The viewing rooms at Mission Control had begun to fill. Every notable and high official in NASA was now there, Dr. Thomas Paine and Rocco Petrone, Von Braun and Debus, Chris Kraft, Sam Phillips, Seaman and Low, John Houbolt. There was George Mueller and Dr. Gilruth and John Glenn, Deke Slayton, and Cernan, Conrad, McDivitt, and Lovell, and others, and then others. Name an astronaut. He was there. The high society of NASA was a group as closed to superficial penetration as a guild of Dutch burghers in the Seventeenth Century—no one but the men in that room would ever begin to know the novels and dramas of conflict, the games of loyalty, and what captures and frustrations of power had played back and forth among these men in the last ten years—it was another of the great novels of the world which would never be written. And was the world a little more polluted for that?
Since they were also a most sophisticated audience, they were now to go through a half hour of excruciating theater, that high theater of symbolic languages and masks and incantations where no word is familiar to the uninitiate and the motions of the actors are communicated from behind a screen. An observer unfamiliar with the technical terms of the subject or stranger to the small reserved gestures of the flight controllers on the floor would have gathered nothing of the dramas developing—merely the tension which constricted the air of the room.
There would have been enormous tension in any case—ten years of work would now be concentrated in an hour—but as Eagle came over the hill for the last time, gliding down in its reduced orbit to the point of decision at fifty thousand feet, so the radio began to give trouble:
CAPCOM: Columbia, Houston. We’ve lost all data with Eagle. Please ask him to reacquire to high gain. Over.
COLUMBIA: Eagle, this is Columbia. Houston would like you to reacquire on the high-gain antenna.
COLUMBIA: Eagle, did you copy Columbia?
CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. Did you call?
The Capcom was Charley Duke, the man who had been Capcom during the lunar rendezvous of Apollo 10, a thirty-three-year-old astronaut who had been accepted for the program as late as the spring of ’66. Armstrong had asked him to be Capcom for Apollo 11. “I would have liked to say,” Duke later remarked, “that I was on a crew and wouldn’t have time to do it, but I wasn’t on a crew.” So Duke was the Capcom even if he had never been up in space.
Later he would talk about the moment their radio went bad.
It always happens that when we have the critical revolution or the critical pass, we have lousy communications. It just seems like that’s our luck. The data kept dropping out. I said to myself, “Oh, no, here we go again,” because we had a mission rule that said we needed adequate communications and data from the spacecraft before we would commit to powered descent.
Yet Eagle continued. The decision to land would not be taken until they were at fifty thousand feet. If the radio was still bad they could take another orbit. So they went on. Sometimes data came, sometimes it was out again. One can hardly divine the tension from their dialogue:
COLUMBIA: Eagle this is Columbia. Houston lost you again. They’re requesting another try at the high-gain.
CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. We have you now. How do you read? Over.
ALDRIN: Loud and clear … I know what the problem was there. It just started oscillating around in yaw.
CAPCOM: Roger, we’ll work on it.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: Aldrin is referring to the Lem steerable antenna. That comment about the oscillations.
The steerable antenna, sensitive as a finger wet for the wind, the steerable antenna charged, for all one knew, with some unknown charisma, had been oscillating, and no one was about to be certain just why.
ALDRIN: Did you copy the star—I mean the sun check, Charlie?
CAPCOM: That’s affirmative. We did, Buzz. Out .…
CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. We recommend if you yaw 10 right, it will help us on the high-gain signal strength. Over.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: Coming up on five minutes to ignition. Gene Kranz getting a GO-NO GO for descent.
CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. If you read, you’re a GO for powered descent. Over.
COLUMBIA: Eagle, this is Columbia. They just gave you a GO for powered descent.
CAPCOM: Columbia, Houston. We’ve lost them on the high gain again. Would you please—we recommend they yaw right ten degrees and reacquire.
COLUMBIA: Eagle, this is Columbia. You’re a GO for a PDI and they recommend you yaw right ten degrees, and try the high gain again.
COLUMBIA: Eagle, you read Columbia?
ALDRIN: Roger, read you.
COLUMBIA: Okay.
CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. We read you now. You’re GO for PDI. Over.
ALDRIN: Roger. Understand. AELD control circuit breaker. Second Gimbal AC, closed.
