Thirty years ago next Tuesday, people throughout the world looked up toward the moon, smiling in awe, as two Americans walked there and a third circled it in a space capsule. It was a shining peak of technological achievement and courage.
What they didn't realize, on July 20, 1969, was that many of the scientists and administrators who knew most about the Apollo 11 mission were not smiling. They were gritting their teeth, crossing their fingers and hoping that a disaster wasn't in the offing.More than anyone else, they knew how dangerous the adventure really was.
Three Utahns who worked with the Apollo program -- Don Lind, William T. O'Bryant and Richard W. Shorthill -- remember what it was like.
The very first words beamed from Earth to the moon reflected that tension. For several agonizing minutes, the commanding astronaut, Neil A. Armstrong, had maneuvered the landing module over an unexpected boulder field.
The only message from the crew was the voice of Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin reading off the altitude levels -- and he kept reading them, and reading them, and reading them, long after the lander should have been down. NASA experts knew they were running out of fuel.
Then, at 6:17 p.m. Utah time, the radio crackled with the words the world awaited: "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."
Responded a controller at NASA's Manned Space Flight Center in Houston, "Roger, Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."
Don Lind
Former astronaut Don Lind, a Utah native who lives in Smithfield, Cache County, was one of those guys in Houston about to turn blue as the capsule descended toward the Sea of Tranquillity.
"The tension was absolutely excruciating," Lind recalled.
He occupied the "fourth-best seat" to watch the landing. The best were in the lander on the surface and in the command module orbiting overhead.
Lind had joined the astronaut corps during the earlier Gemini missions. As a geologist, he was in line for a moon landing sometime after the first -- probably Apollo 19 or Apollo 20.
(Ask him if he was terribly disappointed when the landing program was canceled before he could go to the moon, and he'll reply, "Terribly is a very mild word." However, Lind did fly on the shuttle.)
As NASA worked toward the landings, Lind was in charge of planning surface operations. For 3 1/2 years, he worked on contingencies about what to do outside the lander.
What would happen if an astronaut fell over in his bulky space suit with its backpack and gear? If he dropped a geology hammer, he did not dare to bend over to pick it up, or he'd fall over.
Every piece of equipment had a handle that would stick 23 inches above the surface, so a person wouldn't need to lean over to get it, Lind said.
But what if one of the first men on the moon slipped off the capsule's descent ladder? What if someone stumbled over a small cliff? Lind prepared ways to deal with all sorts of trouble.
Because of this expertise, Lind could pick up a microphone and tell Armstrong and Aldrin exactly what to do should they get into trouble on the surface.
He was stationed in the center of the first row of controllers at Houston. "So I claim to have had the fourth best seat for the most exciting thing to happen in our generation."
It was a bit too exciting, with the long delay as Armstrong maneuvered the craft above boulders.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP), a bundle of heavy scientific instruments, was to have been deployed on the first mission. But 18 months before the landing, planners worried that the astronauts might run out of fuel and decided to strip away every ounce of gear they could do without.
Bendix Corp. and NASA came up with a slimmed-down substitute that carried only two instruments, a seismograph station and a reflective device that would allow scientists to bounce lasers off the moon and measure its exact distance to Earth. The change let them take more fuel.
During the powered descent to the moon, for 3 1/2 minutes, fears ran high.
"If anybody saw a movie or a television reenactment of that, they would think it was totally unrealistic, high-tension stuff," Lind said. "You cannot imagine the tension back in the control room."
Nobody in the control room said a word during the descent. Lind was busy digging fingerprints into his chair.
"We didn't know why Neil wasn't coming down like he was supposed to, and the tension was just excruciating."
When the lander finally touched down, according to NASA, it had only 30 seconds' reserve fuel, beyond what it needed to get back into lunar orbit.
Lind was flooded with relief, pride and a sense of unreality. "I thought, 'This is not another simulation at Flagstaff (Arizona, where astronauts trained). They're really there this time.' "
When they were ready to go onto the surface, Aldrin had to crouch in an uncomfortable position and reach beneath the control panel and release a pressure valve.
"Buzz was really having a hard time getting the door unlatched," Lind said.
Controllers could hear him breathing heavily as he struggled. "We knew something was wrong."
Then came Aldrin's voice, "Oh shucks, I bent it."
