I don’t remember the occasion, but he told us that if we were unable to land on
the first attempt, we could fly the following flight and try again.
—Neil Armstrong, recalling to the author his last
conversation with Tom Paine before the flight
“He is wrong!”
Paine was emphatic. Ted Kennedy had clearly crossed the line this time. With three astronauts 230,000 miles away and about to enter into lunar orbit, NASA’s biggest critic in Congress was publicly questioning why the United States was even going to the moon at all. The senator from Massachusetts had decided to use a memorial banquet for the late rocket pioneer Robert Goddard in Worcester as the backdrop for his harshest criticism yet of the country’s manned space program.
“Frankly, we are surprised and disappointed that at a ceremony honoring Dr. Goddard, Senator Kennedy would present such a dispiriting vision of this nation’s vigor and destiny in space,” Paine replied, using a national press conference to address the senator. He was at Mission Control in Houston for Apollo 10, and the timing of the remark in the middle of the flight did not sit well with him at all. As he ended the press conference, he turned around and added, “We won’t be including this item in the daily news reports we send up to the astronauts.”1
The irony of Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy’s opposition to the US space program always puzzled him. The senator’s older brother, President Kennedy, was the one who had made the bold gamble to send a man to the moon. As a national tribute, the spaceport on Cape Canaveral, Florida, from which astronauts left the planet was named in his honor. Now, as the country was about to make history, he was finding just how disruptive the younger Kennedy was. Senator Kennedy would oppose Paine his whole career.
Shortly after Apollo 10 splashed down and before Apollo 11 launched, he went to Kennedy. He proposed a truce, and offered an act of some sort that might link the American moon landing with the Kennedy name. The monumental significance of the event that was about to take place in just over a month would be unique in the annals of human history. Paine suggested that a simple gesture, perhaps leaving a personal memento of Jack Kennedy (a PT-109 tie clip) on the moon, might be fitting. He had discussed this with Julian Scheer, and the NASA Public Affairs Office thought it would indeed be a very appropriate, non-political unifying gesture. Another idea that they had come up with was to leave a Kennedy half-dollar on the surface. This, however, did not seem as fitting to him, since a piece of money would have hardly been the appropriate artifact to leave on the moon.
Kennedy, however, stonewalled Paine in the meeting and gave him no encouragement at all. Paine realized then that the Kennedys had no real interest in identifying JFK with America’s moon program. If what he heard from Ted Kennedy was right, the family was, in fact, treating it as an aberration in the late president’s legacy.2
His conclusion was later reinforced a second time. He had Scheer contact the Kennedys a year and a half later, in August of 1970. He wanted to see if they might consider accepting a moon rock from NASA to be placed at the JFK grave site in Arlington National Cemetery. Paine had no personal allegiance to the Kennedys, but wanted to try to give what he believed to be a rightful tribute to JFK. The late president was the one who had moved the nation forward in a time when many doubted America’s resolve to do something historic.
As before, Ted Kennedy rejected the offer, saying the family would be very much opposed to such a move. The Kennedys had turned down requests before to emplace mementos at the grave site. They were already distressed at the large number of tourists disturbing the serenity of the site in the years since the assassination. The senator expressed an interest, however, that NASA might perhaps bestow a moon rock on the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum—with the caveat that it be stored indefinitely in a Boston office until the presidential library opened sometime in the future. This doused Paine’s enthusiasm completely; he had no desire at all to see a piece of the moon tucked away in an office safe somewhere in downtown Boston. He gave up talking to Kennedy after that. The reluctance of the family to associate the space program with President Kennedy disappointed him greatly.3
It was now the Sunday afternoon of the long Fourth of July weekend. Paine and Associate Deputy Administrator Willis Shapley were talking in his Washington office. Their attention was focused on a drawing that Bob Gilruth had just sent over by Telecopier (fax) from Houston. The launch of Apollo 11 was now just ten days away. This was the last opportunity to make any changes to the brushed stainless steel commemorative plaque that the astronauts would leave behind after landing on the Sea of Tranquility.4 The plaque would mark the spot where mankind first touched down on the surface of another celestial body. It was one of the historical accoutrements of the flight that was not without controversy.
