One Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong's Stellar American Journey - Softcover

Wagener, Leon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312875924 ISBN 13: 9780312875923

Publisher: Forge Books, 2005

Synopsis

On July 20, 1969, the whole world stopped. It was the day when a man who grew up on a farm without electricity announced, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." But the world never knew how truly dangerous this quest was.

Armstrong and his crew's extraordinary mission was a long, complex chain of events, at least 50 percent likely to snap at one delicate point or another and end in failure or worse. As the mission unfolded, those in the know about the daunting task the astronauts faced held their breath. The President of the United States, Richard Nixon, ordered their eulogy prepared for him to read on national television.

In this, the first-ever biography of Neil Armstrong, Leon Wagener explores the man whose walk on the moon is still compared to humankind's progenitor's crawl out of the primordial ooze---and whose retreat back to a farm in his native Ohio soon after the last ticker-tape confetti fell has left him looked upon as a reclusive hermit ever since.

This is the true story of a national hero whose lifelong quest to walk on the moon truly mirrors our best selves. He's an American who daily braved incredible danger over a long career and finally broke free of Earth's surly bonds, achieving what seemed impossible and proving forever that man can reach for the stars and succeed.

About this title

About the Author

LEON WAGENER has been a journalist for more than thirty years. He lives in Boca Raton, Florida with his photographer wife Rochelle and daughter Madison.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE GIANT LEAP
Chapter OneTo see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, as brothers who know they are truly brothers.--Archibald MacLeish 
For one crowning moment we were creatures of the cosmic ocean, a moment that a thousand years hence may be seen as the signature of our century ... .--Buzz Aldrin 
During that one bright shining instant in July 1969, humankind enjoyed a collective jolt that transcended the quotidian anxieties of life. Earthmen had succeeded where Icarus failed, flying toward the sun without melting their wings, setting foot in the heavens, on the shore of another world. Suddenly, as two of our number walked on an alien orb a quarter-million miles in space and stared with awe and longing back at our blue-green world, we realized where we were; that man was alone, precariously clinging to a spinning ball in the vastness of space. Through their eyes and the black-and-white flickering television images of them, and the images of ourselves they sent back, we finally had a fledgling "you are here" map of the universe in our collective mind.Even if the cynical view of the launch of Apollo 11, which said it was just spectacle to take our minds off the Vietnam War and the other troubles of the day, was true, it was nevertheless pageant on the grandest of scales, and the whole world reacted in kind.More than a million people were drawn to northern Florida's eastern coast to bask in proximity to the capes where the phenomenal voyage was to begin.Cape Kennedy--as it was called for a decade until it was quietly decided the nation had gone overboard naming things after the slain president--was the space center, a hive of frenetic activity, where thousands labored to fulfill John Kennedy's promise to send a man to the moon and bring him safely back before the end of the seventh decade of the twentieth century.In the days and weeks before blastoff a ragtag army assembled, ranging from drug-addled nomadic hippies to families on vacation to retirees in campers. Vehicles of all sorts sported American flag stickers--generally taken to mean to send a message that the occupants were against the people who were against the war in Vietnam. The flag stickers were fairly ubiquitous that summer; sixty-eight million of them had been distributed via copies of the Reader's Digest the previous winter.Pilgrims descended on the area, erecting tent cities, drawing their recreational vehicles, jalopies, high-finned Cadillacs, and VW minibuses in circles, camping around the sulphurous estuaries, mangroves, and sand dunes surrounding the cape. Lotus-like, they emptied grocery store shelves, culled 7-Elevens of beer and soda, depleted the region's McDonalds of their last all-beef patties, and finally, like any voracious army, turned to the land for succour, harvesting grapefruit trees and orange bushes and provoking outraged local farmers to brandish shotguns. Bars were sold out of liquor, and drugstores out of suntan oil.Motel rooms had been spoken for many months earlier. Even the nineteen state governors who attended were forced to stay sixty-five miles away in Daytona Beach. Service stations posted NO GAS signs--an eerie foreshadowing of oil shortages that would roil America in the seventies. The city of Cocoa Beach parked a gasoline tanker and posted an armed guard behind city hall to supply police cars.Making matters more desperate, the incredible tangle of traffic that clogged the highways for miles around made timely resupply difficult. A blazing sun, eighty-five-degree heat, and 75 percent humidity begat frayed tempers, uncountable fender benders, and endless lines of crippled cars and campers, hoods raised, spouting geysers of steam. Curses, fistfights, and worse punctuated the mad tableau.Some who came were blissfully ignorant of the years of preparation and publicity that had preceded the launch, but were inexplicably drawn to the scene. One vacationing family sleeping