American History Hit - The Moon Landing

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

July 20th, 1969. Neil Armstrong descends from Lunar Module Eagle to the Moon's surface. A momentous moment in American, and human history. For more than a decade, pioneers in the US and Soviet Union had competed in the exploration of space, the final frontier. Jay Gallentine tells Don how new technology was developed to go where no one had gone before. How America won the Space Race.Produced by Freddy Chick and Benjie Guy. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is the 12th of September, 1962 in Houston, Texas. A crowd of 40,000 spectators is packed into the football stadium at Rice University

to watch President John F. Kennedy deliver a speech on the nation's space efforts. It has been five years since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, its first artificial satellite in 1957. In April 61, Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, followed by Alan Shepard's launch that May, and then John Glenn eight months later. While the U.S. is making progress in space against the Soviets, it still lags behind. In the sweltering Texas heat, Kennedy lays down the gauntlet, couching the space project in a larger Cold War ethos,

a great mission to achieve scientific superiority. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. The race to the moon is on. Money is pouring into NASA to develop new technology for something never before attempted. And after years of trials, tribulations, and tragedy, the Apollo mission is finally completed on July 20th, 1969,

when the Eagle lands on the moon and Neil Armstrong descends to its surface. America has won the space race. and a new era is born. Hello all, welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman. So glad you're listening. All around the world today, there are those of us of a certain age who can summon a still vivid memory of arguably the greatest exploratory endeavor in the history of civilization.

It came on July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong carefully climbed down the ladder of the lunar module, becoming the first human to step onto the moon. For me, an 8-year-old boy up far past his bedtime on a Sunday night, I remember watching those grainy images on our black and white RCA television, hardly able to grasp the gravitas of that event, simultaneously witnessed in real time by so many millions across the planet. I remember I was mostly confused about who was shooting the camera if Neil Armstrong was the first one out, but I was that kind of kid.

The first moonwalk would become an event of such profound meaning and implication as to immediately challenge our very concept of the universe and mankind's place in it. In ways, I'm sure, we've still not fully absorbed five decades later, if we ever will. I am proud and pleased to welcome back to the podcast, the writer Jay Galentine, author of two great histories of the space program, ambassadors from Earth, and Infinity Beckoned. And he's working on a new one right now entitled Born to Explore Out Next Year. On our two previous podcast episodes, Jay guided us through the early days of the space race and then further along into the Mercury and Gemini programs.

I invite listeners to circle back to those earlier episodes. You'll get a nice overview of efforts from World War II onward, both here and in the Soviet Union. Today, we're discussing the grand culmination of it all, the fulfillment of JFK's mission to reach the moon inside of a decade. Jay Galentine, welcome back to American History Hip. Hi, Don. Thanks for having me on. Jay, as the story goes, we are now long past the days of adapting V2 designs to become rockets and chimpanzees and dogs in orbit. Mercury has led to Gemini, Gemini to Apollo, all in a short span of years. I mean, looking back, it seems like a nice ordered process.

It was, I imagine, anything but. That's right. And I think it was the Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Sernan, who tried to put Apollo into perspective many years later. said something like we accomplished so much in so short a period of time that it set almost an unreal expectation for what you could do in a space program. Don't ever expect that kind of pace in the future. There's just going to be too much bureaucracy, too much arguing over the particulars. Apollo really broke the mold on that. So brief over you, Mercury got us up there. Gemini showed us how to get further out. What was Apollo intended to do? It was all about the landing, right?

Absolutely. Apollo was all about Kennedy's challenge of landing a person on the moon and bringing him safely back to the Earth. What kind of new technology was going to be involved in that? What do they need to test out? There were so many new things to test out that it prompted a whole separate program of Gemini. So Gemini was never in the queue. They were planning to go directly from mercury to Apollo. But people started to say, wait a second, we don't understand rendezvous and docking. We don't understand walking in space. We have this major new technology called fuel cells that we are going to be leaning on for the lunar voyage. And are we even going to be okay health-wise spending up to two weeks in space? And so these really big problems, big things to work out, led to a whole

separate program of Gemini. Jay, there are 11 manned Apollo missions, Apollo 7 to 17. But there was a series of earlier Apollo flights right back to the Apollo 1 tragedy. So let's start with that terrible and very sad day, that accident. I actually remember coming home from school. This is 1967, and my mom was riveted to the news. What happened in that event? Well, everyone thought that if there was a real danger, that it wouldn't happen during a test on the ground. for heaven's sake. They thought that it would happen during a launch or something out in space or even out at the moon. So this was not thought to be a particularly dangerous test at all. It was a brand new machine. It had never been flown with pilots inside it. One of the most complicated things that had ever been designed and built. And like so many things of that nature, it's a custom deal.

