The Eagle Has Landed: The Story of Apollo 11

by Jeffrey Smith

  Copyright © 2012 Jeffrey K. Smith

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1480127744

  EAN-13: 978-1480127746

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62347-051-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920319

  New Frontier Publications, North Charleston, South Carolina

  NOTE TO READERS

  More than once, I have been questioned about the absence of footnotes or endnotes in my non-fiction books. Simply answered—it is a matter of style. While recounting the lives and times of historical figures, I have chosen to present their stories in narrative format. It is my goal to bring history alive, akin to a fast-paced novel. The chronology and accuracy of the events in this book and my other works of non-fiction are substantiated by extensive research, with the sources listed in the bibliography. Ultimately, I hope readers will understand that fact is often stranger and more compelling than fiction.

  CONTENTS

  NOTE TO READERS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1: Yes, to the Moon

  CHAPTER 2: Luna

  CHAPTER 3: Vergeltungswaffe

  CHAPTER 4: Beep-beep

  CHAPTER 5: Luck has no business in space fight

  CHAPTER 6: Amiable strangers

  CHAPTER 7: Good luck and Godspeed

  CHAPTER 8: Like a chicken on a spit

  CHAPTER 9: The most awesome sphere that I’ve ever seen

  CHAPTER 10: Hello Moon

  CHAPTER 11: Magnifcent desolation

  CHAPTER 12: One small step

  CHAPTER 13: Hot diggety dog!

  CHAPTER 14: We got you coming home

  CHAPTER 15: Everyone okay inside

  CHAPTER 16: The greatest week in the history of the world, since Creation

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS BY JEFFREY K. SMITH

  PROLOGUE

  It all began with a blinking light racing across the nighttime skies. A silver-colored satellite, the size of a basketball and weighing 184 pounds, was orbiting the Earth once every 96 minutes at the unheard of speed of 17,000 miles per hour. Christened Sputnik by its Russian designers, the world’s first orbiting satellite was launched on October 4, 1957.

  Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev gloated: “People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite. They are saying the United States has been beaten.”

  In a decade dominated by McCarthyism and the exaggerated “Red Scare,” civilian and military leaders were suddenly pressured to unveil America’s own plans for space exploration. Thus began the Space Race.

  Early on, the contest was decidedly in favor of the Soviet Union, as the U.S. struggled to catch up with their Communist rivals. Eventually, the tide turned, and America overtook its Cold War foe, culminating in what many still consider the greatest technological feat of the 20th century.

  On July 20, 1969, as a worldwide television audience of 500 million watched, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. Nearly a half-century later, Armstrong’s words still resonate: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Barely a decade after entering the Space Race, the United States had achieved the unthinkable. The combined efforts of 400,000 individuals led to the successful design, development, and implementation of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.

  While the Space Race is commonly remembered as a time of innovation and technological advances, powerful, yet often overlooked forces were also at play. Politics and money were among the prime catalysts of space exploration. Opportunists exploited the emotions of fellow Americans, many of whom genuinely feared nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. While history was being made and new heroes were discovered, the aerospace industry reaped enormous profits and political careers blossomed.

  The Eagle Has Landed: The Story of Apollo 11 chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of America’s quest to land a man on the Moon, beginning with the stories of the visionaries who made space exploration a reality. It is a remarkable story of political gamesmanship, innovation, perseverance, and courage.

  CHAPTER 1

  Yes, to the Moon

  At a quarter past four on the morning on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts received their wake-up calls. After final physical examinations by NASA flight surgeons, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had a final sit-down meeting with the Director of Flight Crew Operations, Donald “Deke” Slayton.

  Over a breakfast of steak, scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee, the four men reviewed the events of the coming day. Across the room, artist Paul Calle sketched the astronauts while they ate; the first of many lasting visual images from that historic day.

  After breakfast, the trio entered the suit room to don their launch garb. The Apollo 11 crew had already spent two weeks in virtual quarantine to minimize the risk of exposure to infectious diseases prior to their space flight. After medical bio-sensory leads were attached to their torso and limbs, the three men slipped into their white nylon jump suits. With the assistance of experienced technicians, the astronauts then squeezed inside their pressurized spacesuits. Finally, their helmets and visors were snapped shut, completely isolating them from the outside world.

  At 5:30 a.m., the astronauts exited the Kennedy Center for Manned Spacecraft Operations, and boarded a van for transport to launch pad 39A. Clutching their portable ventilators in one hand, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins used the other to wave at the reporters gathered outside the building.

  While the majority of the world viewed them as courageous explorers, the astronauts were indeed very human. Neil Armstrong carried a comb and a package of Lifesavers in his pocket, while Buzz Aldrin pocketed pictures of his three children.

  At Cape Canaveral, Florida, over a half-million people had gathered to witness the launch of Apollo 11. The neighboring highways were hopelessly clogged, resulting in a 10-mile-long traffic jam. Fires smoldered along the beaches and in the surrounding wooded areas, where eager space enthusiasts had camped all night. Thousands of boats were anchored on the nearby Indian and Banana Rivers, positioned to capture a bird’s eye view of the historic launch. Worldwide, 25 million viewers huddled around their television sets.

