But newspapers throughout the country ran stories trumpeting the choice of Aldrin. Nine days later, after the successful launch of Apollo 9, NASA changed its tune again. At another presser, General Sam Phillips, the Apollo program manager, said, “The decision really hasn’t been reviewed by all of us who expect to take a look at the details of that mission plan. From my standpoint, the decision hasn’t been made.”
Cloudy as it was, that was the public version of the story. Behind the scenes, it was more complicated.
When Aldrin heard a rumor that Slayton had decided that Armstrong would be the first to walk on the moon, he was not happy. He also heard that Neil’s civilian status was a reason for the choice—NASA wanted to make a clear statement about the nonmilitary nature of the landing and of the American space program as a whole. Aldrin decided to confront Armstrong about it. According to Aldrin, Neil “equivocated a minute or so, then with a coolness I had not known he possessed he said that the decision was quite historical and he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of going first.” Aldrin approached a few other lunar-module pilots and used charts and graphs and statistics to show why he—and they—should step out onto the moon before other crewmen. When he tried to discuss it with Mike Collins, Mike cut him off. Aldrin also bugged Apollo 10 commander Tom Stafford, who was involved in mission planning. He pushed for the final mission plans to show the LM pilot exiting first.
Slayton heard about Aldrin’s evangelizing and decided a talk with him was necessary. He explained that since Neil had seniority, it was only right that he be the first. Aldrin would later claim that this satisfied him—it had been the ambiguity, he said, that he found unsettling. Buzz may have been okay with the explanation, but his father wasn’t. Soon after Buzz told him about it, the elder Aldrin contacted high-placed friends with connections to NASA and the military and tried to get the plan changed, with no luck.
Meanwhile, the Apollo 11 crew continued to train. Armstrong and Aldrin spent many hours in a full-size LM mock-up practicing the lunar landing—including their egress onto an elaborate fake moonscape—and the more times they ran through it, the more obvious it became that Armstrong exiting first made more sense.
At a NASA press conference on April 14, it was officially announced that “plans called for Mr. Armstrong to be the first man out after the moon landing.” Slayton provided Aldrin with another explanation of why Armstrong should be the first out, and it seemed to placate him: In the LM, the hatch leading outside was on the left, where Armstrong, the commander, would be standing, and it opened inward, with the hinges on the right. It would be impractical for the lunar-module pilot, on the right and in a fully pressurized spacesuit and EVA backpack, to maneuver around his similarly suited commander in the tight confines of the small LM cabin, then get down on his knees and crawl backward through the small opening. There were too many switches and circuits that might be broken off, activated, or deactivated during such a dance. (Of course, the astronauts could have switched places before donning their bulky backpacks and helmets and pressurizing their suits.)
Buzz put up a good front in public, but privately, he was “devastated,” according to his wife, Joan. After the press conference, Collins noticed a significant downturn in Aldrin’s mood. It might have sunk even lower had he known of another reason—the main reason—for the decision.
Shortly before the announcement, there had been another meeting attended by four NASA officials. Early on, Chris Kraft had given serious thought to the historic importance of that first step on the moon—the man who took it would be another Columbus, thought Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. He believed that man should be Neil Armstrong, who, unlike Aldrin, had never petitioned for the privilege. Kraft voiced his concerns first to Slayton, then to George Low, who both agreed with him. Sometime in mid-March, they met with Gilruth in his office. Everyone was aware that Buzz had been lobbying for the honor, and no one was critical of him for that. After some discussion, they made a unanimous decision. Neil Armstrong was their choice. He was the right kind of man to be the first to walk on the moon.
Next up was the dry run for the lunar landing, and it had just as many new dangers as the previous flight. Apollo 10’s crewmen—Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan—were all seasoned; each had flown at least one Gemini mission, and Stafford and Young had flown two. They had plenty of rendezvous and docking experience, which would be needed for this most ambitious Apollo effort to date. And unlike the last time, the simulators didn’t keep breaking down, so the crew members were well rested at launch. But they almost didn’t get to fly it.