An ad hoc Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing, which Paine had appointed back in February, had recommended that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin do two notable things as part of their historic moonwalk activities. The first was to plant the US flag;5 the second was to unveil the plaque. He had polled the directors of the NASA field centers from across the country and asked them whether the flag of the United Nations should be planted, and if so, whether it should be the only flag planted or whether it should be planted alongside the Stars and Stripes. The center directors told him unanimously: plant only the US flag. As for the UN flag, “You do that and you’re asking to be crucified,” Hans Mark, the former director of the Ames Research Center, put it. “Don’t do it,” he recalled. “The American taxpayers paid for it, and dammit, if you put a UN flag next to that, you’re going to have half a nation angry at you. I don’t know what my colleagues did, but I sure as hell was very hard over on that,” he said.6
But the controversy over the commemorative plaque was strictly partisan Republican versus Democrat politics. When it was first proposed, the plaque (which was attached to the front landing strut of the LM descent stage that was left behind on the moon) was to bear a print of the US flag. It was then changed to show the eastern and western hemispheres of Earth, along with the inscription “We come in peace for all mankind.” The signatures of astronauts Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Aldrin had also been added by Houston. Paine and Shapley looked at the new design. Shapley liked it, but thought it was still missing something. He could not quite pinpoint what it was, however. They played with a few pencil sketches but could not improve on what Houston had designed. It was getting late, and so they sent it over to the White House.7
The White House came back with two additional changes the very next morning. (It was about the fastest response that he had ever received from the White House, Paine later recalled.) First, they wanted to alter the message “We come in peace for all mankind” to “We came in peace for all mankind” to tone the message down from sounding heavy and perhaps a bit hostile, to one more of historicalness. The second change was that Richard Nixon wanted his signature on it.
President Nixon received a lot of criticism for wanting to put his name on the plaque. Many derided him for signing it, but Paine was not one of them. He instead defended the action of the president, who he believed “had every right to sign that in the name of all the people. … We were not getting the signature of Dick Nixon from Whittier, California. We were getting the signature of the President of the United States, and [by] the President of the United States signing that, we were getting the Chief Executive Officer of the entire 200 million Americans who had done this thing to sign on that. … I thought the press completely missed the point and were using this as really an undercover attack on the President.”8 He viewed the plaque not as a political symbol but as a historical token. To him, the president was the one person that history could point to as the head of state of the country in the epoch when human beings first reached the moon. Whether that was fortuitous happenstance or not was not the point. Angering the Democrats even more was that Richard Nixon’s signature, in fact, turned out to be the only presidential signature left on the moon. Only the Apollo 11 and 17 plaques (the first landing in 1969 and the last landing in 1972) bore the president’s signature.
Nine days later, Paine found himself standing in the middle of a field surrounded by a group of reporters and cameras. He was engaged in a lively discussion with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, but their conversation was no means private. The dark clouds of a nearby thunderstorm added to the drama of the confrontation. The civil rights showdown on the eve of the launch of Apollo 11 was one that he knew was coming but could not avoid. The American civil rights leader from Alabama had become the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had died in his arms from an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. Scheer had told Paine to be ready for Abernathy. Just a month before, Abernathy had gone to Washington and was jailed for failing to leave a march. Now he, along with Hosea Williams and members of his mule train hunger marchers, had descended en masse on the Kennedy Space Center. They were there to protest the fact that America would go to the moon while so many were still living in poverty.
With the nation watching, Paine and Scheer met Abernathy just outside the main gate of the space center. The timing of the protest bothered Paine. His position on civil rights was that the complex social problems facing the nation, problems like the ghettos, racial discrimination, crime, and poverty, were not things that could be solved by not launching the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. The two issues were mutually exclusive, he often said. If all of America’s ills could be solved by not pushing the button to launch the rocket, as he put it, he “would not push it.”
