Apollo 11’s success fulfilled Kennedy’s quest
A few months ago, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins came to Washington to discuss all things lunar with the National Press Club. As in a little moon talk, if you will — the good, the bad ... and the scary.
Let’s begin in the scare department.
Collins, who in 1969 orbited the moon in the Apollo 11 command module while fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the lunar surface, recalled: “Because the flight to and from the moon is a long and very fragile daisy chain of events, any one link in that chain breaks, and everything downstream from that is useless. I was really not too much worried about Neil and Buzz going down. I thought Neil knew how to fly (the lunar module called the “Eagle”) extraordinarily well. He was going to find a safe landing spot, flat enough.
“But the Eagle just had one ascent engine, one little engine bell, one little ignition source, and that worried me. That was such an obvious fragile link in this daisy chain, and if they couldn’t get off, they were dead, and, yes, I was coming home (in the Columbia command module). So, it was a worry, something to keep you awake at night.”
But we, of course, know the rest of the story, as the world today recognizes the 50th anniversary of the remarkable moon landing. In July 1969, the ascent engine on the lunar module (transporting Armstrong and Aldrin) performed. And that spacecraft redocked with Collins’ command module in orbit as the three returned intact to Earth, just as President John F. Kennedy requested during his moon-exploration speech in 1961.
Kennedy essentially launched the lunar mission that year when addressing a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Collins and his colleagues revered what we will call the Kennedy Quest. They were highly motivated to fulfill Kennedy’s vision.
Collins said of Kennedy’s edict that his “masterpiece of simplicity gave us our marching orders. It told us what to do, when to do it, and then the-howto-do-it was up to us, and that’s what we spent days working diligently at.”
Though Kennedy had been assassinated six years earlier, his spiritual presence was palpable for the astronauts in 1969.
Said Collins: “As we went through all of the training and preparation, we used Kennedy — ‘Hey, you guys got to get more on the ball. You know what he said. The time’s running out. Get with it.’”
The three astronauts didn’t want to let JFK down.
Still, there were doubts. Collins acknowledged that Armstrong gave Apollo 11 50/50 odds. Collins agreed with Armstrong’s assessment. And so did the Richard Nixon White House.
In fact, historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the new book “American Moonshot,” has said Nixon had a speech ready to be read in case Armstrong and Aldrin ended up stranded.
Nixon’s speech read, in part, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”
In summary, Collins offered, “That was the end of Kennedy’s dream. It was an honor to be any tiny part of that.”
Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin had fulfilled the Kennedy Quest. Gregory Clay is a Washington columnist for McClatchyTribune News Service.