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Science / Space Race

[November 26, 1969] From the Earth to the Moon…and back (Apollo 12)

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photo of Gideon Marcus, a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Just four months ago, men first set foot on the Moon, fulfilling a millennia-long dream of humanity as well as culminating a decade-long Space Race between the superpowers. And the question on everyone's lips: how do you top that?

It's important to remember that the flight of Apollo 11 was not the end, but only a beginning—just as John Glenn's orbital flight, Gus Grissom's mission in Gemini 3, Wally Schirra's in Apollo 7 were all beginnings. The Moon Port is open, and it is time to start the exploration of the cosmos in earnest.

Appropriately, the flight of Apollo 12 was planned to mark an incremental expansion upon the prior mission's success. Scheduled for a November 14 launch at 11:22AM Eastern time months in advance, the second lunar mission would include the following improvements:

  • Time spent on the Moon would be 32 hours, half again more than the 21 hours spent by Apollo 11.
  • There would be two Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) rather than one.
  • The astronauts would set up a series of experiments designed to operate for one year from the lunar surface.
  • The Lunar Module (LM) would execute a pinpoint landing at Site 7 in the Sea of Storms, as opposed to the less precise touchdown made by Eagle in July
  • As a result, the astronauts would be able to recover the TV camera from Surveyor 3, which had soft-landed on the Moon two years prior.
  • The Moonwalks would be televised in color this time.
  • After lunar exploration, Apollo 12 would spend an extra day in lunar orbit photographing future landing sites.

In all, Apollo 12 promised to be only slightly more ambitious than its predecessor, but how much more ambitious than a flight to the Moon do you need?

Crew and Capsule

The astronauts selected for this mission included two veterans and a rookie, the first time since Apollo 9 that an Apollo crew has included a newcomer. The mission commander was Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., an irrepressibly cheerful and talented fellow who almost made the Mercury 7. He was pilot on the Gemini 5 endurance mission and commander on Gemini 11, which conducted docking and microgravity experiments. Richard "Dick" Gordon served as Command Module Pilot, and since he had been Conrad's pilot on Gemini 11, it must have seemed like old times. The newcomer was Alan Bean, who, like Gordon, had been part of the third group of NASA astronauts. His job was to pilot the Lunar Module down to the Moon's surface.

A promotional color photograph of astronauts Conrad, Gordon and Bean, in their spacesuits minus gloves and helmets, in front of the Apollo 12 Lunar Module.
Left to right: Conrad, Gordon, and Bean

The timing for this crew's mission was determined by quirks of fate, only becoming set in stone in December. NASA has a protocol of assigning back-up crews (stand-ins who will replace mission crews in an emergency) to live missions three flights later. Originally, Conrad and Gordon had been the back-up crew for Apollo 8, along with third group astronaut Clifton Williams. Apollo 8 was supposed to test the LM in Earth orbit. But after the successful flight of Apollo 7, which tested the Command and Service Modules, and with the threat of an impending Soviet circumlunar flight, Apollo 8 was bumped to the 9th slot, and the December 1968 flight was reprogrammed for a mission around the Moon.

Conrad and Gordon backed up the delayed Apollo 9 flight, along with Alan Bean, who replaced Clifton Williams, who had died in a test flight October 5, 1967. Nine plus three is twelve, and so those three were put on the second lunar lander mission. But if Williams had not died, and had Apollo's missions gone as schedule, then it would have been Conrad and Bean to set the first steps on the Moon.

As with the prior Columbia and Eagle, NASA wanted proud names for the Apollo 12 vessels. Thousands of NASA employees and contractors sent in their suggestions, and the all-Navy crew decided on Yankee Clipper for the Command Module and Intrepid for the Lunar Module. This marks the first time that a NASA ship has shared a name with one that appeared on Star Trek—namely, the Vulcan-crewed starship in "The Immunity Syndrome". Of course, Intrepid has also been used for American naval vessels since the country's founding, but one has to wonder if Trek's outsize impact on popular culture wasn't a factor. I guess we'll see if we ever get a spaceship called Enterprise…

Official crew insignia for the mission. It is circular with concentric thin blue, thin white then thick yellow edges, the latter sporting the text Apollo 12, Conrad, Gordon, Bean. The center of the insignia consists of a drawn picture of a clipper ship in space in front of the Ocean of Storms area of the Moon, where the Lunar Module was to, and did eventually land. The clipper ship was chosen because the all crew comes from the Navy.

The crew were intimately involved in the creation of the Apollo 12 patch. The blue and gold motif was chosen to honor the U.S. Navy. The Eagle was featured on the last patch; this time, Yankee Clipper got to star. Al Bean went to the library to round up suitable ship references for the clipper and worked closely with the artist to ensure it had a truly "American" look, nixing the first draft as looking too much like the Argo from Greek myth.

Stormy weather

In 1949, President Truman chose Cape Canaveral in Florida to be the nation's spaceport as it allowed launches over the Atlantic rather than over populated regions; it is also as close to the equator as you can get in the continental United States, which means space launches get the most boost from the Earth's rotation.

But it also rains a lot in Florida, and an approaching storm front threatened to delay the Nov. 14th launch date. There was a four and a half hour window that day; if rain grounded the launch beyond that point, the back-up date was Nov. 16th, with a different landing site.

An internal problem reared its head, too: one of the fuel cells (a kind of refillable battery) on Yankee Clipper was leaking hydrogen and had to be replaced.

A color photograph of Apollo 12's Saturn V lift-off from Kennedy Space Center. The sky is completely overcast. The fuel burning at the back of the launcher makes a bright spot in the center of the photograph, with fumes and steam on the sides of the launchpad. Two birds are passing in the frame, near the photographer.

Nevetherless, at 22 minutes past the 8:00 (Pacific time) hour, Apollo 12's Saturn V spurted flame and began its ascent, President Nixon in attendance with his family. The rocket was almost immediately lost in the clouds. Moments later, ABC anchor Frank Reynold's voice went tremulous. He reported that an electrical shock, perhaps caused by a lightning strike, had shot through Apollo 12, taking the fuel cells off-line. Worse, the inertial navigation platform "eight-ball", common to air and spacecraft alike, went haywire. Without these, the mission would probably have to be scrubbed.

A picture of the Flight Director Attitude Indicator. It serves to know at any given moment the relative position and direction of a spacecraft in space.
Flight Director Attitude Indicator: the "platform" or "Eight-ball"

Apollo Commander Conrad, to his credit, retained his cool. "I always like to start out behind the eight-ball and get ahead," he joked as the spacecraft slid into its first orbit around the Earth.

Moonward, Ho!

Once in orbit, a reset brought most of the affected systems back on line, and bright stars were used to realign the platform once Yankee Clipper had passed into night time. Conrad and Bean thoroughly checked their lunar module, entering it ahead of schedule, to ensure there was no lightning damage. That survey complete, they blasted out of orbit into a "free-return" trajectory that would take them around the Moon. On the way, they snapped this picture of the Earth:

A photograph of a crescent Earth taken by Apollo 12 crew on their way to the moon.

They also conducted two color broadcasts, Dick Gordon donning shades to deal with the solar glare. Although we've seen it before, I always marvel at the spaciousness of the Apollo/LM complex compared to prior spacecraft. That one can travel fifteen feet now without hitting anything seems like incomparable luxury compared to the cramped Gemini and Mercury capsules.

After three days, Yankee Clipper decelerated, entering lunar orbit. Apollo 12 was now at that scary juncture, out of radio contact for 45 minutes every hour and a half as the spacecraft ducked behind the Moon. And, as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite never failed to remind us, if the Service Module's engine did not fire, the astronauts would be stranded a quarter million miles from home.

While looping the Moon, the Apollo 12 crew returned live TV shots, gawking at the stark beauty of the horizon, whose peaks looked like distant clouds to them, and at the pebbled landscape, which Conrad described as cotton candy someone had shot BBs at.


The big crater, Copernicus, ejecta of which ridged the Apollo 12 landing site


Fra Mauro, potential future landing site of Apollo 13

Stormy approach

As Intrepid undocked from its mother ship and began its hour-long descent to the lunar surface, two concerns sprung up: firstly, a solar flare had erupted, threatening radio communications, if not the lives of the astronauts; secondly, Alan Bean got a congested nose—but a decongestant pill kept trouble at bay.

Then the LM was on its way, the two Navy aviators, Conrad and Bean, as jovial as any two spacefarers have ever been. Cronkite noted to former astronaut Wally Schirra that the spacemen seemed particularly jocular this flight, to which the Navy Captain replied that that's the way it should be; astronauts shouldn't have to be stuffy.

At first, the spaceship flew almost perpendicular to the lunar surface, not so much landing as orbiting. In fact, until a final burn at about 50,000 feet, Intrepid was in an orbit just nine miles high, such a feat being possible because the Moon has no atmospheric drag.


See how the ship is sideways for most of it?

Once the landing burn commenced, the Intrepid began slowly arcing toward vertical, its engine spewing close to its maximum thrust: some 9000 pounds of force. As the lunar horizon came into view, the astronauts burst into excited exclamations. The target crater was right where it was supposed to be, and they were bang on course. Pete Conrad maneuvered the LM closer and closer to the lunar surface, Bean calling out altitude checks and attaboys in a constant stream. As the module descended, a huge cloud of black dust billowed up—a feature of that site, as Surveyor 3 had found previously. At last, Intrepid landed in "Pete's Parking Lot" just 600 feet from Surveyor 3 with 7% of its fuel left in the tanks, a healthy margin. The pinpoint landing had worked out perfectly.

Going for a walk

Unlike Apollo 11, no post-landing rest period was planned for the astronauts. Who could restrain them anyway, at this point? Just four hours after touchdown, Pete Conrad was out the hatch and making his descent down the ladder. This happened around 3:30 in the morning for me. I have to wonder what viewership was like for this flight given that coverage started at 10 PM. Luckily, Amber works third shift, so we kept each other company on the phone, and when I fell asleep around 11:30 PM, she kindly gave me a wake-up call when the Moonwalk began.

True to style, Pete's first words as he lit on the lunar surface were, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" I watched the astronaut toodle around, in color and at 30 frames per second, for a while, but then fell back into unconsciousness around 4 AM. No worries, I thought. The exciting stuff wouldn't happen until the second EVA…


Hard to tell, but that's Conrad jumping down to the surface

Except when I woke up and watched the news, it turned out Alan Bean had accidentally set up the camera on a tripod pointed directly at the Sun. In short order, the picture tube had burned out. So much for color TV from the Moon.

I'd actually missed the deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), which included a seismometer, a magnetometer, and a spectrometer for measuring the solar wind. The last instrument, in particular, would return data that would be compared with that being returned from Explorer 35, which has been in lunar orbit since 1967. This will tell us if the Moon, itself, generates or conducts any electric fields that can't be detected from space. All are powered by a SNAP-27 nuclear reactor that creates electricity from radioactive decay. The solar wind experiment was, in part, built by Marcia Neugebauer, whom you may recall was responsible for similar devices on the Venus probe, Mariner 2.


Diagram of ALSEP components laid out on the Moon

I did not miss, however, the astronauts walking into Surveyor 3's crater. As they bounced around, Bean noted that they looked like they were in one of those overcranked silent films of the '20s. They collected samples, uttering profound statements like, "That's a good rock!" The landing site is particularly good for selenology (the lunar equivalent of geology, natch), because the terrain is rather varied; ejecta from Copernicus crater when it was formed fell over the site, creating a mixed set of soil.

Then they found Surveyor and, as planned, began taking a hacksaw to it to bring some pieces home with them. Interestingly, they noted that it was no longer white, but a kind of tan. A trick of the light or erosion? We don't know yet. The metal also seemed to have crystallized, becoming more brittle than it had been on Earth.

The astronauts blasted off from the Moon and, with almost blasé affect, docked with Yankee Clipper. Bean and Conrad rejoined the more laconic Gordon, and they jettisoned Intrepid's top half. Shortly thereafter, they activated the half-LM's engines and plowed the vehicle into the Moon in a test of the ALSEP's seismometer. So much for that ten million bucks. The result was a Moonquake that lasted a good hour, so long that NASA scientists believe the impact may have triggered a landslide. Either that, or the material of the Moon is unique such that, instead of dampening shock waves, as on Earth, it actually amplifies them.


Intrepid as seen from Yankee Clipper; sorry for the monochrome—I snapped this shot off my black and white TV

After a day of photographing the Moon from orbit, Yankee Clipper fired its main engine, broke lunar orbit, and began the three day trip to Earth. On the way, the space trio gave us one final broadcast and also snapped a shot of the Earth as it eclipsed the Sun. All the while, the astronauts suffered from runny noses and wheezy breath, the consequence of lunar dust ending up in the capsule.

On the morning of the 24th, Yankee Clipper sailed into the Earth's atmosphere and the typical radio blackout. Three minutes before splashdown at 12:58 Pacific time, cameras from the U.S.S. Hornet recovery carrier, 1200 miles south of Hawaii, spotted the three orange and white parachutes, just two and a half miles away. This ties Apollo 8 for the closest recovery. The command module touched the roughest waves ever encountered on an Apollo recovery, immediately inverting. Recovery was swift and efficient, the Hornet's helicopter #66 making its fourth Apollo astronaut pick-up (previous ones included 8, 10, and 11).

Once the spacemen were on the carrier, we got to see that they were not wrapped up in suits, but merely wearing respirators. They jauntily waved to the cameras as they entered their quarantine trailer, where they will stay for five days, before transferring to a larger facility for thirteen more days. Missing were the folks in protective suits immediately washing away their bootprints. One has to wonder if they'll even bother with quarantine after this mission. They don't seem to be taking it very seriously this time.

President Nixon called the astronauts to congratulate them. He capped the conference with an on-the-spot promotion. This is customary for spacemen after each flight, but I think this is the first time the President has done it. Conrad, Bean, and Gordon are all now Navy Captains.

There was some concern that Apollo 12's systems might have been permanently damaged by the lightning that struck on take-off. Nothing seems to have been hurt at all, but there is still a clamor to launch the next missions in clearer weather to avoid another strike.


The lightning strike was caught on camera after launch but not discovered by NASA until later

It is an amazing and saddening thing that the public seems already somewhat tired of the Apollo missions. NBC's David Brinkley and CBS' Harry Reasoner could barely keep the disdain out of their voices as they described the astronauts gallivanting on the Moon, as if they were personally wasting taxpayer money. Conrad and Bean's casual mien, rather than charming the public, seems to have belittled the enterprise in the public's esteem.

Beyond that, NASA itself is in turmoil. They are demoralized at what they see as the end of an era, rather than the beginning of a new one. Vice President Agnew may be gung ho on going to Mars, but President Nixon refuses to make any commitments. To quote Music Scene's David Steinberg, who said this about Nixon's Vietnamization speech, "We would like to go out of our way to salute President Nixon, who in his speech exactly one week ago had the courage and the confidence to believe that he actually said something."


After that comment, an FBI agent stepped up and snapped his picture. This became a running gag.

NASA scientists feel that they have not been listened to, and that the Apollo missions stress engineering and political issues over the acquisition of knowledge. Indeed, many prominent researchers have quit, and others have been laid off.

Nevertheless, the money has been paid and the Saturns have been built. Apollo 13 is scheduled to launch next March to some spot scouted by Apollo 12, and we'll have at least four more missions after that (Apollo 20 has been cancelled; Apollos 18 and 19 may be on the block). I, personally, am excited that travel to the Moon has become routine. We are very much at a similar juncture as when Schirra flew his textbook Sigma 7 flight, and he didn't even make the front page. You know what? I am okay with taking the spectacle out of things. Let's get down to the real business: exploration and utilization of space. It's not about the missiles anymore, but humanity.

The kind of humanity down-to-Earth heroes like Conrad, Bean, and Gordon represent. Hear, hear, folks.


The astronauts enter their quarantine trailer, one of them miming a pistol shot at the crew




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 24, 1969] The Wind That Shakes The Snottygobbles O: New Worlds December 1969

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Tune in at 12:45 pm Pacific for LIVE splashdown coverage of Apollo 12!

Photo portrait of Fiona Moore. She is a white woman with long curly dark blonde hair. She has glasses and is wearing a light blue blouse under a sleeveless green velvet vest.
by Fiona Moore

Once again, greetings from London. The big news this month is that Britain is now a space power! Yes, thanks to the launch of the Skynet 1-A satellite, we now have our very own presence in orbit. Can regular rocket launches from Woomera be far behind?

BW photograph of Skynet 1A satellite. It is cylindrical with solar panels making out all of its visible shape.
Skynet 1-A is GO!

In news that’s closer to home, Royal Holloway College has acquired a colour television for the student lounge, and I’ve been taking advantage of my position as Staff Advisor to the Film Club to make use of it. The students’ new favourite programme is a delightfully surreal children’s stop-motion SF tale called The Clangers, featuring aliens that look like pink mice and live on an asteroid. I much prefer it to Monty Python, myself. One of my more enterprising students has worked out a knitting pattern to make her own; I’m sure an official one will be not long in coming. I shall keep an eye on the Radio Times.

Photo from the show. Standing on a desert grey ground, pink mice-shaped aliens with red and gold vests are looking up and raising their arms. There are a few stars visible in the sly. The aliens seems to be made out of fabric.The Clangers, I love them all

On to this month’s, sadly rather thin, issue of New Worlds. Sadly, Britain’s new space-faring ways are not reflected in the magazine’s content. I tend to like New Worlds best when it’s being a SF magazine with a literary sensibility, but this month it is thinking of itself as a literary magazine with a few weird or surreal touches, so I found this issue disappointing. I even found myself missing the Jerry Cornelius segment!