You don't know exactly how all the wiring bundles are going to fit. You don't know exactly. exactly how all the little doors are going to open and close, how all the pipes are going to run. It was a work in progress. And then on top of that, you had some major characteristics of this early Apollo capsule that, in hindsight, were a bad idea. Number one was the access door. So the thing was going to be pressurized from the inside. So don't you want the pressure holding the door closed like you have on an airplane? And so the hatch was actually this three-piece hatch, and it was heavy.

It was like 90 pounds. And it came completely out of the opening where the astronauts would crawl in and out. And so if you can imagine the person who's laying on their back in the couch and they have to reach behind them over their head with a tool to dismantle this hatch, getting out of that spacecraft is not going to be a quick thing. So that was something that was definitely a mark against the, crew getting out alive. The other issue was that simplify the design of the spacecraft. The gases that the astronauts would breathe were oxygen only. So there was no like nitrogen oxygen

mix. Way too complicated. It's already really complicated. We got to simplify things. And when oxygen is at 100% under 15 PSI like it was in the capsule, metal can light on fire. And so the speculation, the strong speculation is that there was a wiring bundle where its insulation had been worn off by the opening and closing of a little access door. And over time, it wore away to the bare conductors on the inside. There was some kind of spark or other source of ignition, and it licked the oxygen on fire. And so these three men, let's name them, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee. This is the first time we have a three-man crew. I mean, Gemini is basically two men, and then Mercury just famously won.

And so the third man's there, obviously, to be flying the command module while the lunar module goes to the moon. So this is the first time they have this configuration. A larger command module, a much bigger rocket will speak up in a moment. So they're figuring things out, as we see. Basically, during this test, this rocket was not going anywhere. They were just testing it out. They're sealed in there, and that oxygen-rich environment catches fire, and these guys just perish. It was horrible.

Yes, that's what happened. So the manned hiatus follows that. They take some time off because that was obviously a shock to the system. And that follows the accident 20 months. They don't put anybody up in the air. But during this time, there is a series of unmanned flights, Apollo 4. They skipped Apollo 2 and 3 in the numbering, I suppose, out of respect, to give some psychological distance from the event.

So Apollo 4 is the next one. Then 5 and 6. They are testing this new rocket. primarily. Am I right? This is a gigantic machine that has been invented for this process. This was a massive rocket. It was the largest operational rocket of its time, an incredible amount of thrust, an incredible amount of payload to orbit. There were a lot of things to work out on it. They had built the assembly building, 48 stories high, the equivalent of. The thing is gigantic to this day, it takes your breath away. The problem that they were facing was suddenly they had a

huge payload to carry off and get out of Earth's atmosphere, which included a lot more weight, not least of which was the lunar module. All of this extra rocket had to be built to house all of this stuff. So they overbuilt it, I suppose. This is the Saturn 5. It's just, to this day, if you go to those museums, you just can't believe how huge it was and really did the job well. Yeah, the scale of it was just unbelievable. I mean, the first time that I saw one in person, I had been reading about it for years, but then to go see one in person and see these rocket engines that just the injector plate alone is the size of a manhole cover. Every last thing on this very carefully engineered for performance as well as lightweight. You have the second stage of the Saturn 5, which is running

on liquid hydrogen, which is one of the trickiest things in the world to work with when it comes to rocketry. It has to be chilled far below that of liquid hydrogen. You needed a separate plumbing system to pre-chill the tanks. And they were out of weight and out of space for the second stage. And so they had to basically invent this common bulkhead between the two to separate these two propellants by millimeters that were hundreds of degrees different in temperature to make it all work. can work perfectly, it's just mind-blowing. Apollo 7 goes up. I truly never heard of this before I started preparing for this interview. I just skip over it. Everybody does. There was an Apollo 7 mission sent up with Wally Shira, Cunningham, and Isley. Actually, they are the first three-man crew,

now featuring the guy who drives the car and the other takes the lunar module. But it was Apollo 8 that really resonated with the American public. It's 1968 heavy-duty year, by the way. And it's Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, who becomes very famous for Apollo 13 later on, and Bill Anders. This happened during Christmas time. Jay, tell me why I remember this so fondly. It was a very, very important mission. It was the first time we went around the moon. It was the first time we went around the moon. And not only that, we went into orbit around the moon and orbited the moon on Christmas Eve. And there was a very famous episode where the astronauts, with prior permission, actually pulled out a copy of the Bible and read from Genesis

