Magnificent Desolation

by Buzz Aldrin

  Unfortunately, the incident was never reported to Neil, Mike, or me. Whatever had been learned about this alarm, and whether it meant a go or no-go, never made it into our mission preparation. Being the systems guy in the LM, I was very much in the dark when this alarm came up during the tense moments of our powered descent. The lack of communication could have proved deadly.

  At Mission Control, as the Eagle zoomed lower at a velocity of 250 feet per second, Gene Kranz called out to Steve Bales, “GUIDO?” (This was the acronym for Steve’s position as Guidance Officer.) “Are you happy?”

  Steve Bales knew the computer was still overloaded, but it didn’t appear that the problem was hardware-related. Although he couldn’t be certain to what extent the software glitch might affect the computer twenty-four hours later, when it came time for us to get off the moon’s surface, he had to make a decision now: either go or no-go for landing.

  With his eyes glued to his computer screen, Steve called back to Kranz, “Go!”

  Charlie Duke passed the word on to us. “Eagle, you’re go for landing.”

  We throttled down and continued our descent, closing in rapidly making adjustments to pitch over as we checked our position relative to the surface. Seven and a half minutes in, we were at 16,000 feet. Eight minutes in, 7,000 feet. Nine minutes in, 3,000 feet.

  Twenty seconds later, at an altitude of only 2,000 feet, another alarm lit up on the computer display in the LM. Neil and I looked up simultaneously. “Twelve alarm,” he said to Houston. “Twelve-oh-one.”

  “Roger,” Charlie acknowledged our concern. “Twelve-oh-one alarm.”

  At the Mission Control consoles, the ever calm, crewcut Kranz winced. “GUIDO?”

  Steve Bales had only a fraction of a second to make up his mind. “Go,” he said tersely.

  “We’re go,” Charlie relayed the decision to us. “Hang tight. We’re go.”

  At about 1,000 feet above the surface, Neil began a visual search, looking for a good spot to land. “That’s not a bad looking area … Okay. One thousand at thirty is good.”

  Charlie Duke replied, “Eagle, looking great. You’re go.” He must have seen the same thing we did, another alarm, because there was a pause in Charlie’s strained voice. Then, “Roger. Twelve-oh-two. We copy it.”

  While Neil was looking out the window, my gaze was glued to the instrument readings in front of me. With the dropouts in communication, and the dropouts in radar information owing to the computer glitches, it was even more vital that Neil receive accurate altimeter readings. Moreover, our fuel level was becoming a concern. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the read-outs for more than a fraction of a second.

  Neil was still scanning the surface as we headed to our designated landing site, and he was not happy with what he saw.

  “Seven-fifty coming down at twenty-three,” I called from where I was standing beside him, letting Neil know that we were a mere 750 feet above the surface and descending at twenty-three feet per second.

  “Okay,” Neil said quietly. “Pretty rocky area …”

  “Six hundred, down at nineteen.”

  Neil had made up his mind. “I’m going to …” He didn’t have to finish his statement. I knew that Neil was taking over manual control of the Eagle. Good thing, too, since our computer was leading us into a landing field littered with large boulders surrounding a forty-foot-wide crater. Neil made a split-second decision to fly long, to go farther than we had planned to search for a safe landing area.

  “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

  MAGNIFICENT

  DESOLATION

  LANDING 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.

  SHORTLY 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.”