Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  They soon settled into a routine. They would wake up, have breakfast—including dehydrated coffee, predictably disappointing even with hot water—and clean up. The CapCom relayed the flight-plan updates, relevant telemetry readings, the news from Earth, including the baseball scores, and the latest on Luna 15 (which by Thursday had entered orbit around the moon). They would troubleshoot minor problems, and Collins would take star sightings to check location and trajectory; on the ground, Mission Control would continue to monitor telemetry and relay any necessary information.

  The three Gemini vets enjoyed the experience of weightlessness, particularly in a spacious cabin with room to move about. Spacious was a relative term, though; it was roomier than either the Mercury or the Gemini spacecraft but still not much larger than the inside of a station wagon. But the lack of gravity made the area above them usable also, so the short connecting tunnel leading to the LM could serve as a cubbyhole to relax in. Below the couches in the equipment bay, one man could stand up fully, and two men could stand there after the center seat was folded up. There was room for two men to stretch out and float weightless in their zipped-up, lightweight nylon sleeping bags slung fore to aft under the left and right couches. The third crewman slept above them in the left-hand seat with its seat folded flat, loosely buckled in to keep from floating away and with his headset volume lowered—a call would come in only in an emergency. Though there was no true day or night, their bodies’ circadian rhythms kept them on the same sleep/wake schedule they had always known. With the craft’s shades pulled down over the windows and its interior lights dimmed, only the soft whirring of ventilators interrupted the unearthly quiet of cislunar space that lay just a few inches outside the gray alloy walls.

  The gravitational pull of the Earth extended more than halfway to the moon, and their escape velocity of almost 25,000 miles per hour gradually diminished to a tenth of that speed. Not that the crew could tell; since there was nothing to compare their speed to—no trees or buildings or asteroids whizzing by—they had no sense of movement. Only the barbecue roll, the gauges, and the slowly shrinking Earth gave the men any indication that they were moving. Their destination couldn’t be seen yet because of its proximity to the blinding sun.

  Besides sleeping, daily chores, and the near-constant chasing after floating items of all sizes—from pens and sunglasses to crumbs and cameras, each of which had to be stowed away or anchored to one of the dozens of Velcro panels affixed to the cabin walls—the astronauts did not have much to do in cislunar space once the spacecraft was set on the proper trajectory, and the computer and Mission Control were in charge. Most other flights included a long list of experiments; not this one. They could be distractions, and this crew had to be as rested and prepared as possible for their Sunday excursion, although they would set up a few experiments on the surface. But daily telecasts had been planned, and on Thursday evening, the second day out, the crew aimed a color-TV camera out the window and shot the Earth for fifteen minutes while delivering a running commentary on what they were seeing. “Hey, Houston,” Buzz said, “do you suppose you could turn the Earth a bit so we could get a little bit more than just water?” Then twenty-one minutes were spent showing the inside of the command module.

  When the camera was turned off, there wasn’t a lot of conversation among the three men, especially compared to their Apollo 10 predecessors. “It’s all dead air and static,” said one NASA official. Armstrong and Aldrin were laconic by nature, and they had the descent flight plans and checklists to review and ninety-two large-scale lunar-surface photos to study. Collins was more loquacious, although not to the point that he talked to himself. But their moods had definitely lightened up; even Aldrin had shaken off his not-the-first-man disappointment and seemed to be in a fine mood, validating Slayton’s faith in him. He wasn’t even trying to communicate telepathically.

  Collins took care of most of the housekeeping; he charged batteries, purged fuel cells, dumped wastewater, chlorinated drinking water, and prepared most of the meals, the solar system’s only combination pilot/cook/housekeeper/handyman. Sometimes they played music on a small cassette player, mostly easy listening and classical, including Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” and a favorite of Armstrong’s entitled Music Out of the Moon, a 1947 album of jazz instrumentals featuring the otherworldly sounds of a theremin. One day, Collins ran in place for a while, his hands above his head against the bulkhead. So did Armstrong, briefly—a mild shock to anyone aware of his avoidance-of-exercise philosophy.

