Setting off

AN EARLY START

Although Armstrong and Aldrin ran some LM simulations on Tuesday, 15 July, they spent the remainder of the day relaxing in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. In the evening, Lew Hartzell served a dinner of broiled sirloin steak and buttered asparagus for the crew, their backups, the members of their support crew, and Deke Slayton. The three astronauts then chatted with their wives by telephone, and retired at 10 pm. After clearing away the dinner, Hartzell went to the camper he kept in the nearby parking lot, but as it was too hot to sleep there he slept in a spare bedroom in the crew quarters, awakening at 2.30 am to prepare breakfast.

Guenter F. Wendt’s job title was Pad Leader, but John Glenn had dubbed him der pad fuehrer on account of his Teutonic accent being as thick as the lenses of his spectacles. Although from Germany, he was not one of Wernher von Braun’s rocket team; he had flown night-fighters for the Luftwaffe, as an engineer. After the war he emigrated to the USA, got citizenship, and joined McDonnell Aircraft. When the company won the contract to build the Mercury spacecraft, Wendt was given the task of ensuring that the spacecraft was ready for launch – supervising it from the moment that it arrived at the Cape, to the sealing of its hatch. When the company produced the Gemini spacecraft he continued at the Cape. However, the contract for the Apollo spacecraft was given to North American Aviation, which appointed its own pad crew.[2] After the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a fire on the pad, Wally Schirra insisted that Wendt be rehired. Before Glenn’s flight Wendt had told his wife Annie that while he could not guarantee her husband’s safe return, he could promise that every effort would be made to ensure that the spacecraft was up to the job. This had remained his objective. Having spent most of 15 July methodically checking and rechecking, he went home at 6 pm, dozed until midnight, then rounded up three of the members of his team: NASA quality inspector ‘Lucky’ Chambers, North

American Rockwell mechanical technician John Grissinger, and backup crew member Fred Haise.

Meanwhile, at 11 pm the chill-down process had begun, preparatory to loading cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle. During the night, a communications issue on the ground delayed pumping liquid hydrogen into the S-II by 25 minutes, but this time was recovered during the scheduled hold at T-3 hours 30 minutes. A high-pressure cell over the ocean off North Carolina combined with a weak trough over the northeastern Gulf of Mexico to draw light southerly surface winds across the Cape, increasing humidity. The sky was heavily overcast and there was light rain, with occasional flashes of lightning off to the north. Nevertheless, the forecast was optimistic.

A full week before launch, people began to gather at the Cape communities of Titusville, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach and Melbourne. With four days to go, the Florida authorities were expecting 35,000 cars, 2,000 private aircraft and a flotilla of boats to converge on the Cape. People were drawn from all around the world to witness the launch and be able to tell their grandchildren that they had been present when men set off to make the first lunar landing. Jay Marks, a Houston car dealer and casual acquaintance of the Armstrong family, had arrived a week early, lived in his camper van, and spent the week fishing. He was not alone. As Marks put it, “Apollo 11 gave a lot of nice people a chance to get acquainted.” By 15 July there was not a vacant room to hire. Hotels and motels allowed late-comers to set up their camp beds in lounges and lobbies, but most people spent the night on the beaches and roadsides, where vehicles were parked nose to tail for a 30-mile radius. Since it was to be a dawn launch, the countdown parties ran through the night. At one of the parties Wernher von Braun and his wife Maria met Hermann Oberth who, at 75 years of age, was the only one of the three pioneers of rocketry still alive to witness the great dream become reality. Konstantin Tsiolkovski had died in 1935 and Robert Goddard in 1945.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” said Slayton as he awakened Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins at 4.15 am local time on Wednesday, 16 July. The weather was clearing, as predicted. Once the astronauts had showered and shaved, they went to the exercise room where Dee O’Hara, wearing a crisp white uniform, short dark hair and vivid lipstick, gave them their final check-up. At 5 am they sat down for breakfast with Slayton and Bill Anders, a member of the backup crew, eating the traditional low – residue fayre of orange juice, toast, scrambled eggs and steak. In fact, Armstrong had earlier confided to his wife, “I’m sick of steak!’’ NASA artist Paul Calle sat in the corner of the room, unobtrusively sketching. After packing their possessions to be sent home, they made their way to the suit room.

