ESSAY - JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

ON JULY 20, 1969, at 9:56:20 p.m. at NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas, Neil A. Armstrong stepped from the ladder of Apollo 11’s lunar module to the surface of the Moon. His first words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He presumably meant “one small step for a man,” but the “a” was lost in the static, or perhaps he simply forgot it in his understandable excitement.

Mr. Armstrong tested the footing and determined that he could move about easily in his bulky white spacesuit and heavy backpack while under the influence of lunar gravity, which makes everything weigh one-sixth of what it weighs on Earth. After 19 minutes, he was joined outside by another astronaut, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. The two immediately set up a TV camera away from the spacecraft to give people back home a broader view of the lunar landscape and their operations.

Years later, the third crew member, Michael Collins, who remained in lunar orbit in Apollo 11’s command module while Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin walked on the moon, would recall the world tour the astronauts took after the mission. He was warmed by their reception, not so much by the adulation as the expressions of shared accomplishment. People they met felt they had participated in the landing, too.

In the 2007 documentary film “In the Shadow of the Moon,” Mr. Collins said: “People, instead of saying, ‘Well, you Americans did it,’ everywhere they said: ‘We did it!’ We, humankind, we, the human race, we, people did it!”

It occurred to me, as I covered the landing for The Times at Mission Control in Houston, that if Christopher Columbus or Captain James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happened. Exploring is old, but instantaneous telecommunications is new and marvelous.

In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for radio waves to travel the 383,000 kilometers from Moon to Earth, each step by Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin was seen, and their voices heard, throughout the world they had for the time being left behind. In contrast to exploration’s previous landfalls, the whole world shared in this moment.

During their 2-hour, 21-minute Moon walk, the astronauts planted an American flag, deployed three scientific instruments for collecting data in the months after their departure, and picked up samples of rock and soil.

Mr. Aldrin, at one point, described the bounding kangaroo hops of their movements in the low lunar gravity. “Sometimes it takes about two or three paces to make sure that your feet are underneath you,” he said. “And about two or three, maybe four, easy paces can bring you to a fairly smooth stop.”

The astronauts paused for a telephone call from the White House. “Because of what you have done,” President Richard M. Nixon told them, “the heavens have become a part of man’s world.”

The year before the first landing, an earlier mission in the lunar program had set out to circumnavigate the Moon for the first time. The flight of Apollo 8 came at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in American history. The country in 1968 was divided and demoralized.

Opposition to the Vietnam War had forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw from a run for another term. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fell dead in Memphis, Tennessee, from an assassin’s bullet, a tragedy that incited a riot of arson and looting in scores of cities. The mourning and fury had hardly subsided when Robert F. Kennedy was cut down by another assassin’s bullet, in Los Angeles.

No one in power, as I recall, seriously advocated canceling or deferring the Apollo mission. Yet amid a shooting war abroad and bitter unrest at home, going to the Moon slipped lower in the public’s order of priorities. It dismayed me to think that in this climate, the first human voyages to the Moon might wind up as irrelevancies.




Astronauts from the United States’ Apollo 11 mission took a walk on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity in 1969 and set up a television camera so millions around the world could watch.


Earthrise, 1968


Apollo 8 proved to be an inspiration at this crucial time. The astronauts - Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders - flew to the Moon and circled it 10 times in orbits within 100 kilometers of the lifeless surface. Their television camera recorded the gray plains and wide craters, one scene after another of everlasting desolation.

On the fourth orbit, as Apollo emerged from behind the Moon, Mr. Borman, the commander, exclaimed: “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!” The astronauts gasped at the sight of Earth, a blue and white orb sparkling in the blackness of space, in contrast to the dead lunar surface in the foreground.

The sight moved the poet Archibald MacLeish to write in The Times: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

NASA later released the pictures the astronauts had taken of “Earthrise.” These were even more inspiring and humbling, the mission’s prized keepsake. Time magazine closed out the troubled year with the Earthrise photograph on its cover, accompanied by a one-word caption, “Dawn.”

