The Moon: A GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND

THE ghostly, white-clad figure slowly descended the ladder. Having reached the bottom rung, he lowered himself into the bowl-shaped footpad of Eagle, the spindly lunar module of Apollo 11. Then he extended his left foot, cautiously, tentatively, as if testing water in a pool—and, in fact, testing a wholly new environment for man. That groping foot, encased in a heavy multi-layered boot (size 9½B), would remain indelible in the minds of millions who watched it on TV, and a symbol of man’s determination to step—and forever keep stepping—toward the unknown.

After a few short but interminable seconds, U.S. Astronaut Neil Armstrong placed his foot firmly on the fine-grained surface of the moon. The time was 10:56 p.m. (E.D.T.), July 20, 1969. Pausing briefly, the first man on the moon spoke the first words on lunar soil:

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

With a cautious, almost shuffling gait, the astronaut began moving about in the harsh light of the lunar morning. “The surface is fine and powdery, it adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my foot,” he said. “I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” Minutes later, Armstrong was joined by Edwin Aldrin. Then, gaining confidence with every step, the two jumped and loped across the barren land scape for 2 hrs. 14 min., while the TV camera they had set up some 50 ft. from Eagle transmitted their movements with remarkable clarity to enthralled audiences on earth, a quarter of a million miles away. Sometimes moving in surrealistic slow motion, sometimes bounding around in the weak lunar gravity like exuberant kangaroos, they set up experiments and scooped up rocks, snapped pictures and probed the soil, apparently enjoying every moment of their stay in the moon’s alien environment.

After centuries of dreams and prophecies, the moment had come. Man had broken his terrestrial shackles for the first time and set foot on another world. Standing on the lifeless, rock-studded surface he could see the earth, a lovely blue and white hemisphere suspended in the velvety black sky. The spectacular view might well help him place his problems, as well as his world, in a new perspective.

Although the Apollo 11 astronauts planted an American flag on the moon, their feat was far more than a national triumph.* It was a stunning scientific and intellectual accomplishment for a creature who, in the space of a few million years—an instant in evolutionary chronology—emerged from primeval forests to hurl himself at the stars. Its eventual effect on human civilization is a matter of conjecture. But it was in any event a shining reaffirmation of the optimistic premise that whatever man imagines he can bring to pass.

It was appropriate that the event was watched by ordinary citizens in Prague as well as Paris, Bucharest as well as Boston, Warsaw as well as Wapakoneta, Ohio. In practically every other corner of the earth, newspapers broke out what pressmen refer to as their “Second Coming” type to hail the lunar landing. Poets hymned the occasion. Wrote Archibald MacLeish:

O

silver evasion in our farthest thought—

“the visiting moon” . . . “the glimpses of the moon” . . .

and we have touched you! . . .

Three days and three nights we journeyed,

steered by farthest stars, climbed outward,

crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust

falls one way or the other in the void between,

followed that other down, encountered

cold, faced death—unfathomable emptiness.

U.S. space officials, normally as detached and professionally cool as the astronauts they sent into space, in their own way also grew poetic. “We have clearly entered a new era,” said Thomas O. Paine, Administrator of NASA. “The voices coming from the moon are still hard to believe.”

For those who watched, in fact, the whole period that began with Eagle’s un-docking from Columbia, the command module, and its descent to the moon seemed difficult to believe. No work of the imagination, however contrived, could have rivaled it for excitement, suspense and, finally, triumph.

The Eagle Has Wings

As the orbiting command module and the lunar module emerged from behind the moon, having undocked while they were out of radio communication, an anxious capsule commentator in Houston inquired: “How does it look?” Replied Armstrong: “The Eagle has wings,” The lunar module was on its own, ready for its landing on the moon.

Behind the moon again, on their 14th revolution, Eagle’s descent engine was fired, slowing the module down and dropping it into the orbit that would take it to within 50,000 ft. of the lunar surface. The crucial word from Houston was relayed by Michael Collins, Columbia pilot, when a burst of static momentarily cut Eagle off from the ground: “You are gofor PDI [powered descent insertion].” Again Eagle’s descent engine fired, beginning a twelve-minute burn that was scheduled to end only when the craft was within two yards of the lunar surface. One of the most dangerous parts of Apollo 11 ‘s long journey had begun.

Now the tension was obvious in the voices of both the crew and the controller. Just 160 ft. from the surface Aldrin reported: “Quantity light.” The light signaled that only 114 seconds of fuel remained. Armstrong and Aldren had 40 seconds to decide if they could land within the next 20 seconds. If they could not, they would have to abort, jettisoning their descent stage and firing their ascent engine to return to Columbia,

At that critical point, Armstrong, a 39-year-old civilian with 23 years of experience at flying everything from Ford tri-motors to experimental X-15 rocket planes, took decisive action. The automatic landing system was taking Eagle down into a football-field-size crater littered with rocks and boulders, Armstrong explained: “It required a manual takeover on the P-66 [a semiautomatic computer program] and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.” The crisis emphasized the value of manned flight. Had Eagle continued on its computer-guided course, it might well have crashed into a boulder, toppled over or landed at an angle of more than 30° from the vertical, making a later takeoff impossible. Said a shaken Paine in Houston’s Mission Operations Control Room: “It crossed my mind that, boy, this isn’t a simulation. Perhaps we should come back for just one more simulation.”

