by Robert Stone
The previous week Frank Borman had returned from a trip to the Soviet Union; he was the first American astronaut to make such a diplomatic visit. While in Moscow he had heard Russian space scientists alluding to an upcoming robot mission but was unaware that the final preparations were already under way. In recent years, a vocal segment of the American scientific community had advocated for less-costly, unpiloted research missions rather than human piloted flight. Should Luna 15 succeed, it would likely strengthen that position. Appearing on Meet the Press to discuss the upcoming Apollo 11 mission and Luna 15, Borman acknowledged that automated probes played a worthwhile role in space exploration, but there was still no substitute for human judgment during the course of a space mission. Since commanding Apollo 8, Borman had become one of the country’s most admired citizens, honored for his courage, honesty, and straight talk. NASA and the Nixon White House asked him to serve as a special adviser to the president during the Apollo 11 mission, including soliciting his thoughts on the ceremonial aspects of the first moon landing.
Luna 15’s lunar mission was of concern to flight director Chris Kraft. Unlike Armstrong, he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the two craft might affect each other’s orbits. Just to be safe, Kraft called Borman at the White House and asked if he could use his new connections in the USSR to obtain details about Luna 15’s trajectory. From his small White House office, Borman sent a teletype message to the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, using the now-famous hotline set up by President Kennedy in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his message, Borman requested Luna 15’s orbital parameters, in accordance with the rules of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Within hours Borman received a response, revealing that Luna 15’s trajectory would not intersect Apollo 11’s orbit, as well as an assurance that should anything change he would be notified promptly. This was the first cooperative message exchanged between the Soviets and the Americans during an ongoing space mission.
A spirit of camaraderie and goodwill had surrounded Borman during his recent Soviet visit, which came as a result of an invitation from Russia’s ambassador. Both President Nixon and his National Security Council head, Henry Kissinger, had encouraged it. Borman’s itinerary took him to ceremonial events and included a visit to Star City, the cosmonauts’ village outside Moscow. He and Susan Borman placed wreaths on the tombs of Lenin and space heroes Korolev, Gagarin, and Komorov. But in spite of the red-carpet welcome and all the smiles, some things remained off-limits to a United States Air Force colonel. When Borman inquired whether he could visit the Baikonur Cosmodrome—the Soviet Union’s launch facility, located in a remote region of Kazakhstan—his genial hosts awkwardly informed him that a visit, unfortunately, wouldn’t be possible.
Not long after Borman’s return, Western publications printed reports that offered a likely explanation for his hosts’ discomfort. Borman’s visit had coincided with a dramatic turning point in Soviet space history. Shortly after Borman’s arrival in Moscow, a team of engineers 1,600 miles away attempted a night launch of the massive N-1, the moon rocket Korolev’s team was working on when he’d died three years earlier. Unknown to Western observers, this was Russia’s second test of the N-1. Five months earlier, another test had failed a minute after liftoff. When the Baikonur team made its second attempt, the N-1 encountered trouble seconds after ignition, as one of its thirty first-stage engines blew apart, setting off an irreversible and disastrous chain of consequences. The Saturn V’s Soviet rival climbed into the sky for no more than twenty seconds before it slowly began to fall back to the Earth, tipping sideways in a tower of flame. It crashed to the ground, destroying the launchpad with an explosion equivalent to two hundred fifty tons of TNT—the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in history. The secrecy enveloping the launch and its aftermath was so effective that Borman had no indication that the Soviet space program had endured so decisive a setback while he was in the country.
With Luna 15, the Soviets were making one last play for world attention while the international press was converging on Cape Kennedy. The mysterious little robot probe heading toward the Moon was providing the final suspenseful chapter in the saga of the lunar space race. It was a far cry from the heady days earlier in the decade when beaming portraits of Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, and Alexei Leonov appeared below huge headlines trumpeting the Soviet’s latest first in space.
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THE LAUNCH OF Apollo 11 would be a media event like no other in the history of the world. For months the suspense had been building. After nearly a decade of planning and anticipation, President Kennedy’s goal appeared as if it might be achieved on time and close to budget. Television producers, magazine editors, and advertisers all knew they would have a unique opportunity to impress their customers. Editors commissioned special magazine and newspaper supplements designed to educate their readers with retrospective histories and details about the equipment and the crucial stages of the mission. In the media capitals of New York and London, television networks prepared features and interviews with poets and intellectuals to supplement their planned live coverage of the mission; Duke Ellington and Pink Floyd composed and recorded original musical performances that would be premiered on air.
At Cape Kennedy, NASA had issued nearly three thousand passes to credentialed journalists, more than eight hundred of them representing foreign media outlets, including many from Soviet countries. Upon arriving in Florida in the days before the launch, every reporter was hungry to discover a story that was distinctive and original. By now every motel owner in the costal region near the Cape had been interviewed about the scarcity of available rooms or had offered reflections on how their business had changed since Alan Shepard’s first flight eight years ago. The presence of the countless cameras, microphones, and reporters assembled in Florida did not go unnoticed by veteran activists in one of the other great national historical turning points of the 1960s: the crusade for civil rights.
