IF they accomplish their mission, the three men assigned to pilot Columbia and Eagle to the moon will rank with history's most illustrious explorers. Yet each realizes that the privilege—and the peril—of making man's first lunar landing belongs to them only by an unlikely combination of luck and circumstance. Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, 39, who will steer the lunar module to the surface of the moon, puts it this way: "We've been given a tremendous responsibility by the twists and turns of fate."
Command Pilot Neil Armstrong, 38, could have missed his destiny as the result of half a dozen close shaves. He crashed his Panther jet behind enemy lines in Korea, but escaped a day later. As a civilian test pilot in 1962, he plummeted uncontrollably toward earth when the rocket engine in his X-15 failed to start, but it caught on just in time. As commander of Gemini 8 in 1966, he had to abort the scheduled three-day flight after ten hours when a short circuit threw the spacecraft's thrusters out of control. Last summer he had to eject from a lunar-landing research vehicle at an altitude of only 100 ft. when it spun out of control and crashed.
Buzz Aldrin might not have been an astronaut at all but for his persistence, raw determination—and good fortune. He was turned down when he first applied in 1962. Though he was a veteran fighter pilot (two MIGs destroyed, one damaged in 66 Korean missions for the Air Force), NASA regulations at the time demanded that astronauts be graduate test pilots. The next year, after the regulations had been eased to let in combat pilots with more than 1,000 hours of experience flying jets, Aldrin was accepted.
Michael Collins, 38, owes his couch on the moonship to a bout of bad health. He was to have been a member of the Apollo 8 crew, which made man's first orbits around the moon last Christmas. A paralyzing bone spur in the neck sent Collins to the hospital in June 1968 for a risky operation, however, and Bill Anders took his place. The surgery was a complete success, and Collins was back on full flight status by last November. It was much too late for him to resume his original place with the Apollo 8 crew—but it opened the way for him to join Apollo 11.
Stick and Rudder Men
The members of Apollo 11's crew are seasoned, imperturbable astronauts. Armstrong, known as an inscrutable loner, flew Gemini 8 to the first successful space docking. Aldrin, a hard-driving perfectionist, set the record for space walking (5 hr., 30 min.) during the four-day flight of Gemini 12 in 1966. Collins, the most relaxed and outgoing of the three, helped steer Gemini 10 through complicated rendezvous and docking maneuvers.
As a team, they are remarkably free from quarrels, but they are not close friends. They waste few words on the job, generally talking to each other in technological jargon. Once in a while, Mike Collins cracks a joke. Once in a longer while, Neil Armstrong flashes a fleeting smile. After work, they go their separate ways. It may be true, Aldrin admits, that they have all been somewhat dehumanized by what he calls "the treadmill" of the space program.