July 17, 1969 / The Dream Team

During the crew’s first full day in space, we jump back in time to learn who Neil, Buzz, and Michael are, and exactly what happened in their lives to put them in the Moon’s crosshairs. It’s not nearly as straightforward as you might think.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Nine Days in July is a production of I Heart
Radio and trade Craft Studios in association with High five Content.
September three, in the air of Page or nine, Korea.
Do you hear that sound? That's the roar of a
Grummin F nine panther holding the stick is a twenty

(00:22):
one year old well boy. He's a newly minted lieutenant
junior grade and he's only been in the Navy for
two and a half years. It's the height of the
Korean War. Our pilot is in one of five U. S.
Navy Fighter jets flying over a narrow road known as
Green six. The ground is blurring beneath him at three

(00:43):
hundred and fifty miles per hour. The squadron's mission is
to bomb some freight yards and a bridge the enemy
is using to resupply their troops. Well, the men have
been warned they're going into a hot zone. None are
prepared for what they encounter at three o'clock's slip information.

(01:03):
According to one of the pilots, the anti aircraft fire
was so thick it looked as if he could have
climbed out of his jet and walked on top Beyond
the pilot in the jet. Just in front of ours
is Lieutenant Frank Sistruct. He's heading for the bridge. The
lead panther is struck. Lieutenant Sistructs aircraft spirals into the ground,

(01:27):
exploding on impact. Our pilot doesn't have time to mourn
or panic. He inhales deeply and takes a His aircraft
is also hit. As he wrestles to maintain control, his
panther plows into a metal cable strung across the valley
as a booby trap for low flying aircraft. The cable

(01:48):
slices through the panther's right wing, sharing off nearly six feet,
narrowly missing the cockpit. Our pilot manages to stay locked
just long enough to return to friendly territory, but there
is no away. He's landing this plane. Facing an impossible decision,
He has no choice but to eject over a rice pat,

(02:09):
cracking his helmet in half and breaking his tailbone in
the process. This is a polo control at twenty two
hours forty nine minutes ground the lapsed time spacecraft communicator
here in mission control, Bruce McCandless is standing by to
make a call to the crew. It's July sev nineteen

(02:31):
sixty nine, day two of the Apollo eleven mission. Apollo
eleven has left planet Earth and is on its way
to the Moon. As the crew begins their first full
day in space, it's the perfect time to tell you
how Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins became the
Dream Team, as well as how a handful of kids
built Mission Control. But first, let's check in with the

(02:52):
capsule communicator, who's decided it's time to wake our crew
with some morning news from Earth eleven. When you're really
to copy the eleven I've got in the morning nude.
This will become a tradition. Each day the capcom and
mission control will let the astronauts know what's going on
on the planet they left behind. Okay, we're all immigration

(03:13):
of facial and Louva. Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will
be refused third Guard banner Mexico and large. They take
a bath and get haircut. It's sometimes hard to remember
given all of these clean cut NASA types running around
that nineteen sixty nine was also the epicenter of the
hippie movement. For historical context, the Woodstock Music Festival, perhaps
the most famous expression of hippie culture is less than

(03:36):
one month away. But the House of Lords was assured
one day that I made the American submarine would not
quote damage or a full unquote. They locked as monker
in one the British tabloid Daily Express said no one
will ever understand Lockness. Its conquest will be a greater
triumph than the conquest of the mood. Fitting then that

(03:59):
the old Georgia man named Dan Taylor built a yellow
submarine in his garage and shipped it to Scotland, where
he planned to fire biopsy darts into the creature so
scientists could figure out exactly what it was. Luckily, the
most famous sea monster in history was safe from the
midget sub The Locknest Monster was nowhere to be found.

(04:20):
That's Apollo control. Pollo eleven's distance from Earth is three
eight nautical miles velocity five thousand, four hundred eleven feet
per second. Uh, the Earth should be a lot more
in your field of you today, and I'm sure you're
a lot more qualified to tell us about that than

(04:41):
we are. It's true. Exactly one day after their Saturn
five left the Earth, Michael thinks to himself that his
home planet appears no larger than the watch face on
his wrist. It's really a fantasticing we all end view.
The view up there today is all about mission critical housekeeping,
ensuring their metallic home, currently moving at nearly thirty seven

(05:02):
hundred miles an hour, remains in tip top shape. This
means purging fuel cells, stirring oxygen tanks, recharging batteries, dumping wastewater,
and chlorinating their drinking water. All of it is essential
to getting them from here to where they need to go.
Remember the story that opened our show, our pilot whose

