by Jay Barbree
Together they selected the crews who would fly America’s space missions. Early on, Deke had established a pattern: “I would assign the crew that backed up a prime mission crew to fly the third flight after that.”
Thus, Deke and Alan called the backup crew that had supported the moon-orbiting flight of Apollo 8. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and were told they were it. They would fly Apollo 11. They would get the first chance to land on the moon.
But NASA had yet to fly that bug-eyed spidery creature it called the lunar module, which would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to lunar soil. It must be flown, and successfully, on Apollo 9. That meant firing the entire Apollo assembly of command, service, and lunar modules into earth orbit and simulating as many lunar flight procedures as could be squeezed into the mission. And if all that went well, there was still Apollo 10, which was going to repeat the moon orbit flight of Apollo 8, only with a much heavier payload demand on the Saturn V, which would send the entire Apollo package all the way to the moon for an even more demanding dress rehearsal.
If nothing went awry, if the two missions were successful, if the next great booster was ready, if the Apollo spaceships were ready to go, if no one broke a toe or came down with the flu at the last moment, if, if, if, then the first landing assignment would go to the crew of Neil Armstrong, who had pulled Gemini 8 out of its deadly spin; Buzz Aldrin, who had solved the problems of space-walking on the very last Gemini mission; and Mike Collins, the space walker of Gemini 10.
Mike didn’t think they would avoid all the potential pitfalls. He figured that if the Las Vegas bettors were brought in, they’d say the odds of Apollo 11 getting the choice plum would be only one in ten, and the odds would improve to four in ten for Pete Conrad’s Apollo 12 crew.
Deke Slayton was staying with a tried-and-proven system in selecting these three for Apollo 11. His strategy, which he employed with Alan Shepard, was to select three astronauts who had skills that complemented one another’s, and who would serve as a team—commander, command module pilot, and lunar module pilot—and assign them as a backup crew. The strategy called for a backup team to sit out the next two scheduled missions, drawing the prime assignment on the third.
“Well,” Deke said grinning at his astronauts, “it’s a bit more than sitting it out. You people are going to live in the simulators, and you’re going to ‘fly your mission’ a couple of hundred times before you finally go out to the launch pad.” He demanded everything of them except corporal punishment and a few hundred pushups. While two other crews flew, they’d practice in the simulators, follow every move the other teams made in their flights, listen to every detail of the debriefings, ask all the questions they could. They would become a great snowball rolling down a mountain, gathering data all the way for their own flight.
Standing on its four spindly landing legs, it looked like a creature from another world—hardly like a spaceship intended to land two men on the moon. This was the lunar module of the U.S. space program, LM for short. It was a sixteen-ton package of eighteen engines, eight radio systems, fuel tanks, life-support systems, and instruments, the product of six years of design and construction by NASA, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, and its subcontractors.
The LM was unique. It was the first vehicle designed to operate in airless space and as such was the first true spaceship. It was not intended to withstand the heat of reentry into earth’s atmosphere and so lacked a heat shield and the sleek aerodynamic lines of the Apollo craft. Instead, with bristling antennae and four slender legs, it resembled an awkward giant bug.
It was the only major piece of Apollo hardware not tested by astronauts in space. Assigned that critical task was the Apollo 9 crew: space veterans Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott and rookie Rusty Schweickart. Said McDivitt when he first set eyes on the craft: “Holy Moses, we’re really going to fly that thing? It’s a very flimsy craft—like a tissue-paper spacecraft. If we’re not careful, we could easily put a foot through it.”
Five days after Apollo 9 slipped into earth orbit, McDivitt and Schweickart opened hatches in the docking tunnel that linked the Apollo to the moon taxi, drifted in weightlessness into the LM, and sealed them off from Scott, who remained in the command ship. They ran down their checklists, tested their system, and “cast off” their ungainly vessel from Apollo.
In that careful retreat from the command ship, McDivitt and Schweickart became the first astronauts ever to fly aboard a spacecraft designed to operate only in the vacuum of space. Any lunar module fired away from earth was destined never to return. It could descend to a world without atmosphere like the moon, but racing into the atmosphere of the earth would transform the LM into a splash of flame. Anyone flying this machine simply had to make it back to the mother ship if they wanted to return safely to earth.
McDivitt and Schweickart were acutely aware of the unknowns they faced. Drifting free of Scott in the command module, they remained prudently close. If the lunar module failed in its propulsion or other control systems, they still had a way out of being helpless. Scott could close in and link up with the LM.
Because two spacecraft were involved, to avoid radio call-sign confusion NASA allowed the astronauts to name their ships, lifting a ban imposed after Gus Grissom had tagged his Gemini capsule Molly Brown. Some officials were not too pleased with the names selected by the Apollo 9 team, considered them not worthy of this noble effort. Assessing the shapes of the two vehicles, the astronauts named the lunar module Spider and the cone-shaped command module Gumdrop.
The first tentative stabs with the altitude thrusters and different engines of Spider went according to schedule. It was time to bite the bullet, to fly away from Gumdrop with newfound confidence in the thin-hulled LM. Flame speared from the descent stage, Spider leaped away from Gumdrop as if flung from an invisible catapult, and in a move of great confidence the two men aboard the space bug sped 113 miles’ distance from Scott.
