This appeared in today's Deseret News. Click on the "The Eagle has landed" title to read the entire article.
...Armstrong's voice was calm. But his heart wasn't, racing twice the usual rate at 156 beats per minute.
The cool atmosphere of the previous three days of the mission was now thick with tension.
"We could tell something wasn't right, but we didn't know what or how worried the center flight personnel were for a while after," former Deseret News science reporter Hal Knight said last week, recalling the events that day as one in a throng of news people from around the world gathered in the auditorium of mission control in Houston.
Aborting the mission had become a real possibility, but at the same time an impossibility — only 30 seconds of fuel remained.
"It was the moment I remember best and was one of many that made the lunar landing one of the rare times when real life is more dramatic than any novel or movie could ever make it," Knight said of his two-week assignment to cover the launch.
Knight had an insider's feel of the mission-control center, courtesy of a personal, other-press-prohibited guided tour a few days earlier by his old Jordan High School classmate Don Lind, an Apollo astronaut who wouldn't get to go to the moon but would fly with the Shuttle Spacelab-3 mission in 1985.
"He got me as close as I could get without being on a rocket," Knight said. "I don't think anyone was even breathing until we finally heard the center intercom say, 'Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground.' "
Knight didn't hear the rest of what Houston said: "You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."
Applause in the auditorium was too loud. "Even tough old news guys couldn't help but cheer. I remember a reporter from Germany jumped up and raised his arms as if someone had just scored an impossible, last-second shot. It felt like a big, group sigh of relief," Knight said.
