Neil Armstrong,
Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. - 1969
Photo by Bill
Anders from Apollo 8 in 1968
“Suddenly,
from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense
majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate
sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising
gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes
more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.”
Edgar Mitchell
on Apollo 14:
Buzz Aldrin
LINKS:
NSSDC - The National Space
Science Data Center, NASA's permanent archive for space science mission
data.
NASA |
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Reluctant
hero
Rupert Cornwell - The Independent
FORTY years on, the debate is over. He didn't say the "a". Neil Armstrong
meant to, of course; the line he had prepared to mark the climax of
humankind's greatest adventure of the 20th century should have come out
as: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." But the "a"
somehow got lost. Some experts blamed it on his flat Midwestern accent.
Some maintained the humble indefinite article was obliterated by static.
But a phalanx of phoneticians and speech analysts have gone over newly
enhanced magnetic tapes of those imperishable words from the Sea of
Tranquillity, and in May they announced their finding. There was not room
- not even the 35 milliseconds posited by Australian researchers in 2006 -
for an "a", whether half-swallowed, elided or otherwise consumed.
Armstrong simply didn't say it. Either he forgot, or for once nerves got
to him.
If Armstrong had his way, this scientific debate about the missing "a"
would be the only point of interest this coming July 20, and he would
continue to live the quiet and anonymous life he has built for himself,
without interruption. But, for a few weeks at least, it cannot be. That
day in 1969, a global television audience of 500 million watched this
quiet son of an Ohio state auditor become the first man to set foot on the
moon.
The TV images may now be museum pieces. But they remain as thrilling and
incredible as when they appeared for the first time, generating an
unchanged sense of miracle. The technology was primitive: a tiny modern
mobile phone packs vastly more power than the Doctor Who-like electronics
that graced Apollo 11, all toggles and blinking lights. Yet these clunky
instruments somehow guided Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin to
an alien world - even if the onboard computer effectively crashed because
of data overload as the lunar module started its descent.
There was another scary moment in the last instants before the landing, as
Armstrong had to steer the craft away from some boulders, consuming extra
seconds of vital fuel in the process - and yet another when they prepared
to depart and the engine ignition switch for lift-off had broken. They
solved that mini-crisis by using a pen to break a circuit and activate the
launch process.
In the end, the mission went well-nigh perfectly. The men from Apollo 11
might have spent only 2½ hours outside the lunar module, and less than a
day in all on the moon's surface. But in that short time Armstrong had
joined Columbus, Amundsen and Lindbergh in the pantheon of explorers whose
exploits changed history. And once inside the pantheon, he has managed the
burden of celebrity as well or better than any of them.
Destiny surely pre-ordained him for the role. He was born in the flat
farmlands of western Ohio, in the state that has produced more astronauts
than any other, just 80-odd kilometres north of Dayton where Orville and
Wilbur Wright pioneered the science that would take Apollo to the moon.
As a boy, Armstrong was fascinated by flight, and by the engineering and
physics that made flight possible. At 16, before he had learnt to drive,
he was the proud owner of a pilot's licence. Five years later, he was
flying combat missions over Korea, and after that war he became a hotshot
test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert, flying
the Bell X-1, the hypersonic North American X-15 and other exotic planes
chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff that formed the bridge between
the early jet age and the space age.
In one 1962 incident that is now part of Edwards legend, Armstrong messed
up an X-15 descent and flew over the base where he was scheduled to land
at a speed of Mach 3 (3200 km/h) and an altitude of 30,480 metres. But he
managed to rectify the mistake, turning from above north-eastern Los
Angeles back towards Edwards, and executing a high-speed glide to get the
plane safely down instants before it would have crashed.
The episode was vintage Armstrong, cool and resourceful, and seemingly
without nerves. There would be similar moments later. In 1968, Armstrong
was practising for the moon trip on the LLTV, the Lunar Landing Training
Vehicle, better known as the "Flying Bedstead", when the craft began to
fly out of control at an altitude of just 30 metres. He ejected a second
or so before the LLTV smashed into the ground in flames. In typical
unflappable fashion, he brushed himself down and went back to his office
to do some paperwork.