Hamilton Standard of Windsor Locks, Connecticut, was prime contractor for the space suit, or pressure garment assembly. Earth’s atmosphere has a sea-level pressure of about 15 psi and a gas mix of roughly 80 per cent nitrogen and 20 per cent oxygen. The International Latex Corporation of Dover, Delaware, was subcontracted to make an airtight bladder to hold pure oxygen at a differential pressure of 3.7 psi. Although contoured to the human shape, the extremely flexible material of the bladder would tend to ‘balloon’ when pressurised. It was therefore restrained by a

complex system of bellows, stiff fabric, inflexible tubes and sliding cables which, while maintaining the shape of the suit, impaired the mobility of the occupant. The design of the knee and elbow joints was simple, since these work in the manner of a hinge, but because the shoulder joint can rotate in several axes this was a greater challenge, so much so that at one point NASA briefly considered reassigning the contract. The bladder incorporated a network of ventilation tubes to cool the occupant and preclude the build-up of moisture. Two versions of the suit were required: one for use inside the spacecraft as protection against loss of cabin pressure, and the other to provide thermal and micrometeoroid protection plus other systems required when operating on the lunar surface.

The space suits varied in certain respects:

• Both suits shared a nomex inner layer, a neoprene-coated nylon pressure bladder, and a nylon restraint layer.

• The outer layers of the intravehicular suit comprised nomex and a double layer of teflon-coated beta cloth.

• The integral thermal and micrometeoroid protection for the extravehicular suit had a double-layer liner of neoprene-coated nylon, a number of layers of beta – kapton laminate and a teflon-coated beta cloth surface.

• The intravehicular suit had one pair of umbilical connectors installed on the chest to circulate oxygen from the cabin system.

• The extravehicular suit had two pairs of such connectors, one pair as on the intravehicular suit, and the other pair for use with the portable life-support system.

• The extravehicular suit also had a coolant water loop.

• Both suits had a connector for electrical power and communications.

The boots were part of the bladder, but the helmet and gloves used aluminium locking rings to maintain the integrity of the bladder. The helmet was a transparent polycarbonate ‘bubble’, with adequate air flow to prevent a build-up of carbon dioxide. The gloves were required to support a natural range of bending and rotating motions of the wrist, with a finger-covering material that was sufficiently thin and flexible to allow the manipulation of switches. Each astronaut had three individually tailored suits – a training suit for use in simulators and the low-gravity KC-135 aircraft, during which it was likely to suffer wear and tear, and two flight suits (one prime, the other backup) which, after integrity tests, were reserved for countdown demonstrations and the actual mission. Each suit had a US flag on the left shoulder, a NASA ‘meatball’ on the right breast and the mission patch on the left breast.[3] As his astronaut specialism, Collins had liaised between the crew systems division and the industrial teams to ensure that the suits were both fit for function and safe to use.

Having already donned his ‘Snoopy hat’, Neil Armstrong lifts his ‘bubble’ helmet.

Joseph W. Schmitt led a four-man team. He had supervised the suiting up of every American astronaut since Al Shepard in 1961. After the countdown demonstration test on 3 July, the three primary suits had been stripped, inspected for wear and tear, cleaned and reassembled – a four-day task. On arriving at 3.30 am, Schmitt had supervised the unbagging and inspection of the suits, and the astronauts arrived for simultaneous suiting at 5.30 am. This laborious process started with each man rubbing his posterior with salve prior to donning a diaper that would contain both fecal matter and associated odours. This was a precaution against a loss of pressure in the cabin when retrieving the LM from the final stage of the launch vehicle after translunar injection, in which event the astronauts might require to spend several days in their suits. Next was a prophylactic-style urine collector, with a collection bag worn around the waist. A connector on the thigh of the suit enabled the bag to be emptied while the astronaut was suited. Biosensors were attached to the chest, and linked to a signal-conditioning electronics pack that supplied telemetry through the electrical umbilical. After donning cotton long-johns, which NASA referred to as a constant-wear garment, each man was assisted into his one-piece pressure suit. Armstrong and Aldrin were to wear the 55-pound extravehicular suit, and Collins the lightweight 35-pound model for internal use. In the suiting-up procedure, the astronaut sat on a reclining couch, inserted his legs into the suit’s open rear, inserted his arms, bent forward and eased his head through the rigid metal neck ring. He then had to stand and shuffle until the suit felt comfortable, whereupon a technician would seal the bladder and zipper. The next item was the brown-and-white soft communications carrier, dubbed a ‘Snoopy hat’, with its integrated earphones and microphones. Once the gloves were fastened to the wrist rings and the helmet was in place, the oxygen umbilicals were attached to the sockets on one or other side of the chest and the suit was pumped to above-ambient pressure in order to verify the integrity of the bladder, helmet and gloves. There was a pressure gauge on the right arm of the suit. The Omega watches on the suit wrists were set to Houston time, one hour behind the Cape. They would breathe pure oxygen at sea-level pressure to purge nitrogen from their blood stream, and thereby preclude ‘the bends’ when the pressure was reduced during the ascent to orbit. With the suit sealed, communication was by umbilical intercom.

