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Los Angeles Times
July 21, 1969
Millions of people around the world watched as first Neil A. Armstrong and then Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., stepped onto the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. The astronauts’ Apollo 11 landing craft—named the Eagle—was equipped with a television camera that recorded the first steps human beings took onto another celestial body. This Los Angeles Times article captured the tension and then the exultation as the Eagle touched down on the lunar Sea of Tranquility.
By Marvin Miles and Rudy Abramson
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HOUSTON—U.S. astronauts stepped onto the surface of the moon Sunday and explored its bleak, forbidding crust in man's first visit to another celestial body.
Apollo 11 Commander Neil A. Armstrong climbed slowly down the ladder from the spaceship Eagle, and became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface.
As Armstrong swung his left boot to the surface of the moon at 7:56 p.m., PDT, he gave millions of spellbound television viewers words sure to live in history:
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'That's one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind.'
Nearly seven hours earlier, Armstrong had averted possible disaster by taking full manual control of the vehicle on landing, selecting a safe spot for man's first landing on the moon.
Much of the civilized world watched and listened as Armstrong and fellow explorer Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., who followed him down the steps about 20 minutes later, collected rocks which may reveal the oldest secrets of the solar system.
Waiting and listening in lunar orbit was the third member of the Apollo crew, command module pilot Michael Collins.
As he took his first steps on the lunar surface, Armstrong could be seen in remarkably clear television pictures taken by a camera attached to the lunar module descent stage. He described what he found.
He said the surface 'appears finegrained, almost like a powder. I can kick it up loosely with my foot. I only go in maybe an eighth of an inch.'
Armstrong said the lunar module's round footpads penetrated the surface only one to two inches.
At first the black-and-white pictures were silhouettes, but then as Armstrong moved away from the ladder his bulky life support pack could be discerned. In almost no time Armstrong was moving around the surface rapidly—quickly adapting to the lunar environment.
The spacecraft commander went to work on his first major assignment, the gathering of a contingency sample of lunar soil. This is a 'quick grab' of sample material, about two pounds, retrieved with a butterfly net-type device.
The contingency sample was planned to assure that at least some lunar material would be brought back to earth if for any reason the astronauts had to launch from the moon in an emergency.
At one point he said he had penetrated the surface six to eight inches with the sampler and told Mission Control, 'I'm sure I could push it in further.'
Aldrin was down on the surface of the moon at 8:16 p.m. with an athletic drop of what appeared to be about three feet. He then immediately practiced several jumps to determine the effect of the moon's weight gravity on his balance and coordination.
Mission Control here asked Armstrong if he foresaw any difficulty transferring equipment back and forth between the surface and the lunar module cabin in the top stage of the spacecraft and his cryptic reply was 'Negative.'
As soon as Aldrin was on the surface, both men could be seen by the television audience working near the ladder which was mounted on the lander's forward leg.
One of the first tasks of the two men after Armstrong gathered the contingency sample and stowed it in a bag in his spacesuit pocket, was to make a cursory examination of the spacecraft, particularly its landing legs and shocks. He had some trouble in stowing the sample because the suit, bulky with many layers of material and 3.5 pounds per square inch pressurization, was stiff and he could not tell if the pocket was open. He had to ask for Aldrin's assistance.
Aldrin's first comment after reaching the surface was that the rocks felt quite 'slippery.'
Both astronauts wore their heavy gold sunshields pulled down over their fishbowl helmets and their faces could not be discerned.
In no time it seemed that both men were acclimated entirely to the lunar environment, as they moved around with ease, flung their arms and legs and jumped as if in happiness but actually in tests of mobility.
At one juncture Aldrin reported, 'I was about to lose my balance in one direction but recovery is quite natural.'
Early in the moon walk there was not too much description of the landing scene itself except Armstrong's note: 'It's different, but beautiful.'
While Aldrin worked at an equipment bay in the module's lower stage, removing tools and rockboxes, Armstrong moved out to one side of the lander, perhaps 60 or 70 feet, then aimed the camera in a series of panoramic views of the area.
The scenes showed clearly the utter desolation of the moon—the rough, scarred terrain, in what appeared to be scores of small craters. The pictures showed a couple of elongated craters, and in the distance small rocks.
Once he had fixed the camera on a tripod, Armstrong moved back to center stage where Aldrin was busy mounting a solar wind detector, something like a windowblind to catch particles of the solar wind for return to earth.
Over and over again, the explorers noted the cohesiveness of the moon's soil.
From early moments of their explorations, physicians in Mission Control reported the pilots remained in excellent physical condition.
There were no indications in their voices that they were excited, confused or fatigued by the physical and emotional experience.
Aldrin said his blue lunar overshoes had turned to a grayish cocoa color after his striding about for a time in the lunar dust.
Forty-five minutes after Armstrong stepped down from the ladder onto the surface, the two pilots planted the American Flag just in front of the lander.
The Flag was carried to the moon in a container along side the ladder. Mounted on an eight foot staff, it was held out by a spring making it look almost as though it were in a stiff breeze.