Cover of New Worlds for December 1969. There is the shape of a person with unkempt hair in black on yellow. The cover reads: New Worlds Number 196 3s 6d Special new writers issue Plus: Ballard on Hitler Sladek on God Harrison on Pot Moorcock on Neophiliacs Platt on the Underground & more!Cover of New Worlds for December 1969

Although it is advertised as a “new writers’ issue”, only two new writers are actually included. Once again, book reviews take up almost a third of the publication. There is no art this issue, only photographs, and by only two photographers, which makes me wonder if they’re saving money by not commissioning drawings.

Their 1970 preview advert suggests they should be back in more SF territory with the next issue, which purports to “look ahead to 1980”, and I hope that’s not wrong.

Lead-in

A short one this issue, mostly highlighting the two new writers, C.R. Clive and Michael Biggs, and encouraging people to buy the abovementioned 1970 first issue, promising us Brian W. Aldiss, Pam Zoline and Thomas M. Disch as well as the usual suspects. We all know how well that went last time, so I’m not holding my breath.

Rise and Fall by Marek Obtulowicz

BW photograph of a man with closed eyes. He seems to be sleeping.Photo by Gabi Nasemann

A man named Lykke goes on a few dates with his neighbour, Janet. They have sex and a lot of rather pretentious conversations about autumn leaves. It’s all really rather banal. I struggled to see the point of it all. Two stars.

Hemingway by Michael Biggs

As the title suggests, a Hemingway pastiche about a reporter going to Vietnam. It’s a skilful enough evocation of Hemingway’s style and fairly exciting, and I suppose it’s got the subtext of comparing the current ongoing, seemingly neverending, conflict with the wars Hemingway himself covered. I’m not a huge Hemingway fan but it at least held my attention. No illustrations. Three stars.

Graphics and Collages by Ian Breakwell

Illustration by Ian Breakwell A collage with patterned paper, BW photographs and a text in capital letters covering the whole piece. The text reads: Follow my lead said the old electrician have a stake in the wrecked roomOne of the better collages

As the title suggests: collages of text and pictures forming illustrated short-short stories or prose poems. A portrait of squalor, a joke about an electrician, something about sports and physical culture, a factual article about skin grafts juxtaposed with images of radios and televisions, a piece of what looks like found poetry about business. As with a lot of these things it didn’t really appeal to me, though apparently it appeals to the editors of New Worlds. Two stars.

The Last Awakening by C.R. Clive

Photo by Gabi Naseman BW photograph of a white man. He's looking down to the left of the picture.Photo by Gabi Nasemann

This is the only story this issue that could really be described as SF, a postapocalyptic narrative mostly involving a forty-four-year-old man leching over a teenage girl with the excuse that they’re the only ones left alive. If I didn’t know the author was 27 I would have put it down to wish fulfilment. The prose is pretty good, with some nicely evocative touches about the postapocalyptic landscape, but I wish it had been put in the service of something less predictable. Two stars.

The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree Part II (a Jack Trevor Story)

Photo by Roy Cornwall BW photograph of a street. There are houses and vehicles. A pedestrian is crossing the street in the background.Photo by Roy Cornwall

Not much of an improvement on part I, really, other than that there’s less improbable sex and more time devoted to making it ambiguous whether our protagonist, Marchmont, is a secret agent or just an innocent caught in the crossfire. Apparently it’s to be continued next month. I can’t say I’m terribly looking forward to it. One star.

Book Reviews

Our esteemed editor has told me that I don’t need to review the book reviews, so I won’t go into too much detail about these. However, there are a couple this issue that are worth checking out. J.G. Ballard reviews Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, treating it as a psychological portrait of a man obsessed with hygiene and pseudo-biology. Elsewhere, John T. Sladek reviews Erich von Daaniken’s Chariots of the Gods, getting more and more scathing as he gets further and further into the weeds; as someone who absolutely loathes that book and rues the impact it has had on some of our more impressionable undergraduates, I giggled all the way through it. Finally, Michael Moorcock has a go at The Neophiliacs, which is somewhat more long-winded than Sladek’s review of von Daaniken but no less scathing.

Advert for John and Yoko's Wedding Album. BW purple tinted photograph of Ono and Lennon in front of a flight of stairs. They are looking at the camera and surrounded by people in suits.Advert for John and Yoko's Wedding Album, because I can.

In closing, I shall torment the Yoko Ono anti-fan club in my audience by revealing that the last page is an advert for her and John Lennon’s Wedding Album. Sorry, people; she’s here to stay. I understand that her husband is handing back his MBE in protest at the British government’s positions on Biafra and Vietnam. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll make much difference.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 24, 1969] How sweet it isn't (November 1969 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Rats!

A study just completed by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has concluded that cyclamates may cause bladder tumors in rats.

How does this affect you?

Decades ago, it paid to be plump.  It was a sign of wealth and health.  It was attractive!  These days, we're in the Grape Nuts generation, and it's now all about fitness and being slender.  How to reconcile the popularity of fizzy sweet sodapop and the desire to cut sugar from our diets (despite the Sugar Council telling us it's good for us)?

Early this decade, a slew of soft drinks came out, sweetened not with sugar, but with a blend of artificial sweeteners—saccharin and cyclamates.  Diet Rite and Tab may not have tasted just like Coke and Pepsi, but they did the job and preserved the waistline.

But now, thanks to the HEW report, soft drink companies are all pulling their cyclamate sodas off the market as of February 1, 1970.  Grab your vintage colas while you can, because they won't exist come next spring!

What does the future hold for diet sodas?  Well, for now, saccharin is still legal, though by itself, it's a bit bitter (remember the "sach" tablets Winston Smith put in his coffee in 1984)?  There is talk of putting sugar back into diet sodas…just less of it.

And, since this is a science fiction 'zine, we can always speculate that new and better sweeteners will be developed.  Maybe even on purpose this time—did you know that both saccharin and cyclamates were discovered by accident?  Constantin Fahlberg was researching coal tar derivatives and forgot to wash his hands before going for lunch, when he discovered saccharine was discovered in 1879.  And grad student Michael Sveda was working on anti-fever drugs in 1937; some got on a cigarette, and when he took a drag, it tasted sweet.

Cue the commercials:

Bob: My cigarette just isn't doing it for me anymore.
Larry: Try mine!  It's new.
Bob: Hey! Not bad…sweet!
Larry: You better believe it.


by Jack Gaughan

Of course, with a lede like the one I just wrote, you can guess that the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction is less than palatable.

The Mouse, by Howard Fast

Three-inch aliens descend to Earth in a teeny saucer and smarten up a little mouse to be their telepathic eyes and ears to scout out the world.  When the rodent's work is done, he is heartbroken to find that the aliens must leave, abandoning him to a life of loneliness, the sole example of his kind.  Despondent, he kills himself.

Not only is the story an unecessary downer (the mouse was exposed to the worst humanity had to offer, but also the best—couldn't he have found human friends to love?) but it's written clunkily, as though Howard dashed it off quickly, and didn't bother to correct it.  It's the kind of work I do if I neglect to read my work aloud before sending it in to a publisher.

Two stars.

A Feminine Jurisdiction, by Sterling E. Lanier

The latest Brigadier Ffellowes shaggy dog tale has him stranded just after the Nazi invasion of Crete (how timely!) on an Aegean island lost to time, housing a trio of mythical sisters.  One of them has, shall we say, a stony-eyed gaze.  Of course, we know the Brigadier will escape (how else could he live to tell the tale?) but the fun is in the how.

I could have done without the casual sexism.  World-traveler Ffelowes surely could not have forged his opinion on matriarchies solely on this one stacked-deck example.  Beyond that, the well Lanier plumbed for material is a little mined out.  Still, it's a competent and entertaining yarn.

Three stars.

Penny Dreadful, by Ron Goulart

A ghost writer cum secret agent (or is it the other way around?) is on one of the planets of the Barnum system, a frequent Goulart setting, mostly known from his Ben Jolson stories.  All he wants to do is collect his fee from deadbeats.  In the process, he ends up cleaning up local politics.

Goulart, at his best, does light, spy/detective stuff really well.  This is not his best.  Indeed, it's among his worst—incomprehensible and somehow incomplete.

Two stars.

The CRIB Circuit, by Miriam Allen deFord

A young computer operator, who died of cancer in 1970, is revived after five centuries of cold sleep.  But the Brave New World she wakes up into is not interested in welcoming her as a citizen, but only as a temporary subject of study before she is to be put down again.  Must keep the population constant, you see!  Can Alexandra come up with a way to extend her second life?

I had thought her solution would be a variation on the Scheherazade shtick from 1001 Arabian Nights, but it's actually a bit cleverer.  There's also a nice sting in the tail of the piece.  I should have seen it coming; that I didn't is a credit to DeFord's writing.

Four stars, and my favorite piece of the ish.

Come Up and See Me Some Time, by Gilbert Thomas

A pre-teen genius builds a psychic space ship and prepares to head off into another dimension, presumably to be reunited with his murdered mother.  But not before giving an ostentatious and horrific reply to his father, who we learn is responsible for his wife's death.

Told from the point of view of the father, the tale is just silly.  It's more of a mood piece than anything, and frankly, I didn't care enough about the schmuck to get into his head.

One star.

After the Bomb Cliches, by Bruce McAllister

Martin Potsubay is convinced The End Is Nigh.  So he builds a bomb shelter, and when the air raid sirens begin to blow, ensconces himself inside.  But the trumpets keep blowing, and in the end, there's no way to avoid Armageddon…or the heavenly recruitment officers!

This is definitely my favorite McAllister piece to date, bordering right between three and four stars.  On reflection, I think I'll finally give him the win.

Four it is (but I still like the deFord better!)

The Sin of the Scientist, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor takes Oppenheimer's "physicists have known sin" line and runs with it, defining "sin" in a scientific sense, and discussing which scientists have committed it.  His answer is an interesting one.

Three stars.

Diaspora, by Robin Scott

A catastrophe has rendered the Earth uninhabitable, and just one small colony of 400 humans is left.  Establishing themselves on a kind world, farm yields explode and the settlement prospers.  Yet, their puritannical leader refuses to loosen the reins of privation.  One rebellious type chafes under the tyrant, and so he plots an escape, establishing himself as an independent concern.  This proves instrumental to the colony's success…and as it turns out, all according to plan.

This story is decently written, but the overly deterministic nature of the premise is a turn-off.  The idea that the colony was founded with the expectation that it would need a malcontent to ensure its success, and that a ten-year agenda could be stuck to so as to carry out the plan, beggars belief.  It's the kind of thing I expect from Analog.

Three stars.

After the Myths Went Home, by Robert Silverberg

Future-dwellers get bored of reconstituting historical personages, so they turn to reviving mythical people.  After having their fill of hanging out with the whole panoply of (Western) legends, from Adam to Hercules to JFK, they banish them, too.  But the result is there's never a hero around when you need one…

Silverbob phoned this one in.  It has the veneer of literariness, but it just coats a hollow interior.

Two stars.

Ptui!

Like soda without sweetener, the latest F&SF was a bland mouthful.  Still, the two good pieces are enough to keep me going, albeit with ever fading enthusiasm.

But perhaps next year, the editors will find the right formula to spice up their wares…


by Gahan Wilson




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Science / Space Race

[October 22, 1969] Three for Three! (the flights of Soyuz 6, 7, and 8)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

(Un?)Lucky Seven

In 1959, NASA unveiled the identities of the first seven astronauts—the folks who would fly the Mercury capsule into space.  Over the course of two years, from 1961-1963, six of them rode a pillar of flame beyond the Earth's atmosphere, one at a time.

This month, the Soviets orbited seven cosmonauts at once.

Like Sputnik, this momentous occasion was not exactly a surprise.  Indeed, since late August, the USSR had put out releases to the effect that cosmonauts would be taking to the skies in record numbers.  The mission started innocuously enough with the launch of Soyuz 6 on October 11 carrying cosmonauts Shonin and Kubasov on their first flight.  Significantly, their flight plan included "experiments…on the methods of welding of metals in a high vacuum and in the state of weightlessness."  Such techniques have application in the development of orbital space stations, the next inevitable phase in space development.


Comparison of the Soyuz booster compared to the ones that launched the Voskhod and Vostok capsules

The next day, Soyuz 7 blasted off with cosmonauts Filipchenko, Volkov, and Gorbatko—like the Soyuz 6 crew, all rookies.  Given the prior Soviet announcements, the successful previous flight and docking of Soyuz 4 and 5, and the maneuvers made by Soyuz 6 on its first day in orbit, the launch of Soyuz 7 was no surprise.  In fact, cosmonauts in both crews had been the back-ups for the cosmonauts on Soyuz 4/5.  It seemed a second docking/impromptu space station mission was in the works.  But was that the plan?

Apparently not, for the next day, yet another Soyuz was launched, this time carrying veterans Shatalov and Yeliseyev, who had actually flown on the last Soyuz mission.  By the 15th, all three spacecraft were in sight of each other.  The stage was set.

And then…

The next day, Soyuz 6 crew did do their welding experiments and then landed.  On the 17th, Soyuz 7 returned to Earth.  Soyuz 8 followed on the 18th.  Though all of the spacecraft jockeyed around each other while in each other's vicinity, no docking was made or, per the Soviets, even attempted!

Can we buy that there was no docking plan at all?  We know from Soyuz 4/5 that adding a docking adapter to the basic Soyuz design means extra weight for the spacecraft.  Soyuz 6, with its "Vulkan" experiment package in the forward science module (that spherical bit ahead of the command module, where the crew sits during take-off and reentry) probably couldn't carry anything more.  But Soyuz 7 and 8 could have, and given their particular crews, it sure seemed like a docking was in the offing. 


An ad hoc space station based on an illustration released by the Soviets—was this what was supposed to have happened?

The actual mission of the three spacecraft is anyone's guess at this point.  Certainly, the coordination of three crews in orbit is a big deal in and of itself, so maybe that was the point.  The knowledge gained from the flight of the three Soyuz will be valuable both in the future construction of a space station and also when/if the Soviets decide to try for their own lunar mission (though, if they need three craft to go to the Moon, that suggests their rockets aren't as big as our Saturn V, necessitating more launches0.

But given that the Soviets love their space spectaculars, and we just had the biggest one of all this summer, with a repeat set for next month, I'd bet rubles to borscht that the Russkies had planned something more dramatic than playing orbital footsie.

I guess we'll see come Soyuz 9/10/11!




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Science / Space Race

[September 28, 1969] Apollo’s New Muses (Women Behind the Scenes in the Apollo Programme)

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Seven years ago, the Journey published an article on the Women Pioneers of Space Science.  At long last, Kaye offers a much-needed update, this time focusing on the women who helped make Apollo 11's trip to the Moon possible…


by Kaye Dee

Classical literature tells us that the god Apollo was associated with the Nine Muses, the goddesses who inspired the arts, literature and science.

Our modern Apollo program also has its Muses – trailblazing women working behind the scenes in critical areas of the programme. They deserve to be better known, not just for their own impressive careers to date, but also as role models, inspiring girls and young women who might be interested in science, technology, engineering, mathematics or medicine, but are diverted away from them by the prevailing view that careers in these areas are for men, not women.

The famous ‘Dance of Apollo and the Muses’ by the Italian architect and painter, Baldassare Tommaso Peruzzi

As someone who has had to contend with these stereotypes myself, trying to establish a career in the space sector in Australia, I thought it might be interesting this month to delve into the stories of four of the women working behind the scenes in the Apollo programme: modern-day daughters of Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, Mathematics and the “exact sciences”.

The “Return to Earth” Specialist: Frances “Poppy” Northcutt

Every aspect of a lunar voyage involves moving objects – the Apollo spacecraft, the Earth and the Moon. Calculating the trajectories required for an Apollo mission to meet and go into orbit around the Moon at a particular date and time, is a mind-bending feat. But getting astronauts safely home from the Moon is even more important!

NASA’s specialist in the incredibly complex and precise calculations required to determine the optimal trajectories for the return to Earth from the Moon, minimising fuel and flight time, is Miss Frances Northcutt, who goes by the nickname “Poppy”. She is, perhaps, the only one of these ladies that you might have heard of (at least those of you in the United States), as she was such a “curiosity” during the press and television coverage of the Apollo-8 mission that she has been interviewed many times (and more on this below).

Born in 1943, Miss Northcutt earned a mathematics degree from the University of Texas, then commenced working at TRW in 1965 as a “computress”! Yes, that was her actual job title, although in Australia we’d have just called her a "computer" (a term applied here and in Britain to both men and women doing this kind of intensive calculating work). Miss Northcutt was placed at NASA’s Langley Research Centre, calculating spacecraft trajectories for the Gemini missions. She proved to be so talented in this area that within just six months TRW promoted her to engineering work with its Return to Earth task force, helping to design the computer programmes and flight trajectories to return an Apollo spacecraft from lunar orbit to Earth.

A simplified version of the Apollo lunar free return flight trajectories

Poppy Northcutt became the first woman to work in this type of role and was soon undertaking the intricate calculations involved in enabling the Apollo astronauts to travel around the Moon and come safely home. The Moon’s lower gravity changes parameters such as fuel usage, as well as the timing of manoeuvres, so the calculations are particularly tricky. Poppy identified mistakes in NASA’s original trajectory plan, performing calculations that reduced the amount of fuel used to swing around the Moon.