It was mostly luck that Armstrong was on the Apollo 11 mission, his second
actual space flight. An accident or a technical glitch might have altered
the timetable; another crew might have found itself heading to the moon.
But it was perhaps less accidental that Armstrong was selected to be
commander and then designated to be first out on to the lunar surface.
The man himself insists not. "I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just
chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular
role. That wasn't planned by anyone," he maintained in a 2005 interview
with CBS television. But was it really a fluke? Perhaps some shrewd
individual at NASA realised that the moon landing carried with it more
than every man's standard 15 minutes. Armstrong, this wise man may have
concluded, would be better able to cope with the lifetime of celebrity
ahead than, say, Aldrin - who after his space days lapsed into depression
and alcoholism and still attends rehab, and whose latest venture, confided
to a New York Times interviewer last month, was a rap session with Snoop
Dogg.
And incontestably, July 20, 1969, changed Armstrong's life forever. In his
professional circle, "friends and colleagues all of a sudden looked at us,
treated us slightly differently than they had months or years before when
we were working together. I never quite understood that," Armstrong told
James Hansen, author of the 2005 biography First Man: The Life of Neil A.
Armstrong.
For a person instinctively averse to publicity, even worse was to come.
The success of the moon mission turned Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael
Collins - who flew the orbiting command module - into global heroes and
champions of brand America.
Armstrong could have succumbed to the adulation, using celebrity as a
springboard for a new career. He could have gone into politics, like his
colleagues John Glenn - who represented Ohio for 24 years in the US Senate
- and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who served a term as senator for New
Mexico. He could have become a professional pitchman, an ambassador for
NASA, a television talking head. He could have cashed in on the lecture
circuit with speeches for tens of thousands of dollars a time.
Among mind-changing experiences, few can rank higher than walking on the
moon, an experience granted to just 12 men, of them only nine still alive.
But Armstrong was different. His priority was a normal life. For him, two
years as NASA's show pony were more than enough. In the summer of 1971, he
went back to his early passion of aeronautical engineering, taking a
professorship at the University of Cincinnati. A predictable flurry of
media attention soon subsided after he made it clear he was there to
teach, not talk to the press.
To aid the transition, Armstrong made a careful study of what had happened
to Charles Lindbergh. By the time of the moon flight, the man who had made
the first solo trans-Atlantic flight was in his 70s. His 1927 exploit had
turned him into the most famous man in the world, and changed his life
forever - and not for the better.
The similarities between Armstrong and Lindbergh were considerable. In
their respective heydays, both were young and handsome heroes. Both men,
too, were shy and reserved, and their politics leant to the right, based
on a belief that America should stay out of foreign conflicts. And,
finally, each had known family tragedy. Back in 1932, the kidnapping and
murder of the Lindbergh baby - probably the most sensational and avidly
covered criminal case in US history - had banished forever the moniker of
"Lucky Lindy". In 1962, Armstrong experienced the grief of losing his
two-year-old daughter, Karen, to brain cancer.
That the two pioneers, though 28 years apart in age, should feel an
affinity and strike up an acquaintance was inevitable. "I wonder,"
Lindbergh wrote to Armstrong after the landing, "if you felt on the moon's
surface as I did after landing at Paris in 1927: that I would like to have
had more chance to look around."
Even more revealing was Lindbergh's reaction to an invitation to fly out
with president Richard Nixon to personally greet the three returning
conquerors on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet - albeit only through a
glass window into the trailer where Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were
being held in quarantine for three weeks, lest they had brought back some
lethal lunar bug.
Lindbergh turned his president down. The decision, he later wrote, was
based on what happened after his own historic flight, "when I spent close
to a quarter century re-achieving a position in which I could live, work
and travel under normal circumstances". The moon landing and its
follow-up, the old aviator feared, "would attract the greatest
concentration of publicity in the history of the world", and he himself
would be forced back "into a press relationship and way of life I am most
anxious not to re-enter".
