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Mankind takes giant leap, and life goes on

The Associated Press

From left, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins each struggled with their hero status.

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By JEFF HOUCK | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 19, 2009

TITUSVILLE - On Sunday, July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to place their feet on the moon.

On July 27, 1969, Aldrin spoke to his wife, Joan, from his post-landing quarantine inside a silver Airstream trailer at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.

For their first conversation since splashdown, the second man on the moon begged for fresh underwear.

It didn't mean that the moon landing wasn't "a giant leap for mankind," as Armstrong put it after placing his size 91/2 boot on moon soil a week earlier. It was.

It didn't mean Aldrin wasn't happy to see his wife back on terra firma. He was.

But there was a practical side to all the hoopla. For all the walking around and planting of flags and plucking of moon rocks and snapping of breathtaking pictures and leaving of "we came in peace" plaques and beating of Russians to that place so very far away, there were other things to consider. Everyday life things. Going to the moon wouldn't change that.

It's the reality that, 40 years later, will be easy to overlook this week in all the retellings of that day and that time and that achievement by those men.

Moon landings are grand and glorious achievements. They testify to the will of the human spirit to accomplish tasks beyond comprehension.

And then they're done.

It must have been the same after the last block of stone was pushed atop the Great Pyramid of Giza.

It had to have occurred in an eye blink after the final brick of the Great Wall separated the Ming Dynasty from its enemies in China. Or when the last shovel of jungle dirt was scooped from the Panama Canal.

Someone must have pondered, "What's next?"

There are nights when the moon glows pumpkin orange and seems to hover over the skyline. In the summer, driving east atop the Selmon Crosstown Expressway, it looks as if it might roll like a meatball into downtown Tampa.

An astronomer would tell you that the moon is about 221,000 miles from the Earth at perigee, 252,000 miles at apogee.

On July 20, 1969, there was no distance between the Earth and the moon. With a cold determination on the unforgiving moon surface, Armstrong and Aldrin assembled science experiments that measured solar wind and vibrations from moonquakes. They took samples that would unravel mysteries pondered for centuries.

When the men got back to the cabin of their lunar module, the Eagle — which they had to leave open because there was no handle for the door — they realized a switch to a circuit breaker had broken from a panel. It was the switch they would flip to fire the engine that would propel them off the moon and back to Michael Collins, orbiting in the command module.

They had to find a fix or they would be trapped on the moon with no chance of rescue. In hours they would be out of air.

Aldrin suggested pushing a felt-tip pen into the circuit the moment the ascent engine needed to fire. He did, and it fired.

One insignificant step for mankind. One giant fix for two men.

Getting there was one thing. Walking there was quite another. Leaving was far more important.

Every man who left Earth to step on the moon, and there have been 12 of them, last put his boot on the face of Florida before doing so. It was that way for three years, from July 20, 1969, when Armstrong and Aldrin did it, to Dec. 19, 1972, when Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan finished the program with Apollo 17.

They were heady times.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to find the remnants of that time in the place from which they left.

Yes, the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building used to stack the 30-story Saturn V rockets is there. It still is the largest one-story building in the world. When the convection of Florida humidity churns in the summer, the 525-foot-tall building creates its own weather pattern inside as pseudo rain clouds form at the ceiling.

The giant, towering red gantry of Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, from which Apollo 11 blasted from Earth, is gone. Its pedestal was converted decades ago for the smaller support housing for the space shuttle launches.

The command module that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, is encased in plastic at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington.

With the shuttle program winding down to its final launches in 2010 and the Ares program with its new vehicle still in testing, Kennedy Space Center soon will be more of a tourist attraction than a space port.

The Apollo/Saturn V center, its replica rocket propped on one side, gives visitors a sense of the mammoth scale of the most powerful rocket ever built. A lunar rover sits parked along one wall. A spiderlike lunar lander dangles from the ceiling.

But the 363-foot-long behemoth remnant from the canceled Saturn V launch dominates the room. Instead of blasting off a pad, it's a showpiece that Cub Scouts camp under during overnight trips. It's as if a space whale has beached under a shed amid the scrub of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.

Even the cultural references to the spirit of the space race are all but gone. The kitschy hotels themed with orbit and satellite and astronaut lingo have dwindled to a handful along the coastal spines of U.S. 1 and U.S. 3 in Titusville and Cocoa Beach. You'll find a giant shuttle perched atop the Playland at the Merritt Island McDonald's. There are Mercury astronaut handprints and statues at Spaceview Park in Titusville, where the locals go to watch shuttle launches and scrubs. The marquee at Old Florida Grill & Oyster House in Cocoa urges passing cars to "COME WATCH THE SHUTTLE HERE."

