Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (35 page)

Nominal—engineering lingo for normal, and Neil assured flight controllers, “Apollo
11
’s crew is Go.” They were speeding away from Earth faster than a bullet and when they reached the end of their ride, they were moving across every single seven-mile stretch in only a second. The sudden loss of rocket power slid them into a free coast to the moon. With the exception of the hums of their Apollo’s electronics and the fluids moving through its systems, they were left in a world of silence with little sensation of movement
and
the exhilarating freedom of floating weightless.

Speed: 24,500 mph

Earth Distance: 588 miles

Mission Elapsed Time: 2 hours, 54 minutes

Once again Neil could take a breath. He told Mission Control, “Hey, Houston, the Saturn V gave us a magnificent ride.”

“Roger,
11
. We’ll pass that on. And it certainly looks like you are well on your way.”

“We have no complaints with any of the three stages on that ride,” Neil assured them. “It was beautiful.”

“Roger. We copy. No transients at staging of any significance.”

“That’s right,” Neil told them. “It was all, all a good ride,” he concluded as he and Mike Collins prepared for the next job: separating Apollo and the lunar module from the S4B stage.

“
Apollo 11
, you’re Go for separation.”

“Houston,” Neil came back. “We’re ready. We’re about to Sep.”

“This is Houston. We copy.”

Neil felt explosive bolts fire, and heard metal clanging as he sensed his spacecraft was now smaller. “Sep complete, Houston,” he reported.

They were leaving the final stage of their Saturn V behind and Mike Collins was now at the controls. The crew felt and heard Columbia’s thruster rockets fire. Saw their ship turning around bringing them face to face with the Eagle. They were staring at their lunar module that had been riding atop the rocket secured inside its strong container. Columbia must have appeared as if it were a thick-bodied insect about to devour the helpless Eagle—but no matter. Mike Collins triggered more blasts from Columbia’s thrusters and transparent flame streaked back. The tip of its docking probe entered the lunar module’s docking port. One more blast of the thrusters and both ships rocked from impact. The astronauts felt it and heard metallic snaps as the docking hooks latched; suddenly staring back at them was the capture light. Their two spacecraft were now one.

Neil told the ground, “We are docked.”

Speed: 19,180 mph

Earth Distance: 7,646 miles

Mission Elapsed Time: 3 hours, 29 minutes

For the first time since leaving Earth orbit and heading for the moon Neil could relax—only for a moment. “Houston,” he began telling Mission Control, “you might be interested that out my left-hand window now, I can observe the entire continent of North America, Alaska, and over the Pole, down to the Yucatán Peninsula, Cuba, northern part of South America, and then I run out of window.”

“Roger, we copy.”

Neil’s view of a quickly disappearing Earth. (NASA)

Neil had to laugh out loud. He knew those in Mission Control had little time for sightseeing as they were getting ready for an evasive maneuver—one that would keep
Apollo 11
away from any contact again with its Saturn V’s S4B third stage. The firing would slingshot the rocket past the trailing edge of the moon and into a solar orbit. But few—only the crews of
Apollo 8
and
Apollo 10
—ever had such a view of Earth. The small-town boy from Ohio was impressed.

“
11
, Houston,” CapCom called. “Whenever you’re possessed of a free moment there, we’ve got this maneuver PAD.”

“Okay,” Buzz answered.

CapCom read off all the letters and numbers needed for S4B’s slingshot, and Buzz copied them while Neil and Mike began getting out of their sweaty spacesuits. They’d been wearing the heavy, pressurized garments since leaving their crew quarters six hours earlier. They quickly traded their exoskeletons for their comfortable, lightweight Teflon jumpsuits, but undressing and dressing in their newly acquired spacecraft was akin to performing the task in your family car.

As soon as Neil began feeling sorry for himself he remembered his friend and the mission’s backup commander Jim Lovell who had actually lived two weeks in space in a phone booth—lived in one of
Gemini 7
’s two seats with Frank Borman. Neil quickly renewed his thanks for his spacious Apollo. It wasn’t yet like living in a men’s restroom.

Neil was most aware in weightlessness that for every action there’s an opposite reaction. He would push against something and his body would take off in the opposite direction. Then he would have to muscle his way back all the while not really sensing how fast they were speeding away from Earth. When riding in a car, on a train, or in an airplane at night the moon and stars seem to stay in place—moving along with you as road signs and buildings and trees whiz by. These near objects tell you how fast you are going. In space you are too far away from other bodies of the universe to get a feeling of how fast you are moving.

Neil often pointed out that our Earth is moving around our sun at 67,062 miles per hour, and we pay little notice. We’re only reminded by the change in the seasons.

*   *   *

Once he was comfortably in his jumpsuit, Neil was back at the window. The slowly changing panorama of Earth became a sphere and he was thankful he had kept his nose in the geography books in school.

He got a kick out of being able to pinpoint locations on Earth and he told Mission Control, “We didn’t have much time, Houston, to talk to you about our views out the window. We had the entire northern part of the lighted hemisphere visible including North America, North Atlantic, and Europe and Northern Africa. We could see that the weather was good just about everywhere. There was one cyclonic depression in Northern Canada, in the Athabaska—probably east of Athabaska area.”