Now the craft was close to the surface. “Forty feet,” called Aldrin, rattling off altitudes and rates of descent with crackling precision. “Things look good. Picking up some dust [stirred up on the surface by the blasting descent engine]. Faint shadow. Drifting to the right a little. Contact light! O.K. Engine stop.” Armstrong quickly recited a ten-second check list of switches to turn off Then came the word that the world had been waiting for

“Houston,” Armstrong called. “Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The time: 4:17:41 p.m,, E,D.T., just about H minutes earlier than the landing time scheduled months before, It was a wild, incredible moment. There were cheers, tears and frantic applause at Mission Control in Houston “You got a lot of guys around here about to turn blue,” the NASA communicator radioed to Eagle “We’re breathing again.” A little later, Houston added: “There’s lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.” “There are two of them up here,” responded Eagle. “And don’t forget the one up here,” Collins piped in from the orbiting Columbia.

Archetypal Tourist

For the next 3 hrs. 12 min., Armstrong and Aldrin busily read through check lists and punched out computer instructions, making all Eagle systems ready for a quick takeoff if it should become necessary Aldrin took time to describe the landing site: “It looks like a collection of just about every variety of shapes, Angularities, granularities, every variety of rock you could find.”

After it became evident that the sturdy, 16-ton craft had survived the landing unscathed, the astronauts, eager to explore their new world, requested permission to skip their scheduled sleep period and leave Eagle around four hours earlier than planned, “Tranquillity Base,” radioed Houston, “we’ve thought about it, We will support it.”

Armstrong and Aldrin struggled to put on their boots, gloves, helmets and backpacks (known as PLSS, or Portable Life Support System), then depressurized Eagle’s cabin and opened the hatch Wriggling backward out of the hatch on his stomach, Armstrong worked his way across the LM “porch” to the ladder and began to climb down On his way he pulled a lanyard that opened the MESA (Modularized Equipment Storage Assembly) and exposed the camera that televised the remainder of his historic descent. Thus the miracle of the moon flight was heightened by the miracle of TV from outer space, made possible by a special miniature camera (see TELEVISION) Because the camera had to be stowed upside down for a few seconds, Armstrong was turned topsy-turvy in the picture; a NASA television converter quickly righted it.

On the moon, even the taciturn Armstrong could not contain his excitement. He could not, of course, have known about the gentle admonition made by his wife Janet as she watched the mission on TV: “Be descriptive now, Neil.” Yet suddenly he began to bubble over with detailed descriptions and snap pictures with all the enthusiasm of the archetypal tourist. Houston had to remind him four times to quit clicking and get on with a task of higher priority: gathering a small “contingency” sample of lunar soil that would guarantee the return of at least some moon material if the mission had to be suddenly aborted.

“Just as soon as we finish these pictures,” said Armstrong. Scooping up the soil, he reported: “It’s a very soft surface. But here and there, where I probe with the contingency sample collector, I run into very hard surface.” Even his geologic descriptions bordered on the rhapsodic “It has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.”

Aldrin, obviously itching to join Armstrong, asked: “Is it O.K. for me to come out?” As soon as he touched the surface, he jumped back up to the first rung of the ladder three times to show how easy it was. Then, delighted with his new-found agility despite the 183 Ibs. of clothing and gear that he carried, he became the first man to run on the lunar surface.

Armstrong moved the still-operating camera to its panorama position on a tripod aimed at the lunar module. During the next two hours, the astronauts went busily about their appointed tasks, moving in and out of the camera’s view. They planted a 3-ft. by 5-ft. American flag, stiffened with thin wire so that it would appear to be flying in the vacuum of the moon. Effortlessly they set up three scientific devices: 1) a solar wind experiment, consisting of a 4-ft.-long aluminum-foil strip designed to capture particles streaming in from the sun; 2) a seismometer to. register moonquakes and meteor impacts and report them back to earth; and 3) a reflector for measuring precise earth-moon distances by bouncing laser beams from earth directly back to the source.

The seismometer went to work immediately. It recorded and transmitted to earth evidence of the tremors caused when Aldrin hammered tubes into the lunar surface to collect core samples. It also registered the thud when the astronauts dropped their backpacks from Eagle’s hatch. But the first test of the laser reflector failed when a beam shot from California’s Lick Observatory missed the reflector by about 50 miles.

