Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (51 page)

So they were obliged to proceed through the long braking burn with their minds on thoughts of Abort all the way, their eyes on
the instrument panel, Armstrong’s eyes as much as Aldrin’s, searching for a clue to what had caused the overload, six hundred dials and switches to consider and eliminate in blocks and banks—a hopeless activity: the cause of the malfunction might reveal itself on no dial, and in fact could derive from the load of the rendezvous radar in addition to the landing radar, and that introduced still another fear, for the rendezvous radar would have even more work on the trip up from the moon. As Duke said: “Here we are with a computer that seems to be saturated during descent and my gosh, we might be asking it to perform a more complicated task during ascent.” And periodically Kranz queried his FIDO, his GUIDO, his TelCom and his EECOM, and the voices came back, “GO, GO, GO, GO,” and Eagle descended, now at twenty-one thousand feet, now at sixteen thousand, thirteen thousand five hundred. “Stand by,” said the Capcom, “You’re looking great at eight minutes.” Altitude ninety-two hundred feet.

In another twelve seconds they were at high gate. Now their horizontal speed was very low, their thrust was reduced, and they began to sit up from their near horizontal position. Slowly the astronauts’ legs inclined with the legs of the Lem toward the ground, slowly their heads came up. And as they did, so returned a view of the moon through the bottom of the window now that the Lem inclined back toward the vertical. There were markings on their windows, horizontal lines to line up against the horizon of the moon and so serve to pinpoint the area where they would land, but as the ground of the Sea of Tranquility came into sight from four thousand feet, from three thousand feet, as their angle shifted and more and more of the moon was visible through that slanted window, so to their distress was the terrain unrecognizable. Quick glimpses showed no landmarks, no particular craters on the flat desert of Tranquility which might bear familiar relation to the photographs and charts Apollo 10 had prepared for them, and Armstrong memorized, no, now they were in another place, whether four miles or fourteen away from the selected landing site was impossible to tell. And at that instant a new alarm blinks on
the computer. “Twelve alarm,” says Aldrin, “1201.” The Capcom answers, “Roger. 1201 alarm.”

When nothing further is said, Aldrin’s voice comes in again. “We’re GO. Hang tight. We’re GO. Two thousand feet …”

And the flight controllers at Mission Control are screwed to the parameters of the consoles, the roll calls come in for GO. There is always attention to Bales’ answer to Kranz’s query. “GO,” Bales’ voice will pipe out against the alarms.

Kranz is a leader. He is a man who gives others the feeling that they are about to go through the door together into the stadium where they are each going to play the best game of their life. Kranz, like Slayton, has the look of a man who had lived for years in space, and Bales is a young engineer with a large round face and large horn-rimmed glasses, destiny sits on him with a moist touch, but the limits of decision had been clarified that June morning a month ago and Bales had done the work to separate a total crisis from a partial crisis on 1202 and 1201, and now, distinguishing the differences—no time to ask for confirmation—calls GO. The mission continues.

But the astronauts continue without the division of labor Aldrin has specified as tidy. They come down toward the gray wife of the earth’s ages with their eyes riveted to the instruments. There are no more than peeps and glimpses of the oncoming ground. At two thousand feet, Armstrong finally leaves the dials, studies the view from the window. He can land by hand if necessary now.

But he cannot locate himself. No landmarks are familiar. From one thousand feet up it is apparent that Eagle is headed for a wretched crater with a boulder field of rocks and “the rocks seemed to be coming up at us awfully fast.” Fast and mean are those rocks accelerating to the eye like the zoom of a camera down to the
ground. “The clock runs about triple speed in a situation like that.” And now Aldrin is calling out relevant computer and instrument readings. Here they come at Armstrong! “750, coming down at 23.” That was altitude seven hundred and fifty feet, rate of descent twenty-three feet per second. “700 feet, 21 down. 600 feet, down at 19. 540 feet down at 30—down at 15.” In the tension Aldrin has miscalled a number for an instant. “400 feet, down at 9.” Something is now garbled. Then the voice again. It is quiet, it is almost sad. “350, down at 4. 330 feet, 3½ down. We’re pegged on horizontal velocity.”