VII
Good communication was reacquired just three and a half minutes before ignition. Mission Control could take air into their lungs again. It is the first cliché of tense activity. We do not breathe, as if we are afraid to alter the benevolent dispositions of the universe by the evil emanations of our heart. Or is it rather the thought of freezing one’s existence at the instant so that everything good in the heart can be deposited to the credit of the protagonist we watch? The questions are without answer, but then as equally are many serious questions about the curious functioning of a radio. They could talk—Eagle to Columbia—from as little as ten feet away; they could call across a quarter of a million miles of space. Either way, their communications could fail, or stagger, or crackle into caterwauling of static—some irritated zone of universe always between. When one abstracted one’s knowledge of radio the knowledge ended in one final abstraction: All solids, liquids and gases could be reduced to structured and structureless arrangements of molecules, and radio seemed to be the communication from one kind of activated structure—sometimes no more than a crystal which was scratched—to another structure, and the message, or the resonance, or the wave went out in all directions through any medium of fluids or gases or near-voids of structureless molecules. It suggested that it was in the nature of structures to address each other. It was not as if a transmitter shot a direct communication on a line to a unique spot, or on direct lines to millions of receivers, it was rather that a particular message went out to be added to all the other messages resonating in the atmosphere and—however it happened—in the vacuums of space as well, and so every structure on earth, and in space, was forever being passed through myriads of invisible messages which pervaded atmosphere and space, any one of them to be picked up if the equipment of the structure were appropriate to the task.
If one took into account that besides radio, and all other electromagnetic transmissions, there were also transmissions of nature to be recognized in the antenna and signal-makers of insects, and half-recognized in the whiskers of cats, the homing instincts of birds, the wheeling of schools of fish, the God-knows-what of bacteria and viruses adapting at high speed to antibiotics which would kill them, if one stretches credulity so far as to permit some astral plane or marketplace in sleep where the souls of the living and/or the dead could speak, well, what a devil of a soup of numberless messages careening in all directions of the universe, what a bath of meanings never glimpsed in every molecule of breath to pass each tree in the forest of the nostrils of the nose, what a small glimpse in the static of all the lost messages which snarl at the passage of favored communications—the wonder is that radio works at all, and not that there are other messages transmitted by other means which are sufficiently close in kind to distort reception. Any man who lived with a radio was an unspoken student of the psychology of machines and so was likely to believe—even if he would confess it only on a torture rack—that coming so near to the moon, that incomparable dish antenna of the stars, five-billion-year-old instrument of universes back of universes, who was to think the radio would not act up, who was ready to swear his life was so clean that if he were a NASA notable, seated in that room at Mission Control, he did not hav
e to hold his breath, for space held no curses, and he had violated no taboo nor intervening message? They held their breath. The moon was coming ever nearer, the power descent was begun, from eight and a half miles up it was begun, and who had not thoughts at that instant of the inexplicable? Did Collins in his Command Module now advancing at greater and greater distance ahead of Eagle, now off alone on thirty hours of continuing orbit before he would ever see them again, if ever he did—did Collins think of the night before the launch when a violent thunderstorm had struck the plains south of Houston and an old oak on his front lawn had been uprooted? Was it lightning or deluges of rain? Good cheer for Collins that he had no savage mind. And Cernan at Mission Control or Armstrong in the Eagle—did they think of that mysterious and still unexplained moment when the Lunar Module of Apollo 10, just thirteen miles above the moon, went—against all the controls of its systems—automatic, when it took off on its own flight plan, and Cernan, surprised to the seat of his meat, gave vent to a curse all audible over the mass media of America. “Son of a bitch,” Cernan had cried out. And indeed the Lem had had its moment of acting like a child of passion. Or did Armstrong think of the night before, when the Lem had tried to point to the moon? Boxed in their bulky pressure suits, tied in and swaddled like Eskimo children in baskets, all moves bulky, always in fear of rapping a bank of switches with the insensitive surface of their suits—“You’re so clumsy and there’s so much force required to move inside the suit,” Aldrin had said, “that everything is WHAM! I could bump right into you and maybe I wouldn’t know it”—constrained in vision, they began their powered descent. The motors of the descent stage were fired. Once again they braked. Once again the reduction of their speed began to bring them down from high velocity to low. Now they came below the orbital parameter of fifty thousand feet. They were committed. They would land, or they would crash, or they would abort and return to Columbia, but they could not try it again.