Then came the moment to “break apart” the boxy main structure of the Spider. The bottom half, descent stage, whose engine in the near future would lower its crew to the lunar surface, was jettisoned, leaving a legless, seemingly helpless space creature with two men sailing through orbit. The ascent stage with the crew cabin carried an engine designed to lift this upper portion of the landing vehicle off the moon and carry it all the way to a rendezvous with a waiting command module. On an actual landing mission, the descent stage would serve as a launch pad and would remain on the moon.
McDivitt and Schweickart triggered this ascent engine and began executing a complex series of maneuvers nearly identical to those to be made by two astronauts leaving the moon to catch up with their command ship orbiting sixty miles above the surface. They flew with precision until Spider and Gumdrop were only a hundred feet apart.
Dave Scott moved his heavy command vessel in for docking. “You’re the biggest, friendliest, funniest-looking spider I’ve ever seen,” he told the two astronauts waiting for their ride home. After flying separately for six hours, the ships were together, and another milestone had been passed.
The ugly duckling of a lunar craft was looked upon with all the affection afforded the most beautiful of swans.
Two months later Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the spaceships of Apollo 10, eased into lunar orbit, this time on a mission not only to test the LM further, but also to perfect navigating around the moon and to confirm a future landing site. The Sea of Tranquility, so named by ancient astronomers who thought it was a smooth body of water, was their main objective. If one particularly level plain in that “sea” proved acceptable, then Apollo 11 would soon be aiming for that same area. But for now it was a matter of test flying and scouting.
Pilot of the big command module Charlie Brown was John Young. Commander of the mission was Tom Stafford, and when he and Gene Cernan drifted away in the lunar module Snoopy for its vital test, Young was all too aware that his own ship was the only ticket home his two friends had. Make a mistak
e and miss a rendezvous with these two pilots, and he’d be making a long trip back to earth alone.
This was the final dress rehearsal with everybody on stage center, a mission that had raised questions among impatient (and usually ill-informed) members of NASA, the public, and the press as to why another checkout was needed. If Apollo was going to lunar orbit and the two men would ride Snoopy down to some nine miles above the surface, why not “go all the way” and commit to a landing?
There were still too many loose ends, too many questions about precise navigation about the moon. This would bring them all together in a single tight package. Let there be no question that Stafford and Cernan were straining at the leash to take Snoopy down to knock loose a cloud of dust and land. But Apollo Program Director Sam Phillips nixed that from the beginning. To risk a landing after only one flight around the moon with a LM that had been run through a single flight test, Phillips said, would be “premature and foolhardy.”
While yearning for an “all-the-way” flight, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard agreed the decision was a prudent one. “We just couldn’t risk it,” Shepard said.
The press climbed all over Stafford trying to get some controversy going on the issue. Tom countered with an explanation that was smooth enough to be engraved in stone. “There are too many unknowns up there,” he told the media hungering for a hot clash between the astronauts and their NASA bosses. “Our job is to eliminate as many of them as we can, and the only way we can do that is to take the thing down to nine miles or less and see how it behaves that close to the moon.”
There was more than enough excitement in store for Tom and Gene without dusting Snoopy’s landing legs. The countdown to fire the descent engine that would send the LM barreling toward the lunar surface began when Snoopy was over the moon’s far side. Mission Control went through another bout of nail-biting as the astronauts punched through critical maneuvers out of sight and out of touch with mission monitors.
Then they heard the excited voice of Young from Charlie Brown; he’d appeared first around the limb of the moon, and as he reestablished radio contact with Earth, he fired off the initial message of mission progress: “They are down there,” he confirmed, “among the rocks, rambling through the boulders.”
Moments later Snoopy appeared, and the exuberant voice of Stafford followed Young’s tongue-in-cheek call of boulder tripping. “There are enough boulders around here to fill up Galveston Bay. It’s a fascinating sight. Okay, we’re coming up over the landing site. There are plenty of holes there. The surface is actually very smooth, like a very wet clay—with the exception of the big craters.”
Cernan’s voice, too, rang with unrestrained excitement. “We’re right there! We’re right over it!” he cried as Snoopy whipped moonward to within the planned nine miles of the Sea of Tranquility. “I’m telling you, we are low, we are close, babe!”
Stafford’s voice followed with its own infectious glee. “All you have to do is put your tail wheel down and we’re there!” Snoopy swooped low over the moon, actually four miles south of the intended Apollo 11 landing site because of the navigational errors planners had expected. They raced on, and then it was time to prepare for the critical dismembering of Snoopy—separating the lunar craft so the legless upper portion would return them to Charlie Brown.
“Sonofabitch!” The curse from Cernan sent instant alarm through Mission Control. Before controllers could determine from their own instruments what could have caused the moment of obvious danger, Cernan’s own explanation followed.
Snoopy was wheeling around in wild gyrations, the snub nose both pitching up and down and yawing violently between left and right. This close to the moon the movements were terrifying and on the thin edge of lethal.
