THE CREW: MEN APART

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.

Dehumanized or not, the crew fully measures up to Boss Astronaut Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton's tough requirements. "You're really looking for a damn good engineering test pilot," says Slayton. "They've got to be good stick and rudder men, and also real smart." Not many qualify. Of 1,400 applicants for the last batch of astronauts in 1967, only eleven were chosen. There are now only 49 astronauts and, in many ways, all are as precise as the laws of celestial mechanics--and as unforgiving as the machines that hurtle them through space. Says Slayton of his astronauts: "They don't have any technical weaknesses. If they did, we wouldn't have them aboard."

Like so much else at NASA, the selection of the moon-landing crew seemed totally routine. Indeed, when the crew was selected in January, there was no assurance that Apollo 11 would make the first moon landing. Apollo 10 was then still a candidate for the mission; there was also the distinct possibility that if problems developed, the attempt would be postponed until Apollo 12, 13 or even 14. "There isn't any big magic selection that goes on for each mission," says Slayton, whose crew recommendations have never been overruled. "It is like every squadron of fighter pilots. You've got a mission to do and you've got so many flights to fly and you assign guys to fly them. It's that straightforward."

Command Pilot Armstrong is considered tight-lipped and phlegmatic, even in the notoriously taciturn fraternity of astronauts. "Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer," his wife Janet said in an interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. More than any other astronaut, Neil Armstrong epitomizes small-town America.

He was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio (pop. 7,500), the son of a career civil servant who is now assistant director of the state's Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction. As a youth, Neil limited his social life mainly to school and church functions; when he went out with a girl it was usually on a double date to the ice-cream parlor. He played baritone horn in the school band. He studied hard, and while his teachers do not remember Armstrong as a particularly brilliant student, he impressed them all with the thorough, meticulous way he went about his work. Says Professor Paul E. Stanley, who taught Neil aerodynamics at Purdue: "He was a Boy Scout [in fact, he made Eagle Scout at 17], and he literally lived up to the motto 'Be Prepared.' "

Faith in Machines

Armstrong first set eyes on an airplane at the age of two, and he made his first flight at six in an old Ford tri-motor. As a boy, he was forever assembling model airplanes, and while other youngsters were still scrambling for comic books, he went right for the aeronautical publications when the magazine shipments arrived on the stands. He worked part time in the drugstore (400 an hour) and as a grease monkey at the airfield to accumulate the money for flying lessons ($9 an hour), and earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, the first day he was eligible. For a while, he had to bicycle the three miles between Wapakoneta and the field; Neil Armstrong was flying planes before he had a driver's license.

At about the same time, the future astronaut was taking his first close look at the moon through a homemade 8-in. reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on roller-skate wheels atop a garage. The wondrous device belonged to Jacob Zint, a neighbor of the Armstrongs and a draftsman in the Westinghouse plant. "I can't recall that Neil ever said he wanted to go to the moon," says Zint. But as early as 1946, Armstrong was regularly visiting the makeshift observatory and often, says Zint, "he looked right into the Sea of Tranquillity"--the prime site for next week's landing.

After graduating from Wapakoneta High School, Armstrong won a Navy scholarship to Purdue, the alma mater of three other astronauts (Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, both of whom died in the Apollo launch-pad fire of Jan. 27, 1967, and Eugene Ceroan, a member of the Apollo 10 crew). Called to service in Korea at the end of his sophomore year, Armstrong earned a reputation as a hot pilot and three Air Medals in 78 combat missions. Returning to Purdue, he collected his degree in aeronautical engineering, and a wife, the former Janet E. Shearon of Evanston, Ill., who was studying home economics at Purdue when they met. They have two sons: Eric, 12, and Mark, 6.

A Lot of Marbles

Armstrong went to work for NASA as a civilian test pilot for the X-15 rocket plane, which he flew at 3,989 m.p.h. and an altitude of 207,500 ft.--both records at the time. In the early days of the space program, Armstrong had no desire to become an astronaut. Says a close acquaintance: "He thought those guys were playing around with a lot of marbles." After the "marbles" began lifting other pilots into space, he changed his mind and in 1962 became one of the second group of astronauts to be chosen. As a civilian, he is paid more than any other astronaut ($30,054 a year, v. Aldrin's $22,650 as an Air Force colonel and Collins' $20,400 as an Air Force lieutenant colonel), a fact that has stirred resentment. There are men in the space program, in fact, who detect behind Armstrong's supercool all-American image a rigid character who has more faith in the perfectibility of machines than of people. "He's all scrubbed up on the outside," says a NASA official, "but inside he has nothing but contempt for the rest of mankind that isn't willing to work as hard as he does."

Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts' flight surgeon, differs. "Neil strikes some people as cold," admits Berry, "but that is partly bashfulness. He is really warm and blushes easily." Yet, says Stanley Butchart, who tested planes with Armstrong and now directs flight operations for. NASA at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., "I think you could know him for a long time and not really know him." A friend who has been in Armstrong's house dozens of times agrees: "For all I know, he could be a secret poet or a secret sadist."

Air Force Colonel Buzz Aldrin, who will guide the lunar module and step onto the moon's surface after Armstrong, is also something of an introvert. His future seems to have been ordained even before his birth in affluent Montclair, N.J. His father, Edwin Sr., was a noted aviator in the 1920s, and is the man who introduced Charles Lindbergh to America's greatest rocket pioneer, Robert Goddard. As a result of the meeting, Lindbergh arranged a $50,000 Guggenheim grant for Goddard, which allowed the inventor to move to New Mexico to develop the rocketry that would one day carry Aldrin's son to the moon. For what it is worth, the maiden name of Buzz Aldrin's mother was Moon.

