First Man

The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

By James R. Hansen

Shortly before liftoff, CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid, who at age sixty-six was seeing his first manned shot, described the scene to Walter Cronkite’s television audience: “Walter …… as we sit here today … I think the [English] language is being altered. … How do you say “high as the sky anymore,” or “the sky is the limit—what does that mean?”

(Hansen 2005, 4)

At 04:09:25:38 mission elapsed time, Buzz radioed, “Houston, this is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever or whoever he may be, to contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.”

Then, with his mic off, Buzz read to himself from a small card on which he had written the portion of the Book of John (John 15:5) traditionally used in the Presbyterian communion ceremony.

I am the vine, you are the branches, He who abides in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit, For apart from me, you can do nothing.

It had been Buzz’s intention to read the beautiful passage back to Earth, but at the last minute Slayton had advised him not to do it and Buzz reluctantly agreed. Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis had generated sufficient controversy to make the space agency shy away from overt religious messages. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the celebrated American atheist, had sued the federal government over the Bible reading by Borman, Lovell, and Anders.

By the time of Apollo 11, O’Hair had added a complaint that NASA was purposefully withholding “facts” about Armstrong being an atheist. Though the U. S. Supreme Court eventually rejected O’Hair’s lawsuit, NASA understandably did not want to risk getting embroiled in another battle of this type. Regrettably to NASA, the word of Aldrin’s religious ceremony quickly made its way to the press. CBS’s Cronkite passed an advance word to his viewers: “Buzz Aldrin did take something most unusual with him today, and it has become public—made public by the pastor at his church outside of Houston. He took part of the Communion bread loaf, so that during his evening meal tonight he will, in a sense, share communion with the people of his church, by having a bit of that bread up there on the surface of the Moon. The first Communion on the Moon.”

Characteristically, Neil greeted Buzz’s religious ritual with polite silence. “He had told me he planned a little celebratory communion,” Neil recalls, “and he asked if I had any problems with that, and I said, “No, go right ahead.’ I had plenty of things to keep busy with. I just let him do his own thing.”

(Hansen 2005, 487-488)

Armstrong maintains he spent no time thinking about what he would say until sometime after he had successfully executed the landing.

At 04:13:24:48 mission elapsed time, which was a few seconds before 10:57 P. M. EDT, Neil spoke his eternally famous words:

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

In El Lago, Janet reportedly said as Neil was coming down the ladder, “I can’t believe it’s really happening,” then when Neil stepped off, “That’s the big step!” As he began to walk upon the Moon, she coaxed him, “Be descriptive now, Neil.” In Wapakoneta, Viola, clutching the arms of her chair ever so tightly, thanked God that her son was not sinking into the lunar dust, a fear that many people still harbored even after the LM had landed.

In El Lago, Janet kept telling her company that she had absolutely no idea what her husband would say when he stepped onto the Moon. An hour earlier, she had jested, as everyone grew more impatient for Neil and Buzz to begin the EVA, “It’s taking them so long because Neil’s trying to decide about the first words he’s going to say when he steps out on the Moon. Decisions, decisions, decisions!”

Janet’s joke was not too far from the truth, as Neil testifies: “Once on the surface and realizing that the moment was at hand, fortunately I had some hours to think about it after getting there. My own view was that it was a very simplistic statement: what can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. It just sort of evolved during the period that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff and the EVA prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. I didn’t think it was particularly important, but other people obviously did. Even so, I have never thought that I picked a particularly enlightening statement. It was a very simple statement.”

Then there was the matter of the missing “a”—the fact that Neil fully intended to say, “That’s one small step for a man,” but, in the rush of the moment, forgot to say, or just did not say, the “a.”

In terms of memory, “I can’t recapture it. For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps it was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time there for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said-although it actually might have been.”

When asked how he prefers for historians to quote his statement, Neil answers only somewhat facetiously, “They can put it in parentheses.”

“As for what I did say on the Moon, I took a small step–so that part of it came real easy. Then it wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare that with.”