“We’ve got some wild gyrations,” Cernan called out, his voice the measured tones of the veteran test pilot riding the razor’s edge.
Fearful controllers in Houston studied their monitors and instruments. From what they saw, they knew Stafford was wrestling with the controls that would blow away the troubled landing stage from the upper ascent stage holding the two men.
Cernan’s voice rang out over headsets and speakers. “Hit the AGS!” he yelled to Stafford to activate the abort guidance system. Stafford’s hands flew across his controls; Snoopy calmed down. The past few minutes had been knife-edged flirting with disaster.
Had the two pilots failed to act swiftly and skillfully as they did, in another two seconds Snoopy would have been locked into a dive toward the moon from which the astronauts never could have recovered.
“I don’t know what the hell that was, babe,” a relieved and puzzled Cernan radioed CapCom. “But that was something. We were wobbling all over the sky.”
It was too close.
Thirty years later Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford would admit to NBC News Correspondent Jay Barbree that Stafford had thrown a switch that was to have been thrown by Cernan and when Cernan snapped it unknowingly into an incorrect position, that sent Snoopy into a radar search for its mother ship, Charlie Brown, instead of stabilizing itself in preparation for separating its ascent stage from its descent stage.
It was a hell of a way to prove the ruggedness of the lunar module, which had performed far beyond the design of the skittish machine.
Finally separated, Snoopy’s upper-stage engine fired. With radar seeking the target and the astronauts flying their vehicle through intricate maneuvers, they rose in a closing maneuver to dock with Charlie Brown. Stafford continued his “it’s a piece of cake” routine with the remark, that “Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other.”
The three men, back together in the Apollo 10 command ship, made one more trip around the cratered landscape before beginning the homeward journey. Young took one last look at an alien world, and his words caught CapCom by surprise. “You’ve often heard the nursery rhyme about the man in the moon,” he called. “We didn’t see one here, but pretty soon there will be two men on the moon.”
Charlie Brown fired up and went home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Landing
THE TWO ASTRONAUTS SWOOPED TOWARD the lunar landscape in their landing craft—the first of their kind to descend on the moon. Their ship was named Eagle. Within its cramped cabin Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood with their booted feet flat against its flight deck. Each was sealed within the protective layers of a pressurized spacesuit, and each instinctively tugged at the cinches on his body harness as Eagle rushed on in the grip of the gravitational pull of the moon below. Armstrong and Aldrin were still virtually weightless, freed of the physical sensation of earth’s gravity, held now by the moon as they and their craft slid through lunar orbit.
Flying backward with their faces parallel to the silent and airless surface below, they glanced at the glowing numbers of their timers. They were minutes from the moment they would ignite the engine beneath their feet and descend to the moon’s surface. Time seemed to stretch endlessly.
A quarter-of-a-million-miles away in Mission Control, a fellow astronaut named Charlie Duke studied glowing instrument panels, listened to the chatter of his moonbound colleagues and of those manning the consoles around him. Everything he observed and heard fed him critical data about Eagle’s plunge toward the lunar surface. At the moment, Duke was the only one authorized to communicate with Armstrong and Aldrin. It was time to send the message.
“Eagle, Houston,” he spoke into his microphone. His words, crackling and charged with static, raced across space at 186,300 miles per second to the two astronauts falling toward craters and dusty rocks. “If you read, you’re GO for powered descent.”
Eagle was curving downward from the far side of the moon, emerging from a twenty-two-minute period during which the moon was between the spacecraft and the earth, blocking communication with Mission Control. Duke’s sputtering message was the first the astronauts heard as they came around the lunar limb.
Armstrong and Aldrin were not alone. A third member of the Apol
lo 11 crew, Michael Collins, was above them, in lunar orbit in their command ship, Columbia. He had heard clearly CapCom Charlie Duke’s vital message.
“Eagle,” Collins called, “This is Columbia.” His words flashed instantly into the headsets of Armstrong and Aldrin. “They just gave you a GO for powered descent.”
The two men glanced at each other. “Roger,” Armstrong acknowledged. They were headed for a waterless sea known as Tranquility.
Inside Mission Control twenty-five miles south of Houston a small army of tense flight controllers sat with eyes riveted to their data consoles. The control center was configured in terraced rows of consoles and monitors. Each successive row toward the front of the room was lower than the one behind it, so that each skilled technician sitting at these consoles had a clear view of the wide projection screens covering the front wall and the monitors before them that glowed and flashed with every twitch and slide of the Eagle.
In the midst was a man who spurned the long hair and outlandish garb that defined the youth of the 1960s. With an outdated crew cut adding starkness to his features, Gene Kranz seemed strangely out of place among his team. He was the final authority, the flight director whose sweeping powers would decide the what, when, and where of the first ever descent and landing on the moon. Now, with Eagle dropping silently toward lunar dust and craters, no one called him by his name. He answered to Flight.
Kranz leaned into his communications panel. With an easy motion he switched from the standard talk network to an auxiliary loop. Now he could be heard only within Mission Control. What Gene Kranz had to say was meant for his team only.
