W 30. rocznicę tego historycznego wydarzenia cytujemy w oryginale (przekład straciłby na autentyczności) raport z fazy lądowania i wyjścia pierwszego człowieka na Księżyc. Są to fragmenty rozdziału 9 "A Giant Leap" książki Harry Hurt'a For All Mankind, A Morgan Entrekin Book, The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1969

FOR ALL MANKIND

APOLLO-11

HARRY HURT III

(fragments)

"Okay, Eagle, one minute," Collins cautioned. "You guys take care ...

"See you later," Armstrong promised.

The Eagle disappeared behind the moon's western horizon at 101 hours 28 minutes GET, approximately 2 P.M. Houston time. Then, at Armstrong's command, the spacecraft tilted her feet and exhaust nozzle forward, and fired her descent engine in a 28.9-second braking burn. The LEM slowed to a forward velocity of about 4,600 feet per second, roughly 3,000 statute m.p.h., and started plunging feet first toward the crater pocked surface of the moon.

CAPCOM (DUKE): "Eagle, Houston. If you read, you're GO for powered descent. Over."

No answer.

COLLINS: "Eagle, this is Columbia. They just gave you a GO for powered descent."

CAPCOM (DUKE): "Columbia, Houston. We've lost them again on the high gain ... We recommend they yaw right ten degrees and then try for high gain again."

Collins relayed the message via the S-Band frequency, and Eagle yawed right as instructed.

CAPCOM Charley Duke fretted in silence along with his cohorts back in Houston. As Duke recalls: "It always happens that when we have the critical revolution or the critical pass, we have lousy communications. It just seems like that's our luck ... I said to myself, 'Oh, no, here we go again,' because we had a mission rule that said we had needed adequate communications and data from the spacecraft before we could commit to powered descent."

Then, amid a cacophony of radio static, the sound of Armstrong's voice once again crackled in the earphones of the men at Mission Control: "Houston, Eagle. How do you read us now? Over."

CAPCOM (DUKE): "Eagle, Houston. We read you now. You're GO for PDI MARK 3:30 [three minutes and thirty seconds] until ignition."

ARMSTRONG: "Roger, understand . . . Elevate the GO circuit breaker."

Armstrong and Aldrin were now due to arrive at the Sea of Tranquility in just twelve minutes. But at ignition of PDI, they were still fifty thousand feet above the lunar surface with a forward velocity of three thousand statute m.p.h. And unbeknownst to them and their guardian angels on the ground, they were about to confront a series of last-minute crises that almost forced them to abort-and very nearly cost them their lives.

Four minutes into the powered descent, at forty thousand feet, the Eagle rolled over to lock in her landing radar, and the two astronauts once again found themselves "upside down." They would have to remain in that inverted position, totally dependent on the LEM's computer guidance system, until "high gate" at seven thousand feet, where Mission Control would make the penultimate GO/NO GO decision. Then the spacecraft would start to tilt forward and downward until they were "standing up" like trolley car conductors and could once again see where they were going.

" Eagle, Houston . . . You are GO to continue powered descent," CAPCOM Duke advised.

"Roger," Aldrin acknowledged. "Got the earth right out our front window."

But just before he lost sight of the lunar surface, Armstrong realized he had an even more serious problem than the annoying radio lapses. As the Eagle was descending, he had been charting their progress by looking for previously photo-mapped landmarks and comparing their actual passover times to those in the flight plan. When a large easterly crater called Maskelyne W appeared in his window two seconds sooner than expected, he knew something was wrong. At three thousand m.p.h., two seconds translated into two miles off course.

"Our position checks downrange show us a little long," Armstrong reported.

"Roger, we confirm," replied Charley Duke.

This deliberately matter-of-fact exchange belied the true gravity of the Eagle's descent trajectory error. According to ground-based radar, the spacecraft was diving toward the lunar surface a good fifteen m.p.h. (twenty-three feet per second) faster than called for in the flight plan. Mission rules stated that if the velocity increased by another eight m.p.h., the astronauts would have to abort their landing attempt and rendezvous with the command module.