The symbolic Flag raising was done without fanfare. Neither of the astronauts commented when the Stars and Stripes were raised over the Sea of Tranquility.
Viewers could see the white - suited astronauts becoming more and more at home in the light lunar gravity.
At times, they almost seemed to lope about in their stiff suits with bulky backpacks. Shoulders hunched, they looked like linebackers moving about.
And at times they bounded about in what astronauts called the 'Kangaroo hop.' Aldrin, a former football player, looked like a broken field runner.
'It could get rather tiring,' Aldrin said, moving too briskly. But he observed this might be caused by the stiffness of the pressurized suits.
At 8:50 p.m. President Nixon called from the Oval Room of the White House.
He said it was the most historic telephone call in all mankind and told the astronauts, 'I can't tell you how proud we all are … for every American this has been the proudest day of our lives. Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man's world. As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth.'
'Thank you. Mr. President,' Armstrong replied, 'it's a great honor and a privilege for us to be here representing not only the United States, but peaceable nations, and with interest and a curiosity and anticipation for the future. It's an honor for us to be able to participate here today.'
'And thank you very much,' Mr. Nixon replied, 'and all of us look forward to seeing you on the Hornet on Thursday.'
'We look forward to that very much, sir,' Armstrong said.
Shortly after the conversation with the President, Armstrong began shoveling bulk samples of dust and rock into the two rock boxes to be returned to earth for scientific analysis.
Through most of the expedition, the heart rates for the pilots ranged between 90 and 100 beats per minute. This was less than the heart rate Armstrong experienced when they were launched toward the moon from Cape Kennedy last Wednesday.
Aldrin, who has a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Houston he thought it was particularly interesting that when he picked up particles from the moon surface, they seemed to all go in the same direction with the same velocity no matter what their size. He attributed the phenomenon to the fact the moon has no atmosphere.
As Armstrong filled the bag with the bulk sample, he held a scale so he could weigh what he was preparing to bring home.
At the same time, Aldrin worked his way around the lunar module, inspecting it, taking pictures of its flat feet settling into the soil.
It appeared the area where Eagle touched down was almost perfectly level. Stretching out to meet the black sky, the surface of the moon looked like a barren field or vacant lot, strewn with rubble, formless and forgotten.
By 9:15, Armstrong had completed packing and sealing the bulk samples in an airtight box.
Inspecting their landing vehicle, Armstrong and Aldrin reported they could see no damage as a result of the landing.
The control thrusters on the side seemed in perfect condition, they said, and there was no evidence of fuel spillage or structural failure underneath. They seemed amazed at how little the 39-inch wide footpads had penetrated the surface.
After they completed their inspection of the spacecraft and collected and packaged the samples, they started to work setting up scientific experiments to be left behind on the moon, chatting casually about the best way to set up the instruments.
First, they deployed a device called a passive seismometer which will measure tremors in the moon's crust, helping scientists to determine definitely whether the moon is seismically active and to record the tremors which would be set off by the impact of large meteorites in the area of the moon near the landing site.
Besides the seismometer, the explorers set up a reflector to bounce back beams of laser light aimed at it from earth.
By careful measurement of these reflected beams, scientists will be able to measure the moon's distance from the earth, its orbit, and the rate at which it is receiving from the earth much more precisely than they have ever been able to do before.
Such experiments may also confirm or discount the theory that the continents on earth are drifting apart. After a period of years, it may be possible to actually measure the rate at which the continents are drifting.
Throughout the excursion, Mission Control enjoyed flawless communication with the pilots walking around the surface. At times, it was difficult to determine which man was which as they moved about.
The explorers left behind messages from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon along with leaders of 73 countries around the world. They also left tributes to five space explorers who lost their lives in man's reach for the moon.
They included U.S. astronauts Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee, who were killed in an Apollo fire in January 1967. The others were cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth, who was killed in an airplane crash, and Vladimir Komarov, who died in a landing accident in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Still inside the lunar module to be brought home with the moon explorers are two more large American flags, flags of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, along with those of several other countries.
Early in the spacewalk both crewmen drew close to Eagle's forward landing strut where they uncovered a plaque bolted to the lander's lower stage which will be left on the moon.
Armstrong read from the plaque:
'Here men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.'
On the plaque were engraved the names of the Apollo 11 crew, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, and President Nixon.
Aldrin was first to return to the Eagle cabin. He hopped up the ladder like an athlete, three rungs at a time, and disappeared off the front porch at 10 p.m. PDT.
For ten minutes he assisted Armstrong, who remained on the surface to haul rock sample boxes into the cabin with aid of a continuous conveyor belt.
The Apollo 11 commander climbed the ladder and crawled into the hatch at 10:11 p.m.
The astounding performance of the two crewmen is not expected to change the remaining time line of the mission. Eagle is scheduled to blast off from the moon just before 11 a.m. PDT today.
The moon walk, originally scheduled for 10 hours after the landing on the surface at 1:17 p.m. PDT, had been moved up more than three hours.
Not until several minutes after the landing did the world realize how terrifying the last moments of the descent from space had been.