in lunar orbit. And religions aside, I think that it was a very moving thing. I like to think that it helped unite people and that it was a bit of a call for peace. This is Christmas time and Hanukkah and all kinds of things are going on in the world at this time. We've had a very, very rough year of assassinations. It was Vietnam. It was incredibly fraught time in the news all day long. Suddenly there's this very uniting mission where these three human beings doing what human beings have never done before. And we're seeing this moon up close from cameras that are inside. It's an extraordinary moment. It's also the first time that Earth is seen from space by human beings. It's the first time it's photographed anyway. And that becomes a very central image, really, to this day, of

the environmental movement. Absolutely. So there's this famous photo that was taken on Apollo 8 of Earthrise, where the astronauts are coming around the moon and they're actually able to see and take a picture of Earth rising in the sky. First time something like that had ever been experienced before by humans. Apollo 9, I'm insistent on naming these names because I don't want them lost in just the numbers and lists. Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweiger. Then 10, Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Sernan, who I actually met, who was a lovely guy, are about testing the equipment out, taking the lunar module to the moon, but not yet landing it. I mean, it's really quite a step-by-step process in each one of these missions. They've got to really work out all

the kinks. There's a lot of moving parts here. Absolutely. And the way that the missions ended up executing was not the original plan. Apollo 8, its original plan was not to fly out to the moon and go into orbit, but there were a number of factors driving that, a big one being the rumor that the Soviets were going to try to orbit something around the moon. And the Soviets were actually first to the moon with live creatures. They sent this spacecraft called Zand 5 there in September of 68, so a few months ahead of Apollo 8, but they didn't stay in. orbit. There were no people aboard. There were a couple of turtles aboard Zon 5, and there were some plants. And when I read the manifest, I just have this picture in my head that I hope isn't a

disservice to all the smart engineers who worked on Zon 5. But it's kind of this, okay, we launch in an hour. Everybody, go find something to put on board, you know, and people just like run outside and see what's laying in the yard and grab that. Okay, you got a couple turtles. Great. We'll put them in. Okay. Sargay's got some plants. Okay. we're going to put those into. And that's what rode to the moon. It was not on the Soviet's lunar rocket. It was a different rocket called a proton. And again, I think it was more of a stunt. It looped around. It did a figure eight and came back. But there was definitely this concern about what the Soviets were up to. And are they going to beat us? Are they going to beat us to this next way station? And at the same time, the lunar module was behind in its development.

Apollo 8 was supposed to be the mission that first flew the lunar module, and the thing wasn't ready. It was still too heavy. It had something like 100 major issues on it. I think in one of my books I tried to say something clever, like it had more issues than Reader's Digest. But it just wasn't ready to go. And so they said, okay, well, we're going to flip-flop the Apollo 8 and 9 missions. We're going to send 8 to the moon, bit of a stunt, but we think we can do it. and then by the time we're ready for nine, the lunar module should be ready as well.

Was it still a race at this point with the Russians at all, or had they officially lost? I think the Russians officially lost with Apollo 8. A lot of folks seem to think maybe it was Apollo 11 because that was the landing. But certainly at the time of Apollo 8, really by the time it launched, the Soviet hierarchy had said, you know what, we are not going to beat the Americans to the moon. The lunar module, you've mentioned it already. This is one of these crazy contraptions. It's a form follows function, for sure.

Basically, they just had to figure out everything they needed to do and then create a craft that could do that. It's purely purpose-driven because it's a crazy-looking machine. That's such a wonderful way to put it on. I might borrow that phrase sometime if you don't mind. But the lunar module was never the plan. I mean, once again, when Apollo got going, the plan was we are going to have one massive spacecraft. that launches from Earth and goes all the way out to the moon,

and that same massive spacecraft lands, essentially backwards on its tail. And then the astronauts slide down a pole or take an elevator, because this thing is so big. And all three of them are there on the surface, and then they blast off and come home. And quickly that proved to be technologically impossible, and logistically, it didn't make sense either. It's like, okay, well, that thing is going to have the parachutes

for landing back on Earth, why in the world do we need to take the parachutes down to the surface of the moon, plus all the maneuvering fuel to get home and the radios and the batteries and all this stuff, you know, the life preservers, and take that all to the surface of the moon? What if we had a separate vehicle that was purpose built just for landing? We leave all the stuff we don't need in orbit, and then we land with this machine and come back up. that's what led to the lunar module. It still astonishes me because you're adding into the process so many more steps, any one of which can fail and probably will and lead to the greatest most famous tragedy, certainly, in the history of man. I mean, God, we'll talk about that

