the computer said, ‘There’s a problem, and it’s not my fault.’ The people here on the ground were right on top of that, and of course, the computer continued in a contrary manner periodically all the way to the surface. But my own feeling was, as long as everything was going well and looked right, the engine was operating right, I had control, and we weren’t getting into any unusual attitudes or things that looked like they were out of place, I would be in favour of continuing, no matter what the computer was complaining about.
Kranz says:
So now we’re fighting – we’ve got this new landing area that we’re going to be going into, we’re fighting the communications, we’ve got the problem with the communications, and we’ve got the AC problem that we’re now tracking for the crew, and now a new problem creeps into this thing, which is this series of program alarms. There’s two types of alarms. These are the exact ones that we blew in the training session on our final training day, twelve-oh-one. Twelve-oh-one is what we call a bail-out type of alarm. It’s telling us the computer doesn’t have enough time to do all of the jobs that it has to do, and it’s now moving into a priority scheme where it’s going to fire jets, it’s going to do navigation, it’s going to provide guidance, but it’s basically telling us to do something because it’s running out of time to accomplish all the functions it should.
We tell them we’re going the alarms, we tell them to accept radar, go on the alarms, you know, radar’s good, getting close – you know, we’re continuing to work our way down to the surface. Now, fortunately the communications have improved dramatically. Communications are no longer a concern of mine, but they were for about the first six or eight minutes of our descent. But now we’re about four minutes off the surface. Communications are just a dream.
Hovering above the lunar surface, Armstrong looked for a landing site. He had taken over manual control at 150 m; the first thing he did was to slow the rate of descent while maintaining his forward speed. There were huge blocks and an extensive boulder field below him. They couldn’t land there, they had to press on. Ahead there appeared to be a more open area.
Armstrong says:
We could have tried to land there, and we might have gotten away with it. It was a fairly steep slope and it was covered with very big rocks, and it just wasn’t a good place to go. You know, if I’d run out of fuel, why, I would have put down right there, but if I had any choice of a more promising spot, I was going to take it. There were some attractive areas far more level, far less occupied by boulders and things, a half mile ahead or so, so that’s where I went.
When they pitched over to look at the lunar surface, they didn’t recognize anything and they were going into this big boulder field and Neil was flying a trajectory that we’d never flown in the simulator. It was something we’d never seen. And, you know, we kept trying to figure out […] what’s going on? You know, he’s just whizzing across the surface at about 400 feet, and all of a sudden he – the thing rears back and he slows it down and then comes down. And I’m sitting there, sweating out.
Kranz says:
Some person – and we’ve never been able to identify it in the voice loop – comes up and says, ‘This is just like a simulation,’ and everybody relaxes. Here you’re fighting problems that are just unbelievable and you keep working your way to the surface, to the surface, to the surface. So we get down to the point – and we know it’s tough down there, because the toe of the footprint is really a boulder field, so Armstrong has to pick out a landing site, and he’s very close to the surface. Instead of moving slowly horizontal, he’s moving very rapidly, and ten and fifteen feet per second, I mean, we’ve never seen anybody flying it this way in training.
Now [Bob] Carlton calls out ‘sixty seconds’, and we’re still not close to the surface yet, and now I’m thinking, okay, we’ve got this last altitude hack from the crew, which is about 150 feet, which now means that we’ve got to average roughly about three feet per second rate of descent, and I see Armstrong’s at zero. So I say, ‘Boy, he’s going to really have to let the bottom out of this pretty soon. I crossed myself and said ‘Please God.’
Once Armstrong had picked what seemed to be a safe spot it was a question of lowering the Lunar Module relatively slowly. They got to within 15 m of the surface and inwardly Armstrong knew they had done it. Later Gene Kranz said, ‘I never dreamed we would still be flying this close to empty.’ When Duke called, ‘Thirty seconds’, Neil wasn’t worried about the fuel. They landed the simulators with fifteen seconds of fuel left.
