Fifty years ago today, US astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon, on Sunday, July 20, 1969, 4 minutes before eleven o’clock at night EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time). Here in NZ it was Monday, July 21, 2:56pm.
Some 600 million people around the world, about 20% of the global population at the time, watched those first steps in fuzzy B&W TV images. At least another billion listened to it on the radio. The latter certainly was the case here in NZ, where we did not yet have satellite TV. Instead, an RNZAF Canberra bomber stood by in Australia to rush videotape across the Tasman Sea in time for the NZBC evening news.
The “step” came some six and-a-half hours after the landing, a harrowing 13 minute drop into the void by Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar lander, with Armstrong and Aldrin on board, from 50,000 feet up in Lunar orbit. You can listen to that whole thing here in episode ten of the BBC podcast series, Thirteen Minutes to the Moon. Eagle landedat 8:17am, July 21st NZ time.
Or if you prefer having something to see, there is the following YouTube piece that combines views from the spacecraft’s 16mm camera with on-screen transcripts of the voices of Mission Control and the crew, plus displays of key facts about various moments in the descent, which ended with words almost as famous as those of the first step:
Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!
Which was actually not the standard technical response given during training. Clearly Armstrong had a touch of the poet about him.
But that personal, triumphal touch is understandable, given that he had come close to death twice as an astronaut, starting with his very first spaceflight in Gemini VIII, in 1966. After making the first Earth-orbit docking with an unmanned rocket, an essential procedure for the lunar flights, a thruster activated and could not be shut down. It threw the spacecraft around violently, sending Armstrong and fellow astronaut, Dave Scott (who would command Apollo 15), spinning at up to 50rpm while also tumbling and yawing.
With extraordinary calm, Armstrong saved the day by switching on the Reentry Control System, a separate set of thrusters that shut down the Orbital system and allowed him to slowly regain control. It did mean abandoning the mission, but it saved their lives, and possibly the entire space program. NASA played down how close they’d come to disaster and it never got much publicity until it was referenced in the late 90’s TV mini-series, From The Earth To The Moon.
The second close scrape came with his crash of the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), a god-awful kludge of a machine designed to give the astronauts a feel for flying the lunar lander, beyond what the computer simulations of the day could deliver.
Balanced on a gimballed jet engine to cancel 5/6 of the vehicle’s weight, thereby simulating lunar gravity (1/6 of earth’s), the system was unstable, especially in windy conditions. The astronauts hated it, but used it to practice lunar landing anyway. It did have an ejection seat!
In 1968 Armstrong’s vehicle ran out of thruster fuel and went out of control just 200 feet up. He ejected two seconds before it crashed and exploded. Unhurt, and as a typical test pilot, he simply shrugged off the crash, going on to fly between 50 and 60 landings in other LLTV’s.
All of this, together with his experience as a test pilot, including with the X-15 rocket plane in the early 60’s – regarded as the premier test pilot job in America before the space program – enabled Armstrong to land Eagle on the Moon: through all the computer alarms, manually flying the spaceship in the last minute over a rocky, dangerous landing area that the computer was steering them into, and touching down with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining. The word “cool” is overused: not here.
Yet even with these personal skills, Armstrong always referred to how “we at NASA” did the landing. He knew it was a massive team effort that pulled together many complex actions. The picture below is the Mission Control shift for the Apollo 11 landing. Steve Bales, the controller who made the crucial calls to ignore the computer alarms and continue the descent, is mid-top-right.
Several weeks earlier he had called an abort during a simulated landing because he had not recognised the alarm codes. Flight Director Kranz ordered them to be memorised, which was done by Bales and his backroom guru, Jake Garman. It was Garman’s call of, “Go, go, go“, that allowed Bales to make his call as Flight Controller, and they had to do this several more times during the landing as Armstrong anxiously waited – all while he and Aldrin dropped hundreds of feet every few seconds towards the lunar surface.
