One Giant – Candy Hatcher

ONE GIANT LEAP; 50 years later, the small step is still big

Palm Beach Post July 20, 2019

Candy Hatcher

CAPE KENNEDY

The spacemen were jabbering to Launch Control in technospeak, and their 36-story flying machine was groaning and purring, and NASA had announced, in its monotone voice, that Apollo 11 was ready to go. Everyone, especially the 1 million Americans clogging Brevard County’s bridges and highways and beaches this muggy July morning, was anxious, excited, straining to see the rocket about to be shot off to the moon.

No one wanted to miss the startup of engines or the tremble of Earth or the 800 feet of fire that would send three men toward the stars. This was history. A marriage of patriotism and technology. The realization of a $24 billion dream.

President Kennedy said 2,974 days earlier that America should put a man on the moon before the decade was done, and by gosh, America was doing it!

The effort had taken eight years and seven astronauts’ lives, had involved 21 manned space flights, 60,000 NASA managers working with 400,000 engineers and technicians.

And in four days, if all went well, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would step out of a fragile, spiderlike spacecraft and onto the moon, collect bags of rocks, wave to the half-billion folks watching them on television, stick an American flag in the shallow moon soil, salute it and come home.

It was 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, and Armstrong and Aldrin and Michael Collins, three serious-minded test pilots with the right stuff, were sealed in a capsule and itching to get going. They received one last message:

Godspeed.

The journey had begun with Kennedy’s challenge to Congress on May 25, 1961. Russia was beating the daylights out of America in the space race. The Russians had launched a satellite and put a man into orbit. America had sent one man into space, and he was there for only 15 minutes. Few thought America could do it.

Nevertheless, Congress budgeted the money and sent NASA scurrying to build rockets and train astronauts and figure out some way, in eight years, to land a man on the moon. Before the Russians.

While this technological scramble was under way, Kennedy was assassinated. Thousands of Americans were killed in Vietnam. Thousands more staged protests and campus sit-ins. Civil rights disputes turned bloody. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered.

The moon mission provided relief, an alter ego to America’s divisive mood. The nation looked to the heavens and found a goal – well defined, tangible, attainable. A sense of purpose. A rallying cry. To hell with the cost.

We actually had a shot at beating the Russians!

Said Armstrong: ”I believed, I think we all believed, that a successful lunar landing could, might inspire men around the world to believe that impossible goals were possible, that the hope for solutions to humanity’s problems was not a joke.”

In January 1969, NASA announced the Apollo 11 crew. Armstrong, 38, an engineer, historian and an extremely private man, would command the spacecraft and if it landed safely on the moon, be the first human to set foot there.

Aldrin, 39, an engineer and technical wizard, would pilot the lunar module, called Eagle. During his last weekend at home before the launch, Aldrin dismantled and reassembled his family’s dishwasher, which had never worked well. When he left Houston for Cape Kennedy, he said, ”it was working perfectly.”

Collins, 38, a mild-mannered pilot and artist, was in charge of the command module Columbia. He spent the weekend before the launch in a plane flying loop-the-loops to get his body ready for space.

These astronauts weren’t close, yet they’d have to live together for a week in a space about the size of the inside of a station wagon. Collins suggested the three were ”amiable strangers” who got along fine but spoke only of technical minutiae. They had work to do, and they were honored, no, thrilled, to be doing it.

The day of the launch, they awoke shortly after 4 a.m., ate steak and eggs, put on their bulky white spacesuits and climbed into the Saturn V rocket poised on launch pad 39A.

”Here I am,” Collins wrote, ”a white male, age 38, height 5’11”” weight 165 pounds, salary $17,000 annum, resident of a Texas suburb, with black spots on my roses, state of mind unsettled, about to be shot off to the moon. Yes, to the moon.”

Rockwell engineer John Tribe was watching the launch and holding his breath. ”It’s always amazing when all that hardware works,” he said. ”No matter how many times you check it out and assure yourself the design is right, you think, ‘Good Lord, those . . . engines. How can that all work, how can it stay working for 8 1/2 minutes?”’

But Apollo 11, a 6 1/2-million-pound machine when it was launched, performed perfectly -accelerating to 6,340 mph as it circled the Earth and increasing to 24,200 mph as it headed for the moon.

”What a feeling of power!” Collins wrote in his book. ”Those aren’t counties going by, those are countries or continents; not lakes, but oceans!”

Three hours after liftoff, Apollo 11 had gone around the world nearly twice, and those who came to the cape to watch the launch were still bumper-to-bumper on the road back to their motels.

The astronauts had brought mementos to leave behind: a plaque that said they had come in peace, a patch for the Apollo 1 crew that died on the launch pad in 1967, an American flag and two medallions for each of the Russian cosmonauts who had been killed. Some items would make a round trip: gold olive branch pins for their mothers and wives, a piece of the fabric from the Wright brothers’ 1903 airplane, the flags of 136 countries.

As Armstrong and Aldrin left Columbia for the vehicle that would take them to the moon’s surface, Collins looked through his window at the Eagle. ”Spindly legs are jutting up above a lumpy body that has neither symmetry nor grace,” he wrote. ”The weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky.”

But that’s not what he told his colleagues. ”I think you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle.”

More than 200,000 miles away, at Mission Control in Houston, the ”can-do guys” – the young, cool, imperturbable

NASA engineers monitoring the mission – were watching Eagle’s descent.

