Magnificent Desolation (4 page)

“Okay, four hundred feet,” I let him know, “down at nine.” Then, for
the first time, I added, “Fifty-eight forward.” We were now skimming over the moon’s surface at fifty-eight feet per second, about forty miles an hour.

“No problem,” Neil responded, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that he still wasn’t satisfied with the terrain. I started to be concerned about our fuel. It would be problematic to get this close and run out of “gas.”

“Three hundred,” I called. “Ease her down. Two-seventy”

“Okay, how’s the fuel?” Neil asked without taking his eyes from the surface.

“Eight percent,” I responded.

“Okay, here’s a … looks like a good area here.”

“I got the shadow out there,” I said, referring to the shadow cast by the
Eagle
as it flew, and thinking it might be some sort of aid to Neil in landing. I might have seen the shadow earlier, but I was staying extremely focused on the instrument panel and calling out the numbers, rather than looking out the window.

“Two hundred fifty. Altitude-velocity lights.” I was letting Neil know that the warning lights indicated that the computer was not getting good radar data. “Two-twenty, thirteen forward. Coming down nicely.”

“Gonna be right over that crater,” Neil said more to himself than to me, Mission Control, and the rest of the listening world.

“Two hundred feet, four and half down,” I responded.

“I’ve got a good spot,” Neil said.

I looked at our fuel gauge. We had about ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, and Neil was still searching for a spot to bring us down. Once we got down to what we called the “bingo” fuel call, we would have to land within twenty seconds or abort. If we were at fifty feet when we hit the bingo mark, and were coming down in a good spot, we could still land. But if we still had seventy to one hundred feet to go, it would be too risky to land; we’d come down too hard. Without wanting to say anything to Neil that might disrupt his focus, I pretty much
used my body “English” as best I could in a spacesuit, as if to say,
Neil, get this on the ground!

“Sixty seconds,” Charlie warned. Our ascent engine fuel tanks were filled to capacity, but that fuel did us no good, since the descent engine tanks were completely separate. We had sixty seconds worth of fuel left in the descent tanks to either land or abort. I glanced furtively out my window and saw that we were at eye level with the moon’s horizon. Off in the near distance was nothing but blackness.

“Sixty feet, down two and a half.” Neil had slowed our descent to two and a half feet per second. “Two forward,” I said. “That’s good.” We wanted to be moving forward when we landed to make sure that we didn’t back into something we couldn’t see, or some crater shrouded by darkness. “Forty feet … Picking up some dust.”

We were moving over the lunar surface like a helicopter coming in for a landing, but we were now in what we sometimes referred to as the “dead zone.” Any touchdown from higher than ten feet was sure to damage the landing gear. Moreover, if we ran out of fuel at this altitude, we would crash onto the moon before our ascent engine could push us back into space. “Four forward. Drifting to the right a little …”

“Thirty seconds,” Charlie said, the nervousness evident in his voice.

Neil slowed the
Eagle
even more, searching … searching … we’d come so far, surely there was a safe place where we could come down.

Then I saw it—the shadow of one of the three footpads that had touched the surface. Although our engine was still running and the
Eagle
was hovering, a probe had touched the surface. “Contact light,” I said. Neil and I looked at each other with a stolen glance of relief and immense satisfaction. The LM settled gently, and we stopped moving. After flying for more than four days, it was a strange sensation to be suddenly stationary. “Shutdown,” I heard Neil say.

“Okay, engine stopped,” I answered.

It was 4:17 p.m. (EDT) on July 20, 1969, and we had less than twenty seconds worth of fuel remaining, but we were on the moon.

Feelings of elation threatened to overwhelm me, but I dared not
give in to them. We still had a lot to do before we could breathe easier. I continued rattling off items from our flight-check list. We didn’t want to make any mistakes at this point. “ACA out of detent,” I said, reminding Neil to take the “Attitude Control Assembly,” the joystick with which he had manually landed us on the moon, out of
MANUAL
and put it back to
AUTO
for our ascent.