The responsibility for deciding whether or not Armstrong and Aldrin should continue their descent rested with one of the men in the trench back at Mission Control: thirty-five-year-old computer specialist Steve Bales, the guidance officer (GUIDO). Flight director Gene Kranz, who was already sweating through his "lucky" white vest, demanded an immediate answer.

"I think this is going to hold steady and we're going to make it," Bales reported, adding an ominously inconclusive, "I think."

Five minutes into the PDI burn, as the Eagle dove to within twenty thousand feet of the lunar surface, it looked like Bales was right. The spacecraft came uncomfortably close to but did not exceed the mandatory abort mark of twenty-three m.p.h. (thirty-five feet per second) over the projected optimum descent velocity.

Then the LEM's on-board computer flashed an unexpected warning signal.

"Program alarm," Aldrin rasped. "It's a 1202."

The computer program alarm caught Steve Bales by surprise. At first, he could not even recall what a 1202 was. For a good ten seconds, he fumbled around his work station in a frantic search for a code book that could help him identify the nature of this mysterious malfunction.

"Give me a reading on that alarm," Aldrin demanded after another thirty seconds had elapsed.

Then one of Bales's teammates in the trench advised that a 1202 program alarm signified an "Executive Overflow." That was the on-board guidance computer's cryptic way of saying it was being taxed beyond maximum capacity and would temporarily have to delay execution of certain commands until it could catch up with itself.

"The most dangerous items," as Collins had observed before lift-off from the Cape, "are the ones we've overlooked."

The cause of the 1202 program alarm was one of the few items Houston had overlooked. At first, it looked like the combined currents of the spacecraft's guidance, control, and life support systems were producing an unforeseen overload of electromagnetism. The electromagnetic interference was apparently creating "sneak circuits," which disrupted and confused the on-board computer's program execution process. Much to their chagrin, the men in the trench would later determine that the program alarm was caused by a much less esoteric electronic bugaboo. It turned out that the Eagle's rendez-vous radar, which could not communicate with the separately designed landing radar, was simultaneously transmitting a series of contradictory signals to the onboard guidance system. As a result, the computer was vainly attempting to serve two masters-one intent on locating a touchdown site in the Sea of Tranquility, the other preoccupied with finding a route back to the mothership in lunar orbit.

Fortunately, the men at Mission Control had not overlooked ways to cope with an on-board computer failure during Apollo 1 l's final descent to the lunar surface. An almost identical problem had been thrown at them in a disastrous simulation exercise about a month before the launch. Although flight director Kranz had aborted the simulated mission to the mutual embarrassment of all involved, the experience had prompted the White Team to "get smart" about the general nature of last-minute computer alarms and the procedures for avoiding an unnecessary abort during the real thing.

Bales, who had participated in the aborted simulation exercise, decided "on instinct as much as anything else" to recommend that Armstrong and Aldrin get the GO to proceed with their powered descent despite the 1202 program alarm. As he recalled in a recent interview: "All that we could tell at the time was that the computer was being overloaded. Why, we didn't know, couldn't tell. The only thing we could do was rely on the rules we'd established before the flight. If this particular kind of alarm didn't come up more than once every minute or so, and if the computer continued to steer the vehicle properly, we'd continue with the descent. I looked at it for about thirty seconds, and it looked good to me, and that was it. We didn't have time to delve into it any more than that."

Both astronauts later applauded Mission Control's grace under pressure. "It was not a serious program alarm," Buzz Aldrin would insist. "It just told us that for a brief instant the computer was reaching a point of . . . having too many jobs for it to do. Unfortunately, it came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular problems."

Aldrin claimed the decision to ignore the 1202 alarm was "what we wanted to hear." It was that kind of positive thinking, that kind of "GO if at all possible" attitude, that truly separated the real mission from all the simulated missions. Indeed, as Armstrong would note in a post flight press conference: "In the simulator we have a large number of failures, and are spring-loaded to the ABORT position . . . In the real flight, we are spring-loaded to the 'LAND' position."

