Buzzing Around

"We have the universe at our fingertips."

            The second person to do something never gets as much attention as the first. The example-to-end-all-examples of that would be Buzz Aldrin, the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, the second man to walk on the Moon.
            His courage is equal to that of Neil Armstrong. In fact, one might contend that his role showed more bravery because he knew that for the rest of his life he would live in another man's shadow.

            Born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., he got his nickname Buzz not from his flying exploits but because one of his young sisters could only pronounce "brother" as "buzzer." His name actually is Buzz. He had it legally changed in 1988. (Interestingly, the maiden name of Aldrin's mother is Moon.)

            And Aldrin knew how to fly. After graduating third in his class at West Point in 1951, he was commissioned in the Air Force and flew 66 combat missions in Korea where he shot down two MiG-15 fighters.

            Besides being a nerves-of-steel flier, Aldrin also knew a little bit about the science of spaceflight and orbital docking maneuvers. He earned a PhD from MIT in 1963. His thesis topic? Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.

A rather important switch

            He was America's best, a fitting partner to stand beside Armstrong as they descended to the Moon's surface on July 20, 1969. The Lunar Module (LM, formerly called the LEM, Lunar Excursion Module) was stripped to the bones to keep its weight light for liftoff.

            There were no seats. The astronauts slept in hammocks. Its walls were not much thicker than aluminum foil, and there were no covers on its circuit breakers.

            As a consequence of this weight-saving design, one circuit breaker switch snapped off when Armstrong and Aldrin was dressing for their Moon walk or undressing afterwards. Aldrin noticed it on the floor. He had to wedge it back in place with the plastic cap of his felt-tip pen. It was a rather important switch. It was the circuit breaker for the ascent engine. Had it not worked or gone missing, they would have been stranded.

            After detaching from the Command Module, the LM descended to an orbit eight miles above the Moon.

            "If you read, you are go for powered descent," said astronaut Charlie Duke in Houston. He was serving as Capcom, the Capsule Communicator.         

            Five minutes into the descent an alarm flashed.

            "Program alarm," Armstrong radioed Houston. "It's a twelve-oh-two," he said referring to the numbers on the screen.

            Neither Aldrin or Armstrong had ever seen this alarm during their many training sessions.           

            The Apollo 12 crew, however, had been given this alarm during a simulation. When they saw it, they aborted their 'flight.' "You should not have aborted," the trainers told the crew.

            The alarm meant that the computer was overloaded with data. Aldrin had correctly left on the LM's rendezvous radar on as a safety precaution in case he and Armstrong had to abort the flight. Nonetheless, their Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) still functioned perfectly. It had been designed to be crash-proof and to focus its computing activities on its highest priority tasks.

            Though Apollo's computers have been derided as primitive, they represented a massive leap, so to speak, in computing technology. Engineers had fit what once required a room into a container the size of a briefcase. Plus, this was the first time computers had performed real-time navigational problem-solving. All in all, the AGCs used technology that would not see their way into "real world" applications for 10 years in computers like the Apple II.

            Somehow Armstrong and Aldrin went through years of training—and the Apollo 12 snafu—without ever knowing what a "1202" alarm was.

            By the time this crisis was averted, the LM had dropped to 750 feet above the Moon, its engine controlling its gradual descent.            

            NASA had carefully picked the landing site—a smooth lava field. Photos showed it to be free of craters and large rocks.

            "Pretty rocky area," Armstrong radioed. He may not have known it, but he was off-course by four miles. When the lunar module had undocked from the command module, it was not fully depressurized. The resulting 'burp' of released air had nudged the LM off its trajectory. 
            The computer couldn't keep up with the new heading, and it was automatically bringing the LM down onto where it thought it should be.

            "Six hundred, down at 19," he added, meaning that the LM was now 200 yards above the surface and descending at 19 feet-per-second.

            At this point seeing boulders everywhere, Armstrong said, "I'm going to…" and took control of the LM from the computer and began to fly it manually.

"I've got a good spot."

            "Okay," said Aldrin. "Four hundred feet. Down at nine. Fifty-eight forward." That meant that instead of descending vertically, Armstrong was flying the LM forward at 58 feet per second, going 40 miles an hour, shooting across the lunar surface like a helicopter.

            "Three hundred," said Aldrin.

            "Okay, how's the fuel?" Armstrong replied.

            "Eight percent."

            At 200 feet above the surface, Armstrong said, "I've got a good spot."

            The astronauts now had only 94 seconds of fuel left. If the LM was higher than 70 feet above the surface with only 20 seconds of fuel remaining, they would have had to abort. They would not have had enough fuel to make a safe landing and would have come down too hard and crashed.

            If they aborted at 70 feet, they would have jettisoned the lower half of the LM (which was designed to remain on the Moon's surface) and then fire the rocket on the top half of the LEM, shooting them back into orbit.

            "Sixty seconds," warned Capcom, telling the astronauts they had one minute to get to 50 feet above a landing site.

            "Sixty feet, down two and a half," said Armstrong.

            "Two forward," said Aldrin. "Forty feet….Picking up some dust."

            If the LEM ran out of fuel now, it would crash before the ascent engine could gain enough thrust to hurl it to safety.

            "Four forward," said Aldrin. "Drifting to the right a little."

            "Thirty seconds," said Duke.

            Now a vertical probe jutting from the bottom of one of the LM's four footpads touched the surface.

            "Contact light," said Aldrin, and Armstrong settled the LM to a perfect landing.

            "Shutdown," said Armstrong.

            "Okay, engine stopped," replied Aldrin.

            They had landed with less than 20 seconds of fuel remaining.
             Twenty seconds of fuel left. Twenty seconds.

            "We copy you down, Eagle."

            "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," said Armstrong

            "Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."

            "Thank you," Aldrin replied.

            One landing danger remained. As the astronauts completed a post-landing checklist, Houston noticed that pressure was abnormally high—and rising—in one of the descent fuel tanks. The remaining fuel should have been venting out. It wasn't.

            "Tranquility, Houston," said Duke. "We have an indication that we've frozen up the descent-fuel helium heat exchanger—and with some fuel trapped in the line between there and the valves...And the pressure we're looking at is increasing there. Over."

            "We were ready to leave if we had to," Armstrong later said, "And we were listening carefully to their instructions."

            Then the gauge read normal again, and no action was required.
            Everyone knows what Armstrong said when he set foot on the Moon. What did Aldrin say? "Beautiful view."

            After returning to Earth, Aldrin struggled with depression, alcoholism, and divorce. "Having been to the Moon, I plummeted into my own personal hell on Earth," he wrote in his autobiography.

            Aldrin conquered his demons, and today at age 87 remains a tireless advocate of space travel. Says Aldrin: "I believe we have the universe at our fingertips."

MORAL: Trust your internal guidance system.

Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!