  NASA had invited over 20,000 VIPs to view the launch, including some 250 members of Congress, half of the states’ Governors, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the current Vice-President, Spiro T. Agnew. Jack Benny and Johnny Carson were among the notables representing the entertainment world. Over 3,000 journalists, representing 56 countries, had been issued press passes.

  A viewing area had been established three miles from the launch pad, with bleachers, portable toilets, water tanks, and refreshment stands. Even though it was still early morning, the Florida heat and humidity were already extracting a heavy toll from the assembled guests. Among the most anxious of the observers were the astronaut’s wives, all of whom had traveled from their homes in Houston to Cape Canaveral to witness the launch. Neil Armstrong’s wife, Janet, stared at the monstrous launch rocket from a yacht anchored on the Banana River.

  During the 1960s, demonstrations had become commonplace, and on this sweltering summer morning, a group of 150 protesters led by civil rights leader, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, gathered within sight of the launch pad. As representatives of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, Abernathy and his followers loudly decried the government’s “foolish waste of money that could be used to feed the poor.”

  At daybreak, Wernher von Braun, the German-born rocket scientist who had supervised the design of the Saturn V rocket that woul
d propel the Apollo 11 crew into space, kissed his wife goodbye, before leaving the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn.

  “Pray,” he implored.

  “Bye and good luck,” she replied.

  To bypass the snarled roadways, von Braun was flown by helicopter to nearby Cape Canaveral. During the final countdown, the man known as the “Father of the American space program,” bowed his head and recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  When the astronauts arrived at the launch pad, the 363-feet-tall Saturn V rocket towered above, attached by umbilical lines to a steel support tower. After briefly glancing skyward, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins glided up the elevator to the space capsule perched atop the mammoth rocket.

  Three-quarters of the way up, the elevator halted, and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto a platform and waited, while his crewmates were carried the rest of the way to the top. Standing alone, isolated from the outside world in his pressurized spacesuit, Aldrin stared at the rising sun over the Atlantic Ocean. The veteran astronaut, who had spent thousands of hours training for this historic mission, prepared to be hurtled into space for the second time in five years.

  Inside the capsule boarding area, known as the white room, Armstrong and Collins entered the Apollo capsule first. Aldrin, who had temporarily waited below to ease overcrowding, was the last to arrive and board the tiny command service module (CSM), which would serve as the astronauts’ home for the next eight days.

  Fred Haise, the back-up lunar module pilot, had just exited the CSM, christened Columbia, having completed a checklist of 417 pre-flight tests. Haise wished his fellow astronauts good luck, before taking the elevator down.

  The crew squeezed into their couches—NASA terminology for cockpit seats. Mission commander Armstrong sat on the left, with Collins on the right, and Aldrin positioned in the middle. Before closing the capsule hatch, launch pad lead technician Guenter Wendt presented Armstrong with a going away present—a crescent moon carved out of Styrofoam and covered with tin foil. In the distant horizon, invisible to the naked eye, a thin sliver of moon, a quarter of a million miles away, kept watch over Cape Canaveral.

  Once the launch pad technicians sealed the capsule hatch, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins would have no face-to-face contact with other humans for more than a week. Adding to the drama, the Apollo 11 crew was keenly aware that any one of a number of potentially fatal mishaps could leave them stranded in space forever.

  Command module pilot Michael Collins silently reflected on his forthcoming role in history: “Here I am, a white male, age 30, height 5-feet 11-inches, weight 165 pounds, salary $17,000 per annum; resident of a Texas suburb, with a black spot on my roses; state of mind unsettled, about to be shot off the to Moon—yes, to the Moon.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Luna

  Mankind’s fascination with the Moon dates back many centuries. Celestial observers have long been intrigued by its cyclical phases and captivated by the wonderment of infrequent solar and lunar eclipses. For generations, the origin and composition of this celestial body remained a mystery. The Romans named it Luna, while the Greeks called it Selene or Artemis. In the developing Western civilizations, it was simply known as the Moon—a word of Germanic origin.

  In 1609, Italian astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Galileo Galilei began studying the Moon closely, utilizing the telescope; an instrument invented a year earlier in the Netherlands. Using his “spyglass” and artistic skills, Galileo drew detailed sketches in his publication, Siderus Nuncius. Originally thought to be smooth sphere, Galileo’s illustrations revealed the true topography of the lunar surface—craters surrounded by rugged mountains.

  A year later, German mathematician and astronomer John Kepler extended Galileo’s vision to foretell of space exploration: “Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky travelers, maps of celestial bodies. I shall do it for the Moon, you Galileo, for Jupiter.”

  The upper echelons of the Roman Catholic Church soon branded Galileo as a heretic for challenging the Aristotelian/ Ptolemaic Theory that the Sun, Moon, and planets revolved around an immobile Earth, and harshly condemned the Italian visionary’s treatise, Dialogue on the Great World Systems. As punishment for his “blasphemous utterances,” Galileo was ordered to repudiate his published observations, and forced to spend the remaining years of his life under house arrest in a villa outside Florence. Galileo died in 1642, but it was not until 1992 that Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the famed astronomer had been wronged by the Catholic Church.