It is worth a moment to consider the complexities of the descent. The Lem, we recall, had started at a speed of thirty-six hundred miles an hour when it left the Command Module and would come hovering to the lunar soil at three feet a second or less. Its first burn had braked its speed enough to reduce its orbit, but this was relatively a small reduction. Now at fifty thousand feet it would go from approximately three thousand and more miles an hour down to six hundred miles an hour at 13,500 feet, a steady forceful braking of the motors for two hundred and fifty miles. Conceive of them on this long brake, two hundred and fifty miles with their rocket motors burning in front of them in order to take their speed down to no more than the speed of a jet plane, and that is but the beginning. They have lost but five miles of altitude in this period of braking—their route has been near to parallel to the curve of the moon—they will descend yet another half-mile and cover another ten miles before their horizontal speed is relevant to the speeds of an automobile, sixty miles an hour, fifty miles an hour, there, slowed, ready for the last descent, they are at high gate, seven thousand feet, not a mile and a half above the moon. Yet all this while, for all of this trip, from a point forty-five thousand feet up, down to high gate at seven thousand feet, there in their bulky-wham suits, they have been riding on their backs, feet forward, eyes looking up through their windows, so that they see nothing of the moon ground, but instead are staring up at the earth. What a curious position for descent. But the landing radar is on the other side of the Lem (it would require a huge outrigger to install it in a position more comfortable for them) and the landing radar is now their eyes as it bounces signals off the moon and returns them estimates of altitude. So they will ride from forty-five thousand feet to seven thousand feet flat on their backs, unable even to see the moon. Yet there has been additional cause for worry already. At the beginning of powered descent, at fifty thousand feet, before they turned over, they had been lying face down, looking out backward on the Sea of Tranquility as it receded through their windows, and their first mark of orientation, the crater Maskelyne W, did not appear on time and in the place where it should be. A fatefully long second passed. A second at three thousand miles an hour is nearly a mile, another second passed. Were they lost? Maskelyne W came under the window two full seconds and then a little more late. They were already two miles off the mark. At forty-five thousand feet, motor burning all the way in front of them, the Lem rolled them over on their backs. The moon was now invisible, the earth above their window—their hands reached up to the instrument panel overhead, they floated, held in position by cables and restraints for there were, we may remember, no couches in the Lem. How must the earth have looked in the quiet anxiety of the moment. Their toes were leading them to the moon, their eyes were looking at the earth—would they ever see it again, or was this the hour of signing off? So descended the Lem, weird unwieldy flying machine, vehicle on stilts and never before landed, craft with a range of shifting velocities more than comparable to the difference from a racing car down to an amphibious duck, a vehicle with huge variations in speed and handling as it slowed, a vehicle to be flown for the first time in the rapidly changing field of gravity of the moon, going from weightlessness to one-sixth gravity, and one-sixth gravity had never been experienced before in anything but the crudest simulations, and mascons beneath, their location unknown, their effect on moon gravity considerable, angles of vision altering all the time and never near to perfect, the weight of the vehicle reducing drastically as the fuel was consumed, and with it all, the computer guiding them, allowing them to feel all the confidence a one-eyed man can put in a blind man going down a dark alley, and when, at the moment they would take over themselves to fly it manually, a range of choices already tried in simulation but never in reality would be open between full manual and full computer. Armstrong could, if he wished, control the attitude of the Lem and its forward progress, but allow the computer to manage the rate of descent. The only difficulty was that the hand controls of the Lem were curious indeed. To his right was a short thick red pistol grip like a small club of a joy stick, and it could be cocked left and right, forward and back, or be turned like a screwdriver to translate separate commands for roll, pitch, and yaw—it had even a push-to-talk switch, and this control (Attitude Controller Assembly) by pitching the Lem forward or back, could serve to increase or retard the forward speed once the ship was slowed for the final descent; it could also twist her, sidle her, waddle her, or cant her into new positions for skimming over boulders. What a swivel, what phallus!
At the left hand was a control which altered the speed of descent, a Thrust-Translater Controller, a glorified toggle switch which changed the rate of descent one foot per second every time one clicked it. Armed with this set of instruments, they would come in over ground never seen closely before, in an unfamiliar field of gravity, flying a ship which had never been landed, there to come down on four legs rather than wheels, all the while directing their vehicle with two hand controls as difficult of manipulation as some sophisticated version of patting the head with one hand while rubbing a circle on the belly with the other. All of this to be done in the bulky-wham suit.
It was not easy. No question of that. Many of the simulations on the ground had ended in mock crashes or mock aborts. Not all problems were solvable on the spot. Only Armstrong in fact was trained to take the Lem all the way in, and he had the memory of smashing the LLRV. But let us listen to an account of the difficulties by Aldrin.
Neil will take it down. He has the controls on his side. I don’t have them on my side. There’s a throttle on my side, but I don’t have this rate of descent control, and I don’t have this redesignation capability.… But during the actual landing there is a fairly neat division of labor. Neil will be looking more and more out the window with his hand on that stick. He’s not able to look much at the displays on board. This is where we have to have a finely tuned teamwork, so that Neil gets the information he needs to transfer whatever he sees into something meaningful. I’ll have to relay this information. If Neil has to
take his attention away from looking out the window, look down to the keyboard and then back again, this is wasteful.
There were items sufficient for tension, yes. It was the measure of the trip to the moon that the more one knew of the difficulties, the more intense was the anxiety. Now we can add to the failures of communication and the difficulties of flying the Lem that extraordinary moment in the descent when the alarm light went on and the number 1202 blinked on the Display and Keyboard.
VIII
We can go back to the point not four minutes after ignition when the Lem turned over on its back and the astronauts approaching the moon looked across a quarter of a million miles to earth. The comments are laconic, the difficulties are doubtless still ahead, but the radio is giving trouble again. They have passed through a minute where their remarks are garbled.