Houston, Monday, July 21—Men have landed and walked on the moon.
It is deceptively simple. It has heft. As he recalled in a recent interview: “That word, the ‘moon.’ It was the code word for inaccessible, unreachable.”
This opening sentence, he said, put the amazing shift in humanity’s perception of the moon into terms of everyday life that any reader could relate to: “Not only have we reached it, but we walked on it!”
We all walk. It is, literally, a pedestrian thing. But this is walking made glorious: “Landed. And walked. On the moon.”
This is the story behind that story, which even today can wow a reader with the excitement of the moment: how it was reported and how Wilford — a giant of science writing and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — turned a technically challenging human achievement into a narrative suffused with drama, felicitous language and even humor.
The lede — the word is an artifact of the days of Linotype machines and is used to distinguish the leading sentence of an article from the metal used in those days to form type — was also un-Timesian, especially in 1969. Wilford had been hired away from Time magazine in 1965 to take on the space beat.
The editor who hired him, Harrison Salisbury, told him that The Times did not “want someone to write a science story or a flight story or an engineering story.” He recalls Salisbury saying that the moon landing should be “a story of a big adventure.”
Salisbury was part of a faction of editors who were looking to “put some life into The Times,” Wilford recalled. But the newsroom was also still filled with “old-fashioned shirt-sleeve editors who went by the old book.”
So Wilford was not just worried about the first eight words of the article. He was also concerned about whether the old guard would require him to come up with something more stuffy and clunky.
“I was deathly afraid they were going to want me to do some kind of old-fashioned, ‘who what when and where’ lede, and I did not want that,” he said.
Another thing he did not want was “to have ‘historic’ in the lede,” he said. “It’s a lame way to say something is important.”
Wilford called his editor at the time in New York, Henry Lieberman, to clear the way for the unconventional line, with its ring of authority, of history, of a new age in human activity. “I told him what I wanted to do and why, and I said, ‘Do you think that’s going to be all right?’”
He said Lieberman replied, “Well, I’ll run that by the editors.”
“I guess that he did, I never heard any more,” Wilford added. “I took nothing as a positive answer.”
He then went on to the kind of stylistic flourishes he has always been known for, as in his segue into one of Neil Armstrong’s immortal quotes:
Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.
Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old civilian commander, radioed to earth and the Mission Control room here:
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Wilford reported on the launch in Florida, arriving days before with other Times reporters, all working in a rusty trailer that the newspaper maintained at the Kennedy Space Center press site.
He wrote three versions of the article that night for successive editions of The Times. By deadline of the first edition, the astronauts had landed but not exited the lunar module; by the third edition, two astronauts’ boots had touched the gritty soil of the moon. There was no email; to get his article to New York, Wilford banged it out on a typewriter and then read each word over the phone, making small changes on the fly as he read, to the “recording room,” where transcriptionists quickly typed up pages and passed them to editors.
But after writing up the launch in Florida, there was the problem of how to cover the transition of management of the spacecraft to Mission Control in Houston. For earlier launches, Wilford often ended up on a late-night flight. This launch was different. So the publisher of The Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, “let us use his private jet.” After meeting the newspaper’s deadlines, they traveled speedily and in luxury to Houston.
In Houston, the setup for reporters was different, but Wilford still had his desk, his background materials and his yellow pad with notes about what to expect from the mission — elements of the day-by-day flight plan that he could track as things went along.
His preparation for this reporting was extensive; he had even “flown” a simulator of the lunar lander to get a feel for what Armstrong was up against in piloting the spidery craft. Wilford repeatedly crashed the vehicle.
Wilford’s storytelling switched back and forth in time between the landing and the moon walk, to a congratulatory phone call from President Richard M. Nixon, then back to the details of stepping down to the surface. Then he deftly transitioned to a stirring paean to exploration:
On the second step from the top, he pulled a lanyard that released a fold-down equipment compartment on the side of the lunar module. This deployed the television camera that transmitted the dramatic pictures of man’s first steps on the moon.
American Dream Fulfilled
It was man’s first landing on another world, the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination. The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.
“I started using ‘spacefaring’ even before the lunar landing,” Wilford said; he was drawn to the word’s historical echoes. “Seafaring, spacefaring — it’s part of the same thrust.”
The structure of the article was determined in part by an editorial requirement to get the details of the landing and first steps on the moon, and the call from Nixon, “before the jump” — that is, within the part of the article that can be read on the front page. And he found space for flashes of dry humor, as well:
They turned on the electrical power, checked all the switch settings on the cockpit panel and checked communications with the command ship and the ground controllers. Everything was “nominal,” as the spacemen say.
