Michael Collins watched the Eagle drift down toward the lunar surface. Down? What does down mean? The vehicle taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon was going toward "land."
Land? What does land mean? There were reporters on TV stations down on Earth telling the world that there was a chance that the entire moon was just dust, and the Eagle would sink on contact. For the American Space Program, such an event would have been disconcerting.
But not as disconcerting as an astronaut taking a step on the moon, only to erupt in flames. That was going around on television, too. Imagine the families of the first astronauts listening to that.
Some people in the press asked officials whether the astronauts would be armed when they stepped onto the moon. Just in case something unfriendly was there.
As he watched his colleagues descend, as he manned the return ship, Michael Collins considered the chances of a successful mission. He thought it was about 50 percent. He didn't know at the time, but Neil Armstrong thought the same.
Little did they know at the time that their chances weren't that good.
As they approached what they thought was their landing spot, Neil Armstrong noticed they were going in too fast, too hot, and over-shooting. Too much more, and the simulations back home required an abort. While he was figuring out how to scheme for that, the computer's alarm started screeching.
The computer nerds back on Earth tried to figure out what "Alarm Code 1202" meant as it flashed at Armstrong and Aldrin. The computer wanted to abort. The humans--in Houston and a quarter million miles away from Houston--didn't. As their craft approached a clear landing spot among the rocks and boulders, Neil Armstrong went blind. That is, he couldn't see out the window. The dust that his craft was kicking up blocked all view. How did they not think of that?
The landing was so perfect, so light, that neither man in the Eagle felt it.
The way Tom Wolfe described it, Americans had been not just disappointed in their space efforts, but humiliated. The story goes that after Alan Shepard splashed down and finally got home, he took up his wife in his arms and announced: You're hugging the first man in space!
To which Louise Shepard replied: "Who let a Russian in here?"
Twas but a joke.
Yes, the Russian fellas were beating the pants off us, as the Clean Marine, Col. John Glenn (he of Col. Glenn Road) might have put it. Gus Grissom would have put it plainer.
After Sputnik, the Americans hurriedly put something on the launch pad. And televised it. The bird fell into its own nest and exploded.
The Russians sent condolences.
The American space nerds down here were amazed when a new president named Kennedy said he not only wanted to land a man on the moon in a decade, but bring him back, too. Landing a man on the moon is one thing. Getting him back is another. There was talk about making the LM edible, for when the inevitable happened and men became stranded on the lunar surface. Apparently the cooks at NASA couldn't make the LM taste good enough to be a better option than starving to death. The idea, like so many others, was abandoned.
America's space program, or at least its voyage to the moon, might have started in 1961 with the words of a president named Kennedy, but by 1969 things were moving fast. As these matters go, eight years is fast.
There was the Mercury program, to see if a man could actually live in weightlessness without his eyes popping out. Once the Mercury 7--"gentlemen all!"--had proven space wasn't a death trap, then came Gemini, the low-Earth orbit missions to figure out how to walk in space and turn ships around. The Apollo missions were put together to finally get to the moon. The first Apollo mission killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on the launchpad in January of 1967.
At that time, the 1960s were happening. Vietnam was in full swing. Between the disaster of Apollo 1 and the landing of Apollo 11, you had: The assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy. The Six-Day War. Muhammad Ali stripped of his title. Detroit riots. Czechsoslovakia's Prague Spring brutally put down. Milwaukee riots. USS Pueblo captured. Chicago riots. Tet Offensive. Baltimore riots. My Lai. Kansas City riots. Washington riots. Louisville riots.
Americans needed something to believe in. The Apollo program gave it to them.
The space race had been won by July 20th, 1969, exactly 50 years ago today. And the Americans had won it. After its initial successes, the Russians had a long losing streak in space. In what might have been the last straw for the Russian moon shot, a few weeks before American boys walked on the moon, an explosion of a Soviet N1 rocket did so much damage that it took a year and a half to rebuild the launch site. It was called the largest rocket explosion in human history. It left a crater not only in Russian soil, but in the Russian pysche.
The Americans had space.
What they didn't have was the moon. Not yet.
Not until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with an assist by Michael Collins, landed on it.
But the work that it took to make Apollo 11 a success was immense. Some would say impossible.
The Nepalese think when you die you go to the moon. Astronauts visiting Nepal get this question on occasion: "Did you see my grandmother up there?" The moon isn't just poetic and beautiful, though. It's inhospitable and uninviting. It's deadly. It took billions of American tax dollars and millions of man (and woman) hours to make those few landings.
When Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, he had his astronauts blasted from Earth's orbit from an over-sized cannon. It wasn't exactly like that. But it wasn't not that, either. How do you get a person, or three persons, out of Earth's orbit, into the moon's orbit four days later, on the lunar surface safely, then back out of the moon's orbit, into the Earth's orbit again, then safely to this planet, preferably landing in water? Hint: There's a lot of math involved.
Why go? It's a question that many people asked at the time, as the budget increased year after year. And academics still ask this question today. For the answer, we give you the eloquent Mr. Kennedy, at a speech on Sept. 12, 1962:
"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. . . . I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours . . . .
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."
Recommended reading: American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley.
Required reading: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
Must read when you get the soonest chance and don't delay: Moondust by Andrew Smith.
Editorial on 07/20/2019