Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (41 page)

As part of their preparations to leave lunar orbit, the crew collected rubbish, urine bags and items they no longer needed and dumped everything inside the LM.
Eagle
was to be jettisoned and left to freely coast around the Moon. Its decaying orbit would eventually bring it crashing down to the surface. Once Neil and Buzz had taken a last look at the cabin of their spacecraft, the hatches were replaced and Collins fired pyrotechnics to separate the two vehicles. 'There she goes,' said Armstrong, 'it was a good one.'
²⁰
At 6.41pm, Collins flew
Columbia
away from the LM, and as they began to leave it behind they saw its thrusters fire as
Eagle
loyally held its position.
²¹

Two hours later,
Columbia
was passing the near side on the twenty-ninth orbit when Charlie Duke offered to read them some news.

Starting off: Congratulatory messages on the Apollo 11 mission have been pouring into the White House from world leaders in a steady stream all day. Among the latest are telegrams from Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Great Britain and the King of Belgium. The world's press has been dominated by news of Apollo 11. Some newsmen estimate that more than 60 per cent of the news used in papers across the country today concerned your mission. The
New York Times
which, as we mentioned before, has had such a demand for its edition of the paper today – even though it ran 950,000 copies – said it will reprint the whole thing on Thursday as a souvenir edition. And Premier Alexei Kosygin has sent congratulations to you and President Nixon through former Vice President Humphrey who is visiting Russia. The cosmonauts have also issued a statement of congratulations. Humphrey quoted Kosygin as saying, 'I want you to tell the President and the American people that the Soviet Union desires to work with the United States in the cause of peace.

Duke then moved on to news from home.

You're probably interested in the comments your wives have made. Neil, Jan said about yesterday's activities, 'The evening was unbelievably perfect. It is an honour and a privilege to share with my husband, the crew, the Manned Spacecraft Center, the American public, and all mankind, the magnificent experience of the beginning of lunar exploration.' She was then asked if she considered the Moon landing the greatest moment in her life. She said, 'No, that was the day we were married.' And Mike, Pat said simply, 'It was fantastically marvellous.' Buzz, Joan said – apparently couldn't quite believe the EVA on the Moon. She said, 'It was hard to think it was real until the men actually moved. After the Moon touchdown, I wept because I was so happy.' But she added, 'The best part of the mission will be the splashdown.'

After one more orbit, Michael was ready to make the final significant burn of the mission, the trans-Earth injection manoeuvre, which would launch them out of lunar orbit and send them on their journey home. At 11.55pm they ignited the engine, and for two minutes and 30 seconds a stream of flame accelerated them from less than 3,700mph to 5,900mph, enough to free them from the grip of the Moon. Coasting back to Earth, once again they maintained the passive thermal control roll – slowly turning the spacecraft in order to distribute evenly the impact of the Sun's heat. As on the outward journey, platform alignments, fuel cell purges and waste dumps needed to be regularly tended to, but other than their routine chores there was little to do beyond watching the Moon get smaller. 'What did we do with our free time?' Collins asked himself later. 'We mostly just waited. We had plenty of time to eat, had plenty of time to get rested up.'
²²

At last they had time to complete some minor tasks. It had been hoped that before
Eagle
parted from
Columbia
, prior to the descent to the surface, the crew would have time to frank a first-day cover commemorating a new 10-cent stamp showing an astronaut on the Moon. The idea was that the envelope would bear proof that it had been handled by the crew only hours before the landing. They had been given ink and a rubber stamp marked with the date 20 July, but they did not have a chance to use them until 22 July, the seventh day of the mission.
²³

That night, as they aimed their camera out the window during their TV broadcast, Charlie Duke identified what he could see.

Mission Control: 'We see the Earth in the centre of the screen ... and see some land-masses in the centre, at least I guess that's what it is. It's very hazy at this time on our Eidephor [screen]. Over.'

Collins: 'Believe that's where we just came from.'

Mission Control: 'It is, huh? Well, I'm really looking at a bad screen here. Stand by one. Hey, you're right.'

Collins: 'It's not bad enough not finding the right landing spot, but when you haven't even got the right planet!'

Mission Control: 'I'll never live that one down.'

Collins: 'We're making it get smaller and smaller here to make sure that it really is the one we're leaving.'

Mission Control: 'All right. That's enough you guys.'

On the following day, Wednesday 23 July, Houston informed the men that Nixon was planning to meet them on their return. The president was about to embark on a trip to seven nations and would begin his travels with a visit to the USS
Hornet
, the aircraft carrier that was waiting to recover the crew. As well as international updates there were also domestic headlines: 'A little closer to home here, back in Memphis, Tennessee, a young lady who is presently tipping the scales at eight pounds, two ounces, was named "Module" by her parents, Mr and Mrs Eddie Lee McGhee. "It wasn't my idea," said Mrs McGhee, "it was my husband's." She said she had baulked at the name Lunar Module McGhee, because it didn't sound too good, but apparently they have compromised on just Module. Over.' The crew were also told that the residents of Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and San Francisco were planning to make their cities visible by switching on all their available lights.

That evening Janet Armstrong and Pat Collins took their children to Mission Control to watch the crew's final TV broadcast. With the mission drawing to a close, each of the men had prepared a personal statement. After Neil delivered a brief introduction, he handed over to Michael. Collins was conscious that while TV audiences around the world knew of the three astronauts, Apollo 11 represented the work of thousands of people who did not receive the same recognition. Paying tribute to those who had put together the hardware on which their lives depended, he thanked the 'American workmen' who had built the spacecraft, the technicians who had assembled and tested everything and everyone who had worked on the mission at the Manned Spacecraft Center. 'This operation,' said Collins, 'is somewhat like the periscope of a submarine. All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all those, I would like to say, thank you very much.'