at a moment, but it really is an incredible added obstacle to the whole success of mission. I'm amazed that thing even worked. You know, as you say, form completely followed function. It was the absolute bare minimum to land two people on the surface of the moon and bring them back. Everything was made as simple as possible. The rocket engines on that didn't even need ignition systems. They used propellants that would ignite on contact, simple valves. There were no pumps for the propellant. So it was actually a tank of helium that would pressurize the tanks and push the propellant through the lines, so we have more simplicity there and less mechanical devices to fail. But the thing was so small. I don't know if you've ever been in one, Don, but for the listeners out there,

there are a few lunar module simulators that are out there in some of the museums, and you can go inside them still. And the amount of space that you don't have there is staggering. The only place you can stand up is right up in front, and two people can barely stand side by side, you know, and your head is like an inch from the ceiling. There's just no space in there. It's like a launch in a harbor. I mean, you only use this thing for one purpose, which is to get from the shore to the ship.

It's not got to be fancy. It just has to do what it needs to do and get you there. Let's talk about how they chose where they were going to go. There's a whole other aspect to this moon mission where they set up rockets with surveying equipment. I'm talking about the Rangers series. There's seven flights, not to mention the lunar orbiter program. Both of these two flights, that's how we map out the moon.

before these guys even get there. Tell me when that happened and how it worked. I've written pretty extensively about Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor. They were these three unpilited robotic programs that flew out to the moon and conducted a variety of surveying, basically, of the surface. Now, Ranger had been planned and approved in advance of Apollo long before there was a plan to put people on the moon. But once Apollo got going, it was like, hey, wait a second, we're going to need to find out more about the surface of the moon. Hey, does anybody know about this program Ranger where they're going to fly into the moon and try to land a little seismometer in a balsawood ball and take a picture as we pile in? We're going to repurpose that for Apollo.

And they basically co-opted the entire program. There was this other program called Lunar Orbiter, where as the name would suggest, they were these really high-quality cameras that were orbited around the moon. There was a series of those. And Kodak actually invented a whole new type of film and chemical processing system to use on the lunar orbiters. Typically, like in the good old days, Don, when you and I shot photos when we were kids,

the film was developed in liquid chemical baths, which are very hard to use when you're in lunar orbit. And so Kodak engineers came up with this chemical sandwich called the bimat system. And so once the film was exposed, then it was pressed against a strip of chemicals that would develop the image and fix it right there. And then there was equipment that basically scan the negatives

right on board the spacecraft and then radioed them home. Those images were so good, and they were completely publicly available, that the Soviets actually used the lunar orbiter images very heavily when they were planning their own lunar excursions. And so lunar orbiter was the great, greatest method for choosing the landing sites. And the initial landing sites, obviously, were chosen for safety.

We're going to have something that is on the front side of the moon so we can be in constant radio contact, something that is nice and clear and wide open as possible, as rubble-free as possible, so we can have as safe of a landing as possible. Okay, Apollo 11. Talk to me about the crew. Neil Armstrong, Edwin, Buzz Aldrin. Michael Collins, how they choose them? What had they done to that point? They were not the original plan.

Once again, they fell into the rotation because of the switching of Apollo 8 and 9 missions. And so the way Deke Slayton ran his cruise is that you would get assigned to back up a mission. And then you would sit out the next two missions. And then you would be up for a prime slot on the mission that followed. And so astronauts kind of dreaded the dead-end assignments when you would get assigned to like back up the last Gemini mission because you're not going to go on to anything. There's nothing else in the queue.

They're not building any more capsules. It's kind of a dead-end gig. So had Apollo 8 and 9 not switch places and had the lunar module been ready earlier and whatnot, Armstrong and Aldrin very likely would not have been the first people to set foot on the surface of the moon. All three of these people were Cracker Jacks, Armstrong was a Navy pilot who flew in Korea, like Aldrin, flying off aircraft carriers,

became a test pilot, was far and away the most experienced test pilot beginning his astronaut career. Armstrong flew the X-1B. He flew the X-15 multiple times. He was praised by his colleagues for his deep understanding of the technical aspects of how all these systems worked. He was so enamored of flying that actually he earned his pilot's license before he had his driver's license as a kid. So that's Armstrong's background coming into this. There's a famous episode in the Gemini days when Armstrong gets caught into a twist. The spaceship is spinning like crazy and he very famously has a cool head and controls that spin despite the odds. Armstrong had so many close calls as a test pilot and sometimes it wasn't even when he was in the experimental aircraft. He had a propeller disintegrate in a B-29 that he was flying,

and underneath them they had an experimental aircraft. They're flying up to altitude, and then they're going to drop it, and the pilot inside goes off and flies the mission. And here they have a propeller disintegrate, and it takes parts of two other propellers with it, and they had to land a B-29, like one of the biggest propeller aircraft ever. On one of one propeller, and Armstrong isn't even the test pilot. You know, he was flying the right seat on that one. He had a very close call, as you say, in Gemini 8. That was the first actual hard docking in space where he and Dave Scott docked with this unpilited, basically a target, something to dock with. And there was a thruster that stuck on. And despite their attempts to resolve the issue, they weren't able to.