At 6.20 am, after the astronauts had donned yellow rubber galoshes for the trip to the pad, suit technician Ron C. Woods led the procession from the suit room, with Schmitt bringing up the rear. At Guenter Wendt’s request, Schmitt had put a sign on the corridor wall saying ‘The Key To The Moon Is Located’, the meaning of which was, as yet, obscure. As the astronauts made their way down to ground level, with each man carrying his ventilator like a suitcase, the corridors were lined with old friends and coworkers, but their good wishes were almost inaudible over the hiss of the oxygen circulation. Collins, by arrangement, was handed a brown paper shopping bag containing a surprise for Wendt. On emerging from the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building they waved at the television crews supervised by Charles Buckley, the head of security. Parked by the door were the two white transfer vans – one prime and the other a backup. Slayton checked the astronauts into the van, which had a large mission patch adorning its rear access door, wished

The White Room on Swing Arm 9 provided access to the spacecraft.

Neil Armstrong leads Michael Collins along Swing Arm 9.

them good luck, and then set off for Firing Room 1 of the Launch Control Center beside the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the 463 members of Rocco A. Petrone’s launch team monitored consoles showing the status of the space vehicle, comprising the launch vehicle and the spacecraft. Schmitt and Woods joined the crew, and the two vans departed in a convoy, driving north to the Vehicle Assembly Building then swinging east over the Banana River causeway to Pad A of Launch Complex 39, a total distance of just over 8 miles. On the way, Armstrong had Schmitt extract a small card from his pocket and push it beneath his watchband. Just before he unplugged from the communications circuit, Schmitt wished the three astronauts “a real good flight’’, to which Aldrin replied, “You take yourself on a good vacation when you get us all off.’’ As they arrived at the pad at 6.37, sunrise was imminent. The elevator of Mobile Launch Platform 1 was waiting. Once on the upper deck, as they crossed to the high-speed elevator of the Launch Umbilical Tower, Collins observed that on previous visits the site had been a hive of activity, but now it was utterly deserted.

On exiting the elevator at the 320-foot level, the astronauts were met by Wendt, wearing a white smock and cap. As they were not yet on intercom, he greeted each man with a pat on the shoulder. Because the White Room that provided access to the command module was so cramped, Aldrin remained on the tower while Wendt led Armstrong, Collins, Schmitt and Woods across Swing Arm 9. Wendt then handed to Armstrong the promised ‘Key To The Moon’. Its shaft was a crescent Moon about 4 feet long made of styrofoam and covered by aluminium foil, with an oval loop on one end and a set of teeth on the other. Armstrong withdrew the card from his watchband and presented it to Wendt.[4] The card read: ‘Space Taxi. Good Between Any Two Planets.’ At 6.53 am Armstrong shed the galoshes that had protected the boots of his suit, stood in front of the hatch, which was set at floor level, grasped with both hands a bar that was located inside the cabin, inserted both of his feet, and slipped onto the centre couch. Haise, who had spent 90 minutes running through a 400-item checklist, setting switches and making checks, was already in the lower equipment bay to assist him to shuffle onto the left couch. For launch, the couch was adjusted to elevate the lower legs, and once in space it would be set flat. Schmitt entered to switch Armstrong’s oxygen from the portable ventilator to the cabin’s system and to plug in the communications umbilical. Armstrong checked in with Clarence ‘Skip’ Chauvin, the Spacecraft Test Conductor in the Firing Room. Jim Lovell, Armstrong’s backup, came on the line. The previous evening Lovell had promised that if Armstrong did not feel up to the flight, he was ready to take his place; Lovell repeated his offer, but Armstrong assured Lovell that he was feeling just fine.