A little over eight minutes into the powered descent, the Eagle reached "high gate" at seven thousand feet, and "stood up" on her landing legs. The braking thrust of her descent engine had reduced her velocity to six hundred feet per second, about sixty m.p.h., and her exhaust nozzle now pointed down toward the lunar surface. But according to the mission rules, the astronauts had to touch down in the Sea of Tranquility in less than six minutes or hit the abort handle.

Flight director Gene Kranz commenced the last formal GO/NO GO roll call of the men at the key consoles in the Control Room: the retrofire officers, the flight dynamics officers, the guidance officers, the flight surgeon, the electrical and communications systems squad, the telemetry communications team, the flight operations chief, and the ground tracking network controllers.

"RETRO?"
" GO!"
"FIDO?"
"GO!"
"GUIDO?"
" GO!"
"SURGEON?"
"GO!"
"EECOM?"
"GO!"
"TELCOM?"
" GO!"
"OPS?"
"GO!"
"NETWORK?"
"We're GO, FLIGHT!"

Kranz ordered CAPCOM Charley Duke to relay the unanimous verdict to Armstrong and Aldrin.

"Eagle, Houston. You're GO for landing."

"Roger, understand," Armstrong answered. "GO for landing."

Although the Eagle's faltering computer was still expected to pilot the descent for another 6,500 feet, Armstrong had already begun preparing to take over manual control much sooner if need be. On his right, there was a joy stick with a bright red pistol grip, the Attitude Controller Assembly (ACA), which could make the LEM pitch, roll, or yaw, thereby changing her course and/or slowing her descent. On his left was a toggle switch called the Thrust Translator Controller, which would supposedly slow the LEM's descent velocity one foot per second each time he clicked it.

Then at 2,500 feet, Eagle's on-board guidance systems registered a second program alarm.

"1201," Aldrin barked.

"1201," Armstrong repeated.

Houston copied the alarm, determined that it indicated a computer overload similar to the 1202 alarm, and gave the GO to proceed. But the 1201 warning raised the tension still higher out of fear that the astronauts might face catastrophic computer problems if they had to abort the landing attempt. As CAPCOM Duke recalls, "Here we are with a computer that seems saturated during descent, and my gosh, we might be asking it to perform a more complicated task during ascent."

Only then did Armstrong and Aldrin begin to realize the true implications of the computer alarms. The "Executive Overflows" and the excess velocity of their powered descent were causing the Eagle to overshoot their designated landing site in the Sea of Tranquility by at least four miles. If the trajectory error increased to six miles, they would have to affect a mandatory abort.

In the meantime, as the Eagle passed the one-thousand-foot mark, the astronauts appeared to be plummeting toward a large crater full of jagged boulders. Armstrong later admitted: "I was surprised by the size of those boulders; some of them were as big as small motor cars. And it seemed at the time that we were coming up on them pretty fast; of course, the clock runs at about triple speed in such a situation."

Aldrin kept calling out the latest altitude and velocity readings in a steady drone:

"Seven hundred feet, twenty-one [feet per second] down "Six hundred feet, down at nineteen . . ."

"Five hundred forty feet, down at thirty-down at fifteen When Armstrong took over semiautomatic manual control at five hundred feet, he could not decide what to do. He was "sure the ejecta [in the crater] would have been lunar bedrock, and as such, fascinating to the scientists." But he also knew that the boulders could wreck his spacecraft on impact.

"I was tempted to land," he confided afterward, "but my better judgment took over."

Armstrong made the LEM pitch over from her vertical or "standing up" posture to a horizontal attitude with her thrusters pointing "backward" so he could "skim over the top of the boulder field" and look for a less hazardous alternate landing site. As he would later explain to media critics back on Earth, "I was absolutely adamant about my right to be wishy-washy about where I was going to land, and the only way I could buy time was to slow down the descent rate ..."