(05:24):
F nine panther was so badly damaged that he had
to eject over a rice patty, breaking both his helmet
and his tailbone. While that pilot was none other than
Neil Armstrong. It's time to meet the astronauts of Apollo eleven.
Neil Armstrong was born on August fifth, nineteen thirty, in Wapakanetta, Ohio,
a small town of barely five thousand people. James Hansen

(05:45):
wrote Neil's definitive biography, First Man, from the time he
was this very small boy who became passionate about the
whole idea of airplanes, and as a boy, Neil just
begged his mother for the model airplane, and as he
got older, his model airplanes got more and more. Just
before his sixth birthday, Neil and his father skipped Sunday
school to take a ride in a Ford trimotor. Do

(06:07):
you remember the plane that Indiana Jones, Willie and Short
Round jumped out of in the beginning of Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom. That's a Ford trimotor. It
was there in those wicker seats that Neil realized he
wanted to spend the rest of his life in the sky.
At age fifteen, he began working in the stock room
of a local pharmacy, earning forty cents an hour to

(06:27):
pay for flying lessons. It's a little grass airfield outside
of his town of Waplicanetta, Ohio, where they were living.
Uh He soloed and got his pilot's license on the
dairy day of his birthday. Neil could pilot an aircraft,
but he wasn't even old enough to drive a car.
At seventeen, Neil graduated from high school and began studying
aeronautical engineering at nearby Purdue University. While he'd been accepted

(06:50):
to m I T his family convinced him to take
advantage of a new post war government program that paid
for students tuition if they would commit to three years
flight service with the U. S. Navy. You finished two
years of schooling when the Korean War started, and so
he was notified that at the end of his second
year he would need to report to Pensacola, Florida, where

(07:11):
the naval aviation training took place. Then suddenly, in the
pre dawned darkness of June nineteen fifty, South Korean's what
jarred awake by living nightmare, unprovoked and unannounced, the Communist
latest war of conquest had begun. Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.

(07:33):
Was born into a flying family on January nineteen thirty
in New Jersey. His father was a World War One
Army pilot and later served as the assistant commandant of
the Army's Test Pilot School. Young Edwin was the youngest
of three children. His sister, fay Anne, who was just
a year and a half older, struggled with the word brother.
She consistently pronounced it as buzzer. Edwin enjoyed her mispronunciation

(07:57):
so much that he shortened it to buzz and a
opted it as his own. Buzz was a terrific student
and a champion football player in high school. His father
wanted him to attend the U. S. Naval Academy, but
Buzz stood up to him. He wanted to fly, not sail.
There was no US Air Force yet, so if you
wanted to fly in the military and you didn't like boats,
you joined the Army Air Corps. Buzz did just as

(08:20):
well at West Point as he did in high school,
graduating third in his class. The Korean War had broken
out during his junior year, and he now chose to
transition out of the Army and into the brand new
Air Force, even though he knew he'd be heading straight
for the front lines. Like Buzz, Michael Collins's father was

(08:45):
in the Army, assigned to a base in Rome, Italy,
when Michael entered the world on Halloween Day ninety Over
the next seventeen years, Michael called eight different military bases home.
One of those bases was in Puerto Rico, where a
teenage Michael took his first plane ride aboard a Grumm
and Widgeon, a small aircraft that could take off and
land in the water. He even took controls for part

(09:08):
of the flight and was immediately hooked. Michael finished high
school in Washington, d c. His mother was keen for
him to work as a diplomat, but Michael wanted to
follow his father into military service. He attended West Point
and graduated in nineteen fifty two, two years after Buzz,
with a bachelor's degree in military science. Buzz graduated third
in his class. Michael, I went to West Point primarily

(09:32):
because it was a free and good education. When I
graduated from the Military Academy, there was no Air Force academy,
but we had a choice of either going into the
Army or the Air Force. The Air Force seemed like
a more interesting choice. Had he not transition to the
Air Force, we wouldn't be talking about him today. This

(09:53):
is control. The ignation time for this mid course correction
will be twenty six hours, four four minutes fifty seven seconds.
Back in Apollo eleven, more than one hundred and eight
thousand miles from the Earth and traveling at more than
thirty four hundred miles, the crew is preparing to make
a minor course correction. Yesterday, the third stage of the

(10:14):
Saturn five launched Apollo eleven toward the Moon. Isaac Newton
is currently piloting Apollo eleven. An object in motion will
stay in motion unless acted upon by some other force,
but the crew does need to make small course corrections
here and there. One minute to the burn, the duration
will be three seconds burning shut down. There's the burn

(10:37):
complete that you caught me in our residual term. What
was a good burn. Apollo eleven will now begin a
series of passive thermal control burns. The astronauts have dubbed
this barbecue mode because the spacecraft spins like a rotisserie
chicken to ensure one side of the spacecraft is not
always exposed to the blistering heat of the sun. And

