Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (12 page)

By 1969, Kraft had become the director of flight operations and in this capacity he appointed four flight directors to support Apollo 11, each with his own team of controllers. During the critical moments of a mission Bob Gilruth, Kraft and other senior figures sat at the back of the room, in 'management row'. Minutes before the launch of Apollo 11, Kraft had asked so many niggly questions that Charlesworth had been forced to tell his boss, 'Chris, if you don't settle down, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the room. You're making me nervous.'
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Risking the wrath of God, Kraft gave a thumbs-up and sat back in his chair. Nobody argued with the flight director.

Six hours into the mission, Charlesworth's green team handed over to the white team of Gene Kranz, a former fighter pilot who regarded his job almost as a personal crusade. From the start, NASA had been a civilian organisation but many of its staff had a military background, as was reflected in the command and control structure adopted in Mission Control. This was also apparent in the sense of self-discipline fostered by Gilruth, which extended to unwritten rules on beards and long hair. No-one's hair was more military than Gene's. Kranz was regarded by Kraft as 'sometimes too militaristic, but so quick and smart that it was sometimes scary to remember that he was human'.
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Kranz's military bearing largely stemmed from his perception that NASA was defending the frontline in the Cold War, and that as a 'Cold War warrior' he was flying the flag as much as anyone in uniform. A loving family man who was prone to tears of emotion during the highs and lows of his work, Kranz was warm and easy-going. Wearing a white waistcoat embroidered with silver thread, made by his wife in honour of the mission, at 2.30pm Gene slipped into Charlesworth's seat. 'A position in Mission Control was the next best thing to being in the spaceship,' Kranz later wrote.
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In a surprise addition to the flight-plan, he was soon to get an unexpected glimpse of space-flight for himself.

Armstrong: 'If you'd like to delay PTC [passive thermal control] for ten minutes or so, we can shoot you some TV of a seven-eights Earth.'

Houston: 'Apollo 11, Houston. We're ready at Goldstone for the TV. It'll be recorded at Goldstone and then replayed back over here, Neil, any time you want to turn her on, we're ready. Over.'

Having completed TLI, retrieved the LM and abandoned the third stage, the crew had entered a period of relative calm. The risk of the spacecraft suddenly losing pressure had decreased and the astronauts were finally able to remove their bulky pressure suits along with the uncomfortable urine-collection and fecal-containment devices. The struggle to fold the suits, stuff them into bags and stow them under a couch 'brought about a good deal of confusion', Buzz said, 'with parts and pieces floating about the cabin as we tried to keep logistics under control'.
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They pulled on two-piece, Teflon-fabric flight-suits over their underwear before replacing the spacecraft's carbon dioxide filter and tending to other routine tasks, including navigation checks, urine dumps and computer updates. Ten and a half hours into the mission, they were ready to try out the television equipment.

Collins: 'OK, Houston. You suppose you could turn the Earth a little bit so we can get a little bit more than just water?'

Houston: 'Roger, 11. I don't think we got much control over that. Looks like you'll have to settle for the water.'

Armstrong: 'Roger. We're seeing the centre of the Earth as viewed from the spacecraft in the eastern Pacific Ocean. We have not been able to visually pick up the Hawaiian Island chain, but we can clearly see the western coast of North America. The United States, the San Joaquin Valley, the High Sierras, Baja California, and Mexico down as far as Acapulco, and the Yucatán Peninsula; and you can see on through Central America to the northern coast of South America, Venezuela and Colombia. I'm not sure you'll be able to see all that on your screen down there.'

Houston: 'Roger, Neil. We just wanted a narrative such that we can – when we get the playback, we can sort of correlate what we're seeing. Thank you very much.'

Collins: 'I haven't seen anything but the DSKY [computer] so far.'

Houston: 'Looks like they're hogging the window.'

Armstrong zoomed in on the Earth, the last refuge of colour in a lonely expanse of black emptiness. Already the planet barely filled his window. As the Earth gradually grew smaller, it gave the crew their only sense of movement, yet this was so slow that Aldrin felt 'we could not immediately detect the fact that the Earth was shrinking as we sped away from it'.
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With nothing else outside the window to indicate speed it was hard to appreciate that they were moving at all, as was apparent in the TV pictures sent back from more than 50,900 miles away. The colour footage, lasting a little over 16 minutes, was received by NASA's Goldstone communications station in California before being passed to Mission Control an hour later. From there it was fed to the TV networks.

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After returning to Houston from the Cape aboard a NASA aircraft, Janet Armstrong slipped through the huddle of reporters outside her home and quickly switched on the squawk box and the TV. She was just in time to catch the Apollo 11 broadcast. Since the TV transmission had not been included in the flightplan, NASA was taken by surprise and did not alert the wives. Of the three of them, only Janet caught Neil's images of Earth. For the vast majority of people watching across the nation this was their first opportunity to see anything of the mission for themselves. For the families of the crew, it was hard to believe that after the months of preparation the flight was actually happening. Janet knew that Neil was finally getting a chance to lay to rest his frustration following Gemini 8. Walking on the Moon was not a driving motivation for Armstrong; for the test pilot fascinated by flying machines since childhood, this mission was principally about the pioneering descent to the surface. For Neil, for Janet and for their children, this was the culmination of everything that had shaped their lives over the last 13 years, since the days when Janet had let the Sun heat tubs of water outside their remote cabin as the only way to bathe Ricky.
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They were still working on the plumbing when Karen was born in 1959.
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In June 1961, Janet had taken the children to Seattle where Armstrong was working with Boeing on a NASA project. While visiting a park, two-year-old Karen was running through the grass when she tripped and fell. 'We went immediately home,' Janet said. 'She had a little nosebleed with it, and we thought maybe she'd had a little concussion. By that evening we noticed that her eyes weren't operating properly.' Over time, it became clear that Karen was getting progressively worse; she continued to fall over and her eyes were almost constantly crossed. By the time Janet took her to hospital her eyes had begun to roll and her speech had become affected. Karen was diagnosed as suffering from a malignant tumour growing within the middle part of her brain stem. For seven weeks X-rays were used to try to reduce the tumour, though they disrupted her sense of balance so that Karen could no longer stand. 'She was the sweetest thing. She never, ever complained,' Janet later said.