Meanwhile, because Wendt claimed to have caught an implausibly large trout, Collins had purchased the smallest trout available – just 7 inches in length – frozen it, and nailed it onto a wooden plaque with the inscriptions ‘Guenter Wendt’ and ‘Trophy Trout’. It was in the brown paper bag. During the walk out to the van, Collins had dreaded dropping the bag in view of the television cameras, causing the world to wonder why a man bound for the Moon was carrying a dead fish. He presented it to Wendt, then entered the spacecraft.[5] As Aldrin had been CMP when backing up Apollo 8, and was familiar with the centre crewman’s tasks during launch, it had been decided that he should retain this position, which placed Collins on the right.

Alongside the elevator, Aldrin enjoyed 15 minutes of solitude. He admired the view of sunrise and surf to the east, the cars and boats in the distance on the roads and rivers, and the monolith of the Vehicle Assembly Building to the west. Far to the south was ‘Missile Row’, with Pad 5 from which Al Shepard rode a Redstone on a suborbital flight in 1961; Pad 14 from which John Glenn rode an Atlas into orbit in 1962; Pad 19 from which Aldrin and his colleagues rode Titan II missiles on their Gemini missions in 1966; and Pad 34, where the Apollo 1 crew had been consumed by fire in 1967. After Schmitt escorted Aldrin across the access arm, Aldrin presented his fellow Presbyterian with a condensed version of the Bible entitled Good News For Modern Man, inscribed inside: ‘On permanent loan to G. Wendt’.

At 7.22 am, having confirmed that there were no extraneous items in the cabin, Haise departed. As the couches were so closely spaced that the astronauts’ elbows touched, he wriggled under the centre couch to reach the hatch. He could hear the crew on the intercom but could not speak to them to wish them luck, so once he was outside he leaned in and shook each man’s hand. When Chauvin gave the go-ahead to close the hatch, Wendt tapped Aldrin’s helmet and stepped aside; Grissinger then swung the big hatch closed and locked it. Once the hermetic integrity of the seal had been verified, Grissinger added that section of the boost-protective cover. At 7.52 am Wendt’s team descended to ground level and drove to a nearby site in case their services should be required. Meanwhile, Swing Arm 9 with the White Room was rotated 5 feet from the spacecraft, ready to be either restored in an emergency, or swung completely clear just prior to launch.

In the spacecraft, the astronauts verified the switch settings to ensure that none had been disturbed, either by themselves ingressing or by Schmitt or Haise moving around in the capsule. Meanwhile, the cabin was purged. Following the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a capsule fire, the practice of pressurising the cabin with oxygen for launch had been discontinued. The suited crew remained on pure oxygen, but the atmosphere in the cabin was replaced by 40 per cent nitrogen and 60 per cent oxygen. On being informed that elements of the count were 15 minutes ahead of time, Armstrong pointed out that he wanted them to wait for the launch window to open before starting the engines.

On Tuesday, 15 July, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, successor to the late Martin

Luther King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had led a mule-drawn wagon and a small group of protestors to the Kennedy Space Center to decry “this foolish waste of money that could be used to feed the poor”. NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine had met them. After observing that to cancel the mission would yield no benefit to the poor, Paine had invited a delegation to watch the launch from the official guest area.

Overnight, seeing no one heading away from the Cape, drivers had switched lanes to get closer, generating the worst congestion in Florida’s history. Even the residents of Cocoa Beach, to whom launches were routine, were caught up in the excitement. With the notable exception of alarm clocks, which had been sold out by Tuesday afternoon, local shopkeepers were able to supply the needs of the visitors. As dawn approached on 16 July, it was estimated that 1,000,000 people were on the roads, rivers and beaches, where ‘Good Luck Apollo 11’ had been etched in large letters in the sand. Worldwide, 1,000 times that number were watching the ‘live’ television coverage.

