Young Buzz read science fiction books and magazines and the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips, and he constructed model airplanes and hung them in his room during World War II. He had plenty of pets, including a squirrel, several white mice, and, for a short time, an alligator named Agamemnon. In high school, at a hundred and sixty pounds, he played center on his school’s state champion football team. He had a few close friends, but he was a quiet teenager, and at some point in those years he discovered a love of science and began to apply himself to his studies. The boy did everything he could to gain his father’s approval, but when Aldrin Sr. wanted him to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Buzz defied him and went to West Point, where he graduated third in his class of four hundred and seventy-five with a BS in mechanical engineering.
With graduation came another disagreement with his father. Graduates had the choice of joining the newly formed air force, which had no academy at the time, or the army. Both father and son agreed he would join the air force and become a pilot, but Aldrin Sr. wanted Buzz to choose multi-engine school and eventually command a bomber crew—a tried-and-true method of scaling the officer ranks. Buzz chose fighter-pilot school, which had fewer command opportunities. The Korean War was still raging, and after eighteen months of flight training, Aldrin arrived in Korea in December of 1952. By the time the armistice was signed, in July 1953, he had flown sixty-six F-86 combat missions and shot down two Soviet MiG-15s.
In December 1954, he married Joan Archer, a young blond actress from New Jersey who had appeared in theater productions and landed a few small TV parts. In late 1955, in the middle of the Cold War, Aldrin was assigned to a fighter squadron in West Germany, where he became good friends with another young air force pilot, a former West Point track-team buddy (Buzz had been a good pole vaulter) named Ed White. Several assignments later, Buzz earned a ScD in astronautics from MIT in 1963 with a dissertation entitled “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” His dedication read: “In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country’s present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!” When he applied to be an astronaut that year, his dissertation topic couldn’t have hurt. Aldrin was assigned to work on mission planning, specifically orbital rendezvous, and some of his ideas were incorporated into NASA procedures. (Ironically, he found that some parts of his theories were wrong.)
But behind the brilliant mind and high-achieving exterior was a man battling with insecurity and a family history of depression that had escaped NASA’s battery of psychological tests. Shortly after his triumphant Gemini 12 flight, Aldrin took to his bed and didn’t leave it for five days. Later he would recognize this as a sign of depression, but he didn’t understand it at the time. Eighteen months later, on May 24, 1968, Aldrin’s mother deliberately took a fatal dose of sleeping pills; the reason most often cited by Aldrin for this was her reluctance to face the attention that would result from her son’s probable upcoming trip to the moon. Her father, a minister, had put a gun in his mouth and killed himself; an uncle of hers had also committed suicide. Aldrin self-medicated his demons with excessive alcohol and extramarital flings, but since drinking and fooling around were common astronaut behaviors, they didn’t draw attention like they might have in other professions, especially since at the time, newspeople just looked the other way. The regimented discipline of his job also prevented the bad habits from getting too out of hand. He was a workaholic and too goal-oriented to allow that to happen.
Aldrin had been socially awkward in high school, and he never really overcame that. When he arrived at his astronaut interview in a suit and tie wearing his flight wings and Phi Beta Kappa key, Gus Grissom said, “We’ve already seen your résumé. Why are you wearing it?” Small talk was a foreign language to Buzz, and one he never mastered. Even fellow astronauts dreaded sitting next to “Dr. Rendezvous” at dinner, since the conversation usually became a one-sided lecture on Aldrin’s favorite topic, orbital mechanics. He once spent hours lecturing an astronaut’s wife on the subject. “Aldrin,” said one friend, “is a professor who is always on.” One newspaper referred to him by a nickname that some at NASA, and even Aldrin, had used: the Mechanical Man. “I sometimes think he could correct a computer,” one flight planner commented. If a computer could talk, he might have sounded like Aldrin. After the Gemini 9 misunderstanding, Slayton had suggested that next time, Buzz should let him translate.
Sometimes he seemed to communicate via telepathy. Once during training, when he was walking with Jim Lovell, his Gemini 12 crewmate, he said, “Isn’t that right, Jim?”
Lovell was dumbfounded—he had heard nothing before that. He said, “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, about the rendezvous,” said Buzz, and he began to elucidate.
Lovell said, “Buzz…please speak up when you’re doing that.”
Aldrin was a loner who was participating in a team sport, and even he admitted that he didn’t work well as part of a team. “I just wasn’t an organization man,” he wrote later. Most of the other astronauts didn’t care for him much, but they respected his keen scientific mind.
Mike Collins had required no such luck to gain a seat on the crew. Slayton was impressed with his work ethic, his attitude, his intelligence. And though every astronaut was as smart as a whip, it’s doubtful that any of them were as literate and cultured as Collins. When asked for his five desert-island books, he named Don Quixote, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, an anthology of English verse, the Bible, and a contemporary novel by Jan de Hartog, The Spiral Road. He also loved poetry, and not just John Magee Jr.’s “High Flight,” the one poem every pilot knew, at least the first line: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth.” Despite these questionable traits—questionable in the tough-guy test-pilot world, anyway—and others, such as a passion for rose gardening, Collins was well liked. He also possessed a self-deprecating wit. If he had a weakness, it was his insistence on finding the humor in any situation, even serious in-flight ones. Not every astronaut appreciated that much humor.
