Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (27 page)

Collins: 'Minus 1, minus 1, plus 1. Jesus! I take back any bad things I ever said about MIT – which I never have.'

Armstrong: 'That was a beautiful burn.'

Collins: 'Well, I don't know if we're 60 miles or not, but at least we haven't hit that mother.'

Aldrin: 'Look at that! Look at that, 169.6 by 60.9.'

Collins: 'Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!'

Aldrin: 'What – what'd it say ... 60.2.'

Collins: 'You want to write that down or something? Write it down just for the hell of it, 170 by 60, like gangbusters.'

Aldrin: 'We only missed [the predicted highest orbital point] by a couple of tenths of a mile.'

Collins: 'Hello, Moon; how's the old back side?'

With the burn complete, they were free to look out of the windows at the alien landscape below. In the great void of space here was land – like home. Although baked by the Sun, the barren ground appeared coldly foreboding and anything less like home was hard to imagine. A 'withered, sun-seared peach pit' Michael called it. 'There is no comfort to it...its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only.'
⁴¹
Even its colour was hard to judge. Apollo 8 reported the surface to be black-grey-white, while Apollo 10 described it as black-brown-tan-white.
⁴²
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins had been asked to settle the issue, and to them there appeared to be truth on both sides. The colours varied according to the angle of the Sun. Immediately either side of the region of shadow the ground appeared to be a shade of grey, but once lit by bright sunlight it was more tan, fading to brown and then grey as it shrank into the darkness once more.

Coasting around the remainder of the far side, Neil, Buzz and Michael were still out of radio contact, and for a moment it felt as if the grown-ups had left the building. Free to enjoy the view, the crew looked in amazement at the enormous craters passing beneath them. Their excitement led to unguarded comments that they knew would not be broadcast to the nation – but which were captured by a tape recorder.

Armstrong: 'What a spectacular view!'

Collins: 'God, look at that Moon! Fantastic. Look back there behind us, sure looks like a gigantic crater; look at the mountains going around it. My gosh, they're monsters.'

Armstrong: 'See that real big-'

Collins: 'Yes, there's a moose down here you just wouldn't believe. There's the biggest one yet. God, it's huge! It is enormous! It's so big I can't even get it in the window. You want to look at that? That's the biggest one you ever seen in your life. Neil? God, look at this central mountain peak.'

Armstrong: 'That's kind of a foggy window.'

Collins: 'That's a horrible window. It's too bad we have to shoot through this one, but – oh, boy, you could spend a lifetime just geologising that one crater alone, you know that?'

Armstrong: 'You could.'

Collins: 'That's not how I'd like to spend my lifetime, but – picture that. Beautiful!'

Aldrin: 'Yes, there's a big mother over here, too.'

Collins: 'Come on now, Buzz, don't refer to them as big mothers; give them some scientific name.'

Aldrin: 'It sure looks like a lot of them have slumped down.' [The tops of the craters had collapsed into the pit below.]

Collins: 'A slumping big mother. Well, you see those every once in a while.'

Aldrin: 'Most of them are slumping. The bigger they are, the more they slump – that's a truism, isn't it? That is, the older they get.'

Radio contact with Mission Control was imminent, and not wanting their initial public exchange with Houston to begin with a conversation about ageing mothers, slumped or otherwise, Armstrong changed the subject: 'Well, we're at 180 degrees, and now we're going to want to stop that and start a slow pitch-down.'

( )

The far side of the Moon had eluded man's curiosity until October 1959 when the first eye-opening pictures were sent home by a Russian probe. Astronomers were taken aback by the far side's heavily cratered landscapes, devoid of seas and strewn with what Collins later described as an 'uninterrupted jumble of tortured hills'.
⁴³
Anxious to demonstrate prowess in the emerging space-race, in December 1959 NASA commissioned its own series of probes, named Ranger. Rangers 1 and 2, however, never got beyond short-lived low-Earth orbits, and Ranger 3 missed in its attempt to reach the Moon. Ranger 4 suffered electrical failure, 5 also missed, and for good measure also suffered electrical failure, and 6 was disabled at launch; but Ranger 7 proved, five years later, that NASA could also snap pictures of the Moon. Deliberately plunging towards the lunar surface, before it was destroyed on impact Ranger 7 briefly transmitted TV images that were a thousand times sharper than anything that had been seen through a telescope.
⁴⁴
They revealed not the jagged mountains that appeared in the speculative paintings by Chesley Bonestell, but rolling hills and open spaces. Since boulders littered the ground, it appeared the surface was capable of supporting a spacecraft.

Following Kennedy's challenge to land on the Moon, NASA commissioned the Surveyor series of probes. Designed to carefully examine the nature of the surface, the information they would send home was urgently needed by Tom Kelly's team working on the lunar module. In May 1966, Surveyor 1 gently landed in the Ocean of Storms; equipped with a television camera, it sent back images of a flat area pockmarked by rocks and craters. Surveyor 2 was lost en route to the Moon, but in April 1967 the third Surveyor also successfully landed in the Ocean of Storms. Fitted with a mechanical arm, it managed to dig into the surface, unearthing details about the material below. Surveyor 4 was also lost, but the fifth probe reached the Sea of Tranquility where it investigated the chemical properties of the lunar dust, work that was later extended by Surveyor 6 in the Meridian Bay.

