On a hot midsummer evening, Americans were joined by some 600 million people around the world to watch in awe as Neil A. Armstrong, aged 38, from Wapakoneta, Ohio, gingerly lowered his left foot into the soft dust of the moon's surface. "That's one small step for man . . . one giant leap for America could not claim the moon. There was an international agreement on that, so Armstrong and Aldrin enriched the bleak environment with a platitude engraved on the abandoned base of their landing craft: "Here men from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." The wording was a gesture. They set foot on the moon for America, for American prestige, for an America driven not by humanitarianism or science or economic profit but by the simple fear the Russians would get there first. The race for the moon was a myth. It was never a Russian priority. The landing, for all that, was one of America's greatest triumphs-43 years after Robert Goddard successfully flew the first liquid-fueled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts, 24 years after Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team from PeenemŸnde were captured by the American Army in the Bavarian Alps and brought to Texas.
Eight years was an incredibly short time for fulfilling Kennedy's pledge, but a long time for sustaining an effort of national will at a cost of $25 billion. It was an exhilarating demonstration of the American genius for optimism as well as for the American capacity for organization, for concentrated teamwork of the highest quality at the edge of industrial and scientific technology.
Everything for the launch, the four-day flight and the landing in the spidery Eagle was planned and tracked on 450 computer consoles, but cool nerves counted too when on the fourth day of the mission it came time to leave the mother module, Columbia, and power down to the vast unknown in the landing craft Eagle. None of the watching millions knew that computer alarms kept threatening to abort the landing or that Armstrong had to take over manually when the weird and flimsy Eagle headed for a crater strewn with boulders. Or that when Armstrong sent the magic signal "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed," he had but 20 seconds of fuel left.
Armstrong and Aldrin spent 22 hours on the moon, collecting rock, taking pictures, setting up experiments and talking with President Nixon. While they did, the lonely Michael Collins, aged 38, flew Columbia through sunlight and total blackness wondering if his buddies would make it back from somewhere 69 miles below. He wrote later: "My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding the truth of the matter. If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know. Almost better not to have the option I enjoy." But the single-rocket engine worked and just after midnight on July 22 the trio were on their way home.
Before the program ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972, ten other men walked on the surface: Charles Conrad, Jr.; Alan L. Bean; Edgar D. Mitchell; James J. Irwin; David R. Scott; Charles M. Duke, Jr.; John W. Young; Eugene A. Cernan; Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt; and Alan Shepard.
Americans, all.
mankind." The Apollo 11 landing was on July 20, 1969, eight years and 56 days since President Kennedy had promised to land a man on the moon "before the end of the decade." "Man on the moon" was not quite the right expression. The determination all along was to land an American on the moon. Congress had apoplexy at the suggestion that the flag of the U.N., or any other symbol of humankind, might supplant the emblem of American power. It was Old Glory that Armstrong and his copilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, age 39, from Montclair, New Jersey, struggled to emplant in the rock and dust of the Sea of Tranquillity, the Stars and Stripes stiffened with wire so that in the airless world of the moon it would seem to fly as heroically as the flag on Iwo Jima.
CHILDREN
by David Halberstam