This article appeared in the Sunday Herald Sun - 6th July 2009
The headline that humbled Hinch
Apollo 11 40th Anniversary By Derryn Hinch
Forty years ago this month, the dusty, rilled footprint of Neil Armstrong was historically planted on the moon as man walked on the lunar surface for the first time. About ten years before that –when I was a teenager – I used to wrestle with my Dad for first go at the daily newspaper to read about the latest exploits of seven men chosen to be the first human voyagers into space.
Men like Glenn, Shepard and Grissom. The Project Mercury astronauts. They would go to places we had only seen in the Eagle comics featuring the adventures of Dan Dare and the dreaded Mekon.
The pioneering astronauts were introduced to the world with great fanfare in Washington in 1959. It was the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had already hurled the grapefruit-sized beeping Sputnik into orbit in 1957. The Space Race was on.
Alan Shepard was due to blast off in October 1960 to be the first man in space. But there were delays and problems with the Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral. There was a further, crucial, postponement in March ’61.
A month later, from behind the Iron Curtain, came news that shocked and enthralled the world. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth at 27,000 kilometers per hour for nearly two hours in April 1961. In May, Alan
Shepard finally made an anti-climactic sub-orbital flight. Fifteen minutes. Three hundred miles.
The West was petrified and panicky. Everybody believed, that, with the Cold War and the awesomely destructive power of nuclear weapons, ‘He who conquered space would rule the world’.
Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the hydrogen bomb, said the United States had lost ‘a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.’ U.S. News & World Report said the launching ranked alongside nuclear fission in military importance.
Within days the boyish new President, John F. Kennedy, went before Congress to reassure the American people and pledge to the world:
‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’
I certainly didn’t believe that before that decade was out, in July 1969, men would not only be on the moon but that teenager, fighting with his Dad over his local newspaper in a small town in New Zealand, would be at the Apollo 11 launch site at Cape Kennedy, Florida, to watch Neil Armstrong, ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins blast off into the unknown.
And to broadcast that historic event live to more than 50 radio stations around Australia on the Macquarie Network.
Also, before that decade was out, three astronauts had died – incinerated on the launch pad – trapped in their capsule in the nose of Apollo One when fire engulfed them in January 1967. One of them, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, was an original astronaut and veteran of the Mercury and Gemini programs.
In an interview, days before he died, Grissom presciently said
‘If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business and we hope if anything happens to us it will not delay the program.’
It did delay the program and there were no manned flights until Apollo 7 in October 1968. But on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 sat on the launch pad ready to fulfill John Kennedy’s pledge. Cape Canaveral had been renamed Cape Kennedy by President Lyndon Johnson after JFK was assassinated in November 1963.(It’s since reverted to its old name).
Covering that Apollo 11 liftoff was one of the greatest personal and professional experiences of my life. Radio was a part-time job. I had only been doing it for about six weeks, while on assignment around the US as an Australian foreign correspondent. Describing that trail-blazing blast-off of three brave men, going where nobody had ever ventured before, was my first ‘live’ call. I was told I did a good job. I said the subject matter wasn’t half bad.
The atmosphere at the Cape was a carnival. It had been for weeks. The permanent population at nearby Cocoa Beach was only a few thousand but there was a university population of around 60,000 including 25,000 students in Orlando only 40 miles away.
Cocoa Beach had become the astronauts’ playground. They flew T-38 trainers in the air, drove the hottest, red Corvettes during the day and partied hard at night. Even the married ones. Especially some of the married ones.
Their nocturnal activities were never reported on. Drink-driving trangressions were ignored by Police. They were astronauts. They were gods. And there were plenty of groupies.
NASA had cleverly, if controversially, signed all the astronauts to an exclusive contract with LIFE magazine back when the Mercury squad was announced and the well-scripted, well-controlled, stories all showed happy families with dedicated wives and all-American children. Any domestic unrest would be hushed up. There would be no divorce for any spaceman. A hint of scandal, if it got out, would strip a man of his chance to fly into space. This was the Space Age version of The Brady Bunch.
But that didn’t stop some famous names from partying up and down Cocoa Beach at bars that boasted such Apollo special cocktails as ‘moonrocks off’ and ‘astronaughties’.
In the countdown to the liftoff of Apollo 11 the whole peninsular and surrounding towns were booked out. Had been for months. From Orlando to our namesake Melbourne. There were more than 3500 accredited journalists.
By the time we headed by bus to the launch site to arrive at midnight, for a scheduled launch more than nine hours later, there were more than one million people camped along every inch of beach and inlet road space. They had their beach umbrellas, camp beds, pup tents, barbecues, portable TVs and the parties had already started.