(10:57):
now recovered an opulent rap out of the row of
car driving up down. That was Michael. Ever, the class
clown chances are if someone on this mission is cracking
a joke or horsing around, it's Michael. He and Buzz

(11:17):
are chatting with astronaut Jim Level, who has temporarily taken
over at Capcom out of the deal of the airborne again.
Bud about Daddy, I've been having a ball floating around
in air. Lovel and Buzz shared a far smaller capsule
three years earlier on their Gemini mission. But that's jumping
too far ahead in our story. When we last checked
in with our cruise younger selves, becoming astronauts wasn't even

(11:40):
on their radar screens. They had far larger things to
worry about, like surviving one dred and forty collective combat
missions in the skies over Korea. That's one hundred and
forty different times when our boys could have suffered the
same fate as the more than thirty six thousand American
war fighters who perished in the Korean War. When Neil's
number got called, he just nineteen. A year or so later,

(12:02):
he'd already made his first aircraft carrier landing. In late
nineteen fifty, he became the youngest officer at VF fifty one,
the Screaming Eagles, the Navy's first all jet fighter squadron.
Here's Hanson again. Once that squadron was then its pilots
were ready to go. They got aboard their carrier, the Essex,
which headed over to the Sea of Japan, where they

(12:24):
began operations to fly over North Korea during the Korean War.
Neil flew nearly eighty combat missions over Korea, including the
one we profiled at the beginning of this podcast. His
active duty commission ended when he was only twenty two,
and he transferred back to the United States. As Neil
was leaving Korea, Buzz was just getting there. After his

(12:45):
initial flight training, Second Lieutenant Aldren had to decide what
kind of aircraft he wanted to pilot. His father recommended bombers.
Once again, Buzz stood up to his old man and
chose fighters. In late nineteen fifty two, Buzz began patrolling
an area of Korea the serviceman dubbed MiG Alley, looking
for enemy fighters heading south to terrorize American troops. On

(13:07):
May fourteenth, nineteen fifty three, he was in his F
eighty six Saber when he spotted an enemy aircraft below him.
Luz locked his guns on his target and shot the
plane down. Less than a month later, the tables were
turned a MiG surprise Buzz and moved in behind him
for the kill. Buzz had only one chance, a high
gi maneuver in which he kept crossing over the MiG's

(13:28):
direction of travel while cutting his speed. Buzz hoped his
adversary would miscalculate and overshoot him. His plan worked. The
fifty caliber machine gun brought the enemy plane down Back
on Apollo eleven. Michael Collins, of course, is joking around
with Jim Level about all the housekeeping chores Houston has

(13:49):
the crew doing. I've been very busy so far. I'm
working for it, tagging afternon. I've been cooking and sleeping
and almost going and then well, you know the years,
your little house, big thing. It was very convenient the
way they put the food preparations. That's right next to
the math days, everything right next to everything that was

(14:09):
armstrong reminding level than in a spacecraft this small, everything's
within arm's reach. While the crew takes a break for lunch,
Bruce McCandless returns to the capcomposition. I gred that music
got here in the background thing. Okay, ye, Michael's having

(14:34):
a joke at Bruce's expense. The crew is enjoying Angel
of the Morning by Merrily Rush and the Turnabouts. Shortly
after they conclude their lunch, the crew passes a significant milestone.
A Polo eleven distance from the Moon is one five thousand,
seven hundred nine nautical miles. At the present time. In
terms of distance, Apollo eleven has just passed the halfway

(14:57):
point on its trip to the Moon. In terms of time,
they still have more than a day's journey. Based on
the present trajectory, a Polo eleb and will enter the
lunar sphere of influence at an elapsed time of sixty
one hours, thirty nine minutes fifty eight seconds. The lunar
sphere of influence is that point at which the gravity
of the Moon becomes stronger than the gravity of the Earth. Yeah,

(15:24):
are you that way? How are you fine? Team? Today?
The White teams bright at Bucky Dale, wherever learned down there.
It's time to meet Neil, Buzz and Michael's co pilots
and mission control. These are the guys who keep a
close watch over the spacecraft's trajectory, hardware, and software, as

(15:45):
well as the crew's health. These unsung heroes are the
backbone of every NASA mission. They operate out of a
place they initiated, reverently referred to as the Cathedral. The
high priest of the cathedral is the flight director, whose
call sign is simply flight. These men were responsible for
overseeing every element of any given mission while a mission

