【誰にともなしに、独り言レス―その2953】
原作 First Man: The Life of Neil A.Armstrong （James R. Hansen） のクダリ―
On that Monday afternoon, December 23,1968, as things were settling down following the end of the TV transmission from Apollo 8, Armstrong and Slayton retired to one of the back rooms at the Mission Control Center for what would prove to be a historic conversation.“Deke laid out his thinking about Apollo 11 and asked how I felt about having Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin as my crew.We talked about it a little bit, and I didn‘t have any problem with that. And Deke said that Buzz wasn’t necessarily so easy to work with, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve been working with him the last few months [in the backup role for Apollo 8] and everything seems to be going all right.’ But I knew what Deke was saying. Then he said he wanted to make Jim Lovell available for Apollo 11 even though it would be a little bit out of sequence, but that’s what he’d do, if that is what I thought I needed. I would have been happy to get Lovell. Jim was a very reliable guy, very steady. I had a lot of confidence in him. It would have been highly unusual for the crew assignment to have worked out this way but Deke offered the possibility that it would be Jim Lovell and Mike Collins as my crew.”Armstrong wanted a little time to think about it. He took only until the next day, Christmas Eve, to give Deke his answer. By then, the crew of Apollo 8, with Jim Lovell piloting the command module, was in orbit around the Moon. Lovell would never learn that if Armstrong's answer had been different he would have become a member of the Apollo 11 crew. “Jim had already been commander of Gemini XII,” Neil states, “and I thought he deserved his own command. I thought it would be not right of me to pull Lovell out of line for a command, so he ended up with Apollo 13. To this day, he doesn't know anything about that. I have never related these conversations that I had with Slayton to anyone. As far as I know, Buzz doesn't know about them, either.” If Armstrong had taken Lovell for Apollo 11, Aldrin would have been pushed back to a later crew, probably to the ill-fated Apollo 13. Neil answered Slayton in the way he did because he had had no trouble working with Buzz, and Lovell deserved his own command.
