_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [70]
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag on the moon. (NASA).
The two astronauts gathered fifty pounds of lunar soil samples and rocks, and once everything was loaded for the flight back to Earth, they shut down the first moonwalk.
Twenty-one hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, they fired Eagle’s ascent engine and left the moon.
They saw the first American flag deployed on the lunar landscape toppled by the rocket’s blast. That was all the time the astronauts had for sightseeing. They had to man Eagle’s controls and computers and radar systems for the three-and-a-half-hour trip needed to reach Michael Collins and Columbia orbiting sixty miles overhead.
Armstrong and Aldrin flew Eagle precisely down the route pioneered by Apollo 10’s Snoopy two months earlier and, as steady as a rock, linked up with Columbia. After they moved their lunar booty into the command ship, they discarded their faithful Eagle, leaving it to orbit the moon for several weeks before lunar gravity pulled it into a crash landing.
It would take two-and-a-half days to make the return trip home, but Neil, Buzz, and Michael knew the way. All they had to do was follow the trail locked in the computers by Frank, Jim, Bill, Tom, Gene, and John—the astronauts of Apollos 8 and 10.
Back on Earth, the uncontrolled celebrations began.
Apollo 11’s splashdown parties set a record.
In fact, the parties quickly grew into one that covered all the communities in and around Mission Control, and when they were finally over, Houston had to lend the small towns a fleet of garbage trucks to haul away the mess.
NBC’s Chet Huntley, America’s number-one and most-loved television news anchor of the day, was one of the warmest and most considerate people you could meet until he decided to take a drink. Then Chet would change from this fatherly, lovable introvert to an “everything goes” extrovert.
During his very successful career (so I’m told), Huntley could be found pushing his stalled automobile through the streets of Miami’s infamous Liberty City at 3:00 A.M., directing late-night traffic in the middle of the George Washington Bridge, or driving a hansom cab through Central Park with a governor and not his bride in the back.
On the night of Apollo 11’s great splashdown party, Chet and us folks from NBC partied hard. We partied down the streets, on the streets, across lawns, up stairs, on balconies, down stairs, through pasture lands, and in and out of all bars, and when we could no longer motor, Chet came up with a unique way of topping it all off. There had been much complaining about the talents of a piano player located poolside at our hotel, and when the last sour note was hit, Chet pushed piano and player in the pool.
Shad Northshield, NBC News’s general manager, stood staring at the piano on the pool bottom as he watched the drenched musician climb out of the water.
“Whose expense account am I going to put this one on?” he asked no one, before wobbling away for the privacy of his room.
Tales of Apollo 11’s splashdown parties were the talk of most social events through the summer and into the fall until Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon set sail for the moon’s Ocean of Storms on a wet November 14, 1969. NASA quickly learned that a thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V rocket climbing in rain clouds becomes a lightning generator.
I was standing under the launch on the NBC studio balcony, voicing a “radio on the scene” report. I was telling our listeners how I had just lost sight of Apollo 12 in the clouds when the only lightning bolt of the day cracked across our location. It filled the small city of buildings, tents, trailers, trucks, and grandstands with rolling thunder, and it cut a jagged streak from the Saturn V to its launch pad. I stopped my broadcast on a dime for our listeners to hear commander Pete Conrad’s report