And the mission was aborted. And they were back down in the... the ocean just hours later. That was another close call. When he was training for the lunar landing, there was this crazy contraption called the lunar landing trainer that was a jet engine pointing down and a framework built around it with a seat and controls. And you took off and you had to balance on this crazy thing and then attempt a landing on it. And Armstrong said later that that was one of the most valuable things that he ever did. This thing was crazy. dangerous, but it was great training for a lunar landing, and he had to eject on one of his flights, you know, seconds off the ground. I'll be back with more from Jay after this short break.

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wherever you get your podcasts. Buzz Aldrin, huge personality, brilliant guy, had alienated a few other people in the space program at that point. That's right. I think Buzz is a good guy, but he's one of these people who is just so smart that it can be off-putting. He was another West Pointer, another Korean war pilot.

He actually shot down two Migs in combat over Korea. And then he went to school after the war, and he got his PhD in Astronautics. He wrote his PhD Thessonautics. on orbital rendezvous, in part because he was hoping to get selected as an astronaut, and he thought that that would be a good calling card. And I wouldn't disagree with that. But his application to be an astronaut actually was initially rejected because he wasn't a test pilot.

He was able to get in ultimately because the requirements changed, and he had thousands of flying hours under his belt. He was a good pilot. But he got onto a Gemini backup crew, eventually flew the last Gemini mission with Jim Lovell and then entered the Apollo rotation. How was that decision made that Armstrong would go first instead of Aldrin? That's a great question. The first thing that I would have to say is both astronauts were completely aware of the

significance of that event, the historical significance. Even though both of them would land at exactly the same time, which Buzz Aldrin has continuously pointed out in the intervening years, the person who actually set forward. on the moon first would be renowned. They would be the Lindbergh, right? But what it really came down to was how the door opened on the lunar module. So that was just a chance of engineering. So it opened inwards and it opened towards the lunar module pilot. So if you were standing in the cabin, the hinges were on the right and the handle was on the left. And so when it was opened, then it would make more sense for the commander to get out first.

And there were times when Armstrong and Aldrin would be in the simulator, fully suited up, practicing these maneuvers. And one day they actually tried to switch places so that Aldrin could get out first, even though the door opened up towards him. And they broke something inside the spacecraft. And it was like, well, this isn't going to work. It's ridiculous. It doesn't matter. You're both getting out.

So we'll just have the commander get out first. I have often thought about that, just musing on the difficulties. They're in these bulky suits. They're in that tiny little space because that lunar module is not big. And they're trying to manipulate their large selves out of a fairly small hatch. It's pretty incredible. I mean, obviously, they practiced it until it was perfect. They practiced it until it was perfect.

There's a funny story, though, that when Armstrong and Aldrin returned from their single moonwalk, They climb back up into the cabin, and obviously you come in on your hands and knees on the floor, and one of them noticed that there was a little part, a little piece of something laying on the floor. They had actually broken part of one of the controls maneuvering around to get out the hatch. I know the story you're telling about it. It's a toggle switch, and they can't take off unless they can switch that switch. And I think Aldrin had like a tip of a pen or something that he was able to use to engage it. It was a circuit breaker or something. It became a very famous pen and was marketed as such after the fact.

The pen that got us off the moon. Okay, so we're at the landing spot. This is July 19th. The craft has gone around and around. Let me explain what has happened for anyone who doesn't remember this or wasn't around at the time. There was a point in moving towards the moon when the actual command module separates from the lunar module and attaches. So at that point, they drop all the extra gear, all the extra ship, and they have these two crafts. attached at the tops of each one. And that's what's heading to the moon and goes around and around

the moon until they're ready to go. That's the position they're in when they set up for the landing. That's right. So these two craft are docked together. So on the nose of the cone shape command module was the docking hatch. And then on the top of the lunar module, so on the ceiling, basically, was its docking hatch. And they've ridden out to the moon linked together that way. And there's a very short tunnel between the two that you can float through. Columbia being the command module and Eagle being the lunar module. That's right, yeah. And so they go into orbit around the moon at about 70 miles of altitude.