  With the passage of time and advancement of science, man gained a better understanding of the interrelationship between Earth and its only natural satellite. The Moon is sometimes called a terrestrial planet, because its size and composition are so similar to Earth, Mars, and Venus. The Moon, however, is not an actual planet, merely a satellite, orbiting the Earth once every 27.3 days. Because the Earth simultaneously orbits the Sun, the actual time between new Moons is fixed at 29 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes. Developers of the modern calendar devised a unit named moonths, which eventually became known as months.

  The Moon’s diameter is only 2,160 miles (1/4th that of Earth’s), and its surface area is only 1/13th as large. While it is dwarfed by Earth, the Moon is still the second largest satellite in the solar system, and the largest one respective to the size of its mother planet.

  The Moon orbits Earth in an elliptical rather than an equatorial plane. At its closest orbital point (perigee), the distance from the Earth to the Moon is 221,463 miles, while at the peak of its orbit (apogee), the distance extends to 252,710 miles.

  The Moon follows a synchronous rotation, such that the time it takes to rotate around its own axis nearly matches the time necessary for a single orbit around the Earth. As a result of these dual rotations, the same face of the Moon is always visible in the sky—in actuality, due to small variations (librations) in its axis of rotation, slightly more than half of the Moon (59 percent) is visible at one time or the other. The remaining 41 percent, referred to as the Moon’s dark side, is always out of sight from Earth. This designation is a misnomer; while not visible from Earth, the backside of the Moon receives as much sunlight as the near side. Lunar days last longer than those on Earth, approximately 48 hours in duration.

  When the near side of the Moon is pointed toward the Sun, a visible full Moon is observed. During the new Moon phase, when it is turned away from the Sun, the Moon is invisible to Earth-bound observers.

  The rare straight alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon results in a phenomenon known as an eclipse. When Earth is positioned between the Sun and Moon, and casts its enormous shadow over the Moon, a lunar eclipse is observable in the night skies. Since the Moon’s orbit is inclined approximately five degrees with respect to Earth’s orbit, lunar eclipses do not occur with every full moon. A solar eclipse is a much rarer occurrence—the result of the Moon passing directly in front of the Sun and casting its shadow on Earth.

  While a captive of Earth’s gravity, the Moon manages to exert a powerful influence on its mother planet. Lunar gravitational pull on the side of Earth facing the Moon, creates two bulges (elevations in sea level), which are constantly rotating. The remaining ocean water pursues those bulges, generating the Earth’s high and low sea tides.

  The Moon’s landscape is barren and its environmental conditions are harsh. The darkened areas visible to the naked eye are lunar plains, known as maria (the Latin word for seas). Many experts believe the lunar maria once contained water. For unexplained reasons, most of the maria are found on the near side of the moon, yet occupy only 16 percent of the lunar surface.

  The lighter areas observable on a moonlit evening represent highland regions, or terrae. The terrae range in height from small hills to mountainous peaks, and dominate the lunar topography

  The Moon’s surface is pock-marked with craters created by the impact of asteroids and comets. Mo
re than 500 million such craters litter the lunar topography—some are only inches in diameter, while the South Pole Aitken Basin, located on the far side of the Moon, is 2,250 kilometers-wide and 12 kilometers-deep. The rugged lunar surface is covered with regolith, a mixture of fine dust and rocky debris.

  Lunar surface temperatures are extreme, averaging 107 degrees Centigrade during the day and -153 degrees Centigrade at night. The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin as to be negligible, containing only small concentrations of argon, helium, oxygen, methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, providing scant protection from the Sun’s penetrating rays. Because the diffraction of light requires the presence of atmosphere, the lunar sky is invariably a deep black. With its intense sunlight and deep shadows, the lunar climate is inhospitable. With such harsh environmental conditions, it is little wonder that no life forms have been identified on the Moon.

  The origin of the Moon is a subject of considerable debate. Strict Creationists believe the first Chapter of Genesis clearly explains the divine formation of the Moon. Advocates of the Fission hypothesis believe the Moon broke away as a piece from the Earth due to strong centrifugal forces, leaving behind a giant basin that is now occupied by the Pacific Ocean. Others believe the Moon formed elsewhere in the solar system, but was eventually attracted to Earth’s gravitational pull—the Capture hypothesis. The Co-formation hypothesis postulates that the Earth and Moon were formed at the same time from a primordial accretion disk. The prevailing scientific theory is the Giant Impact hypothesis—Theia, a planetary body roughly the size of Mars, struck Protoearth, and blasted away enough material to form the present day Earth and Moon.

  Some astronomers theorize that the Earth once had two Moons, both formed during the Giant Impact. The larger of the two Moons, three times wider and 25 times heavier than its counterpart, is believed to have drawn the smaller one into its orbit; the 5,000 mile per hour crash of the smaller planetary body into the larger one resulted in what astronomers refer to as the big splat.