One theory is that Armstrong came across the idea for his statement while reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In one scene of the book, the protagonist Bilbo Baggins, while invisible, jumps over the villainous Gollum in a leap that Tolkien described as “not a great leap for a man, but a leap in the dark.” Reinforcing this suggestion is the fact that Armstrong, when he named his farm Rivendell, which is the name of the idyllic secluded valley of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings and the abode (“the last homely house”) of noble Elrond, who is half elf and half human. In the Rings trilogy Rivendell is the last place where elves live before leaving Middle Earth and returning to “the immortal lands” over the sea. Adding spice to this theory is the fact, known to many of Neil’s friends, that in the 1990s Neil also based his e-mail address on a Tolkien theme.

Regrettably for Tolkien fans, Armstrong’s reading of the classic books could not have influenced what he said when he stepped onto the lunar surface to read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but not until well after Apollo 11. “My boys made me read the series years later when we were living on the farm. I read all the books, but I don’t remember bumping into anything even then that made me think about what I to a farm in Lebanon, Ohio, after leaving NASA in 1971, moved his family face in 1969. Indeed, had said.”

A far less chimerical theory is that a high NASA official gave him the idea. This hypothesis is based on the existence of an April 19, 1969, memorandum from Willis Shapley, an associate deputy administrator at NASA Headquarters, to Dr.

George Mueller, head of the Office of Manned Space Flight. Shapley’s three-page memo, entitled “Symbolic Items for the First Lunar Landing,” addressed what sorts of items should be left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew as well as what commemorative articles should be taken to the lunar surface and returned. Early in the memo, in talking about what sort of message the Moon landing should present to the world, Shapley wrote: “The intended overall impression of the symbolic activities and of the manner in which they are presented to the world should be to signalize [sic] the first lunar landing as an historic step forward for all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States of America. … The “forward step for all mankind’ aspect of the landing should be symbolized primarily by a suitable inscription to be left on the Moon and by statements made on Earth, and also perhaps by leaving on the Moon miniature flags of all nations.” As the story goes, Mueller passed this memo on to Deke Slayton who shared it with Armstrong, thus planting the seed for the idea that led to Neil’s historic statement.

(Hansen 2005, 493-495)

Another item that was not on their checklist but that NASA wanted accomplished fairly early during their EVA was the planting of the American flag. As discussed earlier, the decision to erect an American flag on the Moon had been controversial. Armstrong remembers: “There was substantial discussion before the flight on what the flag should be. It was questioned as to whether it should be an American flag or a United Nations flag.” Once it was decided (with no input from the crew) that it should be the American flag, Neil, a former Eagle Scout, did give some thought as to how the flag should be displayed. “I thought the flag should just be draped down, that it should fall down the flagpole like it would here on Earth. It shouldn’t be made to stand out or put into any rigid framework, which it ultimately was.I soon decided that this had gotten to be such a big issue, outside of my realm and point of view, that it didn’t pay for me to even worry about it. It was going to be other people’s decision, and whatever they decided was okay. I wasn’t going to have any voice in that.”

While he and Buzz had trained in minute detail to execute virtually every other assigned task during the EVA, they had done no training at all for the flag ceremony, as it, too, like the unveiling of the plaque, was a late addition. As it turned out, planting the flag (some thirty feet in front of the LM) took a lot more effort than anyone had imagined—so much more that the whole thing nearly turned into a public relations disaster.

First there was difficulty with the small telescoping arm that was attached as a crossbar to the top end of the flagpole; its function was to keep the flag (measuring three feet by five feet) extended and perpendicular in the still, windless lunar atmosphere. Armstrong and Aldrin were able quickly enough to lock the arm in its 90-degree position, but as hard as they tried, they could not get the telescope to extend fully. Thus, instead of the flag turning out flat and fully stretched, it had what Buzz has called “a unique permanent wave.” Then, to the dismay of the two men, fully aware that the whole world was watching them through the TV camera they had just set up, they could not get the staff of the flagpole to penetrate deeply enough into the soil to support itself in an upright position. “We had trouble getting it to the surface,” recalls Neil. “It ran into the subsurface crust.” With the pole sticking barely six inches into the Moon, all the two men could think about was the dreaded possibility that the American flag might collapse into the lunar dust right in front of the global television audience.

