Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (40 page)

But there was no time for savoring it, or appreciating the science of it all. They had much to do very quickly, and they got busy. Surprisingly in only half the time they anticipated, Eagle had settled gently into its perch on the moon with all its systems purring. Neil and Buzz were ready to open the hatch. That plan to hoodwink the media with a scheduled four-hour sleep and rest period wasn’t needed.

“Of course we wanted to get outside as soon as possible,” Neil told me. “We needed the contingency sample to show we had been there, but we were convinced we’d need several hours to get Eagle’s fluids and systems settled. With all that time passing and nothing happening,” he explained further, “you reporters would have been speculating, guessing about possible problems, and we didn’t want you guys inventing stories.” Again that one-of-a-kind grin. “We wanted you thinking we were sleeping.”

“Guilty,” I acknowledged.

*   *   *

Neil and Buzz were ready to step onto the lunar landscape, and this reporter believed they were resting. The NBC News team was having dinner, celebrating, when we received the call, “They’re coming out early.”

With Texas beef and delicacies from Galveston Bay left on tables, we beat a path back to our microphones. We were in place to report the first human step on the moon when the last discernible bits of Eagle’s atmosphere rushed pass its hatch’s edges and we heard Neil tell an estimated billion plus listeners, “The hatch is coming open.”

It was obvious NASA had made the correct decision regarding who would be first to leave the lunar lander. Outfitted in his bulky spacesuit, boots, and backpack there was no way Buzz could have maneuvered around Neil to the hatch. The commander simply had to be the first to leave and the last to return. Neil leaned forward, backing out, stopping on the porch with its large handrails leading to the ladder. Before he could begin descending to the moon’s surface, he had to pull a D-ring, which lowered an equipment tray holding things needed for their moonwalk. It was called the MESA, and Neil told Mission Control, “The MESA came down all right.”

“This is Houston. We copy, standing by for your TV.”

The primitive, low-grade black-and-white television camera was located on the MESA, but the billion plus watching back on Earth didn’t care about its quality. They wanted to see anything they could, and an excited CapCom Bruce McCandless told the astronauts, “Man, we’re getting a picture.”

“You got a good picture. Huh?” Buzz questioned.

“There’s a great deal of contrast in it, and currently it’s upside down on our monitor,” CapCom explained. “But we can make out a fair amount of detail.”

It was back to the days of fiddling with early television but Mission Control quickly readjusted the view and an excited McCandless reported, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder.”

Viewers worldwide saw a strange, black-and-white image of Eagle’s front leg with its ladder slanted across a totally dark sky. Below and in the background was a very bright lunar surface. On the ladder was a ghost. The ghost was Neil Armstrong. (NASA)

He moved slowly and steadily as if he had no place to go. The moon had been waiting for 4.6 billion years and Neil was in no hurry. Every move had to be precise, correct, no problems.

Soon he was a step above lunar dirt and he paused, staring at Eagle’s landing footpads and legs. They had been designed to compress with the force of landing, making the ship more stable, bringing its ladder closer to the moon’s surface. But Neil’s piloting skills proved to be the problem. He sat Eagle on the moon so gently there was no collapsing of the pads and legs, and the bottom rung of the ladder was still three-and-a-half feet up.

Way to go, Armstrong, he scolded himself as he dangled a foot over the rung and fell slowly to the footpad beneath him. But before he would take another step, he wanted to be sure he could get back up to the ladder. In the low gravity he sprang with such force he almost missed the bottom rung. He steadied himself. Satisfied he could handle the extra long step, he descended back onto the footpad.

“Okay, I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It’s not collapsed too far, but it’s adequate to get back up.”

“Roger. We copy,” acknowledged CapCom.

“It takes a pretty good little jump,” Neil told them before turning his attention to his dilemma. For some time he had been thinking about what he would say when he actually stepped on the moon. He had thought about one statement he judged had meaning and fit the historic occasion and he ran it by his brother Dean and others close. Neil had not made up his mind.

He told me he was undecided until he was faced with the moment.

He reached up with his gloved hand grasping the ladder, and then turned left, leaning outward. “I’m going to step off the LM now,” he said, lifting his left boot over the footpad and setting it down in moon dust that shot up and outward in a fine spray—a spray that lasted only a quick instant in the absence of an atmosphere. “That’s one small step for man,” Neil said with a momentary pause, “One giant leap for mankind.”

What most didn’t know was that Neil had meant to say, “That’s one small step for
a
man,” and the loss of the “a” set off an argument for years to come. Had a
beep
in the transmission covered the a or some other loss of transmission wiped it from our ears, or had Neil nervously skipped the word?

Knowing Neil’s struggles with public speaking, I believe the latter, and with all the excitement and emotions of the moment, I’ve never been convinced Neil himself really knew for sure.

*   *   *

His mother had told him her only real concern for his safety on the moon was that the lunar crust might not support him. Again Neil tested his weight. Then he told Mission Control, “The surface is fine and powdery. I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.”

“Neil, this is Houston. We’re copying.”

He stood there rock solid, boots braced for balance, enclosed in the elaborate pressurized exoskeleton that sustained his life in this inhospitable place. It was filled with energy, with supplies of heat and cooling, water, oxygen pressure—a capsule of life created by his Apollo colleagues, and Neil Armstrong stood looking long and hard at this small, untouched world.

