I know Neil and Buzz didn’t sleep very well, cramped on the narrow floor of Eagle, but I had a good rest in Columbia. I blocked out all the light by putting shades over the windows, and I trusted the experts in Houston to watch over my equipment while I was asleep. Of course, if anything went wrong on the far side of the moon no one could help me, but on the front side Houston could tell from Columbia’s electronic signals whether most things were working properly or not. If trouble developed, they could call me on the radio and wake me up. Reassured by this, I slept like a log, until I heard a voice in my ear, calling over and over again: “Columbia, Columbia, good morning from Houston.” “Hi, Ron,” I replied groggily. It was Ron Evans, an astronaut who would later fly to the moon on the final Apollo flight. Ron told me it was going to be a busy day, which I knew already, and then he proved it by giving me a long list of things to do to prepare for the rendezvous. As the day wore on, I knew I would be expected to perform approximately 850 computer-button pushes alone. If everything went well with Eagle, I knew precisely what to do, because I had practiced over and over again in the simulator, but if I had to go rescue Eagle from some lopsided orbit, then things could get awfully complicated in a big hurry. I had a book around my neck, fastened by a clip to my pressure suit, which contained procedures for eighteen different types of rendezvous that I might need.
As Eagle’s lift-off time approached, I got really nervous, probably as nervous as I got any time during the flight. If their engine didn’t work, there was nothing I could do to rescue them from the surface. I simply had to come home by myself, leaving Neil and Buzz to die on the surface of the moon. They had oxygen enough for only another day at the most. Needless to say, the idea of leaving them was horrible, but it was the only thing I could do, as it made no sense for me to commit suicide. These thoughts were running through my mind as I heard Buzz counting the seconds to ignition: “9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 … Beautiful!” They were off! Seven minutes later, their single engine had pushed them into a good orbit, below and behind me, and they then began a carefully calculated three-hour chase to close the gap. On my first pass over Tranquility Base since their departure, I told them: “Eagle, Columbia passing over the landing site. It sure is great to look down there and not see you!” Not that I had ever really seen them on the surface, but just knowing they were up in orbit again was a great relief. Not long after this, I really did see Eagle for the first time in a day, as it appeared as a tiny blinking light in my sextant. As it grew, so did my confidence, for my computer told me they were precisely on centerline as they overtook me. Finally we were side by side, and Eagle had never looked better. It was missing its bottom half, which stayed on the moon, after acting as a launching pad for the top half.
For the first time in six months, I felt that the Apollo 11 flight was definitely going to be a success. All I had to do now was dock with Eagle, transfer Neil and Buzz back into Columbia, and head for home! The docking itself went well, with just a slight bump as Columbia nudged Eagle, but then Eagle gave a wild lurch and for a couple of seconds I thought we might have real trouble. But the two vehicles swung back in line, and then the docking latches pulled them together in a tight grip, and all was well again. Buzz was first through the hatch, with a triumphant grin on his face. I was going to kiss him, but then I got embarrassed and just shook his hand. Together we greeted Neil, and for a couple of minutes the three of us just floated there, admiring two shiny silver boxes filled with moon rocks. I also got a couple of questions answered, such as what did the lift-off from the moon feel like (“There was a little blast … The floor came up to meet you”), and did the moon rocks all look the same (“No, not at all”). Then it was time to leave Eagle in lunar orbit, light Columbia’s big engine for a couple of minutes, and come on home. Just as in the case of a Gemini deorbit burn, we paid extraordinary attention to the direction we were pointed. If we made a mistake and pointed in the opposite direction, we would crash into the moon instead of returning to earth. After the burn was over, Houston told us their radar tracking stations indicated we were right on course. Another hurdle behind us! As we left the moon, we tried to use up all our remaining film by taking pictures of the moon. All together, we must have taken close to a thousand pictures of the moon in the three days we were there. As we left the moon, we curved around its right side, and we could see it gleaming in the sunlight, vividly etched against the black sky in gray-tan tones. It was beautiful, but it was nothing compared to earth, and I didn’t want to come back ever.
The trip home was quiet and uneventful. I spent my time doing routine housekeeping chores, like adding chlorine to the drinking water, and watching the moon get smaller and the beautiful earth grow larger and more inviting as each hour went by. Things were so quiet that we even got to play some music we had brought along on a small tape recorder. My favorite song on the tape was called “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” Also on the tape was a recording of a bunch of loud noises: bells, train whistles, shrieks, and other unidentified sounds. Once we played this part to the people in Houston just to shake them up. Who ever heard of train whistles coming from outer space? They were really surprised, and we wouldn’t admit that we had made the noises. We also put on a couple of television shows, hoping to give people an idea of what the earth looked like, and what it was like living inside the command module in weightlessness. For instance, on one show I filled a spoon carefully with water. I told Houston: “I’m afraid I filled it too full and it’s going to spill over the sides. I’ll tell you what. I’ll just turn this one over and get rid of the water and start all over again. O.K.?” “O.K.,” said Houston. Slowly I turned the spoon upside down, but of course in weightlessness the water didn’t spill, but stayed right in the spoon, which I then put in my mouth. I also showed the people on earth how our water gun worked, holding it out in front of me a foot or so and squirting the water into my mouth. Or at least squirting some of it into my mouth. Most of it missed and floated off in small spherical blobs.