That summer Neil took two weeks off work so that he and Janet could stay with Karen round the clock while also taking care of four-year-old Ricky. The treatment seemed to work and Karen began to show signs of improvement. She learned to crawl again, and by playing with her Ricky helped her regain a sense of balance. 'It was Ricky who told me, in October, that something was the matter with Karen again,' Janet said. By this time the little girl's body was too weak to take any further treatment and it was decided that she would be happier at home. 'She made it through Christmas,' Janet remembered. 'It seems like the day Christmas was over, she just went downhill ... it just overcame her.' Karen died at her home in the California hills on 28 January 1962, Neil and Janet's sixth wedding anniversary. She was a little less than three years old.
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Neil's boss at Edwards, Joe Walker, had lost a two-year-old son in 1958. His wife Grace later described how those who live with the threat of death and danger try to deal with grief: 'I would say it's a pilot thing. Most of them act pretty stoic. They would say they had an "okay flight" and then they would go into the bathroom and vomit. I think Joe was a little more supportive for me than Neil was for Janet. Now I say that not as a criticism, but just the way Neil was – he was very tight emotionally.'
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Neil's sister June remembered things differently: 'Somehow he felt responsible for her death ... in terms of "is there some gene in my body that made the difference?" ... I thought his heart would break.'
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Neil threw himself into new challenges at work. Three weeks after Karen's funeral John Glenn orbited the Earth, and that spring Neil decided his future lay in space-flight, although the extent to which Karen's death influenced his decision is hard to estimate.
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In the years that followed he talked of Karen so infrequently in public that many of his colleagues did not know that he had ever had a daughter. When the family moved to Houston many of their possessions remained in storage, and only some of the most important items were unpacked – including photos of Karen.

In 1964, many of these pictures were destroyed when a fire ripped through the Armstrongs' home in the early hours of 24 April. Struggling to get through to the local fire department, Janet rushed out into the garden and screamed for help from their neighbours. The family lived next door to Ed White, who was a year away from his pioneering space walk. Ed and his wife Pat had grown close to the Armstrongs; the wives saw much of each other and the Whites' children had an open invitation to play in the Armstrongs' pool. While Janet rushed out of the house, Neil went to get their ten-month-old baby, Mark. Meanwhile Ed flew downstairs, and after grabbing a garden hose he started to tackle the flames. He took the baby from Neil and handed him over the back fence to Pat, allowing Neil to rush back into the house in search of Ricky. By this point, with the walls glowing red and the glass cracking in the windows, Janet had to hose down the hot concrete floor just to be able to stand on it. Pressing a wet towel over his face, Neil held his breath and fought his way back into the burning building. 'When you take a whiff of that thick smoke, it's terrible,' he said. Desperately, he tried to reach Ricky's room while fearing what he might find there; he later described this as the longest journey of his life. Fortunately, Ricky was unhurt. Scrabbling the boy into his arms, Neil put the towel over his son's face and raced outside where Ed was still fighting the flames. Together the two men pushed the family's cars out of the garage, then returned to tackle the fire. Ed was as strong as an ox and without his help things could have been far more serious. The Armstrongs stayed with the Whites for a few days while they assessed the damage and listed their lost possessions. The blaze, caused by an electrical fault, consumed so much of the house it took six months to rebuild it.
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During this time, Neil continued to work on the Gemini programme. He initially served as the Gemini 5 backup commander before flying aboard Gemini 8, a mission that ultimately won him praise from many in the Manned Spacecraft Center. While some of his peers questioned the action he took, robust opinions were part and parcel of life in the Astronaut Office. In Armstrong's case the negative comments were not taken seriously by those in authority: two days after he landed he was named as the backup commander of Gemini 11. Chris Kraft believed that 'Armstrong's touch was as fine as any astronaut'.
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The Gemini 8 problems began just as Gene Kranz was settling in during a shift handover in Mission Control. 'I was damned impressed with Neil,' Kranz later said. For him, fault lay with the organisation as a whole rather than with the mission commander. 'We failed to realise that when two spacecraft are docked they must be considered as one,' Kranz noted – a lesson he came to view as one of the most valuable of the entire Gemini programme.
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During this period Neil also supported the fledgling Apollo programme, the components of which were being developed at various sites around the country. While Mercury and Gemini used converted military missiles to take men into space, Apollo would rely on von Braun's Saturn booster, the first large launch vehicle designed and built by NASA. Assembled by the Marshall Space Flight Center, the new rocket was powered by a cluster of eight modified engines taken from the Jupiter booster. It successfully completed its maiden flight on 27 October 1961. In the first of ten successful launches, the 162-foot-tall Saturn I flew for eight minutes, reaching more than 3,600mph.
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A month later, the contract to build the command and service modules was awarded to North American Aviation, who had built the X-15. North American's work was to be managed by the Manned Spacecraft Center, which would also oversee designs for the lunar module, submitted by the Grumman Corporation. Due to the protracted row over lunar orbit rendezvous, Grumman was not selected until November 1962.
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