Fifty-three minutes after Armstrong first set foot on the moon, Houston urged him and Aldrin to move within camera range. “The President of the United States would like to say a few words to you,” Mission Control advised. The President has been eager all along to associate himself with the mission. Now, as both astronauts stood stiffly at attention near the flag, Nixon told them: “This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. . . . All the people on this earth are truly one in their pride of what you have done, and one in their prayers that you will return safely.”

In the remaining time, Armstrong and Aldrin scooped up about 60 Ibs. (earth weight) of rocks for one of the lunar sample boxes. Using a core sampler, Aldrin was to have dug some 13 in. into the moon’s surface, but he had to hammer the tool vigorously to drive it no more than 9 in. deep. “The material was quite well packed,” he said. “The way it adhered to the core tube, it gave me the impression of being moist.” The astronauts managed to collect 20 Ibs. of rocks for the sample box that was supposed to hold sorted and identified rocks. Unfortunately, with time running out, none of the rocks were actually catalogued. At the urging of controllers (“Head on up the ladder”), the astronauts rolled up the solar wind experiment, placed it in a sample box, sealed both boxes, and hauled them via a clothesline-like pulley into the lunar module. Two hours and 31 minutes after Armstrong first emerged, both men had climbed back inside Eagle, and the hatch was closed.

In addition to the flag, the astronauts left behind a number of mementos from the earth. There was a 1½-in. silicon disk bearing statements (reduced in size 200 times) by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and words of good will from leaders of 72 different countries. The disk also bore a message from Pope Paul VI quoting from the Eighth Psalm, a hymn to the Creator:

When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place—

What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him?

You have made him little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet. . .

Attached to a leg of the lunar module’s lower stage, which would remain on the moon when the upper portion blasted off, was the already famous “We came in peace” plaque signed by President Nixon and Apollo 11 Astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. Also to be left behind: medals and shoulder patches in memory of Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Komarov, Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, five men who have died while in Soviet or U.S. space programs.

Later, after reopening the hatch, the astronauts tossed out LM equipment unnecessary for the return trip, their backpacks, boots and other items that had been exposed to lunar soil and dust. Then, their lunar excursion successfully completed, they settled down to a relaxed meal and a rest. It was strange to think that while much of the U.S. slept, two Americans were also sleeping in their cramped quarters on the distant and silent moon. Some 21 hours after landing on the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin were ready to blast off in the five-ton upper stage of the lunar module. Later, they were to rendezvous and dock with the orbiting Columbia.

Other stages of the flight had been —and would be—dangerous enough. At any point during the eight-day journey, a massive failure of the electrical or oxygen systems, or a collision with a large meteor would almost surely result in tragedy. But lift-off was the most nerve-racking part of the mission. If the ascent engine had failed to start, Eagle would have been stranded on the lunar surface. Too short a burn would have tossed the module into a trajectory that would send it smashing back onto the lunar surface. Had the LM achieved an orbit with an apocynthion (high point) much less than 50,000 ft., Columbia would have been unable to reach it. As it turned out, departure from the moon was triumphantly smooth. Of course, even after lift-off and redocking, there were still the dangers of the homeward trip. Control failures could cause the spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere at too steep an angle and burn to a cinder, or at so flat an angle that it would bounce off the outer fringes of the atmosphere far into space. There its oxygen would be exhausted before it could loop back to the earth.

The Beginning

The early part of Apollo 11 ‘s epic journey had been as uneventful as the later part was suspenseful. Lift-off was nearly perfect. Rising Phoenix-like above its own exhaust flames, a scant 724 milliseconds behind schedule, the giant rocket shook loose some 1,300 Ibs. of ice that had frozen on its white sides. Although it was the heaviest space vehicle ever fired aloft—6,484,289 Ibs. at ignition—it cleared the launch tower in twelve seconds.

Less than twelve minutes after liftoff, a brief boost from the S-4B third stage placed Apollo into a circular 119-mile orbit at a velocity of 17,427 m.p.h. Over the Pacific for the second time, just 2½ hrs. after launch, the spacecraft was cleared by Houston for “translunar insertion” (TLI). Firing for five minutes, the reliable S-4B engine accelerated the ship to 24,245 m.p.h., fast enough to tear it loose from the earth’s gravitational embrace and send it toward the moon. At a point 43,495 miles from the moon, lunar gravity exerted a force equal to the gravity of the earth, then some 200,000 miles distant. Beyond that crest, lunar gravity predominated, and Apollo was on the “downhill” leg of its journey.

Through the remainder of the outbound flight, Apollo 11 astronauts were less talkative than their Apollo 10 predecessors. “It’s all dead air and static,” said an official in Mission Control.