Before his murder the previous year, the decade’s most influential advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience would occasionally reference the achievement of the American space program as an example of what could be accomplished by human resolve and determination. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., contrasted modern technological marvels, such as thinking machines and spaceships, with the moral and spiritual deficiency that led to injustice, poverty, and war. During the last year of his life, when opposing the expense and immorality of America’s “unjust, evil, and futile” military intervention in Vietnam, King would also question the nation’s decision to spend billions to put a man on the Moon while failing to allocate billions toward putting “God’s children on their two feet right here on Earth.”
King’s rare words of criticism did not question the space program’s aspirational goals or its morality. Rather, he addressed it as a case of misdirected national priorities in a time of crisis. After King’s murder, his successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ralph Abernathy, continued to work on King’s last major effort: the Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice. During the troubled summer of 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign had driven a symbolic mule train of carts from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., and mounted demonstrations at both the Democratic and Republican conventions.
Less than twenty-four hours before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11, Tom Paine was attending a meeting with Kurt Debus, the director of the Kennedy Space Center. Shortly after noontime he was interrupted by the arrival of the center’s chief security officer, who reported that access to the space center’s main entrance was under threat from a planned demonstration. All the available deputy sheriffs in nearby counties were being marshaled to counter the approaching protesters, in an effort to keep the gate open. Paine and Julian Scheer immediately realized that if the local police engaged in a violent confrontation with demonstrators before the eyes of the world
press, NASA would be facing a public-relations disaster that promised to tarnish its greatest triumph.
The demonstrators heading for Cape Kennedy were from the Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. Once again, to symbolize their cause and attract the attention of the media, a small mule train of wagons accompanied them. The SCLC had also just released a position paper describing the march as a demonstration intended to caution against the possible illusion that conquering space would solve the country’s domestic problems. It opened by stating clearly that the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign did not oppose the launch of Apollo 11: “We hail this historic achievement.” But it also asserted another lofty goal that merited attention: “America can and must end poverty, racism, and war on Earth.”
Paine told the Cape’s security chief that the sheriff’s deputies must avoid a confrontation. He and Scheer then decided to handle the situation by themselves. During his career as a journalist, Scheer had covered the formative years of the civil rights movement, had befriended the writer James Baldwin, and interviewed many of the leading figures. He sent word that he and Paine would like to meet with Abernathy and members of the campaign for a public conversation that afternoon. Only the two of them would be representing NASA, and the press was invited to attend as well. In his reply, Abernathy suggested that they meet in an open dirt field near the gate. Paine and Scheer would stand on the north end of the field, Abernathy and the marchers would gather on the south end, after which they would both approach to meet at the center.
The humidity became increasingly oppressive in the early afternoon. At the south end of the field, the demonstrators gathered, some singing and clapping, others holding hand-lettered signs of protest. The chants were led by the booming voice of forty-three-year-old Hosea Williams, an iconic figure of the civil rights era whose biography included an escape from a lynch mob at age thirteen and facing down club-wielding state troopers on Selma’s “Bloody Sunday.”
At the north end of the field, Paine and Scheer wore traditional NASA attire: white oxford shirts, skinny neckties, and plastic-enclosed security identification badges. Looking to the horizon, Paine noticed thunderheads forming in the tropical air and heard the slight rumble of a gathering storm. A few hundred feet away, in the shadow of a Mercury Redstone rocket standing on display, he saw approximately one hundred marchers approaching, with Abernathy and Williams at the front. The press was assembling as well, thankful to have some action to report as they waited for the launch. Few could forget that little more than a year earlier, Abernathy had cradled the head of his closest friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., as he lay dying on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He and King had drawn strength from each other for more than a decade, during which they had been arrested and jailed as collaborators seventeen times. Today he marched in King’s stead, dressed in a buttoned-up suit, seemingly unaffected by the sweltering weather. Behind him walked women and children holding signs. The elderly followed next, with the mules, the carts, and a few dogs at the rear. To Abernathy’s right, Paine noticed one marcher supported on crutches, struggling to keep pace. Near the halfway point in the field, the two NASA men could begin to make out the familiar poignant sounds of “We Shall Overcome,” a song Scheer had heard sung countless times while covering tense situations for The Charlotte News.
NASA administrator Tom Paine smiles as public-affairs chief Julian Scheer (left) shakes the hand of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy during the Southern Christian Leadership Conference protest near the gate to the Kennedy Space Center on the afternoon before the launch of Apollo 11. Future District of Columbia congressman Walter Fauntroy holds a microphone near Abernathy while Hosea Williams (extreme right) looks on.