In a 2008 book, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” Robert Poole contends that the picture was the spiritual nascence of the environmental movement, writing that “it is possible to see that Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it means for Earth.”

Another Apollo 8 surprise was in store, prepared by the astronauts. Late on Christmas Eve 1968, on one of the final orbits, Mr. Anders announced, “The crew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send to you.” While a camera focused on the Moon outside the spacecraft window, Mr. Anders read the opening words of the creation story from the Book of Genesis.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth,” he began. “And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Mr. Lovell then took over with the verse beginning: “And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.” Mr. Borman closed the reading: “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas; and God saw that it was good.”


The Genesis Flight

At the conclusion, a hushed audience throughout the lands of Earth heard Mr. Borman sign off from the Moon: “And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth.” Today, Apollo 8 is still spoken of as the Genesis flight.

The inclusiveness of these experiences was remarkable, given the space race’s origins in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence. It all started with the Sputnik alarm in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first spacecraft, giving rise to invigorated United States efforts in science and technology. It was followed by President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to the nation in 1961 to put astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Looking back, three of the nine Apollo lunar missions stand out from the others as especially emotional experiences.

Apollo 11 made history. Kennedy’s bold commitment was fulfilled, and those alive then have never forgotten where they were and their feelings when humans first walked on the Moon. Apollo 13 was an epic suspense unfolding in real time to a global audience. Three astronauts went forth, met disaster, faced death and barely limped back to the safety of home. And Apollo 8, as the first flight of humans beyond Earth’s low orbital confines, restored momentum and magnitude to the adventure of reaching for the Moon.

Mr. Collins, who was the capsule communicator in Mission Control for Apollo 8, said that the essence of that flight was about leaving, and that Apollo 11’s was about arriving. “As you look back 100 years from now, which is more important, the idea that people left their home planet or the idea that people arrived at their nearby satellite?” he asked himself. “I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11, even though today we regard Apollo 11 as being the showpiece and zenith of the Apollo program, rightly so.”





The Launching

In memory, after all this time, Apollo 11 resists relegation to the past tense. In the wee hours of July 16, 1969, the summer air of the Florida coast is warm and still as we drive toward a light in the distance.

After the first checkpoint, where guards at Kennedy Space Center inspect our badges and car pass, the source of the light comes into view. The sight is magnetic, drawing us on. Strong xenon beams converge on Pad 39A, highlighting the mighty Saturn 5 rocket as it is being fueled.

A few more kilometers, another checkpoint, and Doug Dederer, a freelancer for The Times, and I approach the Vehicle Assembly Building, a mammoth presence.

Along an embankment stretches a line of trailers for the larger news organizations and imposing studios for the three major television networks. In the early light of dawn, the three Apollo 11 astronauts take the drive from their quarters to the launching pad. Everything is on schedule for a liftoff at 9:32 a.m.

Precisely on schedule, Jack King, the “voice of Apollo,” intones the final countdown. 5-4-3. Ignition. Orange flame and dark smoke erupt from huge nozzles at the base of the Saturn 5. The rocket hesitates, held down by heavy steel arms. 2-1, King continues. “We have liftoff.”

Once at full thrust, and unbound, the 3,463-metric-ton spaceship strains to overcome gravity, and for a heart-stopping second or two appears to be losing the fight. Then, ever so slowly, it rises and clears the tower.

Only now do the staccato thunderclaps from the engines reach the press site, confirming once again that sound travels more slowly than light. The blasts beat on your chest and shake the ground you stand on. The experience is visceral, the Saturn moving earth and smacking us with goodbyes. The spacefarers are off over the ocean, fire and vapor trailing behind, on their way to the Moon.


Apollo’s Legacy

Apollo 11 effectively ended the space race. The Russians conceded as much by their subsequent space endeavors. Handicapped by failures in testing their own heavy-lift rocket, they never attempted a human flight to the Moon and turned instead to long-duration flights in low orbit.

