Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (31 page)

Preparations for the extra-vehicular activity took up less than 14 per cent of the entire training period, and mostly took place at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
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Fully suited, Neil and Buzz would clamber down from a makeshift LM and set up their various pieces of equipment on an extensive sand tray. Sections of the EVA were also occasionally practised elsewhere, including the pool at Houston's Neutral Buoyancy Facility and the KC-135 'vomit comet', both offering the ability to work in reduced gravity. Lunar gravity was also replicated at Grumman's plant in New York, using a cable and pulley system which Armstrong referred to as the 'Peter Pan rig'. By supporting five-sixths of his weight, the facility gave him the sense of being able to jump very high. 'You also had a feeling that things were happening slowly, which indeed they were,' Armstrong noted. Through such tests, it was established that once they'd readjusted their sense of balance the crew would be able to walk about in search of stones.
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Armstrong and Aldrin liked the geology lessons that astronauts had been taking part in since 1964, and both acquired extensive knowledge of the subject.
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Collins, however, was not a fan, telling Dora Jane Hamblin, 'I hate geology. Maybe that's why they won't let me get out on the Moon.'
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A final geology field trip was made in February 1969, when Neil and Buzz visited west Texas, accompanied by the press. On 18 June, the day after the flight readiness review approved the launch date, senior NASA managers watched them complete a full run-through of their work on the surface. Amid concerns about what could be expected of them during their search for lunar material, it was agreed that the astronauts would not venture further than around 100 feet from the spacecraft. Armstrong later said, 'If the descent and the final approach to landing were rated a nine on a ten-point scale of difficulty, I would put the surface work down at a two.'
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As well as using the simulators at the Cape, and taking part in EVA training in Houston, the crew also spent time at Grumman on Long Island, and at North American Rockwell in Downey, California. They attended computer briefings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studied stars at the Morehead Planetarium, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles. In order to travel quickly between these and other places the astronauts were provided with supersonic T-38 jets, the air force's most modern training aircraft. To Collins, the T-38 was one of the joys of the job, particularly when given the chance to talk about it: 'Sure, I left Houston after work, refuelled at El Paso, and landed in LA before sunset. Would have been here sooner except I had to shut down one engine just past Phoenix.'
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It was not always an easy aircraft to fly. As well as Charlie Bassett and Elliot See, astronauts Ted Freeman and C. C. Williams were also killed in T-38 crashes.

Time also had to be found for non-essential parts of the mission. Collins wrote that during a discussion on ideas for the mission patch, Jim Lovell suggested an eagle. Flicking through a book at home, Collins found a picture of a bald eagle, legs down, coming in for a landing. He traced the image on to tissue paper and added a lunar surface and the words 'Apollo' round the top and 'eleven' round the bottom. Armstrong felt 'eleven' might not be understood abroad, so 'Apollo 11' was added to the top. Collins wanted to introduce an element of peace to the patch but wasn't sure how. A simulator instructor suggested he include an olive branch, which Collins then added to the eagle's beak before submitting the design for approval. NASA headquarters felt that the eagle's claws looked too aggressive, as if the bird were about to seize the Moon for itself. After he moved the olive branch from the beak to the talons, Collins sent the patch back to Washington and this time it was approved. The crew decided not to include their names so that the emblem would be representative of everyone who had worked on the mission. Once the patch was complete, it was a short jump from there to naming the lunar module
Eagle
– the symbol of America serving as an appropriate partner to
Columbia
, which at one stage had almost become the country's name.
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In between the training sessions, the crew also needed to assemble their personal preference kits (PPKs). Each consisted of a pouch made of fireproof cloth that was not much bigger than this book. Subject to weight and space restrictions, the men were largely free to take what they wanted, as long as they gave a list of everything to Deke. NASA kept the contents of PPKs confidential, and a degree of mystery still surrounds the kits, including even their number. It appears three were tucked away in a compartment in the command module (weighing up to five pounds each) and another two were in the lunar module (neither heavier than half a pound). A sixth PPK (probably consisting of several small packages, together weighing more than 50lb) was known as the Official Flight Kit, while a seventh was easily accessible and contained frequently used items such as pens, torches and other small objects. The secrecy surrounding the kits stems from the fact that most contained the men's private property, along with mementos passed to them by friends and relatives. A measure of discretion was also required since not everything given to Neil and Buzz would actually go to the surface. Nor would anything given to Mike – unless taken down to the Moon on his behalf. Prior to the mission the men agreed that all personal items taken into space would simply be described as 'carried to the Moon', regardless of which spacecraft the object was actually on.
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The three men personally spent $2,700 on 450 silver medallions bearing the Apollo 11 eagle, to be shared between them. They also took with them a commemorative Apollo 11 envelope issued by the US Postal Service, complete with commemorative stamp. Additional Apollo 11 envelopes, signed by the crew, were also carried into space, alongside six-inch flags of the US and other countries. Aboard the LM was an Apollo 1 mission patch, along with two medals honouring Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin (who had been killed in an air crash in 1968) that were brought back from Russia by Frank Borman. Secured within the command module were two full-size US flags that had flown above Congress before the flight and which were due to be returned to Washington.
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The men also carried a number of mission patches, three gold olive-branch pins for their wives and other items of jewellery. Buzz took to the Moon a small vial filled with wine and a miniature chalice, photos of his children and a gold bracelet that had belonged to his mother. Mike carried his college ring, together with a gold locket for his daughter Ann, and a gold cross that had been in the family for many years and which was to be given to his daughter Kate. He also carried many small items at the request of other people, including prayers, poems, coins, tie-pins, cufflinks and a hollow bean containing no less than 50 tiny ivory elephants.
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By special arrangement, Neil took aboard the LM a small section of muslin and a piece of wood from the left propeller of
Flyer
, the Wright Brothers' first successful aircraft. 'Did he take something of Karen with him?' Armstrong's sister June later wondered. 'Oh, I dearly hope so,' she added.
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Throughout April, May and June, assembling the PPKs, designing the patch, learning to use the stills, TV and 16mm cameras, and other minor duties had to be squeezed into the relentless training regime. For Neil and Buzz, the hardest time came in early June when difficulties with the simulator were slowing their progress and, according to Janet, sapping morale. Janet recalled that 'Neil used to come home with his face drawn white, and I was worried about him'.
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But while the wives may have seen the impact the mission was having on the men, according to Collins the crew never discussed among themselves the difficulties facing them. He himself felt subject to an imaginary commandment proclaiming 'thou shalt not screw up', but he had no idea whether Neil and Buzz felt the same way since they rarely talked about anything beyond technical details. 'Amiable strangers,' he later famously called the three of them.
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To outsiders, Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin seemed unconnected. Guenter Wendt, the technician in charge of the launch-pad, noticed that they always arrived for launch training sessions in separate cars.
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But beneath the surface, having worked together so closely for so long they were able to read each other's thoughts. By July, Michael believed that they had come to know each other 'by osmosis or some other mysterious transfer process, rather than by direct communication'.
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As they got closer to lift-off, the pressure continued to build. When the Apollo 9 crew reached the same point in their preparations, they were physically run down and suffered chest infections that postponed their launch by three days. Apollo 11 could not afford a similar delay since suitable lighting conditions on the Moon would not return for a month. To limit the risk of infection, the men went into quarantine at the Cape, emerging on Saturday 5 July for a press conference in Houston. Extraordinary measures were taken to protect them from any germs carried by the press. Walking into the room, the crew wore gas masks which they removed only once they'd taken their seats within a large three-sided plastic box. Beside them, fans blew air out into the auditorium.
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Each of them spoke before taking questions. One reporter asked Armstrong whether he believed the Moon would eventually become part of the civilised world; another wanted to know if he feared losing his private life after the mission. To a question about what he would be taking to the Moon, Neil wryly replied, 'If I had a choice, I would take more fuel.' After sitting through an array of arid answers, Norman Mailer wrote that Armstrong 'surrendered words about as happily as a hound allowed meat to be pulled out of his teeth'.