Like his Apollo 11 crewmate Aldrin, Mike Collins had been raised in privileged circumstances, although his parents were not wealthy. His father was a two-star general, but no one, not even a general, became rich in the army. Collins’s father had spent time in Mexico chasing after Pancho Villa with General John J. Pershing’s horse cavalry, and had been awarded a Silver Star in France during World War I. Military service ran in Mike Collins’s family; one uncle was army chief of staff during the Korean War, another uncle was a brigadier general, his brother was a colonel, and one of his cousins was a major—all army.
General Collins’s assignments took him to several locations around the world, including Rome, where on October 31, 1930, his son Michael was born in an apartment just off the Borghese Gardens. Like most military families, the Collinses never spent more than a few years in one place; they lived in Oklahoma, Texas, Puerto Rico, New York, and elsewhere. It was in Puerto Rico that young Mike, about ten, took his first airplane ride, in a Grumman Widgeon, a twin-engine amphibious aircraft. His father had made his own first flight in 1911 on an early Wright flying machine, sitting on the wing next to the pilot.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, General Collins retired, and the family settled in Alexandria, Virginia. Mike had inherited a love of art and literature from his mother, and like almost every other American boy, he read Buck Rogers comics and watched Flash Gordon serials at the movies. He dreamed about going to Mars, his favorite planet.
A life in the military seemed preordained but actually wasn’t; his parents wanted their children to do whatever they wanted, so young Collins wasn’t pushed into a service career, or pushed at all. Consequently, in school he was more interested in making mischief than in getting straight A’s. In high school, he decided to try to get into West Point, not because it would lead to an army comm
ission but because it was a free, and excellent, education. He earned an appointment and graduated in 1952 with a bachelor of science degree. To fulfill his military obligation, Collins chose the air force. That wasn’t due to a lifelong passion for flying, for his interest had been sporadic, but to avoid nepotism, or its appearance. As he later put it, “I felt I had a better chance to make my own way [in the air force].”
It didn’t take long before he fell in love with flying. After instrument and formation flying, then jet indoctrination, he graduated to day-fighter training in F-86 Sabres in preparation for battling MiG-15s in Korea. But the armistice removed that option. Over the next few years he was assigned to fighter units in California and then France, where he became a flight commander and trained to fly against the enemy behind the Iron Curtain. He developed a love of fine food and wine while stationed in France, where he also learned how to drop nuclear bombs. Soon he “could tell a good wine from a bad wine,” he later claimed, and, with tongue in cheek, “roughly what district it was from and maybe what chateau or vineyard.” One night on the base in the officers’ mess, he met a young woman named Patricia Finnegan, a smart, attractive brunette from suburban Boston. Eager to see some of the world, after college she’d taken a civilian job with the air force that brought her to Europe. The two hit it off. He loved her warmth and vivacity; she loved his voracious appetite for life and his sunny approach to it. They married in April 1957.
That was about the time Collins developed a yen to be a test pilot and attend the air force’s school at Edwards AFB. In August 1960, along with another air force pilot named Frank Borman and several other top aviators, he began the grueling eight-month course. After graduating in the spring of 1961, he was assigned to fighter operations, which was what he had yearned for. At Edwards, he developed a passing acquaintance with a hotshot test pilot named Neil Armstrong.
But these less desirable jobs he was given left him unfulfilled. In 1962, two months after John Glenn’s three-orbit triumph, NASA called for an additional group of astronauts, and Collins applied, despite the sneers of some of his Edwards comrades about the lack of actual flying done by the capsule passengers. He underwent the five days of physical exams and the weeklong battery of psychological and stress tests. He didn’t make the final cut. He had gotten the highest score on the Miller Analogies Test, which measured verbal abilities, but he had scored lower in mathematical reasoning and engineering tests. Over the next year, he worked to improve his knowledge of the new cutting-edge aircraft, and in June 1963, when the call went out for another group of astronauts, he applied again, and his scores were better. Deke Slayton phoned him in mid-October and casually asked if he might still be interested in joining the group. Collins somehow managed to tell him that yes, he was.
On January 9, 1969, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were announced publicly as the crew of Apollo 11.
Five days later, Soyuz 4 launched into space with one cosmonaut, Vladimir Shatalov, aboard. Rumors about its intent immediately began to circulate in the West; it was said that another Soyuz craft would rendezvous and even dock with it, perhaps to effect a crew transfer or to begin the process of assembling a space station from which a moon mission might launch. The first guess was accurate. Soyuz 5 lifted off the following morning carrying three cosmonauts. The two spacecraft docked the next day. Just two orbits later, two tethered crewmen from Soyuz 5 EVAed over to Shatalov’s craft and entered. After closing the hatch and repressurizing the cabin, Shatalov and his new crew undocked, and they returned to Earth the next morning in a smooth landing. Perhaps desperate for some positive propaganda, the Soviets claimed it was “the world’s first experimental space station.”