(Hansen 2005, 503-504)

One of the gaps in the record of Apollo 11 concerns the personal items and mementos Armstrong and his crew mates took with them to the Moon.All three men had a Personal Preference Kit stowed on board for them at launch. A PPK was a beta-cloth pouch about the size of a large brown lunch sack, with a pull-string opening at the top, coated with fireproof Teflon.

Exactly how many PPK pouches were sent by each Apollo 11 astronaut to the Moon is unknown. Apparently at least one belonging to each stayed of the command module; these CM PPKs could weigh no more than five for the entire flight in the left side lower equipment stowage compartment pounds per astronaut. At least two other PPKs, one for Neil and one for Buzz, were stowed inside the LM, in compartment cabinets located underneath the control and display panels to the right and left of Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s flight stations, respectively. These LM PPKs—it is likely there were only two of them, one for each of them—were limited to half a pound per astronaut. Anything in excess of those amounts would have required a special waiver from the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Dr. George Low. (The weights of Apollo 11’s PPKs are unknown.) Sometime before or after the flight, Neil, Mike, and Buzz agreed to authenticate all items on board Apollo 11 as “carried to the Moon,” whether they went to the lunar surface or stayed in the CSM, so as not to devalue the symbolic importance of the items carried by Collins only in lunar orbit.

None of the three astronauts has ever shared an inventory of the souvenirs that were in those six bags. (In addition to the bags mentioned above, the astronauts also took another PPK for frequently used personal items, such as pens, razors, and sunglasses.) What is known about them has been based solely on what the astronauts over the years have said or written and on what they have released and identified from their private holdings for sale or display. In Armstrong’s case, this has amounted to almost nothing, since Neil has never spoken about what he took to the Moon—and, unlike Buzz and Mike, has never put any of his items up for auction.

(Hansen 2005, 522-523)

Janet Armstrong, in reply to a persistent newsman on hand for her public greeting two hours after her husband landed on the Moon, admitted that Neil had taken something to the Moon for her, but she refused to reveal what it was.

(Hansen 2005, 523)

So cautious was NASA about releasing what its astronauts carried as souvenirs that it is not known with certainty even today what Apollo 11 was carrying in its OFK, or Official Flight Kit. An OFK manifest for Apollo 11 was never released publicly, and none has ever been located. The only proof that one even existed is a 1974 memorandum from NASA Associate Administrator Rocco A. Petrone to NASA Administrator Dr. James C.Fletcher dealing with the proposed future distribution of American flags flown on U. S. space missions, stating that an OFK had flown on Apollo 11.(The memo informed Fletcher that the remaining U. S. flags that had been flown on Apollo 11 and not yet given away were being reserved for future U. S. presidents and vice presidents only.)

Apollo 11’s OFK might not even have been an actual bag or pouch. It is possible that OFK items for the first Moon landing were simply stowed in one or more of the cabinets inside the command module. A NASA document from 1972 would later indicate that “the total weight of this kit shall not exceed 53,3 pounds per mission.” Clearly, the contents of the OFK comprised a much larger stash of souvenir items than what went into the astronauts’ PPKs. As official NASA souvenirs, OFK items were meant for distribution, either by the astronauts or by leading NASA officials, to VIPs and organizations. As none of these items were transferred over to the LM prior to its separation in lunar orbit, it seems clear that nothing from the OFK, whether one physically existed or not, was carried to the surface.

(Hansen 2005, 525)

As for Armstrong specifically, he has never released any information about the contents of his PPK. He agreed to do so for publication in this book, but reported that he was unable to find the manifest among his many papers. All he had to say about what he took with him to the Moon was, “In my PPK I had some Apollo 11 medallions, some jewelry for my wife and mother (simply the gold olive branch pin for each), and some things for other people.” He is most clear about, and most proud of, the pieces of the historic Wright Flyer that he took to the Moon. Under a special arrangement with the U. S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, he took in his LM PPK a piece of wood from the Wright brothers’ 1903 airplane’s left propeller and a piece of muslin fabric (8 x 13 inches) from its upper left wing.

Armstrong also took along his college fraternity pin from Purdue, which he later donated for display at Phi Delta Theta’s headquarters in Oxford, Ohio. Contrary to published stories, he did not take Janet’s Alpha Chi Omega sorority pin.