we hoped to do during the Apollo mission. Neil and Dave performed a beautiful docking maneuver but then something went wrong. The spacecraft began rolling, and the astronauts couldn’t do anything about it. They were forced to undock the Gemini capsule from the Agena, but that only made things worse. The Gemini went into a rapid roll, practically a tumble, spinning at nearly one revolution a second. There was a strong concern that the astronauts would black out, and that would most likely be deadly.
Neil switched on the reentry system in hopes of regaining control of the spacecraft. During the high-speed roll, Neil was able to reach up and activate the switches that slowly brought the Gemini under control and saved their lives. He rarely talked much about the incident, but it was another close call with death.
On May 6, 1968, more than a year before the flight of Apollo 11, Neil had another close call. Because the lunar lander itself, with its wafer-thin walls, was far too delicate to be used for practice, part of the preparation for landing on the Moon required Neil to practice in the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, a strange-looking contraption meant to approximate the real module. We derisively referred to the vehicle as the “Flying Bedstead,” but it actually flew. It was not easy to control the vehicle, and during a test in which Neil alone was maneuvering the vehicle above a landing strip in Houston, something in the vehicle’s fuel system caused the trainer to tilt for some unknown reason. Neil had little more than a second to make a decision. He hit the ejection button just as the training vehicle exploded in the sky and crashed to the runway, totally demolishing it. Neil escaped with a few relatively minor injuries, including a gash in his tongue from his teeth that made it nearly impossible to understand his words for a few days. But he survived.
Despite his numerous accidents, Neil remained unflappable. To him, that’s just what test pilots did, and accidents went with the territory. Nothing seemed to shake him. He was just the kind of guy you wanted to be standing next to you as you searched for a place to land on the Moon.
When Neil and I slipped through the tunnel from the Columbia to the Eagle, it was the first time for either of us to ever fly the thing. Although we had practiced repeatedly on simulators, nobody had ever before tried to land an actual lunar module.
That’s why it was a bit disconcerting when the Eagle’s computer alarms went off with about six minutes to go during our descent to the Moon. At about 35,000 feet above the surface, a little lower than what the average commercial passenger plane flies, the data screen in front of us went totally blank.
“Program alarm!” Neil reported to Houston.
Something was affecting our guidance computer, overloading its ability to handle the massive amount of data coming into it. Alarms continued going off every few seconds, but even though it took one and a half seconds each way for us to communicate with Mission Control, we had to trust the guys on Earth when they told us it was safe to proceed for a landing.
Trust your instruments. At about 2,000 feet above the surface, another alarm lit up. Another quick check with Houston told us to keep going. Neil was looking out the window, searching for a good spot to land, while my eyes were glued to the altimeter readings. With our communications dropouts and computer glitches, if we were going to come down in one piece, he needed accurate readings.
“Seven-fifty,” I called out to Neil, letting him know that we were 750 feet above the surface while he continued to scan the surface intently.
“Pretty rocky,” Neil said.
“Six hundred,” I said.
But also trust your gut.
At only 600 feet above the surface, Neil switched over to manual controls, taking our lives into his own hands, as we tried to find a safe place to land before we ran out of fuel. It was a classic instance of “Trust your instruments, but also trust your gut.”
“Forty feet,” I said. “Picking up some dust.”
“Thirty seconds,” Charlie Duke, our Mission Control liaison, said from Earth, letting us know that we had only 30 seconds of fuel left before we crashed.
Neil slowed the Eagle even more, just as he had the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle from which he had to eject 14 months earlier, but there was no ejection