Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (35 page)

At around 600 feet Armstrong activated the hand controller and, following the pilot's maxim of 'when in doubt, land long', cut his rate of descent and tipped
Eagle
forward slightly. Flying the spacecraft like a helicopter, Neil allowed the main engine to carry them across the dangers below, at a speed of 40mph. Now entering the dead-man's box, if the engine failed there was little he could do about it. Come what may, in less than three minutes the limited amount of fuel would force him down. Yet looking at the ground ahead Neil still didn't like what he saw.

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'Pretty rocky area.'

Ignoring the difficulties below, Buzz continued to support Neil with a constant account of their progress, his life now in Armstrong's hands.

Aldrin: '600 feet, down at 19 [feet per second].'

Aldrin: '540 feet, down at 15.'

Aldrin: 'OK, 400 feet, down at 9; 58 [feet per second] forward.'

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'No problem.'

Aldrin: '350 feet, down at 4 ... 330, 3½ down. OK, you're pegged on horizontal velocity.'

Uncertain where he was and running low on fuel, Neil finally spotted a suitable area, sandwiched between more craters and another boulder field. By now 'quite concerned' about the fuel level, he still had some distance to cover to reach safety.
³⁵
'I was being absolutely adamant,' Armstrong later said, 'about my right to be wishy-washy about where I was going to land.'
³⁶

In Houston, Janet put her arm round Ricky's shoulder as she sat with a hand over her mouth. To most TV viewers there was barely any indication of just how much pressure the men were under.

As he cleared an 80-foot crater, Armstrong was still covering a greater distance horizontally than vertically. At less than 100 feet, with dust being blown aside and obscuring his visibility, he faced a multitude of competing demands. He needed to be edging forward at the moment of landing in order to stay clear of the dust kicked up by the rocket exhaust. The rate of velocity must not be fast enough to risk damaging the legs, and he would have to avoid a slope of more than 15 degrees. He could not land while drifting sideways, and he must avoid craters. At the same time he must remain aware of their abort options, his position relative to the Sun, and the fuel rate called out by Buzz. Above all he had to come down soon.

In Houston, the controllers could see the LM's odd trajectory and could not understand what was happening. Why wasn't he landing? Bob Carlton's figures showed there was just 5 per cent fuel remaining. In his relaxed southern drawl he called 60 seconds, Duke passing on the message. Later, Charlie Duke said the atmosphere was so tense you could have cut a chunk out of it. Anxious to do what he could to help the crew, at one point he was jabbed in the ribs by Deke who muttered, 'Shut up, Charlie, let 'em land!'
³⁷

Leaning against a doorframe in her living room, Joan Aldrin dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
³⁸
In homes around the world millions of people listened to the sound of one of the spacemen calmly reading out some numbers, everything apparently going smoothly.

Aldrin: '40 feet, down 2½. Picking up some dust.'

There was no mistaking that comment by anybody: the Moon was real, and at last so was the chance of landing on it.

Aldrin: '30 feet, 2½ down. Faint shadow.'

Aldrin: '4 forward, 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. OK. Down a half.'

Aldrin: '20 feet, down a half; drifting forward just a little bit. Good. OK.'

In Houston, Carlton counted down the seconds as the fuel supply reached a critical level. To Kranz he sounded completely unperturbed, as if 'out picking cotton'.
³⁹
Other than Carlton, the MOCR was silent, the rest of the controllers almost not daring to breathe as they helplessly waited for
Eagle
to land. Carlton reported there were just 45 seconds remaining. No-one reacted. Kranz knew the crew must now either abandon it or come down immediately. He didn't know how high they were when they'd started picking up dust, but since they must be within reach of the surface he had to accept that the final decision was Armstrong's.

Fifteen seconds later, Carlton spoke again, and again Duke passed on the warning.

Mission Control: '30 seconds.'

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'Forward drift?'

Armstrong was struggling to see the ground through the clouds of dirt rising up from the surface. He was a little confused, he said later, about
Eagle
's sideways motion and he tried to focus on anything that appeared to be static. 'I could see rocks and craters through this blowing dust,' he recalled.
⁴⁰

Aldrin: 'OK.'

Suddenly a blue light on Armstrong's instrument panel lit up as one of the six-foot probes beneath
Eagle
's landing pads made contact.

Aldrin: 'Contact light.'

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'Shutdown.'

The right and forward landing pads reached the ground simultaneously as Neil brought
Eagle
smoothly down to the surface. He had intended to let the LM fall the last three feet but he didn't have time to switch the engine off early, as planned.
⁴¹
'It just settled down like a helicopter on the ground and landed,' Armstrong later said.
⁴²

Aldrin: 'OK. Engine stop. ACA out of detent [the hand controller needed to be put in the correct position].'

Armstrong: 'Out of detent. Auto.'

Aldrin: 'Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off; 413 is in [a reference to an AGS program].'

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'Engine arm is off.'

Neil, the soft-spoken auditor's son from small-town America, had landed on the Moon. It was later established that he had more fuel than he thought (which wasn't registered due to sloshing in the tanks). Nevertheless Armstrong had enough for only another 25 seconds of flight. Now, his immediate task was to confirm the landing for the benefit of everyone listening in. Reluctant to say 'Houston,
Eagle
,
Eagle
has landed', he had decided in advance what he was going to say and had warned Charlie Duke.

Duke: 'We copy you down,
Eagle
.'

Armstrong: 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed.'