Aldrin calmly continued to monitor the instruments.

"Four hundred feet, down at nine . . ."

"Three hundred fifty feet, down at four. . ."

"Three hundred thirty feet, three and one half down . . . We're pegged on horizontal velocity."

But as Armstrong continued to exercise his "right to be wishy-washy," man's first real attempt to land on the moon suddenly looked like it might turn into a repeat of his disastrous practice session in the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston the previous spring.

Although the Apollo 11 commander's impromptu pitch maneuver did slow the Eagle's rate of descent, it actually increased her forward velocity by several more feet per second. It also extended her approach trajectory another two miles. The spacecraft was now at least four miles off course-just two miles from a mandatory abort-and she was rapidly running out of descent fuel.

Armstrong, who was ordinarily the most unflappable pilot in the entire astronaut corps, started to feel the heat. During lift-off from the Cape, his heart rate had never exceeded the relatively moderate level of 115 beats per minute. But following the mysterious computer malfunctions during his descent to the lunar surface, his pulse reached a peak of 156 beats per minute, more than fast enough for him to break into a cold sweat. Later, when informed of how high his pulse had elevated, Armstrong replied, "I'd be really disturbed with myself if it hadn't."

"I changed my mind a couple of times again, looking for a parking place," Armstrong recalls. "Something would look good, and then as we got closer, it really wasn't good. Finally we found an area ringed on one side by fairly good-sized craters and on the other side by a boulder field. It was not a particularly big area, only a couple of hundred square feet, about the size of a big house lot. But it looked satisfactory. And I was quite concerned about the fuel level. We had to get on the surface very soon or fire the ascent engine and abort."

At two hundred feet above the lunar surface, the same altitude at which Armstrong had bailed out of the LLRV before it crashed and burned on the tarmac at Ellington, he hooked back around in the direction from whence he came, hovered for a few seconds, and jerked the LEM back into the full upright position required for landing.

"Sixty seconds," warned CAPCOM Duke, indicating that only one minute's worth of descent fuel was left.

"Forty feet," Aldrin reported, "down two and one half.

The Eagle drifted into the darkness of her own shadow, and quickly became engulfed in an enormous cloud of dust kicked up by the exhaust of her descent engine.

By this time, the men in the trench at Mission Control had started the countdown for an emergency abort. But the astronauts were already in the "dead man's zone." As Aldrin noted later, "In this zone, if anything had gone wrong-if, for example, the engine had failed-it would probably have been too late to do anything about it before we impacted with the moon.

Yet, Aldrin also claims, "I felt no apprehension at all during this short time. Rather, I felt a kind of arrogance-an arrogance inspired by knowing that so many people had worked on this landing, people possessing the greatest scientific talent in the world."

"Thirty seconds," CAPCOM Duke reported.

The Eagle was down to less than half a minute of descent fuel.

"Forward drift?" Armstrong wanted to know.

"Yes," Aldrin confirmed, adding a reassuring, "Okay. . ."

Duke started to call out another fuel consumption reading, but chief astronaut Deke Slayton, who had taken the adjacent seat at the CAPCOM's console, cut him off.

"Shut up, Charley," Slayton ordered, "and let 'em land."

Moments later, the Eagle gently plopped down somewhere on the uncharted eastern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. According to Aldrin, "The landing was so smooth that I had to check the landing lights from the touchdown sensors to make sure the slight bump I felt was indeed the landing. "

"CONTACT LIGHT!" Aldrin exhulted.

Then, in keeping with the official flight plan, he immediately proceeded to run through the first items on the post-touchdown checklist.

"Okay," Aldrin noted, "ENGINE STOP. ACA-out of DETENT."

"Out of DETENT," Armstrong confirmed.

"MODE CONTROL both AUTO," Aldrin continued. "DESCENT ENGINE COMMAND OVERRIDE-OFF. ENGINE ARM-OFF. 413 is in . . ."

