Magnificent Desolation

by Buzz Aldrin

  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.

  THE 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.

  “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” Neil said. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches.” That was an intriguing point, since some scientists had speculated that the lunar surface could house a lot of dust, and that our landing pads might sink deep down into the dirt, possibly even dangerously deep.

  “I’m going to step off the LM now,” Neil said, confidently but tentatively. It was 10:56 p.m. (EDT), and the world was watching the black-and-white live broadcast on their TV sets. I watched, too, from the window as Neil, with his right hand firmly grasping the ladder, moved his left blue lunar overshoe from the metal dish of the footpad to take the first step onto the powdery gray surface of the moon. He kept his right foot on the footpad until he could tell how the surface might respond to his weight. He paused briefly, and proclaimed those now famous, well thought-out words: “That’s one small step for … man, one giant leap for mankind.” He later said that he intended to say “one small step for a man …” but the “a” got lost in transmission. It didn’t matter; the world got the message, and it was good.

  At first Neil was tethered to the ladder, because no one knew for sure if the surface would be like quicksand, literally sucking a person down into a quagmire of dust. “The surface is fine and powdery,” Neil said. “I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” Neil let go of the ladder and put both feet on the moon. He quickly found that it was solid below the immediate layer of dust, and it was relatively easy to walk around on the surface.

  One of Neil’s first actions after he made those initial steps was to grab some samples of rocks and soil and place them in his thigh pocket. These were our contingency samples in case we had to leave in a hurry and had no time to gather other samples of the lunar
surface, or were otherwise unable to complete our full EVA as scheduled. If something went wrong, at least we would have some samples of the moon that we could bring back. Meanwhile, I used the tether strap rigged up as a pulley system to lower the specially designed 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera to Neil.

  After Neil had been on the surface for about twenty minutes, it was time for me to join him. It was my turn to ease out of the hatch and back down the ladder. Neil stood on the surface taking photos of my progress and offered watchful comments much like a rock climber relaying helpful hints from below as I commenced my rappel. I arched my back to clear the bulkhead, and continued to the edge of the porch to position my feet on the ladder. I remembered that the checklist said, “Do not leave the hatch wide open.” For some reason we never completely figured out, the checklist instructed me to partially close the hatch.

  My gloved hand on the hatch door, I attempted a touch of humor to ease the tense moment. “Okay, now I want to back up and partially close the hatch,” I said, “making sure not to lock it on my way out.”

  Watching me from the surface, Neil cracked up laughing. “A particularly good thought,” he quipped.

  We had just discovered what would happen if that door was shut, with a very small amount of oxygen inside. With no handle on the outside to unlatch the hatch after returning from our EVA, it would take only a trace of cabin pressure to make it nearly impossible to open. We certainly did not want to lock ourselves out by allowing the hatch to seal shut due to a variance in the external pressure on the moon.

  “That’s our home for the next couple of hours, and we want to take good care of it,” I said. “Okay. I’m on the top step … It’s a very simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.” As I descended the ladder, I began to get my bearings, making sure that I knew how to operate in lunar gravity and that I wouldn’t roll over with my heavy backpack, and fall off the ladder. There was a distance of about three feet between the bottom rung of the ladder and the surface, so I jumped down from the ladder to the footpad.

  Our procedure was that at the bottom of the ladder, we would jump back up again just to be sure we could comfortably make that first step when we returned from our moonwalking EVA. From within the Eagle looking outside the window, I had watched Neil when he checked getting back up from the pad onto the ladder, and it didn’t look so bad. Now, with my boot down on the Eagles footpad, I made the small leap. But I underestimated the lunar gravity thinking it would be pretty easy to bounce back up. I missed by an inch, scraping the bottom rung of the ladder. Feeling pretty awkward, I now had some moon dust on my suit; my shins were smudged. Later people would wonder if I had fallen down, or knelt on the ground, but I had done neither. Just a minor scrape of moon dust that had been deposited from Neil’s boots on the ladder.

  For a moment, though, I lost a bit of confidence. Maybe it was not quite as easy as it looked to move around in the one-sixth-gravity environment. I decided this would be an excellent opportunity to relieve the nervousness in my bladder. I don’t know that history grants any reward for such actions, but that dubious distinction is my “first” on the moon.

  I then said to myself, I’ll put a little more oomph in it, and I jumped up, this time easily reaching the bottom rung. From there I dropped back down to the footpad and turned around to take in the panorama. In every direction I could see detailed characteristics of the gray ash-colored lunar scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters and with every variety and shape of rock. I saw the horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.

  “Beautiful view!” I said.

  “Isn’t that something!” Neil gushed. “Magnificent sight out here.”

  I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, “Magnificent desolation.” It was a spontaneous utterance, an oxymoron that would take on ever-deeper dimensions of meaning in describing this strange new environment.

  Turning in Neil’s direction, I tried out a few steps and a couple of short jumps to test my maneuverability and recovery, and to figure out the best way to maintain my balance. With the heavy backpack altering my center of mass, I leaned slightly forward in the direction I was moving to keep from falling backwards.

