Magnificent Desolation (2 page)

Weightless now, we could float around the module as Neil and I began running through our checklists while Mike checked out the equipment bays below. At approximately three hours into the trip, Mike ignited the Saturn V third-stage rocket engines for our Trans-Lunar Injection burn to take us out of Earth’s orbit, catapulting us to a speed of nearly 25,000 miles per hour, heading toward the moon. The burn was successful, so it was time to let go of the third stage rocket. But first we needed to extract the lunar module (LM) that had been stored in the third stage, now fully exposed as the protective panels were released. We detached the command module (CM) to move forward and away from the rocket, and then navigated a full U-turn to head back toward the LM. Mike adeptly docked the nose of the CM to the nose of the LM, just as he had done hundreds of times in simulations. With a firm hold on the lunar lander, we practically plucked it out of the third rocket stage as we threw the switch to release the rocket and send it on its way in the direction of the sun. We were now an odd-looking apparatus speeding along, one cone-shaped command module sitting atop its cylindrical service module, nose to nose with what looked like an upside-down, gold-foil-covered cement mixer. We would fly that way until we reached lunar orbit, when Neil and I were safely inside the LM ready to disconnect from Mike and the CM, and descend to the surface of the moon.

The eight-day journey to the moon would take three days outbound, and another three days to get back home, plus two days in lunar orbit, including the day Neil and I planned to be on the lunar surface, so we were happy when we could finally take off our bulky pressurized space suits and stow them after the first five hours. Working in our more comfortable flight suits, we could now move around our weightless environment much more freely, having completed several crucial engine burns and our docking procedures. We ate our first meal aboard—real tasty precooked food from pre-measured packages organized by each
meal. We had selections of chicken salad, applesauce, and even freeze-dried shrimp cocktail. It wasn’t exactly gourmet cooking, but it was enough sustenance to keep us energized. Some of the meals were ready to eat, and others required hot water, which we could add from a hot water gun in the CM. Eating with a spoon was a much trickier activity without gravity; any crumbs from your pineapple fruitcake could float around just about anywhere in the cabin. But I liked it better than simply squirting food into my mouth, as Jim Lovell and I had done on our Gemini 12 mission.

With the CM starting to feel like home, after dinner it was time for a nap. We pulled down the shades on our windows, and dimmed the cabin lights and the sound from our radio. Mission Control could contact us if necessary, but in the meantime a bit of peace and quiet would be welcomed. I settled into my lightweight sleeping bag and stretched out, floating weightless in the lower equipment bay, while Neil curled up on a couch and Mike moved back and forth between the two areas, keeping a close watch on the instruments on the walls all around the couches. Amazingly, I found it relatively easy to rest in our artificial environment. It hardly occurred to me that just an inch away, outside the thin wall of metallic alloy, was a deadly, vast, airless vacuum.

On the way to the moon, we slept only about five hours each night. Our excitement and adrenaline made sleep elusive; besides, our schedule was full of tasks and preparations. We constantly monitored our progress, and fired small guidance rockets to check and correct our course. We also sent back live television broadcasts to give people on Earth a glimpse of our activities inside the spacecraft, such as making a ham-spread sandwich with the bread floating in zero gravity. We had to coordinate our times with Houston, since there was really no telling day from night in space. The sun was always shining, yet the sky around us was a constant black blanket dotted with millions of stars. One thing was certain: with each passing hour, the Earth was growing smaller and the moon was getting larger when we looked out our windows.

Here and there, we had a few “blank pages” in our flight plan that allowed us the opportunity to reflect. As we moved outward into space,
it was an interesting feeling looking back at Earth. Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were leaving behind.