As well as discovering general details about the surface, NASA also needed to identify places that might serve as landing sites for manned missions. The ideal spot would be within easy reach of a spacecraft that was travelling on a free-return trajectory and had little fuel to spare. In practice, this meant finding an area within a narrow band stretching horizontally across much of the middle of the near side of the Moon. The site would have to be away from high hills and deep craters, which might send misleading altitude signals to the landing radar. It would have to be largely smooth and predominantly flat, and would have to receive a consistent level of sunlight in case the launch were delayed. A lunar day lasts two weeks, and during the Moon's lingering dawn the long shadows cast by the Sun made it easier to spot rocks and craters when looking from above. All of this meant that ideally the landing would be attempted just after local sunrise at a suitable site near the eastern half of the equator. This way, as the Sun moved further west, areas in the western region of the equator would become available once the shadows began to shorten at the first location.

Using telescopes, the Apollo Site Selection Board initially produced a list of 30 potential landing grounds. These were to be photographed from a height of 35 miles by the Lunar Orbiter missions, NASA's third series of probes. In August 1966 Lunar Orbiter 1 sent home medium-resolution pictures of nine of the targets. These included an area in the Sea of Tranquility, later labelled Apollo Landing Site 2 (ALS-2). Lunar Orbiter 2 later photographed a further 11 sites, and also sent back high-resolution images of some of the places inspected by its predecessor, among them ALS-2.
⁴⁵
Some of the pictures were given to the press, and a spectacular image of the crater Copernicus appeared on front pages around the world. Released from the flat pictures taken with telescopes, for the first time the Moon was exposed as a three-dimensional place where towering mountains overshadowed haunting valleys, and empty stretches of wilderness extended for miles in all directions. The photograph gave millions of people a chance to see for themselves what it might be like to study the surface from a pilot's perspective.

Landmarks on routes approaching the most promising landing sites were photographed by Lunar Orbiter 3, and pictures from all three Orbiter missions helped the selection board whittle down the options to five areas. In looking for a flat plain in the east near the equator, the Sea of Tranquility stood out as an obvious candidate, and here two sites were chosen, ALS-1 and ALS-2. The first was inspected by Apollo 8, and Apollo 10 flew over the second, both bringing back pictures that helped the crew of Apollo 11 prepare for their own mission.
⁴⁶
It was decided that Armstrong and Aldrin would attempt to land at ALS-2, in the south-western part of the Sea of Tranquility. If the flight were delayed, secondary sites further west were located in the Sinus Medii (almost in the centre of the visible face of the Moon) and in the Ocean of Storms.

Meanwhile, having taken the first pictures of the far side of the Moon, the Russians continued to develop their Luna series of probes. In many cases their unmanned spacecraft outperformed America's just as decisively as their manned missions beat NASA's in achieving key objectives. Luna 9 landed on the Moon in January 1966, four months ahead of Surveyor 1. Although cosmonauts were unlikely to reach the surface, some in NASA feared that a Russian probe might still try to retrieve the first samples of lunar rocks. Three days before the launch of Apollo 11, on Sunday 13 July 1969, the Soviet Union announced that Luna 15 had been launched on a mission to the Moon. Amid US fears that Armstrong's crew would have to contend with a chunk of Russian metalwork in their vicinity, there were suggestions that Luna 15 might scoop up some dust and bring it home while Neil and Buzz were still strapping on their boots.

( )

Thirty-four minutes after Mission Control lost contact with the crew, the powerful antenna in Madrid picked up their signal as the spacecraft came within sight of the Earth. It was Houston's first indication that the initial LOI burn had been successful. Many of the features on the desolate far side were unnamed, but now that Apollo 11 was coasting across the near side the crew were passing over more familiar ground. For months, Neil and Buzz had been studying photos of distinctive landmarks they would look out for during critical phases of the descent. Features of the Moon were identified, in Latin, according to rules set out by the International Astronomical Union in 1961. The plains, traditionally described as oceans and seas, were named after states of mind, such as the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Crisis. The highlands were named after mountain ranges on Earth, and craters recalled eminent scientists, while some of the smaller features were informally named by the two previous Apollo missions.
⁴⁷

Armstrong: 'Apollo 11 is getting its first view of the landing approach. This time we are going over the Taruntius crater, and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollo 8 and 10 have given us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and watching it on TV. There's no substitute for actually being here.'

Soaring 127 miles above the surface, the feature Neil particularly wanted to see was the landing ground. Eleven miles long and three wide, it was still officially identified as ALS-2, but the astronauts had come to refer to it using the baseball term 'home plate'. Half the Moon was bathed in sunshine, but for the moment the landing site lay just beyond the terminator, the line dividing sunlight and darkness. Dawn would not reveal it until the following day. Until then Armstrong would have to content himself with studying the approach route, including the hill Jim Lovell had named after his wife.

Aldrin: 'We're going over Mount Marilyn at the present time, and its ignition point.'

Mission Control: 'Roger. Thank you. And our preliminary tracking data for the first few minutes shows you in a 61.6 by 169.5 orbit. Over.'

Aldrin: 'Roger.'

Mission Control: 'And Jim is smiling.'

Armstrong: 'Currently going over Maskelyne. And Boot Hill, Duke Island, Sidewinder, looking at Maskelyne-W, that's the yaw round checkpoint. Just coming into the terminator.'

And with that, the crew flew back into the Moon's shadow, knowing that somewhere down in the darkness ALS-2 was awaiting them.

While coasting through dark skies, at around 1.50pm they tried to answer questions about the surface until Neil reminded Mission Control that they were tucking into lunch. He wanted to focus on the next major task on the flight-plan, the second lunar orbit insertion burn, but he knew Houston had other ideas.

Mission Control: 'We'd like to know if you're still planning to have the TV up with the beginning of the next pass. Over.'

Armstrong: 'Roger, Houston. We'll try to have it ready.'

Mission Control: 'This is Houston. We are inquiring if it is your plan to. Over.'

Armstrong: 'It never was our plan to; but it's in the flightplan, so I guess we'll do it.'