First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong: Part Seven

The powered ascent of Apollo 11 from its launchpad into orbit involved a number of discrete phases, and within each of these phases there were discrete changes in abort technique.

“I don’t feel historic,” Janet succinctly told them, ushering her boys into the house.

In the patois of spaceflight, TLI meant “translunar injection”—leaving Earth orbit and heading into deep space.

Motion sickness could happen more easily in the Apollo spacecraft than in the Gemini because Apollo was more commodious.

As for his own proclivity for nausea, “I was sensitive to motion sickness when I was small, in automobiles and boats. I grew out of it, but I could still make myself queasy by doing a lot of aerobatics...”

But, curiously, the predisposition does not correlate with what goes on in space. Space sickness does not correlate to motion sickness on Earth.

However, the disadvantage of helmets and gloves was that you were less able, less mobile, and less facile.

As blasphemous as it may sound, the juice aboard Apollo 11 was not Tang, the famous orange juice made from powder that its manufacturer, General Foods, advertised as the special drink of the astronauts.

If the unmanned test launch of the N-1 worked, the Soviets were prepared to press on with their clandestine manned lunar program, a program that Kremlin leadership had always insisted they did not have.

Seconds after the launch, however, the N-1 rocket collapsed back onto its pad and exploded—by some estimates with a strength equivalent to 250 tons of TNT, not quite the power of a nuclear explosion, but still formidable.

Somehow no one was killed in the carnage, but the launchpad was completely destroyed and the steppe surrounding it “literally strewn with dead animals and birds.”

The sighting of “flying saucers” became an epidemic in the years following World War II, perhaps because, as one historian has tried to explain it, the specter of Armageddon brought on by the appearance of the atomic bomb spawned “at once an appetite for vicarious scientific adventure and a need to externalize fear.”

It would have been astounding if something as epochal as the first Moon landing had not generated a fresh and intense new round of UFO stories even more untruthful, hyperbolic, and stubbornly persistent than what came before.

Our reticence to be outspoken while it was happening was because we were just prudent.

With the Sun directly behind the Moon and backlighting the planetoid, Apollo 11 was flying through a giant solar eclipse, a massive lunar shadow, with the Sun’s corona cascading brilliantly around the edges of what was now a huge dark object completely filling their windows.

Even Collins, the one who did not have to land, privately felt a foreboding—the “cool, magnificent sphere” hanging there “ominously,” “a formidable presence without sound or motion,” issuing “no invitation to invade its domain.”

“But when I first saw it, at the other Sun angle, it really looked gray,” Buzz continued, and his mates agreed, though they expatiated about the Moon’s color throughout several orbits.

The drama that was Apollo 11 unfolded in five acts almost as if Aeschylus or Shakespeare had staged it. Act One launched the protagonists—those “amiable strangers”—toward their lunar destiny. Act Two moved them inexorably into the brave new world of the outward bound.

Not that stepping onto another heavenly body for the first time, the essential element of Act Four, or returning to Earth safely, the denouement of Act Five, were without grave risk, high adventure, and cosmic symbolism.

When asked how he prefers for historians to quote his statement, Neil answers only somewhat facetiously, “They can put it in parentheses.”

Reinforcing this suggestion is the fact that Armstrong, when he moved his family to a farm in Lebanon, Ohio, after leaving NASA in 1971, named his farm Rivendell, which is the name of the idyllic secluded valley of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth...

A far less chimerical theory is that a high NASA official gave him the idea.

As a matter of fact, though Buzz and Neil did not think of it at the time, there was a way that they could have locked themselves out, if the hatch’s pressure valve had somehow gone awry and started repressurizing.

These included a “loping gait”...as well as a “kangaroo hop,” which few Apollo astronauts ever employed, except playfully, because its movements were so stilted.

It is one of the minor tragedies of Apollo 11 that posterity benefits from no photos of the First Man on the Moon.

The most noteworthy change in the plan came late in the EVA when Armstrong decided he wanted to go over and take a look at the sizable crater about sixty-five yards east of the LM (thus known today to Apollo 11 aficionados as East Crater).

After struggling to close the bulk sample box, it took “just about everything I could do,” “an inordinate amount of force,” to close the documented sample, his second box.

He sounded very laconic, unemotional.

When PPKs came into existence during Project Gemini (when they were known as APKs, or Astronaut Preference Kits), only the astronauts themselves and Deke Slayton as head of the Astronaut Office had access to their manifest.

While they were eating, a delighted Slayton sent his congratulations in the masculine style germane to the astronauts corps:
04:18:00:02 Slayton: Just want to let you guys know that, since you’re an hour and a half over your timeline and we’re all taking a day off tomorrow, we’re going to leave you.

Mike recalls that his hands were full with the “arcane, almost black-magical manipulations” called for by his notebook full of rendezvous procedures.

Bigger and bigger the LM appeared in Collins’s window, and it was hard for him to hold back the feeling of exultation.

It simply floated for the next few years as a piece of debris until its orbit deteriorated and the noble craft crashed ignominiously into the lunar surface.

We were in a good position to report what was really news, for which there was a great deal of interest. The only caveat that I would add is that I don’t think you should ever jeopardize the safety of a flight in order to do television.

Mike and Neil spent the flight preparing their speeches (Buzz’s unease with extemporaneous speaking had motivated him to begin days in advance).

At La Guardia Airport, Mayor John Lindsay and his wife greeted their honored guests, then flew them by helicopter to a pier near Wall Street in full view of a salute by a flotilla of fireboats.

Not even the revelry at the end of World War II or the parade for Lindbergh in 1927 matched in size the New York City celebration for the lunar astronauts.

And Time magazine reported, “Neil Armstrong’s words to President Nixon in Los Angeles last week seemed all the more eloquent because they were unstudied, and because for once the usually phlegmatic voice of the first man on the Moon quavered with emotion.”

The small town was wrapped almost entirely in red, white, and blue bunting.

The following week the Armstrongs returned to Washington, where the Apollo 11 crew was to be honored at a midday joint session of Congress. Promptly at noon, the astronauts were led by a bipartisan delegation up to seats on the Speaker’s rostrum.

Instead, the astronauts were treated to a nadir of political influence.

One incident from the Congo on October 22-23 that Armstrong decided not to comment on in his journal was an embarrassing moment at the evening ball when Aldrin jumped from the dais and cut in on Miss Congo, who was dancing with her escort.

Janet Armstrong feels that the fact that Neil made most of the toasts and did such an outstanding job as the crew’s spokesman exacerbated Buzz’s sense of being aggrieved.

Under Hope’s tutelage, Armstrong, decked out in chino pants, a red sport shirt, and a jungle hat, often played the straight man...

A few questions posed by the American soldiers tested Neil’s mettle.