The decade of the 1960s had been a tumultuous one. Camelot had fallen, marred by the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the 1968 assassinations of his brother, Robert Kennedy, during his presidential campaign, and of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. A few days after Dr. King’s death, I called my pastor in Houston to join me in a “walk”—as we participated in a memorial march through the streets of downtown Houston in honor of Dr. King’s life and all he’d fought for in the civil rights movement. There was the weight of global crises during this era as well. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had escalated with the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we were embroiled in an ongoing war in Vietnam, with no clear victory in sight. There arose social unrest and a cry for peace on many fronts, with war protests and civil rights marches, teach-ins at universities, the pacifist message of the Beatles, and the mobilization of the youth movement that would culminate in the Woodstock festival during the summer of 1969.

Our space quests continued through all of this. In the Cold War environment, it had to. The Soviets had jump-started the Space Age with the launch
of Sputnik
in October 1957, and the satellite’s strange new beeping sound startled the western world as it orbited the Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets sent the first human into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, for one full orbit around the Earth. NASA responded by sending America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, for a fifteen-minute suborbital ride, sixty-two miles up to the edge of space, on May 5. Three weeks after Shepard’s fledgling flight, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress and issued a stunning challenge to the nation to embrace a bold new commitment to land a man on the moon and bring him safely home before the end of the decade. It was May 25, 1961. We didn’t have the know-how, the technology, or the rocketry,
but we had the willpower. NASA’s innovative engineers and rocket scientists, including the indomitable Wernher von Braun, along with the aerospace industry, congressional support, and teams of thousands throughout the country, worked together to bring us to this point of being on the verge of realizing Kennedy’s challenge.

We
needed
this first moon landing to be a success to lift America, and to reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil. We needed this mission to succeed after eight years of national effort to get us here. Yes, we were determined to win the space race, to beat the Soviets to the moon. In the broadest sense, we hoped this mission would lift and unite the world, and stand as a symbol of peace for all mankind. That’s why we included an olive branch in the design of our Apollo 11 mission patch, which we wore on all our space-suits. Initially, the design depicted an American bald eagle (the inspiration for the name of our lunar landing craft) with its talons stretched out, about to land on the crater-marked surface of the moon. When we added the olive branch of peace to be carried in the eagle’s talons, that made it all the more significant to me. In addition, we departed from tradition and chose not to include our names on the patch. We felt the mission had a bigger meaning than that of the individuals involved.

On the third day of our journey,
Apollo 11
flew into the shadow of the moon. We were more than five-sixths of the way to our destination. But for now we marveled at the unusual view ahead of us of a shadowed lunar sphere eclipsing the sun, lit from the back with a bright halo of refracted light. The soft glow of reflected light from the Earth helped us see ever more vividly the moon’s protruding ridges and the impressions of craters, almost adding a 3-D sensation to our view.

On the morning of day four, it was time to enter the moon’s gravitational influence. We needed two Lunar Orbit Insertion burns to move us into position before the command module could separate from the lunar module so Neil and I could begin our descent to the surface. For the first burn, we strapped ourselves in to swing around the moon’s far side, the rugged, dark side never seen from Earth, bombarded by meteoric activity And for the first time we would lose all
communication signals with Mission Control during the forty-eight minutes it would take for us to traverse the far side. The burn had to be precisely orchestrated at exactly the right time for six minutes to slow us down to just over 3,600 miles per hour—the speed at which we would be “captured” by lunar gravity. But we were entirely on our own for this one. This had to go right. Mike punched the
PROCEED
button to fire the engine, and the timing was perfect—although Mission Control would not receive confirmation for another forty minutes.

Now that we were in lunar orbit, we had two hours to initiate one more burn to transform our wide elliptical orbit into a tighter, more circular one. We carefully aligned our navigation using star sightings. Through a complex series of star positioning checks and alignment of our CM platform, we were ready for our second burn. If we over-burned for as little as two seconds, we would be on a collision course back toward the far side of the moon. Working this time in full coordination with Mission Control, the tricky procedure came off perfectly as we sailed even closer to the moon.

