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Skill and luck were on space hero Neil Armstrong's side

First moon landing fell to Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins by luck of the draw. More setbacks like the 1967 ground test fire killing 3 Apollo astronauts would mean a different lineup. March 1966 Armstrong and Dave Scott orbiting on Gemini 8 just completed the first successful docking of 2 vehicles in space when their spacecraft gyrated violently while still attached to the other craft, an Agena rocket booster, spinning almost one revolution a second. The astronauts, in danger of colliding with the Agena, approached their physical limits. After other measures failed Armstrong activated the reentry system, aborting the mission. 2 years later a moon-lander training vehicle Armstrong maneuvered spewed smoke, spinning 200 feet above ground. He parachuted to safety seconds before the $2.5 million craft crashed and burned. Minutes later he was back in the hangar discussing the incident.

His professionalism made Neil Armstrong a natural choice for Apollo 11 mission commander. A preliminary checklist had Aldrin exit the lander first. He lobbied hard to keep that position. Conventional protocol was for commander Armstrong to exit first. Landing module layout cinched the matter: 2 men in bulky space suits could hardly swap places so Aldrin could wriggle through the tiny hatch first. Pete Conrad, training with Armstrong in the Gemini and Apollo programs, says the issue never arose until Buzz mentioned it. Armstrong let Aldrin's complaints wash over him and let Deke Slayton, who ran the astronaut office, handle it. Neil hemmed and hawed a moment and looked away, breaking eye contact with a coolness Aldrin never saw in him before, saying, "I realize the historical significance of this. I won't rule anything out."

Walking was the easy part. Landing safely was the real achievement. Asked what it was like to walk on the moon, Armstrong replied, "Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying." Earth's riveting TV moment and headline focus was that first step. Exhilaration and relief came 7 hours earlier when Armstrong landed his craft safely, marking the achievement 1/3 million people worked 10 years at. Descending over the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin to live had to keep the Eagle in good enough condition for takeoff and rendezvous with Collins and the Columbia, orbiting 60 NM above them. Standing inside the Eagle's closet-sized cabin, sealed inside pressure suits, looking out triangular windows, they felt the onset of lunar gravity after 4 weightless days. At 33,000 feet above the surface, lights flashed and alarms went off unexpectedly. Ground control soon told the tense astronauts their onboard computer was handling too much data and falling behind. Aldrin felt that first hot edge of panic.

At 5,000 feet Armstrong took partial manual control of the lander as planned. Unknown to ground control, looking out the window he noticed the automated targeting system carrying the craft toward a crater of boulders as big as cars. Armstrong moved a hand-control stick and flicked a toggle switch to fly clear of the danger zone while searching for a clean landing spot. This consumed extra fuel and he was running low. Eagle's thrusters "kicked up a transparent sheet of moving dust, like landing an airplane in thin layers of fast-moving, transparent ground fog." He felt the craft rocking, skidding through space as its thrusters adjusted its position. Later he told NASA debriefers, "I didn't fly the vehicle smoothly. I felt erratic." Analysts going over his every move second by second reported his maneuvers were "well within the design control regime despite his apology." As Armstrong concentrated on landing in moon fog, Aldrin called out numbers from the radar: "400 feet altitude, down at 9 ft per second ... 200 feet, 4 down ... 40 feet, down 2 1/2, kicking up dust." Houston radioed them they had 50 seconds of descent fuel left. Neil Armstrong balanced the unwieldy craft on a cone of fire from his descent engine, sidling sideways over the thinning field of boulders. After an agonizing wait, Aldrin said: "Contact light." At touchdown NASA measured Armstrong's pulse at 150 beats per minute. You can hear the emotion in the recording of the Apollo commander's words of confirmation: "Houston, uh ..." He paused, staring at the deceptively benign-looking moonscape. His voice quavered as he identified the landing spot as he believed would evoke human explorers' traditions over centuries: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." It was 1:17:42 p m PDT.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
Neil Armstrong composed the line during the 6 1/2 hours between touchdown and stepping out, knowing the occasion called for something beyond engineer-speak. His mother told reporters he wanted to say something including everybody in the world. He hopped from ladder to surface in prime time - 7:56 p m PDT Sunday July 20, 1969. Grainy B/W TV images beamed worldwide live from the moon's surface. Armstrong and Aldrin spent less than 2 1/2 hours outside their moon ship setting up experiments, collecting rocks, taking pictures, always within 150 feet from the lander. Armstrong startled ground teams by leaving camera view to examine an interesting crater. Like on a flood-lit sandlot baseball field at night you stand in dazzling light, a stark black sky above. Earth appears 4 times as big as the moon does from Earth, showing oceans, continents and clouds. Neil Armstrong was elated when he didn't sink into the surface. His most surprising visual impression was the eerie play of color and light. At lunar dawn the airless moonscape seemed drained of color. As the sun rose the moving light was reflected in bright tan. The rock's actual color viewed close up was dark or charcoal brown. The horizon, close by, was jagged and outlined with knife-edge sharpness against the black abyss. As they stood in the flood of light, Armstrong clapped his gloved hand on Aldrin's shoulder and said, "Isn't it fun?"