And from there, obviously, it's a long trip down to the lunar surface. But after they undock, the first thing that Eagle, the lunar module needs to do after it undocks is dropped down to a lower orbit. So its descent engine is pointed forward and it's turned so that the windows are facing down towards the lunar surface so that the astronauts can study the landmarks as they pass and ensure that they're doing this properly. So the descent engine lights up and from the 70 miles where the command module will stay, the lunar module drops down to about 50,000 feet, which, was the limit that Apollo 10 had gone to. So they went as low as 50,000 feet. Their lunar module is too heavy to land.

And so then they came back up. That was their dress rehearsal. So at 50,000 feet, the astronauts are flying as if they're laying on their bellies, right? With the descent engine facing forward, that engine lights up and begins slowing the craft down so that they can ultimately land. So now at about 40,000 feet, there's a problem because the landing radar, which is mounted on the bottom of the lunar module near the engine, it has to be turned so that it can be pointed more towards the lunar surface. And so it's this thing that's about the size of a microwave oven maybe, and it's on the bottom of the lunar module, and it can pivot a little bit. But it needs to be pointed more towards the lunar surface.

So the whole lunar module has to rotate. Now the astronauts are flying as if they're laying on their backs, and they're looking straight up, no longer at the lunar surface. But they had to fly in that orientation so that the landing radar could pick up the lunar surface. They're heading for what's called the Sea of Tranquility. That was the intended spot. Is that right? Yes, that's right.

This is a big, obviously, wide open, flat place, they hope. That's the intent, yeah. It turns out to be otherwise. So at some point, the machine has to be pointed downward so that the feet are in position to land. Absolutely. So that's a maneuver called pitchover, which was a really exciting time for the astronauts because they've spent several minutes just kind of staring out the window at space and they can't see what they're headed towards. So at pitch over, now all of a sudden, if you can imagine the lunar surface like rising up from the bottom of the wind, windows, and then they can start to see the landing zone.

So at this point, they are much closer to the lunar surface. They're traveling much slower, still horizontally. And basically, you've got these two controllers where you can kind of tick, tick, tick your way down in intensity until you're ready to land. Another amazing aspect about the lunar module was that you had a rocket engine with a throttle, which no engine had ever had before. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. And so by increasing and decreasing the power of that motor, Armstrong is able to guide this ship in to what must have been a precisely chosen place. I mean, if anything was chosen, it was this one spot. But that's exactly what does not happen. That's right. So theoretically, you could have let the computer completely take you down all the way. You know, you could have just like stood there with your arms crossed in the lunar module and let the computer take you down. Armstrong being one of the greatest test pilots in the world easily was not about to let that happen. So I think all the astronauts had kind of agreed that they would be at the sticks for the actual landing. But the problem with Apollo 11 was that the targeting system was taking. them into a series of craters, basically. And so Armstrong, as cool-headed as ever, just takes that opportunity to say, okay, now I'm going to go into manual control and takes over and starts

maneuvering around for a place to land. And this is so different from flying an aircraft. If anything, it's much more like flying a helicopter than a fixed-wing aircraft. But essentially, when you land, you have to do so at no forward motion. So it's this process of finding a safe spot, maneuvering to it, and realizing that when you get to that spot, you need to be in hover mode. And you're not traveling any horizontal distance at all. You're just able to come straight down. And as he did so, he just kept finding more and more areas where there was rubble, there were boulders. It's not safe. It's not safe. It's not safe. they had about 30 seconds of fuel remaining, give or take, and Armstrong was finally able to find a place that was suitable and set the craft down there.

I think it was about seven kilometers away from where they were supposed to land. So in coming in, the issue is fuel. They're watching this clock because every moment they're burning more fuel and they only have so much. I mean, they had systems to both get onto the moon and then get off. Absolutely. So there's a completely different set of tanks and engine for the landing as there is for the ascent. So that was a completely separate system. Still, there's only so much juice in the tanks. And then the other problem is they could have aborted, but you get to this point where you're in the dead man zone, they called it. You're running out of fuel. You're too low to abort. You're too high to land. safely. And it's one of these which you're going to go with. Ultimately, Armstrong did have enough fuel left to land safely. Not only safely, he does an extraordinary job. He lands so lightly, as I understand it, that it almost didn't bring the craft down far enough. And that's why, this is a

fascinating little factoid. That's why it's so far from the ladder to the surface of the moon, because he landed it too lightly, too well, and therefore there was a bigger jump to make from the ladder. Yeah, so the lander didn't have hydraulics in the legs because it would have been heavy. It would have been complicated. How are you going to handle these fluids in space? All this stuff. And so the shock absorbers were this crushable metal honeycomb. Things only got to land on one time.