  On the distant blue sphere behind them, the crew’s families watched telecasts with friends and the occasional astronaut. This wasn’t their first space rodeo; each of the three women had previously endured what the wives had come to call a “death watch”—waiting and watching at home to see if their husbands would survive a mission. But the media attention for this one was off the charts. Between Life reporters and photographers in their houses, and TV crews and newspeople outside on their front lawns, there weren’t many places to avoid the spotlight. They were dutiful and gave interviews; everyone in the astro-community knew it was expected. But they tried to balance the attention with some sense of normalcy, so the three families alternated between watching the TV broadcasts and going on with ordinary activities. They ate at their favorite restaurants and snuck out, hidden in their neighbors’ cars, to shop and get their hair done (they had to look good for the cameras), though one female reporter tracked a wife to the beauty parlor and had her hair done too. On Friday, the Aldrin family, which now included Buzz’s uncle Bob Moon and his wife, hosted an afternoon pool party. The other two wives attended, and all three talked to the press on the front lawn.

  On Thursday evening, Frank Borman had received a phone call from Russia. It was Keldysh’s assistant saying that the academy president had gotten his message. A little while later, Borman received a cablegram from the USSR with the precise trajectory of the Luna probe’s orbit and the assurance that it would not intersect with that of Apollo 11; Borman would be notified if there were any changes. It was signed Keldysh. For the first time, the Soviets had revealed mission details to their Cold War rivals while the mission was still in progress. There was no mention of the probe’s purpose or its radio frequencies, but Borman and Kraft took it on good faith that there would be no radio interference. Late the next morning, the two held a short press conference to announce the news; that information was relayed to Apollo 11, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  Friday afternoon, the astronauts took the TV camera out again for a twenty-minute shot of Earth, then shots of the crew and the cabin, and then, for the first time, a shot of the LM. After Collins removed the probe and drogue assembly from the connecting tunnel between the LM and the command module, Aldrin and Armstrong floated up and squeezed through the yard-wide opening into the LM to begin preparing for the separation on Sunday. They followed that with a ninety-six-minute telecast during which they roamed through both modules and displayed an Earth no larger than a silver dollar and becoming even smaller.

  At 11:12 p.m., traveling at a snail’s pace of 2,040 miles per hour and just 38,000 miles from their destination, the spacecraft entered the moon’s gravitational field. The craft began picking up speed, and the men woke up early on Saturday to find themselves only ten thousand miles from the moon. While they ate breakfast, they entered the moon’s shadow, and a few hours later, they stopped the barbecue mode and swung the joined spacecraft around. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, they had the opportunity to see the moon clearly. It was no longer a distant, flat-looking, grayish-white orb the size of an extended thumb but a massive, darker, and fully three-dimensional world that filled the window and brightly reflected the earthshine—four times as bright as moonshine—from their home planet behind them. The light lent a cold bluish tint to the moon’s features, adding shadows to its craters and mountains. It looked close enough to touch and cold and ominous. “It’s a view worth the price of the tr
ip,” Armstrong said.

  They could also see stars again; the dazzling sunlight had prevented that for days. “The sky is full of stars, just like the nights on Earth,” reported Collins.

  The seventy-three-hour voyage—the translunar coast—had been, in the best sense of the word, uneventful. Only one three-second burn on Thursday had been necessary to fine-tune their trajectory, and that had been so accurate that two others had been canceled. Now, as they neared the moon, another danger point approached: lunar-orbit insertion (LOI). They had to turn their ship around and apply a braking burn that would slow their speed from 5,225 miles per hour to 3,248 miles per hour, allowing the craft to be captured by the moon’s gravity and drop down to an elliptical orbit. If they didn’t get it right, Apollo 11 would sail around the moon in a huge arc and then head back toward the Earth in a free-return trajectory—or it would be carried the other way, toward the sun. If the burn was too long by just a few seconds, their reduced speed would send them crashing to the lunar surface. They had to fire up the service-module engine again for six minutes and three seconds—and they had to do it eight minutes after they disappeared behind the moon, where they’d be unable to communicate with Mission Control if a problem occurred.