Since Abernathy’s people had by then camped outside the space center, Paine sent a bus the next morning, served them breakfast, and brought the group to the VIP viewing stands. There, Abernathy, Williams, and the others watched the moon launch with dignitaries and guests from around the globe. He had no quarrel with Abernathy and never forgot what the reverend told him that day. Although Abernathy conceded that he was using the drama of Apollo 11 to focus national attention on what he felt were major failings of equality in social injustice, nobody in this country could be prouder of the astronauts’ achievements than he was. That evening, he held a prayer meeting and the marchers prayed for the safety of Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin.9
The attention of the world was focused on NASA on July 16, 1969. That was why Abernathy was there. Paine was sympathetic to their cause, but his chief concern was to contain the situation:
The thing that really bothered me when the Abernathy thing came up down at The Cape was that if we allowed [his] movement to contrast the situation of hunger and poverty in the United States with the Moon launch the next day, that we would be doing a very obvious disservice, I thought, to the NASA program. If a great deal of publicity were to be given to this, and particularly if the lunar program were not successful and it could be contrasted with the fact that here we have spent all this money and we perhaps were not able to get to the Moon, it may be a fiasco or even a tragedy. Contrasting it then with Abernathy’s point that the money should have been spent somewhere else, it certainly could do grave disservice to NASA and even to the nation that invested $20 billion in this venture. So I was very concerned that we handle the … situation in the coolest and most correct possible fashion to minimize any reflections, any ability that [he] might have to seize the stage and hold it to the detriment of the lunar program. Even though I had a good deal of sympathy with Abernathy’s objectives, it was very important that we not allow it to do harm to the NASA program … and put it in the best possible light of the space agency.10
He had to answer for the nation’s space agency. The question of whether the billions spent going to the moon would have been better spent on poverty programs was one that he tried to answer with conviction. He wanted to be as pragmatic as he could. There was no easy answer, as the debate appealed to people’s emotion. His encounter with Abernathy showed this. The dilemma was not unique to the space agency, however. It also applied to other parts of the federal government. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), for example, had to be held accountable to the American people as well. To this end, he pointed out every chance he had that the two much larger departments, whose job it was to directly address and tackle the country’s social issues, were never subject to the same level of scrutiny as the space agency.
The $20 billion (over $100 billion in 2017 dollars as adjusted for inflation) that NASA spent on Project Apollo equaled a mere 4 percent of the half a trillion dollars that HUD and HEW spent on social programs during the 1960s. “If we had foregone US advances in space and science technology, if we had allowed the new ocean of space to become a Russian lake, our cities and social problems would be just where they are today. But what a miserably defeatist view of America is implied by the view that our mighty nation can only do one thing at a time.”11
We must do many things at once. It is just as important to carry the garbage and sewage out of a modern city as it is to have police and fire protection, to have beautiful buildings and fountains, to educate the children, to support art museums and baseball teams. … We have got to do all of these things and many others simultaneously. … The space program in the United States is less than a-half-of-one-percent of our gross national product. … Unfortunately, the public does not realize what a very modest percentage of the resources of America—the wealthiest nation in history—is devoted to our space program. To argue that by reallocating this modest effort we could somehow create utopia is obviously fatuous, as is the emotional reasoning that balances NASA against poverty. Stopping the space program would only stop U.S. progress in space, that’s all.12
By the beginning of 1969, the progression of flights had put Apollo 11 in line to make the first landing attempt. At NASA Headquarters, Paine and Mueller generally stayed out of the crew selection process, deferring to Deke Slayton and the Flight Crew Operations Directorate in Houston to put forward the best crew for each mission. This included Apollo 11. By the end of 1968, it was becoming clear to everyone in NASA that if the schedule held, Apollo 10, 11, or 12 would attempt the first landing, with 11 being the most likely in the group. Since crew training requirements had to be identified over a year before a flight, Slayton had assigned NASA’s most experienced flight crews to begin preparations so that any one of them could be ready when the time came.13
Timing had put Paine in charge of NASA. At the time, he knew Neil Armstrong only as well as he did other members of the Apollo flight crews—in their capacities as NASA boss and NASA astronaut. Only after the flight did Paine get to know him much better on a professional level. Paine did not make Armstrong the first man to set foot on the moon, but he did sign off on the decision.
Initially, the topic of who would be the first man on the moon was not directly addressed by NASA managers. It began to take on a life of its own, however, as the national press made it into a worldwide sensation right after the Apollo 11 prime crew was named that January. There was wide public speculation that Armstrong, as the mission commander, would be the first rather than Buzz Aldrin, who was the lunar module pilot and the third-ranking member of the crew behind Armstrong and Command Module Pilot Michael Collins. But this would have broken with the pattern of the copilot (Aldrin, in this case) leaving the spacecraft on space walks. This had been the practice on five previous Gemini flights and on Apollo 9. On those occasions, however, the commander did not leave the spacecraft, but instead stayed inside to monitor activities. Since both astronauts would now be leaving the lander to explore the lunar surface, this protocol no longer applied.