And the astronauts’ banter:
“Eagle has wings,” Mr. Armstrong replied.
The two ships were then only a few feet apart. But at 2:12 P.M., Colonel Collins fired the command ship’s maneuvering rockets to move about two miles away and in a slightly different orbit from the lunar module.
“It looks like you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you’re upside down,” Colonel Collins commented, watching the spidery lunar module receding in the distance.
“Somebody’s upside down,” Mr. Armstrong replied.
What is “up” and what is “down” is never quite clear in the absence of landmarks and the sensation of gravity’s pull.
At Mission Control’s press area, Wilford wore earphones to hear the public affairs officer’s commentary and watched closed-circuit television to see what the spaceship’s cameras were showing.
He kept his ears attuned to whenever anything fresh and amusing occurred, such as that exchange between Armstrong and Michael Collins.
“If you hear a particularly good quote, if you have anything that helps to give some narrative connection to events, you make a quick, scribbly note that no one but me could decipher,” he said. “I didn’t tape the air-to-ground, and you didn’t usually get a transcript of air-to-ground until several hours later.”
The most dramatic element of the landing — the need to fly farther than planned to find a safer landing place — was overshadowed at the time, Wilford recalled, by a series of alarms from the lander’s computers that mission controllers safely disregarded. The search for a landing spot was described in detail at a briefing later in the evening, and he worked it into the article’s chronology of events:
The brownish-gray panorama rushed below them — myriad craters, hills and ridges, deep cracks and ancient rubble on the moon, which Dr. Robert Jastrow, the space agency scientist, called the “Rosetta Stone of life.”
“You’re ‘go’ for landing,” Mission Control informed the two men.
The Eagle closed in, dropping about 20 feet a second, until it was hovering almost directly over the landing area at an altitude of 500 feet.
Its floor was littered with boulders.
It was when the craft reached an altitude of 300 feet that Mr. Armstrong took over semimanual control for the rest of the way. The computer continued to have control of the rocket firing, but the astronaut could adjust the craft’s hovering position.
He was expected to take over such control anyway, but the sight of a crater looming ahead at the touchdown point made it imperative.
As Mr. Armstrong said later, “The auto-targeting was taking us right into a football field- sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks.”
For about 90 seconds, he peered through the window in search of a clear touchdown point. Using the lever at his right hand, he tilted the vehicle forward to redirect the firing of the maneuvering jets and thus shift its hovering position.
Finally, Mr. Armstrong found the spot he liked, and the blue light on the cockpit flashed to indicate that five-foot-long probes, like curb feelers, on three of the four legs had touched the surface.
“Contact light,” Mr. Armstrong radioed.
He pressed a button marked “Stop” and reported, “O.K., engine stop.”
There were a few more cryptic messages of functions performed.
Then Maj. Charles M. Duke, the capsule communicator in the control room, radioed to the two astronauts: “We copy you down, Eagle.”
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
“Roger, Tranquility,” Major Duke replied. “We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We are breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
Throughout the piece, Wilford alternated between lyrical passages and those rich in scientific information and data, framed in ways that could grip the reader. These lines about Armstrong’s heartbeat speak volumes:
Although Mr. Armstrong is known as a man of few words, his heartbeats told of his excitement upon leading man’s first landing on the moon.
At the time of the descent rocket ignition, his heartbeat rate registered 110 a minute — 77 is normal for him — and it shot up to 156 at touchdown.
Stephen Dubner, a co-author of the “Freakonomics” book series, has called this “one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article,” adding, “Someday I would like to write two sentences as good as those.”
Mr. Dubner, join the crowd.
Near the end of the article, Wilford returned to Collins, still orbiting the moon as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface:
At the time of the landing, Colonel Collins was riding the command ship Columbia about 65 miles overhead.
Mission Control informed the colonel, “Eagle is at Tranquility.
“Yea, I heard the whole thing,” Colonel Collins, the man who went so far but not all the way, replied. “Fantastic.”
Wilford recalled that the return to Collins was an attempt to bring some balance to the distribution of glory, an act of empathy for a man as alone as any human has ever been.
“I still think of what Collins must have been thinking,” he said. “He’s up there in orbit. And Armstrong and Aldrin are landing on the moon, walking on the moon, and you think if something happens that they can’t come back, he has no choice. He can’t rescue them. He has to make the flight back on his own. That would have been the hardest thing in the world, I think.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.