In fact the computer was working exactly as it was supposed to. It was later found that the Rendezvous Radar, switched on to track the Command ship overhead in case of an abort, had been bombarding the guidance computer with “requests”, 12,800 times per second, all because of a minor power phasing problem. The computer alarms were not a sign of malfunction but signals to the crew that it was overloaded, dumping these non-landing tasks, instantly re-booting and continuing the landing program. A modern laptop, though millions of times more powerful, would simply crash.
That the LM computer – “The Fourth Astronaut” – was able to do this in the first place was primarily due to two people. One was Dr Laning, who designed its Operating System (OS) from scratch. Its concept of an executive function that controls task processing on the basis of pre-assigned priority, is still the state-of-the-art for such systems.
The other was Margaret Hamilton, one of the pioneers of Software Engineering (she coined the term), who led the teams that designed the software running on that OS, and used the same principles of snapshot and rollback to allow instant restarts. She called the approach “kill and recompute from a safe place“. She was also in constant contact with Jake Garman during the landing. Given all this it’s a little hard to believe that software was never mentioned in NASA’s original computer contract, the first of all the contracts signed for Apollo.
With the magnetic memory disks of the day being too big and fragile, and no such thing as Solid State Drives (SSD’s), the software had to be woven into core-rope-memory, bundles of magnetic rings and wires that could not be wiped out by power loss or anything short of physical destruction. The job was done by woman who were expert weavers and watchmakers.
Similarly NASA ended up buying 60% of all the integrated circuits produced in the USA at the time: there was no other way to make a computer small enough for the spacecraft: 1 cubic foot of space, 55 watts power and 70 pounds of weight – all for 76Kb of memory.
Pictured below is the astronauts interface with the computer, the DSKY, which is explained further on the Vintage Space channel, hosted by space nerd Amy Shira Teitel.
This team effort, itself a culmination of intense work by 400,000 people for almost a decade, was the reason that Armstrong was more proud of the landing than his “small step“; he knew the latter was merely an afterthought, even if few outside NASA saw it that way. As ever, symbolism dominates.
It’s a strange fact that I have no personal recollection of all this, yet have a vivid memory of Apollo 8, despite it having occurred seven months earlier. I suspect the reason is that it was Christmas Day in NZ when the mission broadcast its famous TV message from the Moon.
So, in addition to the usual excitement of the day for a little boy, with the bright colours of tinsel and decorations and presents amid the lush green of the tree, right beside that was the strange, grey surface of the moon, sliding along the screen of our old B&W TV in that corner of our farmhouse living room.
We would not see the Earthrise photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew, for a couple of weeks. One of the most famous photos in history.
Incidentally, NASA insiders still regard Apollo 8 as the gutsiest mission of them all, even more so than Apollo 11.
It was a magical age: over the next three years I could come home from school, switch on the TV to watch the incredible flying machines of Thunderbirds…
…and then later that night or in the early hours of a morning, watch machines that seemed no less fantastic, on another world, complete with astronauts gambolling around in a car on the last three missions.
The Warkworth satellite station was completed in 1972, so I stayed home from school one day to watch, with Mum and Dad, one of the final moonwalks live from the Apollo 17 mission, which had the clearest and sharpest TV of all, and in colour, though we didn’t know it.
Not only Neil Armstrong believed that it was “one giant leap for mankind“, but most of the world did too. It seemed like a distinct break in human history. At the time it was not too difficult to believe that even more amazing space explorations lay ahead in my lifetime.
But it was not to be.
Within months of the landing, NASA’s budget, which had already peaked in 1965, was cut further as the Nixon administration struggled with economic recession.
The last three lunar missions, Apollo 18, 19 and 20, scheduled for 1973-74, were rapidly canned.
Senators and House members who had long opposed what they saw as a waste of money, got their revenge. One member, the execrably small-minded Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, was so fanatical that he ensured there was a budget line item to destroy all the jigs and jobbing tools needed to build more Saturn V’s, just to be sure.
But he’d probably become merely fashionable. With the Russians beaten, the American public also rapidly tired of Apollo. TV viewing numbers collapsed for later missions, even as their explorations of the Moon and the quality of their TV advanced spectacularly. In an age where the control of the Big Three Networks in the US was total, little or none of this was shown, aside from brief, edited clips. The execs decided that going to the moon was boring.
