What we didn’t know about the moonwalk

Jay Barbree Correspondent

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Neil Armstrong moved slowly down the ladder. Getting to the moon had been a long time coming.  He was an Ohio pilot who came from the same soil as Orville and Wilbur, who ejected from a crippled jet fighter over Korea just after turning 21, who flew seven test flights in the X-15 rocket, who saved himself and a crewmate in Gemini 8, who ejected from a lunar landing trainer a split second before it crashed.

In the 1950s and '60s, he flew about every propeller, jet, rocket and helicopter built by his country. To say that this Midwestern farmboy was the best test pilot in an emergency ever was an easy argument. That’s why chief astronaut Deke Slayton chose Neil Armstrong to take the first step on a small world that had never been touched by life. A landscape where no leaf had ever drifted, no insect had ever scurried, where no blade of green ever waved, where in the silence of vacuum even the fury of a thermonuclear blast would sound no louder than a falling snowflake.

More than 200,000 miles away, billions of eyes stared at the black-and-white TV picture.  They watched Neil’s ghostly figure move like a spacesuited phantom, closer and closer, planting his boots in moondust at 10:56 p.m. ET, July 20, 1969.

All motion stopped. "That's one small step for a man," Neil said slowly, "one giant leap for mankind."

Neil gathered several ounces of rock and soil from the lunar surface and stuffed the invaluable material in a suit pocket. The plan was, after Buzz Aldrin joined him, they would remain outside for two hours, planting experiments and collecting primarily rocks, but if something should go wrong, at least they would have a tiny bit of the moon.

With the contingency sample safely tucked away, he took the time to look around.  “The moon has a very stark beauty all its own,” he said, almost whispering.  “It’s like much of the high desert areas of the United States. It’s different, but it’s pretty out here.”

What we on Earth did not know at the time was exactly why history’s first moonwalk began when it did. NASA had scheduled a four-hour sleep and rest period for Armstrong and Aldrin in the lunar module, or LM, and we were told to wait.

It turned out that we were hoodwinked.

The truth came out last November. NBC News President Steve Capus was giving me a dinner to celebrate my 50 years at the network. Former astronauts Neil Armstrong, John Glenn and Edgar Mitchell flew in, along with other survivors of the old days. Following dinner and a short ride to one of our favorite watering holes, Neil spilled the beans.

“Of course we wanted to get outside as soon as possible, before an emergency. But we thought we would need several hours to get the LM’s fluids and systems settled,” he explained.

Courtesy of Jay Barbree NBC News correspondent Jay Barbree (at right) shares a laugh with former senator-astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, and moonwalker Neil Armstrong at a dinner in Barbree's honor last November.

"For several hours you reporters would have been speculating, guessing about possible problems, and we didn’t want one of you inventing stories,” Neil grinned. “That’s why we put in a four-hour sleep and rest period we hoped we would never use.”

We laughed, and Neil laughed, and he added, “Everything went much faster than we expected.”

Most of us were having dinner when the call came that the moonwalk would begin early. We rushed back to our microphones and reported the history-making event of our lives.

Buzz takes his turn
While Neil took his one small step, Buzz Aldrin stayed aboard the lunar module, which they named Eagle, to monitor its systems. That was his duty as lunar module pilot, and that was one reason why he was the second man to walk on the moon. When he and Mission Control were convinced that the Eagle was safe and purring, he joined Neil on the surface.

“Beautiful, beautiful!  Magnificent desolation,” Buzz said as he stared at a sky that was the darkest of blacks above a landscape that was many shades of gray, a touch of brown, and utter black where the rocks cast their shadows.  No real color, not even the places lit by the unfiltered sun.

Then there was the weak gravity. They weighed only one-sixth of their Earth poundage, and Neil reported, “The surface is fine and powdery.  It adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my boots.  I only go in a fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”

Was the moonwalk faked? No!
It would be these highly defined footprints that would set some armchair physicists crying the moonwalk was a fake. In the years to come there would be those who would claim Apollo astronauts never went to the moon. They said all of it was done on a movie set in an Arizona.

It occurred to me that if NASA had been so deviously smart to persuade 400,000 Apollo workers to lie, to persuade the Russians to lie, to persuade the people tracking the lunar flights with giant radio antennas around the world to lie ... well, if NASA got away with it once, would the agency be so stupid as to try to get away with this world-class hoax nine times?

The claim is too dumb not to be laughable.  It is sad.  We as a people would rather think the worst of ourselves than the best.

Nevertheless, scientific investigators investigated.

Myth-believers claimed that Neil and Buzz could have only left such firm, defined bootprints in soil with moisture — and everyone knows there is no water on the moon, right?

Wrong. There’s now evidence there could be water ice at the poles, but that hasn’t a thing to do with the first footprints on the moon.

Close examination of the lunar soil back on earth showed it to be virgin. The grains still had their sharp edges. They had not been rounded off by wind and erosion in an atmosphere.  In their vacuum the sharp edges of lunar soil cling together, leaving a smooth surface much as moist sand does on a beach.

"Where were the stars," the myth-believers ask. "Where’s the crater carved out by Eagle's descent rockets during landing?"

The cameras that NASA sent to the moon had to use short-exposure times to take pictures of the bright lunar surface and the moonwalkers' white spacesuits. Stars’ images were too faint and underexposed to be seen, as they are in photographs taken from Earth orbit.  And why didn’t the descent rockets carve out a crater?  Their thrust was simply too weak to make a huge dent in the lunar surface.

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