(16:05):
was in progress. Not even the NASA administrator or the
President of the United States could countermand in order given
by flight. If they wanted to overrule him, they had
to fire him. Flight supervises a hive mind of brilliant kids.
And I say kids because for most of the men
helming these consoles, this was their first job out of college.
Why are they so young? Simple? NASA needed flight controllers

(16:29):
fluent in the latest emergent technologies, meeting computers. Bill Barry
is NASA's chief historian who's an expert on going into space.
Nobody that that capability didn't really exist in MR Control.
Their average ages about six uh and so it's a
really young group of folks who really set the stage

(16:51):
for getting to the Moon and really create our space program.
I'm Steven Bales. I was the guidance officer on Apollo
level the time to follow eleven mission flew. I was
the people that led us were older than example Jean
Kransmas Ticks, I believe, and then we call them the
older folks older. If you picture Mission Control in your mind,

(17:15):
it looks like something straight out of a movie. A
high tech control center dominated by massive display screens flanked
by four long rows of twenty consoles. The first of
our four rows is known as the trench. These guys
job was monitoring what the ship was doing and where
it was going. Let's take a look at our mission
control roster. The Flight Dynamics Officer or FIDO, supervises the

(17:37):
spacecraft's trajectory over the course of the entire mission. Guido
is the guidance officer. He monitors Apollos onboard systems, making
sure where the spacecraft is and where it thinks it
is are aligned. When we get to the moon landing,
you're going to get to know Steve Bales and this
console very well. Retro is the Retro fire officer. His

(17:58):
job is getting the crew back home again. Taken together, Fido, Guido,
and Retro are Apollo eleven's ground pilots. Behind the trench
is a second row of consoles, which includes the surgeon.
That position is occupied by a medical doctor responsible for
monitoring the health of the crew. To avoid chaos and confusion,
the astronauts only ever communicate with a single person in

(18:20):
mission control, the capsule communicator or capcom. You should already
know this position pretty well. The person in this seat
is always an astronaut. The flight director oversees everything from
the third row. The final top row is reserved for
various agency management and the public affairs officer giving play
by play commentary for the public. Obviously, these guys can't

(18:42):
stay at their console. Apollo eleven had four rotating shifts,
divided into the black, White, Green, and Maroon teams. And
that's not even everybody. There were also hundreds of other
mission control technicians working in various back rooms throughout the building,
directly supporting each of the consoles we just ran through,
plus nearly two dozen more. Oh and one last thing.

(19:04):
This was a man's world, if ever there was one.
But that didn't mean there weren't women already taking pick
axes to that glass ceiling. I was tired, is what
was called a computerst It occurred to me that I
was as smart as those guys, that we're earning a
lot more million than I was. That's Poppy north Cut.

(19:26):
She had a degree in mathematics and was hired by TRW,
a NASA contractor, to check the work of the male
engineers in mission control. Unlike her male colleagues who were salaried, Poppy,
because she was a woman, was hourly and not paid
beyond nine hours a day. My supervisor would come around
and tell me, you know, at six o'clock, state law
says we can't pay you. And I would just say,

(19:47):
I understand that. I just keep on working. Poppy would
not only come in early and stay late, she would
bring her work home with her, going over everything until
she knew it backwards and forwards. I think that was
the real key to want I got promoted and other
people didn't. I really became a member of the team.
Poppy was assigned to the retro flight controller. Her job

(20:09):
was to help compute the trajectories that ensured the Apollo
spacecraft traveled to and from the Moon safely. She was
the first woman to ever work in mission control. I
didn't know I was going to be the first three
knowledge and during mission control when I walked in there,
and you're certainly aware that you stand out and that
you're an object of attention, and it's it's always a
little uncomfortable, especially if your whole idea is that you

(20:32):
want to be a member of the team. I mean,
you want to blend into the team. You don't want
to be standing out. Poppy was tall, blond, and beautiful.
She did stand out. ABC's Jules Bergman once interviewed her,
asking how much attention do men in mission control pay
to a pretty girl wearing miniskirts? Yeah, she was swimming
in a sea of sexism. My feeling was that it

(20:53):
was important for women and men for that matter, to
know that women could do these jobs. So you had
to put up with a certain amoun out of that stuff.
And with that, let's return to Apollo eleven, where Michael
is running an experiment to mess with mission control, because
that's what astronauts with a bit of spare time in
their hands. Do you got any maddict right, I'm trying

(21:15):
to do some running in light down here, and I'm
wondering curiosity where they break my heart rate up? Uh?
Well they will spring in acting here momentarily said Michael
is running in place in zero gravity. He's curious if
the exertion, without actually impacting any surfaces, will increase his
heart rate and show up on the flight surgeon's monitors. Soon,

(21:36):
Neil and Buzz decided to join him very inflat I'd
like to see that night. Why don't you give us
a TV picture of that one? Everybody's running from levon
Houston Mike, we say about a ninety so hardly now right,
there's a reasonable Michael decides to haul to his experiment.