Early in 1969, NASA’s new administrator, Thomas Paine, had suggested that the Apollo 10 mission should be an unmanned flight. He felt it might be the best way to get to a manned lunar landing with Apollo 11. A quick study was conducted, and it concluded that it would take six months to a year to mechanize the mission—far too long if they were aiming for a 1969 landing. There were too many functions that needed to be handled by the astronaut.
Administrators had briefly thought about allowing Apollo 10 to attempt a landing, but that hadn’t been considered long. There were still too many unknowns that had to be investigated and tested—combined operations with two spacecraft orbiting the moon, communications with the LM at lunar distances, and rendezvous and docking near the moon for starters, to say nothing of the LM descent, landing, EVA, and ascent.
Apollo 10’s launch into space on March 18, 1969, went off without a hitch, if you didn’t count some bone-rattling pogo vibrations from both the second and third stages. Three days later, the crew fired the hefty SPS engine and moved into an orbit sixty-nine miles above the lunar surface. On the twelfth revolution, Stafford and Cernan transferred to the LM, separated from the command-service module, powered their descent engine, and arced down toward the moon to an altitude of forty-seven thousand feet. They skimmed over its craters and mares—and even closer to its mountains, some of which reached twenty thousand feet. They would go no closer, since Young in the command-service module couldn’t descend any lower than that to rescue them in case of emergency. Standing at the controls and tethered in place, the crew flew over the Sea of Tranquility, the planned landing site for the next flight, and the awed men took plenty of photographs and film while observing boulders as large as forty-story buildings. The landing radar, essential to any complete descent, worked in its debut. When Stafford began preparing to activate the ascent engine to push them toward a rendezvous with the command-service module, Cernan—anticipating his commander’s procedures—flicked a navigational control switch to help him. A moment later, an unsuspecting Stafford flicked the same switch, setting it back to where it had been.
The LM immediately started gyrating as its rendezvous radar tried to lock in on the command-service module somewhere below the horizon and its thrusters fired in an effort to move toward it. “Son of a bitch!” yelled Cernan as he and Stafford were thrown around and the craft began to roll end over end at about sixty degrees a second. Stafford said, “Let’s go to PGNS,” referring to their main guidance system, and flipped another switch, but that didn’t help, and he said, “Goddamn!” The LM’s rendezvous radar that should have locked onto the command-service module above had instead locked onto the moon below. Stafford said, “We’re in trouble,” but hundreds of hours of failure simulations had prepared them for this scenario, and he switched over to the manual system, jettisoned the descent stage, and coolly got the spacecraft under control using his directional thrusters. Then they fired the ascent engine, which propelled them toward the correct rendezvous point with Young. A couple of orbits later, the two vehicles were successfully docked. When Stafford and Cernan were safely transferred to the command-service module, the LM was released to eventually enter orbit around the sun. Three days later, the command module hit the Earth’s atmosphere at a record speed for a manned vehicle, 24,791 miles per hour, and splashed down just two miles from the recovery ship.
There was a public furor over
the men’s language during the descent’s live broadcast—“Air Turns Blue as Astronauts Blow ‘Cool’ Image,” read one headline—and one high-profile minister demanded a public apology. NASA ordered Cernan to offer one, and he did. The astronauts had also used even stronger profanity, but the avalanche of letters received by NASA were generally supportive of the crew’s blue language; the opinions ran twenty-five to one in favor of their expressing themselves freely. In spite of the language controversy and the underlying reason for its use, the flight was a success. It also contributed valuable data on the mascons, especially since the LM had followed the exact trajectory outlined for Apollo 11—which would now attempt a landing on the moon.
If, that is, all the elements of the mission were ready. There were grave doubts among the upper management of NASA that they would be, and the pacing item—that is, the thing that would take the longest to complete—was the astronauts’ training. Because of the landing, the Apollo 11 crew needed more preparation than any of the previous crews, and it wasn’t clear that the requirements could be met in time.
On June 12, a flight-readiness review meeting was held to determine if the mission would proceed on July 16. They would need to begin loading some of the spacecraft’s hypergolic fuels on June 16. A dozen Apollo managers met in General Sam Phillips’s office at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. Several more directors participated via conference call from Houston, Huntsville, and Cape Kennedy. But the decision would be made by Phillips.