They are drifting horizontally over the boulder fields, skittering like a water bug debating which pad it will light on. Armstrong has taken over all of attitude control and part of throttle control—his commands are now inserted in with computer commands. The descent rate has reduced from ten feet a second to three feet, then only a foot a second. They hover, Armstrong searching for a spot in the boulder field, “because I’m sure some of the ejecta coming out of such a large crater would have been lunar bedrock, and as such, fascinating to the scientists. I was tempted, but my better judgment took over …” No, he is not rushing in. He has gone through the computer alerts, the loss of all landmarks, has descended into that narrow field of vision where the horizon of the moon is always near, now drops down toward those boulders, hovers and skims, he has not had his recurring dreams as a boy night after night without tutoring the synapses of his growth into a thousand simulations of deliberate entrance into a dark space.

At last there is a place, “the size of a big house lot” between craters and a boulder field, and drifting almost done, they see the shadow of their Lem slanting across the moon ground like a giant prehistoric bird of destiny and “200 feet,” says Aldrin, “4½ down, 5½ down. 160, 6½ down, 5½ down, 9 forward. 5 percent. Quantity light. 73 feet. Things looking good. Down a half. 6 forward.”

“Sixty seconds,” says the Capcom. That is the limit of their fuel.

“Lights on,” returns Eagle. Now their landing lights burn down
on the sunlit moon ground to beam through the dust, and now comes the dust. At thirty feet above the ground, a great amount blows out in all directions like an underwater flower of the sea and the ground is partially visible beneath as if “landing in a very fast-moving ground fog,” and the fuel gauges almost empty, and still he drifts forward. “Thirty seconds,” calls out the Capcom for warning. And in a murk of dust and sunlight and landing lights, the Eagle settles in. Contact lights light up on the board to register the touch of the probes below her legs. Aldrin’s voice speaks softly, “Okay, engine stop. ACA out of detente. Modes control both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off. 413 is in.”

Then was it that the tension broke for fifty million people or was it five hundred million, or some sum of billions of eyes and ears around a world which had just come into contact with another world for what future glory, disaster, blessing or curse nobody living could know. And Armstrong and Aldrin, never demonstrative, shook hands or clapped each other on the back—they did not later remember—and back at Mission Control, Charley Duke said, “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

And Kranz, who had issued every order to Duke, and queried his controllers in a voice of absolute calm for the entire trip down, now tried to speak and could not. And tried to speak, and again could not, and finally could unlock his lungs only by smashing his hand on a console so hard his bones were bruised for days. But then if his throat had constricted and his lungs locked, his heart stopped, he would have been a man who died at the maximum of his moments on earth and what a spring might then have delivered him to
the first explorers of the moon. Perhaps it is the function of the dream to teach us those moments when we are GO or NO GO for the maximum thrust into death. They were down, they were on the moon ground, and who could speak?

“All right,” said Kranz. “Everybody settle down, and let’s get ready for a T-1 Stay–No Stay.”

They were down, they had landed—the decade in which the project had been conceived was the decade in which it was achieved. What an achievement! Hannibal had taken his legions across the Alps, Cortez had conquered the mighty armies of the Aztecs with less than a thousand conquistadors, Castro landed in Cuba with eighty-two men, lost seventy in ambush on the beach, and five days later, hiding in the jungle, said to the survivors: “the days of the dictatorship are numbered.” Now Apollo 12 had landed on the moon, for if Apollo 11 was down, Apollo 12 could not be far behind. A new age of man had probably begun: just conceive of those purifications of discipline and cooperation that ordinary technicians working for most ordinary if immense corporations had shown. What an abstention from intrigue, treachery and betrayal had been forged in the million links of the chain.