(22:01):
Remember there are no showers on Apollo eleven. After the war,
Neil went back to school. Korea had hijacked his degree,
and now it was time to jump back in. That
wasny too, It was really old man. We have this

(22:22):
image of Neil as a stick in the mud, but
he joined a fraternity, wrote and co directed to student musicals,
and played in the Purdue All American Marching Band, and
of course he continued flying. At a party one night,
he met Janet Elizabeth Sharon, a home economics major NASA
historian James Hanson. Janet grew up in suburban Chicago, a

(22:44):
very different kind of upbringing than Neil. She went to
Purdue and she was very popular there. She's a very
attractive and vivasious young woman. Neil told his roommates later
that night that he just met his future wife, but
it still took him three years to find the askar
out of a date. He was not the sort of
person to rush into anything. In January of nineteen fifty five,

(23:07):
Neil graduated Perdue with a degree in aeronautical engineering. The
following year, he married Janet. Soon the happy couple moved
to a small off the grid cabin in southern California,
where Neil began work as an experimental research test pilot
at Edwards Air Force Base. Edwards is the flight test
center of the United States Air Force Air Research and
Development Command. Here, men in search of truth fly into

(23:33):
the world of the future. Edwards is the place where
all the really hot and new experimental airplanes were being tested.
It was here, nearly a decade earlier that Chuck Yeager
first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X one
Glamorous Glennis, and he does it the first human to
attract the sound barrier. Decades later, the facility would become

(23:57):
a NASA campus and be renamed the Neil A Strong
Flight Research Center. But we're clearly getting ahead of ourselves.
Neil's fellow pilots were astonished at his flying prowess, as
well as his ability to master dozens of different aircraft.
He was regarded as intense and enigmatic in a field
of swagger and bluster. He rarely opened his mouth. He

(24:18):
let his superb flying do all the talking. But that
didn't mean he didn't have a close call or two.
There was the time in the spring of nineteen fifty
six when Neil was co piloting a B twenty nine
super Fortress when one of the propellers shadowed it, shredded
the engine beside it, and launched trapnel through the fuselage,
destroying one of the engines on the opposite wing. Armstrong

(24:39):
and his copilot landed the massive bomber using only one
of its floor engines. Neil's next brush with death was
in something a bit more high tech. The X fifteen
was more rocket than plane and flew at the boundary
of space. Before the X fifteen, the question had been
what is to be man's role in space travel? Kenny
pilot on air craft out of the Earth's atmosphere, fly

(25:02):
it in space, then re entered the atmosphere, and bring
it back to a safe landing on Earth. During one
particular descent, the X fifteen's nose refused to pitch downward,
meaning that the plane kept bouncing off from the atmosphere.
Over the course of his life, Neil would have more
than a half dozen brushes with death. So for six years,
basically he's flying almost every day. You know, Without that experience,

(25:25):
he really would not have been ready for the astronaut experience.
Neil might have had the perfect experience, but he was
ineligible to become an astronaut. He was no longer in
the military, and an active duty status was a NASA requirement.
After the Korean War ended, Buzz returned home and married
Joan Archer, a young woman his parents had set him

(25:46):
up with shortly before he went overseas. She was a
stage actress with a masters in theater from Columbia University.
Their wedding day was only the fifth time they'd ever
gone out together. Joan called marriage her greatest role. One
of Buzz's fellow officers at his new squadron was Ed White.
Ed was getting a master's degree in aeronautical engineering because

(26:06):
he wanted to be an astronaut and encouraged Buzz to
do the same. Buzz enrolled at m I T and
went all in getting a doctorate instead. Doctor Buzz Aldrin
graduated in early nineteen sixty three with a degree in astronautics.
His doctoral thesis was titled Line of Sight Guidance Techniques
for Manned Orbital Rendezvous. He dedicated the thesis to those

(26:28):
working in America's space program. If only I could join
them in their exciting endeavors, Buzz admitted in the dedication.
Buzz had applied for NASA's Gemini program, but his application
was rejected. Another NASA requirement was that all astronaut candidates
had to be test pilots. Neil and Buzz were out
of the running. That left Michael Collins. Michael never went

(26:50):
to war. By the time he graduated from flight training,
the Korean War was over. In nineteen fifty six, Michael
met his wife, Patricia Finnegan, at the base officers club.
She was a social worker taking some time off to
see the world. They were married the following year and
were soon joined by two daughters and a son. Pat
gushed about how wonderful a husband and father Michael was.