Armstrong says:
There was a lot of concern about coming close to running out of fuel, and I was very cognizant of that. But I did know that if I could have my speed stabilized and attitude stabilized, I could fall from a fairly good height, perhaps maybe forty feet or more in the low lunar gravity, the gear would absorb that much fall. So I was perhaps probably less concerned about it than a lot of people watching down here on Earth.
As it turned out, the touchdown was so gentle that the landing shock-absorbing struts were hardly compressed.
Then Aldrin said, ‘Contact light.’ These were the first words ever said on the lunar surface as a probe from one of the legs registered the ground. A few seconds later Armstrong said, ‘Shutdown.’
Kranz says:
Well, what happens, we have a three-foot-long probe stick underneath each of the landing pads. When one of those touches the lunar surface, it turns on a blue light in the cockpit, and when it turns on that blue light, that’s lunar contact, their job is to shut the engine down, and they literally fall the last three feet to the surface of the Moon. So you hear the ‘lunar contact,’ and then you hear, ‘ACA [Attitude Control Assembly] out of Detent [out of center position].’ They’re in the process of shutting down the engine at the time that Carlton says ‘Fifteen seconds,’ and then you hear Carlton come back almost immediately after that fifteen seconds call and say, ‘Engine shutdown,’ and the crew is now continuing this process of going through the procedures, shutting down the engine.
Duke says:
Everybody erupted in Mission Control and then his famous lines about, ‘Houston. Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ And so we made it, you know, and it was really a great release. People cheering and all. I was so excited, I couldn’t get out ‘Tranquillity Base’. It came out sort of like ‘Twangquility’. And so […] it was, ‘Roger, Twangquility Base. We copy you down. We’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. But we’re breathing again.’ And I believe that’s […] a true statement. It was spontaneous, but it was true. I mean, we were – I was holding my breath, you know, because we were close.
Kranz:
In the meantime we’re just busier than hell […] we use a cryogenic bottle, super critical helium, to pressurize our descent engine. Again, one of the things you can never test, the heat soak-back from the engine and the surface now is raising the pressure in that bottle very dramatically, and now we’re wondering if this damned thing’s going to explode and what the hell are we going to do about it. The fortunate thing was that they had designed some relief valves. They had a pressure disc in there. If the pressure got so high, it actually blows the disc and the valve, rather than blowing the bottle up. So we’re all sweating this thing out here. We’re trying to get everything re-synced for the next lift-off […] Throughout this whole period of time, except for the instant of hearing the cheering, you never got a chance to really think, ‘We’ve landed on the Moon’.
And so at 02.39 UTC on Monday 21 July 1969, Armstrong opened the hatch, and twelve minutes later began the final part of his descent to the lunar surface. The Remote Control Unit controls on his chest kept him from seeing his feet as he climbed down the nine rungs. On his way he pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle’s side; it deployed and activated the TV camera. An estimated 600 million people were watching.
Afterwards, Armstrong reflected upon his choice of words, ‘That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.’
I thought about it after landing, and because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on but just something that was kind of passing around subliminally or in the background. But it, you know, was a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something. Why, it wasn’t a very complex thing. It was what it was. I didn’t want to be dumb, but it was contrived in a way, and I was guilty of that.
Armstrong said later that there were a lot of things to do, and they had a hard time getting them finished:
We had very little trouble, much less trouble than expected, on the surface. It was a pleasant operation. Temperatures weren’t high. They were very comfortable. The little EMU, the combination of spacesuit and backpack that sustained our life on the surface, operated magnificently. The primary difficulty was just far too little time to do the variety of things we would have liked. We had the problem of the five-year-old boy in a candy store.