After hearing from everyone, Phillips asked Deke Slayton about the crew.
“Our situation hasn’t changed appreciably. Training is scheduled up to the sixteenth. We’ve had to compromise in the CMS-LM area,” Slayton said, referring to the lunar module. “We should have one hundred more hours, but we’ll have to fit the training in only half of that. I think we’re comfortable with what we’ve got. It will be a ten-hour day, six days a week for the crew from now on. They shouldn’t have to work past eight o’clock at night. The LLTV is an open area. Neil will fly the LLTV Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and maybe Tuesday and the following weekend.” There had been another accident with the LLTV in December 1968, and it had been out of commission for four months after that. But Armstrong was adamant about its importance in training for the landing.
They discussed the LLTV some more, then moved on to other parts of the astronauts’ schedule.
Phillips said, “Deke, we don’t want to wind up with the crew beat down two days before the launch.”
“We’re about where we were this time before Apollo 8,” Slayton said. “We’re in better shape than with 9, but not so good as 10. I have no reservations about the crew being adequately trained.” He had asked the crew if they needed another month. Armstrong had told him they’d be ready in July.
Phillips asked Slayton what it would mean if they delayed until August.
“Honest to say,” Slayton told him, “I don’t think we’d be all that much better off.”
The last man to give his opinion was Dr. Charles Berry, the surgeon in charge of the astronauts and a man disliked by most of them. He appeared frequently on televised press conferences, where he billed himself as their personal doctor, but they rarely saw him. He told Phillips that he had a “gut feeling” that the crew would not be in the best condition for a July launch, though his reasons were vague.
That didn’t sit well with Phillips. He polled the room again and received a Go from everyone. He gave a short summary of the issues. “I came into this discussion fully prepared to hold up for an August launch—if there were grave questions,” he said. “I have not seen that that is the case. My summary is that nothing is now apparent to prevent our proceeding toward a July launch.
“So, Rocco,” he said to Rocco Petrone, the launch director at Cape Kennedy, “go ahead with your hypergolic loading.”
Apollo 11 was on for July 16.
IV.
DOWN
Chapter Fourteen
“You’re Go”
If we get those first three guys back alive, we’re going to be damn lucky.
Robert Gilruth
A month before the launch, the Apollo 11 crew moved to Cape Kennedy, where they would live and train in semi-isolation. The idea was to keep them focused and healthy by reducing their contact with—well, almost everyone. That included friends, family, and the unrelenting media. Finishing their training requirements in time for their mission would be challenging enough, and the fewer distractions the better. Despite these measures, there was still plenty of stress to go around.
They spent most of their time in simulators, Collins in the command module, Armstrong and Aldrin in the LM, though occasionally an integrated sim was run with all three connected to a fully staffed Mission Control in Houston. As the days went by, these sessions became increasingly difficult. One of them occasioned a rare argument between Armstrong and Aldrin.
After a late dinner in their crew quarters on the third floor of the assembly and test building, just a block away from the simulator building, Armstrong retired to his bedroom. Aldrin and Collins stayed up in the common lounge area, Collins with his favorite libation, a martini, Aldrin with his Scotch. Buzz was annoyed with Neil’s decision earlier, during one particularly hairy descent, to allow the LM to crash into the lunar surface. Armstrong, who had spent countless hours in simulators as a test pilot before becoming an astronaut, had considered it an important learning experience, not just for the pilots but also for Mission Control. Every so often, when Armstrong thought things were slow during a LM sim, he’d reach over and pull a switch or flip a circuit breaker just to keep the flight controllers on their toes. That didn’t go over well with Buzz, who had never been a test pilot; he saw the simulation as a game to be won, and deliberately crashing into the moon instead of aborting the flight didn’t make sense to him. It would, he believed, reflect badly on his and the crew’s ability to perform.
Aldrin insisted on telling Collins all about his annoyance, and fueled by irritation and Scotch, he became louder; finally, Armstrong, clearly irritated himself, walked out of the bedroom in his pajamas. “You guys are making too much noise,” he said. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Collins quickly excused himself and went to bed; Aldrin and Armstrong argued late into the night. By the next morning, they had ironed out their differences—or at least had come to an understanding about them. But if their relationship had been strained by the first-man brouhaha, it was even more so now.