(27:10):
Unlike many of his colleagues, Michael was able to leave
work at the office at home. He was happy, relaxed,
and devoted to his family. Maybe that's because he hated
his job commanding an aircraft mechanics school. He still managed
to get in more than fift undred flight hours, the
minimum requirement for the Air Force's Experimental Test Pilot school.
At where else Edwards Air Force Space, and in nineteen

(27:33):
sixty he began flying the most technically challenging and futuristic
aircraft rolling off the line. But after John Glenn became
the first American to orbit the Earth on February nineteen
sixty two, Michael instantly knew what he wanted to do,
and it was simple logical thing to go on to

(27:53):
the next increment, which was higher and faster, and become
an astronaut rather than a test pilot. The Air Force
was behind him all the way, going so far as
to send him to specialized training and even charm school
to increase his chances. But despite it all, Michael, like
Neil and Buzz, was rejected. I didn't make that I
didn't have sufficient experience, They said. None of these men

(28:16):
were ever going to see space. Now that their housekeeping
duties have been accomplished, it's time for the crew of
Apollo eleven to begin their first scheduled color telecast, transmitting
their incredible views back to their home planet. Neil begins
by describing the view of Earth out of Polo eleven's windows.

(28:37):
Our left hand window, we're looking at the eastern Pacific
of the North America. We got doing a good job
at the real estate picture here. Clarity is an excellent Today,
we're so used to images of our beautiful spherical planet
that it's necessary to be reminded that just fifty years ago,
seeing Earth from space was still a unique and aw

(28:59):
spy thing. The person holding the camera so steadily is Michael,
but always the jokester. He can't pass up an opportunity
to give millions of people back on Earth vertigo. Hey world,
hold on your head, I'm gonna turn you upside down.
He begins spinning the camera eleven. That's a pretty good
roll there, that's very flappy. Let me out hein, You'll

(29:22):
never be at the Thunderberg. Charlie Duke is mocking Michael's
camera work, claiming he'll never be better than the Air
Force's aerobatic Demonstration Squadron. Magay that good and put you
back right inside up bray Blon Roger could comply, we'd
like to see smiling faces up there if you could
give us some intery re views. I'm sure everybody likes

(29:42):
to see you over. Mission control has seen enough of
the Earth. Charlie wants to see the astronauts themselves. Quite
my gout, who they had big Mike Colin there. Yeah,
hello there, you got up in a may but Mail
the center couch and Buzzy doing the camera work good time, right,
put on a okay, but I don't about them. Add
that Roger looked like Neil was coming in five by

(30:06):
their eleven and nail Dannon on his head again. He
trying to make me nervous. Buzz must have enjoyed his
exercise earlier, because he decides to demonstrate how the crew
stays physically fit in zero gravity. We can get some
of the wire and untangled. Here. We'll give you a
demonstration of how easy push ups are up here. Buzz
begins doing some pushups on what is according to the

(30:27):
orientation of the camera the command modules floor. And it's
pretty hard doing it that way. Why we just rolling
over and do it the other way. He begins doing
more pushups off the ceiling. All right, we copy. I
didn't figure out whether that was a pin up or
put up joints. I guess clearly the guys are enjoying weightlessness.

(30:48):
When we last checked in with Neil, Buzz, and Michael,
they had each been rejected by the Astronaut program. Buzz
had no test pilot experience, Michael didn't have enough, and
Neil was no longer in the military, all required as
to be an astronaut. But as time went on, NASA
began changing its rules. It no longer required active duty
military service. Civilians could now apply, but Neil didn't even

(31:10):
know if he wanted to. In those days, space flight
was not generally regarded as a realistic objective. That was
a bit buying this guy. I was plying the X fifteen,
and I had the understanding or belief that if I continued,
I would be the chief pilot of that project. Ironically,
it was all those hours in the X fifteen that

(31:30):
made him a shoe in to be selected, or at
least he would have been had he sent his application
in on time. NASA's James Hansen, Neil's daughter Karen two
an a half years old, dies in late January nineteen two.
She had a glioma of the ponds, which is very
malignant brain tumor that had been diagnosed a few months earlier.

