Figure 1: Neil Armstrong and his "one small step for a man, giant leap for mankind" on July 20th, 1969. Credit: NASA.


FIRST MAN ON THE MOON, HALF A CENTURY LATER

On July 20th, 1969, humans set foot upon the Moon for the first time. This was the result of thousands of people working hard to reach that specific goal on what it was called Project Apollo. The work of everyone of them was necessary for that. Without it, what is probably the greatest achievement in human history may have never been a reality. All happened within an international political context that provided enough motivation for those thousands of men and women to join efforts in pursuit of what it was established as a national goal. Nevertheless, the vast majority of those contributors and enablers has just passed without due attention to the rest of us. Only a very reduced minority of them has even had the chance to appear on documentaries or written articles. Astronauts were the most recognizable actors, the "tip of the arrow", and even then, some of them were less prominent than others. Obviously, the most famous of them all was the first man to step on to the lunar surface: Mr. Neil Alden Armstrong (Fig. 1).

Armstrong, as well as the other Apollo astronauts, was part of an elite of fighter and test pilots. As such, he was used to conducting very difficult missions and flying complex, never or little before tested machines. Armstrong was also an aeronautical engineer and a civilian when joined project Gemini in 1962. As an engineer, his ultimate personal goal was that of achieving the best possible design of an aircraft. As an experienced test pilot, his ultimate personal goal being an Apollo astronaut was that of executing a successful -perhaps the first- lunar landing. But he never actually thought of being the first human to walk on the surface of the Moon. That was simply not an interesting enough achievement to him. He considered himself as just one more astronaut and just one more person -among many, many others- working hard to meet president Kennedy's deadline: to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. In fact, all Apollo astronauts were at the same level an equally qualified to perform such a historic mission. Nevertheless, history, and particularly events that were out of the reach of any mission planner at NASA and even Armstrong himself, determined who the first man on the Moon would be. Surprisingly enough, that was, in a way, induced by the Soviet Union's space program itself.

Figure 2: Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton (1924-1993). Credit: NASA

Figure 3: Neil Alden Armstrong (1930-2012). Credit: NASA

Figure 4: Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. (1930-1999). Credit: NASA

After being grounded because of a heart condition, before having even flown into space, Deke Slayton (Fig. 2), one of the Mercury 7 astronauts, became the chief of NASA's astronaut office. He developed a methodology that, although not fully rigorous or strict, allowed him to assign crews to specific missions. Apollo mission crews were composed by three astronauts: commander (CDR), command module pilot (CMP), and lunar module pilot (LMP). The most senior astronaut would be the CDR, followed by the CMP, and then by the LMP, the latter considered the "junior" astronaut. Every mission would have a prime crew, destined to execute the mission itself, a backup crew, intended to replace one or more of the prime crew's members for the flight in case of need, and a support crew, whose mission was that of ensuring that prime and backup crews were always up-to-date on and informed of any changes to the flight plan, checklists, and mission rules. Deke Slayton's general rule for crew rotation was that every backup crew would be considered to be prime crew three missions later. Slayton had to be flexible of course to accommodate for astronauts' personal decisions, temporal grounding (or even death) of an astronaut, and also his personal choices for a specific mission or those of NASA's management.

In the particular case of Armstrong (Fig. 3), he was part of the backup crew of Gemini 5, becoming commander of Gemini 8, the third flight after Gemini 5. Then he was again selected as a backup for Gemini 11. For Apollo, Slayton wanted an original Mercury astronaut to be commander of the first Apollo mission. Since Alan Shepard was grounded due to Ménière's Disease, Virgil Grissom was chosen to command the AS-204 mission, later renamed Apollo 1. It was the 6th flight after Grissom served as backup commander for Gemini 6A. Hence, the general rule for crew selection was not followed when moving from Gemini to Apollo. In fact, the rule was not always followed exactly during Gemini, although it was relatively closely. Due to the Apollo 1 fire and the death of its entire crew, mission crew assignments had to be reconsidered as well. After being backup commander for Gemini 11, Armstrong was assigned as backup commander for the second mission to test the Command/Service Module (CSM) around Earth's orbit, Apollo 9. If everything went well, Armstrong would thus most likely be commander of the second moon landing attempt, the third flight after Apollo 9. The first moon landing would then be the responsibility of the backup crew of the Apollo 8 mission (first manned test of the lunar module in Earth's orbit), commanded by Pete Conrad (Fig. 4). Any delay in the program, requiring additional preparatory missions before the first moon landing attempt, would certainly require modifications to the flight and crew schedules, pushing even further the first lunar descent mission.