Since the day the crew of Apollo 11 had been announced, the astronauts had been inundated with interview requests from media outlets around the world. NASA’s public-relations department handled the demands and sent some requests to Slayton, who nixed the vast majority. But this mission was one of the most newsworthy stories of the century, and a certain amount of media cooperation was necessary, even at Cape Kennedy. The press wanted time with the three astronauts, and they wanted revelations from them—especially the mission commander. The private and reticent Armstrong rarely satisfied them.
In interviews, he was so guarded, he often seemed like a defendant under cross-examination at a murder trial. Friends always mentioned his dry wit, but it was rarely in view before the press. Aldrin answered questions more quickly, though he wasn’t much livelier; he lived up to his reputation as an egghead, the Mechanical Man. But the media loved the easygoing Collins, who was erudite and charming with a self-deprecating wit: “I hate geology,” he said. “Maybe that’s why they won’t let me get out on the Moon.” He made no secret of his distaste for machines and computers, and his disarming honesty and insouciance beguiled the press corps. If only he were the commander, this man with his laid-back attitude and easy smile. But he wasn’t, Armstrong was, and so he received the lion’s share of the questions, and his measured responses were rarely helpful to a reporter looking for a glib sound bite.
It wasn’t the luck of the draw that got Gene Kranz the plum assignment of flight director for the lunar descent, and it wasn’t
the fact that he was a good friend of Cliff Charlesworth, the man who made the decision. It was his previous experience with the LM.
The prime flight directors, Kranz, Charlesworth, and Glynn Lunney, had been taking turns as lead flight. The Apollo 11 mission was Charlesworth’s turn, and as lead, he was the one who assigned the flight directors for the various phases of the mission. It would have three new phases—lunar landing, surface EVA, and lunar ascent. Everyone wanted to work the landing, including Charlesworth, but after weighing the strength and experience factors, Charlesworth told Kranz the landing was his. Lunney would handle the lunar ascent, he himself would take the EVA and launch, and another flight director, Milt Windler, would take the reentry and fill in on the occasional graveyard shift while the crew slept.
Kranz had just gotten the assignment of his life, and he knew it. After bouncing off the walls for a while and calling his wife to tell her, he began picking his landing team. Flight shifts were formed on a mission-by-mission basis. “The branch chiefs carefully matched the personalities and strengths of controllers to those of the individual flight directors and their capabilities to handle mission events,” remembered Kranz, and each team would focus on training for its specific phase. His White team included experienced controllers Don Puddy, Jay Greene, Bob Carlton, Chuck Deiterich, Granville Paules, and Steve Bales.
If astronauts were the stars in this spaceflight production, and Kraft and his flight directors and controllers in Mission Control their supporting cast, then the hundreds of thousands of other NASA and contractor employees were the technical crew behind the scenes, all performing important and often unrecognized jobs. The men who ran the simulators were just such unsung heroes. Tasked with training the astronauts—either separately with the LM or the command module or together in integrated simulations with or without Mission Control—simulation supervisors (SimSups) and their teams honed the skills of both astronauts and flight controllers to a fine edge, sometimes acting like Marine drill instructors turning raw recruits into fighting machines. With lives in the balance, it was not enough for teams to know what to do when everything worked, a daunting task in itself given the myriad systems involved—they needed to know what to do when things went wrong. To that end, the sim teams ran their charges through every problem or abort situation conceivable and some that were not. The variations were endless and included a host of different failures in virtually every system: fuel, engine, computer, communications, spacesuit, navigation, thrusters, oxygen, and more, even the sudden illness of one of the astronauts. One simulation included a controller’s heart attack; another, a blown fuse on Bales’s console. The SimSups’ job was to make sure the two groups were prepared for every eventuality, and they took that job seriously. Often, an especially difficult simulation—such as one that ended in an abort that the crew shouldn’t have called but did or one that wasn’t called but should have been—would result in a change to the mission plan. But one tenet of the simulations was strictly obeyed: there was always a way out that did not involve an abort.
Shoot for the Moon Page 29