While the reporters vainly searched for drops of emotion as if looking for water on the Moon, a few hundred yards away Gene Kranz and his team were beginning their final training session. The crew later gave many individual interviews before going home at the end of a 14-hour day – unaware of 1201 alarms that could be safely ignored.
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After flying back to the Cape on Monday 7 July, the men returned to the simulators, once again living a life of relative isolation. During one flight to Florida, Michael shared a T-38 with Deke Slayton, who mentioned that he had been looking at future missions. As the command module pilot on such a prominent trip, Collins could expect to lead a future flight, giving him a chance to walk on the Moon. Michael told Deke that if Apollo 11 aborted he would be looking to fly again but if all went well this would be his last space-flight. He had come to believe that 'I simply was putting too much of myself into Apollo 11 to consider doing it all over again at a later date; besides, the strain on my wife was not good and should end as soon as possible.'
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The mission consumed so much time and energy over so many months that in some respects the astronauts knew more about what was happening on the Moon than on Earth. 'When you're part of the pioneering effort,' Buzz later said, 'there's a focusing of an individual's concentration and level of attention that is at the exclusion of a lot of other things. It's a kind of gunbarrel vision.'
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They largely remained aloof from developments dominating the news at home and abroad, events that, like their own mission, promised to occupy a place in modern American history. For in 1969 America was a divided country, and there was hope that the flight would restore some of the national pride that had corroded over the previous 18 months.

In January 1968, the Viet Cong's series of successful counterattacks demonstrated that America was not going to be able to extricate itself from Vietnam any time soon. At home, smouldering resentment over the war was ignited by revelations of a massacre of up to 500 civilians by US soldiers in the village of My Lai. Anti-war protesters were involved in fighting on university campuses and elsewhere across America. For five days in August 1968, demonstrators in Chicago clashed with police in the streets surrounding the Democratic National Convention.

Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin believed they were going to the Moon in the name of America, but for millions of black Americans, many of whom had until recently been confronted by widespread segregation, NASA was almost exclusively white, spectacularly rich, and might as well have been on the Moon already. During the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos presented a Black Power salute by raising their gloved fists in the air. They, at least, did not share the notion of a unified America such as might have been felt in Houston. The $24 billion invested in Apollo was said to be benefiting the economy since not a cent of it was spent in space, but critics couldn't help wondering how much of it was being spent in the poorer corners of the nation. The cash largely went to other rich white organisations such as North American Rockwell and Grumman. NASA was picketed, and there were reports of bomb threats. For much of America, the deluge of fire surrounding the launch of Apollo 6 was overshadowed by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King on the same day. In Houston, Buzz joined a march in memory of the civil rights leader, accompanied by his church minister, the Reverend Dean Woodruff.