I heard that Nixon had prepared a speech to give, in case the Lunar Excursion Module failed (marooning the two astronauts on the moon). Anybody know if the text of this has been preserved? I suppose it would have a pretty horrible death-running out of oxygen and eventual suffocation. did these guys have suicide kits? Does anybody know what NASA had estimated as the probability of the LEM’s engines failure to fire when departing the moon?
I’ve always heard they never had suicide kits, because the easiest and quickest way to commit suicide in space (or on the moon, I suppose, vacuum and all) would be to open the hatch.
I’m sure you’re right. All federal employees are issued suicide kits on their first day of employee orientation. 
Thanks to ralph124c and friedo for making me aware of this. What a chilling speech–except for this bit, which I found to be unintentionally funny:
The Smoking Gun reproduces the original White House memo from William Safire - yes, the same - to Haldeman with his proposed text for the President’s speech and the other statements that would have to be made.
There’s this one, and Eisenhower’s speech accepting responsibility for the failure of the Normandy invasion. Anyone know of a list of other contingency speeches that were never needed?
(I would have wanted Nixon to wait instead until Armstrong and Aldrin were actually dead first, but maybe that’s just me.)
Buzz Aldrin said on a TV interview (no, I don’t have a cite) that they did NOT have suicide pills/kits. He said that he and Armstrong would have spent every single minute they had alive trying to fix the LEM, and the only way they would have died would have been running out of oxygen. Suicide was not an option, according to Buzz…
Doesn’t surprise me at all, having met Gene Krantz and talked to him about the space program the way it was then (as opposed to now) and the men involved. Hell, his autobiography is called Failure is Not an Option.
I wasn’t saying they would commit suicide, but only mentioning a theoretical method. Just to clarify.
It’s pretty much covered in every book on the Apollo program. For some reason, everyone thinks that the astronauts have the suicide pills. I can’t really imagine them wanting the things. They’re not the kind of guys to give up, and a suicide pill is most certainly the ultimate form of surrender. None of them liked talking about the CM pilot running sims on how to get home if the guys didn’t make it back from the surface of the Moon.
Every time I read the speech, I love this bit:
It’s powerful stuff!
Had this happened, would they have tried to retrieve the bodies on the next mission?
At the risk of sounding callous, we only had a finite supply of Saturn V’s, and a lot more landing sites to visit.
Assuming the program wasn’t completely shelved after a fatal catastrophe like that, we’d be wasting a scientific expedition (and risking the lives of two astronauts in a spacecraft thats already killed two men) to bring back a couple hundred pounds of mummies.
I’d say an Apollo lander makes as good a mausoleum as any. And if we change our minds…it’s not like they’re going anywhere, right? A few decades isn’t going to make much of a difference.
Two more points:
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It wouldn’t have been a particularly horrible death. As the oxygen levels began to decrease, and the CO2 levels began to increase, the astronauts would begin to feel sleepy and drift off for the long count. Not painful at all. Aldrin said that in the same interview which I don’t have a cite for.
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The LEMs engines would not fail to fire. It’s not like your car on a cold winter morning. It was a simple mixture of two liquids to cause an ignition. No distributer caps, or plugs and wires. Mix liquids A and B and get a big fire underneath…
Nah, that’s what I figured. It’s sort of a pride thing–“we put a man on the Moon… and left him there.”
Actually, this sentence sounds like it was inspired by Rupert Brooke’s poem, “The Soldier.” The first two lines of Brooke’s poem are as follows:
Two lines, eh? 
That might be why the line seemed so familiar, even the first time I read the speech. I’ve never read the whole poem by Brooke, but I’m sure that line’s been quoted at more than one Remembrance Day ceremony.
Brooke’s poem is a little odd structurally. When read by a reader who knows how to correctly interpret the poem, it does indeed sound like the first two lines. There is very little break between “field” and “That,” but the caesura after “England” is a dead stop. So three lines on the page, but two lines in practice.
That’s the test pilot training, at least in part - pilots are trained to keep trying to fix whatever’s wrong until they themselves are no longer functioning.
Look what happened to Apollo 13 - those aren’t the sort of guys who give up and die.
I’ve just watched all 12 hours of From the Earth to the Moon, and apart from the sucky last two episodes that I endured last night*, the overall feeling I got from it was holy living fuck, what were they thinking?!
I mean, today we glibly go “yeah, man has walked on the moon”, but when you actually think about what they did, and the risks involved! The timescales. The paucity of the technology. The astonishing, foolhardy prototype techniques that were do-or-die. Two men, alone on the surface of a celestial body, standing by a craft that had never been tested for its purpose in situ.
Theirs was a level of bravery - and insanity - that I simply cannot comprehend.
*As well as the un-fast-forwardable JFK speech at the start of each episode that got stuck in my head. “We choose to go to the moon… We choose to go to the moon… We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.” What are these other things, JFK? Pork Marilyn Monroe? Get shot?