  Then for the first time since stepping on the surface, I looked upward, above the LM. It was not an easy thing to do in a pressurized suit, inflated as stiff as a football, with a gold sun visor jutting out from my helmet. But I managed to direct my view homeward, and there in the black, starless sky I could see our marble-sized planet, no bigger than my thumb.

  I became all the more conscious that here we were, two guys walking on the moon, our every move being watched by more people than had ever before viewed one single event. In a strange way there was an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and everyone back on Earth. Yet we were physically separated and farther away from home than any two human beings had ever been. The irony was paradoxical, even overwhelming, but I dared not dwell on it for long.

  Snapping out of my momentary reverie, I noticed some damage to the LM’s struts. “Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effect on it right here, Neil.” I pointed to the blackened area on the strut.

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Neil agreed. “That seems to be the worst, although there are similar effects all around.” Overall, though, at first glance, it seemed that the Eagle had landed with surprisingly few bumps and scrapes.

  The moon dust fascinated me. “Very fine powder, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t it fine?” Neil responded.

  The lunar dust seemed to go down quite a ways into the surface. Although it was loose close to the surface from the many impacts of asteroid material, it was firm deeper down. Even our spacecraft only pierced the surface ever so slightly, about an inch or two beneath the dust.

  Once I set foot on the lunar surface, my first responsibility was to examine and photograph the condition of the Eagles landing gear. So I “borrowed” the Hasselblad camera from Neil and got busy photographing the pad, the thrusters, the slight crater underneath it caused by our landing, and any potentially damaged areas around the ascent stage, as well as the descent. I walked all around the LM, snapping photos as I went, including a couple of Neil. I passed the camera back to Neil, whose responsibility it was to take most of the pictures. We also needed to set up the black-and-white live-feed television camera in a panoramic position out from its stationary location attached to the LM, as far as the camera’s cable would allow. As Neil moved out with the TV camera, I fed the cable from the LM, until he reached an area just beyond a freshly made crater about fifty feet out. Perched atop a tripod, it could now record our activities as we moved around within its field of view.

  Back on Earth, when we practiced deploying and extending that camera out from the spacecraft, the cable lay flat, but in lunar gravity it was almost floating above the surface, just waiting for some daydreaming astronaut to trip over it, pull over the camera, and really mess up the mission. Not to mention embarrassing himself in front of the world and for all of history. Those were the things that you just didn’t want to have happen in front of millions of people watching.

  In commemoration of this first landing, we unveiled the plaque that was attached to the leg of the LM, and would remain on the lunar surface for eons to come. Depicting the two hemispheres of the Earth and dated July 20, 1969, the plaque stated our heartfelt desire:

  HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT ON THE MOON. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.

  Most of our activities took place within a hundred feet or so of the Eagle. We were the moon’s first explorers, so on this mission we stuck pretty close to home. Just a short distance away from the LM, we found a spot to put up the American flag. But getting the flagpole to stand in the lunar
surface was more difficult than we anticipated. The pole itself was hollow, and we were trying to push it down into the lunar “soil” that was made up of millions of years worth of asteroid impacts, all densely packed down into a hard surface. But the soil wouldn’t compress, because there was no air or moisture in the dust. Inserting the flagpole was almost like trying to punch a hole in a bunch of tiny rocks. For the first time a shot of panic seared through me. Since childhood I had seen pictures of great explorers planting their flags in their new worlds. Would I be the first to plant the flag and have it fall over?

  Finally we secured the pole in the surface, and extended the Stars and Stripes along the telescoping arm so it wouldn’t droop down in the airless, breezeless plain of Tranquillity But the arm would not telescope out all the way, which, by accident, made the flag look furled as though waving in the nonexistent wind. As we raised the flag, almost instinctively I took a few steps back and proudly saluted our brave banner. The camera was still running, so the whole world saw me offer the salute. Neil caught it on the Hasselblad, as well. I still think it’s the best-looking flag up there, out of all six that would be planted during subsequent Apollo missions.

  While Neil collected an assortment of rock samples, my next task was to test the various modes of locomotion in the lunar gravity. We knew the television camera was aimed at us and sending live pictures from its pedestal, so I moved into the camera’s field of view to begin experimenting with a variety of steps. I started jogging around a bit, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion in a lazy lope, often with both of my feet floating in the air. One of the pure joys of being on the moon was our somewhat lightfooted mobility. But on the moon, inertia seemed much greater than on Earth. Earthbound, I would have stopped my run in just one step with an abrupt halt. I immediately sensed that if I tried that on the lunar surface, I would end up facedown in the lunar dust. Instead, I had to exercise a little patience and use two or three steps to wind down to a halt. I cut to the side like a football player, skipped straight forward, and then tried the two-legged kangaroo hop—which looked fun, but proved tiring to do for long with the extra effort exerted. When I moved my arms more vigorously, I could nearly lift my feet off the ground with an easy buoyancy.