in their overheated car told a reporter: "We were somewhere in the Midwest when we heard about it. We thought it was going to be last Wednesday, so we've been here a week."Bill Emerton, then forty-nine years old and a very serious runner, covered the 1,034 miles from Houston to Cape Kennedy on foot.Visitors who had planned ahead parked in the Celestial Trailer Court, or checked into the Polaris, Sea Missile, or Satellite motels. They dined at the Astro-Diner Outer Space Eat In, and used restrooms marked ASTRONAUTS and ASTRONETTES. Pan American Airlines had a stewardess dressed in a head-to-knee plastic bubble taking reservations for the first charter flight to the moon.Distinguished guests included Jack Benny, Johnny Carson, Charles Lindbergh, 205 congressmen, 69 ambassadors, and thousands of the celebrated, well-connected, or merely rich. The privileged were feted at lavish parties thrown by contractors, many of whom had gotten very rich off the $24 billion spent to put men on the moon.President Richard Nixon had wanted to attend, but demurred when he concluded his presence would be dwarfed by the event. His chief aide, the fearsomely loyal H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, known for his henchman-like mien and deliberately unfashionable brush haircut, laid out the president's reservations in a memo: "He definitely wants to go ahead with plans to visit the Cape for the shoot and was interested in using the boat for his Presidential reception. He wants to be sure, however, that this would clearly be the President's affair--not NASA's--and he is afraid that if the boat belongs to NASA, and the VIP's are housed on it, that it will become their function rather than his."Instead of taking a chance on being upstaged at the launch, Nixon canceled the trip, making plans to talk to the astronauts while they walked on the moon, pictured next to them on a split-screen television--in effect, putting him on the moon with them, doubtless one of the most brilliant public-relations coups in history.The Banana and Indian rivers, which offered good views of the launchpad, likewise were jammed bow to transom; police estimates were three thousand craft of every description. The skies around the cape were peppered with hundreds of small planes buzzing back andforth, often precariously close to colliding, which led worried NASA officials to ask the Federal Aviation Agency to intervene and avert a disaster.News coverage of the event, particularly television coverage, was unprecedented, precisely because there was no precedent. Never had the twenty-year-old medium covered a history-making news event that would "break" continuously for a week and be watched by a half-billion people around the world.CBS, NBC, and ABC, America's three networks, canceled their, regular programming and broadcast thirty-one continuous hours of coverage and analysis. At the crucial moment of Armstrong and Aldrin's walk on the moon, Walter Cronkite, the paterfamilias news grandee, of whom it was said, only half-jokingly, that "he'll get them back safely," was struck dumb. "Wow, oh, boy," seemed the only sound he could make. Desperately, drowning in his elation, Cronkite croaked to his co-host, astronaut Wally Schirra, "say something, Wally." The press corps on July 16, 1969, numbered an amazing 3,100 and ranged in seriousness from distinguished historians to a French magazine that passed out "gay" straw hats, a fact that William Greider, the Washington Post writer who reported it, fretted would be lost to history.The million citizens, six thousand VIPs invited by the government, and throng of journalists representing fifty-four countries had come to see the Saturn V rocket, which stood amid all the hubris and carnival, alone, silent, and dignified on its concrete pad. Brilliantly bathed in xenon spotlights, shimmering a pale indigo, skirted by a diaphanous mist of venting liquid hydrogen, Saturn rose thirty-seven stories tall, sixty feet higher than the Statue of Liberty and fifteen times heavier; it was the most powerful machine ever built by man.Saturn's passengers, commander Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins slept less than four fitful hours the night of July 15.The three had much in common. They were all born in 1930, were engineers and jet fighter pilots, and each possessed the suprahuman ability to face the maw of death with steely calm. But beneath the surface their personalities were divergent and occasionally even rancorous. The great voyage that lay ahead was reason enough for fitfulness, but the astronauts had numerous other vexations that had long been seething.Buzz Aldrin was described by a writer as "powerful as a smallbull ... all meat and stone." He had graduated third in his West Point class and was a decorated Korean War fighter pilot. Aldrin earned a doctorate in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was the son of a general with an M.I.T. doctorate. The astronautics specialty that appealed to him was spacecraft rendezvous, a rather arcane subject in 1961, before John Glenn had achieved three tentative orbits of the earth--even before there was any certainty there would be a space program."I wish I could play the tapes back of those days and find out what I was thinking," he muses now. As with most of the happenstances that eventually winnowed the pool of potential space explorers to twelve stout-hearted Americans, Aldrin's choice of postgraduate study would be one significant step that in retrospect seems like predestination, because it made him the one man in tens of millions just right for the exacting job of navigating the new interplanetary ocean.In the weeks leading up to the launch of Apollo 11, Aldrin was deeply