When NASA decided that Apollo-8 would become a lunar orbiting mission, the task force team, including Miss Northcutt, moved to Mission Control to instruct the flight controllers on the trajectory calculations and be available to make real-time calculations and course corrections in the event of unexpected incidents during the flight. Assigned to Mission Control's Mission Planning and Analysis room, Miss Northcutt and her team have been an integral part of Apollo-8, 10 and 11 and are now preparing for Apollo-12. She is the only female engineer in the teams that work in the backrooms of Mission Control in Houston, providing support to the flight controllers.

Poppy Northcutt working in the Mission Control support room during Apollo-8

Working Like a Man (but not being paid like one!)

“Computresses” in Miss Northcutt’s original position are classed as “hourly workers”, with their wages capped at working 54 hours per week (in other words, five nine-hour days). Their male counterparts were not only paid more (as we all know, female workers are generally paid between about half and two-thirds of the wages for a man doing the same job), they were also on salaries and paid overtime.

As an ambitious young woman, Miss Northcutt quickly realised that to earn the respect of her male colleagues and be considered a peer, she would have to work the same long hours they did – even if this meant that she was essentially working 10 or more hours a week for no pay!

A NASA promotional photo of Miss Northcutt at work in March this year. She presents herself as a diligent professional

Her talent and diligence paid off with her promotion to engineer, but, ironically, even though she was still being paid less than her male colleagues, Miss Northcutt tells the story that there was no normal mechanism to approve the pay rise she received with this jump from Computress! Her manager had to keep scheduling the highest possible raise as frequently as he could to bring her up to the full female rate of her new salary. 

During Apollo missions, when shifts last around 12 to 13 hours a day in Mission Control, Miss Northcutt usually commences her duty shifts for each mission around the time that the Apollo spacecraft, coasting towards the Moon, prepares to enter the lunar sphere of gravitational influence. During lunar orbit insertion she stands by to assist with new calculations, in the event of an emergency abort, and she reports for duty at Mission Control every day of the lunar phase of the mission and until the astronauts have returned safely to the Earth's sphere of influence. No one can say Poppy Northcutt isn’t pulling her weight, just like a man!

Sexism, Celebrity and Activism

As the only female engineer in Mission Control during the Apollo-8 mission, Miss Northcutt was such a “curiosity” that she received a lot of attention from journalists. While much of this coverage was not seen in Australia, from what I have heard from friends in America, I understand that many of the questions that she received were quite sexist – and even silly.

Miss Northcutt is a very pretty woman and dresses fashionably, so apparently ABC reporter Jules Bergman thought it was more important to ask about her potential to distract her male colleagues from the mission, than to ask about her crucial role: “How much attention do men in Mission Control pay to a pretty girl wearing miniskirts?” Would they have asked a male flight controller if the suit he was wearing turned the heads of the typing pool?! I gather that she gave him a polite brush off response.

A friend in the US took this photo from her television screen, giving me a glimpse of Mr. Bergman's interview with Miss Northcutt

It is bad enough when reporters focus on her appearance and ask her such inane questions, while she operates at the level of her male colleagues, for far less monetary reward. But Miss Northcutt has also reported an instance in which she discovered that the other flight engineers were covertly watching her on a video feed, from a camera trained on her while she was conducting equipment flight tests.

As a result of her personal experiences with sexism, Miss Northcutt has become a strong advocate for women’s rights, and has joined the feminist National Organisation for Women. Even in her early days at TRW, she worked to improve the company’s affirmative action and pregnancy leave policies. “As the first and only woman in Mission Control, the attention I have received has increased my awareness of how limited women’s opportunities are”, she has said. “I’m aware of the issues that are emerging. Working in this environment I can see the discrimination against women.”

TRW is happy to use Miss Northcutt's minor celebrity to promote itself, but not happy enough to pay her the same salary as her male colleagues!

However, while she is not pleased that much of the attention she has received has been focussed on her appearance, or treating her as a rare exception to the male-dominated world of spaceflight, Miss Northcutt has said that she recognises that being a woman visibly occupying a critical position in the space programme does send a very positive message to women and girls: a career in science and technology is possible if you want it – and are prepared to work for it!

Miss Northcutt has received letters and fan mail from around the world (including several marriage proposals, it seems!) She has said that she is motivated to continue to advocate for women’s rights in the workplace by the letters she has received from young women, who have said how much she has inspired them. 

Whoever Heard of a “Software Engineer”? Margaret Hamilton

The Apollo missions not only need precise trajectories for their lunar voyages – they also need software for their onboard flight computers, which control so many aspects of the flight. If you’re not familiar with this term, “software” describes the mathematical programmes that tell a computer how to carry out its tasks, and a “software engineer” applies the engineering design process to develop software for those different tasks.

The Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming is Mrs. Margaret Hamilton Lickly, who prefers to be known professionally as Margaret Hamilton.I've heard that women in the United States who prefer not to be categorised by their marital status, are now starting to use the designation "Ms.". I don't know if Margaret Hamilton is using this new honorific, but it seems to me appropriate to apply it to her in this article. 

33-year-old Ms. Hamilton is another woman playing a crucial role in NASA’s lunar program. Not only is she a pioneer in software engineering, she even coined the term!


Like Miss Northcutt, Ms. Hamilton is also a mathematician, having studied at the University of Michigan and Earlham College. Shortly after graduating in 1958, she married her first husband, James Hamilton, and taught high school mathematics and French, before taking a job in the Meteorology Department at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in 1959, a few months before the birth of her daughter.

Ms. Hamilton developed software for predicting weather, and in 1961 she moved to MIT’s Lincoln Lab for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project, adapting weather prediction software into a programme used by the U.S. Air Force to search for potential enemy aircraft. At the Lab, she was the first person to get a particularly difficult programme, which no-one had been able to get to run, to actually work! While working on SAGE, Ms. Hamilton began to take an interest in software reliability, which would pay dividends during Apollo-11’s lunar landing.

A Calculated Move

When Margaret Hamilton learned about the Apollo project in 1965, she wanted to become involved in the lunar programme, and moved to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was developing the Apollo Guidance Computer. She was the first programmer hired for the Apollo work project at MIT and has led the team responsible for creating the on-board flight software for both the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules. She also serves as Director of the Software Engineering Division at the Instrumentation Laboratory.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was installed on both the Command and Service Modules. Astronauts communicated with it using a numeric display and keyboard

While working on the Apollo software, Ms. Hamilton felt that it was necessary to give software development the same legitimacy as other engineering disciplines. In 1966, she therefore coined the term “software engineering” to distinguish software development from other areas of engineering. She believes that this encourages respect for the new field, as well as respect for its practitioners.

A page from the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer

On one occasion when her young daughter was visiting the lab, the little girl pushed a simulator button that made the system crash. Ms. Hamilton realised immediately that the mistake was one that an astronaut could make. While Ms. Hamilton has said that she works in a relationship of "mutual respect" with her colleagues, when she recommended adjusting the software to address the issue, she was told: “Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.” Yet during Apollo-8, astronaut Jim Lovell made the exact same error that her young daughter had!

While Ms. Hamilton’s team was able to rapidly correct the problem, for future Apollo missions protection was built into the software to prevent a recurrence. With her interest in software reliability, Margaret Hamilton insisted that the Apollo system should be error-proof. To achieve this goal, she developed a programme referred to as Priority Displays, that recognises error messages and forces the computer to prioritise the most important tasks, also alerting the astronauts to the situation.

In Part 2 of my series of Apollo-11 articles, we saw how, during the descent to the Moon’s surface, the Lunar Module’s computer began flashing error messages, which could have resulted in Mission Control aborting the landing. However, the Priority Displays programme gave Guidance Officer Bales and his support team confidence that the computer would perform as it should despite the data input overloads that it was experiencing, and that the landing could proceed.

Ms. Hamilton with this year's printout of the entire Apollo Guidance Computer software

Ms. Hamilton and her 100-strong team continue to work on developing and refining the Apollo flight software, and I’m sure that they will contribute to whatever future spaceflight projects NASA develops, stemming from Vice-president Agnew’s recently-delivered Space Task Group report to President Nixon.

“I’ve Got Rocket Fuel in my Blood”: JoAnn Morgan

Mission safety and reliability are, of course, critical, but Apollo-11 could not even have made the historic lunar landing if the mission had been unable to launch in the first place! When Apollo-11 lifted off, there was one lone woman in the launch firing team at Kennedy Space Centre’s (KSC) Launch Control Centre, who helped to ensure that would happen – Instrumentation Controller JoAnn Morgan.

JoAnn Morgan watching the lift-off of Apollo-11 from her station in Launch Control

Mrs. Morgan, who was born in December 1940, has described herself as a “precocious little kid” who loved mathematics, science and music, and wanted to become a piano teacher. However, after her family moved to Florida from Alabama, she was inspired by the launch of the first American satellite, Explorer-1, in January 1958, and its significant discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. It was the “opportunity for new knowledge” that space exploration represented that filled the teenager with a desire to be part of the new space programme.

Young JoAnn with one of her favourite books. As a child she loved to read and play with her chemistry set

Soon after, JoAnn saw an advertisement for two (US) Summer student internship positions, as Engineer’s Aides with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Cape Canaveral. As we know, job openings are often advertised separately for males and females, but this ad only referred to “students” (not “boys”), so she took the chance, decided to apply, and was successful thanks to her strong marks in science and mathematics.

So, at just 17, JoAnn Hardin, as she was then, began working as a University of Florida trainee for the Army at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “I graduated from high school on the weekend and went to work for the Army on Monday. I worked on my first launch on Friday night” is how Mrs. Morgan describes the beginning of her NASA career. The Army programme she was working with became part of NASA when it was established in October 1958.

Supportive Male Mentors

While undertaking her degree in mathematics at Jacksonville State University, Mrs. Morgan continued her Summer internships with the NASA team launching rockets at Cape Canaveral. The young student’s potential did not go unnoticed, and she acknowledges that she received significant support in furthering her career from several senior NASA personnel, including Dr. Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket, Dr. Kurt Debus, the first director of Kennedy Space Centre and Mr. Rocco Petrone, Director of Launch Operations at KSC.

Mentors Kurt Debus, left, and Rocco Petrone, right, during the Apollo 7 flight readiness test in the blockhouse at Complex 34

Dr. Debus provided Mrs. Morgan with a pathway to becoming an engineer, and she gained certification as a Measurement and Instrumentation Engineer and a Data Systems Engineer, which enabled her to be employed as a Junior Engineer on the launch team. “It was just meant to be for me to be in the launching business,” she says. “I’ve got rocket fuel in my blood.”

As a young woman joining an all-male group, Mrs. Morgan was fortunate that (unbeknownst to her at the time) her immediate supervisor, Mr. Jim White, insisted that the men on the launch team address her professionally, not be “familiar”, and reportedly told them that “You don’t ask an engineer to make the coffee”! (Which, of course, is often a task that falls to the women in any office).

Professional Disrespect

Despite Mr. White’s efforts to create an environment of respect for his first female engineer, Mrs. Morgan has still described experiencing sexism and harassment, treatment similar to the experiences of Miss Northcutt. With no female restrooms in the launch blockhouses at Cape Canaveral, when she needs to use the restroom, she has to ask a security guard to clear out the men’s room so that she can enter. She has reported receiving obscene phone calls at her station (which disappointingly could only have come from colleagues).

However, like Miss Northcutt, while she has said that she sometimes feels a sense of loneliness as the only woman in the team, Mrs. Morgan “wants to do the best job she can” and works the same long hours as her male colleagues. In 1967, as the Apollo programme was ramping up, her dedication to her work had tragic consequences. The stress and long hours of her job contributed to her miscarrying and losing her first child.

The crowded interior of the blockhouse at Launch Complex 34, where Mrs. Morgan has often worked

Perhaps the most shocking example of professional disrespect and harassment (which could be considered an assault) that Mrs. Morgan has experienced was during a test being conducted at the blockhouse for Pad 34, where the first Apollo missions were set to be launched. When preparing to acquire some test results, she was actually struck on the back by a test supervisor, who aggressively told her that “We don’t have women in here!” She had to appeal to her own supervisor, Mr. Karl Sendler (who developed the launch processing systems for the Apollo programme) to confirm that she could remain. He told her to disregard the test supervisor and continue with her work (though it’s not clear if any action was taken against the offending supervisor).

On Console for Apollo-11

The unpleasant incident with the test supervisor prompted many of Mrs. Morgan’s colleagues and senior managers to come forward in expressing acceptance and respect for her as part of the team. Nevertheless, even though she has worked launches for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, received an achievement award for her work during the activation of Apollo Launch Complex 39, and been promoted to a senior engineer, Mrs. Morgan has frequently found herself rostered for the inconvenient evening shifts. Since her husband is a school teacher and band-leader, this hasn’t always allowed them a lot of time to be together.

Until Apollo-11, Mrs. Morgan was also not selected to be part of the firing room personnel for a launch, usually being stationed at a telemetry facility, a display room or a tracking site for launch. She found this very disappointing, as she always wanted to feel the vibrations from a launch that her colleagues described.

But her desire to experience the incredible shockwave vibrations of a Saturn-V lift-off was finally achieved with the launch of Apollo-11. Recognising that Mrs. Morgan is his best communicator, Mr. Sendler quietly obtained permission from Dr. Debus for her to be the Instrumentation Controller on the console in the firing room for Apollo 11! (This achievement also had the bonus of working day shifts, so that she has been able to spend more time with her husband).

Can you spot the lone woman in a sea of men? In this picture of the Launch Control firing room during Apollo-11, Mrs. Morgan is in the third row, just to the left of centre.

A successful launch is critical to each mission and Mrs. Morgan believes that her prime role in the launch of the historic mission will help to further her career within NASA. Although she has not received the same level of press and television attention as Miss Northcutt, she does hope that even the photos of her in Launch Control – a lone woman in a sea of men – will help to inspire young women to aspire to careers in the space programme, so that, at some time in the future, photos like the ones she is in now “won’t exist anymore.”

Making Packed Lunches for Astronauts: Rita Rapp

You could say that the astronauts are the most fragile component of each Apollo mission. Nutrition is important in keeping crews healthy and functioning during a flight, so space food has to be as appetising as possible, within the constraints of spaceflight and the weightless environment – especially as missions to the Moon, and future space stations and lunar bases will keep astronauts in space for longer and longer periods. 

Physiologist Miss Rita Rapp, head of the Apollo Food Systems team, has been looking after the astronauts' bodies – and stomachs – since she joined NASA in 1960. For the Apollo programme, she has developed the space food and food stowage system designed to keep the astronauts supplied with the right mix of calories, vitamins, and nutrients to enable them to function well in space. One of her goals has been to ensure that crews have something worth eating during their spaceflights.

Rita Rapp with some of her space food innovations that have greatly improved the space food menu for Apollo astronauts

Born in 1928, Miss Rapp studied science at the University of Dayton and then took a Master’s in anatomy at the St. Louis University Graduate School of Medicine. She was one of the first women to enrol in this school. Graduating in 1953, she took a position in the Aeromedical laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where she began assessing the effects of high g-forces on the human body, especially the blood and renal systems, using centrifuge systems.

In 1960 Miss Rapp joined NASA’s Space Task Group preparing for the Mercury manned spaceflight programme, later transferring to the Manned Spacecraft Centre in Houston. For the Mercury program, she continued her work on centrifugal effects on the human body. She also designed the first elastic exercisers for Mercury and Gemini missions, devised biological experiments for the astronauts to conduct in-flight, and developed the Gemini medical kit.

The first Gemini biological experiment, designed by Miss Rapp

From Aeromedicine to Space Food

In 1966, as the Apollo programme was ramping up, Miss Rapp joined the Apollo Food Systems team. Although she has continued to work on space health and hygiene projects, in her new role her primary focus became looking at systems for storing food onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Working with dieticians, and commercial companies, she has investigated the ways space food could be packaged and prepared, and become the main interface between NASA’s Food Lab and the astronauts.

Although she tries to use as much commercially available food as possible, Miss Rapp and her team are also continually experimenting with new recipes in the food lab, gradually replacing the earlier “tubes and cubes” style of space food used in Mercury and Gemini with meals that are closer to an everyday eating experience.

She has developed improved means of food preservation, such as dehydration, thermostabilisation, irradiation and moisture control, which allows for a wider range of foods to be suitable for spaceflight, and I have no doubt these useful technologies will find their way into commercial food preparation and onto our supermarket shelves in the not-too-distant future. 


Working with the Whirlpool Corporation, Miss Rapp has developed new forms of food packaging for Apollo, such as the spoon bowls, “wet packs” and cans for thermostabilised food. These containers enable astronauts to eat with more conventional utensils, instead of sucking food out of a tube or plastic bag. Creating a more natural, homelike eating experience is good for the astronauts’ morale and psychological health during missions. You can discover more about Miss Rapp's space food developments in my articles on the various Apollo missions. 

Miss Rapp takes great pride in providing the Apollo crews with the flavours and comforts of home. “I like to feed them what they like, because I want them healthy and happy,” she says. She takes note of their individual food preferences, often devises new recipes and prepares the individual meals of each Apollo astronaut separately. Her home-made sugar cookies, that she bakes herself, are a special favourite of Apollo crews, and additional supplies are included as snacks in the onboard food pantries of the Command and Lunar Modules. She also likes to provide the crews with special food “surprises”, such as the turkey dinner enjoyed by the Apollo-8 crew in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve last year.


Just the Beginning

The women of Apollo who I’ve discussed in this article are trailblazers for women’s participation in mathematics, engineering, and other technical aspects of spaceflight.  While they are not the only women in professional roles in the space sector, female participation in space careers, and in science, engineering, and technology more generally, is still very low.

