Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (26 page)

After each round of simulations, Neil and Buzz spent time on their own, refining their procedures and leaving the flight controllers to do the same. The mission rules would then be updated, and the next series of exercises would begin. Once again Koos would scatter catastrophes about, daring the crew and controllers to take on his mischievous team of instructors. After particularly difficult sessions, the flight controllers would conduct a soul-searching inquisition into what had gone wrong. Especially challenging was the 'dead-man's box', the region between the surface and a few hundred feet above. At this height, the complex relationship between speed, altitude and time made a safe abort impossible.
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This wasn't lost on Armstrong. With Kranz and his team sitting on a planet far removed from them, Neil knew the final decisions would be down to him. Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations who saw his flight directors as 'God', wondered whether Armstrong would be prepared to accept a higher degree of risk than he was ready to allow.
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In mid-June, Kraft brought Neil into Mission Control to go over the rules that had been agreed so far. As far as Kraft was concerned, Houston was running the show and an independent decision by the crew 'wasn't something we encouraged'.
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Yet Armstrong made no secret of the fact that he would be the man on the spot. Neil, who was first and foremost a test pilot, knew that instruments could sometimes give faulty readings, needlessly causing concern. Unless the spacecraft was actually out of control, what was there to worry about? But inaccurate telemetry sent from space could prompt a controller to mistakenly order a safe flight to be aborted. Neil's opinion on the issue 'led to some heated discussions', Kraft wrote. '"I'm going to be in a better position to know what's happening than the people back in Houston," he said over and over,' Kraft later remembered. 'And I'm not going to tolerate any unnecessary risks,' Kraft retorted, 'that's why we have mission rules.' In the final weeks before the launch, Kraft suspected Armstrong still privately harboured doubts about some of the rules. 'I wondered then if he'd overrule all of us in lunar orbit,' he said.
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In addition to his work in the LM simulator, Neil spent a further 34 hours practising descent trajectories, both at the research facility at Langley and in the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle.
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He continued to believe that the LLTV provided the best training despite his accident in May 1968, which prompted modifications to the machine's control system. But after Houston's chief test pilot Joe Algranti was forced to eject from the improved version in December, Chris Kraft and MSC director Bob Gilruth were ready to bar anyone else from flying it.
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Once again the astronauts fought back, Armstrong as keen as anyone to fly it. As the next commander to go into space, and the first to attempt a lunar landing, his opinion could not be overlooked. After further modifications, by June 1969 a new LLTV was ready, and Neil was among the first to fly it.
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Kraft asked him to justify his use of such a hazardous vehicle.

'It's absolutely essential,' Armstrong told him, 'by far the best training for landing on the Moon.'

'It's dangerous, damn it,' snapped Kraft.

'Yes, it is,' Neil replied. 'I know you're worried, but I have to support it. It's just darned good training.'

Kraft received the same response from other astronauts, so 'with our fingers crossed, we let them keep it', but a compromise was reached in that only the commanders of lunar missions were to fly it.
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Neil flew the machine a total of 27 times, more than any other astronaut.
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Buzz never got the chance.

After the flight readiness review of 17 June, Neil, Buzz and Michael transferred to the Cape where they could work at maximum capacity with minimum interference. Having been cleared for launch, Collins moved to Florida 'with my bottle of gin and my bottle of vermouth, and a heavy load removed from either shoulder'.
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Hidden away on the fourth floor of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, the crew were given small, windowless bedrooms that were joined to a shared living room, exercise room, sauna, dining room, kitchen and briefing room. After a hurried breakfast, each morning they would go to the simulators awaiting them in a nearby building and work until lunchtime, when they would attend to piles of sandwiches and phone messages. In returning his calls Michael found that many of the conversations followed a similar theme: '"Oh really, Mrs —, you haven't received an invitation to the launch? Why, I can't understand that, anyone as dedicated to the space program as you have been!" Who the hell is in charge of this anyway,' he would ask himself, 'and why is this broad calling me?'
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His brief lunch over, Collins would climb back into the couch for the next rendezvous workout, knowing that no matter how rickety the simulator computers were, Neil and Buzz probably had it worse.