Yet the question remained. Apollo was the god of the sun, so NASA did not fail to use his name for the expedition to the moon. Was the voyage of Apollo 11 the noblest expression of a technological age, or the best evidence of its utter insanity? It was the
question which would dog Aquarius into the tenderest roots of his brain. So any spirit of impatience which would now have the astronauts open the hatch may as well burn its fumes—six hours are to go by before a man’s boot comes off the Lem and puts the mark of sneaker cleats on the moon. In the meantime, moon conceivably all quivering in its finest registers from the four landing feet of the Lem, the question persists—are we witness to grandeur or madness? So the mind casts back to the source of Project Apollo and the birth of NASA, back into the warlock’s pot of high politics in that hour after American prestige drooped in the eyes of the world because the Russians had put Sputnik into orbit and Soviet technology was in some ways at least superior to American. Eisenhower complained. If he had signed the bill which created NASA in 1958, he still did not know, he would announce, why everyone was thus inflamed about space. And in 1961, on the way out, in his last message to Congress a few days in January before John F. Kennedy would be inaugurated, Ike gave the word that he would not advise any extension of space flight after Mercury, no, not unless—and here came Elixir of Eisenhower—not unless “further experiment and testing” gave go to good reason. Can we be certain it was altogether out of Eisenhower’s reach to realize that a vain young President from an opposing party, consumed with the large desire to do things his way, was not going to take the ex-President’s advice? But then we never give credit to Eisenhower for being so sly a man he was not even aware of it himself.

If it is natural to assume Kennedy was sympathetic to a moon shot when Eisenhower was publicly opposed, Kennedy was also a man with a regard for consensus; a national poll showed fifty-eight percent of the public sample were opposed to spending forty billion dollars in a race against the Russians to the lunar sphere. Kennedy was therefore not about to make a push. Not then. After the Bay of Pigs, however, the national desire may have moved up to the stars; certainly, after Alan Shepard’s flight in Mercury-Redstone 3, public opinion took a full shift. It shifted with a rush. All the while, Johnson had not been chairman of the Senate Space
Committee and head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council for nothing, no, and had not personally picked James E. Webb to be head of NASA for no reason, nor looked upon fast-expanding Houston without plans for even more rapid expansion. It is not hard to conceive of how fast the tip of his tongue could flicker in and out of Kennedy’s ear when public opinion began to turn. Indeed the President had to agree with the Vice President about something. And Space was congenial to Kennedy, congenial to the metaphor of a new frontier, congenial to his love of doughty ships and mysterious seas; besides, the brightest of his economists were fond of the absurdity of space. The most advanced of them had come to the conclusion that economics was a phenomenon which resisted planning—the Soviet Union had been giving its unwilling demonstration of this point for thirty years: yes, economies were most interesting when they developed off the target. It was as if one did not achieve a career in the theater by studying how to act but by mountain-climbing or road racing. The effort, not the technique, seemed to prepare the result, or if not the intended result, another equally desirable. The voyage to the moon came to be seen by many of Kennedy’s liberal advisers as the most imaginative way to prime an economic pump in a time of relative prosperity and no war. Who cared if it succeeded? When the decade was out, there might be no moon rocks in the hand, but a new kind of prefabricated housing could well have been discovered instead, or some new fuel for automobiles. Plastics were bound to accelerate themselves into products and industries not yet conceived. Advances in metallurgy and electronics would inspire huge new plants of higher education, boom them up from swamps newly filled by the exudations of the cities. The technological age, bloated with waiting, was ready to burst on the landscape of America. That technological age would solve all the old problems—so declared the confidence of Kennedy’s elite. What better for the symbol of a new age than a landing on the moon before the decade was out? It was a blind push, equal to the hot sobs of the Oklahoma land grabber who plunked down his marker and said, “Mah land runs from
this stone to that tree,” before he even knew if he had bottom lands or water. Before the decade was out. Why? Because the trip to the moon had to serve as the embodiment of a new vision and visions are obliged to be neat. Kennedy, like many an enterprising young man before him, knew the best approach to large and complex mysteries was to plunge your hands into the short hair. “This is a new ocean,” he said, “and I believe the United States must sail upon it.”