Buzz took a different tack, and suggested that the mission was representative of something more than the will of one nation. To him, Apollo 11 stood 'as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown'. He added, 'Neil's statement the other day upon first setting foot on the surface of the Moon, "This is a small step for a man, but a great leap for mankind," I believe sums up these feelings very nicely.' Buzz then finished with a verse from Psalms before handing back to Armstrong, who ended the broadcast with a farewell to everyone listening in: 'We would like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people, tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Goodnight from Apollo 11.'

After the broadcast, looking down at the lights shining on the west coast of North America, the crew prepared for the final night of the mission.

By the morning of Thursday 24 July the crescent-shaped Earth was growing rapidly larger in the windows. Gravity was pulling the spacecraft towards the planet with ever-increasing speed. By the time the crew hit the atmosphere they would be travelling at nearly 25,000 miles per hour, 40 per cent faster than a Mercury capsule.
²⁴
At this velocity, if they came in at too steep an angle they would burn up; if their approach were too shallow they risked bouncing off the atmosphere on a trajectory that would take them back into space. The acceptable gap between the two was just 40 miles wide. If the Earth were the size of a football, this re-entry corridor would be little thicker than the edge of a sheet of paper.

After securing loose items in the cabin, the men took seasickness pills while working their way through the re-entry checklist.
²⁵
Sitting in the left-hand commander's seat, Michael kept an eye on their progress by monitoring the angle of the horizon, assisted by Neil in the middle couch who was reading from the DSKY. The computer would guide them down, but Collins had to be prepared to take over should anything unexpected develop. 'As our journey draws to a close,' he later wrote, 'the consequence of a screw-up looms as large as life, literally.'
²⁶

Columbia
's shape was designed to produce a small amount of lift, like an aircraft wing. The angle at which the spacecraft fell could be altered by thrusters embedded in its hull, allowing some control over its path through the atmosphere. Collins had been expecting to fly just over a thousand miles during re-entry, but fearing turbulent weather in the landing zone Houston advised him to increase the ground-track to 1,500 miles. The
Hornet
had already moved to the new position, which was 800 miles southwest of Hawaii. By using the thrusters to change the angle of lift, the command module's flight-path could be extended. But the new landing point was at the far end of its range and Michael was concerned that should he need to take over from the computer he would be 'hard-pressed to come anywhere near the ship'.
²⁷

Twenty-seven minutes from re-entry,
Columbia
entered the Earth's shadow. Then, with just 14 minutes to go, the service module was jettisoned. After keeping the crew supplied with water, oxygen and electrical power throughout the mission, it was no longer needed, and the men watched it fly past their windows on its way to burning up in the atmosphere. At launch, Apollo 11 had been heavier than 3,300 tons; now all that remained was the command module, which weighed less than six.
Columbia
's blunt side, previously hidden by the service module, was protected by a heat-shield. Made of resin, the shield was ablative, in that as the temperature rose pieces of it would gradually flake off, exposing cooler material underneath.

Once their altitude fell to 67 miles (400,000 feet) above the Earth, the crew began to be buffeted about as
Columbia
ripped a burning hole through the night sky above the Solomon Islands, north-east of Australia.
²⁸
Wearing only their flight-suits, and sitting with their backs to the direction of travel, the men plummeted 33 miles towards the ocean while covering the first 500 miles of the ground-track. Falling too fast to push the air out of the way,
Columbia
hurtled through a blaze of colour as it collided with gaseous molecules beneath the heat-shield, smashing into them, generating friction and creating bursts of heat that accumulated into a fiery ball. 'We started to get all these colours past the windows,' Collins later remembered, 'subtle lavenders, light blue-greens, little touches of violet, and great variations mostly of blues and greens.'
²⁹
As flames rolled back the blackness of space, Michael believed they were 'flooding the entire Pacific basin with light'.
³⁰
The disintegration (or ionisation) of the molecules blocked radio signals, and for three minutes the crew were unable to talk to Houston. At 5,000°F, temperatures outside the spacecraft were hotter than the exhaust from the F-1 engines that had launched the men eight days earlier.
³¹
The command module's silver-coloured thermal shielding helped to prevent heat penetrating the cabin, and inside the crew were kept cool by the spacecraft's life-support system.

Eventually
Columbia
flattened out, at which point each man felt six and a half times heavier than his normal weight on Earth as the g-forces peaked at their maximum level. The spacecraft flew the next 500 miles more or less horizontally, but it was approaching the landing point too quickly and risked overshooting it. Following a predetermined plan, the computer shifted the command module's angle of attack, sending
Columbia
thousands of feet back up into the atmosphere. Then, as they dived down to cover the final 300 miles towards the landing point, the crew were given a second dose of high g-forces. By the time the spacecraft had descended to an altitude of 15 miles, it was plunging almost vertically.

At 24,000 feet, a cover protecting the apex of the command module was jettisoned and two small drogue parachutes were released, stabilising the descent.
³²
At 10,000 feet, three much larger parachutes opened. Looking up out of the windows, Michael watched the orange and white streams of cloth blossom into three great canopies. Together they eased
Columbia
through banks of stratocumulus clouds. The men struggled to regain control of their arms and legs, now suddenly heavy with gravity.