I hope that by highlighting the exciting Apollo-related careers of the four women above, it will plant a seed in the minds of young girls reading the Journey that they, too, can aspire to careers in scientific and technological fields that are generally thought of only as careers for men. I also hope that growing levels of female participation in the workforce, together with feminist activism, will eventually consign the sexism, discrimination and harassment that women working in all careers experience at present, to the history books—though I won’t hold my breath on it happening any time soon.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 31, 1969] Over (and under) the Moon (September 1969 Analog)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Being #2, they try…harder?

Last October, just after Apollo 7 went up, it looked as if the Soviets still had a chance at beating us to the Moon.  Their Zond 5, really a noseless Soyuz, had been sent around the Moon two months ahead of our Apollo 8 circumlunar flight.  Just a month later, the similar Zond 6 took off on November 16 and zoomed around the Moon before not just landing, but making a pinpoint landing in the Kazakh S.S.R. (near its launch site) with the aid of little wings.  Apparently, the prior Zond 5's splashing down in the Indian Ocean was not according to plan.

Shortly after the flight, the Soviets dropped the bombshell that Zond 6 could have been manned—and the next one might well be.

Well, as we all know, the Communists didn't beat us around the Moon.  Moreover, they didn't beat us to the Moon, either.  Remember all that talk about Luna 15 during the flight of Apollo 11?  That was the probe launched just before Columbia and Eagle, rumored to be a sample-return mission.  Well, it crashed into the aptly named Sea of Crises about 500 miles northeast of Eagle's landing site on July 21.  Had its mission been successful, the Soviets might have had bragging rights about getting the first batch of Moon rocks.

But, as the Ruskies found out after who knows how many unsuccessful Luna flights, only succeeding in 1966 with Luna 9, complicated maneuvers rarely work on the first time out.

That said, even with the clear American victory in the Moon race, the Soviets appear to still be going strong.  Earlier this month, Zond 7 sailed around the Earth's companion, landing on August 14.  Still no people onboard, but perhaps they worked out the communications troubles that reportedly plagued the last two Zond missions.

Whether these Zond flights presage an upcoming attempt with people onboard remains to be seen.  According to former NASA chief Jim Webb, the Soviets are also building a super rocket, which they will use to put cosmonauts on the Moon.  Put two and two together, and perhaps the early 70s will see the USSR catch up to and surpass the US.

Unless we get to Mars first…

Being #1, they've stopped trying

Analog has, for decades now, kept the title of the most-read science fiction magazine on the market.  On the other hand, editor John Campbell has been sitting on his laurels for a long time, producing an unexciting periodical for the past several years.  The latest issue of Analog only adds more fuel to the argument that perhaps it is time for the old don to step down and let someone vigorous take his place—at least to bring the magazine into the 1960s!


by Kelly Freas

Your Haploid Heart, by James Tiptree, Jr.


by Kelly Freas

A two-man team is sent from Earth to the planet of Esthaa.  Their mission: to determine of the humanoid inhabitants are, well, human.  The results may put to bed the two competing theories that explain the ubiquity of the human form in the galaxy: common evolution and random scattering, or independent, convergent evolution.

The Esthaans are a robust, beautiful people, but there is something somehow phony about them.  Meanwhile, they seem to be on the verge of completing a genocide against the primitive Flenns…who also appear to be a type of human.

What is the connection between the two races?  And why have the civilized Esthaans developed such an antipathy for the pathetic Flenns?  And is an earlier Terran expedition somehow the cause of all this?

There's some interesting biology wrapped up in this story (as suggested by the title), and since biology is not my specialty, I can't even begin to speculate how plausible it is.  But it's an interesting story, well-written, and easily the best I've read from newcomer Tiptree.

Four stars.

Starman, by W. Macfarlane


by Leo Summers

The assistant fifth mate on an interstellar tramp freighter decides to jump ship on a backwater world.  The natives have reverted to savagery after once having broadcast power and space travel.

Said starman soon learns that Stone Age living isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Luckily, there are a few relics of the old days left at his disposal.

This is a fun, if inconsequential, story.  The writing is breezy, fun, and tongue-in-cheek, though the casual slurs are somewhat offputting.  I'm also getting very tired of humans, humans everywhere instead of true E-Ts.

Three stars.

The Big Boosters of the U.S.S.R., by G. Harry Stine

Speaking of the Soviet super-booster—amateur rocketeer Stine conjectures as to the configuration and capability of the USSR's rocket stable.  Of course, given how secretive the Russians are, there's a lot of guesswork involved.

I appreciated it, but I have to wonder how accurate he is.  In particular, I'm not sure why he believes that Soyuz 1 was launched on a different rocket from the later Soyuz missions.  I've seen nothing to that effect.  Maybe he's talking about whatever is shooting up Zonds around the Moon.  Those are, after all, just stripped down Soyuzes.

Anyway, four stars.  We'll see how right he is in a decade or so…

Damper, by E. G. Von Wald


by Peter Skirka

A tyro hotshot joins the Weather Control Bureau and is dispatched to a small, Arabian country.  When a Soviet incursion threatens the peace, he shifts the focus of his rain-making efforts from irrigation to interdiction.

Aside from the casual and constant male chauvinism, I have a hard time buying weather control as an SFnal theme, particularly so thinly sketched out as it is in this story.  Orbital lasers (don't those count as space-based weapons?) pumped a lot of heat into the atmosphere to evaporate ocean water and create onshore winds—that heat doesn't go away.  What happens when the Earth warms up by several degrees thanks to all that extra heat?  Beyond that, the technique wouldn't work anyway: it takes more than wet air to make rain; you need some kind of condensate material.  That's why planes seed clouds with silver iodide so the water has something to coalesce around to make droplets.

Two stars.

Stimulus-Response, by Herbert Jacob Bernstein


by Kelly Freas

A trio of scientists are using electrodes and encephalograms to record brain patterns.  The goal is to train a dog to use specific thoughts to trigger its food dish.  In the process, the researchers accidentally teach the beagle how to telekinese.

Not only is this story a turgid bit of pseudo-engineering, but then it abandons science entirely to enter the region of Campbell's beloved psi.  Look, I can sort of enjoy psionics if I treat them like a kind of magic, but when they're mixed in with engineering to get a patina of respectability—and the story is deadly dull to boot—well, there's only one score for it.

One star.

In His Image, by Robert Chilson


by Leo Summers

A biologist synthesizes the first androids—they are human in all respects, save for their satyr-form lower halves.  Bred to be performers, they have been conscious just six months, but have the minds of college professors and the bodies of nubile goddesses.  When the Actors' Guild sues for an injunction against their use in the entertainment business citing unfair competition, a friendly reporter purchases one of them despite the fact that they are sentient and, for all intents and purposes, human. The goal is to force the courts to declare the androids fully human and thus exempt from measures against discrimination.

The question of whether or not androids are people has frequently been explored in science fiction, from the sublime Synth to the less than perfectly successful Trek episode Requiem for Methuselah.  Chilson's tale is… well, it's dull and kind of stupid.  The androids have no personality save for interchangeable sex kitten, the writing is uninspired, and the universe implausible.  It's not even clear what point Chilson is trying to make, so muddied are all the story's elements.  In the end, the plot of the story, such as it is, seems only to exist so we can have a trio of jiggly goat girls mincing around.

One star.

The Visitors, by Jack Wodhams


by Kelly Freas

Terrans land on the first inhabitable world ever found and make first contact with the natives.  Turns out "primitive" doesn't mean "defenseless."

This would be a two-star story, inoffensive but not noteworthy, except for the sheer number of words Wodhams wastes getting to his point.  Twenty pages that could easily have been condensed to, I dunno, five.

One star.

Crashlanding

Well, like the Soviets, Analog is churning issues out that look like winners, but really are just unimpressive retreads.  This one clocks in at 2.4, which is higher than Galaxy (2.2), but lower than Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.7), Visions of Tomorrow (2.8), Amazing (2.9). If (3.0), New Worlds (3.3).

Only one new piece of fiction was written by a woman, and if you took all the decent stuff published this month, you'd only be able to fill two digests—and that's with the extra paperback anthology this month.  Whither short SF?  Whither the Soviet space program?

I guess we'll see what happens next month…




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Science / Space Race

[August 20, 1969] Hail Columbia! (Apollo-11, Part 3)

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by Kaye Dee

Columbia photographed over the Bay of Success in the Sea of Fertility by the LM crew before their descent to the Moon. They did not photograph the CM on their return to orbit

It’s hard to believe that it’s already a month since Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first human beings to land on the Moon – and what an eventful month it’s been for the crew of Apollo-11! It feels like this is the right time for the final part of my Apollo-11 coverage, wrapping up the final phases of the historic mission and its aftermath.

Another Giant Leap
I concluded my previous Apollo-11 article with the Lunar Module (LM) Eagle on its way to lunar orbit after a successful lift-off from the Moon’s surface. This was one of the critical stages of the mission, because if the LM’s ascent engine had failed to fire, its crew would have been stranded on the Moon – there was no back-up system. (It is rumoured that President Nixon had a suitably sombre speech prepared had the worst occurred).

The astronauts have since reported that, as they took off, they heard no sounds in the Moon’s airless environment, but they felt the acceleration and a high frequency vibration through their feet. Seconds after liftoff, the LM pitched forward about 45 degrees, so Mr. Armstrong and Col. Aldrin could see the Moon’s surface scrolling past and receding as they leapt towards rendezvous with the Command Module (CM) Columbia in lunar orbit. As they had during the landing, Aldrin worked the computer while Armstrong flew and navigated the LM. “We’re going right down US-1,” Commander Armstrong informed Mission Control about three minutes into the flight.

All Quiet on the Orbital Front

While orbiting the Moon alone, CM Pilot Collins had a comparatively quiet time. He generally performed maintenance and “housekeeping” tasks, although on his third solo orbit a problem arose with the temperature of the environmental coolant, which might have caused parts of Columbia to freeze. Fortunately, this was soon resolved and there were no other major issues.

When the LM crew slept after their exhausting Moonwalk, so too did Col. Collins. He wanted to be well-rested for the rendezvous with Eagle , on which the next step in Apollo-11’s success would rest.

Crucial Rendezvous

Just as the separation from the CM to begin the descent to the lunar surface had occurred behind the Moon, with the astronauts out of contact with Mission Control, so to would the crucial return rendezvous between the two spacecraft.

While Columbia orbited 60 miles above the lunar surface, Mike Collins prepared for the rendezvous. Slung around his neck, he carried a book he had prepared containing 18 different rendezvous procedures – he was taking no chances at this stage of the mission! Although the flight plan called for Eagle to fly up to Columbia, if necessary Col. Collins could descend to meet the LM.

Collins' favourite photo of the images he snapped of this scene. It shows the Earth, Moon, LM and the CM window frame, thus capturing all four players in the mission in one image

Eagle fortunately encountered no problems during its ascent to orbit. As the two spacecraft came around the Moon and back into contact with Mission Control, Col. Collins captured yet another magnificent sight: the Moon, Earth, and returning Ascent Stage of the LM approaching him, all in one picture.

Duelling Vehicles

Mr. Armstrong took up a station-keeping position just 50 ft from the CM. Then the three astronauts prepared for the critical re-docking. At 128:03:00 Ground Elapsed Time (GET), the two spacecraft gently connected, so smoothly that Col. Collins said he did not even feel the docking latches snap together.


However, moments later, the astronauts were jolted as the joined vehicles began to jerk around, with both the LM and CM firing their thrusters! What was happening? It seems that the automatic attitude systems on both spacecraft were competing with each other to control the attitude of the docked vessels! Fortunately, when the Eagle’s automatic pilot was switched off the problem disappeared.

Together Again

Despite that unexpected incident, the Apollo-11 crew were safely back together again, just three minutes behind the time specified by the original Flight Plan! Col. Aldrin was the first through the hatch into the CM, followed by mission commander Armstrong, and an excited reunion took place.

The precious 47lbs of lunar samples were transferred to Columbia, along with the still and movie camera film magazines and some other equipment. Two hours after the docking, the Eagle was jettisoned into lunar orbit in preparation for the return to Earth. Mr. Armstrong commented, “The separation was slow and majestic; we were able to follow it visually for a long time” (although Col. Collins forgot to film it as had been intended).

On Their Way Home

One orbit later, behind the Moon, at 135:23:42 GET, Apollo-11 fired the Service Module’s motor for 2 minutes 31.41 seconds to set them on a safe course for home at an initial speed of 5856 miles per hour. The Command Service Module (CSM) had completed 30 orbits of the Moon in 59 hours 30 minutes 26 seconds.

View of Lomonosov and Joliot craters, taken after Apollo-11 was en-route for Earth

As the Moon quickly receded behind them, the Apollo-11 crew snapped many pictures of it to use up some of their film, and then took the time for some much-needed rest, sleeping for about ten hours. Waking at 147:37:00 GET, they passed through the gravity hump between the moon and Earth about 30 minutes later, as they ate their breakfast 200,000 miles from the Earth and 39,000 miles from the Moon.
View of the receding Moon 1922 miles behind Apollo-11

Pinpointing the Landing Site

I mentioned in Part 2 that, because Commander Armstrong had to overfly the originally planned landing site to find safer terrain on which to put the LM down, the exact site of Tranquillity Base was uncertain. As they were returning to Earth, Mr. Armstrong made a casual remark during a debriefing that finally helped to pinpoint the exact location.

“I took a stroll back to a crater behind us that was maybe seventy or eighty feet in diameter and fifteen or twenty feet deep and took some pictures of it. It had rocks in the bottom….”


While that might not sound like much to those of us who are not geologists, it was just the description NASA’s lunar mapping team needed to identify the landing spot on their maps – an identification later confirmed by the 16mm film of the landing. We now know that Tranquillity Base is located at 0° 41'15" North latitude, 23° 25'45" East longitude. If only Armstrong had mentioned that crater before!

The Apollo-11 Show

At 155:36:00 GET the Apollo-11 crew presented an 18 minute television broadcast. The show began with views of the Moon, and Capcom Duke in Mission Control generated some amused banter when he misidentified the image of the Moon on his monitor as the Earth!

Would you mistake this Moon for the Earth? The image quality of the monitor Charles Duke was looking at was apparently very poor!

Mr. Armstrong showed the boxes of lunar samples and explained that they were vacuum packed on the lunar surface. Col. Aldrin provided a quick history of space food, showed how to make a weightless ham-spread sandwich, and then demonstrated the physics of gyroscopes (a lot more fascinating than reading it in a textbook).


For “all you kids” on Earth, Col. Collins showed how water clings to a spoon in zero-g, before demonstrating how the crew actually drank water using a water gun. The broadcast finished with a view of the approaching Earth.

Greg Saves the Day

As Apollo-11 sped towards the Earth, the Manned Space Flight Network tracking station in Guam, due to play an important role in the final stages of the mission, had a problem. A bearing seized from lack of grease had immobilised the antenna. A normal repair would take too long, and only a narrow hole could provide access for a quick fix—too small for the staff to reach the bearing through it.

View of the Guam Manned Space Flight Network Station

Eventually, Station Director Charles Force drafted his ten-year-old son, Greg, to help. The boy was able to slip his hand into the small opening and pack the bearing with grease, enabling the antenna to move again so that the station could continue its tracking support. I’m told that Neil Armstrong intends to thank Greg personally when the Apollo-11 crew visits the Guam station to thank the team for their mission support work. I'm sure it will be a wonderful surprise for the lad.

A Thoughtful Final Broadcast

Commencing at 177:32:00 GET, 105,150 miles from Earth, the Apollo-11 astronauts gave the final television broadcast of their mission, which began by referencing Jules Verne's "Del la Terre a la Lune" (From the Earth to the Moon) and included thoughtful commentaries on the contribution of the hundreds of thousands behind the scenes whose work had helped to make the mission a success. This was very much in keeping with the spirit in which the crew decided not to include their names on their mission patch, so that it could symbolise everyone involved.


Col. Collins pointed out the number of components involved in the Apollo spacecraft and expressed the crew’s confidence in their reliability. He likened the mission to the periscope of a submarine. “All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all those, I would like to say thank you very much.”

During his talk, Col. Aldrin expanded on this idea: “We have come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the Moon. More still than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all Mankind to explore the unknown.”


Finally, Mr. Armstrong concluded the broadcast with this tribute: “The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort. Next with the American people, who have through their will, indicated their desire. Next to four administrations and their Congresses for implementing that will. And then to the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft […]. We would like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built those spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests and put their their hearts and all their abilities into those craft.

"To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all those people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.”

View of the Earth from around 100,000 miles taken about an hour after the final television broadcast

Returning to Earth

As I’ve noted before, the entry corridor into the Earth’s atmosphere when returning from the Moon is extremely critical: too steep an entry would cause the spacecraft to burn up, while too shallow an entry would make it skip off the atmosphere and out into solar orbit, to be lost forever. Apollo-11’s re-entry corridor was 40 miles wide, and they would be coming in at 24,680mph! Consequently, before re-entry, the Apollo-11 crew jettisoned the Service Module at 189:28:35 GET, to re-enter and burn up separately. The 4.8 (imperial) ton Command Module would be the only part of the original 3,148-ton Apollo-Saturn vehicle that made this historic lunar voyage that returned to Earth.

Apollo-11's Service Module disintegrates and burns up on re-entry. This photo was captured by a NASA ARIA tracking aircraft

Re-entry commenced at 400,000ft, with the CM becoming engulfed in a fireball as it hit the denser air. The effects of gravity and deceleration subjected the Apollo-11 crew to stresses of up to 6.5g.

Skipping Home

Prior to re-entry, the astronauts had been informed that their splashdown point was being shifted 215 nautical miles due to a dangerous thunderstorm in the planned recovery area. This required the CM to make one final manoeuvre during re-entry to target the new splashdown site, about 1,000 miles south-west of Honolulu.

