The Moon: TASK ACCOMPLISHED

ABOARD the U.S.S. Hornet, 950 miles southwest of Hawaii, hundreds of crewmen, reporters, cameramen and VIP guests anxiously scanned the pre-dawn skies. At 5:41 a.m., shouts of “There it is! There it is!” rose from the aircraft carrier’s huge flight deck. For a split second, a tiny orange speck, no brighter than a faint shooting star, shone against the thick, purplish clouds. Apollo 11 had come home; now it was streaking through the earth’s familiar atmosphere after completing the most momentous journey in man’s history. Two of the three human beings aboard the returning spacecraft had actually landed on the moon, strode effortlessly across its tortured surface and brought a few chunks of lunar rock home with them.

Aboard the spacecraft, the astronauts were briskly preparing for the final perilous moments of descent. They had jettisoned the Service Module just before the atmosphere dramatically braked their speed from 24,602 miles per hour to only 168. Then, before the searingly hot gasses that envelop a spacecraft on re-entry blacked out communications, Neil Armstrong reported, almost nostalgically: “We have the moon in the field of view right now.”

As Columbia plunged to earth, its computerized guidance system took over and tilted the leading edge of the heat shield ever so slightly, to give the command ship more lift. That maneuver, a departure from the original flight plan, carried the craft 205 miles farther downrange to avoid a Pacific storm. A few moments later, swaying gently under its three bright orange and white chutes, Apollo 11 dropped into the Pacific nine miles away from the Hornet and only 1.7 miles off target.

For Astronauts Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the journey concluded as flawlessly as it had begun 195 hours, 18 minutes and 21 seconds earlier. President Nixon, waiting aboard the Hornet to greet the astronauts, hailed their achievement with buoyant enthusiasm. At the same time, over 4,000 miles away in Houston’s Mission Control, nerve center of the flight, John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge that the U.S. would land a man on the moon “before this decade is out” flashed on a display board. Near by, a smaller screen carried Apollo 11 ‘s Eagle emblem along with the immensely proud statement: “Task accomplished . . . July 1969.”

It was not accomplished without grave risks—from the initial launching atop a rocket brimful of explosive propellants, to the final splashdown in rolling seas. Perhaps most perilous of all were the maneuvers near and on the moon—if only because they had never before been attempted. As the mission reached its climactic moments and Eagle, the lunar module, was curving down to within a few miles of the moon, Eagle’s computer reported: “Program alarm.” Eagle’s on-board computer was being asked to make too many calculations in the frenetic moments before touchdown. It had begun to balk at having to track Columbia while also making the final descent. “It gave us grave concern,” said Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft. Mission Control quickly spotted the cause and ordered the rendezvous radar turned off to remedy the situation. And then, unhappy with the terrain of the landing site, Armstrong took over the manual controls. Had he not done so, the LM would have set down in an area strewn with boulders.

Not long after Eagle’s successful touchdown, the Soviet space vehicle Luna 15 met with a less fortunate fate. The unmanned ship dropped from her lunar orbit and headed for the moon’s surface. Telemetered data picked up by Western observatories indicated that Luna had hit too hard to survive. To most space experts, the failure was one more proof that the Russians are months if not years behind the U.S. in space technology.

Apollo’s Star Performer

For Armstrong and Aldrin, the next nerve-racking maneuver was lift-off from the moon’s surface. The squat, 172-Ib. ascent engine had been test-fired more than 3,000 times, but this was no test. Houston radioed: “You’re cleared for takeoff.” Replied Aldrin: “Roger, understand. We’re No. 1 on the runway.” Seconds later, tension dissolved; Eagle was airborne, headed into a lunar orbit. Within four hours, the module had rendezvoused and docked with Columbia on the far side of the moon. Then Armstrong and Aldrin left the LM so quickly that ground controllers, caught by surprise, sounded a bit put out. “You beat us to the punch,” groused Mission Control. And why not? The two moon walkers were as anxious to return to the mother ship as Columbia’s Pilot Collins was anxious to see them.

Buoyed by the presence of human companions after 27 hours 47 minutes of solitude, Collins took over as Apollo’s star performer. During a telecast to earth on the second night of the homeward voyage, Collins hammed it up by showing earthlings how someone could drink water in space. Turning a spoonful of water upside down, he left the globules eerily suspended in the gravity-free cabin. Then, like a trout snapping at a fly, he “captured” the drops with his mouth.

Columbia’s homeward heading was so accurate” that only one of the three scheduled course-correcting rocket firings was needed. The uneventful journey also gave the astronauts unusually long periods of sleep and relaxation. “Apollo 11, this is Houston,” crackled the ship’s radio during one particularly long silent stretch. “Are you still up there?”

If the flight was smooth, so was the landing—except for a brief moment after splashdown, when Columbia was capsized by 6-ft. swells. But it was quickly righted by large flotation bags, or balloons, released from its submerged tip.

The recovery team opened the hatch, tossed in the bulky Biological Isolation Garments (BIGs) and then helped the astronauts out of their spacecraft. On a rubber life raft the astronauts scrubbed down with Betadine, an iodine-based disinfectant. Hoisted by helicopter aboard the Hornet, the astronauts were soon settled in comfortable isolation inside a biologically “clean” van to begin 18 days of quarantine.

On to the Ocean of Storms

Although scientists are fairly certain that the moon supports no life, NASA has taken care to guard against lunar infection. During the homeward voyage, Columbia’s environmental-control system circulated the air within the capsule more than 100 times, passing it through special filters. On earth, the precautions were equally stringent. Besides the astronauts, the only persons allowed in the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) were a doctor and an engineer. During the next three days, about all that relieved the tedium was a video-tape replay of the moon walk. The most interested viewer was Collins, one of the few human beings who had not yet had a chance to see that epic.

When the Hornet arrived at Pearl Harbor, the van was hauled by helicopter to nearby Hickam Air Force Base, flown by an Air Force C-141 transport to Houston, then trundled on the flatbed of a diesel truck to the Space Center. There the astronauts were transferred to the $15 million Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) that was built especially for men returning from the moon. Its provisions for recreation include a lounge for cards, a game room with pool table and exercising equipment, and a film library (Goodbye, Columbus, Romeo and Juliet). But until their quarantine ends, the astronauts can speak to their wives only by telephone or through glass partitions.

If their earthly ordeal seems slightly annoying and anticlimactic, the astronauts show no signs of regret. To them, the conquest of the moon was far more than a personal triumph. “We’ve come to the conclusion,” said Aldrin on the night before splashdown, “that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the moon. More even than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Apollo 11 has surely pointed the way for an era of exploration that carry man to the edges of the system and ultimately to the stars.

But for now, the moon remains a continuing challenge. Only hours after Columbia and her crewmen were plucked of the Pacific, U.S. space officials an that Apollo 12 will lift off Cape Kennedy on November 14. Its target: the Ocean of Storms, several miles northeast of Apollo 11 ‘s Tranquillity Base.