It may have a 321 area code that nods to the countdown of a launch, but the Space Coast has been scrubbed clean of most of its moon memories.

If the passing of 40 years since the first moon landing makes you feel old, consider that the Moon Man trophy given at the MTV Video Music Awards is 25 years old this summer.

Michael Jackson's famous moonwalk performance at the Apollo Theater took place 26 years ago.

Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, has been dead for 31 years.

Moon Unit Zappa is 41.

Mankind's view of the world may have changed that night in July 1969, but mankind changed very little.

The next month, a cult led by Charles Manson would murder pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others.

Three months after that, the world learned that more than 340 people had been tortured, mutilated and massacred by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

In December, at the Altamont Speedway Free Concert, an 18-year-old who drew a gun in front of the stage would be stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang during a performance by the Rolling Stones.

One small step.

One person who hasn't moved on from the space program is Gary Lewis.

Growing up in Troy, Ohio, just 38 miles away from Neil Armstrong's hometown of Wapakoneta, Lewis was 11 when his fellow Ohioan first stepped on the moon. He remembers being awakened to watch the landing on television with his family. So fascinated by the era, he built a 3-foot-tall model of the Saturn V in his bedroom. His mother made him a full spacesuit for Halloween one year. He ached with the idea of becoming an astronaut.

Now 51, Lewis still lives in Troy with his wife, Sheryl, 47. Still passionate about his interest in space travel, the couple have tried for years to see a shuttle launch, only to have it scrubbed for weather or technical reasons.

"If they'd have a lottery, I'd go up in a heartbeat," he says. "In a heartbeat. Just tell me where to sign, and let's go."

Last week, after Endeavour's third cancellation, he folded his collapsible lawn chairs, gathered his Igloo cooler and packed them away from his place along the seawall at Spaceview Park. On his right hip dangled a BlackBerry. On his face, polarized sunglasses protected his eyes from harmful rays.

Lewis didn't make it to the moon. Instead, the technology of the moon and the space program came to him.

Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. graduated third in his class at West Point. He flew 66 combat missions over Korea in the 1950s and shot down two Soviet MiG 15 fighter jets. He became the second man to step on the moon.

But he couldn't deal with being a hero.

"Even before I went to the moon, I was dreading the aftermath of being a celebrity on a pedestal giving speeches and all that sort of thing," he told a Kennedy Space Center audience that gathered Thursday, the Apollo 11 launch anniversary.

"It clearly ended up being far more challenging to me to come back from a very structured life to then try and find my way afterward."

To label them celebrities would be to miss the mark wildly. There were parades in New York City and Chicago, and addresses to a joint session of Congress. The trio then visited 23 countries in 38 days on a goodwill tour. It was tiring and bewildering, especially because their spots on Apollo 11 were largely a luck of the draw.

"I would just project myself into the audience, thinking, 'What are they thinking?' They're thinking, 'Which one of these three guys is giving a better talk?'" Aldrin said. "We had enough competitiveness without having to be subjected to it continually thereafter."

Armstrong, who was 39 when he went to the moon, struggled to find his identity post-Apollo. Aldrin, who struggled with his identity as The Second One, battled clinical depression and alcoholism in the years after the landing. Michael Collins, the only one not to divorce after the flight, wrote books and went into business.

Aldrin's job now, other than promoting a new book, is to be the face of the mission. Armstrong was a reluctant celebrity even before his Apollo mission. Collins has said all he has to say. Looking tan and trim at 79 and wearing a watch on each wrist, Aldrin is America's stylish grandpa astronaut who relishes his role as an advocate for Mars missions instead of retread moon visits.

But he still seems publicly incapable of connecting emotion with the experience of visiting another planet. Ask him about what it felt like sitting atop the most complex, most powerful vehicle in history and he defaults into a recitation of facts about thrust and velocity and fuel capacity.

"I don't think there were any big surprises," he said. "I don't think that any changes in my life were particularly affected by the journey to the moon and back.

"It wasn't anything I saw or felt any particular emotion of having done something and being on a pedestal and being kind of a hero. I could adjust easily to the fact that yes, we did do something very spectacular and very meaningful."

It happened. Then it was over.

What's next?

Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324. Information from the book "Rocket Men" by Craig Nelson was included in this story.

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