News cameras were trained on both the column of marchers and the two isolated men who slowly approached from the opposite direction. Paine’s earlier work on a federal American cities task force led him to believe that with the creative application of science and technology, many of the existing urban problems could be solved, though doing so would not be easy. Scheer, on the other hand, had begun to feel a balance of conflicting emotions during his time with NASA. He was proud of what the nation had accomplished in space during the past decade, during a time when so much had gone wrong elsewhere. However, his pride was mixed with a sense of guilt. He was sympathetic to the unavoidable question of national priorities that had brought the protesters and the world press to the field outside the space center.
Cameras and microphone booms circled as Abernathy and Williams reached out to shake the hands of Paine and Scheer. Two men representing the world of science, technology, and corporate and government power looked into the eyes of two African American men of deep religious faith and committed social activism. All four were close in age and had served their country during World War II. Yet they represented segregated cultures and philosophies. Their lives had been shaped by the country’s troubled history and a legacy that continued to define American life.
Paine said he had come because he wanted to meet them, acknowledging he had read the SCLC’s position paper calling for a national program to aid the nation’s forty million poor. He expressed his hope that the space program would serve as a demonstration of what the country could do when it mustered its skills, resolve, and resources. It was his hope that it would also spur the United States to face up to its responsibility to do better at tackling the problems on Earth.
Abernathy reiterated that they were not at Cape Kennedy to protest or disrupt the scheduled launching. “We are happy because our nation is a leader in this area,” he said, but then added, “We have mixed our priorities in our country.” He spoke with pride of the nation’s scientific and technological advancements, yet he said he could not express any pride that the nation failed to feed its hungry, clothe its naked, provide housing for the needy, or bring every citizen into the mainstream of American life. “For [a] nation to spend billions of dollars to put a man on the Moon and…not spend sixty dollars to stand one on its feet right down here on Earth. That is a sick nation.”
He then made three requests: VIP passes to the launch for ten poor families; Paine’s support for a crash program to combat hunger and poverty; and the assistance of NASA’s engineers and technicians to work toward solving the nation’s social problems.
Paine swiftly and happily granted the passes. “I only wish it were possible to do the other things as easily,” he admitted. “To change men’s hearts, to lift people from poverty—these are gigantic tasks beside which our moon program is child’s play.”
And then to make his point he stated, “If it were possible tomorrow morning to not push the button and solve the problems of which you are concerned, believe me, we would not push the button.”
As the first raindrops began to fall, Paine and Scheer departed, walking toward the NASA car parked on the north side of the field. They could hear another round of “We Shall Overcome” growing fainter in the distance. Scheer turned toward his boss and exhaled a sigh of relief.
The press cameras remained with the demonstrators and kept filming while Abernathy closed his eyes and offered up a prayer for the safety of the astronauts, with the hope that while heading to the Moon they might also reflect on the nation’s ten million poor and hungry. Within a few minutes, film of the meeting was being processed for inclusion on the evening newscasts. Back at the public-affairs office, Scheer arranged for buses, guest passes, and meals for the one hundred members of the Poor People’s Campaign, who would be at the launch the next morning.
For a few minutes, an unkempt field outside the Kennedy Space Center gate served as common ground where two opposing philosophies motivated toward achieving a better America met to listen to each other.
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ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, July 16, 1969, the three commercial television networks were on the air early with live television coverage from Cape Kennedy. All
had individual broadcast booths with desks that allowed their correspondents to appear on camera with a view of Pad 39A and the Saturn V three miles in the distance.
Before sunrise, a few journalists with press passes assembled near the exit door of the Kennedy Space Center’s Operations Building to catch a glimpse of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins as they boarded the white transport van that would drive them to the launchpad. When the trio exited the building, carrying their suitcase-size portable air-conditioning and ventilation units, they waved to the small crowd a few feet away. One eyewitness, aware that he was literally watching three men in space suits begin their journey to the Moon, compared it to “watching Columbus sail out of port.”
For CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, the coming week would culminate a decade of preparation. He had been absent from his evening-news anchor desk for nearly a month, laying the groundwork for the historic broadcasts by studying NASA reports, spacecraft manuals, and flight plans as if cramming for a final exam. Unlike Chet Huntley, his craggy counterpart on NBC, who openly questioned the lunar mission and the nation’s priorities that morning, Cronkite’s enthusiasm and support for the space program was never in doubt. Culturally and politically, Cronkite’s influence was unique in broadcast journalism. Within three years he would outpoll presidents and senators as “the most trusted man in America.”
An hour before launch, network cameramen began to focus on recognizable faces arriving at the space center’s press site and VIP viewing area near the Vehicle Assembly Building. Vice President Spiro Agnew arrived with a contingent from the White House. Since on orders from the Apollo flight surgeon President Nixon had been prevented from dining with the astronauts the evening before the launch, he remained at the White House, where he prepared to watch the TV coverage with Frank Borman, and made plans to greet the crew on their return.