The next morning at 8:50 a.m. (EDT) on Sunday, July 20, 1969, Neil and I floated up through the access tunnel that linked the CM to the LM, the spacecraft in which Neil and I would descend to the lunar surface. We were no longer in flight suits, but fully suited up in our twenty-one-layered extra-vehicular-activity (EVA) spacesuits that we would wear until returning to the CM. We hooked up the hoses from our suits to the oxygen supply on the LM, donned our helmets, and waited while Mike went through his lengthy preparations for separation. Our hearts pounded in anticipation of the “powered descent” to the lunar surface.

As lunar module pilot, I had previously entered the LM on the second day of our journey to check things out and prepare what would now be Neil’s and my home away from home for approximately twenty-four hours. The LM was the epitome of bare-bones construction. A technological wonder, it had to be as light as possible, so it was far from luxurious inside. Everything in the interior of the LM had been sprayed with a dull navy-gray fire-resistant coating. To further reduce
weight, nothing was covered unless absolutely necessary; all the wiring bundles and plumbing were completely exposed, and there weren’t even covers on the walls of circuit breakers and switches. There were no seats in the LM, or sleeping couches. We would sleep in makeshift hammocks hung from the walls, and we would fly the lunar lander while standing up, almost shoulder to shoulder, in our pressurized suits and helmets. We would be tethered to the deck of the LM by elastic cords. Two small upside-down triangular windows, one on each side of the control panels, provided our only sight of the surface. It was going to be an interesting ride.

The time seemed interminable as Mike went through his checklist to make sure every item was carefully set up. If he botched the undocking and damaged the tunnel, Neil and I would have no way to rejoin Mike in the CM. At least not the way we planned. If we found that the tunnel was jammed after attempting to re-dock, then Neil and I would have no other option than to exit the LM for an EVA spacewalk, using our emergency oxygen containers, and follow the handrails outside the LM to the top to manually open the CM’s hatch and climb in. As commander of the Gemini 8 mission, Neil had not performed a space-walk, since no commanders participated in EVA prior to Apollo, but he was well trained to perform one if necessary. My five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk on Gemini 12 had been thrilling, and had set a world record for spacewalking in large part thanks to being the first astronaut to train underwater using scuba gear, and the first to use a system of greatly improved fixed hand and foot restraints I had suggested for the exterior of the Gemini spacecraft. But an emergency EVA was a different story. The timing, owing to the limited supply of oxygen in our emergency packs, would be critical. And if for some reason we could not dock at all with the CM, Neil and I would still need to exit the LM for a spacewalk so Mike could gently maneuver the CM in our direction to pick us up. Although far from ideal, an emergency EVA could be our only means of survival. One way or another, we would need to pass through the narrow tunnel connecting the two spacecraft to return home, or we wouldn’t return at all.

On our thirteenth orbit around the moon, we found ourselves on the far side when Mike informed us that we were ready to commence undocking. Until this point, our docked pair of spacecraft had simply been known as
Apollo 11.
Now, as we rounded the moon back toward Earth’s side and sealed off the hatches to become two separate entities, the CM would take on the name picked by Mike, the
Columbia
, and the LM became known to Mission Control and the world as the
Eagle
, the name selected by Neil and me. Houston began monitoring the data that was now streaming between the computers of the two spacecraft. Finally we heard the words from Mission Control: “You are go for separation,
Columbia
.”

Mike wasted no time. As though he were backing a truck out of a parking space, he pulled the
Columbia
away from the
Eagle
, releasing us with a resulting thump. At 1:47 p.m. (EDT), July 20, the
Eagle
separated from the
Columbia.
“Okay,
Eagle”
Mike said. “You guys take care.”

“See you later,” Neil replied, as casually as if we were back in Houston, heading home from another day of training.

As one last precaution before setting off on his own solo orbits around the moon—the first man in history ever to do so—Mike visually inspected the LM from his perspective in the
Columbia
, after we had undocked. “I think you’ve got a fine-looking machine there,
Eagle
, despite the fact that you’re upside down.”