Aldrin was jogging to test his manoeuvrability; the exercise gave him an odd sensation. With the bulky suits on they seemed to be moving in slow motion:
I noticed immediately that my inertia seemed much greater. Earth-bound, I would have stopped my run in just one step, but I had to use three of four steps to sort of wind down. My Earth weight, with the big backpack and heavy suit, was 360 pounds. On the Moon I weighed only 60 pounds.
Aldrin said that the view was ‘Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation’, adding that he was struck by the contrast between the starkness of the shadows and the desert-like barrenness of the rest of the surface. It ranged from dusty grey to light tan and was unchanging except for one startling sight: the LM was sitting there with its black, silver, and bright yellow-orange thermal coating shining brightly in the otherwise colourless landscape.
I had seen Neil in his suit thousands of times before, but on the Moon the unnatural whiteness of it seemed unusually brilliant. We could also look around and see the Earth, which, though much larger than the Moon the Earth was seeing, seemed small – a beckoning oasis shining far away in the sky.
As they went through their tasks Armstrong had the camera most of the time, and the majority of pictures taken on the Moon that include an astronaut are of Aldrin. It wasn’t until they were back on Earth in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory that they realized there were few pictures of Neil. ‘My fault perhaps,’ said Aldrin, ‘but we had never simulated this in our training.’
During a pause in experiments they put up the flag. It took both of them to set it up and it was nearly a disaster. A small telescoping arm was attached to the flagpole to keep the flag extended and perpendicular but it wouldn’t fully extend. Thus the flag, which should have been flat, had its own unique permanent wave. Then to their dismay the pole wouldn’t go far enough into the lunar surface to support itself in an upright position. After much struggling they finally got it to stay upright, but in a precarious position.
Houston comes on the line saying that the President of the United States would like to talk to them. ‘That would be an honor,’ says Armstrong.
Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made … Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth …
Armstrong replies, ‘It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations, and with interest and a curiosity and a vision for the future.’
They had a pulley system to load the boxes of rocks into the LM’s cabin. Back inside they had to pressurize the cabin and begin stowing the rock boxes, film magazines, and anything else they wouldn’t need until they were connected once again with Columbia. They removed their boots and the big backpacks, opened the LM hatch, and threw them outside, along with a bagful of empty food packages and urine bags. The exact moment they tossed everything out was measured back on Earth – the seismometer they had deployed was even more sensitive than expected.
Meanwhile, the Luna 15 mission had run into difficulties. Soviet scientists had not anticipated the ruggedness of the lunar surface, and their attempted landing was delayed as a result. Tyutin’s State Commission finally commanded Luna 15 to fire its descent engine at 18.47 Moscow Time on 21 July, a little more than two hours prior to the planned lift-off of Armstrong and Aldrin from the Moon. Controllers followed the signals from Luna 15 as it descended. Landing would be in six minutes; but suddenly all data ceased. Later analysis showed that the spacecraft had unexpectedly hit the side of a mountain. TASS announced that Luna 15’s research program had been completed and the spacecraft had reached the Moon in the pre-set area.
But even if Luna 15 had worked perfectly and had returned with a soil sample it would have got back to Earth two hours and four minutes after the splashdown of Apollo 11. The race had been over before it was launched.
Before lift-off procedures, Aldrin and Armstrong were scheduled a rest period but they didn’t sleep much at all. Lift-off from the Moon, after a stay totalling 21 hours, was exactly on schedule and went exactly as it was supposed to. Aldrin says:
The ascent stage of the LM separated, sending out a shower of brilliant insulation particles which had been ripped off from the thrust of the ascent engine. There was no time to sightsee. I was concentrating on the computers, and Neil was studying the attitude indicator, but I looked up long enough to see the flag fall over … Three hours and ten minutes later we were connected once again with the Columbia.
As Eagle approached, Collins was looking through the docking telescope and saw they were approaching right down the centre line of the approach path. ‘I have 0.7 mile and I got you at 31 feet per second,’ he said. ‘For the first time since I was assigned to this incredible flight, I feel that it is going to happen. Granted, we are a long way from home, but from here on it should be all downhill.’ After the docking, Aldrin was the first one through, bearing a big smile. Collins grabbed his head, a hand on each temple, about to give him a kiss on the forehead, but then thought better of it and grabbed his hand.