12:02 alarm, Armstrong relayed to Mission Control. The signal indicated a computer malfunction that could mean

Eagle would have to abort the landing.

Gene Kranz, the flight director supervising the descent, held his breath while his engineers huddled. They decided it must be a harmless computer overload. When Kranz asked his 26-year-old chief engineer whether Eagle should continue its descent or abort, the sweating engineer replied, in effect, ”Ignore the computer and trust me.”

Armstrong didn’t like the surface he was seeing and slowed the descent from 20 feet per second (13.6 mph) to 9 feet per second. He looked past the craters and rocky ridges for a smooth place to land.

Eagle was nearly out of fuel. If he ran out, Armstrong had two choices: Use the auxiliary fuel, which would send the module skyward and abort the moon landing, or crash.

Thirty seconds, Mission Control warned. Armstrong kept flying. Ten more seconds passed. Too late to switch to auxiliary fuel. Armstrong continued to fly. Finally, from the moon: ”Got it,” Armstrong said. ”Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

It was 4:17 p.m. on July 20. Aldrin, who Armstrong once called ”my most competent critic,” stuck out his hand and shook – hard – with his commander.

In the viewing room outside Mission Control, ”people started to cheer and applaud,” Kranz recalled. In the control room, Kranz and his crew had immediate checks to conduct to decide whether Eagle could stay on the moon.

But the cheering seeped into the control room and overwhelmed him.

”For a few seconds, it was difficult to speak,” he said. ”It was like somebody had bottled up every emotion a human being could have and suddenly let it all out.”

He needed to stop wasting precious seconds, needed to find some way to stop feeling and start thinking. He slammed his arm down on the table, shattering his pencil and bruising his arm from elbow to wrist.

Then things went back to normal at Mission Control. But not elsewhere in America.

A broadcaster at Yankee Stadium announced the landing to the 16,000 fans watching the Yankees beat the Washington Senators. The game stopped; everyone stood and sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Aldrin found the tiny wine chalice he’d brought from Webster Presbyterian Church and the passages he’d copied from the Book of John, and he asked everybody out there to be quiet, and he celebrated Communion.

”It was my hope that people would keep this whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning behind it all – a challenge, a quest, the human need to do these things.”

His actions made NASA a little nervous. The space agency already was embroiled in a battle with atheist Madalyn

Murray O’Hair, who was angry that the Apollo 8 crew had read from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas.

Nearly seven hours after the landing, Armstrong began climbing down to the moon surface. At 10:56 p.m., he stepped down with his left foot. ”That’s one small step for man . . . ah . . . one giant leap for mankind.”

Next, Aldrin came down, carrying the American flag. He planted it in the dense, rocky soil, then saluted it. And wet his pants while the world was watching.

The astronauts spent 2 1/2 hours on the moon, walking around, hopping, marveling, collecting rocks, talking to the president. They found a new mineral at Tranquility Base, dubbed armalcolite, for Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

The next day, the spindly machine lifted off the moon and rendezvoused with Columbia. Collins, whose secret terror had been returning to Earth alone, saw Aldrin come through the chute with a big smile. He grabbed Aldrin’s head and almost kissed it, then reached for Armstrong’s hand.

Eight days and three hours after the astronauts shot into space, they splashed back to Earth in the Pacific Ocean.

They were immediately quarantined, taken to a helicopter, then to a modified house trailer aboard an aircraft carrier. A band played “The Star Spangled Banner” and nearly everyone, including tough-guy flight director Gene Kranz, cried.

Back in Houston, the 20-by-10-foot screen that had displayed Apollo’s path to the moon and back, went black. Then these words appeared on the left:

”’I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.’ John F. Kennedy to Congress, May 1961.”

On the right-hand screen were these words: ”Task accomplished. July 1969.”

President Nixon, dancing a jig, declared it ”The greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” NASA administrator Tom Paine called the mission ”a triumph of the squares.”

The squares, meanwhile, were living with a colony of mice in their ”mobile quarantine facility.” If the mice started dying, the astronauts were in trouble. If they stayed healthy, the men would be released within three weeks.

The astronauts and their wives, who hated all the publicity and just wanted to be left alone, were sent on a 40-day goodwill tour to 22 countries.

Their lives changed. Armstrong became ”a recluse’s recluse,” moving to a farm in Ohio and refusing to talk about the moon voyage. Aldrin, now a consultant in Southern California, suffered a bout of depression and alcoholism. He explained it this way in his autobiography:

”My life was highly structured, and there had always existed a major goal of one sort or another. . . . Finally, there had been the most important goal of all, and it had been realized – I had gone to the moon. What to do next? What possible goal could I add now? . . . I was suffering from what poets have described as the melancholy of all things done.”

Collins became the first director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., but has since retired to fish off the coasts of North Carolina and Florida.

Kranz, who directed the moon landing, credits the mission with ”changing America’s thinking. Kids became interested in engineering. They wanted to be an astronaut; they wanted to design these magnificent things.”

It wasn’t that Apollo 11 was that different from Apollos 8 or 10, he said. It was that it made America believe in itself again.

Said Aldrin: ”When future generations remember Apollo just as we now recall the voyages of Columbus, they won’t be moved by the geopolitical posturing of the Cold War, the back-room politics on Capitol Hill, or the pork-barrel intrigues that throbbed beneath the surface of the program. They will remember, however, that in July 1969, people like themselves first set foot on the moon.”