"We copy you down, Eagle," CAPCOM Duke reported a few seconds later.

There was a pregnant pause.

Buzz Aldrin would later claim that he had uttered the first words ever spoken from the surface of the moon when he cried, "CONTACT LIGHT!" But at approximately 3:18 P.M. on the afternoon of July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong blurted what most historians would declare to be man's first intelligible message from another planet: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

The men in the trench at Mission Control spontaneously erupted into cheers and applause. So did the Dr. Thomas Paine, Wernher von Braun, former Mercury astronaut John Glenn, and all the other NASA brass and scientific wizards in the VIP room. Row after row of flight controllers, system engineers, supervisors, and official spectators broke out pocket-size American flags and fired up fat cigars, shaking hands, hugging, slapping backs, and beaming with triumph.

One of the most prominent nail-biters was flight operations director Chris Kraft, who had been agonizing over the Eagle's descent and the fate of the two astronauts on board ever since the 1202 and 1201 computer alarms started flashing. As Kraft confided to Duke, "Boy, Charley, I thought we were gone when we had those things."

White-vested flight director Gene Kranz suddenly found himself speechless. He tried to regain his voice, couldn't, and tried again. Still nothing. Then he started banging his fist against the housing of his computer console like a frustrated child. Finally, his vocal cords responded.

"All right," Kranz croaked. "Everybody settle down, and let's get ready for a T-1 STAY/NO STAY."

Meanwhile, the first two men to land on the moon still did not know whether they could remain at Tranquility Base, or if they would have to take off immediately due to excessively soft surface conditions or some other unforeseen problem. Houston would give them the first official word at the one-minute mark with the T- 1 STAY/NO STAY decision. A second STAY/NO STAY decision would come two minutes later. Then command module pilot Mike Collins would slip around the back side of the moon, and the next optimum abort/rendezvous time would not come until Columbia reemerged on the front side once again.

According to Aldrin, "We gave in to our excitement long enough to pat each other on the shoulder, then we plunged into frantic activity . . . If there was any emotional reaction to the lunar landing it was so quickly suppressed that I have no recollection of it. We had so much to do and so little time in which to do it, that we no sooner landed than we were preparing to leave, in the event of an emergency. I'm surprised, in retrospect, that we even took time to slap each other on the shoulders."

Oddly enough, Armstrong later recounted a quite different version of what happened in the Eagle after touchdown, indicating that he and Aldrin silently shook hands instead of patting each other on the back. "If there was an emotional high point," he said at the tenth anniversary of the landing in 1979, "it was the point after touchdown when Buzz and I shook hands without saying a word. That still in my mind is the high point."

Even more surprising was the fact that the Apollo 11 astronauts had managed to land safely in the first place. Amid the joy of their triumphant success, virtually no one on Earth save the men in the trench at Mission Control appreciated just how close they had come to disaster. In the process of detouring over the crater full of boulders to find an alternate landing site, Armstrong had used up nearly all of the Eagle's descent fuel. Though the LEM's ascent stage carried a separate fuel supply, it could only be tapped during a conventional lunar lift-off. Had Armstrong exhausted his descent fuel after entering the so-called "dead man's" zone about fifty feet above the surface where the spacecraft was too low to execute an abort maneuver, the Eagle would have crashed into the Sea of Tranquility. Even in one-sixth G, such a crash would have caused the LEM to tip over sideways, ripping her fuselage on the jagged edges of the surrounding boulders. Armstrong and Aldrin would either have been killed on impact or from exposure.

Exactly how much descent fuel remained when the Eagle touched down was never determined. According to Aldrin, the dials on his side of the spacecraft showed just ten seconds' worth of fuel left.

"My own instruments would have indicated less than thirty seconds, probably fifteen or twenty seconds," Armstrong later claimed at a post mission press conference. He added with characteristic professional cool that a subsequent analysis by the ground suggested that the on-board fuel gauge was slightly off, and that the LEM "probably" had about "forty or forty-five" seconds of fuel left at touchdown.

