Walking on the Moon

Life on Earth has not been the same since the day these unforgettable words crackled over the airwaves: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Forty years later, the men who made the Apollo 11 mission a success tell the incredible story of the trip that changed the Universe.

by Katy Vine

July 2009

(Page 5 of 5)

MCCANDLESS: I was assigned to capcom specifically for the extra-vehicular-activity phase following the landing. There was a period of a couple of minutes following the touchdown during which the systems operators and crew surveyed the situation to make sure it was stable. The call was a “stay” on the lunar surface. And then Buzz and Neil were supposed to take a two-hour nap. That was the plan.

KRAFT: Once we got there and the systems were all okay, Armstrong asked if he could continue on. Frankly, I thought he would ask that from the get-go. I couldn’t see him going to sleep there. You wanted him to sleep, but if it was me, I couldn’t go to sleep.

ALDRIN: The symbolism of the flight was important to me, and I decided that at that time I would serve myself Communion. This had been approved, though I was cautioned by Deke Slayton not to say anything specifically about what I was doing. Instead, I just encouraged everyone to give thanks in their own way.

MCCANDLESS: After the initial checklist was done, Armstrong got out on the porch and deployed the TV camera. At that point we got a signal. We saw a white blob descending the ladder, and that was Neil.

GRIFFIN: The image was awful. It was very grainy, and he was kind of—it was almost like a negative instead of a positive photo.

KRAFT: Looking at that picture was surreal, no question about it. That looked like a sci-fi movie, like a silent movie.

LOVELL: It was mixed emotions. Naturally, all the astronauts wanted to be the first to land on the moon. I was Neil’s backup, but he was too healthy! So we didn’t get a chance. But we all celebrated because we had honored President Kennedy’s commitment to get to the moon before the end of the decade. We certainly had done that.

SORENSEN: I pressed my nose to the television screen to see that dim, foggy picture as best I could, and tears came to my eyes wishing that JFK were alive to see that moment when one of his boldest proposals came to pass.

MCCANDLESS: Of course, Armstrong had a well-prepared historic statement to make: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” His communications were just noisy enough that at the time I couldn’t tell whether he said “man” or “a man,” and, of course, all the news media were jumping on me, wanting to know exactly what he’d said.

JERRY BOSTICK was chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch of the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1969. He lives in Meadowlakes. Pete Conrad, the commander of the next Apollo flight, was sitting next to me, and when Neil stepped out and said his famous words, Pete looked at me and said, “What’d he say?” I said, “Something about a giant leap for mankind.” And he said, “Now, that’s just like Armstrong”—to say something profound. I don’t know how he could have come up with anything better to say.

At 11:11 p.m. Aldrin stepped down the ladder, and in the next two hours and fifteen minutes, he and Armstrong set up their experiments and collected as many samples of lunar soil as time allowed. At 11:41 p.m. the astronauts erected a three-by-five-foot nylon U.S. flag on the moon’s surface. After that they took a telephone call from President Richard Nixon.

ALDRIN: We did the best we could to make the flag upright while we were there. You couldn’t get the pole in more than two or three inches. So that wasn’t very much to hold up a pole.

BOSTICK: The American flag was flying on the moon. How much better can it get?

MCCANDLESS: President Nixon had called fairly early in the EVA [extra-vehicular activity], wanting to talk to Neil and Buzz, and we basically put him off until the midpoint. The White House kept calling and asking when the president could talk to them. Based on our assessment of the situation, after an hour or so we said we were feeling comfortable enough on the timeline that we could accommodate the president, and so the president said a few words, and as far as we could tell everybody was happy.

HARRISON “JACK” SCHMITT was an astronaut with a background in geology who acted as the crew’s liaison to the press and the scientific community on science issues. He lives in Albuquerque. Neil Armstrong was very quiet, and we couldn’t tell what he was doing for us for about twenty minutes. Buzz was talking and running back and forth so the camera could see him, these types of things. A number of us were wondering what Neil was doing. It turned out Neil was out of view of the camera and collecting rocks, and he brought back a fine collection of lunar samples.