Armstrong’s version of the decision that made him the first person out of the spacecraft never changed in the years after the flight. When asked about it for this biography, he recounted again what he believed took place: that technical factors drove the decision. Hours of simulations in Houston that spring had experimented with how he and Aldrin could best don their bulky portable life support systems, open the hatch, and position themselves inside the cabin to back down the ladder of the lunar module. Engineers evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of the various ways that they could exit (and, even more importantly, reenter) the spacecraft. The exercises showed that the best way to egress the very limited confines of the lander was to have the commander go first. This affected not only who went first but the tasks that each astronaut performed while on the surface. George C. Franklin, subsystem manager for the LM crew station at the Manned Spacecraft Center, had detailed these factors in a technical report to Slayton.14
When Slayton offered him the command of Apollo 11, Armstrong had first picked Collins and later added Aldrin—in place of James Lovell, whom Armstrong totally agreed should have the opportunity for his own command, something he later got on Apollo 13—from, in his words, “the relatively small pool” of astronauts who were qualified and available for mission assignment at the time. Of the twenty-four astronauts fitting this category in the Astronauts Office at the time, only two were veterans of at least one Gemini flight: Richard Gordon, who flew on Gemini 11 with Charles (Pete) Conrad, and Aldrin, who flew on Gemini 12. Conrad, whom Slayton had already picked to command Apollo 12, now wanted Gordon as his command module pilot on Apollo 12. This left Aldrin to round out Armstrong’s crew on Apollo 11.15
The question of who should be first on the moon was historically important only on Apollo 11. In 2001, Chris Kraft revealed that he, George Low, Deke Slayton, and Bob Gilruth had discussed the issue and made a decision favoring Armstrong over Aldrin. This was recounted in James Hansen’s authorized biography of Armstrong, First Man. The technical perspective, while quite valid and important, ended up justifying the shrouded management decision. With Franklin’s report in hand, Gilruth conferred with Sam Phillips and George Mueller in Washington. He argued that technical considerations, followed by command prerogatives, affirmed that the commander should be the first to climb down the ladder. Phillips and Mueller had no problems with that. Mueller then notified Paine of his recommendation in a routine Monday-morning memorandum to the administrator. Three and a half months before launch, on April 7, Paine signed the internal memorandum and made it official. Neil Armstrong would be the first man to step on the surface.16
July 20, 1969. Civilization realized its age-old dream as Armstrong and Aldrin piloted Eagle to a soft landing on the Sea of Tranquility near the equator of the moon.17 Six hours later, the world saw the drama continue, as fuzzy black-and-white television images recorded the first human steps on the pristine surface of the moon. Like the rest of the audience watching the EVA (moonwalk) on television, Paine did not know what the first spoken words of a human being on the moon were going to be. The subject never came up—not until Armstrong’s unflappable “one giant leap for mankind,” as the quietly confident thirty-eight-year-old engineer and test pilot from Ohio gently placed his left boot on the surface and into human history.18
It capped off a decade’s worth of work by three hundred thousand people in the US workforce. Human beings’ first excursion on another world was brief, just two and a half hours from start to finish. Armstrong and Aldrin gathered rock samples, carried out a few simple experiments, set up a television camera, planted the American flag, unveiled the plaque, and took an unscheduled telephone call from President Nixon.