(31:52):
So the call for a new class of astronauts came
right during that spring, when he was still very significantly
affect by the daughters. That luckily someone at NASA knew
of Neil's incredible skills and snuck his tardy application into
the pile. He got the job. He thought maybe it
was time for a fresh start, and I think Janet
felt that way about it too well. Initially depressed after

(32:14):
his NASA rejection, Michael Collins threw himself into his work
with even greater abandoned. He began flying the F one
oh four Starfighter, which was capable of flying at ninety
thousand feet. Any higher and you'd have to call it
a spacecraft. In nineteen sixty three, when NASA again began
calling for astronauts, Michael resubmitted his application. He now logged

(32:35):
more thans of flight time. The second time was the charm.
This time Project Gemini came calling, went their pockets started

(33:04):
the first Mercury astronauts were more or less along for
the ride. They had little to do. The rocket went up,
their capsule came back down. But Buzz knew that the
Moon was the goal, meaning the complexity was about to
increase exponentially. NASA would soon need people for the Gemini
and Apollo programs who were fluent in navigating space and
finding and doalking with other spacecraft in short, NASA would

(33:27):
need more than just hotshot test pilots. They would need
brilliant engineers who understood complex orbital mechanics. In nineteen sixty three,
doctor Buzz again applied to become an astronaut. This time
NASA was requiring either test pilot experience or a thousand
hours of flight time in a jet aircraft. Buzz and
more than two thousand he was in. Finally, the stars

(33:50):
were calling. Neil, Buzz and Michael traded their military green
flight suits for NASA blue. Buzz was the first astronaut
with an advanced degree, and based his studies, was assigned
to help NASA develop docking scenarios. Soon he earned the
name Doctor Rendezvous. His fellow astronauts did not always intend
that as a compliment, it was said he could out

(34:11):
compute a computer. A loner among his fellow astronauts, Buzz
was regarded as an easy man to admire but a
hard man to like. But he was, also, according to
one of his trainers, the best scientific mind to ever
go into space. Neil's first trip into space where Gemini eight,
was almost his last. After docking with an unmanned a

(34:31):
Gina target vehicle, he and crewmate Dave Scott suddenly realized
that their capsule was rotating. Neil used the capsule's thrusters
to stop their rotation, except that it didn't work. Nothing
Neil did seemed to stop the joint spacecraft from tumbling
end over end. Something must be wrong with the aegina.
Scott separated the two spacecraft and Neil backed their capsule away. However,

(34:53):
instead of finding themselves stabilized, the capsules spin began accelerating.
The capsule was spinning at revolution a second. Neil and
Dave's vision was beginning to blur. When the rates became
quite violent. I concluded that we just we couldn't continue.
I was afraid we might lose consciousness. If Neil didn't

(35:16):
stop this, they would soon pass out and die. He
noticed that his thruster propellant reserve indicated less than There
was no way it should be that low. Even with
all the maneuvers he had been attempting. One of his
thrusters must be locked in the on position. Neither of
us thought the Germany might be the culprit, because it
could easily hear the gemany thrusters were whenever they fired

(35:39):
crack crack, crack, crack, and we weren't hearing anything. The
reason we didn't hear it as you don't hear it
when it's running steadily. Neil shut the entire system off
and engaged the thrusters designed to orient the spacecraft for
atmospheric reentry. It was a dangerous choice. They'd need those
thrusters to get home, but if they didn't get this
issue fixed, they wouldn't be going home. By the time

(36:00):
Neill regain control of the spacecraft, he'd used up seventy
of the re entry thrust or fuel. That meant they'd
have to cancel the rest of the mission and return
to Earth immediately. It was a great disappointment to us
to have to cut that flight short. We had so
many things we wanted to do it well. The mission
was more or less considered a bust. One thing stood
out Neil Armstrong. Not only did he not break under pressure,

(36:24):
his quick thinking and skilled piloting saved the mission. Michael's
first mission was Gemini ten, during which he conducted a
number of spacewalks. His orders were to exit the capsule
and traverse the length of the a Genus spacecraft they
docked with, but there weren't nearly enough handholds built onto
either spacecraft, and Michael couldn't wrap his bloated pressurized gloves
around the ones that were there. And then I went

(36:47):
car whiling ass over cake cattle, up and around and
about until I came to the end of my tether
and then it swung me in a great, big arc.
I mean, it was more acrobatics and on a trap
pays as terrifying an experience as that was. Michael later
said he felt like a Roman god writing the skies

(37:07):
in his chariot. Buzz flew on Gemini twelve, the final
Gemini mission, alongside Jim Lovell in nineteen sixty six. When
Gemini twelves radar failed in orbit, Buzz had to use
an old fashioned sextant and rendezvous charts that he helped
create to successfully locate their Genus spacecraft. Before Buzz left,

(37:28):
his wife Jones, said that she was convinced that once
Buzz got back, their relationship would be much more magical
and meaningful because of this experience. But after Buzz returned home,
he instead fell into a deep depression. This dark period
coming right on the heels of such an astonishing personal
accomplishment would not be Buzzes last. It would happen again.