  The burn would be handled by the onboard Apollo Guidance Computer. After checking their numbers several times, they would have to enter the directions and figures manually. One wrong digit could mean a catastrophic change to their trajectory.

  Both the LM and the command module carried an AGC, and it was up to the task. Designed by the MIT Instrumentation Lab and built by Raytheon, it was a wondrous machine. Most capable computers of the day took up a large room, like the IBM System/360 Model 75J mainframes on the first floor of the Mission Control Center in Houston, and a mini-computer was the size of a phone booth. The two carried on Apollo 11 were each the size of a briefcase—not quite portable, but the first embedded computer, and a micro-computer for its time. Computers used large, fragile disks and tapes, and they broke down frequently; this one absolutely, positively could not. To increase reliability, the AGC employed a fixed rope-core memory: thin copper-wire ropes woven by a staff of Massachusetts women whose ancestors had worked in the New England weaving industry and who would maintain their expertise between mission-software jobs by knitting and getting paid for it. (Some at NASA called this long, painstaking process the “little old lady” method.) Using looms, they would thread hundreds of these wires around and through many rows of magnetic ceramic-ferrite cores, or microchips, affixed to a board, and each one would take six weeks to build and test. It was one of the first computers to use these new miniaturized, integrated circuits. The result was a computer with a 36,864-word fixed memory and 2,040 words of erasable memory—the equivalent of seventy-two kilobytes—with a processing speed of roughly one megahertz. That was a limited amount of memory, but it was enough to perform the tasks assigned to it, such as measuring velocity changes, determining rendezvous and course corrections, and making minute adjustments to the trajectory during descent. Moreover, the AGC was nearly indestructible and would immediately recover from a crash or overload and continue right where it left off. The AGC would also prioritize jobs in case of memory overload and drop those not considered essential.

  The computer’s keypad interface was an eight-inch-by-eight-inch DSKY (display and keyboard) on the control panel of each spacecraft (there were two in the command module), with a calculator-type, nineteen-pushbutton keyboard, ten indicator lights, and a digital display. The computer was capable of solving real-time problems, and though initiating tasks could be cumbersome, requiring many key presses, they were performed quickly. They had to be.

  As the flight progressed, shifts came and went in Mission Control. Cliff Charlesworth’s Green team had been on console for the liftoff; six hours later, they yielded to Kranz’s White team; eight hours after that, Glynn Lunney’s Black team took over, and then it was the Green team’s turn again. The aroma of stale sandwiches, pizza, Mexican food, and burnt coffee mingled with the blue-gray haze of cigarette smoke in the subdued lighting. Kraft, Gilruth, Paine, and Mueller often watched the proceedings from the top row. An ever-changing cast of astronauts moved in and out of the room to sit and stand near the CapCom console; others watched in the first row of the glass-fronted VIP area, where people came, lingered for a while, and left. Many off-shift controllers on their way home made a stop at the Singing Wheel just a mile down the road to decompress and talk shop. Others remained at Mission Control Center, spending the night in the flight controllers’ dormitory on the floor above the MOCR.

  Just before noon on Saturday morning, Charlesworth polled his flight controllers one by one on lunar-orbit insertion—the burn that would slow down the spacecraft enough to drop it into orbit—then he gave astronaut Bruce McCandless, the CapCom, the okay. At 11:58 a.m., McCandless told the crew, “You’re go for LOI.”

  Aldrin said, “Roger. Go for LOI.”