The return of Soyuz 5 and its commander, Boris Volynov, the following day did not go as well, though the West would not learn of its difficulties for decades. Because of a module that did not attach as it should have, the spacecraft reentered nose-first, with its heat shield at the rear. That left nothing but the ship’s inch-thick insulation to protect Volynov from inferno-like temperatures, and as outside fuel tanks exploded, Volynov watched in dread as the hatch buckled outward and then inward from the extreme pressure. Just before the heat reached its peak, the struts connecting the modules ripped off, and the craft flipped around to its proper attitude. The main parachute deployed only partly, and as the memory of his comrade Komarov’s fate flashed through Volynov’s mind, the chute lines disentangled and the retro-rockets fired and slowed the spacecraft. It hit the frozen ground hard. The impact bruised Volynov badly and broke every tooth in his upper jaw—but he was alive, and he recovered after several months in a hospital.
Another Soyuz disaster would surely have scuttled the program, at least temporarily. But it appeared that the Soviets had leapfrogged Gemini and achieved another first with its crew transfer. To observers in the West, they seemed primed for a journey to the moon.
That assessment was reinforced in December 1968 when CIA satellite photos showed a massive Soviet rocket on a new launch complex at the Baikonur cosmodrome, a rocket as large as the Saturn V—almost certainly a lunar-mission booster.
NASA had scheduled an ambitious five Apollo flights for 1969 and two more if necessary after Apollo 11’s July launch. Most of the astronauts thought Apollo 12 would be the first to actually land on the moon—too many things could still go wrong with the earlier missions, and there were plenty of unknowns, even with the extensive planning and training.
No one had ever trained for any kind of voyage as much as an Apollo astronaut did for a lunar-landing mission. The crews practiced endlessly for every move they would make in every phase of the flight in the command module, in the LM, and on the surface of the moon. They became familiar with the hundreds of switches they would throw and every control they would push as well as some they never would; they went through hundreds of urgent situations that might come up, from a fuel leak to a dead engine to an emergency rendezvous at a dangerously low altitude, and they reviewed all the experiments they would conduct in space and on the ground and every step they would take there. They even practiced eating, drinking, sleeping, defecating, and urinating in the weightlessness of space and in their cramped quarters. In the six months between January, when they were officially assigned the mission, and the July 16 launch, the three crewmen of Apollo 11 trained fourteen hours a day six days a week and often seven, and they spent much of any time they had left reading reports, procedures, and mission rules—and there were a lot of mission rules, a thick book of them.
Sometimes the three of them got together for an integrated simulation, often connected to Mission Control in the closest approximation of the real thing. But Collins usually trained alone in the command-module simulator.
Armstrong continued to make runs on the LLTV, whose predecessor, the LLRV, had almost killed him the previous May. After his session on June 16—the last of thirty-four hours he spent on the dangerous contraptions—his superiors gave a collective sigh of relief. After Armstrong’s last-second escape, none of them had wanted the astronauts to continue training on it, but Armstrong and the other Apollo commanders had insisted. To train for docking, Armstrong and Aldrin regularly flew up to Langley, where full-scale replicas of both the LM and the command-service module hung from cables in a large hangar. He and Aldrin practiced fully suited for their EVA in a reduced-gravity simulator at Langley. All three astronauts took turns on the centrifuge at MSC, going over breathing techniques they would use during the expected ten g’s of reentry.
Armstrong and Aldrin spent much of their time together, as they would be manning the LM, and in the simulators, they stood as they would in the LM itself, practicing the most important phases of the mission, and the most dangerous: the descent, landing, and ascent. In between simulations, they sat on a shelf behind them. Other Apollo crews practicing for a landing, like Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, talked and joked during breaks; Collins often chatted with the sim instructors. Armstrong and Aldrin said little to each other or to
anyone else, and their silence often tempted the sim instructors to walk over and look in to make sure they were awake. The simulations were grueling, and after a long day involving a dozen intense sessions, the participants were wrung out. At the end of one such day, Armstrong climbed out of the LM simulator, lit up a cigarette, and said, “Well, that’s my one cigarette for the year.” It was the only time they ever saw him smoke anything but an occasional cigar.
The flight simulators were remarkable pieces of equipment, although they didn’t look like much from outside—John Young dubbed the command-module simulator the “Great Train Wreck.” It appeared to be a large, tossed-together jumble of boxes with a carpeted staircase leading up to the entrance, an exact replica of the spacecraft’s hatch. Inside, the resemblance was even more uncanny; every dial, gauge, button, and switch was there and in the right place, and they all worked. These simulators were far removed from the simple Link trainers that pilots had practiced on since the first one’s invention in 1929.
Twenty-six-year-old Steve Bales worked almost constantly, and he had no social life to speak of outside of NASA, but he couldn’t have been happier.
Every day, he got to MOCR at eight in the morning and worked till seven or eight at night, with just a short lunch break in the cafeteria. Then he’d make the fifteen-minute drive home to his small rental house on Galveston Bay, eat dinner, decompress for a while, go to sleep, and get up and do it again. He wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
Shoot for the Moon Page 27
