Neil Armstrong's Heart

On Saturday night, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, I saw (for the second time) the movie First Man. As we watched the sequence of the landing itself, I wondered if the filmmakers had goosed the details at all to make it more dramatic. At the last minute, Armstrong and Aldrin had to avoid an area covered in huge boulders and then had to skip over a large crater, leading them to become low on fuel. It's really tense in the film, with Aldrin reading off a fuel countdown and a series of alarms going off.

Well, wonder no more because Jason Kottke at kottke.org has the answer: it was all real:

I’ve watched the TV footage and listened to the recordings dozens of times and I was still on the edge of my seat, sweating the landing alongside Armstrong and Aldrin. And sweating they were…at least Armstrong was. Take a look at his heart rate during the landing; it peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing (note: the “1000 ft altitude” is mislabeled, it should be “100 ft”):


For reference, Armstrong’s resting heart rate was around 60 bpm.

There are a couple of other interesting things about this chart. The first is the two minutes of missing data starting around 102:36. They were supposed to be 10 minutes from landing on the Moon and instead their link to Mission Control in Houston kept cutting out. Then there were the intermittent 1201 and 1202 program alarms, which neither the LM crew nor Houston had encountered in any of the training simulations. At the sign of the first alarm at 102:38:26, Armstrong’s heart rate actually appears to drop. And then, as the alarms continue throughout the sequence along with Houston’s assurances that the alarm is nothing to worry about, Armstrong’s heart rate stays steady.

Right around the 2000 feet mark, Armstrong realizes that he needs to maneuver around a crater and some rocks on the surface to reach a flat landing spot and his heart rate steadily rises until it plateaus at the landing. At the time, he thought he’d landed with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining. That Neil Armstrong was able to keep his cool with unknown alarms going off while avoiding craters and boulders with very little fuel remaining and his heart rate spiking while skimming over the surface OF THE FREAKING MOON doing something no one had ever done before is one of the most totally cold-blooded and badass things anyone has ever done. Damn, I get goosebumps just reading about it!

That's one of the coolest graphs I've ever seen.