Figure 5: Apollo 8 (originally Apollo 9) primary (top row) and backup (bottom row) crews. Primary crew, from left to right: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. Backup crew, from left to right: Neil Armastrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Fred Haise. Credit: NASA

Figure 6: Apollo 9 (originally Apollo 8) backup crew. From left to right: Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. Later, they would become the prime crew of Apollo 12: second lunar landing. Credit: NASA

Because nobody had ever before built a lunar module (LM), its construction was running well behind schedule thus significantly delaying the flight of Apollo 8. And here is when something unexpected, and totally outside NASA, happened. A U.S. spy satellite had photographed a giant Russian rocket on its launch pad getting ready to fly. That rocket was the, at the time unknown, N-1 moon rocket of the Soviets. Such an image could mean only one thing: the Soviet Union was ready to send humans to the Moon. If that N-1 rocket was launched and the first to reach the Moon were the Soviets, then the whole space race was over. As a desperate yet clever and very risky measure, to avoid the Russians being the first to get to the Moon, NASA's George Low suggested to replace the Apollo 9 mission for an entirely new one. This new mission would still test the CSM but instead of doing it around the Earth it would be flying it to the Moon and back! This would require to fly for the first time with astronauts on board the mighty Saturn V in an "all up" test, and, given the LM delays, its flight would have to be before the original Apollo 8 mission. Deke Slayton did not want to lose the experience of the different crews acquired in training. Therefore, he swapped the Apollo 8 and 9 flights keeping their primary and backup crews unchanged (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). Now the Apollo 8 mission would become Apollo 9 and viceversa, and because of this change, Neil Armstrong, backup commander of the new Apollo 8 flight (Fig. 5) to the Moon, was very likely to be, following the general crew rotation rule, commander of the first lunar landing attempt, Apollo 11. Apollo 8 orbited the Moon in December 1968, Apollo 9 successfully tested the LM in Earth's orbit, and Apollo 10 did the same around the Moon. The rest is history: Neil Alden Armstrong becomes the first person to ever walk on the Moon on July 20th, 1969 (Fig. 1). Had not the U.S. satellite spotted the N-1 rocket and the original Apollo 8 and 9 mission swapped, a guy named Pete Conrad would have been the first man to walk on the Moon. Conrad was the commander of Apollo 12, the second successful lunar landing.

Therefore, it was just a matter of chance that Neil Armstrong became the first one to walk on the Moon 50 years ago. In fact, Armstrong could not apply to the first astronaut call for project Mercury because it was opened to military test pilots only, and Armstrong was a civilian test pilot working for NASA at that time. When the call for a second group of NASA astronauts for project Gemini was issued, opened also to civilians, Armstrong's application arrived about one week passed the deadline. It was thanks to the help of someone working for NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, who knew Armstrong, recognized his application and secretly slipped it into the pile of on-time applications, that Armstrong's form reached Slayton's desk. Without that help, Armstrong might have never been accepted into the space program. Years later, Armstrong got close of being killed in two opportunities. The first one during the Gemini 8 mission when his spacecraft entered an extreme roll in orbit around the Earth. The second one, while flying the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, having to eject himself only seconds before crashing. Had any of the above events gone wrong, who knows who might have been the first man on the Moon.

Final remark: Contrary to what had been the tradition during the Gemini program -that the EVA was not conducted by the commander of the flight-, it was NASA's management [by Chris Kraft in fact] decision that for the EVA on the moon the commander would exit the spacecraft first. Had the Gemini procedure been maintained, Armstrong would have been the second on the lunar surface.

References:

"An Audience with Neil Armstrong", Interview by CPA Australia's Alex Malley (2011)
"How Luck Made Neil Armstrong the First Man on the Moon" by Amy Shira Teitel, Discover Magazine (January 2019)
"50 Years Ago: Soviet’s Moon Rocket’s Rollout to Pad Affects Apollo Plans" by Mark Garcia (Editor), NASA Apollo (November 2017)
"50 Years Ago: Armstrong Survives Training Crash" by Melanie Whiting (Editor), NASA History (May 2018)
Neil Armstrong, from Wikipedia, and references therein
"Day Leaves Behind a Rich Legacy" by Sarah Merlin, Dryden Flight Research Center, NASA (News, Vol. 46, Issue 6, July 2004)

-April, 2019. (Last revised: July 2020.)




© R. Demarco, 2019-2022