By the time Apollo 11 was ready to begin its epic journey to the Moon more than a million people had gathered on the beaches of eastern Florida. On the morning of July 16, 1969, for dozens of miles around the Kennedy Space Center, freeways were gridlocked.
Somewhere out there, ahead of the queues, stood a Saturn V booster — the most complex machine ever built. No one needed a degree in rocket science to understand that at precisely 9.32am a tube 363ft (110.6m) high and filled to the brim with explosive fuels would be ignited, propelling the fate of the three men aboard it into the hands of the gods. At more than 3,300 tons, fuel accounted for 90 per cent of its weight.
Of course, those million people would see nothing once the rocket got beyond a few dozen miles. Yet, in that short time, they were promised the spectacle of the three men attempting to maintain the thinnest veneer of control during one of the riskiest phases of their historic mission. It was not the threat of explosion that many found alluring. It was more the fact that the thing was actually intended to explode — emitting a controlled stream of fire so furious that it would drive the crew into space in little more than ten minutes.
As it soared over the Atlantic, exhaling great clouds of fire and smoke, the rocket appeared to have a life of its own. But no one was in any doubt that the crew was in complete control, for nothing less could be expected of Nasa’s futuristic heroes. Clean-living, white-suited and served up alongside movie stars and music legends, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were presented as the living embodiment of the true-grit characters who had always been at the forefront of America’s frontiers.
After a $24 billion programme involving 400,000 people over ten years, humanity’s pioneering attempt to land on the Moon would fall to just two men aboard a tiny spaceship. (Collins would orbit the Moon in a bigger spacecraft waiting for Armstrong and Aldrin to return from the lunar surface.) The most fragile spacecraft ever built, the lunar module (or LM) that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon 40 years ago was so pared to the bone that its crew was left precariously teetering upon the tightest of safety margins. To save weight, the LM used only the lightest components. Nasa’s “tissue-paper spacecraft”, as one astronaut called it, was so vulnerable that on Earth technicians who dropped anything inside it risked piercing its walls. In flight its hatch bowed out into the vacuum of space, threatening to burst open at any moment and, if it had been able to land fully fuelled the LM would have collapsed under its own weight, even in reduced gravity. Yet, for all its fragility, it remains unique in being the only spacecraft able to make a powered landing, whether on Earth, the lunar surface or anywhere else. With no lunar atmosphere, parachutes would be useless and trying to glide down — like the shuttle — would be impossible. The only way to land was to adopt an engine that could be slowed from 3,700mph to walking pace and give it to a pilot skilled enough to survive the journey first time around.
Broadcast to 600 million television viewers, the landing appeared to be a fait accompli to many of those listening to the calm, understated comments transmitted during the flight. Moments of discovery litter the history of mankind but rarely are explorers able to take mankind with them.
For Armstrong and Aldrin the reality was different from popular conceptions in almost every respect. No one flew club class to the Moon. Deprived of weighty seats the men were standing up, their elbows rubbing against each other in their bulky spacesuits.
The LM was flying windows-down, horizontal like an upside-down aircraft — an attitude that allowed Armstrong to look out for familiar landmarks. Had he not been in weightlessness he would have considered himself to be lying face down and flying feet first. Beside him Aldrin was studying the instruments, calling out numbers to his silent commander.
Then just three minutes into the final 12-minute descent phase it became clear that they were in the wrong place on their flight path. Armstrong discovered that they were ahead of themselves by three miles, which meant that they would be coming down three miles beyond their pre-selected landing ground. Far from a smooth plain, they could expect to find rocks and craters, any one of which could damage their fragile spacecraft. If the thin, external fuel tanks were compromised by the LM colliding with a boulder or toppling over, Armstrong and Aldrin would never leave the desolate lunar terrain.
Despite the increased risk neither man said as much to Houston, their dry radio messages sounding as if they were involved in nothing more than a training flight. Armstrong: “OK, we went by the three-minute point early.
A little off.” Aldrin: “Rate of descent looks real good. Altitude — right about on.” Mission Control: “Roger. Copy.”
Limited fuel, minimal battery life and a basic quantity of oxygen all required the LM to complete its mission within a tight 24-hour time frame. There was almost zero margin for error. President Nixon had already drafted a speech along the lines of “fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay to rest in peace”. After phone calls to the families, his public words were to be followed by a procedure based on a burial at sea.
