Richard Nixon’s Call for a Cosmic Hoedown

Few authors have had as big an impact on space journalism as Jeffrey Kluger. His book Lost Moon, co-authored with Astronaut James Lovell, was the basis for Tom Hanks’s movie, Apollo 13. In honor of the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon on July 16, 1969, Kluger shares with The History Reader the premature, nationwide holiday that Richard Nixon called for to celebrate the Apollo 11 mission before the astronauts actually landed on the moon.

President Richard Nixon took a chance when he issued his call for a national moon party on Thursday, July 16, 1969. To be sure, the nation was in the mood for something of a cosmic hoedown. At 9:32 AM on that clear summer day, Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Kennedy in Florida, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin on a 250,000-mile trajectory that would culminate in Armstrong and Aldrin stepping onto the lunar surface late in the evening on Sunday, July 20. To mark the occasion, Nixon issued a proclamation declaring that Monday, July 21 would be a national holiday. The country’s 4,700 national banks would be asked to close, mail delivery would be suspended, and Social Security checks would not be issued.

“I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America,” Nixon wrote, “do hereby proclaim Monday, July 21, 1969, to be a National Day of Participation, and I invite the Governors of the states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico…to issue similar proclamations.”

The words were stirring, but they were also premature. Between liftoff that Thursday and the party on Monday, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin would be taking their chances and risking their lives in a series of maneuvers that could kill them at almost any moment. Orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour—or 4.9 miles per second—they would have to fire the upper stage of their Saturn V rocket, accelerating to a blazing 25,000 miles per hour, or nearly seven miles per second, to break the grip of Earth’s gravity. They would have to cover the quarter-million-mile translunar distance and then slip into an orbit just 60 nautical miles above the moon’s surface—the equivalent of standing at one end of a football field, aiming a rifle at an apple in the opposite end zone, and rather than hitting it dead-on, skinning one side of it. Armstrong and Aldrin would then have to fly a fragile, flimsy lunar module, made of sheet metal no thicker than three layers of aluminum foil, down to the surface, dodging craters and boulder fields, and coming to rest on the 4.5-billion-year-old surface of another world.

Nixon’s proclamation notwithstanding, if any one of those maneuvers went awry, there might be little to celebrate—and much to grieve—when the time for the Monday holiday came. History would note—and continues to note 56 years on—that nothing did go wrong, that the Apollo 11 crew would fly their craft true, leave their boot prints on the lunar surface, and then come home to walk the more-familiar Earth once more.

“Astronauts Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, so proudly we hail you,” read the big board at the American Stock Exchange.

Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, which, in December of 1968, became the first mission to orbit the moon, said that Apollo 11’s success made him “one of the proudest Americans alive.”

On the deck of the USS Hornet, the mission’s prime recovery vessel, Nixon greeted the astronauts and invited them to a state dinner on August 13. “Would you all please be there?” the most powerful man in the world asked deferentially.

“We’d do anything you say, Mr. President, any time,” Armstrong answered.

Even as the nation allowed itself to stop and cheer and cry happy tears, work went on at Cape Kennedy’s launch pad 39A, from which the crew had left the Earth just over a week earlier. That liftoff was an act of controlled violence—igniting close to six million pounds of volatile rocket fuel, which exploded from five giant F-1engines, scorching the concrete blast apron at the base of the pad, blistering the paint on the gantry, and vaporizing delicate sensors and other equipment. All of that would have to be set to rights, if NASA was to go ahead with its plans for the launches of Apollos 11 and 12 and 13 and beyond. Ultimately, the space agency scheduled ten lunar landings, culminating in a touchdown on the far side of the moon on the capstone mission of the program, Apollo 20.

But NASA would not get all that it hoped for. Budget cuts would ultimately see the cancellation of Apollos 18, 19, and 20. The Apollo 13 crew would never have the opportunity to dirty their white spacesuits with the gray lunar soil when an explosion in one of the craft’s oxygen tanks crippled their ship enroute to the moon and almost saw them lose their lives, before making it home in the most harrowing crisis in the history of the space program. Still, six Apollo crews would land on the moon, 12 men would walk on its surface and 12 more would orbit it or, in the case of Apollo 13, whip around its far side and slingshot home.

All of that high adventure and high drama would begin on that sunny Thursday morning on the coast of Florida when the first of those lunar landing crews left their home world. It is the landing on the moon and the steps on its plains that are best remembered from Apollo 11. But it was that happy and hopeful liftoff that started it all.