Throughout that long Florida night the Saturn 5 rocket, 36 storeys tall, glistened in floodlights and was reflected in a lake that separated us from the launch pad. Steam vented from the base and the sides.
About two and a half hours before liftoff, a few of us, lucky to be in a Press pool, were permitted to join NASA officials and other astronauts to watch Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins leave their quarters after final medical checks to be ferried to their spacecraft. Their families had remained in Houston near Mission Control.
If it weren’t for their fishbowl helmets, white bubble suits and the breathing canisters they each carried, the trio could have been going on a jaunt. They were smiling and giving the thumbs up sign in over-sized gloves. And although everybody was clapping, a lot were also crying. The Apollo One victims had been their friends. They knew things could go fatally wrong.
The tension was palpable as the electronic countdown clock ticked over. There were huge clocks throughout the area and an emotionless, disembodied NASA voice intoned ‘T minus 28 and counting’.
I was in a prime Press stand a (safe) distance from the rocket and there was nothing to impede our view of the white monster, emblazoned with ‘United States’ and ‘USA’, across the lake in front of us.
The final ten seconds of the countdown were awesome as, at the eight second mark, right on the button, Mission Control said ‘We have ignition’ and flames and smoke started belching out the bottom. At ‘Zero’ the rocket started slowly to lift off. As I said on radio ‘so slowly, it looks like it is going to fall over’. But the biggest memory is the noise. That weird and powerful noise. A crackling, spine-tingling, roar. And when it reached us it was physical. It was like being hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.
(When I took a shower later that night after a marathon day I noticed huge black bruises across both thighs from where they had bashed against the press table).
Live on air I shouted ‘The stand that I’m sitting in is shaking… the lights in the stand are shaking… you can probably hardly hear me…I’ll just let you listen to the noise’. Along with the roar and the crackling you could hear a million voices shouting encouragement: ‘go, go, go, you beauty’ as it pulled away from the launch gantry and headed for earth orbit 12 minutes later.
A quarter of a million miles (384,000 kms) later the master ship Columbia was in orbit around the moon preparing for Armstrong and Aldrin, with Aldrin at the controls, to attempt a landing. They swooped down in their ungainly-looking, spiderish, lunar module for a touchdown that was confirmed with the Armstrong quote ‘The Eagle has landed’.
According to the running sheet the two moon men were scheduled to have a decent sleep before going for a walk but they were understandably too excited and Armstrong’s ‘egress’ was brought forward.
Originally, the first man on the moon was meant to be Aldrin. And he almost quit the program when he was demoted. His military background was the problem. Most of the early astronauts came from the Air Force and the Navy but the image-conscious Nixon White House wanted a civilian to be the first and Armstrong got the nod. He’d been a pilot in the Korean War but joined NASA as a civilian research test pilot.
It took Aldrin’s father, also a military man, to convince his son to do his duty and follow orders.
So it was left to a boy from Wapakoneta, Ohio, to become the first man to walk on the moon (and, no, he did not say ‘Good luck, Mr. Gorsky’. That’s an urban myth).
What he did say was ‘That’s one small step for man…. One giant leap for mankind’ which is probably the most famous, and most quoted, piece of historical tautology ever. Think about it. In that context, ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ meant the same thing.
What Neil Armstrong had rehearsed, and planned to say, was ‘That’s one small step for A man… one giant leap for mankind’. And that makes sense.
But he goofed, probably nerves, and the official man/mankind quote stays. It’s even inscribed on a pair of pewter cufflinks I was given by NASA as a memento. Still got them.
Actually, in the months before that historic landing there was much speculation as to what Armstrong’s immortal first words would be.
Would it be a religious message? A piece of American propaganda? Something schmaltzy? Something political? Something really personal?
Some people even hoped for a joke. Like ‘Holy cow! It is made of cheese!’
And what does the plaque say that Armstrong and Aldrin left on the moon, along with an American flag, at a place called Tranquility Base? It says:
Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.
The plaque was signed by all three astronauts and President Richard Nixon. It also had two drawings of Earth – the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. North and South America on one and Europe, Africa, the Soviet Union, India, China, Australia on the other.
It was bolted to the spindly legs of the ladder on the descent stage which was left behind when Eagle blasted off to rendezvous with Collins in the mother ship for the journey home. And that American flag? It was blown over by the Eagle’s engine exhaust as Armstrong and Aldrin headed for home. It lies forever in the lunar dust.
When the moon conquerors got home President Nixon said their eight-day journey was ‘the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation’.
That was all forty years ago, and when the Apollo program ended with Apollo 17, man never went back although NASA hopes to in 2020. All that remains are moon rocks and memories. Fond and indelible memories of an amazing voyage into space. A voyage that started with the liftoff of Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy, Florida, on July 16, 1969.