We had just one more hurdle to clear, that of landing safely in the ocean. We were scheduled to come down in an empty part of the South Pacific, where the aircraft carrier Hornet was waiting for us. President Nixon was also on the Hornet. As we approached the earth, our speed really started to build up, so that we were going 25,000 miles per hour by the time we plunged back into the atmosphere at a very shallow angle of 6°. Again we ran through our checklist with great precision, because we knew we had only one chance to make a good entry. I was flying Columbia from the left side, with Neil in the center handling the computer, and Buzz reading the checklist from the right. We were pointed backward with our heat shield forward. We were looking out the windows at the black sky above us.
As we began to penetrate the thin upper atmosphere, the sky out our windows began to change from the black of space to a tunnel of light. We were trailing a comet’s tail of light, orange-yellow in the center, with edges of blue-green and lavender. It was a spectacular sight, which grew in intensity as the air became denser. Finally the tunnel expanded and its core became so brilliant that I felt we were in the center of a gigantic million-watt light bulb. We could be seen for many hundreds of miles as we arced across the predawn Pacific sky.
As black changed to bright, so also did weightlessness give way to deceleration. It began gently, nudging us back into our couches, and then began to build uncomfortably. After eight days at zero G, our bodies weren’t accustomed to gravity or deceleration, and our good old earth one G seemed heavy indeed. By the time the force peaked at 6.5 G, I felt that a gigantic hand was pushing against my chest. But it didn’t last long, and I had other things to occupy my attention. It was time for our two small drogue parachutes to open, to slow us down enough, and to hold us steady enough, to release our three main parachutes. When the drogues came out, they jerked back and forth quite a bit, but then the three huge main parachutes (each eighty feet in diameter) replaced them, and we were floating serenely down toward what we hoped was a calm sea.
>
I had bet Neil that when Columbia hit the water it would not turn over. Some Apollo command modules turned over, and others didn’t. It depended on a lot of things, but the most important item was to jettison the parachutes swiftly, before the wind could catch in them and pull the spacecraft sideways, causing it to topple upside down. On the other hand, we had to be a hundred percent certain not to jettison the parachutes before the spacecraft hit the water. The procedure was for Buzz (the instant after we hit the water) to turn on the electricity going to the parachute release, and then I would throw the switches to release the chutes. I was thinking about this when all of a sudden—SPLAT!!—we hit the water like a ton of bricks. Buzz’s arm was jerked downward, and before he could move it back up to his electrical panel, I felt us begin to topple over. Drat! Neil had won again.
Anyway, it felt good to be back on earth, even if we were upside down. Being upside down was no big problem, either. All it meant was that I had to throw a couple of switches, which would fill rubber bags on our nose with air, and then we would slowly topple back upright. For the few minutes this took, it felt strange to be hanging against our straps with the windows filled with green water. Once we were upright again, some swimmers, who had been dropped into the ocean by one of the Hornet’s helicopters, surrounded us and tied a life raft to our side. Then we opened the hatch, and one of them threw three biological isolation garments in to us, which we put on. These were supposed to keep any moon germs inside with us, so that we would not contaminate the world. They were also very hot. We got out of Columbia, and locked the hatch behind us. Then, in the raft, we washed one another down with disinfectant, just in case any germs might be on the outside of our garments. Then, one by one, we climbed into a little wire basket on the end of a cable, and were hoisted up into the helicopter.
I stood up inside the helicopter and walked around a little bit. It felt kind of strange to be back in the clutch of gravity again. My body felt heavy, especially my legs. I also felt slightly tired and lightheaded. I knew from talking to other astronauts and from my own Gemini flight that this feeling was normal and would pass within an hour or so. The problem was that my heart, veins, and arteries had gotten used to weightlessness and needed a little while to readjust to gravity. Blood was pooling in my lower body because my cardiovascular system had forgotten what it was like to pump blood “uphill,” there being neither “up” nor “down” in space. That was why I felt tired and lightheaded. By this time the helicopter had reached the Hornet and it was time to get off. I was really glad of that, because I was getting so hot inside my garment that I was about to rip it open, germs or no germs.
The helicopter landed on a big elevator which was lowered below decks. As we stepped out of it, I could barely see through my sweaty, fogged visor. I could see that there were a lot of sailors standing around, and a brass band playing. I could also barely make out the open door of the mobile quarantine facility, our next home, and I headed for it. Once sealed inside, the three of us were able to get out of our hot suits and take showers for the first time in eight days. It really felt good to be clean for a change. The mobile quarantine facility was a modified house trailer with all the doors and windows sealed, to keep any moon germs inside. As soon as we got on board the Hornet, it started steaming as fast as it could for Hawaii, where the MQF would be transferred to a cargo jet for the trip back to Houston. In the meantime, we didn’t have much to do except relax. President Nixon made a speech outside our window, and so did the captain of the Hornet, and then we ate a huge steak and got a good night’s sleep. I felt heavy lying in bed instead of floating free as I had been doing for the past week. It’s too bad you can’t turn gravity off and on at your pleasure. That would really be fun.
In Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor, our MQF was hoisted by a huge crane onto a flat-bed truck and driven out to the airport. People were lined up along the road, shouting and waving at us, and one young man, perhaps twelve years old, ran along behind us for several miles. I wondered how he was going to get back home, and whether he would be in trouble with his parents. I hoped not, because he sure was a good runner, with a lot of endurance and determination. The trip back to Houston was kind of boring, but it was nice to get there and see our friends and families. Of course, they couldn’t come inside the MQF, and we couldn’t go out, so mostly we just waved at each other through the glass. Then another truck ride, from the airport a few miles over to the NASA center, where the MQF was placed inside a huge building called the lunar receiving laboratory.
The lunar receiving laboratory was designed to subject us and our moon rocks to every possible test to make sure we had not brought any germs back from the moon. We had to stay in it (along with a dozen people who worked there) for two weeks if no germs were discovered. If moon germs were found? Who knows, we might have been there for the rest of our lives. In addition to physical examinations for us and microscopic checks of the rocks, there was a colony of white mice which was used to check for germs. These mice had been born in the laboratory and for all their lives they had been kept free of all germs. The idea was to expose the mice to the moon rocks. If the mice stayed healthy, then the moon rocks must be safe and we were free to rejoin our families without fear of infecting anyone. As the days passed and the mice stayed healthy, our spirits rose, and finally, on August 10, 1969, the flight of Apollo 11 ended and we were released to the world.
12
The flight of Apollo 11 ended a remarkable part of my life. For quite a while afterward, my life really was different than it had been before. I received mail from all over the world, from common people and from kings, from a few people I knew and from thousands I did not know. I got a nice letter from Charles Lindbergh, who thought that my flight around the moon by myself must have been similar to his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. I heard from the children of Phil Nowlan, the man who used to write the comic strip “Buck Rogers.” They said that when they were children growing up in a small Pennsylvania town, their father told them all about exploring the moon, thirty years before it actually happened.
In addition to receiving all this mail, and honorary membership in such strange organizations as the Camel Drivers Radio Club of Kabul, Afghanistan, I also found that life had changed in other ways for Neil, Buzz, and me. People wanted to see and hear us. We addressed a joint session of Congress, a rare occasion in the Capitol, attended by members of the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the President’s Cabinet. We followed this with a speedy trip around the world, covering twenty-five countries in thirty-eight days. Everywhere we went, people received us with great enthusiasm, and said, “Well, we finally did it,” meaning that we humans had finally reached the surface of another world. I was surprised by this. I expected people in other countries to say, “Well, you Americans finally did it,” but instead they said “We.” It was a nice feeling.
After the world trip was over, I left the space program. It was difficult for me to decide to quit my job as an astronaut, but I thought I had a couple of good reasons. First, if I had stayed, it would have taken a couple of years to get another flight. Second, during those years, I would have continued to be away from my family a lot, and I was getting very tired of that. Third, after Apollo 11, I didn’t think I would be able to keep my enthusiasm high enough to put up with all the long hours and hard work. Finally, there were plenty of other astronauts waiting to get their first flight. After I quit, my life slowly began returning to normal, and I had time to think about flying in space and what it had meant to me.
I will never forget how beautiful the earth appears from a great distance, floating silently and serenely like a blue and white marble against the pure black of space. For some reason, the tiny earth also appears very fragile, as if a giant hand could suddenly reach out and crush it. Of course, there is no one giant hand, but there are billions of smaller hands on earth, working furiously to change their home. Some of the changes being made are good, and others bad. For example, we are
learning more efficient ways of catching fish, and that is good because it means more people can be fed from the oceans. If, on the other hand, these new methods result in the disappearance of species, such as whales, then that is bad. The automobile gives us great mobility, but pollutes our atmosphere. We cook cleanly and efficiently with natural gas, but we are running short of it. Newspapers and books spread knowledge, but require that trees be chopped down. It seems that nearly every advance in our civilization has some undesirable side effects. Today’s young people are going to have to acquire the wisdom to see that future changes help our planet, not hurt it, so that it truly becomes the beautiful, clean, blue and white pea it seems to be when viewed from the moon. The earth truly is fragile, in the sense that its surface can easily shift from blue and white to black and brown. Is the riverbank a delightful spot to watch diving ducks, or is it lifeless greasy muck littered with bottles and tires? More people should be privileged to fly in space and get the chance to see the fragile earth as it appears from afar.
As time goes by, I think more people will fly in space. People have always been inquisitive, have always wanted to visit new and different places, and have always gone where they have been able to go. The early settlers in the United States were not content to remain on the Atlantic shore but pushed westward to the Pacific as fast as they could. Then, having no more territory to explore, they invented ways to leave their homeland, first on wings and later on rockets, until finally, in July 1969, they touched the face of the moon.
Flying to the Moon Page 12