It's lightweight. It works great. And the stroke of that compression was so small that there was this unexpected huge gap between the bottom of the lander. and the top of the footpad. Why I take such pleasure in that moment, I guess it's just because it occurred to me then, watching it as an eight-year-old. Wow, that's a long way.

He's got to jump off that ladder. And that's why they hadn't planned it that way. Then comes the famous line, the eagle has landed. There's about five hours that we wait. I remember that. We all heard in the afternoon that they had landed on the moon, and now these two guys are going to get suited up and get ready. And boy, the whole world.

It's almost hard to explain it nowadays because of the availability of media, but you have everybody on planet Earth looking up at Moon and realizing that there are two human beings on that thing for the first time. Hard to understand, hard to communicate that to a modern audience. What an import that was. It's so true, Don, exactly right. So today we have movies on demand and audio and your music, you know, when you want it, how you want it, what you want. and here we have something that's happening in real time that is unifying for so many people on the planet. There was something like 600 million people who were tuning in for this first moonwalk.

I want to talk about one aspect of things. They were very prepared for things to go wrong, the sad tragedy of these guys either falling down or whatever. Things might have gone haywire. Several documents were created, one in particular by William Sapphire, the speechwriter, for Nixon. Let's talk about what Nixon was going to read should things go haywire up there. That's right. There's a really interesting backstory on this that I got from Frank Borman himself when I interviewed him. You were talking about Borman before and some of his legacy done. And after he left the astronaut corps, he had a little bit of a problem because his Air Force pension was not fully

vested. And so he had to find some government work to do for like a couple more years as pension was vested, reasonable. So he went to work as the NASA liaison to the Nixon White House. And when the preparations were underway for Apollo 11, it basically came to Borman's attention that there was no plan in place in case the mission wasn't successful. And so he approached the rest of the White House staff and said, you really need to have a plan in place. You need to have something for the president to be able to say in the event of an Apollo disaster. And one of Nixon speechwriters, William Sapphire, he wrote this speech, really a nice speech, actually, to be delivered by Nixon in the event that something happened to the lunar module

and Neil and Buzz would not be coming home. You can see this online. It's July 18, 1969. It was written to H.R. Haldeman from Bill Sapphire in event of moon disaster. I'll just read a few lines of what is a page and a half or so. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. Pretty good line. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin,

know that there is no hope for their recovery. They also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their family and friends. They will be mourned by their nation. They will be mourned by the people of the world. They will be mourned by a mother earth

that dared send to her for sons into the unknown. Oh my God, you choke up thinking of it. It's just an extraordinary, very real danger that they were going to face. We were going to be burying these guys as they sat up there still alive, presumably. It didn't happen. Thank goodness. It didn't happen. It's a magnificent speech. It's not a particularly long one, but I think you can agree, Don, that it was just excellently written. It's free from political implications. It's even free from speaking to the fact that this was an American venture. It speaks to the people of the world. I thought it was excellently written.

Agreed. On the flip side was a very interesting strategic discussion that Borman made to Nixon, who had all kinds of ideas himself, of course, of grand things happening while these guys. were up there, one of which was, of course, they would want to play the star-spangled banner while they were standing on the moon, having unfurled the flag. And Borman says, yeah, not such great idea. That's absolutely true. Nixon, he was as aware as anybody of the political implications of space success. He was definitely aware of that. And one of the ideas that was floated was having the two astronauts on the surface of the moon, here in an environment where literally every second of their activities has been planned out meticulously, you know, by an office full of people who've been working on it for years. No, no, no, we're going to have those two

stand doing absolutely nothing while the Star Spangled banner is played, not even a live band. I got to read from this memo. It's really comical to imagine this conversation. This is Borman to Nixon. Upon further consideration, I would propose that we do not play the Star-Spangled Banner in conjunction with your split-screen television presentation while the crew is on the lunar surface. My reasons for this are as follows. A, continuous modulation of the carrier waves for two and one-half minutes could, in fact, prove to be a potential hazard to the crew's well-being.

It would be possible to cut off ban and transmit from the control center, blah, blah, blah, all about that. Two, playing the Star-Spangled Banner would force the crew to play. stand at attention for two and one half minutes this time, plus the time allocated for unveiling the blow. Oh, my God. He's like, are you kidding me? We can't just have these guys up there just standing there at attention while we indulge ourselves. It was pretty amazing. This doesn't happen. It's an extraordinary experience we all had watching these guys collect rocks. Mostly in the images afterwards, we get the clarity of the grandeur of what this really was. When they get back on to that lunar module. Is it mission accomplished? Was everything done that they hoped would be done on that first landing?