Neil cleared his throat and continued, “Greenland was clear, and it appeared to be we were seeing just the icecap in Greenland. All North Atlantic was pretty good; and Europe and Northern Africa seemed to be clear. Most of the United States was clear. There was a low—looked like a front stretching from the center of the country up across north of the Great Lakes into Newfoundland.”

Mission Control had been listening intently to the geography and weather report, and CapCom told Neil, “Roger. We copy.”

Mission Control receives a weather report from the
Apollo 11
crew with this view of Earth. (NASA)

“I didn’t have much to look at,” Mike Collins added to the transmission, “but I sure did like it.”

“We’ll get you into the PTC soon and you can take turns looking,” Mission Control told Mike.

PTC was the acronym for Passive Thermal Control. To make sure the astronauts and their ship weren’t freezing on one side while roasting on the other they would slowly rotate
Apollo 11
to evenly absorb solar rays. This imitation of a rotisserie would give each astronaut equal opportunities to look out their window and admire the planet they were leaving and the lunar landscapes they were approaching. Flight operations had given the astronauts a simple tool in which to increase their view. It was a monocular—half of a set of binoculars—and with it the crew was taken with the fact that Earth appeared to be so fragile.

Neil thought of their home planet as small yet colorful, and compared to other space bodies it couldn’t put up a very good defense against a celestial onslaught, yet it had been defending itself pretty well for 4.6 billion years. But there was that asteroid or meteor that took out the dinosaurs and the one that cleaned out the millions of acres of forest on the Siberian surface, and such an object if humankind doesn’t prepare could take out Earth. That’s what
Apollo 11
’s mission was all about and Neil was hopeful their mission would help life to continue and flourish.

There was a story going around that said when Neil was flying his F9F Panther on Korean combat patrol he flew over a ridge one early morning to see rows of North Korean soldiers sweating through their calisthenics. He could have mowed them down with his jet’s machine guns, killing hundreds of them, but he didn’t.

Neil never told me the story but it is an easy one for me to believe. Life simply meant too much to the man to waste it.

Once when we were having a drink at our favorite watering hole a young lizard scooted by my feet and I reached down with a cocktail napkin and picked him up. “Take him outside and let him go,” Neil requested, and I did, releasing the young life by the pool to scurry away to live or to be eaten by a larger creature.

In Neil’s mind, killing those defenseless North Korean soldiers would have been the same as shooting a helpless enemy fighter pilot parachuting from his burning aircraft. Neil Armstrong was on his way to the moon in hopes of pioneering new places for life to thrive beyond Earth. He sure as hell wasn’t looking for ways to kill it. He could not and would not waste the smallest of God’s gift.

*   *   *

Neil returned his attention back to the just completed S4B-stage slingshot maneuver and the crew of three agreed it was time to eat.

The crew downed sandwiches made from tube spreads of ham salad, chicken salad, and tuna, and for snacks they found their pantry stocked with peanut cubes, bacon bites, barbecue beef bites, and for the sweet tooth, caramel candy, dried apricots, peaches, and pears. The crew passed their thanks and kudos along to the chefs in Houston.

Speed: 8,161 mph

Earth Distance: 29,521 miles

Mission Elapsed Time: 5 hours, 55 minutes

The astronauts were spending their first day outbound grinning like kids in a down-home swimming hole. There was so much to experience, so much to do, so much to see watching Earth grow smaller in their wake as they took turns playing tourist guide with Buzz Aldrin describing the snow on the mountains in California for CapCom Charlie Duke. He added, “It looks like LA doesn’t have much of a smog problem today, and with the monocular, I can discern a definite green cast to the San Fernando Valley.”

“How’s Baja California look, Buzz?”

“Well, it’s got some clouds up and down it, and there’s a pretty good circulation system a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of California,” he told Charlie.

The astronauts sent television pictures to their worldwide audience and Mike Collins took the tour guide position.

“Okay, Houston, you suppose you could turn the Earth a little bit so we can get a little bit more than just water?”

“Roger,
11
,” CapCom Charlie Duke replied with a grin. “I don’t think we got much control over that. Looks like you’ll have to settle for water.”

“Okay, Charlie,” Mike laughed, making room for Neil at the mike.

Mission Control had asked the crew for ten minutes more television, requesting a narrative from Neil describing what they were seeing.

Apollo 11
was about 60,000 miles from its homeport with the astronauts viewing a quarter of Earth. Neil began his ad-lib narration:

We’re seeing the center of the Earth viewing a quarter of the sphere with the eastern Pacific Ocean. We have not been able to visually pick up the Hawaiian Island chain, but we can clearly see the western coast of North America. The United States, the San Joaquin Valley, the High Sierras, Baja California, and Mexico down as far as Acapulco, and the Yucatán Peninsula, and you can see on through Central America to the northern coast of South America, Venezuela, and Columbia.