“Out of detent. Auto.” Neil replied matter-of-factly

I continued with our procedures, but just then Charlie Duke’s voice broke in. “We copy you down,
Eagle,”
he said with obvious relief.

For the first time I paused and glanced out my window. The sun was out, the sky was velvety black, and the surface appeared even more desolate than I had imagined. The gray-ash colored rocks and pockmarked terrain, which now for the first time in its existence hosted human beings, stretched out as far as I could see and then dipped into the horizon. With our engines stopped, the pervasive silence seemed surreal.

At that moment, however, Neil did something that really surprised me. “Houston,” he said calmly. “Tranquillity Base here. The
Eagle
has landed.”

Neil’s statement must have surprised Charlie as well, since he seemed momentarily tongue-tied. “Roger, Twan …” he began, and then corrected himself. “Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

“Thank
you,”
I offered.

This was no time for celebration, but in the exhilaration of the moment, I reached over and gripped Neil’s hand. “We made it!” I whispered, almost as if I didn’t want to seem as amazed as I was at that moment. It was all starting to sink in, what we had just accomplished. For the rest of my life I would remember those few seconds after we saw the contact button light up when the first probe on one of the
Eagle’s
legs touched the surface of the moon.

Charlie broke in again. “You’re looking good here.”

“Okay,” Neil said to me. “Let’s get on with it.” Immediately, we
were back to business. Then to Mission Control, he added, “Okay, we’re going to be busy for a minute.”

Neil and I went back to work. Although we were now perched on the lunar surface, we didn’t know yet whether we could stay, and we had only a tiny window of opportunity to find out. If something was wrong—if the
Eagle
was about to tip over, if we had a fuel leak, or if some part of the LM had been damaged upon landing and could impair our liftoff, or if some other dangerous situation existed—now was the time to find out, since we had a discrete time in which blasting back off the moon and catching Mike and the
Columbia
would be more favorable. Otherwise it would take another two hours for him to get around the moon and back to us. Mike would be passing by above us now, but after about two minutes it would be too late. We would need to ignite the ascent engines within those two minutes to rendezvous with him, or he’d be too far ahead of us to catch up. That’s why Neil’s taking even a few seconds to communicate our status to Houston had surprised me. At this point every second could be crucial.

We ran hastily down through our checklists, preparing as though we were going to lift off within the two-minute window. I had personally included this precaution in our flight plan, just in case of any mishap. Prior to our mission, there had been a lot of discussion and some question about what we should do first after landing on the moon. Because we had so many variables to consider, I had suggested that the first thing we do on the moon should be to go through a simulated ascent. That way, if for any reason we had to make a hasty escape, we’d have already gone through a practice run of lifting off. Moreover, it had been nearly a week since our last simulated liftoff. If there was an emergency ascent required, at least we would have had a recent reminder of what we were supposed to do.

Neil and I went through each step, activating the computer program, assessing lunar gravity alignment, star-sighting to get our bearings for rendezvous with Mike, if necessary. We did everything but push the button to lift off.

Finally, we could relax.

Almost.

The guys back in Houston were concerned about a pressure buildup in one of the descent fuel tanks that should have been venting and wasn’t, creating the potential for an explosion. After traveling a quarter million miles and landing with just seconds to spare, we now ran the risk of being annihilated. While the world was ecstatically celebrating our accomplishment, the guys at Mission Control discreetly “suggested” that we throw a switch to vent the tank.

I looked out the window. I had just experienced the most intense, exciting ride in my life. And the real adventure was just beginning. Outside that window, the lunar surface awaited mankind’s first footprints.

   2

L
ANDING ON THE MOON IS NOT QUITE THE SAME THING AS
arriving at Grandmother’s for Thanksgiving. You don’t hop out of the lunar module the moment the engine stops and yell, “We’re here! We’re here!” Getting out of the LM takes a lot of preparation, so we had built in several extra hours to our flight plan. We also figured it was wise to allow more time rather than less for our initial activities after landing, just in case anything had gone wrong during the flight.