As the landing ship leveled out over the tortured face of the moon. Armstrong had to take control away from its computer to avoid going down into an ugly boulder-strewn crater where it could have easily crashed.
Several minutes, after the historic touchdown, Armstrong told Mission Control matter-of-factly:
'The auto-targeting was taking us right into a football field-sized crater with a huge number of thick boulders and rocks for about one or two diameters around it.
'It required us … to fly manually over the rock fields to find a reasonably good area.'
Neither Armstrong nor Aldrin so much as mentioned the scary situation as they made their final descent, calling out their speed and altitude as they went down.
Several times, when there were momentary interruptions in communications, Collins relayed instructions from Houston to Armstrong and Aldrin on the way down.
Also circling the moon—over the equator—was the Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, which reached the vicinity of the moon two days ahead of the American astronauts on an unexplained mission.
Armstrong and Aldrin, after the landing, peered through the slanted windows of the lunar module and saw a landscape even more impressive and frightening than thousands of closeup moon pictures have been able to show.
'It looks like a collection of about every variety of shapes, angularity, granularity, and every variety of rock you can find,' Aldrin reported.
The first dramatic words from the lunar surface came at 1:18 p.m. PDT, when Armstrong gave a calm but proud report to Mission Control at the end of a 12-minute heart-stopping landing operation:
'Tranquility Base … the Eagle has landed!'
Armstrong reported: 'The one-sixth G (the force of lunar gravity is but one sixth that of earth) is just like in an airplane… I don't think we notice any difficulty at all in adapting to one-sixth G. It seems immediately natural to move in this environment.'
The spacecraft commander also acknowledged somewhat ruefully: 'The guys who bet we wouldn't be able to tell precisely where we are are the winners today. We were a little bit busy worrying about program alarms and things like that in the part of our descent where we normally would have been picking out a landing site.'
The tension in Mission Control during the landing phase mounted minute by minute as the long descent burn bounced man-made thunder across the face of the moon.
And the first words from capsule communicator Charles M. Duke Jr., once Armstrong reported that 'the Eagle has landed,' told the story:
'We copy. You are on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys here about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.'
A little later Duke spoke of the Eagle crew's 'fantastic job' and told the moon men: 'Be advised there are a lot of smiling faces down here and all over the world.'
'There are two of them up here, too,' Aldrin answered.
'And don't forget the one in the command module,' chimed in Collins from the orbiting Columbia.
The litany of the landing, with Aldrin calling out decreasing altitude speeds as Eagle settled toward the moon heightened the tension of the approach.
Quick and apparently unemotional, it nevertheless showed the strain on the two men. As the approach moved down, from 50,000 feet, where the descent engine was ignited, reports came faster and were more and more clipped.
With Eagle flying backward feet first and the crewmen also riding backward and prone, the radio crackled with communications between the spacecraft and Mission Control.
'Position checks downrange show us to be a little off…”
'At four minutes. Eagle you are go to continue powered descent.”
'We got the earth right out of our front window.'
'She's coming down beautifully!'
'Better than the simulator.'
'Velocity 1,200 feet per second, altitude 21,000.'
'Eagle, you are looking great!'
'Altitude 4,000 feet. You are go for a landing.'
'Rog, understand, we are go for a landing.'
'Two thousand feet, 2,000 feet. We're go! Sit tight!'
'Four hundred feet … 300 feet … 200 … 100.”
'Forty feet—we're picking up some dust…'
'Thirty - five feet… we're drifting to the right a little.”
'Contact light… Engine stop.'
Final preparations for the dramatic descent from orbit had begun at 6:27 a.m. PDT when Aldrin, wearing only a flight suit, crawled through the short tunnel connecting Eagle to Columbia and started a last check of the lander's system. Armstrong followed an hour later, wearing his spacesuit, and picked up Eagle's checklist routine while Aldrin made his way back through the tunnel to Columbia to put on his spacesuit and return.
A dozen latches joining Columbia and Eagle were released at 10:47 a.m. just before the two spacecraft rounded the eastern limb of the moon into communications view of the earth.
The two ships continued to cruise close together, however, with Collins in Columbia checking the lunar module carefully, particularly its extended landing legs.
Eagle continued on course halfway around the moon—with the command ship about 2.2 nautical miles distant—to a point above the hidden side where the lander's descent engine was fired for the first time to head for the surface at 12:08 p.m. PDT.
Called descent orbit insertion (DOI) this burn slowed the lunar module into what is called a transfer orbit, an arc of about 180 degrees to the front side of the moon that shifted Eagle into a new orbit with a low point of 50,000 feet.
After the burn, the landing craft coasted through the 47-minute descent trajectory—again hooking halfway around the moon.
As Eagle moved off the Sea of Fertility and over the Sea of Tranquility, the descent engine ignited again at 1:06 p.m. PDT under control of Eagle's automatic guidance and navigation system.
At this point—powered descent initiation (PDI) began for the longest 12 minutes in spaceflight history, with the descent engine burning continuously starting at 9,850 pounds of thrust, to ease Eagle toward the landing site 260 nautical miles ahead.
Source: Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1969.
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