ALDRIN: I felt it was useful to demonstrate the mobility that a person really had, so instead of just walking from one place to another I was changing directions and sort of jogging in front of the camera for maybe thirty seconds, I guess.

BARBREE: The only photo of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon is a reflection of himself taking a picture of Buzz Aldrin in his face mask. So a lot of people said Buzz was so mad that he didn’t get to step on the moon first that he refused to take a picture of Neil. That is not true. Neil said there were not any pictures of him because Neil had the camera—that was his assignment, and Buzz’s assignment was to set up the experiments.

MCCANDLESS: We didn’t expect that the pressure suit boot prints would be so clearly revealed in 3-D relief on the lunar surface. The tracks—particularly the first one or two we saw—were really dramatic.

ALDRIN: You’d always like to let certain parts be a little longer, but we were operating on a predetermined time, calculated on how much oxygen and how much water and other supplies that we had, so we had to move on to stay within those limits.

ARMSTRONG: We knew we would be fully occupied throughout our surface work. We also knew that there might be unexpected events or observations that could distract us. We tried to work at a steady pace consistent with our practice sessions on Earth. The time went by quickly, but we were able to get most all of our planned work done.

After entering the lunar module and reconnecting with the command module orbiting above, the crew cut the lunar module loose and started the journey home. Three days later, on July 24, they entered Earth’s vicinity at a speed of about 25,000 miles per hour. At 12:51 p.m. they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. Finally, with the crew home safely, the team who had worked on this project for many years was able to celebrate.

FENDELL: After my shift, I went home to my apartment on the Gulf Freeway and I slept for three or four hours, and on the way back to work I stopped at one of those old Dutch Kettles to get some breakfast. I was sitting up at one of those round stools at the counter and I had brought one of the papers. It was this big, thick paper with the headline “Landing on the Moon,” and I’m sitting there and these two guys walk in and sit next to me with gas station coveralls on. They start talking and one says to the other, “I landed at Normandy on D-day, and I went all through Europe in World War II, but I never felt so proud to be an American as I did yesterday.” And I put my money down, went out to my car, and sat down and cried. It hit me what we had done.

BOSTICK: I’ll tell you how momentous it was for me. My whole life is divided before July 20, 1969, and after July 20, 1969. When I hear a date, my first thought is “Okay, was that before or after we landed on the moon?”

BALES: There must have been twenty parties going on at every hotel in the Clear Lake area.

ALDRIN: The entire world was responding to our arrival back home. And that’s a little bit hard to grasp, and that’s why I felt, “Gee, that’s unusual. Is there something cute I can say about that?” So I tapped Neil on the shoulder and said, “Look, we missed the whole thing.”

BALES: Some of the guys are gone now. Most of us will be gone before the next lunar landing. At 66, you realize that it was the people, not the event.

KRANZ: You gotta hold your emotions in check and in check and check and check. And it always seemed they always poured out when the mission was over. The emotional release is so intense at that time. It takes an awful lot to be professional about it. I see that picture of the crew putting the flag on the surface of the moon and I’m so damn proud of them.

BALES: Now, what if it had all turned out badly? We’d still be criticized for the terrible way we did it. Making good decisions doesn’t always get good results, and if you get good results, it’s not necessarily due to good decisions.

LUNNEY: We were lucky. We were lucky, for example, that the damn tank that blew up on Apollo 13 didn’t show up on Apollo 11. I mean, imagine the political reaction.

ARMSTRONG: Progress in flight has been the product of those individuals who had a passion for leaving the surface of the earth, from Daedalus to the Montgolfier brothers to Lilienthal to the Wright brothers to Tsiolkovsky and Goddard. Spaceflight was made possible by two twentieth-century inventions, the liquid-fueled rocket and the electronic computer. But it was the aeronautical industry that developed spaceflight. The space expeditions, manned and unmanned, now and in the future, are and will be integral components of the continuum of flight.

KRAFT: How the hell did we do it? I mean, my God, when we first started thinking about how to fly a man into orbit around the earth, 95 percent of the guys said we couldn’t. It was incredible to do what we did. The impact that we had . . . it flat changed the world.

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