According to our schedule, we were supposed to eat a meal, rest awhile, and then sleep for seven hours after arriving on the moon. After all, we had already worked a long, full day and we wanted to be fresh for our extra-vehicular activity (EVA). Mission Control had notified the media that they could take a break and catch their breath since there wouldn’t be much happening for several hours as we rested. But it was hard to rest with all that adrenaline pumping through our systems.

Nevertheless, in an effort to remain calm and collected, I decided that this would be an excellent time for a ceremony I had planned as an expression of gratitude and hope. Weeks before, as the Apollo mission drew near, I had originally asked Dean Woodruff, pastor at Webster Presbyterian Church, where my family and I attended services when I was home in Houston, to help me to come up with something I could
do on the moon, some appropriate symbolic act regarding the universality of seeking. I had thought in terms of doing something overtly patriotic, but everything we came up with sounded trite and jingoistic. I settled on a well-known expression of spirituality: celebrating the first Christian Communion on the moon, much as Christopher Columbus and other explorers had done when they first landed in their “new world.”

I wanted to do something positive for the world, so the spiritual aspect appealed greatly to me, but NASA was still smarting from a lawsuit filed by atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair after the
Apollo 8
astronauts read from the biblical creation account in Genesis. O’Hair contended this was a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. Although O’Hair’s views did not represent mainstream America at that time, her lawsuit was a nuisance and a distraction that NASA preferred to live without.

I met with Deke Slayton, one of the original “Mercury Seven” astronauts who ran our flight-crew operations, to inform him of my plans and that I intended to tell the world what I was doing. Deke said, “No, that’s not a good idea, Buzz. Go ahead and have communion, but keep your comments more general.” I understood that Deke didn’t want any more trouble.

So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.” I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: “I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the
wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.

Neil watched respectfully, but made no comment to me at the time.

Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind—be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God. It was my hope that people would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning—a challenge, and the human need to explore whatever is above us, below us, or out there.

S
HORTLY AFTER OUR
touchdown, both Neil and I tried to describe for the people on Earth what we were seeing on the moon. Looking out the window, I said, “We’ll get to the details of what’s around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape, angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock you could find. The color is … well, it varies pretty much depending on how you’re looking relative to the zero-phase point (the point directly opposite the sun). There doesn’t appear to be too much of a general color at all. However, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders, of which there are quite a few in the near area—it looks as though they’re going to have some interesting colors to them.”

Neil wanted Mission Control to know why we had flown over our intended landing area. “Hey, Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase,” he said. “The auto targeting was taking us right into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around it, and it required us going in and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.”

Charlie Duke summed up what we were all feeling. “It was beautiful from here, Tranquillity.”

Neil could hardly wait to describe to Mission Control what he saw out his window. “The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain,” he reported, “with a fairly large number of craters of the five-to fifty-foot variety, and some ridges which are small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little one-and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.”

Mike Collins chimed in from high above the moon in the
Columbia
, “Sounds like it looks a lot better than it did yesterday … It looked rough as a corn cob then.”

“It really was rough, Mike,” answered Neil. “Over the targeted landing area, it was extremely rough, cratered, and large numbers of rocks that were probably larger than five or ten feet in size.”

“When in doubt, land long,” Mike replied.

Charlie Duke wanted us to reset the gravity-alignment circuit breaker, and the mission timer, which for some reason had blown a circuit breaker, so Neil’s commentary was momentarily interrupted. When he continued, he attempted to describe the stark, bland landscape. “I’d say the color of the local surface is very comparable to what we observed from orbit at this sun angle—about ten degrees sun angle, or that nature. It’s pretty much without color. It’s gray; and it’s a very white, chalky gray, as you look into the zero-phase line. And it’s considerably darker gray, more like ashen gray as you look out ninety degrees to the sun. Some of the surface rocks in close here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket engine plume are coated with this light gray on the outside; but where they’ve been broken, they display a very dark gray interior; and it looks like it could be country basalt.”

We wanted to get these descriptions on the record as early as possible, should we for any reason have to make a hasty departure. More
than anything, however, we wanted to get out there and explore the moon’s surface for ourselves.

