Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (30 page)

In the struggle for ideological supremacy, America made much of its self-appointed role as the guardian of freedom and democracy. In this spirit, NASA claimed that unlike the menacing Russians it was freely allowing the world to see every triumph and tragedy. In 1957, Vanguard TV3 was set to become America's first satellite. But when it got no further than four feet from the ground, TV networks were allowed to continue their live footage of the unfolding disaster. Similarly, in January 1967, news of the Apollo 1 fire was quickly passed to the press. This policy of making the agency publicly available was to have far-reaching consequences for many of its personnel and their families. Unlike their Russian counterparts, who largely remained anonymous, America's astronauts were living in a country where Hollywood and rock 'n' roll created new heroes every week. Alongside movie stars and music legends, spacemen were offered up to an admiring public by reporters who described them as dashing adventurers. Astronauts were the real-life embodiment of the space-travelling supermen of science fiction, the type of guys who would readily throw you a smile and a salute on their way to ridding exciting new worlds of bug-eyed monsters. The public didn't care about orbital mechanics and P52 platform alignments, they wanted to know what astronauts had for breakfast. Some liked the attention. Others, among them Neil Armstrong, enjoyed press adulation as much as engine failure and considered this aspect of the job a necessary evil.

There was a feeling within NASA that, as a government agency spending billions of public dollars, the public were owed something in return. This led to astronauts being despatched to dinners and local functions across the country. Before his Gemini mission, Michael Collins was sent to a Boy Scouts event in Ohio. He always found such PR work difficult, but on that occasion his dismay was outweighed by the Boy Scouts' own disappointment after they discovered he had not yet flown in space. 'Aren't any of the real astronauts coming?' one of them wanted to know.
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Once in training for a flight, the men were spared such duties.

Initially, the Mercury Seven found it hard to cope with the flood of requests for interviews, but help came in the form of a controversial contract tying the men exclusively to
Life
magazine. In return for an annual sum, divided equally among the astronauts, the men gave their stories to
Life
in an arrangement that allowed them to tell other reporters they were unable to give anything to anyone else. As servicemen, none was highly paid and they found it hard to resist the offer of extra cash. In 1969, Aldrin was still technically in the air force (as was Collins), and he received a modest serviceman's salary of $18,600; Collins received $17,000. The
Life
deal gave him an extra $16,000 per year for his first two years with NASA, although when the number of astronauts later swelled the pot was stretched more thinly.

Armstrong, a civilian employed by NASA since 1955, was earning $30,000 a year, putting him among the highest-paid astronauts.
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Neil believed that reporters, whether from
Life
or elsewhere, frequently misunderstood the truth. Many wanted to know what thoughts were going through his mind at launch and what it was like to ride a rocket. They wanted answers soaked in emotion, that ideally expressed a philosophical message about voyages to the heavens. Armstrong knew they wanted more than abort modes and guidance programs but felt they were missing the point. No-one was writing poems at lift-off. Even the normally sanguine Collins was frustrated by the myopic press whom he believed had a 'morbid, unhealthy, persistent, prodding, probing pre-occupation with the frills, when the silly bastards didn't even understand how the machines operated'.
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It wasn't just the astronauts who were signed to
Life
: the deal also included the personal stories of the men's families. Before a mission, quietly concerned children were asked what they thought about Daddy dying in the depths of space. For an astronaut's wife, life was difficult enough without such questions from the press. Janet Armstrong, Pat Collins and Joan Aldrin had each moved hundreds of miles from relatives and friends to join their husbands in Clear Lake, a distant suburb of Houston. The sprawling Manned Spacecraft Center that dominated their lives was 28 miles from the city centre. With the men spending so much time at work, many astronauts' wives found themselves effectively running one-parent families. Frank Borman later said, 'I was a part-time father ... my input was well-meant and sincere, but it was also too sporadic for me to take much credit for how well they turned out.'
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Few wives had the time or opportunity to pursue a career of their own, marital difficulties were common, depression was a problem, and more than one of the wives turned to alcohol. 'Of course they were treated like royalty,' Tom Stafford's former wife Faye said of the men, 'it was hard for them to come home. What could ever compete with that? I was lucky if I could come second.'
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Most of the women had experienced service life, and knew that military families traditionally developed strong networks in support of each other. A similar thing emerged in Houston, with friends and neighbours rallying round to help those involved in a mission. Janet had never been a service wife and chose not to actively participate in wives' clubs.
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For Joan, the most difficult elements of life during a flight included the daily press conferences she was expected to give. Prior to Gemini 12,
Life
had reserved key stories about the Aldrin home, yet every day she had to find something new for the rest of the press.
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This was all the harder since NASA expected wives to play their part without getting in the way. In practice this meant that they were not welcome at launches, nor were they given any official advice or information before the mission. When Neil experienced problems aboard Gemini 8, NASA switched off the squawk box in Janet's home. Desperate for information she went to Mission Control but was refused entry.
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Joan Aldrin once told Buzz 'no-one tells me anything'. For her, the wives' role was clearly defined: 'Our job is to keep house, take care of children, and not ask questions.'
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Some felt particularly vulnerable since NASA controlled the world in which they lived yet their exclusive link to the agency was through their husband. After Charlie Bassett's jet crashed into the building containing the Gemini 9 spacecraft, his widow Jeannie felt isolated to the point that she could no longer live in Houston. She remained friends with Joan Aldrin, but Joan told Buzz that 'it was as though she wasn't a part of us any more'.
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When Buzz confirmed he was going to the Moon, Joan later wrote in her diary, 'I wish [he] were a truck driver, a carpenter, a scientist – anything but what he is. I want him to do what he wants, but I don't want him to.'
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A few days before the launch of Apollo 11, Pat Collins gave Michael a poem she'd written, which referred to 'nighttime stabs of fear' and 'tears, unbidden, welling'.
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While their husbands were risking their lives in the name of their country, the wives had to maintain a public façade of excitement and awe, as did their children. Officially, as they were once reminded by George Mueller, the head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, they were proud, thrilled and happy; anything else they might be feeling was best hidden from view.
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Nothing was allowed to pierce the wholesome public image of the average astronaut, who occupied a place in the public's consciousness somewhere between a Boy Scout and Buck Rogers. It was an image preserved in print by
Life
, which fostered an impression of clean-cut, contented all-American families. Under the surface, however, the all-too human truth was understood by
Life
writers like Dora Jane Hamblin. Hamblin knew better than most that in space the astronauts were heroes but on the ground they were still men. While life in Houston was based around the family, there was a greater degree of freedom at the Cape. 'There were plenty of pretty women imagining love with a space hero,' Gene Cernan said, and some of the men ensured they didn't have to imagine for very long.
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If an astronaut wanted to take his wife and children to the Cape, permission had to be obtained from Deke.
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Hamblin and other reporters saw what was going on but knew that neither the men nor NASA would allow them to say anything. Nothing untoward could be printed without breaching the astronauts' trust, which
Life
had invested so much in acquiring.
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After spending time with a group of off-duty astronauts, journalist Robert Sherrod saw that in print they 'came out as usual, deodorized, plasticized, and homogenized, without anybody quite intending it that way'.
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No mission had ever attracted as much attention from the press as Apollo 11. As the launch date approached, the flight became bigger than NASA. Interest at home and abroad inevitably focused on the men who were going to the Moon, eclipsing the tremendous efforts of people like Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft and George Low who had been involved in the mission for years. 'We were our nation's envoys,' wrote Collins. 'We would be watched by the world, including the unfriendly parts of it, and we must not fail.'
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As attention from the press grew more intense, in June Michael was able to escape from life under Houston's magnifying glass by retreating to the Cape, taking Pat and the children with him for the first couple of weeks. What he found particularly difficult was the popular misconception that the mission was already all but done. It seemed the press were encouraging a feeling that the flight would pass without a hitch. Astronauts had already travelled as far as lunar orbit and nothing had gone wrong; next time it would be a simple case of going the extra distance.