By the time that the countdown entered its final hour, the rain had stopped, the cloud cover was light cumulus topped by patches of cirrostratus, there was a 6-knot southerly breeze, the temperature was already 85°F, and the humidity was 73 per cent: it was going to be a scorcher of a day.

After seeing the astronauts off, Dee O’Hara went to watch the launch with her friend Lola Morrow, who had been hired by NASA in 1962 as a travel clerk and two years later had taken on the daunting challenge of organising the astronauts’ office at the Cape.

Among the thousands of invitees in the VIP stand were Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, four cabinet ministers, 33 senators, 200 congressmen, 19 state governors, 40 city mayors, hundreds of ambassadors,[6] foreign ministers, ministers of science, military attaches, senior NASA employees, and representatives of the companies that built the launch vehicle and spacecraft. Also present were Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife Ladybird, and James E. Webb, NASA’s former administrator. The nearby press enclosure contained 3,500 journalists, 812 of whom were drawn from 54 foreign countries, including 12 from Eastern Europe – but none from either the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. Each of the American television networks had its own team of commentators and consultants. Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman popularly regarded as ‘the most-trusted man on television’, was acutely aware that Apollo 11 was different from any previous mission. As he later recalled, ‘‘We knew darned good and well that this was real history in the making.’’ If it succeeded, ‘‘this was the date that was going to be in all the history books’’ and ‘‘everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk’’. It became evident that there were three milestones in the space program in terms of press

presence at a launch, with the numbers increasing each time: John Glenn’s orbital flight, Apollo 8’s impromptu flight to orbit the Moon, and now, with luck, the accomplishment of John F. Kennedy’s great challenge.

Meanwhile, in Wapakoneta, almost all of the 7,000 population were watching television. Armstrong had advised his parents not to attend the launch, in order to spare them press attention. Although NASA had dispatched Public Affairs Officer Thomas Andrews to fend them off, reporters were camped outside the house and there was an 80-foot-tall transmission tower in the driveway! On the other hand, on hearing that the house had only a black-and-white television, the networks had delivered a large colour set to enable the family to fully appreciate the coverage of the event.

Jan Armstrong had not attended the Gemini 8 launch because her husband had asked her not to, but for Apollo 11 she had insisted. To enable her to escape press attention, North American Rockwell arranged a corporate jet and moored a motor cruiser on the Banana River, several miles south of the pad. On Tuesday evening, Jan, sons Ricky and Mark, friends Pat Spann and Jeanette Chase, Dave Scott, his wife Lurton, and Dora Jane Hamblin representing Life magazine, flew to Patrick Air Force Base and were then driven to a friend’s house on South Atlantic Avenue. At midnight, Jan drove to the Kennedy Space Center to look at the floodlit space vehicle from the astronauts’ viewing area, 3 miles from the pad, then drove back to her hideaway. At 4 am the group boarded the boat. Listening to the commentary on a transistor radio, Jan hoped the launch would be on time because she was exhausted and needed some sleep.

Joan Aldrin set her alarm for 6 am Houston time, but when it sounded she cancelled it and slept for another 50 minutes. “f wish Buzz was a carpenter, a truck driver, a scientist – anything but what he is,’’ she had confided on discovering that he was to make the first lunar landing. Her plan was to keep busy with housework to take her mind off the mission. Her first intended task had been to raise the US flag in the garden, but on seeing the reporters she left this to someone else. Among her guests was Jeannie Bassett, who once occupied the house beyond the backyard fence. After Charles Bassett’s death in 1966, Jeannie had sold the property and taken the children to California, but had returned in order to keep Joan company during what promised to be a nerve-wracking mission. Pat Collins awoke about the same time. ft had been a rough night in Nassau Bay, with a thunderstorm felling a tree on her lawn, and she arranged for its removal. When the television reported that the count was going exceptionally smoothly, she felt sure the launch would be on time.

Clifford Charlesworth’s flight controller team was to handle the launch phase. When Chris Kraft, the Director of Flight Operations seated on Management Row behind the flight director’s console, put a series of needless queries, Charlesworth turned around, smiled, and warned, “Chris, you’re making me nervous!’’