T
HE PREPARATION TO
go outside was complex; finalizing our suiting-up process from our visor-protected helmets down to our overshoe moon boots would alone take us several hours in the cramped space of the
Eagle.
With just enough room to maneuver, Neil and I helped each other one at a time to put on the 185-pound life-support backpacks, still large and cumbersome even with their lunar-equivalent weight of thirty pounds in the one-sixth gravity. We switched over our life-support connector hoses from the onboard supply of oxygen and electricity to the backpack, fully equipped with its own electrical supply, water connector, communicator, and oxygen inlets and outlets. With no air on the moon, and plenty of heat from the sun and cold in the shadows, our suits and backpacks were truly our life-support system, a 100-percent fully contained living environment. In them, we had cooling provisions in our underwear, thanks to an ingenious system of plastic tubing, about 300 feet worth, that could circulate the ice water that was being produced by the backpack. We had electrical power and enough oxygen for four hours, and antennae connections for radio communications between Neil and me, but also so our conversations could be heard back on Earth. On top of our large backpacks, we had an additional emergency supply of oxygen in a separate container, in case we needed it while on the moon, or for an emergency EVA spacewalk upon re-docking with
Columbia
after liftoff from the moon.

Since we were ahead of schedule, we took our sweet time, making sure that everything was correctly in place. That we weren’t rushed helped us to relax as we anticipated venturing out onto the surface. I remember, right before cabin depressurization, a passing thought I voiced as I put on my helmet, which ended up on the transmission to Houston: “Sure wish I had shaved last night.” I was about to walk on the moon for a one-night stand on a stage before the world, so appearances were on my mind! In final preparation, Neil glanced at a printed
checklist attached on his left wrist and forearm, facing inside just above his gloved hand, that would remind him of the tasks he had to perform during our short time on the moon. I had a similar checklist sewn onto my suit.

When Neil and I had completed connecting all of our life-support equipment, and had made sure all our systems were functioning correctly, we depressurized the
Eagle’s
cabin so we could open the door to the outside world. I watched carefully as the gauge eased down to zero. I attempted to reach down and open the hatch, but it wouldn’t release. The cabin still wasn’t quite empty of oxygen. Amazingly, just a tiny bit of oxygen pressure would keep that hatch from opening inward. I made a mental note of that, since I would be the last man out of the LM. If there was any oxygen remaining in the
Eagle
when I stepped out, and the hatch should close, we’d have a hard time getting back in our ride home. The pressure inside would seal the hatch closed. That’s a good thing when you’re on the inside; not so good if you’re stranded outside, trying to get back in.

Finally, seven hours after we had landed on the surface of the moon, we were ready. Neil opened the hatch and I helped guide him as he backed out on his hands and knees onto the small, shelflike “porch” just above the ladder attached to the forward landing leg, which steadied the LM on the surface.

Neil moved slowly down the ladder, making sure he was securely on each step before allowing his foot to move to the next. He took a strap with him, similar to a clothesline, that was fastened to a pulley, so when he got down to the bottom of the ladder I could put the still camera on the pulley and send it down to Neil. We would later use that same conveyor system to load the lunar samples and the boxes of rocks we collected from the surface and planned to take back to Earth with us. While I guided Neil out, and he was backing down, he reached over to the side of the spacecraft and pulled a lever, causing the equipment-bay side of the lander to open up like a desktop. The desktop fell open, revealing all our tools on it, including a television camera that was pointed at the
Eagle.
I pushed in the circuit breaker, and suddenly Neil
was on live TV. “We’re getting a picture on the TV,” the new Capcom, Bruce McCandless, exclaimed. It was a good thing that the signal went to Mission Control first; as Neil was coming down the ladder, the video image was upside down. The experts at Mission Control quickly righted the image, and beamed it to the television networks, which sent it around the world. I had another 16-millimeter color movie camera loaded with film in my window, so I set that at one frame per second, to capture Neil’s first step on the lunar surface and everything that he did, albeit in a herky-jerky old home-movie sort of way. This same camera would shoot the color footage of Neil and me planting the American flag on the moon.