Still wearing their helmets and gloves, Armstrong and Aldrin smiled at each other and warmly shook hands. Buzz later said, 'I had known what he was going to say, but he had never told me when he was going to say it.'
⁴³

While Buzz's emotional reaction to the landing was 'quickly suppressed', in Joan Aldrin's front room everyone burst into applause – everyone other than Joan, who left them to it and walked into Buzz's study in search of privacy.
⁴⁴
In the Armstrong household, Janet and Ricky hugged each other in delight.
⁴⁵

In New York, an announcement was made at Yankee Stadium, where 16,000 people cheered and sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. In Moscow, cosmonauts – including Alexei Leonov, who had performed the world's first EVA – heard the landing on television and applauded their rivals' achievement. In Britain, TV viewers were glued to the country's first all-night broadcast, including coverage of jubilant scenes in Trafalgar Square. In Japan, Emperor Hirohito also followed the landing on television, and later cancelled his plans in order to watch the moonwalk. It was 3.17pm in Houston, where cheering and applause in Mission Control's viewing gallery took the controllers by surprise. 'There's nothing in training that prepares you for that second,' Kranz remembered.
⁴⁶
John Houbolt, hoping the world would freeze at that moment, was congratulated by Wernher von Braun amid a frenzy of flag-waving and back-slapping. The euphoria threatened to catch on in the MOCR, but between them Slayton and Kranz brought the noise back to an acceptable level so that the team could establish whether
Eagle
was in any immediate danger.

Duke: 'Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.'

Duke slumped back in his chair and grinned at Slayton.
⁴⁷

Armstrong: 'Thank you.'

Duke: 'You're looking good here.'

Armstrong [to Aldrin]: 'OK. Let's get on with it. [To Houston] OK. We're going to be busy for a minute.'

They needed to quickly check that the LM was safe. If an emergency rendezvous were needed
Eagle
would have to launch within the next 12 minutes, before
Columbia
flew out of reach. Prior to the mission, it had been agreed to make two successive decisions at this point as to whether it was safe to stay. Less than two minutes after the landing, the flight controllers quickly checked the LM's systems before announcing all was well. They confirmed their decision seven minutes later, after a more detailed study of the telemetry. Once Michael passed out of range he would not return for another two hours, so for a little while yet at least Neil and Buzz had the Moon to themselves.

Chapter 13
SNEAKING UP ON THE PAST

For astronomers and geologists, Apollo 11 promised to offer a unique glimpse into the earliest years of the Moon, the Earth and the solar system. Relative to the Earth, the Moon is so big that some astronomers don't regard it as a moon at all but more the smaller partner in a binary planetary system. Many of the features on the near side are big enough to be seen with the naked eye, including mountainous regions rising to thousands of feet. But, since it orbits the Earth primarily (and does not orbit the Sun directly, in the way the Earth does), the Moon is not officially classified as a planet by the International Astronomical Union. It is better described as Earth's only natural satellite.

Information given to the press before the launch offered three competing theories for its origin.
¹
While some experts believed the Moon evolved separately from (but at the same time as) the Earth, others thought its mass was once part of the Earth itself until driven into space by some cataclysmic impact. A third idea suggested it had wandered through space until captured by the Earth's gravitational field.
²
In the search for the truth, the Moon's most alluring feature was the promise it held of an unprecedented look into the long-lost history of the Earth. In the billions of years since our planet was formed, climate conditions and continental drift have erased important clues about the past. Seas have come and gone, coastlines have vanished and mountain ranges have been greatly eroded. The lunar surface, however, undisturbed by the processes alive on Earth, remains suspended in a deathly state of preservation. While the Earth's surface is rarely older than 500 million years, there was hope that an astronaut on a lunar mission might find rocks dating back to more than four billion years. In 1969, scientists imagined the Moon would reveal the dormant secrets of the solar system's formative years.

Quite how well preserved the Moon would prove to be depended partly on its history of seismic and volcanic activity. Geologists had been trying to land a seismometer on the surface since the Ranger 1 mission. It was hoped that the instrument carried by Apollo 11 would finally answer some of their questions about the Moon's internal structure. Whether they could find answers to other questions would depend on the astronauts' ability to find valuable examples of moon rocks and successfully bring them home. To stir things up a bit, Armstrong had considered sneaking a piece of limestone (the sedimentary product of sea creatures) into the LM and placing it into one of the two rock-boxes.
³
Samples of material were due to be sent to teams of scientists at 127 laboratories around the world, their research interests ranging from rare gases and metals to the analysis of lunar glass.
⁴
Looking for an exclusive insight into the earliest days of the Moon, they were hoping to be whisked away on a bountiful journey into the distant mists of time. It would all begin the moment someone stepped on to the surface.

For astronauts hoping to walk on the Moon, the most striking features were not the rocks found in a specific area but the life-threatening conditions prevalent across the entire lunar terrain. Unprotected by an atmosphere, during the height of the lunar day the ground soars to a temperature of 243°F. Radiation levels are significantly greater than on Earth, occasionally becoming dangerously high, and micrometeoroids regularly pelt the surface. Armstrong and Aldrin would have to overcome these dangers if they were to leave the relative safety of
Eagle
. And once outside, there was no certainty they would find what they were looking for. Their landing ground had been chosen largely because of its flat terrain rather than for any geological value. They had received little training specific to the site and they were not expected to retrieve much more than samples of whatever they found lying beside the spacecraft.
⁵
Yet slender as these pickings might be, once brought home to Earth they would be unique. Although the dangers were considerable, so were the potential rewards.