First of two parts.
"I believe this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."— President John F. Kennedy, 1961
At 2:18 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, July 20, 1969 — more than three days and 239,000 miles from home, eight years after the first humans had entered space and the U.S. president had issued a challenge to put a man on the moon — the odd-looking little Eagle spacecraft was 500 feet from the first lunar landing and in trouble.
An alarm was sounding and a yellow light was blinking. The on-board computer was registering boulders in the Sea of Tranquility landing site. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin would have to maneuver around them manually to a safer site. Armstrong burned the engines 70 more seconds than plans called for to find a safer spot about four miles away.
"Forward, forward, good. Forty feet," Armstrong told Manned Spacecraft Center mission controllers in Houston. "Picking up some dust … Drifting to the right … Contact light.
OK. Engine stop!"
Armstrong's voice was calm. But his heart wasn't, racing twice the usual rate at 156 beats per minute.
The cool atmosphere of the previous three days of the mission was now thick with tension.
"We could tell something wasn't right, but we didn't know what or how worried the center flight personnel were for a while after," former Deseret News science reporter Hal Knight said last week, recalling the events that day as one in a throng of news people from around the world gathered in the auditorium of mission control in Houston.
Aborting the mission had become a real possibility, but at the same time an impossibility — only 30 seconds of fuel remained.
"It was the moment I remember best and was one of many that made the lunar landing one of the rare times when real life is more dramatic than any novel or movie could ever make it," Knight said of his two-week assignment to cover the launch.
Knight had an insider's feel of the mission-control center, courtesy of a personal, other-press-prohibited guided tour a few days earlier by his old Jordan High School classmate Don Lind, an Apollo astronaut who wouldn't get to go to the moon but would fly with the Shuttle Spacelab-3 mission in 1985.
"He got me as close as I could get without being on a rocket," Knight said. "I don't think anyone was even breathing until we finally heard the center intercom say, 'Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground.' "
Knight didn't hear the rest of what Houston said: "You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."
Applause in the auditorium was too loud. "Even tough old news guys couldn't help but cheer. I remember a reporter from Germany jumped up and raised his arms as if someone had just scored an impossible, last-second shot. It felt like a big, group sigh of relief," Knight said.
When the Eagle's engines were cut, exactly enough fuel was left to power them off the surface and redock with the lunar orbiter and pilot Michael Collins the next day.
That was probably the most critical moment on that landmark voyage, L. King Isaacson, a rocket scientist and emeritus professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, told the Deseret News last week.
Six years before Apollo 11, Isaacson and his wife, Gwen, were in California working with National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists, she helping in instrument calibrations and he developing a mathematical model for the "ablative" heat shields to be used to protect the astronaut capsules in the new Apollo program. The shield is a layer of silicone-laced ceramic attached to the blunt forward wall of the orbiter and works by dissipating the hot shock layer gas that occurs during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
The shield, in effect, warded off temperatures reaching 450 degrees Fahrenheit as the craft fell at 25,000 mph. The shield was first used in low Earth orbit on Aug. 26, 1966, and samples of it are being studied by scientists now as they finish designing NASA's Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the capsulelike Earth-entry vehicle in the lunar and Mars missions scheduled to begin in 2020.
"It's always all about going and getting back safely," Isaacson said. Whether it's a Minuteman missile, a Saturn V or a jet engine, "the top priority is to anticipate and model and test every possible safety threat due to an unanticipated spontaneous event," Isaacson's term for something going wrong.
"Astronauts and those in mission control are known for being calm, because they've trained so long and the engineers have anticipated every possible outcome — sometimes learned through one of those events — that it's rare they haven't seen it coming."
The most famous utterance of an unanticipated event came two missions later, when Apollo 13 commander James Lovell Jr. told the ground crew tracking the six-day mission in April 1970, "Houston, we have a problem."
As with any scientific endeavor, especially one where the mission involves pulling out of Earth's gravity and into lunar orbit, success depends on thousands of little things working in order and in sequence, Isaacson said.
"A minor miss in the planning can have devastating consequences," he added, noting the death of the Apollo I astronauts Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Virgil "Gus" Grissom on Jan. 27, 1967. They died in a fire during a training exercise and pre-launch test.
"These events teach us a lot, but you also lose a lot," Isaacson said. "Apollo had not even gotten off the ground, and it was already off on the wrong foot. That fact was riding along on Apollo 11's trip to the moon. Beating the Soviets was secondary to completing successfully what others weren't able to, some because they had given their lives to get there."
A fact of life in rocket science is that nothing ever goes right the first time, and that was weighing heavily on the minds of those in mission control that historic day in 1969. When there is literally no chance for a do-over — like astronauts on the ground, except the ground is not Earth as in Apollo 11 — altering the flight path or any change is serious.
It didn't take nearly constant three-network national television coverage of the landing for Americans to understand that not enough fuel could mean they were not coming back.
"Space is a place, and no other place is as forbidding to human habitation," Isaacson said. "That we can go there and back on the shuttle, and went to and came back from the moon with Apollo is a grand achievement to be sure. We've had losses, and we have made amazing technological advances from it."
Looking back, Isaacson sums up rockets and early space exploration as ultimately"a humbling testament of not just going but having the guts to try. It set my life path, and it also taught me a life lesson early: It's not the destination, it's the journey. And what better journey is there than the search to understand what's going on here and around our beautiful little planet?"
The Lunar Module spent 21 hours, 36 minutes on the lunar surface and the crew spent two hours, 31 minutes outside the module. Armstrong and Aldrin deployed various instruments and a U.S. flag. They collected 46 pounds of moon rocks and soil. They left behind a retro reflector array used for the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment and other mementos, including a stainless-steel plaque that reads: "Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind."
By the end of Apollo in December 1972, astronauts had left a lot more research equipment, deer trails of footprints, some doughnuts spun from a custom-built four-wheeler and a few divots from a golf club. And the implied promise to return.
The times are different, and so are the reasons to keep going into space and to schedule another series of round trips to the moon.
Money is the main hang-up against returning. Cost ended the Apollo program two moon missions earlier than scheduled, and it will determine, especially if the recession keeps grinding away here on Earth, just how far flung manned space exploration gets over the next 40 years.
Former astronauts, scientists, politicians and future hopeful space-faring Utahns say the "final frontier" remains a kind of last, best hope for humanity.
Where do we go from here? Some local answers are highlighted in Monday's Deseret News.