Difficulties with the LM simulator, and its connections to Houston, began to put Armstrong and Aldrin behind in their tight training schedule. 'The amount of work seemed endless,' Buzz later wrote, 'and, at times, practically insurmountable.'
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There was more talk of delaying the launch to August but neither man openly supported the idea. Yet nor did they seem eager to commit to July. Collins wondered whether they needed time simply to complete minor things or whether they were genuinely unprepared. With several mandatory simulations yet to be completed, it was hard to escape a growing sense of pressure as they tried to get everything done. When the hardware was working satisfactorily, Armstrong tried to wring as much as he could from each training session. He had been involved in the design of simulators since his days at Edwards, and knew that by actively encouraging problems there were useful lessons to be learned.
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Neil wanted to use the LM simulator to do something more than just 'win', as others did. 'They tried to operate perfectly all the time and avoid simulator problems,' he said. 'I did the opposite.'
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Armstrong knew that the occasional 'crash' would reveal useful information about difficult parts of the trajectory. For Buzz, however, a crash wasn't the kind of thing he felt they should be striving to achieve. Aldrin believed they should be mastering not the simulator but the mission.
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Collins recalled that, late one night, Buzz angrily told him they had been replicating a landing when a thruster had stuck open and they had been ordered to abort. Neil did not react immediately, and by the time he tried to take action the computer showed that the LM had already fatally crashed. Michael remembered that Buzz was incensed and, accompanied by a bottle of Scotch, 'kept me up far past my bedtime complaining about it'. Suddenly Neil emerged from his bedroom and entered the debate, at which point Michael crept off to bed, grateful for the fact that in the command module it was just him and the computer, 'and if that son-of-a-bitch mouthed off, I would turn off its power supply'.
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Buzz found that what he referred to as Armstrong's 'communication reticence' was compounded by his own inability to penetrate it.
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At breakfast the following morning, Michael noticed that neither of his crew-mates appeared ruffled after what he assumed to have been a 'frank and beneficial discussion, as they say in the State Department'.
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Occasionally the three of them would train as a team on the elements of the mission they would perform together, such as the launch. By the end of the training schedule, Neil had accumulated 383 hours in the LM simulator, and a further 164 hours in the command module. Aldrin's figures were even higher, at 411 and 182 respectively. As was to be expected, Collins focused almost exclusively on the command module, spending three times as long as Armstrong in studying as many aspects of the spacecraft as he could.
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The final simulation, late on the afternoon of Saturday 5 July, was expected to be a simple confidence-boost for the controllers. Armstrong and Aldrin did not take part and the Mission Control team trained instead with the Apollo 12 backup crew, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. According to Kranz, things were going smoothly when three minutes into the landing Dick Koos triggered a series of computer alarms that had never been seen before. Steve Bales, the 26-year-old guidance officer, suddenly discovered the LM's computer was reporting a 1201 alarm code. A glossary of the LM software showed that 1201 meant 'executive overflow, no vacant areas' – and Bales realised the computer was overloaded. He had no mission rules on how to react to a 1201 alarm, and as more warnings appeared he called his software expert Jack Garman, who was in one of the backroom offices. Both knew the computer was unable to complete some of its tasks, but Bales couldn't tell which of them were being neglected and he urgently advised Kranz to abandon the landing. Kranz quickly agreed. 'If there was one word guaranteed to get your attention in Mission Control,' he wrote, 'it is the word abort.'
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Kranz believed he had given the correct order, but Koos knew otherwise. Whatever the computer's difficulties were, everything else had been working properly. 'This was not an abort. You should have continued the landing,' he told Kranz's team during a subsequent debriefing. Bales was devastated: on the last simulation before launch he had needlessly halted the mission. At first Kranz was angry that they had ended on a failure but he knew the lesson had been necessary.
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That night Bales investigated the problem, and the following morning he worked with various alarm codes in hastily arranged simulations. He added a new entry to the mission rules book, listing a dozen alarms that could prompt an abort. They did not include 1201. The changes were included in the final edition of the book, which was published just five days before the launch. While the crew were familiar with its key points, no-one could be expected to memorise the whole book, and since they were not required to commit the many alarm codes to memory they were not told about the new rule.
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With the training schedule now largely complete, Chris Kraft asked Neil, 'Is there anything we've missed?'

'No, Chris,' Armstrong replied, 'we're ready. It's all done except the countdown.'
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Lingering in the back of Kraft's mind, he later wrote, were memories of the conversation about who would have the final say, the astronauts or Mission Control. But by then he knew there was nothing left to be said. 'We had come at last to this point,' he recalled, 'and for a moment I felt my legs shake.'
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Armstrong: 'Burning; we're looking good.'

Collins: 'Pitch trim is up at 1.5 degrees, cycling about that, which is a little bit off the simulation value. Yaw trim is cycling about zero. Chamber pressure is 95.'

The lunar orbit insertion (LOI) burn began precisely on time. With the service module's engine silently ejecting a bright streak of flame, the spacecraft began to slow and the crew found themselves pushed against their seats as a reassuring sense of gravity briefly replaced weightlessness. When the pressure in the combustion chamber began to rise above its predicted level of 95lb per square inch, the crew realised that the engine was working harder than expected. This meant it would operate for less than the predicted time of six minutes and two seconds, and would be shut down early by the computer. While keeping an eye on the chamber pressure, Collins was also watching the two flight director attitude indicators. Each featured a ball display that allowed the crew to monitor the vehicle's attitude in space.

Collins: 'OK, she's steering like a champ; chamber pressure sneaking up to 100.'

Armstrong: 'We're now predicting 5 seconds early, 05:57.'

Collins: 'Ball number 1 and ball number 2 both right on value. Roll zero, pitch 225, roughly, and yaw 348; and hold.'

Armstrong: '10 seconds.'

Collins: 'OK, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3—'

Armstrong: 'Shutdown.'

The engine cut their speed from 5,600mph to 3,700mph, allowing them to be captured by the Moon's gravity.
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They had now entered an elliptical orbit, taking them around the Moon on a great oval-shaped path that at its highest point carried them nearly 170 miles above the surface and at its lowest brought them down to 60. During the burn, the computer monitored how far they had drifted in the roll, pitch and yaw axes. They could have easily wandered off course. But the computer had successfully kept them on the straight and narrow, and they had strayed by only one tenth of a foot per second in each axis – something that impressed them all.