Well, with the exception of returning home safely, that whole part of it, you've climbed to the top of Everest, still got to get home. Yes. So in terms of the landing and the sample collection and the science experiments, which were a late addition, but still got done, yes, absolutely. And there was a time during the moonwalk, you know, which was only like two and a half hour. It was just one single moonwalk, where Armstrong, as much of a procedures guy as anybody, actually deviated from the flight plan because he wanted to go explore a section of the moon that was beyond TV camera range. So it was kind of against the rules.

But he thought that there might be rock out crops there that would show a piece of lunar bedrock. And he had paid enough attention in their geology training to understand the significance of that. and to his credit, you know, really wanted to bump the science returns with that. When the lunar module takes off, a startling moment, I remember seeing it, boom, they were able to transmit images of that to us at home. A real sudden explosion, and suddenly this thing just pops off its base there. It had the effect that I never knew about again before looking through these things of knocking down the American flag. So we might have all thought that there it sits, still stands unfurled up there. It didn't because the force of the blast knocks it over onto the,

the ground. That's absolutely right. So it was hard to plant the flag to begin with. There was some soft soil and dust at the top, but they could only get the flag pulled down. I think it was like five or six inches or something like that. And it leaned way over. Some of these moon landing conspiracy people point to the fact that the flag is fully unfurled as evidence that it was done in a studio. For heaven's sake, there was a wire going across the top of it that held it out in place. and the flag was positioned very close to the lunar module, closer than it should have been. But I'll give them a pass on that. Yeah, it did fall over as they were taking off.

Boy, does that give a resonance and poetry to the return to the moon that they can make someday, where they'll just sort of drive up and find that thing and put it back up again. What follows from Apollo 11, these following missions, as was made famous in the Apollo 13 movie, progressively lost attention because people kind of got over the thrill of seeing all this stuff. But in epilogue, Jay, what was accomplished on the furtherance of the Apollo program? Definitely the science. So with Apollo 11, the focus was really on the engineering aspects of executing the landing, getting everybody back safely. Thankfully, there was enough of a voice from the scientific community who said, you know what, you're going all that way, looking pretty

good like you're going to make it. Let's take some things along with us. And so there was this rudimentary package of science experiments that was taken to the surface on Apollo 11. And that continued with 12, 14. By the time we got to Apollo 15, the missions were definitely more science oriented. So the lunar module had actually been able to be upgraded so it could carry more. It could carry this vehicle so that the two astronauts could actually drive a little further away to lay down their experiments, much more robust package of experiments. The astronauts had a lot more in the way of geology training, knew what to look for in a sense, and had more time to do it. And then by the time we got to the final Apollo flight on 17, we actually had a professional working geologist,

Jack Schmidt, who was the lunar module pilot, who flew to the surface. and could practice his craft there as a geologist. Well, upon that first footfall, we had won the race, I mean, officially. We'd won it years before, really, as we pointed out. Where's to go from here, Jay? What's your expectation on the next time man steps on the moon or woman? That's a really good question. I tend to be in the camp that there is no real compelling reason to return people to the surface of the moon.

and I know that's earned me a little bit of vitriol from my fellow space colleagues. It's a friendly discussion. I honestly don't see the value in that. It is so hard to get money for any kind of space mission that I feel like the dollars that are allocated should go towards reaching further out into the solar system. I think there's definitely a place for people in space. I think there's value to landing people on the surface of Mars. There's things that we've been trying to do on Mars for decades with robots and rovers and things like this that we will be able to do in very straightforward fashion if we just simply send people there.

It's expensive. It's a dangerous trip. Well, they can sell advertising. Heck of a billboard up there. That is an idea that's been around for a long time. Even going back to America's first Mars rover, there was trouble lining up the money for it. And somebody was like, let's have a bidding war between Coke and Pepsi. for heaven's sake, we're only talking about 25 million here. It's like one of them will pony that up in a second to have a Mars rover that comes down that says Coke on the side

and the internet's going to go wild for it. People will love that. I don't know. Maybe I'm sentimental, but I just feel like it would be a worthy thing to do if only to unite the peoples again, which we desperately need. Also, the Earth Day aspect of it, the environmental aspect of it could be useful. Jay, mission accomplished, we've done it. We've taken this audience.

I hope they've stayed with us. over three episodes from basically World War II all the way to 1969 throughout the space race. The Americans win, good for us, but really humanity wins. Through a lot of sacrifice and a lot of expenditure, human beings walked on the moon. And that was incredible accomplishment, relatively speaking, in recent times. Your books, I want to be sure, to billboard myself, ambassadors from Earth, Infinity Beckoned. Those are your first two, the third is coming out next year called Born to Explore. Jay Gallantine, you are a heck of a guide.

Thank you very much for joining us. Don, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed this. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.