Four days earlier, as the mighty Saturn V ripped through the azure Florida skies, not unlike a majestic monument leaving Earth, Tom Paine had momentarily let his veil down to reveal “a great sense of triumph.”19 Now, as he watched mankind’s first steps on the moon from the Mission Control Viewing Room in Houston, he thought the world’s view of America changed. As with Apollo 8 seven months before, America’s standing in the world had been reaffirmed. It was, in a way, the culmination of the United States reminding the world that it was still the great nation that it believed it was before Sputnik. Whether or not it was worth the $20 billion price tag was something that had to await the judgment of history. But in his mind, there was no question that Apollo was well worth it.20
He had said shortly before launch that the sight of two Americans walking on the moon would do wonders for the nation’s self-esteem. It was the conclusion of a decade when many Americans openly questioned and demonstrated against their country. The feat had forced America to rethink its position among the nations. The landing pushed ahead almost every facet of science and engineering. Nearly everything that modern technology was making possible had to be extended a step further in order for the United States to land on the moon. And most importantly, America chose to pursue that challenge.21
The flight of Apollo 11 was still more remarkable to him because the country chose to be transparent in doing it. It broadcast the mission live to a global audience as it happened, minute by minute. Paine attributed a great part of its success to people who persevered through contentious political differences to accomplish a national goal. In the weeks after Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth, he gave credit publicly to many people inside and outside the space agency. It had all started with Senator Lyndon Johnson and Representative John W. McCormack drafting the Space Act. Dwight Eisenhower then established NASA. John Kennedy challenged a nation. Congress did its part also; Representative George P. Miller and Senator Clinton P. Anderson, in particular, gave unwavering support from Capitol Hill for the space agency to stave off what was otherwise a crippling budget retrenchment. Richard Nixon continued with the program when he could have canceled it. But Paine reserved his highest praise of all for Jim Webb, who had led the agency through what was arguably the most trying time of its existence in the months following the Apollo 1 fire.22
Project Apollo galvanized a nation, if only briefly. Even though Paine did not subscribe to the popular interpretation of the Space Race, fundamental differences between the US system of government and that of the Soviet Union were obvious, as the way the two countries approached their lunar programs had so vividly shown. Both superpowers possessed the people and the resources that were needed to make progress in space; both had assembled the teams of people and the infrastructures needed to succeed. The real question, however, turned out to be one of national daring, national will, and national resolve. Here, he thought the disparity was clear. The Soviet Union emphasized progress in space as an external demonstration of the superiority of the communist state; being first on the moon was something they very much wanted for that reason. That was why right after the American moon landings, the Soviets forged ahead with their (unsuccessful) Mars program.
Paine understood that the Soviets might very well regain the advantage in space after Apollo. But if they did, it would not be due to any technological breakthrough. Rather, his concern was that the United States might feel that, having landed on the moon, it could now relax and rest on its laurels. There was also the national security aspect. “It would now be very unwise of us,” he said, “to allow any other nation to think that they have attained great superiority over us in an area as important as space. It would be a destabilizing force in the world today to have such a situation exist tempting others to rash action.” In 1969, success in space meant America and the West were more secure here on Earth.23
The sky was still dim just before daybreak on July 24, 1969. Nixon was basking in the limelight. He was fraternizing with the sailors, waving to everyone who saw him, and generally enjoying being on the bridge of the USS Hornet as it waited for command module Columbia to splash down as it returned from the moon. Apollo 11 was almost home. Paine, standing beside Nixon, was nervously rehearsing in his head the final sequence of events during reentry blackout. A lot could still go wrong in the next ten minutes. He remembered conversations he had had with engineers when he was still the deputy administrator. What concerned him most was the possibility that the parachutes might not deploy.
My own concern was very much the fact that we had carried this tremendously risky, hazardous, unprecedented mission all the way through to reentry, and I was just hoping to God that the remainder was going to be successful. I was thinking very fondly of Eberhard Rees and the work that he had [done] on the flowerpot assembly [parachute cluster] at the top of the Command Module, and the work that he had done on the parachutes and the fact that [he had] assured me that this problem was really solved and that we could bring that thing down with one drogue and two parachutes, if necessary, and that everything possible had been done. I was going back over in my mind asking myself was there any question that we had left unanswered.24
He looked up into the dawn, searching intently for any trace of Columbia as it made its fiery reentry toward the Pacific some 240 miles south of Johnston Atoll. Most of the sky was obscured by clouds, but there was a very small opening almost directly over the carrier. His eyes dashed back and forth between that opening and the second hand on his wristwatch, anticipating the sight of the capsule at the appointed time and hoping to be the first to catch a glimpse of Columbia. An orange glow finally appeared. It quickly turned into a bright burning streak not unlike an unusually bright shooting star. He grabbed Nixon by the arm and said, “There it is. There it is. Here they come, Mr. President!”25 Moments later, it disappeared behind the clouds. But by then, he was pretty certain that they had done it, as the timing of the reentry was so precise. “That was my last lingering doubt, and I was very confident then that we should shortly pick up the chutes. I began to relax, even though our usual dictum is [to] not relax until the wheels of the helicopter are touching down on the deck of the carrier.” Fifty-five minutes later, Helo 66 was back on the deck of the Hornet with Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. He could relax now.
