Across the stratosphere
A final message, "Give my wife my love"
Then nothing more...
Peter Schilling, Major Tom
Think about it: your task is to put a man - two men, as it turned out - on the Moon. The president has just publicly announced that the United States is going to do this by the end of the decade, and now you have to deliver on that promise.
You basically have to create the required technology from scratch. You've put men in orbit, so you know you can get that far, but now you have to build a system that transports a crew of some sort across the void between the Earth and its satellite, successfully lands on the lunar surface, lets an astronaut - or astronauts - explore the surface on foot, then get back up into space and return to Earth.
You can test parts of it, but tests are just as expensive and time-consuming as the real thing, and the clock is ticking - who knows what the Soviets are up to. But not testing could result in a historic failure, so tests have to happen. Apollo 4 introduces the Saturn V launch system and does a successful unmanned test of the Command Service Module, and Apollo 5 tests the Landing Module - not by landing it, unfortunately, just getting it into space. Apollo 6 suffers from launch problems but makes it into orbit: that's the last unmanned test, now the stakes go up.
You can only imagine - literally - what the conditions on the Moon will be. There's no way to practice the landing: the only way you will find out if you've done everything right is by doing it, so you make your best guess based on what the scientists tell you, and hope that they know what they're talking about.
And if you're wrong about anything, the astronauts will die, as you, their families, their friends, and the world listen helplessly from 238,900 miles away.
Think about all the places that it could have gone wrong! If the Saturn V rocket had failed again during the launch, if one of the thousands and thousands of components had failed at any point in the mission, if there had been a leak in the capsule, if they had crash-landed, if the lunar suits had failed, or some completely unexpected aspect of the lunar surface had meant that they couldn't get back to Columbia, the command module.
The last one is the nightmare scenario, the one you really don't want to think about. If something had gone wrong with the Ascent Stage of the Eagle, there would have been nothing Michael Collins could have done from his post on the orbiting Command Module - he would have had to abandon Armstrong and Collins to a slow death as their oxygen ran out, or to the more immediate conclusion of "deliberately closed down communications" - a euphimistic term for suicide.
In an acknowledgement of the grim necessities that would have followed, a speech was prepared for President Richard Nixon* by William Safire, the presidential speech writer:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.
In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
- Sid
* I always forget that it's Richard Nixon who is president when they land on the Moon, it should be John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy had been dead for six years when Armstrong took his one small step.
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