American astronauts made six more journeys to the Moon, all successes, excepting the ill-starred Apollo 13. But public interest was flagging. A battle in the cold war had been won, people seemed to feel, so bring the boys home.

By the end of 1972, the last of the 12 men to walk on the Moon packed up and returned home. The uncertain future for human spaceflight muted the celebrations at the space center in Houston.

At the conclusion of that flight, Apollo 17, I solicited historians’ assessment of the significance of these early years in space. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. predicted that in 500 years, the 20th century would probably be remembered mainly for humanity’s ventures beyond its native planet. At the close of the century, he had not changed his mind.

How brief the space race was, the 12 years from Sputnik to the first Moon walk, but thrilling, mind-boggling, even magnificent at times. No one has been back to the Moon since 1972.

Yet spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted - a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for the United States’ early Mercury missions of Alan B. Shepard Jr. and John Glenn, and watched, transfixed, the pictures from the moon in July 1969. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.

Seldom does it cross our minds that our voices and text messages are carried across continents and oceans via satellites. Our weather and the effects of global warming are tracked from space. Our news, including reports of astronaut missions now relegated to back pages, is disseminated through space. We view the spectacular images from the planet Saturn and the far cosmos with less thought to how they were obtained than of the beauty and abiding mystery they call to our attention.

The United States has now embarked on a program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 to establish a more permanent research presence there and prepare for eventual human flight to Mars. But in the absence of the cold war motivation, the effort lacks the money and the political mandate that favored Apollo. Another enterprise on the scale of Apollo is, in the foreseeable future, unimaginable.

Someday, however, a party of space travelers may make the pilgrimage to Apollo 11’s landing site on the Sea of Tranquillity, a broad basin that is a smudge on the right face of the Moon, as seen from Earth on clear nights. The encampment, known as Tranquillity Base, should be just as Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin left it. Change comes slowly on the arid, airless Moon, and barring an intervening shower of meteorites, the American flag and the forlorn base of the lunar module should look like new. And the astronauts’ boot prints should still appear fresh in the gray powdery regolith.


An Age of Heroes

For a brief time, when spaceflight was fresh and exciting, we embraced astronauts as heroes who took risks to reach grand goals. We believed then more readily in heroes, people who reflect what it is that we feel is admirable in humanity, who inspire us at least to strive to live up to some ideal image.

Only four years before Sputnik, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were hailed as heroes for making the last “giant leap for mankind” of the pre-space-age generations. Their ascent to the top of Mount Everest, as high as anyone can aspire and still be rooted on terra firma, culminated an era of crossing oceans, penetrating continental interiors and reaching the ends of the earth. They crested a divide in exploration between the more individual exploits of yore and the greater team efforts mobilized to challenge newer frontiers of achievement.

On this side of the divide, potential heroes get lost in the crowd of collaborators and overshadowed by their enabling technology. Even the amazing technology itself, so swiftly domesticated for the workplace and home, soon seems too ordinary to be remarkable. Our laptops have a greater capacity than any of the computers in the Apollo Project.

Neil Armstrong has earned the last word. “I think we’ll always be in space,” he said in a 2001 interview for the American space agency’s oralhistory program. “But it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control and can’t anticipate that will cause things to happen or not happen.”

Mr. Armstrong then struck a note that resonates with his contemporaries, and that includes me. He and his Apollo 11 crew were born in the same year, 1930, three years before I was; we were the right age at the right time and places to participate in a singular adventure in history, whatever its legacy as seen through the eyes of later generations.

“We were really very privileged,” he said, “to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go.”








EXPLORERS Neil A. Armstrong, top, was the first to step onto the Moon, followed 19 minutes later by Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., center. Apollo 11’s lunar module, known as the Eagle, carried the two astronauts to the surface from lunar orbit.

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