While Aldrin has always been known as a devoted team player, a quality essential to the success of manned missions, he is also very much his own man. He was, for example, the only astronaut to take part in Houston's Palm Sunday memorial march for Martin Luther King last year, and he did so without asking anybody in NASA for permission. "It was something I wanted to do," he says simply--and he says no more about it. The episode is in keeping with some advice he gave home-town well-wishers in New Jersey a few years ago. "Just so much can be done on a formal team," he said. "A vast amount of preparation for life must be done on an individual basis."

Aldrin is also exceptional among astronauts in being able to claim an important contribution to the theory of space flight. His doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dealt with the question of orbital rendezvous. The ground was so new and Aldrin's approach so original that some of his professors had difficulty understanding him. The doctoral committee, according to rumor, accepted his thesis with reservations. NASA had no reservations, and no trouble understanding Aldrin's language. A copy of the thesis found its way to the space agency during the early stages of the Gemini project, and NASA scientists were borrowing ideas from it even before Aldrin had joined the program.

Calculated Risks

A brilliant, almost straight-A student throughout his years in the Montclair public school system, Aldrin went on to West Point, where he finished third in a class of 475. After combat duty in Korea, he was assigned to the U.S. Air Force Academy as aide to the dean of the faculty, then flew fighters in West Germany. He began thinking about joining the space program, but decided that he needed more education. After getting his doctorate from M.I.T. in 1963--46 years after his father had received his bachelor's degree there--Aldrin was selected for the third group of astronauts. He is married to the former Joan Archer of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. They have three children: Michael, 13, Janice, almost 12, and Andrew J., just 11.

Athletics have always been all-important to Aldrin. Recollects Albert Hartman, the boy's primary-school principal: "He was willing to take risks, but when he took one you had a pretty good feeling he knew what he was doing. When he decided to steal in baseball, his judgment was usually on the winning side." As center on the Montclair High School football team, he compensated for his smallness (5 ft. 10 in., 165 lbs.) with ferocity, and helped lead the team to its first league championship in 15 years. Those who played with him recall Aldrin's strong team loyalty. Says former Montclair Footballer Ted Cox Jr.: "This was big business with Buzz. You were blood brothers with him if you were playing football."

Air Force Lieut. Colonel Mike Collins, who will orbit the moon in the command module while Armstrong and Aldrin land and return from the surface, is by all accounts the most likable member of the crew. Though he comes from a distinguished military family, he goes out of his way to slop around in jeans and act as unmilitary as possible. He enjoys cooking gourmet dinners and knows his way around French wines. To Collins, everybody is "Babe," and he likes to poke fun at the bloated titles that the simplest pieces of space hardware carry. "What we need in the space program is more English majors," he says.

He was born in Rome, where his father, Major General James L. Collins, was military attache, and he grew up in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. After attending St. Albans, a prep school in Washington, he went to West Point, excelling in soccer, wrestling and tennis, and finishing 216th in the class of 1952, a year after Aldrin. Not even Collins' closest friends at the academy knew until senior year that he was the nephew of General J. Lawton ("Lightning Joe") Collins, famed World War II commander of the 25th ("Tropic Lightning") Division on Guadalcanal, leader of the breakthrough at St.-L6 after the Normandy invasion, and later Army Chief of Staff.

If Mike Collins was fired by any particular ambition in his early years, he managed to conceal the fact. Even as a test pilot, and a member of a traditionally no-nonsense profession, he remained relaxed and easygoing. "He lived from day to day and didn't care too much about the future," recalls Bill Dana, a classmate of Collins' at West Point and a fellow test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. Adds Dana: "He didn't really take hold until he got into the space program." That happened in 1963 when NASA accepted his application to be an astronaut. Collins is married to the former Patricia Finnegan of Boston. They have three children: Kathleen, 10, Ann, 7, and Michael Jr., 6.

Collins is a master of the dry style of humor that is characteristic of many of the astronauts. How did his wife feel about his latest and most hazardous space assignment? Replied Collins: "She gets a little bit happier every time. However, I think she's reached a peak in happiness now, and I'm going to just leave her right where she is." He is also the most philosophical member of the crew, especially about his own motives for venturing into space. "I really think the key is that man has always gone where he could, and he must continue," Collins said. "He would lose something terribly important by having that option and not taking it."

Men Apart

The Apollo 11 crew has been in full-time training since January, spending 12-hr. days often seven days a week going over and over the 294-page flight plan, rehearsing every move they will make in flight simulators, checking and re-checking the command module and lunar module. They practiced a single maneuver--the powered descent to the lunar surface--at least 150 times. Flight Surgeon Berry was seriously concerned about their grueling schedule. He feared that the men might become so tired that their resistance to disease would be dangerously low and that they would catch the flu or one of the gastrointestinal disturbances that afflicted three of the previous four Apollo crews. If that happens, says Berry, "I'll have the whole world on my back demanding proof that they are not down with some moon bug." Berry publicly discouraged Richard Nixon from dining with the astronauts on the eve of their flight, lest the President pass on germs. When the crew members made their final pre-launch public appearance at a press briefing in Houston eleven days before liftoff, they entered the room wearing rubber masks to cover their mouths and noses and sat within a tentlike glass canopy. Both precautions were designed to reduce the risk of infection.

In a way, the barrier that set Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins apart from their questioners was highly appropriate. When--if all goes well--the three make their next public appearance, they will do so as mankind's first voyagers to an extraterrestrial body. They are only men, chosen for their role by fate as well as by their own unquestionable talents. But by virtue of their momentous experience, they will also be men set apart from their fellows.

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