The astronauts compensated for the uninspiring conversations with Houston during several performances in front of their color television camera—something that apparently can bring out the ham in any man. At one point, Collins said: “O.K., world. Hang onto your hat. I’m going to turn you upside down.” As Collins rotated his camera, keeping it pointed toward the earth, the blue and white planet took an erratic 180° turn on earth-based TV screens. “I’m making myself seasick,” Collins called to Houston. “I’m going to put you right side up.” The earth promptly performed another lazy turn on the TV screens.

Snakes in the Lake Bed

Continuing their flawless flight, the astronauts zoomed past the western rim of the moon at 5,645 m.p.h. They were whipped behind the far side and into lunar orbit by the moon’s gravity and a 5-min. 57-sec. burn of the reliable SPS engine that reduced their speed to 3,736 m.p.h. When they emerged from behind the eastern edge, after 34 minutes during which radio communication was blocked, they had dropped into a 70-by 196-mile-high orbit.

That was about as close as Collins, the affable, relaxed Air Force lieutenant colonel, would get. Before the trip, he complained good-humoredly that because he would be piloting Columbia during the moon walk, he would be “about the only person in the world who won’t get to see the thing on television.” He asked Houston to save a videotape for him. At least, said Collins, “I’m going 99.99% of the way.”

Coming around the eastern limb of the moon on their first revolution, the astronauts began sending another TV show to earth. This time they focused the camera on the desolate landscape below. After a long period of silence, a Houston capsule communicator pleaded: “Would you care to comment on some of those craters as we go by?” At last the astronauts came to life.

“Just going over Mount Marilyn,” said Armstrong, referring to a triangular-shaped peak named for the wife of Apollo 8 Astronaut James Lovell. “Now we’re looking at what we call Boot Hill. On the right is the crater Censorinus P.” The spacecraft passed over Sidewinder and Diamondback, two of the sinuous rills that had caused Apollo 10 Astronaut John Young to wonder “if some time long ago fish hadn’t been jumping in those creeks.” Commented Collins: “It looks like a couple of snakes down there in the lake bed.”

At one point, Houston radioed to Apollo 11: “We’ve got an observation you can make if you have some time up there. There’s been some lunar transient events reported in the vicinity of Aristarchus.” Astronomers in Bochum, West Germany, had observed a bright glow on the lunar surface—the same sort of eerie luminescence that has intrigued moon watchers for centuries. The report was passed on to Houston and thence to the astronauts. Almost immediately, Armstrong reported back, “Hey, Houston, I’m looking north up to ward Aristarchus now, and there’s an area that is considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area. It seems to have a slight amount of fluorescence.” Aldrin confirmed his observation. Many scientists believe the glows are caused by lunar eruptions, complete with fire fountains and lava flows.

One thing the astronauts did not observe was Apollo’s companion in lunar orbit—the Soviet Union’s unmanned Luna 15 moon probe (see p. 17). Arriving in the neighborhood two days before the U.S. spacecraft, Luna went into an orbit as close as ten miles from the moon and eventually landed. The chances that Luna would be visible from Apollo 11—much less collide with it—were estimated by Houston’s Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations, as about “one in a billion.”

Momentous Day

None of the astronauts slept very long before awakening to the most momentous day of their lives. Collins got six hours, Aldrin and Armstrong five apiece. During Apollo’s eleventh revolution of the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong donned their space suits and crawled through a tunnel for a final checkout of the lunar module before its long separation from the command module. They paid particular attention to Eagle’s propulsion systems—the tanks containing the hypergolic fuels that fire the descent and ascent engines, and the pressure gauges on the helium that forces the fuels into the combustion chambers, where they burn upon contact with one another. Efficient and businesslike, they completed the check 30 minutes ahead of schedule. Two minutes before the spacecraft disappeared behind the moon on its 13th revolution, Houston advised: “We’re go for undocking.” Tense minutes followed until the spacecraft emerged from the far side and Armstrong reported that Eagle had wings.

Thus did Armstrong and Aldrin set out on that last, epochal one-hundredth of 1% of the outbound journey. Some nine hours later, while Columbia was out of contact on the far side of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin stepped down from the ungainly looking Eagle—and into history. It was a moment that would surely survive long after the criticism that has accompanied every step of the space program is forgotten—understandable as that criticism may be in view of the pressing problems back on earth. It was, too, a moment that symbolized man’s wondrous capacity for questing, then conquering, then questing yet again for something just beyond his reach. But the black vastness that served as a backdrop for the two astronauts’ walk on the moon also was a reminder of something else. Stargazer, now star-reacher, man inhabits a smallish planet of an ordinary sun in a garden-variety galaxy that occupies the tiniest corner of a universe whose scope is beyond comprehension.

* In any case, the U.S. could not have claimed sovereignty over the moon, even if it had been so inclined. A treaty drafted in 1966, and since signed by both Washington and Moscow, asserts that the moon is terra nullius, or no-man’s-land, open to exploration and use by all nations.