The fact that Apollo 11 was a test-flight, which might or might not succeed, seemed to be largely misunderstood. From the word go, Deke and the crew had been working on the basis that the mission had the best shot at completing the first landing, but nothing was certain. Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin were simply first in the queue. Neil himself believed that while they had a 90 per cent chance of making it home, the probability of actually reaching the surface was no more than 50 per cent.
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As well as overestimating the mission's chance of success, the press also misunderstood the flight's main objective, which was the landing itself. To many, the idea of a gentle landing didn't hold the same level of wonder as walking on the Moon. Bringing flying machines to a stop was something man did on a daily basis. But to walk on another planet was the stuff of dreams, and speculation about what the astronauts might find was rife. While many scientists interested in Apollo 11 were working on phenomena such as radiation, most focused on the geology of the Moon. They saw in the mission a unique opportunity to study a snapshot of the solar system's history, undisturbed by weather or life. In agreeing to place a range of experiments on the Moon, NASA allied itself to the wider scientific community and thereby raised the flight beyond a simple level of oneupmanship with the Russians. But the science was an afterthought. Approval for an experiments package didn't come until 1964, three years after Kennedy's speech, which had been a vision presented by a politician and was more about politics than geology.

Ambitious plans for extensive scientific work could be left to the later Apollo missions. During the first manned flight to the surface, time would be limited and priority would be given to gathering samples of rocks and dust. This meant only a small number of experiments would be carried by Apollo 11. An astronaut's ability to work with tools and scientific equipment was investigated in an area of volcanic rock near Cinder Lake, Arizona. Geologists wearing pressure-suits explored a simulated lunar landscape that had been blasted out of the rock, replicating a Lunar Orbiter picture. The results of these and other tests influenced the design of the experiments that were being considered for the flight. A list of potential experiments was prepared in May 1965, and a month later Houston set up a department to develop those that were to be selected. By 1966 a preliminary timeline for the moonwalk had been put together, suggesting that once the astronauts had collected an initial sample of stones they should deploy the experiments before using tools to gather a broader selection of material.
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Two years later, in October 1968, NASA headquarters approved the development of a solar-powered seismometer that would measure meteoroid impacts and 'moonquakes'. To prevent it freezing during the two-week lunar night, the device was equipped with a heater system that incorporated 2.4 ounces of plutonium 238. This represented the first major use of nuclear energy in a manned mission. As well as the seismometer, NASA also commissioned an unpowered laser reflector which would help to improve tracking of the position of the Moon. Together, the two items were known as the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP). On Earth, the instruments – each the size of a suitcase – weighed a total of 170lb, but in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon it would be easier to carry them from the spacecraft to a suitable point on the surface. As well as the EASEP, the astronauts would be a given a solar wind composition experiment (abbreviated to SWC). This would capture evidence of electrically charged particles emitted by the Sun.
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In addition to filling two 'sample return containers' and setting up the experiments, Neil and Buzz would also have to put a TV camera into position and erect the US flag. After photographing their work, the surface and the LM, they would have to prepare the containers and the film magazines for flight before returning to the spacecraft. All of this had to be completed within two hours and 40 minutes, with each task given a specific slot in a detailed timeline.
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