The spacecraft built for those final lunar missions would at least have an after-life, re-purposed for three missions to America’s first space station, Skylab – as was one of the Saturn V rockets, needed to punch 80 tons into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The other two Saturn V’s rest in Florida and Houston to this day. The LM’s went to museums or landfills.
One last Apollo Command ship was used for the forgettable – though hyped – joint US-Soviet mission in 1975. A drab little affair in LEO, whose anniversary also occurred this month but which is little remembered, and deservedly so. Looking back, its only meaningful outcome was that Deke Slayton, a member of The Original Seven Mercury astronauts, who had been dumped from flight status in 1960 because of medical paranoia over his heartbeat, finally made it into space.
And that was that! Not just for Apollo but for any meaningful manned space exploration. Apollo itself turned out to be merely one small step, and one not followed by any giant leaps. NASA would go on to achieve some notable successes over the decades, mainly in partnership with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), sending robots out to explore the Solar System. But it also became calcified, its arteries choked with fat, the fate of all bureaucracies.
Talk of manned missions to Mars was strongly discouraged and NASA set to work on the Space Shuttle, a design compromised by more budget cuts, which led to design compromises that ultimately killed fourteen astronauts and two shuttles decades later. A Space Station, the ISS, was built with the Russians, Europeans and Japanese in the 2000’s, using the Shuttles as proposed in the 1950’s, but it also seems like a step to nowhere.
When the Shuttle program itself ended in 2011 the NASA Administrator set a team of accountants to work up the lifetime cost, adjusting for inflation. They found that each Shuttle flight ended up costing more than each Apollo flight. In other words, rather than flopping around in LEO for three decades, the USA could have continued to send two teams to explore the moon each year, every year, from 1973 to 2003, for less money. Even that ignores the possibilities that would have been enabled by the ever-reducing costs of production line Saturn V’s. The Russians still use fifty year old designs for their rockets.
NASA has been effectively dormant since 2011, relying on Russia to send astronauts to the ISS. They have been building a giant rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), a sort of Saturn V for the 21st century. However, the massive cost overruns and endless slippages in its schedule – it might fly now in 2021 – together with a lack of missions for which to use it, have seen it dubbed the “Senate Launch System“, designed merely to distribute funding to selected US States. There should still be a role for NASA in exploring Deep Space, but as of now “Ichabod” might as well be written over their famous logo.
The future may well belong to billionaire space nuts like Bezos and Musk, children of Apollo who are acting upon their childhood dreams. Certainly their private sector rockets have demonstrated innovations and cost reductions that government space agencies, whether US, European, Chinese or Russian, thought impossible, and they are rapidly pushing ahead on developing spacecraft like the Dragon, unmanned versions of which already supply the ISS.
Aside from these private efforts, what’s held to be the legacy of Apollo changes with time, swinging back and forth between the euphoria of the day, to the bitter cynicism of the 1970’s, to a measure of pride in the 1980’s and 90’s (witness the success of the movie Apollo 13 in 1995) to the #Woke bullshit of the New York Time’s reflections now, not to mention their peddling of news ripped fresh from the pages of 1960’s Pravda. Even the Soviets had more grace in the moment.
But I think that the more time that passes the better it will look. America was very proud of what it did and mostly still is. It was an astonishing achievement that was probably fifty years ahead of its time. No other nation could have done it: marshalling the wealth and invention generated by its sprawling free enterprise system, with private companies giving their all, far beyond any profit motive, and an open, democratic, meritocratic system of government that self-corrected for mistakes throughout every level of the effort.
And contrary to The Listener’s sniffy pronouncement during the 30th anniversary, it was far more than just a “merely technical” achievement. Some writers and historians have opined that a thousand years from now, it may be the only thing remembered from our age. Moreover, as the Apollo astronauts themselves noted on their post-mission global publicity tours, everywhere they went they encountered people who congratulated them, thanked them, and said “We did it“.
The astronauts knew what they meant: all of humanity. There can be no finer legacy.
No Minister 