Neil Armstrong took those words to heart. Since his departure from NASA,
his career has been a case study of how to live with extreme celebrity -
and proof that a dislike of the limelight, a somewhat solitary nature, and
a reluctance to speak to the press do not mean that a man has turned into
a hermit.
"Fame never turned his head; he's a true professional," says John Swez, an
old family friend. "Buzz Aldrin may have lost it a bit, but not Neil. He's
certainly not reclusive. He's got a good sense of humour. The first time I
chatted with him at length, he was funny and outgoing. He's probably the
most intelligent man I've ever talked to. Yes, he's careful in what he
says, but I think it comes from that level of intelligence. He wants to
get it right."
Above all, Armstrong sought normality. Unlike several of his colleagues,
he never wrote his memoirs. It was only after some misgiving, and more
than three decades after the Apollo 11 flight, that he agreed to
co-operate with Hansen, an eminent historian. The 750-page authorised
biography is dense and scholarly, crammed with fascinating detail, but as
unflamboyant as its subject.
The moon walk has left its mark on Wapakoneta, an unpretentious Midwest
town of 9,400 souls. The Armstrong family moved away soon after Neil was
born but returned in 1944 for three years when he was a teenager. The
astronaut's old high school is now a residential building. But the
family's two-storey weatherboard house at 601 West Benton Street looks
much as it must have done then, neat and smartly painted in grey and
white. Once there was a plaque reading "Eagle's Landing, boyhood home of
Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the moon", but it was blown away in a
storm a few years ago.
You can scarcely drive a block without a reminder of Armstrong's feat -
the Moon Florist, the Apollo Storage Company, not to mention the framed
front page from The New York Times of July 21, 1969, that greets visitors
to the men's room in the McDonald's on the way into town.
In his home town, Armstrong's reserve is not universally appreciated. Some
would like to see a bit more of the local boy made good. His refusal of an
invitation to take part in local festivities celebrating the 25th
anniversary of the moon landing in 1994 was particularly upsetting.
Armstrong, however, has explained his modesty thus: "I guess we all like
to be recognised not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our
daily work." Lindbergh's flight was very much a solo affair; Armstrong, by
contrast, was the beneficiary of a decade-long NASA operation that
involved more than 300,000 people. So why, asks Armstrong, should he
receive all the glory? And you can make the case that, in this post-Bush
era, modesty, caution and a willingness to think before speaking are
exactly what America's global image requires.
Then, as now, Armstrong was a man totally in control. Today he makes the
odd public appearance but mainly lives quietly with his second wife,
Carol, at the 80-hectare farm he bought in 1971 in Lebanon, Ohio, a
half-hour drive north of Cincinnati.
As events would have it, NASA seemed to lose interest in things lunar not
long after the giddy euphoria of 1969. The last manned landing, by Apollo
17, was in 1972, and the focus of space exploration shifted to manned low
orbital shuttle flights and unmanned probes to more distant planets. The
moon seemed less a gateway to the heavens than a cul de sac, and the
headlines were consumed by bleaker earthly dramas such as Vietnam and
Watergate.
Now, however, as Armstrong prepares to celebrate his 79th birthday next
month, the moon is making a comeback. NASA intends to have a permanently
staffed solar-powered base up and running by 2024 to prepare future human
missions to Mars and other planets.
This October, the agency plans to send a rocket smashing into the surface
of the moon to create a plume of rocks and debris stretching 240
kilometres into space. This in turn will be analysed by a satellite for
traces of water ice, crucial for any permanent station. And, back down on
Earth, a gentleman farmer in western Ohio will be monitoring proceedings,
his fingers crossed, with a quiet smile of satisfaction on his face."
The Christmas 1968 blessing from Apollo 8
Apollo 8, the
first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve,
December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts; Commander Frank Borman,
Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did
a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed
pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8. Lovell said, "The vast
loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have
back there on Earth." They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns
reading from the book of Genesis.
William Anders:
"For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would
like to send you".
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let
there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from
the darkness."
Jim Lovell:
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let
it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the
firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were
the second day."
Frank Borman:
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto
one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the
waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Borman then added, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good
night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you
on the good Earth."
It was as
surprising as it was moving.
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