Armstrong and Aldrin felt that they had a one in ten chance of losing their lives at some stage during the mission. They also believed that there was only a 50 per cent chance of safely reaching the surface.
Despite their navigational error, for the next few minutes Armstrong and Aldrin allowed the computer to bring them down on a gentle trajectory. Subjected to untried stresses it suddenly emitted an alarm tone, accompanied by a four-digit code that neither man recognised.
Armstrong (to Houston): “Program alarm.” Mission Control: “It’s looking good to us, over.” Armstrong (to Houston): “It’s a 1202.” Armstrong (to Aldrin): “What is it?”
For 18 long seconds Houston searched for an answer and, uncertain what the problem was, Armstrong had to be prepared for an imminent technical failure. The engine, their oxygen, the thrusters, the computer itself — anything could be about to collapse. Finally Houston advised them that, while the tiny 36kB computer was struggling with the workload, they were safe to continue.
Four more times the alarm sounded, intermittent tones and yellow warning lights shattering the men’s concentration and stranding them in a fog of anxiety. Armstrong was spending so much time looking for signs of technical failure that he barely had time to search for recognisable landmarks on the sunlit landscape ahead of him. Driven forwards by a committed, perhaps stubborn, belief in the abilities of himself, of Aldrin and of the LM, Armstrong flew on towards unfamiliar ground. At an altitude of 600ft it became clear that the computer was about to bring them down into a crater the size of a football stadium.
Armstrong took control of the craft and, flying at just 40mph, cut the rate of descent and flew over the crater and its boulder field. As he urgently scanned the rough terrain ahead, searching for a safe place to come down, his heartbeat soared from 77 to 156. Apollo 11 was no longer confined to the science of computers and pre-programmed trajectories, it was about one man’s nerve and skill. Although the flight controllers did not know why, they could see from their computer screens that the craft still had not landed.
Aldrin: “40ft, down 2½ . Picking up some dust.” With just 25 seconds of fuel remaining, the technical updates suddenly changed and the calm voice of Armstrong came over the air. “Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed.”
Around the world a fifth of the population was listening in. So too was Collins, who was orbiting 60 miles above Armstrong and Aldrin on board the combined command and service modules, which had ferried the lunar module and the crew all the way to the Moon.
While patiently coasting around the Moon, Collins was able to talk to Houston. But when he passed behind the far side he slipped out of radio contact so for 48 minutes during every two-hour orbit he was on his own. “I am alone now,” he later wrote, “truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the Moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side.”
Virtually all previous flights, American and Russian, had been confined to Earth orbit. Restricted to a height of about 200 miles, they barely escaped our planet.
Yet for a brief period between 1969 and 1972 men ventured into deep space, flying nearly 240,000 miles to reach the Moon.
In the 1960s nearly all astronauts were skilled test pilots with years of experience and usually a military background. Through a combination of personality and training, once strapped into a cockpit Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were not the types predisposed to fear. “What was there to be afraid of?” Aldrin later asked. “When something goes wrong, that’s when you should be afraid.”
Some ascribed this attitude simply to raw courage and a depth of character required of anyone contemplating space travel. Tom Wolfe described it as “the Right Stuff”, the title of his 1979 book on Nasa’s pioneers. Wolfe’s flag-waving adulation paints a picture of chiselled heroes, always ready with a salute and a smile. Popular though this image was, it inevitably fell wide of the mark.
The astronauts did not particularly value carefree brawn and bravery as much as, say, intelligence. Test pilots favour considered opinions based on intense periods of preparation. For six months the crew of Apollo 11 worked through a training regime so extensive that there was concern they would not have time to complete it. The mission was not about true grit and not much more; it was about highly skilled individuals relying upon months of training to execute flawlessly the flight plan to have a fighting chance of coming home again.
Today about 500 people have flown into space. Of those just 24 travelled to the Moon, of whom only 12 reached the surface. Those 12 people had the strength of mind to pull off what surely amounts to mankind’s greatest technological accomplishment.
Apollo 11 was not a lucky one-off, it was something that we repeated a further five times. It was about the expert execution of trajectories and rocket science. In short, rather than the Right Stuff, it was the Bright Stuff that counted when it came to attempting something so dangerous that 40 years on we are still in awe.
Dan Parry is the author of Moonshot, published by Ebury Press. A television programme Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 is to be screened by ITV on July 20. The film is also being shown tonight at the British Film Institute in London at 8.45pm and will be followed by a Q&A session with Parry and Richard Dale, the director.