He was overwhelmed; his sense and his thoughts set afire with the miracle of being on the lunar surface. He believed that he and Buzz and those who would follow were there for far more than just walking through lunar dust and measuring solar winds, magnetic fields, and radiation levels; all that was window dressing for their real purpose for coming.

It all condensed into every view they had of their fragile, beautiful Earth.

It was suddenly clear to this son of the land once walked by Orville and Wilbur Wright that he was on the moon to look back—to give every single human a clear look at spaceship Earth. In this neighborhood of the universe it was life’s only world. It was encased in diamond-hard blackness and Neil recognized it mattered little if we were Republican, Democrat, Independent, apolitical, Christian, Jew, Muslin, Hindu, Buddhist, or whomever the hell we liked or disliked. We lived on a vulnerable world and we needed to take care of its very definite resources; on a world where we all would suffer terrifying consequences if we destroyed its ability to sustain us, its ability to foster and nurture the very life we now threatened to contaminate. Neil knew no matter how diligent, how great our effort to protect Earth, it was finite and one day if humans were to survive they would have to move on to new worlds. Helping to achieve that was what he and Buzz and all those who would follow were doing walking on the moon.

Neil stopped his thoughts, forced himself out of his introspection.

He and Buzz had much to do before they could catch a few hours rest and he turned and began walking farther away from the security of Eagle.

He knew with every step he was moving farther from the safety of his landing craft. The longer it would take him to get back the greater the risk, but with every halting step he was gaining confidence.

In one sense it was like learning to walk again—shuffling, stiff-legged yet buoyant, like wading through chin-deep water with his feet striking bottom—floating in low gravity within his spacesuit.

On Earth his exoskeleton weighed 348 pounds. Now on the moon it only weighed 58 pounds, and he told Mission Control, “There seems to be no difficulty in moving around, as we suspected. It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations at
¹
⁄
₆
G that we performed. It’s actually no trouble to walk,” he told them, adding, “The descent engine did not leave a crater of any size. It has about one foot clearance on the ground. We’re essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.”

He had maneuvered Eagle to the flattest place on that part of the Sea of Tranquility. He pushed his boots into the soft, greyish-brown dirt. No living creature had ever done this before on this desolate, utterly silent world, but what puzzled Neil most was the lighting. From inside Eagle the moon’s sky was black. But out on the surface it was still black, but a daylight black, and the surface looked tan. What he couldn’t understand, if you looked down-sun, down along your own shadow, or into the sun, the moon was tan. If you looked cross-sun it was darker. If you looked straight down at the surface, particularly in the shadows, it looked very, very dark. When you held lunar material in your hands it was also dark, grey or black.

Neil’s first task was to collect a contingency sample. If they had to abort the moonwalk early a small bag of lunar soil would make scientists happy. But he told himself he should do that in sunlight and for now he needed the camera. He needed to take pictures while his eyes were still adapted to the shadows.

“Okay, Buzz, we ready to bring down the camera?”

“I’m all ready,” Buzz told him. “I think it’s been all squared away and in good shape, but you’ll have to play out all the LEC,” Buzz instructed. “It looks like it’s coming out nice and evenly.”

Neil and Buzz used a special conveyor line with the acronym of LEC to lower the camera down to the surface, and Neil told Mission Control, “I’m standing directly in the shadow now looking up at Buzz in the window, and I can see everything quite clearly. The light is sufficiently bright backlighted into the front of the LM, that everything is very clearly visible.”

Neil mounted the camera on a bracket on his chest and stepped forward to take the number one photograph. It was to have been his first footprint on the moon, but no sooner than he looked for it by the footpad than he was ready to kick himself. In his movements to check out Eagle’s stance and operate the conveyor line to bring the camera down, he had walked over it. It was obvious his later steps had blotted out his first.

Then Bruce McCandless called, “We see you getting some pictures and the contingency sample, Neil.”

Neil didn’t move. He stood there disappointed with the loss of the first footprint, and McCandless asked again, “Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample, over?”

No one was more aware than Neil how important the contingency sample was and he told Bruce, “Roger, I’m going to get to that just as soon as I finish these picture series.”

Buzz watched as Neil completed the photographs and walked away to a sunlit area. He asked, “Going to get the contingency sample there, Neil?” “Right,” Neil answered. “Okay. That’s good,” Buzz agreed.

Neil quickly reached into a thigh pocket and withdrew a collapsible handle with a bag on its end. He was in sunlight for the first time and he turned his back on the penetrating glare. He began digging into the surface. What he found surprised him. There was the same soft powder, but then there wasn’t. He met resistance. “This is very interesting,” he told Mission Control. “It’s a very soft surface, but here and there where I plug with the contingency sample collector, I run into a very hard surface. It appears to be very cohesive material of the same sort.” He scooped up enough lunar soil to fill the bag and told them, “I’ll try to get a rock in here, just a couple.” That’ll give the geologists their money’s worth.

“That looks beautiful from here, Neil,” Buzz told him, talking about the sample, but Neil took Buzz’s comment to mean the moon. “It has a beauty of its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States. It’s different but it’s very pretty out here.”

Neil got the contingency sample put away. Still holding the unneeded collector handle, he thought for a moment about throwing it like a javelin.

He smiled at how pleased Rick would be if his old man could set the record for throwing the javelin. How many times had he been on his older son’s case to practice not only in Little League but in all sports, and he smiled, wondering for a moment what the record was, and then thought better of the idea. Instead he tossed it underhand and it sailed a long way, spinning in the sunlight.