troubled over NASA's indecision about precisely what he and Armstrong were going to do once they landed on the moon. Aldrin felt strongly that his duty was pointing out the safety concerns involved, and he refused to ignore an issue that could have put the mission in jeopardy."I could have just shut up, behaved like a normal person, and did what I was told, or I could speak my thoughts," he laughs. "Let's face it. It was a group of people in which most spoke their thoughts."Aldrin felt that, due to the "critical nature of emergencies that could occur on the lunar surface," they might have to lift off in a do-or-die rush. If Commander Armstrong was at that moment bouncing along on the moon's surface, the escape window--the short period of time when rendezvous with the orbiting mother ship was possible--might be shut, dooming the mission and both astronauts.In addition, the precedent during space walks was for commanders to stay with the ship while junior crew members did what NASA dubbed "extra vehicular activity," or EVA."The commander could oversee what was going on by remaining in the spacecraft and communicating with ground control," argued Aldrin. "There was also an extremely heavy training load on the commander and a lighter load on junior crew members. So it was logical to put the additional burden of spacewalking on the crew."What came to be the more-or-less official version of the decisionto have Armstrong first on the moon was that the landing module was so small, and the men's spacesuits so large and cumbersome, that it would be difficult for Buzz to get around Neil and out the narrow hatch.At the time, he felt Armstrong was going to make the first steps on the moon simply because he was a civilian, and NASA felt it was the politically correct thing to do in the highly charged atmosphere of the Vietnam War protest era. "It would have been an insult to the service. There was no difference between us. We both learned to fly in Korea. When I was satisfied that wasn't the issue, I dropped the matter completely, and we got on with the mission."Aldrin's safety concerns were addressed by planning to immediately prepare for liftoff upon landing, and by waiting until all systems were sound and ready for ascent before either man began the moonwalk.Unfortunately for Aldrin, in the macho-gotcha world of the astronaut corps his queries led to smirking accusations that he was campaigning to be number one on the moon. "That gave fuel to others to say, 'Buzz was running around the office trying to get support for his being first on the moon,'" Aldrin says. "Well, bullshit. That was the interpretation of people who loved to pick apart what other people did."Aldrin felt then and still feels he was something of an outcast in the tight-knit world of the astronauts, despite being as qualified, or more qualified, than the rest of the men. "I was not what you would call an insider. I was not a carrier-based Navy flier. I was an egghead academician. They were competitive in pursuing their career agendas. I can't think of a single Navy test pilot who didn't do everything he could to enhance his career."When I first got into the astronaut program, there was a fun-poking where if you caught another guy doing something, you pointed it out and everybody had their chuckles. I didn't mind being called Dr. Rendezvous. But sometimes it was more than just fun-poking. It bordered on ridiculing the egghead. At least there was an undercurrent of that."To add to the pressure, Aldrin's influential dad, General Edwin, Sr., threatened to fire an outraged broadside across NASA's bow demanding his son be first off the lander.In frustration, Buzz decided to take up the issue of "the order ofexiting" the moon landing vehicle with mission commander Armstrong directly, hoping to end a controversy that was embarrassing and was beginning to "hamper our training.""I went into Neil's office and said I thought we needed a decision on this regardless of anyone's feelings or point of view."Five years later, in his autobiography, Return to Earth, Aldrin wrote that Armstrong reacted "with a coldness I had not known he possessed. He said the decision was quite historical and he didn't want to rule out the possibility of going first."Looking back through the lens of twenty-two years of sobriety, Aldrin says, his life was in turmoil when he okayed the final revisions to the book, and suggests he was harsh in his interpretation of Neil's remarks."I was going through the beginnings of personal problems that were significant--alcoholism misdiagnosed as depression."Michael Collins was destined to become famous as the man who did not walk on the moon. But instead he would be "Carrying the Fire"--the title of his 1974 autobiography. That is, he would orbit the moon alone in the command module Columbia while Neil and Buzz descended to the lunar surface in the landing craft Eagle. The daunting nature of Collins's job was that he was in control of the only ticket home. The astronauts wouldn't travel to the moon in a powered ship; rather, once blasted free of earth's gravity, they would rely on their forward momentum to coast toward the pull of the moon's gravity. Then, like a slingshot, the five-thousand-pound ship would be captured by the lunar gravity; when Apollo 11 fired its engine for about six minutes, it would slow from 5,600 miles per hour to 3,600 and insert itself into a sixty-mile-high orbit.After circling a dozen times, Eagle would separate from the mother ship while on the far side of the moon and begin an hourlong descent to the surface. C...

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0312875924
• ISBN 13: 9780312875923
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336