Out of Orbit

Only minutes earlier, they had been something else—something big enough to be held in the hearts of millions—and soon they would be that big again, but now they were just three men in a bucket floating on the ocean, still far from home. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had gone to the moon and back in the capsule nicknamed
Columbia
before splashing down 812 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. Their miracle trip had taken them a little over eight days. It would be another three weeks before they’d complete the journey from the South Pacific into the arms of their wives.

In July 1969, the world changed, or at least its envelope did, pushed more than a quarter of a million miles across a vacuum. Even on a planet pockmarked by conflict, there was a new hope to latch on to. But that optimism didn’t extend into every corner: no worry-minded scientist would gamble on how much these three men who’d changed the world had changed right along with it. Maybe they weren’t like the rest of us anymore. Maybe they no longer belonged here.

They had lived in impossibly close quarters, drunk water from a pistol, and filled themselves up with a paste engineered to taste like Canadian bacon. They had been weightless, then not really, then weightless again, their blood still pumping but without the usual dams and anchors, flooding into their organs like water finding its level. They had crossed 25,000 miles in an hour. They had soaked up galactic radiation and navigated by stars. They had looked at snapshots of their families and swallowed hard, and they
had wondered whether any single breath was meant to be their last. Two of them had walked in dust that might have contained spores, germs, bacteria, untold ancient lunar diseases and pandemics that every known inoculation couldn’t fight; the third had passed over the dark side of the moon, out of radio contact, alone, for seven orbits, a hermit’s passage.

Like no other men before, they had gone very far away. Who knew how different they might be when they came back?

Was something new and terrible hiding in the bottoms of their lungs or the ridges of their fingerprints? Or, worse, had they absorbed some stowaway parasite like sunlight through their skin?

What did space do to something as finite as a man’s mind? How did punching a hole through Heaven unsettle a man’s soul?

What kind of unforeseen reaction might begin if they dipped a foot into the salt of the ocean? If they shook hands with the rescuers who were on their way in the fat-bellied military choppers? Could even a sneeze make the 812-nautical-mile trip to Hawaii, and from there jump to Japan and California, choking billions of bronchial tubes with some nameless unstoppable plague?

How had space interrupted their bodies’ clocks and rhythms?

How had it skipped their hearts?

How could it not?

And so for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, the waiting began, first in their bucket, still far from home.

·   ·   ·

Back then, as forever, as always—until these days, perhaps—the remedy to any unexplored horizon was a colony. The men of
Apollo 11
would remain in their exclusive society, cut off from the rest of us, kept under glass. They would become the world’s most famous and wide-smiling lepers. Three weeks seemed like a good settlement period. The mysteries of the universe would be waited out.

Every precaution would be taken till then. The swimmers dropped out of their helicopters and attached two orange life rafts to the module, one for decontamination and the other for recovery. One of the swimmers opened
Columbia
’s hatch, threw in three
green, nylon, one-piece biological isolation suits, and slammed the hatch shut. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins each zipped on his suit. The American flag had been stitched to their left shoulders, their names across their chests; their faces were made alien by oval lenses and breathing masks. The swimmer then reopened the hatch and helped the astronauts into the decontamination raft. The four of them floated on the ocean’s gentle surface, under clouds, looking in those outfits more like Martians than moonwalkers.

They were sprayed down with sodium hypochlorite (the module itself would get a betadine bath), transferred to the recovery raft, and lifted like tuna, in Billy Pugh rescue nets, into Helicopter 66 (“Old 66” to the Black Knights inside). The chopper normally hunted for lost surfers and enemy submarines off the California coast. Now its role had changed: for the astronauts in their zipped-up suits, it made more like a pretty good furnace. But the heat was a small complaint—during an earlier recovery exercise, high winds and seas had stalled the lift, and sharks had forced the swimmers back in their rafts. Now that there were no second chances, each part of the plan had to fit into the next without seams.

The decontamination raft and whatever invisible cargo it now harbored was scuttled, and the chopper made the short, thirteen-mile flight to the aircraft carrier USS
Hornet
, on which 2,115 officers and men, 107 NASA officials and civilians, a trio of pool reporters, and President Richard M. Nixon were waiting to make three men in a bucket big again. (The excitement had left the president first needing to take a leak. “Marine, where’s the head?” was his opening verbal salvo after splashdown.) But no wives awaited. Old 66 touched down to cheers on the flight deck, was dropped by elevator to Hangar Deck No. 2, and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins walked through a plastic tunnel into their next new home, the Mobile Quarantine Facility.

Really, it was a souped-up Airstream trailer, a thirty-five-foot-long shining cylinder of unpainted aluminum, smooth except for the rivets. Inside, it looked like just about every other Airstream pulled off the assembly line, with the exception of an obtrusive ventilator above the fold-down table in the kitchenette. Isolation was guaranteed
by negative internal pressure and the filtration of any effluent air. That was the science of it.

For the astronauts, though, it was just the latest in a long string of tin cans. Once inside, they showered, changed into blue flight suits, and settled in for speeches. Nixon, his bladder successfully emptied, told the three men that they had been the principal actors in “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.”

Now joining the trio in their trailer were a technician named John Hirasaki and a NASA physician, Dr. William Carpentier.

The good doctor was never really part of the gang. There was a divide between him and the astronauts, the same gulf that’s always broken off pilots from oddsmakers and logicians, flight surgeons especially. They had no dreaming in them. Asked what would happen if a medical emergency hit the crew of
Apollo 11
before they got off ship, Dr. Carpentier said, “That would be rough. But I’d say the Captain would have to treat the astronauts like carriers of an infectious disease and keep them in quarantine.” The panic in a dying man’s face viewed through a window would be trumped by the most pessimistic clinical imaginings.

With that grim scenario in mind, the crew of the USS
Hornet
began humping a souped-up Airstream to Pearl Harbor, full steam ahead.

·   ·   ·

In the meantime, the three travelers were subject to the first of several physical exams and asked to fill out customs forms, like any other tourists: in the space reserved for declarations, they wrote “moon rock and moon dust samples—manifests attached.” Aside from border agents, thousands more islanders were waiting for them by the time they made it to Honolulu. As many as 25,000 hoped to catch sight of the fresh-tinned astronauts. The Mobile Quarantine Facility was lifted from the carrier, loaded onto a truck, and ferried through the waving crowds from the water to Hickam Air Force Base, where a U.S. Air Force C-141 jet transport waited to swallow the trailer whole.

They were back in flight, over the Pacific and on into Texas.
They touched down at Ellington Air Force Base in the early hours of the morning, with Armstrong providing the homecoming soundtrack on his ukulele. Finally their wives emerged out of the night. Jean Aldrin wore red; Pat Collins wore white; Jan Armstrong wore blue. They smiled up at their husbands, whose hands and faces were pressed against their palm-streaked windows to the world.