Richard Nixon had already planned on an eleven-day world tour with First Lady Pat Nixon. But only after Eagle had successfully landed on the moon did he tell Paine that he was going to kick it off by flying to the middle of the Pacific to see the splashdown. Paine thought that it was a “rather bold move” on the part of the president. There was a definite risk in the decision, and Paine wondered whether Nixon knew the odds as well as he. “That was all very well and good the way it turned out,” he later said, “but I was scared to death that we would have a fiasco or even a tragedy, and that this entire presidential goodwill mission would be scrubbed and that the initial impact to the space program would be something like the U-2 affair was on Eisenhower’s great trip to bring peace to the world in Paris. … President Nixon certainly put us on the line.”26
The effusive global response to the flight of Apollo 11 poured in to his office. He also saw firsthand on his travels overseas the affection for the American space program. People widely and often referred to it as “their” program. This was especially true in places like Australia and Spain, where NASA had network tracking stations. Western countries that had anything to do with Project Apollo adopted the US space program as their own. He found almost everywhere he went that the American space program was regarded as planet Earth’s space program, in which all peoples participated through the technology of live television. NASA became a symbol of success, and Apollo 11 became a symbol of triumph for all mankind. But when Paine spoke, he always reminded people not to forget that the feat was carried out by the American workforce and funded by the American taxpayer. While there was global participation, it was America that had made that triumph possible.27
Speaking to the National Press Club after the mission, Paine attributed the overwhelming global reaction to NASA’s unique founding charter. By choosing to be open and transparent, the country had conferred a tremendous and far-reaching effect on the world opinion of America. To this end, he contrasted the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, was put into orbit by the communist state in 1961—by all accounts an impressive feat, rightfully credited to them. But the closed, secretive nature of the accomplishment prevented the world from joining in the triumph. There was no way for other countries or even the Russian people themselves to share in the human drama, as Moscow tightly controlled the dissemination of any such news. The history-making Apollo missions provided a podium for the United States. By being open, the nation had earned that respect.28
Here lay a fundamental difference between what Paine and his predecessor Jim Webb believed drove the American space program. Webb wanted to stay ahead of the Soviet Union, beat them to the moon, and win the Space Race. By all accounts, this was a successful and necessary formula.29 While Paine acknowledged that there was a competition with the Soviets, he downplayed it, and never pointed to it as the reason that should ever drive the US space program. Instead, he advocated and would continue to advocate for a vigorous space program based not on reaction to what others might do but based on the intrinsic worth of the benefits of human exploration to society.30 It was a noble argument that was, however, not pragmatic enough to provide a rationale for funding a federal government agency.
Paine compared mankind’s venture into space in the twentieth century to the Europeans leaving the Atlantic coast in the fifteenth century. Then, kingdoms and kings had to ask themselves how much they should invest in this new and unknown frontier. For example, the Portuguese voyages of discovery had far-reaching effects beyond sailing the seas. They provided a focus for the best that Europe offered, from cartographers to shipwrights, coopers, and gunsmiths. Lisbon became the richest city in Europe. The commitment to exploration and maritime technology later spurred the mighty Spanish, British, French, and Dutch empires. Their voyages changed history because they were ambitious. Extraordinary results came from setting high goals.31 History has repeatedly shown that exploration of the unknown always produces unanticipated, and often immense, long-range benefits. The quest for pearls, spices, and precious metals motivated Columbus. The Spaniards came to the New World to extract wealth. But in the long run, the value of the gold taken from the Americas proved infinitesimal compared to the new society that was formed. The voyages changed history. The outcome was extraordinary because goals were set extremely high. The difficult challenges caused the best and the most enthusiastic to achieve beyond the normal. This was what NASA had provided the country by going to the moon: “a national value without a price tag.” For Paine, this was the true value of the space program.32
In the months following the flight, open dates on his calendar were few and far between. The White House had arranged for a monumental, one-day national celebratory tour for the crew to take place as soon as they had cleared quarantine—a strictly precautionary measure, in case some unknown moon bacteria came back with them. On August 13, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin boarded Air Force Two with their families and. along with Tom and Barbara, flew from Houston to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Julian Scheer had objected to the ridiculous pace of the schedule, but the White House won.
