READY TO GO

On flying back to the Cape on Monday, 7 July, the astronauts returned to the semi­isolation of their quarters in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, going out only to use the simulators in a nearby building. On 10 July, having been medically checked, Tom Paine had a private dinner with the astronauts at which he implored of them, “If you get into trouble up there, do not hesitate to abort. Come on home. Don’t get killed. If you do have to abort, I promise this crew will be slipped ahead in the mission sequence. You’ll get another chance. Just don’t get killed.’’ Collins reflected that Paine’s motivation was to eliminate “the obvious risk of letting our desire to be first on the Moon cloud our judgement in analysing the hazards’’. In fact, Paine had said the same to the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 10. Earlier that day, after tests had indicated an oxygen leak in the first stage of the launch vehicle, Walter Delle, a Boeing quality inspector, entered the tank and tracked the ‘hiss’ to the helium pressurant manifold. As this was such a delicate item, it was debatable which would be the least risky option: to accept the leak, or attempt to eliminate it. It was decided to try to stem the leak by applying torque to a nut using a wrench. If the manifold were to be damaged in the process, replacing it would take four days, which would require the launch to be postponed. But Delle was successful, and the final review cleared the mission to aim for launch on 16 July.

The week before launch, Charles Berry mentioned to a reporter that President Nixon had asked to have dinner with the crew on the night before launch, as Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had done with the Apollo 10 crew. Berry had stated that Nixon’s presence at such a late stage would prejudice the crew health stabilisation program, since if the Apollo 11 crew were to return with an infection it would be essential to know whether this had been contracted prior to their leaving Earth in order to enable it to be dismissed as a potential lunar infection. In fact, considering that the launch of Apollo 9 had had to be postponed several days to allow its crew to recover from a mild upper-respiratory infection, it was remarkable that Agnew had been permitted to visit the Apollo 10 crew, since they would be in deep space by the time any symptoms that would have given rise to a postponement became manifest. However, NASA headquarters took the view that Berry’s opinion was merely his recommendation; it was not for him to decide whether anybody could visit the crew. Frank Borman, assigned as space adviser to Nixon for Apollo 11, said the dinner should go ahead, since it would be a tremendous boost to crew morale. However, because the matter was now in the public domain, Nixon deferred. If an astronaut were to fall sick in space, Nixon would be open to the damning criticism of callously disregarding the professional advice of the chief flight surgeon. Although the press habitually referred to Berry as the astronauts’ personal physician, he was Director of

Medical Research and Operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center. The final comprehensive medical examination of the astronauts was on Friday, 11 July by the physicians assigned to this mission: Al Harter, Jack Teegan and Bill Carpentier. The aim was to evaluate their biological state of heath by comparing the organisms in their systems with the ‘baseline’ established on 26 June. In the early days, nurse Dee O’Hara had taken blood and urine samples of departing astronauts, but as these tasks were now done by technicians she was responsible for the paperwork – which amounted to 18 pages per man. As a result of this examination, the crew was declared fit to fly. All that remained, medically speaking, was the basic check-up on the morning of launch.

Over the weekend, the pace slackened. They continued to use the simulators, but for proficiency rather than for training, and undertook a final review of the flight plan. Ted Guillory had supervised the writing of the 240-page flight plan for Apollo

11. It weighed 2 pounds, and addressed every aspect of the mission for a nominal duration of 195 hours 40 minutes. Two copies would be needed, one for the CSM and the other for the LM. In addition, there would be some 20 pounds of reference material on board. The general consensus was that the astronauts had reached their ‘peak’ right on time. As Aldrin observed: ‘‘We could spend another year trying to isolate [the open issues] one by one, and we’d never really get them all. We could spend too much time doing that, so much that we could forget what the mission is all about.’’ On 16 May the first draft of the mission rules was issued. Updated weekly, by the time of launch it had expanded into a 350-page book that defined the actions to be taken in the event of a multitude of situations arising in flight. As such, it formalised the collective knowledge of all concerned.

Soon after Apollo 8 set off for the Moon Frank Borman had suffered a bout of ‘space sickness’, which came as a considerable surprise in view of the fact that he had he spent 14 days on board Gemini 7 in December 1965 with no ill effects. Rusty Schweickart suffered similarly on Apollo 9. It seemed that in the confined Gemini spacecraft astronauts had not been able to become disoriented, but by being able to move around in the much larger Apollo cabin they could develop motion sickness. In an effort to prime the vestibular mechanism of his inner ear for weightlessness, Collins drove down the coast to Patrick Air Force Base and flew aerobatically in a T – 38 for an hour each day over the final weekend. Aldrin flew zero-gravity arcs in the KC-135 several days later, in the hope of doing the same.

The hot news on Sunday, 13 July, was the announcement by the Soviet Union that it had launched the unmanned spacecraft, Luna 15. The speculation was that this would land on the Moon, scoop a sample, and return this to Earth. There was some concern in NASA that the spacecraft’s transmissions might interfere with Apollo 11. Since his Apollo 8 flight, Frank Borman had spent much of his time in Washington as Nixon’s space adviser and undertaking goodwill tours. Three days earlier, he had returned from a 10-day trip to the Soviet Union, and was in fact, the first astronaut to visit that country. On a Washington stopover that afternoon he received a message from Chris Kraft in Houston requesting that he use his recent contacts to gain information on the Luna 15 mission. Borman called the office of Mstislav V. Keldysh, the 68-year-old leader of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

However, as it was 2 am in Moscow, Borman left a message and then returned to Houston. At 6 am the following morning he received a phone call from Keldysh’s office reporting that the information was en route, and several hours later identical telegrams arrived at his home and at the White House specifying the orbit intended for Luna 15 and confirming that there would be no radio interference. In view of the rivalry between the space-faring nations, this was welcome cooperation. Even if Luna 15 returned only a few ounces of lunar material, the Soviets would be able to claim that they had ‘beaten’ America as long it returned ahead of Apollo 11. The stakes were therefore high. Wernher von Braun told a reporter that although the Soviets had lost the ‘race’ to send a man, their attempt ‘‘to soft land a spacecraft on the Moon and scoop up a sample of lunar soil and fly it back to Earth’’ represented a tremendous technical challenge, in which he wished them ‘‘full success’’ even though it would ‘‘take a little bit off our program’’. Then he made the telling point that such a mission could be no impromptu effort, because ‘‘to have the hardware ready, it would have had to have been planned… years earlier’’.

In July, the afternoon temperature at the Cape regularly rose to 100°F, and the combination of heat and ocean humidity made conditions almost unbearable. The Sun blazed down day after day. The concrete was so bright that sunglasses were mandatory. But on Sunday, 13 July, it started to rain and the forecast was for several days of poor weather. Thus, even if everything else was ready, the weather might oblige the launch to be postponed, possibly to August.

On Monday, 14 July, Robert Gilruth, George Low, Deke Slayton, Chris Kraft and Max Faget flew to the Cape for the final flight readiness review, which, as expected, confirmed the launch date. At 5 pm the terminal countdown was picked up with the clock at T-28 hours, with two built-in ‘holds’ (the first to start at T-9 hours and last for 11 hours, and the second to start at T-3 hours 30 minutes and last for 1 hour 32 minutes) with a view to launching as the window opened for the primary landing site, which was 9.32 am local time on Wednesday, 16 July.