President Nixon visits quarantined astronauts
Back on Earth 3 days later the Apollo 11 crew found conditions even more surreal than on the moon. NASA isolated them in a plush aluminum trailer aboard the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier whose crew plucked them out of the Pacific after splashdown. Richard Nixon waved and smiled at them through a window. Flying out to greet the returning heroes he invited them and their wives to a White House dinner and asked if they got seasick. They were quarantined on the remote chance they might infect Earth with deadly lunar microbes. In the trailer they ate TV dinners, listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and played gin rummy. A physician sharing the trailer treated Neil Armstrong for an ear inflammation but declared them healthy. When they got out 2 weeks later Armstrong teased that he would feign illness if he saw cameras. He couldn't dodge his next obligation: a world tour and months on the rubber-chicken circuit. Apollo 11's crew addressed a joint session of Congress, then took off for 28 cities in 25 countries in 38 days. They met Queen Elizabeth, Marshal Tito, the pope, the emperor of Japan, the shah of Iran and Generalissimo Franco. Ohio's Dairy Association sculpted Armstrong's likeness in 900 pounds of butter.

Although the astronauts owned their places in history Vietnam and summers of love and rebellion eclipsed Apollo's glow. At a July 1970 NASA press conference Armstrong expressed his disappointment that the moon trip did not better inspire Earth: "I hoped the impact would be more far-reaching. We're tied up with today's problems." About his new status as hero he said, "It's not that I feel uncomfortable. It's just there's inadequate time to do things I'd like to do. There's a drastic change to my life."

12 Americans walked the barren moonscape 1969 - 1972. Neil Armstrong remains uniquely firstness and aloof ever since. His record can never be broken but might in other hands have been tarnished. He can seem arrogant, cold and as distant as the lunar far side. He grants no interviews, rarely attends public functions. Unlike his crewmates he wrote no memoir. He left a university teaching job abruptly in the middle of the school year. On the moon landing's 25th anniversary he avoided a parade in his honor in his hometown Wapakoneta, Ohio. He occasionally returned to view in unexpected ways, for example in a high visibility Chrysler ad campaign. Friends say he's smart, intensely private and determined to live life on his own terms despite public domain. Whether as astronaut, naval combat aviator, test pilot, civil servant, engineer, professor, farmer, businessman, civic booster, musician, husband or father, Neil Armstrong follows his own code.

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Quantum mechanics key to solving mysteries
Two of the 1900s' most seminal developments were discovering and developing quantum mechanics, a collaboration involving many theorists and taking decades, providing our framework for understanding interactions of elementary particles at submicroscopic distances; and Einstein's relativity theory. As waves represent fluctuations in water's 2-dimensional surface gravity represents fluctuations in universal spacetime geometry. These major advances of 1900s theoretical physics are not obviously compatible. This is a great focus of interest at the century's close. In a circuitous process reminiscent of theoretical developments of quantum mechanics we appreciate the string theory, where point particles like electrons or quarks are replaced at a fundamental level by tiny vibrating loops of string. Such theories consistently unify quantum mechanics and relativity, answering questions unthinkable earlier. In the 2000s we'll extract from string theory's majestic, mysterious framework answers to some of physics' remaining major puzzles: why our universe has 3 large spatial dimensions and is almost flat, why quarks and leptons (electrons and cousins) exist with their observed properties, etc. What's harder and even more exciting is new kinds of questions the theory will teach us to ask!

Alpha         Bravo        Charlie       Delta
Echo          Foxtrot      Golf          Hotel
India         Juliet       Kilo          Lima
Mike          November     Oscar         Papa
Quebec        Romeo        Sierra        Tango
Uniform       Victor       Whiskey       Xray
Yankee        Zulu