(37:48):
So how did Neil, Buzz and Michael make it on
too Apollo eleven? Sure they had the resume and they
had the skills, but how exactly did these three men
get chosen for the Moon? Each part of a Paula
was tested in stages, two uncrewed missions for crude missions
to test the various spacecraft, and finally the seventh mission,
the landing itself. Most people assume the astronauts were assigned

(38:12):
to their missions ahead of time, with Neil, Buzz and
Michael knowing they were going to the Moon from the
very beginning, But that wasn't the case because NASA knew
that any hiccup, either a sick astronaut or a malfunctioning
spacecraft would throw the entire rotation into chaos, and there
were a lot of traumatic hurdles on the weight of
the Moon. One astronaut was repeatedly injured in training, three

(38:32):
others were killed in a series of plane crashes, and
of course, on January nine, the Apollo programs stopped cold
when Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffey, the crew
of Apollo one were burned to death in a training exercise.

(38:53):
Apollo astronauts Roger Chaffey, Edward White, and Gus Grissom lose
their lives and a tragic flash fire aboard a grounded
space capsule. The tragedy occurred during a simulated countdown for
the first flight of the Apollo program. If ed White's
name sounds familiar, that's because he was Buzz's friend who
encouraged him to get an advanced degree and apply to
become an astronaut. Meanwhile, Michael Collins began losing sensation in

(39:17):
his legs. Sometimes they would buckle beneath him while he
was walking and he'd end up sprawled on the ground.
He developed a bone spur in his neck pressing on
his spinal cord, and he had to be yanked for surgery.
For all the people back on Earth eight having that
made that we would like then a beginning. On Christmas

(39:39):
Eve night, as Apollo eight orbited the Moon, Deeck Slayton,
the director of Flight Crue Operations, pulled Neil Armstrong aside.
He told Neil he was being given command of Apollo
eleven unless something throw a monkey wrench into Nassa's plans.
This was going to be the mission that would land
on the Moon. Michael call And had just returned to

(40:01):
duty after a successful surgery, and Slayton wanted to put
him on Apollo eleven, and by this time Neil had
been teamed with Buzz, but Slayton gave Neil the option
of replacing him. A lot of people didn't like Buzz.
He was a bossy, know it all and rubbed many
people in the program the wrong way. Slayton offered Jim
Lovell in his place, but Neil said that he wanted

(40:21):
to keep Buzz. He'd never had any issues with him,
and besides, Buzzes arrogance was equal to his skills, the
perfect companion to accompany him to the surface of the Moon.
And just like that, the crew of Apollo eleven was cemented.
There would be no further reshuffling. Less than a year later,
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldron, and Michael Collins would leave for

(40:41):
the Moon. It was more than anything else, pure dumb luck.
Before we get back to the Apollo spacecraft. I'd be
remiss if I didn't say that. While Neil, Buzz and
Michael were obviously thrilled to be going to the moon.
Their wives greeted the news somewhat differently. When Joe Aldron
found out that Buzz had been selected, she didn't know
whether to cheer year or weep. She suddenly found herself

(41:02):
wishing she'd married a carpenter or a truck driver, anything
but an astronaut. Neil's wife, Janet, was angry with her
husband because the closer the launch date came, the more
withdrawn and uncommunicative Neil became. She had to force him
to sit down with their children and explain that if
something went wrong, Daddy would not be coming home. Polo

(41:24):
eleon hethan as it doesn't think slowly, and it went
the white thing they do. Good night, Hey Aaron, you
play today night? Day two is over. On day three,
a million things need to go right to ensure Apollo
eleven makes it to the Moon in one piece. The
Apollo program is the result of hundreds of companies, tens

(41:47):
of thousands of people, and billions of dollars. On our
next episode, we'll look at how we built Apollo and
why I believe it or not. Most Americans did not
want to see us go to the moon. This podcast
is a production of I Heart Radio and trade Craft Studios,

(42:08):
Executive producers Ash Serohia and Scott Bernstein in association with
High five Content, and executive producer Andrew Jacobs. Amazing research
and production assistants by associate producers Brian Showsau and Natalie Robomed.
Our incredible editor is Bill Lance. Original music by Henry
ben Wah. The experts who contributed to this episode were

(42:32):
NASA historian Bill Berry, Neil Armstrong, biographer James Hansen, and
mission controls Steve Bales and Poppy Northcutt. Thanks to this
episode's voice actor Chris Germain. Licensing rights and clearances by
Deborah Correa. This is a brand new podcast and we're
so excited to be sharing it with you. Help us
spread it far and wide, tell your friends, leave ratings

(42:54):
and reviews, and chat about it on social media. Our
hashtag is nine D I J. We would love to
hear what you think. New episodes come out every week,
so be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Brandon Phibbs. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll
see you next episode.