  “All your systems are looking good going around the corner,” said the CapCom, “and we’ll see you on the other side.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the spacecraft disappeared behind the moon, just 309 nautical miles from its surface, and Mission Control became noticeably quieter. A few groups of men stood chatting in low voices. Flight controllers stared at their consoles or the big TV monitors in the front of the room. On the large lunar map, the radar dot representing the spaceship had moved to the left edge and then vanished. If all went well, it would reappear on the right side of the map after about thirty-five minutes.

  In their craft behind the moon, the crew entered the numbers, and then Collins punched in the command to start the service-module engine again. It fired right up and burned five minutes and fifty-seven seconds, placing the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit that ranged from sixty to one hundred and seventy nautical miles above the moon’s pockmarked far side—a near-perfect burn and orbit insertion.

  Using the thruster jets, Collins maneuvered the spacecraft so the moon was visible in the front windows, and they spent the next twenty minutes gazing down at it and taking photos. The rugged surface, completely covered with craters of all sizes, was even more forbidding than the near side. The satellite’s cold, stark visage contrasted with the vibrant blues and greens of the Earth they’d left behind. Like the crew of Apollo 8, they argued over its color and came to the same conclusion: various shades of gray, with some browns here and there, depending on the angle and the light. Three days after leaving Earth, they finally experienced a sense of movement as they made a complete circle of the moon every two hours.

  The crew was mesmerized by what they saw. Though Collins had taken far fewer geology lessons than his shipmates, he became excited over one area below them. “Oh, boy, you could spend a lifetime just geologizing that one crater alone, you know that?”

  Armstrong said, with little enthusiasm, “You could…”

  “That’s not how I’d like to spend my lifetime,” Collins said, “but picture that. Beautiful!”

  Aldrin had been quiet for a while. He said, “Yes, there’s a big mother over here too.”

  “Come on now, Buzz,” said Collins. “Don’t refer to them as big mothers. Give them some scientific name.”

  A few minutes later, they edged around the moon’s right side.

  “There it is,” Aldrin said. “It’s coming up!”

  Collins said, “What?”

  “The Earth. See it?”

  “Yes,” said Collins. “Beautiful.”

  As they took it all in, there had been nothing but static from Mission Control. Then, right on schedule, they heard McCandless’s voice.

  “Apollo 11, Apollo 11, do you read? Over.”

  “Yes, we sure do, Houston,” replied Aldrin. “The LOI burn just nominal as all get-out, and everything’s looking good.”

  It took a minute or two before communications were fully restored. Then McCandless inquired about how the burn figures looked.

  With a grin, Collins
said, “It was like—it was like perfect!”

  In Mission Control, the tension dissipated, the volume increased, and many onlookers began to filter out.

  A couple of hours later, at 2:56 p.m., the crew began a thirty-five-minute TV broadcast. From a side window, they focused the camera on the moon below, pointing out the LM’s planned flight path and the landmarks along it highlighted by the sun’s long shadows. The crew took turns commenting on what they saw. Then they got their first view of their landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. They swiveled the camera to keep it in the frame as they ended the broadcast.

  “And as the moon sinks slowly in the west,” said Collins, “Apollo 11 bids good day to you.”

  About an hour later, they made a second burn on the far side—this one only seventeen seconds—to drop Apollo 11 down to a slightly lower and almost perfectly circular orbit of fifty-four by sixty-six nautical miles. Two more danger points had passed—now six in all. There were several more to come.

  Armstrong and Aldrin floated up into the LM to give it another once-over and prepare for the next day. They spent two and a half hours powering it up, presetting switches, and working a long communications checklist. Then the three gathered in the command-module cabin to eat dinner as soft music played on the small tape recorder. Afterward, Collins tended to the usual housekeeping while his crewmates got their suits and equipment ready. They prepared to retire. Collins would sleep top-deck on the left seat, with his headset on in case of emergency. Armstrong and Aldrin would be in their sleeping bags below; they both needed a good night’s rest. The temperature inside was sixty-nine degrees, a few hundred degrees cooler than outside in the sunlight. It was almost midnight on Sunday—the day they would attempt what they had come all this way for.