The gumdrop-shaped Command Module has a slight aerodynamic lift capability, and this was used to "fly" the extra distance downrange, by generating two short atmospheric “skips” (ones that would not cause the CM to fly off into space again!) during the re-entry.

Diagram showing how the CM's offset centre of mass results in a lift vector during entry, which provides the CM with some manoeuvrability

Then, right on time at 195:12:06 GET, the small drogue parachutes deployed, hauling out the three main orange-and-white striped parachutes and allowing Columbia to float gently down towards the Pacific Ocean.

Splashdown!

Dawn was just breaking as Columbia descended towards the recovery area, where 9,000 men in nine ships and fifty-four aircraft, spearheaded by the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, were waiting. 11 miles away from the Hornet, the spacecraft splashed down in the inverted position known as the Stable 2. In this position, the heavy side of the spacecraft goes downward leaving the hatch facing upwards, while the crew are upright but hanging forward in their harnesses at about 45°.

A low-resolution night vision camera image of the Apollo-11 splashdown, captured by a recovery helicopter. It is the only known image of this event

The historic first lunar landing mission came to an end at 195 hours, 18 minutes 35 seconds GET, 7.50am local Hawaii time on Thursday 24 July (2.50am 25 July for us here in Australia). Amazingly, and a tribute to the mission planners, this was just 24 seconds ahead of the time specified in the original flight plan! The return voyage from the Moon had taken 59 hours 36 minutes 52 seconds.

Taken some minutes later, when the daylight has increased, this photo shows the CM still in the inverted Stable 2 position

It took the floatation bags almost 8 minutes to flip the CM the right way up (Stable 1 position), which allowed the frogmen recovery crews to access to the spacecraft hatch. Although the waves were only about three or four feet, rumour has it that the astronauts were glad they had taken the precaution of swallowing seasickness tablets before re-entry commenced!

Returning Heroes – and Biological Hazards!

Although it has been generally accepted for some time that the Moon is likely a dead and sterile world, an overabundance of caution encouraged the treatment of the returning astronauts, their spacecraft and the lunar samples, as potential biological hazards – just in case there is some unknown form of microbial life on the Moon that might be pathogenic to Earthly lifeforms.

So while the Apollo-11 crew may have returned to Earth as heroes for accomplishing the first successful lunar landing, they were initially treated in a most unheroic way – as potential carriers of contagion! Biological Isolation Garment (BIGs) were tossed through the CM hatch to the astronauts by one of the recovery frogmen. Then, looking like aliens themselves in their masked isolation garments, the astronauts exited the hatch and climbed into a rubber dinghy, spraying each other down with Sodium Hypochlorite.

A recovery helicopter then transferred Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to the Hornet, where they were immediately installed in the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF), a converted Airstream caravan in which they would spend the next three weeks in isolation, supported by volunteer medical personnel. As they set foot on the deck of the Hornet, its band – at President Nixon's request, in honour of the crew and their spacecraft – played "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean".


It was here that President Nixon, who had travelled to the recovery zone to greet the returning astronauts, welcomed the historic crew back to Earth standing outside the MQF’s viewing window.

President Nixon and the Apollo-11 crew in quarantine bow their heads as the USS Hornet's chaplain offers a prayer of thanksgiving for their safe return

Mission Control Celebrates

As the big screens in Mission Control displayed televised images of Columbia floating safely in the Pacific swell, the room erupted in celebration! Excited flight controllers and NASA officials waved flags and smoked the traditional splashdown cigars. When the news came that the astronauts were safely on board the USS Hornet and Mission Control’s responsibility was over the euphoria became even more fervent. It was especially satisfying for them to have met President Kennedy’s deadline and a new image flashed up on the big screen, saying “Task accomplished July, 1969”. 


Congratulatory messages were also sent to the tracking stations around the word that had supported the Apollo-11 mission. Their personnel, too, felt a deep pride in the accomplishment, and their part in it.

The Last Leg of Columbia’s Journey

With its crew whisked away to quarantine, Columbia, bobbing in the ocean, was scrubbed down with Betadyne by the recovery crew, to kill any external contamination it might be carrying. It was then winched aboard the USS Hornet and positioned next to the MQF, so that the two could be connected by a flexible tunnel. This allowed the retrieval of the Moon rocks and other items into the MQF without contaminating the surrounding environment. Like the crew, the interior of the CM was ‘in quarantine’ for 21 days.


After the Hornet docked at Pearl Harbor on 26 July, NASA engineers saved the spacecraft at Ford Island in Honolulu, removing any residual thruster propellants and other hazardous materials before it was transferred by cargo plane to Houston for quarantine in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) in Building 37 of the Manned Spacecraft Centre (MSC).


Columbia finally left the confines of the LRL on 14 August, to be sent back to its manufacturer, North American Rockwell, in Downey, California. Engineers are currently giving her a thorough inspection. Once this is completed, Columbia will be sent to the Smithsonian Institution where this historic spacecraft will eventually be displayed.

Moon Rock Movements

Apollo-11’s lunar samples, literally priceless in both scientific and monetary terms, have made their own separate journey to the LRL in Houston.

After being retrieved from Columbia into the MQF, the sealed boxes were released to NASA officials via the MQF’s transfer lock. Within a few hours of splashdown, the first box of Moon rocks was flown from the USS Hornet to the US Air Force base at Johnston Island in the Pacific, where it was transferred to a cargo plane and sent on to Houston. Just eight hours later it arrived at Ellington Air Force Base near the Manned Spacecraft Centre, from which the container was ferried by two NASA officials to the LRL.


Less than 48 hours after splashdown, the first box of precious lunar samples was opened inside a glovebox at the LRL, and its contents began to be documented. I’m delighted to note that New Zealand-born Australian National University geochemist, my friend Prof. Ross Taylor, has played a significant role in setting up the chemical analysis section of the LRL and is right now carrying out the first emission spectroscopy analysis of Apollo-11’s samples.

Prof. Ross Taylor (left) carrying out an analysis of an Apollo-11 sample at the LRL using an emission spectrograph

While his results are not yet available, the initial findings from other parts of the lab indicate that the lunar rocks are igneous in origin and point to past, if not current, volcanic activity on the Moon. Coupled with some early detections from the seismograph that was left on the Moon as part of the EASEP instruments, some geologists are suggesting that this provides evidence for the Earth and the Moon having a common origin.

Other initial findings are that there is very little evidence of water, and no indications of life in the lunar rocks and regolith, and that the regolith itself contains unusual microscopic spherical glass particles. Dating of some of the samples suggests they could be around 3.6 billion years old, which is the estimated age of the Solar System and the discovery of such ancient rocks has surprised many geologists.

Mice and other animals and plants exposed to lunar materials have so far shown no signs of infection or disease, and neither have the Apollo-11 crew, who were released from quarantine on August 11, leading NASA to indicate that it will generously distribute samples of lunar materials to researchers around the world in September.

A Long Journey Home for the Astronauts

With the Apollo-11 crew confined in the MQF, once the USS Hornet arrived at Pearl Harbour a crane carefully lifted the quarantine facility and its human occupants from the aircraft carrier onto a flat-bed trailer. After a brief welcoming ceremony, the MQF was transported to Hickam Air Force Base, from where it was flown to Houston.


Despite the 2am arrival on July 27, the astronauts’ wives and children were there to welcome them home, along with a large crowd of well-wishers. From inside the MQF, the astronauts could talk with their families by telephone and see them through the window, but a more affectionate homecoming was still weeks away. The MQF was then transferred to the LRL, where the sealed Crew Reception Area (CRA) provided more expansive living and working quarters for the Apollo-11 astronauts for the duration of their quarantine.


Although confined to the CRA, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were not idle, writing their mission reports, and conducting press conferences and mission debriefings from a glass-enclosed conference room. Their health was monitored on a daily basis, without the astronauts ever showing any signs of illness or ill-effects from their sojourn on the lunar surface. They even celebrated Armstrong’s 39th birthday with a surprise party!


On the evening of 10 August, Mr. Armstrong, Col. Aldrin and Col. Collins were finally released from quarantine, stepping out of the CRA to be welcomed by NASA officials and large number of reporters before they were whisked away home by car for long-awaited reunions with their families.

Instant Celebrities

After a day of relaxation at home, the Apollo-11 crew faced a packed press conference on 12 August, where they were greeted with a standing ovation. Referring to the Apollo programme as a “great adventure”, the astronauts spent 45 minutes describing their historic mission in great detail and illustrating it with photographs and film clips taken during the flight. Among the questions they then received from the reporters, Armstrong was asked whether he believed that one day women could become astronauts, to which he promptly replied, “Gosh, I hope so!”

The next day, at the invitation of President Nixon, the astronauts and their families embarked on a day-long whirlwind celebratory tour across the United States, travelling on the presidential jet for the occasion.


From Ellington Air Force Base they flew to New York City, where they were treated to the “largest, longest, and loudest” tickertape parade in the city’s history, with an estimated four million people lining the parade route. After being awarded the gold medal of New York City, the astronauts continued to the United Nations, where UN Secretary General U Thant welcomed them, and they made a brief speech.


Whisked from New York to Chicago, this time around two million people turned out to see the Apollo-11 crew in a tickertape parade through Chicago’s downtown. At the Civic Centre Plaza, a crowd estimated at 100,000 saw the astronauts made honorary citizens of the city, before a final stop on the way back to the airport, at which they addressed a crowd of 15,000 young people.

The final leg of this exhausting day was a visit to Los Angeles, to attend a state dinner hosted by President Nixon, the first ever to be held outside of Washington, DC. 1,440 guests assembled for the event, including the President and Vice President and their families, 14 members of the President’s Cabinet, 44 Governors, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 50 members of Congress, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine and 48 astronauts, ambassadors from 83 countries and numerous Hollywood celebrities – it seems that everyone wants to meet the Apollo-11 astronauts!

Apollo-11 crew and their wives with Vice-President Agnew, President Nixon, and their wives at the Los Angeles gala

Those of you in the US were, I understand, able to see this dinner televised live, which must have been an interesting show. Fittingly, Guidance Controller Steve Bales, who had given the Moon landing the “Go” to proceed despite the guidance computer’s programme alarms, accepted a NASA Group Achievement Award on behalf of the entire flight operations team. President Nixon also presented Mr. Armstrong, Col. Aldrin, and Col. Collins with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour.

The Price of Fame

The following day, accompanied by NASA Administrator Paine, the astronauts and their families flew back to Houston aboard the presidential jet, but it seems their post-flight celebrity is only ramping up. On 15 August the Apollo-11 crew taped a major television interview, during which Col. Collins announced his decision that he would remain with NASA but make no more space flights. The next day, Houston turned on its own welcome for the astronauts with another tickertape parade, attended by about 250,000, followed by a barbecue for an estimated 50,000 invited guests, MC’d by Frank Sinatra.

Neil Armstrong and his wife Jan buried in tickertape during the Houston parade

The Apollo-11 astronauts are not only American heroes, they are also heroes to the world, and the United States intends to use that fame by sending the crew and their families on a global goodwill tour next month. I just hope that they can cope with the hectic pace of their new-found celebrity – I know I wouldn’t have the stamina for such an intense schedule of public appearances – and that the price of this fame will not be too high for the astronauts' families and their marriages.

During the state dinner in Los Angeles, Col. Aldrin summed up the significance of Apollo-11 saying, “The footprints on the Moon are a true symbol of the human spirit… they show we can do what we want to do, what we must do, and what we will do…”

I think those words make a fitting conclusion to my series of articles on Apollo-11, so I’ll sign off here and leave you all to reflect on this momentous and historic mission.

First day cover celebrating the suggestion that the day of the Moon landing becomes Day One of a new universal calendar!




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Science / Space Race

[August 8, 1969] Two by Four (Mariners 6 and 7 go to Mars)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Into the Wild Black Yonder

Ten years ago, when we started our planetary series of articles, none of other worlds in our solar system had been explored.  Since then, five intrepid spacecraft have toured two planets.  Mariner 2 and Mariner 5 probed Venus, returning the revelation that the shrouded world is a seething cauldron.  Mariner 4 returned the first pictures of the Red Planet, shocking humanity with images of Moonlike craters and reports of a vanishingly thin atmosphere, dashing forever the vivid, science fictional conception of Mars as an inhabitable world.

Now, twin Mariners 6 and 7 have flown by Mars, dramatically increasing what we know about the fourth planet.  While we'll never get back that fantasy so elegantly woven by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, the new Mars is also not a blasted husk either.


Distant views of Mars, as seen by Mariner 7 as it approached the planet

The Next Generation

Despite the blow to morale given by Mariner 4, Mars still seemed like the most hospitable place for life to have arisen apart from Earth.  After all, are there not microorganisms living in the harsh environments of Antarctica and at the bottom of the sea?  Even though the Martian atmosphere is just 1% as thick as that of Earth, this is still plenty dense compared to, say, the Moon.  Moreover, Earth's atmosphere is just 1% that of Venus.  Who's to say when an atmosphere is "thick enough"?

So, just a few months after Mariner 4 flew past Mars, Mariners 6 and 7 were authorized.  At first glance, they look a lot like their predecessor, but the differences are profound—both internally and externally.


From top to bottom: Mariners 2, 4, 5, and 6/7 (note the family resemblance of the last three—Mariner 5 was actually a modified Mariner 3/4 backup!)

First, the insides: the new Mariners are the first spacecraft made only to examine their target planet.  All of the prior Mariners had experiments for monitoring the interplanetary environment—solar wind, magnetic fields, that sort of thing.  Mariners 6 and 7 carry two TV cameras (one narrow, one wide-angle), an infrared radiometer (to measure the temperature of Mars), and ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers (to determine the chemical makeup of the Martian atmosphere and surface).  That's it.

As for the outsides, since 1965, when Mariner 4 passed by the Red Planet, there has been a revolution in communications technology.  Not only do the new Mariners carry more powerful transmitters and antennas, but with the construction of the new 210 foot antenna at Goldstone, supplementing the old 85 footers, data can be transferred between the spacecraft and Earth at a rate more than 2000 times the 8.33 bits per second speed of Mariner 4.  It also helps that Mars is closer to Earth this time around, and that the rocket carrying Mariners 6 and 7 is the beefy new Atlas Centaur, which can loft more weight than the old Atlas Agena so the onboard electronics can be heftier and thus more capable.


The 210' "Mars Dish" at Goldstone, California

What this means for us on the ground is that instead of sending back just 22 images of Mars, the new Mariners could transmit hundreds of pictures, all while returning real-time spectrographic and radiometer data.  All of this aided by the installation of the first computer equipped on an interstellar probe, capable of remembering 128 "words" some 22 characters in length.  And that computer can be reprogrammed on the fly from Earth!

On their Way

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the same folks who built the other Mariners, assembled four spacecraft for the mission.  The first was a stay-at-home test model, the second a source of spare parts.  The other two were redundant probes—an understandable precaution given the loss of Mariners 1 and 3.  However, the twin ships weren't entirely redundant; Mariner 6 was targeted to fly over the Martian North Pole while #7 was aimed over the South Pole.

Problems with the spacecraft began before liftoff.  Mariner 6's Atlas rocket, which maintains its structure through internal fuel pressure, sprung a leak and began to deflate like a balloon.  It had to be replaced with Mariner 7's rocket, and a new one ordered from Convair.  This did not delay the launch, however (which had to go at a set time to reach Mars with a minimum of fuel use), and Mariner 6 blasted off on February 24th.  Mariner 7 took off on March 27, but because of its course, was set to reach Mars just five days after its sister.


The launch of Mariner 7

Both rockets performed beautifully, requiring only minor mid-course corrections early in the flight to ensure they zoomed close by the fourth planet.  There were some minor technical problems: The radio on Mariner 6, used to determine range from Earth, kept locking on its own signal rather than Earth's, making it useless.  It fixed itself later in the flight, however.

Similarly, the star tracker designed to keep Mariner positioned properly lost sight of Canopus.  After weeks of engineers scrambling to find an alternative guiding star (they even tried the Large Magellanic Cloud, but the galaxy was too diffuse to be useful), that system fixed itself, too.  Finally, the onboard solar sensors that told how much sunlight was hitting Mariner 6's power panels, began reading too low.  Was the Sun going out?  No.  The sensors had just drifted out of calibration.

Mariner 7's only issue was a radio receiver that dropped to about 20% of its sensitivity, apparently due to cold.  Ground controllers switched it to high power, which warmed the thing up and fixed it.

Thus, its vexing teething pains dealt with, NASA now had, for the first time, two fully operating probes with which to explore Mars.

The Great Galactic Ghoul

On July 29, even as Mariner 6 was finishing the transmission of 33 low-resolution approach images, Mariner 7 suddenly began spinning wildly, all of its scientific data telemetry channels scrambled.  Had an asteroid hit the spacecraft?  Had there been an instrument explosion or some kind of short circuit?  Was there some kind of Great Galactic Ghoul guarding the Red Planet?  No answer was quickly forthcoming.


Collage of Mariner 6 images as it approached Mars

Nevertheless, engineers raced to salvage the mission—with Mariner 7 arriving shortly after its sister, and from a more favorable angle, the JPL science team wanted the spacecraft's experiments all in working order. 

Cautiously, computer engineers went over every bit of code and methodically tested all of Mariner 7's instruments.  They were in working order, but because of the accident, uncalibrated and useless.  How to get real data points to use to base the radiometer and spectrometer data against?


Engineers at the Mariner control center at JPL

As it turned out, the two TV cameras on board were in good order and unaffected.  By pointing them at Martian targets and using the data they returned, it was possible to calibrate the other experiments.  And so, just in the nick of time, Mariner 7 was ready, come close encounter time, to do some real science.

