South Carolina Focus

A half-century ago, as the world watched in awe as Neil Armstrong took that "one small step" into history on the surface of the moon, a voice from Houston was his constant connection to humanity back on Earth. Earlier, however, as the landing craft neared its destination, that voice had called "60 seconds," to warn the Apollo 11 astronauts - Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins - that they had only one minute's worth of fuel to land, or they would have to abort the mission. That voice belonged to future moonwalker Charles Duke of Lancaster, South Carolina. "It was a very tense 12 or 13 minutes as we started the descent," he recalled on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the historic landing. "We started having a lot of problems. Communication problems, data dropout. Then we had computer overloads, so you can imagine the tension rising in Mission Control." To compound matters, the crew saw at the last minute that it was about to land in a patch of rocks and craters. So the craft