In New York, the epic scale of the ticker-tape parade through the “Canyon of Heroes” in Lower Manhattan was one that the city had not been seen since V-J Day at the end of World War II. Riding in the convertible under the rain of confetti and watching the three astronauts waving to the crowd, Paine smiled through it all. They spoke at City Hall, where Mayor John Lindsay presented them with keys to the city. The motorcade continued to the United Nations, where they were greeted in a commemorative ceremony hosted by Secretary General U Thant.33
Arriving later that morning at the Chicago Civic Center, Paine introduced the astronauts to the crowd and then stepped back and applauded with a crowd estimated at 3.5 million that had come from all over the Midwest. Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie proclaimed Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin the “First Citizens of the New Epoch.”34 After they addressed fifteen thousand young people in Grant Park, it was off to Los Angeles. Richard and Pat Nixon, just back from their eight-country goodwill tour, were waiting at the Century Plaza Hotel. The evening saw the largest state dinner ever hosted by a sitting president. (It was also a Secret Service nightmare, recalled Paine, who along with Wernher von Braun, lost his assigned seat to others in all the confusion.) He presented the NASA Distinguished Service Medal to several people; Agnew presented the Medal of Freedom to Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin; and Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, told the astronauts that they were not getting any special medals from him as door prizes for having traveled the greatest distance for dinner. The Reverend Billy Graham closed the evening with an adulating and moving benediction.35
The hectic pace continued. On September 7, Paine flew to New York City, where the next day he addressed the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It was a large moment for the space agency, the United States, and for him. The US space program had made history. It was a harbinger of things to come, he prophesied in a speech that day heard in eight languages inside the General Assembly Hall. One day in the not too distant future, the vast frontier of outer space would provide another kind of hope for mankind, he said with great passion and optimism:
Apollo 11, a most dramatic extension of man’s capabilities in space, was an achievement by and for peoples everywhere. This event has implications for mankind far richer and more meaningful than a landing on the Moon in the narrowest technical sense. If men properly develop and exploit these advanced capabilities, they can surely be directed to a great expansion of those practical benefits which we have only just begun to reap in space in the fields of communications, weather prediction, navigation, Earth resources, and other fields. Man will be able, in time, to extend his domain beyond the confines of his home planet Earth. From our small 8,000 mile diameter planet, we have set forth in this first step upward and outward into the 8,000 million mile solar system around us.
When I say that the success of Apollo 11 is a step forward of all mankind, I do not use these words without thought. The variety and extent of foreign contributions to the Apollo 11 flight are real and they are impressive and they are appreciated by all Americans. … If man’s reach should exceed his grasp, the fact that we have been able, in the Apollo program, to grasp the Moon shows that man has perhaps not been reaching far enough. We can dare and we can win far more for man than we have ever thought possible. And, we should not only in science and technology but in all the affairs of men.
It is very proper that men everywhere around the world are asking us if man can indeed go to the Moon, why can’t we do a far better job here on our planet Earth in ordering the affairs of man. This is a question which is indeed appropriate and a question which those of us concerned with space programs should welcome.
There is much to be learned in space and it is relevant to our total environmental knowledge here on Earth. We are opening a whole new field, that of planet ecology. … We can, and we must, pursue this increased knowledge, and we must turn it increasingly to the benefit of man. To equip ourselves for this task, we should continue the work we have begun and should increase our capabilities still further, but above all, we should do it as much as possible together.
After the Apollo program, we see a very rigorous opportunity to press forward. We believe that the Apollo 11 astronauts have opened a trail that many men will follow. Their flight is a beginning, not an end. We stand at the start of a new era which will see space flight become as safe, as reliable, and as economical as aircraft flight through the atmosphere is today. We see lying ahead of us now the task of developing reusable spacecraft and permanent space stations in orbit that will greatly reduce the cost of space operations and will open space travel to men and women of all nations. The future space programs will consist of equipment that will be multipurpose, it will be used many times and will bring back in many areas far more information than we have been able to acquire in the first dozen years of space.
These future programs can and should be carried forward with far greater international participation than has yet been the case. That participation will be as rewarding to all nations who take part as it has been to those nations which have started down this trail. The character of the space effort in the name of all mankind will surely be more rewarding to every person on this planet and will well repay the energies and the resources required. Certainly, we in the United States will, as we have in the past, make increasing opportunities available to people of all nations who wish to join with us in the pressing forward of this great human endeavor.
The great exploration of history, carried out by many nations, [has] always opened up new vistas of the possible, and the sights of all men have been raised and their hearts inspired. The exploration of space is in that great tradition, and yet it extends by orders of magnitude the past explorations. Where before Apollo exploration was a challenge in itself, its successful beginnings now stand as a challenge for our children and for all future generations as we open up this limitless frontier. Certainly the greatest challenge of all is that the world, which is seen as one from space, should also be seen as one from the Earth itself.36