Exploring Barsoom

So what did the two probes find as they whizzed past Mars, almost grazing it from a scant few thousand miles away?

Well, at first they seemed to confirm Mariner 4's findings.  There were all the craters in stark detail.  There was no evidence that there had ever been widespread water—absent was the erosion one would expect from oceans or even rivers.


A lunar landscape, courtesy of Mariner 7

On the other hand, if Mars wasn't Earth's twin, neither was it sister to the Moon.  As each Mariner went behind the planet, beaming radio signals through the Martian atmosphere, it was confirmed that surface pressure was around 7 millibar—a refinement rather than a revelation.  But they did determine that carbon dioxide makes up a greater percentage of the air than even on Venus.  Nitrogen was completely absent, which was a surprise.  So was ozone, which means that the surface is fairly baked by ultraviolet—again, a strike against life on the planet.

The Red Planet is not quite geologically moribund, however.  The vast Hellas region, smooth of craters, and a region of convoluted terrain akin to the American Badlands, suggests some kind of volcanic activity in comparatively recent times.

Unlike the Moon, clouds scud across the Martian sky, mostly composed of dry ice.  While it may not rain on the planet, it does frost, and maybe even snow ice and carbon dioxide.  The climate changes with the seasons, with polar (dry?) ice caps spreading and receding.  The tropical highs soar to a balmy 60 degrees, but the polar lows plunge to 240 degrees below zero.


A view of the Martian North Pole, snapped by Mariner 6—note the ice cap

Thus, Mars is an inhospitable place…but it if it lacks biological life, it is nevertheless an interesting living, breathing planet in its own right.

What's next?

Mariners 6 and 7 are still functioning, and their onboard systems should work until at least 1971.  Not only might they return pictures of any asteroids or comets that drift by, they will also constitute an experiment in and of themselves.  As they drift through the solar system, terrestrial scientists will measure variations in the timing of their telemetry signals and use them to prove General Relativity—something that requires great distances to detect subtle theoretical variations.

As for successors, a Martian orbiter is already in the works for the 1971 alignment, and in 1973, a probe will use the gravity of Venus to enable a probe to fly by and then visit, for the first time, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.

And also in 1973, the Viking orbiter/lander combo, successor to the overlarge Voyager project, will give Mars a real look.


The 1971 Mars Orbiter

If the 1960s were the dawn of interplanetary science, the 1970s will see its maturity.  I find this as momentous an achievement as footprints on the Moon.

I can't wait to rewrite all of the articles in our solar system series!




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Science / Space Race

[August 4, 1969] A Small Step and a Giant Leap (Apollo-11, Part 2)

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by Kaye Dee

The crew of Apollo-11 has returned home in triumph, splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean on 24 July US time, at the end of their historic mission. The New York Times Editorial of 20 July has called their epic adventure “more than a step in history; it is a step in evolution.” Those footprints (well, bootprints, like Col. Aldrin's above) on the Moon mark the beginning of humanity's giant leap from its home planet into the cosmos.


Despite their hero status, right now the crew of Apollo-11 are pariahs – in quarantine to ensure that they have not brought home any nasty surprises from the Moon in the form of unknown pathogens. But alongside the treasure trove of Moonrocks, what they have brought home is a stunning visual record of Mankind's "greatest adventure", and I have waited a little to prepare this article so that it could be illustrated with many of the images taken during the flight (which had not been developed and distributed until now). I hope you’ll agree that it has been worth the delay.

The Apollo-11 mission has been epic in every sense of the word – so much so, that my intended two-part article has evolved into a three-part story, the final chapter to come after the astronauts are released from their quarantine.

A Smooth Cruise
At the end of Part 1, we left the Apollo-11 crew on their coast to the Moon, which was largely routine and uneventful. Despite the intrinsically dangerous nature of the Apollo-11 mission, the flight was, overall, probably the most trouble-free Apollo mission to date. Certainly, the Operations Supervisor at the Honeysuckle Creek Manned Space Flight (MSFN) Tracking Station has described it as “a very smooth mission from our perspective”, and I understand that Mission Control in Houston thought the same, despite the stresses inherent in such a historically significant undertaking as the first Moon landing. 

Coming to You in Living Colour
34 hours into the flight, Mr. Armstrong, Col. Aldrin and Col. Collins gave their first public television broadcast. Highlights of the 36-minute transmission (in colour for those countries with colour TV service) included views of the Earth, Lunar Module (LM) Pilot Aldrin demonstrating zero-g push-ups and “Chef” Collins dishing up a space food chicken stew. 

Compare the resolution of this photo taken by the crew with the television image of a similar view of the Earth at around 10,000 nautical miles

Another television transmission took place 55 hours after launch, with a 96-minute colour broadcast. Shown live in the US, Japan, western Europe and much of South America, this show again included views of the Earth, now 201,300 miles away. Viewers could see the removal of the probe and drogue docking apparatus and the opening of the spacecraft tunnel hatch to the LM, with Command Module (CM) Pilot Collins making jokes about his non-union “stagehands” (Armstrong and Aldrin).

Col. Aldrin entered the LM first, followed by Mr. Armstrong, providing a tour around the vehicle that would land the first human beings on the Moon. Aldrin also described the Moonwalking gear waiting to be used.


Aldrin in the LM during its first checkout. His sunglasses were specially developed by Australian ophthalmologist Dr. John Colvin

Into Lunar Orbit
On mission day four, Col. Collins swung the Command Service Module (CSM) around, so that the crew could look at the rapidly approaching Moon, its crater-pocked surface now filling their windows. As the spacecraft entered the Moon’s shadow, Mr. Armstrong noted “Now we are able to see stars again and recognise constellations for the first time on the trip. The sky is full of stars, just like the nights on Earth. But all the way here, we’ve only been able to see stars occasionally… but not recognise any star patterns.”

An eerie view approaching the Moon in its shadow, with the solar corona and dimly Earthlit craters appearing around the lunar rim

Like Apollo-8 and 10, the CSM engine burn required to place Apollo-11 into lunar orbit had to occur behind the Moon, with the crew out of direct contact with the Earth. Shortly before they disappeared behind the Moon, while in contact with the MSFN station near Madrid, the astronauts described the lunar surface they could see through their windows, with Col. Collins likening its colour to “Plaster of Paris grey.”


After a Trans-Lunar Coast that lasted for 73 hours, 5 minutes and 35 seconds, a 5 minute 57.53 second burn placed Apollo-11 exactly where it should be – in a lunar orbit of 195 by 69 miles. When reporting to Mission Control on the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn, once contact was re-established, Col. Collins could only say “It was like… perfect.”

Around the Moon
Orbiting the Moon, in their Columbia, like the heroes of Jules Verne’s “Autour de la Lune” (Around the Moon) in their Columbiad, at 78 hours and 20 minutes into the mission Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins offered viewers back on Earth a 40-minute live colour television transmission that showed spectacular views of the lunar surface and the approach path to the LM Eagle’s planned landing site. As the spacecraft prepared to go behind the Moon again, Aldrin quipped, “And as the Moon sinks slowly in the west, Apollo-11 bids good day to you,” paraphrasing Lowell Thomas’ famous travelogue sign-off to fit the occasion.


As Apollo-11 approached the Sea of Tranquility for the first time, it was early dawn on the surface below, with long, black shadows stretching across the cratered Moonscape.

Just over two hours later, CMP Collins initiated a second engine burn of 16.88 seconds, to place the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit, ready for the LM to depart for the lunar surface. This burn was critical, because if it was even two seconds too long it could put Apollo-11 on a collision course with the other side of the Moon!

Checking out the LM
A little over 81 hours after launch, during their fourth orbit of the Moon, LMP Aldrin entered the LM, to power up and checkout the spacecraft systems. Then Commander Armstrong and Col. Aldrin called Mission Control in Houston for the first time from the lunar landing vehicle, using the “Eagle” callsign.

A view of the approach to the Apollo-11 landing site, captured during the LM checkout period. It has been annotated with formal and unofficial names to show the approach path

Once this communications test was completed, the astronauts began to prepare for a sleep period. Collins suggested that Armstrong and Aldrin take the most comfortable sleeping positions in the Command Module, so they would get a good rest before the landing attempt. He was undoubtedly concerned about the possibility of an error due to overtiredness, which could have catastrophic consequences for the mission and the crew. The possibility of having to return to Earth alone if disaster should strike the lunar module crew seems to have weighed on Col. Collins’ mind, as he mentioned his understandable apprehension in several interviews prior to the flight.


Just before the sleep period, the astronauts captured another glorious vision of the Earth hovering above the lunar surface that is certain to become as iconic as Apollo-8’s Earthrise image

The Big Day Arrives
On 20 July (21 July in the eastern hemisphere, including Australia), astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin donned their spacesuits in the CM equipment bay, before entering Eagle for their descent to the lunar surface. After sealing the hatch and completing the final checkout of the LM, they extended Eagle’s landing gear and prepared to separate from the CSM.


This manoeuvre took place behind the Moon, during the 13th orbit, so as to place Eagle on the correct descent trajectory to touch down at the ALS-2 landing site. The LM moved away from Columbia and pirouetted around so that Col. Collins could inspect the vehicle and ensure that Eagle was totally ready for its historic descent to the Moon. “The Eagle has wings,” Armstrong assured Mission Control, as he and Aldrin put the craft through its paces. A nine-second Reaction Control System engine burn by the CSM then separated the two spacecraft to a safe distance apart

Meanwhile, Back in Mission Control
In focussing on the astronauts, it’s easy to forget the flight controllers and their support teams monitoring, guiding and approving every stage of a manned space flight.

Flight Director Kranz (second from right) in the MOCR

For the critical lunar landing phase of Apollo-11, the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR), better known as Mission Control in Houston, was staffed by the White Team of flight controllers, under Flight Director, Mr. Eugene Kranz, usually known as Gene. The space specialists now filling roles that did not even exist outside the pages of science fiction a decade ago, have an average age of just 26 years! Rookie astronaut Charles Duke served as CAPCOM, the direct contact with the astronauts.

CAPCOM Duke, with Apollo-8's Jim Lovell, the Apollo-11 backup commander, listening in

As the time for Apollo-11’s historic landing approached, every available audio outlet in Mission Control had a headset plugged into it, to listen to the spacecraft communications channel. Senior NASA officials and astronauts, including Alan Shepard and John Glenn, positioned themselves in the MOCR to be eyewitnesses to the fulfillment of President Kennedy’s bold challenge of 1961. The families of the crew were also present.

The Eagle Stoops to the Moon
The Descent Orbit Insertion (DOI) burn needed to land Eagle safely on the Moon, required a 30 second firing of the LM descent engine. All the telemetry data being received at Mission Control indicted that everything was going to plan, but the landing on the Moon’s surface was (aside from re-entry) the most dangerous part of the flight: within forty minutes, the Eagle and its crew would either “land, crash or abort”, determining the success of the mission.


At 102:33:05.01 GET (Ground Elapsed Time) Eagle fired its descent engine to commence the landing sequence. Unexpectedly, the burn placed the LM 4.6 miles further downrange than planned, resulting in the landing point being 4.6 miles beyond the designated ALS-2 site. It seems the cause of this discrepancy was some residual pressure in the tunnel connecting the CM and LM when the two craft undocked (the tunnel should have been in vacuum, but had not been fully decompressed). This pushed the spacecraft apart with more velocity than planned.

With the LM’s legs facing the flight path, the astronauts were essentially flying backwards and unable to see where they were going, although they could see landmarks passing by and knew where they were as they descended towards the Moon’s surface. 

Problems Arise
As the LM’s altitude decreased, the on-board radar data was critical for evaluation and comparison with altitude data from the tracking stations on Earth. But a potential electrical problem with the radar was just one of an increasing number of problems that began to arise as the LM dropped towards the lunar surface. Communications difficulties with Mission Control meant that Col. Collins in Columbia had to relay some messages between Houston and Eagle.

Nevertheless, when Flight Director Kranz polled his team, they were all prepared to give the “Go!” for powered descent. Guidance Officer Steve Bales had the only reservations, noting that the spacecraft was moving a little faster than planned. As a result, Eagle was going to land further downrange than planned, in what was expected to be a rockier area.

Abort?
At 102:38:22 GET the astronauts received a 1202 alarm, which meant their computer was overloaded by irrelevant data from the rendezvous radar (which should have been switched off) and couldn’t do all the tasks in the time available. Would the landing have to be aborted?

The backroom boys supporting Mission Control. They realised the alarms were minor issues

With the lives of Commander Armstrong and Col. Aldrin – and the success of the entire mission – in their hands, Guidance Officer Bales and his support team fortunately recognised the issue immediately and were able to give assurance that the computer would perform, nevertheless, and landing could proceed. When a similar 1201 alarm sounded, with Eagle just 2,000 ft above the lunar surface, they once again gave a positive response for the landing to continue.

Heading for Touchdown
With four minutes until touchdown, communications between the LM and Earth finally strengthened and stablised. Another rollcall of the flight controllers gave the landing the “Go!” to proceed.

At 9,000 ft, the LM began to drop its legs to point down to the Moon’s surface. Mission Commander Armstrong was trained to land the LM, controlling the spacecraft’s flight while looking out the window at the landing site. Col. Aldrin’s role was to concentrate on the display panel and provide Armstrong with the information he needed as he guided the Eagle safely down to the lunar surface. At this point, the flight control team back on Earth could do no more for the landing: everything now depended on the skill and teamwork of Armstrong and Aldrin.

Commander Armstrong flying the LM to touchdown in a training simulation

As an experienced test pilot, Neil Armstrong chose to fly the final landing phase (about the last ¾ of a mile to the touch down spot from a thousand feet) manually, like flying a helicopter. This enabled him to exercise his judgement to fly beyond the intended landing position, when it became clear that “a gigantic crater and lots of very big rocks” made it a very unfavourable position to touch down.

Time is Running Out!
Extending his downrange flight, Mr. Armstrong searched for a more suitable landing site, but time and fuel were fast running out. At around 250 ft altitude, an amber light warned that only 5 per cent fuel remained – there were only 94 seconds left to land! Approaching 100 ft above the Moon’s surface, the downblast of the LM’s descent engine began to stir up the dust, making it difficult for Armstrong to gauge their velocity, or sight a safe place to land, by observing surface features.

View from the LM window about 30 seconds before touchdown, with the shadow of an LM leg and contact probe against the lunar surface

Finally, with just 10 seconds of fuel left, as Armstrong saw the shadow of the LM stretching in front of him, Col. Aldrin called “Contact light!”, indicating that one of Eagle’s landing leg probes had touched the lunar surface. So gently that the crew barely noticed it, the first manned spacecraft from Earth touched down on the surface of the Moon! It was 102:45:40 GET, 15:17CDT on 20 July in the United States. (For us on the east coast of Australia, it was 6.17am on a cold winter’s morning!)

“The Eagle has Landed!”
Inside the Eagle, Mr. Armstrong and Col. Aldrin apparently looked across at each other and silently shook their space-gloved hands, celebrating the success of their flight in reaching the Moon’s surface. But as historic as that safe landing was, the astronauts had to immediately prepare the LM for a sudden abort ascent in the event the landing had damaged the Eagle, or some other emergency arose.

Eagle's shadow on the Moon's surface following the landing. This view was taken after the Moonwalk and the astronaut's bootprints can be seen on the surface

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!” Apollo-11 Commander Armstrong announced proudly to Mission Control and the world, as soon as he was sure that Eagle had touched down safely. Since the descent stage of the LM will remain on the Moon (and presumably be designated as a historic monument in the future), it was an appropriate gesture to identify its landing site as Tranquility Base – Earth’s first outpost on another world.

In Mission Control, the flight controllers briefly celebrated, before Flight Director Kranz called for a “Stay/No Stay” decision from his team just one minute after landing. There were abort points at three and twelve minutes after landing – after that, the astronauts would have to wait for Columbia to go around the Moon again. At each decision point, flight controllers approved Eagle to stay on the lunar surface.

The Loneliest Man
While Eagle’s crew on the Moon were in constant communication with Mission Control, CMP Collins was orbiting the Moon, relying on events being relayed to him so that he knew what was happening. After forty minutes of complete isolation behind the Moon on each orbit, he could talk and listen to the Earth for seventy minutes, through either the Goldstone or Tidbinbilla DSN stations. However, he only had about eight minutes in direct contact with Eagle each time his orbit passed over Tranquility Base. Fortunately, Columbia was in the contact zone when Eagle was landing, so that he could hear the verbal exchanges of the touchdown, but his general communication isolation from the Earth, and from his crewmates, earned Mike Collins the nickname “the Loneliest Man”.

Where Did They Land?
Each time he passed over the Sea of Tranquility, Collins scanned the lunar surface for signs of the LM, hoping to spot the spacecraft (he never did) and any landmarks that would assist in identifying Eagle’s actual landing site: since Commander Armstrong had taken the LM further downrange than planned in search of a safe landing site, its exact position on the lunar surface was uncertain.
Annotated NASA image showing Collins' attempts to sight the Eagle's landing site. Very close, but no cigar!

Using huge lunar maps and data from the spacecraft and tracking stations, the Mapping Sciences Laboratory in Houston had narrowed the landing site down to a 5-mile radius, but Eagle’s crew could not identify anything of significance from their position. It wasn’t until Apollo-11 was halfway back to Earth that a chance remark by Mr. Armstrong finally helped the mappers to pinpoint the location of the landing site!