On their way back, the day before splashdown in the Pacific, they gave a TV broadcast; each had his reflections.
Collins:
The Saturn 5 rocket which put us in orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked flawlessly. This computer above my head has a 38,000-word vocabulary, each word of which has been carefully chosen to be of the utmost value to us. […] Our large rocket engine on the aft end of our service module, must have performed flawlessly or we would have been stranded in lunar orbit. The parachutes up above my head must work perfectly tomorrow or we will plummet into the ocean. We have always had confidence that this equipment will work properly. All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of people. First, the American workmen who put these pieces of machinery together in the factory. Second, the painstaking work done by various test teams during the assembly and retest after assembly. And finally, the people at the Manned Spacecraft Center, both in management, in mission planning, in flight control, and last but not least, in crew training. This operation is somewhat like the periscope of a submarine. All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all of those, I would like to say, ‘Thank you very much.’
Aldrin:
This has been far more than three men on a mission to the Moon; more, still, than the efforts of a government and industry team; more, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Today I feel we’re really fully capable of accepting expanded roles in the exploration of space. In retrospect, we have all been particularly pleased with the call signs that we very laboriously chose for our spacecraft, Columbia and Eagle. We’ve been pleased with the emblem of our flight, the eagle carrying an olive branch, bringing the universal symbol of peace from the planet Earth to the Moon. Personally, in reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from Psalms comes to mind. ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man that Thou art mindful of him?’
Armstrong:
The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next with four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that will; and then, with the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft, the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the spacesuit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.
The evening after the Moon landing someone placed a bouquet of flowers next to the grave of President Kennedy at the Arlington National Cemetery. Attached was a note: ‘Mr President. The Eagle has landed.’
They splashed down 900 miles southeast of Hawaii on 24 July and were met by the USS Hornet, which was covered with banners saying ‘Hornet + 3’. They were to enter quarantine and on the Hornet spoke to President Nixon from behind a small window in the quarantine facility. Nixon said:
I want you to know that I think I am the luckiest man in the world, and I say this not only because I have the honor to be President of the United States, but particularly because I have the privilege of speaking for so many in welcoming you back to earth.
I can tell you about all the messages we have received in Washington. Over 100 foreign governments, emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and kings, have sent the most warm messages that we have ever received. They represent over 2 billion people on this earth, all of them who have had the opportunity, through television, to see what you have done.
Frank Borman was standing behind Nixon and during his speech and Nixon referred to him a bit later. ‘Frank Borman feels you are a little younger by reason of having gone into space. Is that right? Do you feel a little bit younger?’
Armstrong: ‘We are younger than Frank Borman.’
Nixon: ‘He is over there. Come on over, Frank, so they can see you. Are you going to take that lying down?’
Astronauts: ‘It looks like he has aged in the last couple weeks.’
Borman: ‘They look a little heavy.’
Concluding, Nixon said:
Well, just let me close off with this one thing: I was thinking, as you know, as you came down, and we knew it was a success, and it had only been eight days, just a week, a long week, that this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I am going to find on this trip around the world, and as Secretary Rogers will find as he covers the other countries in Asia, as a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together before.
On 13 August they took part in parades in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That same evening in Los Angeles there was an official state dinner attended by members of Congress, 44 governors, the Chief Justice of the United States, and ambassadors from 83 nations at the Century Plaza Hotel. President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew gave each astronaut the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was the start of a 45-day ‘Giant Leap’ tour that took them to 25 countries. On 16 September the three spoke before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill. They presented two US flags, one to the House of Representatives and the other to the Senate, that had been carried to the surface of the Moon. Life would never be the same for any of them. Their hardest journey was just beginning.