Everyone wanted to know what "it" was. It turned out to be the hatch itself.
The entire time Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, controllers worried that the bent door would prevent the capsule from repressurizing and the astronauts would have to wear their uncomfortable space suits until they reconnected with Collins.
The new instrument package had to be designed and produced in record time. "It was finished so late in the mission that Buzz Aldrin, who was going to deploy it, had never seen it until he was to open it on the moon," Lind recalled.
After the historic moon walk, the hatch flexed back into position. Armstrong and Aldrin had no trouble reestablishing pressure.
The only device that could not be backed up with redundant systems was the ascent motor that would boost them back into lunar orbit. "We really worried about that," he said.
Even if the engine only worked for a time, it might be enough to get them off the moon. "As long as they could get into a stable orbit and didn't hit a mountain, he (Collins, in the command module) could come down and pick them up."
But 21 hours after the landing, the engine fired and lifted Armstrong and Aldrin to the command module. Everybody in the Manned Space Flight Center heaved a sigh of relief.
"That was almost as comforting as the successful touchdown," Lind said.
William T. O'Bryant
"It was a wise decision to take that fuel" instead of the heavier ALSEP package, says William T. O'Bryant, who headed the NASA team that designed scientific experiments for the moon's surface. Now retired and a resident of Bountiful, O'Bryant was an assistant director of Apollo Lunar Explorations, in charge of all science experiments on the moon.
With the unknown dangers of landing, reducing the science load of the first trip was a good tradeoff, he said. As the landing unfolded, "it was touch and go."
Both the seismograph station and the reflective device turned out to be of value, he said.
"I guess the big surprise was that there was no water in the structure of the moon," O'Bryant said. The seismograph station listened for vibrations that shook the moon after the astronauts left, when a rocket stage was deliberately crashed into our natural satellite.
"The moon rang something like a whole hour after the impact," he said. The seismograph relayed the continued vibrations, telling scientists how hostile the moon is.
On Earth, enough water lubricates the spaces between rocks and soil grains that the ground quickly damps out big vibrations. The water lets particles slip, reducing the tremors.
But on the moon, "there was not enough water up there to allow slippage. The rocks were so dry that they did not slip," O'Bryant said.
"There was good evidence that there was no water anywhere on the moon."
Rocks that the astronauts collected on the surface showed no trace of rust that would have resulted if any water had come into contact with the traces of iron on the moon. Their different chemical makeup also helped disprove a theory that the moon was made up of material somehow slung out of the Pacific Basin.
O'Bryant was based in Washington, D.C., but went to Houston for the first landing.
"Like everybody else, we looked up at the moon and said, 'Gee, they're landing on the moon, or they're on the moon.' It was quite a thrill to think about that. It was a real different situation than people had ever experienced before."
Richard W. Shorthill
At home in Seattle, Richard W. Shorthill turned on two radios, a television and two tape recorders for the first landing. A research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, he lives in Holladay.
Throughout the 1960s, while working for the Boeing Co. to determine surface properties of the moon, he consulted with NASA to help select landing sites for the Apollo program. He joined NASA to work on Mars surveyor projects in 1970 and went to the University of Utah.
"I knew all the dangers," he remembered.
In January 1967, Shorthill attended a NASA conference at which an associate administrator of the space program was present. Someone brought a message to the official.
"I was sitting next to him. He whispered to me, 'There's been an accident,' and he got up and left."
During a practice session, astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee had been killed. A fire flashed through their Apollo capsule and they couldn't get out.
Other dangers could be present in the lunar soil itself, some experts believed. Boeing had tried to investigate properties of the moon's dust before the astronauts arrived, he said.
"They thought the soil would burn if it got into an oxygen atmosphere -- it's called pyrophoric."
The fear was that the soil was so powdery that when mixed with oxygen in the lunar lander, it might explode. Personally, Shorthill doubted that it would, but he knew that was a concern at Boeing.
"There were so many dangers. So many things could have happened -- rip a suit, a door that couldn't get shut. I was extremely tense."
When Armstrong and Aldrin returned to their lander and repressurized, Shorthill remembers, the commander alluded to the fear of exploding dust. Armstrong said, "If it's going to go, it's going to go now."
But it didn't.
Instead, the safe moon landing and the return of the astronauts marked the events of July 1969 as one of the greatest adventures in history.