"That sounds like a short time," Armstrong noted, "but it really is quite a lot."

Even so, as the astronauts waited to hear their first STAY on the lunar surface, Armstrong felt obligated to apologize for the extra time he took to find a "parking place." "Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The AUTO targeting [of the on-board computer guidance system] was taking us right into a football field-sized crater with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around us."

Houston made clear that no apologizes were necessary.

CAPCOM (DUKE): "Roger, copy. Sounds good to us, Tranquility . . . Be advised that there are lots of smiling faces in this room and all over the world."

ALDRIN: "There are two of them up here."

Then Mike Collins interrupted for the first time since the astronauts began their powered descent.

"And don't forget one in the command module," he echoed.

With Aldrin's help and supervision, Armstrong methodically climbed out through the roof of the LEM, and collected himself on the porch above the exit ladder. There were now just nine rungs between him and the lunar surface. But before descending further, he had to hook up the lunar equipment conveyor cord (LEC) and pull open the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) attached to the fuselage of the spacecraft.

Houston then reminded him to activate the remote controlled TV camera mounted inside the MESA so the worldwide audience back on Earth could watch him take man's first step on another planet.

ALDRIN: "Roger. TV circuit breaker's in. LMP reads loud and clear."

CAPCOM (MCCANDLESS): "And we're getting a picture on the TV."

The resolution of the TV pictures was shadowy to say the least, but the bulky white silhouette backing off the porch of the LEM was clearly visible against the black void behind it.

Armstrong backed all the way to the bottom of the ladder, then hopped down to the round metal landing pad. Although the rungs of the ladder were spaced only twelve inches apart, the distance from the lowest bar to the landing pad was about three and a half feet. Just to make sure there would be no problem when it came time to return to the LEM, he jumped back up from the pad to the ninth rung of the exit ladder, and reported the results to his comrade inside the cabin:

"Okay, I just checked-getting back up to that first step, Buzz, it's not even collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up ... It takes a good little jump."

Then Armstrong hopped back down to the landing pad.

"I'm at the foot of the ladder . . . The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. Now and then, it's very fine ... I'm going to step off the LM now . . . "

Buzz Aldrin would later recount the mystery and controversy surrounding how Armstrong chose his first words from the lunar surface:

"There was, in fact, widespread discussion prior to our flight about what he should say. When it reached epidemic proportions, [public affairs officer] Julian Scheer wrote a terse memo to the NASA heads saying in effect: Did Queen Isabella tell Christopher Columbus what to say? There were also rumors-unconfirmed-that Neil was advised what to say by Simon Bourgin, a United States Information Agency official who was in frequent contact with the astronauts and ... was also the rumored source of [Apollo 8 commander] Frank Borman's reading of Genesis. For his part, Neil declined to comment on any of these rumors to anyone, including Mike and myself."

"I had thought about what I was going to say largely because so many people had asked me to think about it," Armstrong claimed later. "I thought about that a little bit on the way to the moon ... [but] I hadn't actually decided what I wanted to say until just before we went out [onto the lunar surface]."

At 9:56 P.m. Houston time, the Apollo 11 commander lifted his Beta cloth-covered right boot off the landing pad, planted it in the colorless dust of the Sea of Tranquility, and blurted:

"THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND."

Although neither Armstrong nor anyone else realized it at the time, he had just blown what was automatically destined to become one of history's most famous lines. As critics back on Earth would soon point out, the statement, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" sounded like a tautology, redundant to the point of being meaningless, as well as rather sexist. What Armstrong reportedly meant to say was, "That's one small step for a man"-that "man" being Armstrong himself-so as to make it clear that he was merely the lucky individual chosen to make "one giant leap" on behalf of the entire human race. But in the glorious heat of the moment, he inexplicably failed to insert the crucial article "a" before the word "man."

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