Going for a (Moon) Walk
Apollo-11’s flight plan called for a four-hour rest period after touching down on the Moon. However, as everything had gone according to schedule, the astronauts were eager to take their first steps on the lunar surface before their rest period. Two hours after landing, Armstrong requested Mission Control’s approval to postpone the scheduled sleep period and go out on the lunar surface straight away.


Mission Control concurred, and Armstrong and Aldrin began to carefully don their lunar Extravehicular Activity (EVA) spacesuits. In the cramped space of the LM’s cabin, surrounded by vulnerable switches and instrument panels, this took considerably longer than the expected preparation time of about two hours. Every move in the donning process had to be meticulously carried out and checked, ultimately taking around 3½ hours for the crew to be fully suited up and ready for Mankind’s historic first steps onto the Moon.

Preparing for the Moonwalk Broadcast
Like me, I’m sure you will be surprised to learn that NASA originally intended to provide only radio coverage of Apollo-11’s history-making first steps on the Moon! It was not until early this year that the decision was finally made to include television coverage of the lunar EVA! However, as a contingency, Westinghouse (which produced the colour television camera used in the Apollo 10 and 11 Command Modules) had been contracted to develop a compact television camera that could be used on the lunar surface. This slow-scan black and white camera has a vertical resolution of 320 lines scanned at 10 frames per second, designed to work with the small transmission bandwidth available from the LM on the Moon, which was not sufficient for a standard TV signal.


The Westinghouse Apollo-11 Lunar Surface Camera was initially mounted in the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA), in the LM Descent Stage, positioned so that it could see the astronauts descending the ladder to step onto the lunar surface. Because of its design, and the limited space available within the MESA, the camera had to be mounted upside down. This meant that the transmitted view of Mission Commander Armstrong coming down the ladder was upside down, and a special switch had to be activated at the reception station on Earth to invert the image to the right way up. This step was not necessary when the camera was removed from the MESA and set up on the Moon’s surface itself to cover the activities of the lunar EVA.

On the Apollo-11 flight plan, the lunar EVA was scheduled so that the television transmission would be received at the Goldstone DSN station, where the 210 ft “Mars” antenna would provide maximum reception capability of the relatively weak television signal. However, should the Moonwalk should occur when Goldstone was unable to receive the television signals, NASA contracted the 210 ft Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia to act as a back-up to receive the astronaut telemetry and television broadcast from the Moon. As events transpired, it was fortunate that this arrangement was in place! The "Mars" DSN antenna at Goldstone, so called because it was developed to support space probes to Mars

Live from the Moon (via Australia)!
When Neil Armstrong finally backed gingerly out of the narrow LM hatch in his bulky spacesuit, he pulled a small ring to activate the television camera in the MESA. At 109:22:00 GET, the first television from the surface of the Moon was received at Goldstone. In Australia, where the Moon was just rising into their field of view, Honeysuckle Creek MSFN station (which was tracking the LM) and the Parkes Radio Telescope could also see the television transmission. 

The Honeysuckle Creek antenna, near Canberra, tracking Eagle on the Moon just as Armstrong stepped onto the surface

Although the picture quality received at Goldstone was good, the vision sent to Houston was extremely contrasty, due to incorrect settings on the scan converter that turned the slow-scan signal into one suitable for regular television broadcast. It was also initially upside down, as the camera operator forgot to flick the inversion switch. The images received at Honeysuckle Creek, though of lower resolution due to its smaller antenna, were clearer than Parkes, where the signal strength was very low. After a few moments switching between signals for the best picture, the broadcast controllers at Houston settled on the signals from Honeysuckle Creek for the initial global television transmission of Armstrong coming down the ladder and stepping onto the Moon’s surface.

About nine minutes later, when the Moon had risen high enough at Parkes to provide a much stronger signal, the quality of its images led the broadcast controllers to switch to the Parkes feed. This was used for the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast from the lunar surface.

The combined Australian and NASA team at Parkes were so dedicated to ensuring that the historic lunar television broadcast was made available to the world, that they kept the radio telescope in operation and stayed at their posts, even when a violent storm arose with windspeeds well in excess of the safe operating limit of the antenna.

“One Small Step for Man”
Moving carefully down the ladder on the leg of the LM, testing every phase of the descent to the surface, Mission Commander Neil Armstrong halted momentarily on the Eagle’s footpad to describe the lunar surface. At 109:24:15 GET, 21:56 CDT July 20 he then took Mankind’s first step onto another world, saying “That’s one small step for Man. One giant leap for Mankind”.

Armstrong about to take the First Step, as seen on the monitor at Honeysuckle Creek.

Armstrong had not shared with anyone what he planned to say as he stepped onto the Moon, and while his first words on the lunar surface will undoubtedly resound through history, they are, in fact, something of a non-sequitur. There’s already speculation that he may have slightly flubbed his intended line – understandable due to the stress and tension of the circumstances – and that he really meant to say “That’s one small step for a man (meaning himself). One giant leap for Mankind", which would be more logical (and indeed, later in the flight, Aldrin quoted Armstrong's utterance with the "a" included).

That First Step was watched around the world by an estimated 650 million viewers, potentially making it the most viewed television event in history (unless 700 million really did watch the Our World broadcast in 1967!). Millions more listened-in on the radio. There are estimates that 93% of televisions in the US were tuned the broadcast.

To watch the historic event, people gathered around television screens at home, or wherever they could find them. In Australia, where television ownership is still relatively low, crowds gathered around the shopfronts of any building displaying a television, like the bank shown below, since the Moonwalk occurred around lunchtime. School children spent the day in front of sets in the classroom or assembly hall. Seasoned newsmen around the world, like your famous Walter Cronkite, struggled to convey their emotions as the ancient dream of touching the Moon was realised in Armstrong's "small step".

On the Surface of the Moon
After ensuring that the Moon’s surface could bear his weight, Armstrong moved around a little, collecting a contingency sample of lunar soil – more correctly called regolith – and a couple of small rocks, in case he had to make a quick retreat to the LM. He also took a series of photographs. At least there would be something for the scientists if Eagle had to make an emergency departure! On the other side of the Moon at the time, Col. Collins was disappointed to miss the historic moment of Armstrong’s first step.


Sixteen minutes later, Col. Aldrin began backing cautiously out of Eagle’s hatch to join Armstrong, making a joke about not locking them out of the LM. On reaching the surface, an awestruck Aldrin described the vista before him as “magnificent desolation”.

As they inspected their spacecraft and their surroundings, both astronauts found their suits comfortable to walk around in, although they found it difficult to stand up again after bending down to pick up an object. 

Ceremonial Activities
As a momentous historic event, the Moonwalk included several ceremonial activities, commencing with the unveiling of a small commemorative plaque, marking the place that humans first landed on the Moon, that was attached to between the third and fourth rungs of the LM ladder. At 109:52:19 GET, the two astronauts gathered around the Eagle’s ladder and ‘unveiled’ this plaque by removing its cover. Armstrong then read the inscription aloud for everyone back on Earth.

Armstrong reading the plaque, with Aldrin beside him. You can almost see the astronauts' faces!

After this moving moment, Mr. Armstrong and Col. Aldrin removed the television camera from the MESA and set it up on a stand, so that it could view their field of operations as they went about performing the real work of their mission.

Although not listed on their procedure checklist, the astronauts' next ceremonial task was setting up a US flag, just as the polar explorers of the past have done on reaching their goals. Since the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty, established in 1967, prohibits any nation on Earth from claiming ownership of the Moon, the US Government has been very careful to state that the flag-planting is purely symbolic, recognising the United States as the first country to land on the Moon, but not representing territorial claim.

The astronauts found it difficult to insert the flagpole into the lunar surface and had trouble extending the arm designed to stretch out the flag to its full extent on the airless lunar surface. However, this worked to good effect, creating the impression that the flag was actually waving in a breeze.

Aldrin poses with the "waving" flag

When the astronauts planted the flag on the Moon's surface, an identical flag was raised in the MOCR.

As a symbolic act of international representation, a silicon disc about the size of a 50-cent piece was placed on the Moon's surface. It contains goodwill messages in the form of statements from leaders of 73 countries around the world, although the USSR and the People's Republic of China are not included.

A final symbolic event took place a little while later, at 110:16:30 GET, when President Richard Nixon made the first interplanetary phone call from the Oval Office in the White House directly to the astronauts on the Moon. Armstrong and Aldrin stood before the television camera to receive the call, so it could be telecast as a split-screen, showing both the astronauts and President Nixon in conversation. The President praised the astronauts for their historic achievement, adding “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of Man’s world… For one priceless moment in the whole history of Man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”

Down to Work
After the ceremonial activities, the real work of the Apollo-11 astronauts began. Aldrin conducted experiments to determine the extent of an astronaut’s mobility, attempting to run and hop like a kangaroo. He also took a core tube sample of the regolith, although he was not able to drive a core tube far into the surface.

Two more images destined to become iconic, I'm sure. Aldrin on the lunar surface, and a close-up of the impression his boot is making in the regolith!

Mr. Armstrong carried out geological observations and collected bulk samples of rock and regolith. He took a large number of photographs of the lunar surface, from close-ups of rock structures and regolith to panoramas and views of craters.

Because Armstrong was usually carrying the camera, the majority of Apollo-11 photographs of an astronaut on the lunar surface show Col. Aldrin. The picture above is one of the rare images – as distinct from television coverage or film – of Armstrong on the lunar surface.

Col. Aldrin set out the EASEP (Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package), the first set of scientific instruments to be placed on the Moon. EASEP instruments include: a seismic detector to measure Moonquake activity, a laser reflector that can be targetted from Earth to precisely measure the distance between our planet and its satellite; a solar wind particle collector; and even a tiny detector to measure the characteristics of lunar dust. Tracking stations on Earth are now collecting data from these instruments to continually monitor conditions around the landing site, even though the astronauts have departed (bringing the solar wind collector sheet back with them to Earth for analysis). 

Aldrin setting up the EASEP seismic detector

The solar wind particle collector

The lunar laser ranging experiment for making precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon

Back to the LM
After 2 hours 31 minutes and 40 seconds, Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin concluded their activities on the surface of the Moon, loading back into the LM some 47lbs of lunar rocks and regolith. They had taken 339 images of the lunar surface and their activities, and walked a total of 1100 yds, travelling a maximum of 67 yds from the LM. The extent of the Apollo-11 lunar excursions could be contained within a football field, but from this small beginning future missions will expand the range of their activities, exploring further away from the LM.


Back aboard Eagle, the astronauts’ first chore was to pressurise the cabin and begin stowing the rock boxes and film magazines. To allow for the weight of the lunar samples, the astronauts’ lunar overboots, life support backpacks, spacecraft trash, and any other gear no longer required, were jettisoned onto the Moon’s surface (proving that humans can leave litter anywhere!).


Elated but exhausted, Armstrong and Aldrin then took time to rest and get some sleep, Col. Aldrin curled up in the limited floor space of the LM, while Armstrong rigged up a sleeping place on the cover of the ascent engine. Neither of them slept well, though future lunar crews will have proper hammocks, I'm told.

After more than 21½ hours on the Moon, Mr. Armstrong and Col. Aldrin prepared their ship for lift off, firing their ascent engine just one minute behind the flight plan scheduled time at 124:22:01 GET. The blast from the engine appears to have knocked over the flagpole planted by the astronauts, but that didn’t dampen the crew’s spirits as the ascent engine worked as expected and set them on a trajectory to rendezvous with Col. Colins in Columbia! 

This article has been lengthy, but there has been so much to cover with such a historic mission. I'm going to pause at this triumphant moment in the story, and will continue with a final wrap-up later this month, when we will hopefully have even more information as the lunar samples are analysed and the Apollo-11 crew are released from isolation.




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Science / Space Race

[July 18, 1969] The Greatest Adventure Lifts Off (Apollo-11, Part 1)

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Two days ago, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy's Pad 39A, destination: Moon.  KGJ, our affiliated TV station, will be simulcasting CBS coverage of the landing and Moonwalk starting at noon, Pacific time, on July 20th, and going all day from then.

Please join us for this once-in-a-lifetime event!


by Kaye Dee

"Lift off. We have lift off”, Launch Control at Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) excitedly announced, as Apollo 11’s Saturn-V thundered off the pad just two days ago! While a Saturn-V liftoff is no longer a new occurrence at KSC, this launch was special. An astronaut crew is now on the way to fulfill the millenium-old human dream of reaching the surface of the Moon!

Describing Apollo 11 as Mankind’s “greatest adventure” has already become hackneyed and overused. And yet, I didn’t really feel that I could give this article today any other title – because the attempt to land the first astronauts on the Moon is an incredible adventure: some commentators are calling it the greatest human adventure since our hominid ancestors ventured out of Africa to explore the world. Is that hyperbole? Perhaps. But it is a daring exploit to venture out from our home planet, across a totally inimical environment, and actually set foot on another world for the first time.


This mission is exciting, complex and – yes – dangerous, so to follow it all, I’m once again going to divide my coverage of it into two parts, beginning today with some background for the mission and its launch. The second part will follow, after the astronauts’ (hopefully) successful return to Earth.

Where to Land?
Operational and engineering considerations have played the major role in dictating where the first astronauts will land on the Moon. Over the last two years, intense analysis has gradually winnowed down some thirty possible landing sites originally suggested based on Lunar Orbiter images and Surveyor lander data and more recent close-up imagery from Apollo-8 and 10.

Several constraint parameters have determined the Apollo-11 landing site and its backup landing locations. The Moon has a peculiar lighting characteristic, in that it reflects the light from the Sun directly back into your face, and it was a concern to the astronauts that they might be dazzled by this reflected light while trying to land. To avoid this, they wanted to have the Sun only about 10 degrees above the horizon, meaning that the Lunar Module (LM) must fly in from the east with the Sun behind it, to land shortly after sunrise, when surface objects cast revealing shadows to identify possible hazards around the landing site.


This trajectory for landing means that the landing site had to be east of the lunar meridian, so that if the launch was delayed for a few days, back-up sites would still have suitable lighting.  NASA wanted the site to be within 5° of the lunar equator, as a higher latitude site would consume more fuel, and fuel economy is an important consideration for this first landing attempt. Finally, mission planners wanted a relatively flat landing site for the initial landing, free from sharp ridges, large boulders or steep sided craters.


A “Water Landing” on a Dry World
These constraints required the location for the first manned lunar landing to be a “mare” region (those areas thought by ancient sky-gazers to be lunar seas) near the Moon’s equator, with the choice settling on the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). This area provided two possible landing targets designated ALS (Apollo Landing Site)-1 and ALS-2.

Map showing the final five prospective landing sites for Apollo-11. Site 2 is the selected location for the landing attempt

The selected site, ALS-2, is only 25 kilometres southeast of the Surveyor-5 landing site, and when Apollo 10 made a low pass over the spot it received a favourable report from Commander Tom Stafford. 

Apollo-10 view of the Apollo-11 landing site

ALS-2 would also allow a two-day recycle in the case of a delay, to the next back-up site in Sinus Medii. Last, but not least, the choice of ALS-2 has made the scientists happy, since it will provide them data from a typical mare site.

A Crew to Make History
For the astronauts of Apollo-11, becoming the crew that would make the historic first lunar landing attempt has been a matter of luck and crew rotation, rather than deliberate selection. As the back-up crew for Apollo-8, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were automatically rotated into the prime crew for Apollo-11. The third member of that back-up team, Fred Haise, was replaced by Michel Collins, following his return to flight status after surgery for a bone spur in his neck. (Haise has now been switched to the Apollo 14 crew).

L. R. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin

We already know that Apollo-10 was a brief contender to make the first landing attempt, while had that mission failed to achieve all its “rehearsal” objectives, Apollo-11 would now be repeating its flight plan. In that case, Apollo-12 would have become the first landing attempt – and should Apollo-11 fail to achieve its landing objective, Apollo-12 may yet become the first Moon landing mission.

While perhaps not “hand-picked” for the job, the current Apollo-11 crew, formally announced on 9 January this year, are certainly up to the task of ensuring the success of this history-making spaceflight!

Apollo-11 crew portrait at the announcement of their selection

Spaceflight Veterans
Each member of the Apollo-11 crew is a veteran of one previous space mission, so we have met them before in the annals of the Journey.

Mission Commander Mr. Neil Armstrong, 38, was the Command Pilot of the Gemini-8 mission, which experienced NASA’s first in-flight emergency. He safely rescued that mission by drawing on his extensive test flight experience. As a civilian, Mr. Armstrong earns $US22,500 a year from NASA, making him the most highly paid of all the astronauts.

A lovely portrait of the Apollo-11 crew with their wives and children, from Life magazine

USAF Colonel Edwin Aldrin, 39, known to his family as “Buzz” and to his astronaut colleagues as Dr. Rendezvous, is the designated Lunar Module Pilot (LMP). Col. Aldrin was the Pilot of Gemini-12, performing three successful spacewalks. If the onboard radar fails, this is a man who can manually complete the rendezvous using a sextant and a slide rule!

Also a Colonel in the US Air Force, Michael Collins is the Command Module Pilot (CMP) for this mission. His first spaceflight was Gemini-10, for which he was the Pilot, performing both a “stand-up” EVA (standing in the hatch of the spacecraft) and a partially-successful spacewalk.

Who’s First Out the Hatch?
At the very first press conference for the Apollo 11 crew in January, on the assumption that it would be the first landing mission, a reporter raised the question of who would be the first astronaut to step onto the Moon. Early mission flight plans and timelines noted that the LM Pilot would step out first, and this scenario was consistent with the practice on the Gemini missions, where the Pilot would make the Extravehicular Activities (EVAs), rather than the Command Pilot.

Fish-eye view of astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong as they train in a mock-up lunar module

However, in April it was announced that Mr. Armstrong, as mission commander, would be the first to step onto the lunar surface. Col. Aldrin, apparently expecting to be first out of the hatch, is rumoured to have been put out by this, especially when there were some stories flying around that he had been sidelined in favour of Armstrong because the commander was a civilian. Aldrin is said to have felt this to be a slight to the military.

A Quiet Hero
There is an official NASA rationale for the decision that Mr. Armstrong should be the first person to exit the LM and step onto the lunar surface: the interior design of the Lunar Module and the physical locations of the two astronauts inside the cabin makes it more practical for Armstrong to be the first one out. As LMP, Col. Aldrin will stand on the right side of the LM, while Mr. Armstrong, on the left, will be closest to the hatch opening.

Diagram of a forward view of the LM, showing the Commander's station the let and the LMP station to the right. It would have been difficult for Armstrong and Aldrin to swap places in this very cramped interior

I have heard through the grapevine at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station that senior NASA managers decided unanimously in March that they wanted Mr. Armstrong to be the First Man on the Moon, because they felt that the first human to set foot on another world should be someone like the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh – a calm and quiet person. Armstrong fitted this mould as “the example of the great American hero – calm, quiet, softly spoken, with absolute confidence and with no ego”.

Charles Lindbergh and Neil Armstrong – seen by NASA managers as two men in the same quietly heroic mould. There is certainly something similar in their facial expressions

Flight Operations Director Deke Slayton is also said to have felt that, as Commander, it was a matter of protocol that Mr. Armstrong should be first out the hatch, especially as he was senior to Col. Aldrin, having joined the astronaut corps in Group Two, while Aldrin entered in Group Three.

But whatever the reasoning, as long as the landing on the lunar surface is a success, Neil Armstrong looks set to become the astronaut whose name will reverberate through history as the First Man on Moon in just a few days’ time.

Symbolic Callsigns
As was the case with Apollo-9 and 10, Apollo-11 requires separate callsigns for the Command and Lunar Modules when they are operating independently at the Moon. Given the globally significant nature of this flight, and its symbolic role in winning the Space Race for the United States by landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface ahead of the USSR, the crew, according to Mr. Armstrong, were inundated with suggestions for the names of their spacecraft.

NASA Public Affairs wanted the Apollo-11 crew to be “less flippant” in selecting their spacecraft names following the more light-hearted choices of the Apollo-9 and 10 crews. While I’ve heard that the names Snowcone (CM) and Haystack (LM) were referred to early in mission planning, ultimately the Apollo-11 astronauts selected the names Columbia (for the CM) and Eagle (for the LM) as being suitably representative of the historic nature of the mission.

1915 US coin depicting Columbia and the American eagle

Columbia (a feminine form derived from the name of Christopher Columbus) is the traditional female personification of the United States. This name is also a nod to Jules Verne’s spacecraft “Columbiad” (from the 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon), which was the name the Apollo-8 crew wanted to use for their historic Command Module.

The obverse of the Great Seal of the United States depicts a bald eagle carrying both an olive branch and a bundle of arrows in its claws, symbolising war and peace

The bald eagle is, of course, the symbolic bird of the United States, depicted on the Great Seal of the United States and the National Coat of Arms. It also appears on the seal of the US Department of the Air Force – and Col. Aldrin and Col. Collins are both USAF officers.

And a Symbolic Mission Patch
The association of the eagle with the United States is a motif that also occurs in the design of the Apollo-11 mission patch. In fact, the deciding factor in selecting the name “Eagle” for the Lunar Module was the patch design already under development, that depicted an American bald eagle landing on the Moon.


Mr. Armstrong’s backup, Captain Jim Lovell, is credited with originally suggesting the symbol of an eagle on the mission patch.

Some early sketches for an Apollo 11 patch were prepared by Allen Stevens of Rockwell International, who has been involved with the development of several Apollo mission patches, but Astronaut Collins seems to have had a major role in the final design.

Allen Stevens early designs for the Apollo-11 patch incorporated the names of the crew and the Roman numeral XI

Col. Collins found a depiction of a bald eagle in a National Geographic book on birds that he considered ideal – the eagle with its wings partially folded, swooping down with its talons extended.(left) A beautiful eagle painting by National Geographic Society staff artist Walter A Weber, first published in the July 1950 issue of National Geographic magazine, was re-used and re-oriented (below) for the book that inspired Michael Collins

Tracing the picture, Collins then sketched in the Moon’s surface to give the impression that the eagle was landing, and included an image of the Earth in space in the background above the eagle’s right wing. In the final patch design, the eastern seaboard of the United States and parts of the northern portion of South America are visible on the globe, with a scattering of white clouds over the blue oceans.

As the design evolved, the crew decided on a departure from previous patch designs, leaving off their own names so that the patch could be said to represent all the people involved in the mission, not just the astronauts. Since Armstrong felt that the Arabic number ‘11’ would be more easily understood around the world, the use of the Roman numeral, or Collins’ suggestion of writing out “eleven” were both dropped as design elements.

An interim step towards the final mission patch design

Images and Impressions Matter
NASA simulator instructor Tom Wilson suggested that the eagle carry an olive branch, as a symbol of the United States’ peaceful intentions in landing on the Moon.

The olive branch was added to the design, depicted as being carried in the eagle’s beak. To round out their design, the three astronauts selected a naturalistic black for the sky, with blue and gold edging around the around the outside of the circular patch.

NASA illustrator James Cooper produced the finished artwork for this design. However, when the crew submitted it for approval, it was rejected on the basis that the eagle’s powerful talons, extended stiffly below it, were "too warlike", and might give a wrong impression in our Cold War environment, where propaganda imagery matters.

Recalling that in the Great Seal, the eagle carries an olive branch in one set of talons, the olive branch was switched from the beak to the eagle’s claws. Although Col. Collins expressed the thought that “the bird looked a little uncomfortable” depicted in this way, the design was approved and became the official mission patch.

Artist James Cooper hands over the finsihed version of the final artwork for the Apollo 11 patch to Astronaut Collins

Tracking Apollo to the Moon
For the previous Apollo missions, I hadn’t written in any detail about the worldwide NASA tracking network that will be following every second of Apollo-11’s voyage to the Moon and back. Time to fix that, as none of the lunar missions would have been possible without it.

NASA’s global Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) will be constantly monitoring the flight, using the resources of 17 stations, 4 ships and the 8 aircraft that form the Apollo Range Instrumented Aircraft (ARIA) fleet.

Map showing the MSFN deployment for Apollo-11's Trans Lunar Injection. The irregular circles mark the reception areas of each tracking station, ship or aircraft

Three MSFN stations – at Goldstone in California, Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, Australia, and Fresnedillas, near Madrid, Spain – were specifically constructed to support the Apollo missions, being deliberately sited close to existing stations in NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) so that the two networks could work together for lunar operations.

The MSFN tracking station at Goldstone, California

Working Together
The DSN facilities at Goldstone, Canberra and Madrid (which have similar 85ft dishes to those used by the MSFN), will be shadowing the MSFN stations to provide back-up, as well as complementing spacecraft communications at the Moon. During the period when the Columbia and Eagle will be operating independently – with the CM in lunar orbit, while the LM transports Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface and back and during their surface activities – the DSN facility will support tracking and communication with one spacecraft while the MSFN station supports the other.

The "Pioneer" DSN antenna at Goldstone, with its "Apollo Wing", housing the equipment added to support Apollo missions

In addition, for the planned live television broadcast from the lunar surface during the LM crew’s historic first Moonwalk, the new 210ft antenna at Goldstone is anticipated to be the prime receiving station for the signals from the Moon, with the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia providing back-up. I’ve mentioned the Parkes telescope previously, in conjunction with the Our World global satellite television broadcast, but what is not generally known is that the design of this 210ft radio telescope was, in fact, the prototype on which the new 210ft dishes of the DSN are based.

The Parkes Radio Telescope, photographed on the evening of Apollo 11's launch

The new "Mars" 210ft antenna at Goldstone

A Tough Training Schedule
It’s hard to believe today that when Alan Shepard made the first Mercury spaceflight, he had only conducted 150 hours of mission simulations. Given the critical nature of the Apollo-11 flight, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins worked 14-hour days, 6 days a week for a full 6 months before the mission. They each spent over 1,200 hours in simulators wrestling with a continuous stream of missions, frequently peppered with emergencies, equipment malfunctions, and potential catastrophes to test their knowledge, skill, and coolness to the limits.

Armstrong and Aldrin practicing their lunar surface activities

CMP Collins concentrates during a session in the LM simulator

Col. Aldrin during survival training at the U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command Life Support School in Texas

It's well-known that Mr. Armstrong has demonstrated his coolness in emergency situations. Not only did he successfully bring the stricken Gemini-8 safely back to Earth, in May last year, he survived the crash of a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle and shortly afterwards was back at work in his office at the Manned Spacecraft Centre as if his narrow escape had not occurred!

Scientist-Astronaut Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a professional geologist, also worked extensively with the Apollo-11 crew, preparing them for lunar rock collecting. After such thorough preparation, the astronauts surely know every twist and turn of the normal and emergency operational procedures, as well as every capricious component of the spacecraft’s 26 subsystems.

Mr. Armstrong and Col. Aldrin on a geology field trip at Sierra Blanca, Texas

Bringing It All Together
Apollo-11’s Lunar Module, LM-5 and its Command and Service Modules, CSM-107, arrived at Kennedy Space Centre in January. LM-5 has several differences from Apollo 10's Lunar Module, customising it for an actual landing on the Moon. These include: a VHF radio antenna to facilitate communication with the astronauts during their time on the lunar surface; a lighter ascent engine and more thermal protection on the landing gear. The LM is also carrying a scientific instrument package – the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP), which will be deployed on the Moon.

LM-5 being checked out at KSC prior to being installed for launch in in the Saturn-V

Apollo-11’s Saturn-V vehicle, AS-506, was rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on 20 May, and transported to Launch Pad 39A while Apollo 10 was still on its way to the Moon. A countdown test was conducted between 26 June and 2 July, which went extremely smoothly, without any major issues – hopefully a good omen for the entire mission.

The Apollo-11 launch vehicle arrives at Pad 39A, in preparation for the historic flight

Avoiding Any Infections
To prevent the crew from picking up any infections that might lead to illnesses causing delays to the mission, since a brief visit home with their families (whom they will not see up close again after their release from quarantine in August if all goes to plan) for the Fourth of July holiday, the astronauts have been kept carefully isolated from all un-necessary contacts.

A dinner with the crew, proposed by President Nixon for the night before launch, was cancelled, while at their last press conference before the launch, Mr. Armstrong and Colonels Aldrin and Collins were stragetically placed on a platform so that air flowed from behind them towards the assembled press corps, in hope that this would keep any germs from the audience reaching the astronauts!

The Apollo-11 crew at their final press conference, hoping to avoid any germs!

At their final medical checks, all three astronauts were pronounced fit and ready for flight – so one assumes that the precautions worked as intended. 

Pre-flight Preparations
The final preparations for Apollo-11’s launch continued the now established pattern for Apollo missions, with an early morning wake-up for the crew, the traditional pre-flight breakfast of steak and eggs with Flight Operations Director Deke Slayton and the backup crew, followed by the ritual of suiting up. A small folding shovel with plastic sample bags were placed in the special pocket of Mr. Armstrong’s spacesuit, to be used should the astronauts’ stay on the Moon be cut short for any reason: at least they would return to Earth with a few lunar soil samples.

L. The Apollo-11 crew enjoy their traditional pre-flight breakfast; R. Suited and ready for space, the astronauts enter their transfer van for the ride to the launch pad

When the crew arrived at Pad 39A, the White Room crew chief, Guenter Wendt, greeted them holding a 4ft long "key to the Moon", which he presented to Neil Armstrong. Mr. Armstrong in turn gave Wendt a card reading, “Space Taxi ticket, good between any two planets.”

At three minutes and twenty seconds before launch, the countdown became automated, and over 450 personnel at the consoles in Launch Control Firing Room 1 turned their eyes to watching that very special Saturn-v leave the tower and soar into the sky.


A Million Spectators?
The Cocoa Beach Chamber of Commerce estimated that perhaps one million spectators would gather to watch the launch of Apollo-11 from the highways, beaches and waterways within the vicinity of Kennedy Space Centre. CBS news later reported that the number was closer to 300,000; local motel owners, charging rates as high as $65 a night, were reportedly disappointed. Nevertheless, the essentially uncountable number was still the highest ever to attend a space launch.

A crowd of spectators in Titusville, near KSC, ready to watch the launch

These spectators included a group from the American Poor People's Campaign demonstrating against the expenditure on space exploration, when people are going hungry in the United States. The Campaign director, Mr Hosea Williams, said the demonstration included hungry people from five southern States. “We're not against things like the space shot” he said, explaining the reason for their protest. "But there's been a miscalculation in priorities". NASA Administrator Paine agreed to host protesters as spectators at the launch. Awestruck, by the powerful spectacle of the rocket's launch, they prayed for the astronauts, despite protesting the mission itself.

Although President Nixon decided to watch the launch on television in the White House, Vice President Agnew and former president Johnson and his wife were among the VIP guests at the launch site. Other dignitaries at the launch included the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, four members of the Cabinet, 19 state governors, 40 mayors, 60 ambassadors and 200 congressional representatives. There were approximately 3,500 press, radio and television representatives: while the majority were from the United States, 55 other countries were also represented in the media contingent.

President and Mrs. Johnson, with Vice President Agnew, were among the VIPS watching the launch from Kennedy Space Centre, along with a huge press corps.

It is estimated that 25 million people tuned in to watch the launch in the US, while thanks to satellite communications, the lift-off was televised live in 33 countries, including Australia. Millions more around the world listened in to radio broadcasts of the launch.

Despite the late night timeslot of the launch here in Australia (11.32pm), thousands of households around the country stayed up to watch. Like many other parents, my sister and her husband roused their children from bed to join the viewing audience: they even sat their eight-month-old baby on the couch to watch. He may not remember it, but at least in the future he will be able to honestly say that he saw the launch of Apollo-11!

Lift off into History!
At last, on 16 July, at 9.32am EDT, Apollo-11 lifted off into history, rising slowly at first from the launch pad.  The three astronauts have reported that they were not aware of the moment of lift-off, but first felt a powerful thrust to their backs, accompanied by a distant rumble, sounding rather like a train. They were thrown left and right against their straps in spasmodic jerks as the 36 storey vehicle adjusted itself to wind effects, to keep on the planned course.


Within forty seconds the Saturn-V was travelling faster than the speed of sound, and the noise in the cabin dropped away. However, Commander Armstrong noted that those first 40 seconds of flight were uncomfortably noisy and rough, much worse than the Gemini Titan launches. He reported that he found it was hard to hear any voices in his earphones, even with his helmet on.

Twelve minutes into the flight, Apollo-11 entered a near-circular Earth orbit. Within 30 minutes, the astronauts were feeling so relaxed that they were playing with the onboard still and movie cameras as they plunged into the night over Tananarive. The powerful FPQ6 radar at the Carnarvon tracking station in Western Australia confirmed that Apollo-11 was in the planned parking orbit, and on the second orbit over Carnarvon, the Capcom at Houston gave the astronauts the “Go!” for the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn that would send Apollo-11 on the way to the Moon.

The FPQ6 radar at Carnarvon tracking station that confirmed Apllo-11's initial orbit. This MSFN station also relayed the TLI confirmation to the spacecraft

On the Way to the Moon

With the Apollo-11 crew now on their way to the Moon, I have no more photos from the mission to share, until they return to Earth with their film canisters hopefully filled with wonderful images from the flight.

To quickly summarise the activities since TLI, about 30 minutes post-TLI, Col. Collins performed the transposition, docking, and extraction manoeuvre, needed to free the LM for the voyage to the Moon. Since leaving Earth orbit, the Apollo-11 crew has quickly settled into routine. After the docking with the LM, they astronauts exchanged their bulky pressure suits for their more comfortable white Teflon jump suits and consumed a lunch of beef and potatoes, butterscotch pudding, and brownies washed down with grape punch.

The crew's first in-flight meal included beef and potatoes, made possible by the new thermostabilised wet pack container technique that is expanding the range of available meals for Apollo flights

During that first day in en route for the Moon, the astronauts said that the Moon didn’t seem to be getting bigger, although the Earth was visibly shrinking. At 11 hours and 20 minutes after launch, they settled down for a sleep period, about 2 hours early, made possible by the cancellation of a mid-course correction.

Television Tryout
Just before 23 hours into the flight, the crew’s second day in space began with a wake-up call from Houston. Then, at the 30 hour mark, there was a 50 minute trial television broadcast from the spacecraft using the omni-directional antennae, which was received at the Goldstone tracking station. This impromptu broadcast showed some spectacular colour views of the Earth, I'm told, and provided practice for the crew's first public television broadcast a few hours later. The astronauts also showed themselves “running” in their seats, while asking if the medical team was receiving their heartbeat data. Goldstone reported they could see the astronauts trying to run in their seats, and Capcom Charles Duke in Houston indicated that the medical telemetry was being received.

This marks the point at which I will have to complete this article to send it via telex to the Traveller, so we’ll pick up the second part of story of Apollo-11's great adventure once the mission has returned, hopefully safely and successfully from the Moon.

Just the Beginning
If Apollo-11 achieves all its mission goals, it will be just the first small step in the exploration of our local neighbourhood in space, the true beginning of our road to the stars. 

Neil Armstrong, who will soon become the first person to set foot on another world has said “I think we’re going to the Moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul…we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream”. I think he’s right!




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