Magnificent Desolation Read online

  TRYING TO SLEEP in the lunar lander was difficult. Not only was it cramped and uncomfortable, it was cold. We turned the heat full up inside the cabin, put on our helmets, and tried to get the water circulation system in our suits to warm us, but it was still awfully cold. After about three hours it became almost impossible to sleep. We could have raised the window shades and let the sunlight in to warm us, but with the sun so bright, that would have kept us from sleeping, too. So our rest was more like a fitful state of drowsing. I don’t imagine, though, that anyone would have slept too well after walking around on the moon all evening, and then planning to lift off for the journey home in six or seven hours.

  When we received our wake-up call from Houston, the question of how to handle the broken circuit breaker had still not been solved. After examining it more closely, I thought that if I could find something in the LM to push into the circuit, it might hold. But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end. I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my suit that might do the job. After moving the countdown procedure up by a couple of hours in case it didn’t work, I inserted the pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed it in; sure enough, the circuit breaker held. We were going to get off the moon, after all. To this day I still have the broken circuit breaker switch and the felt-tipped pen I used to ignite our engines.

  Astronaut Ron Evans had taken over as Capcom at Mission Control the morning we were preparing to lift off from the moon. He and I began the extensive rundown of checks before firing up our engine. Technically, once we were off the surface, we would no longer be known as Tranquillity Base, but Eagle once again, even though we were the same people on the same communication systems. But such was the NASA procedure.

  Ron instructed us to make sure the rendezvous radar was turned off at the beginning of our ascent. I wasn’t too happy about that, as I preferred having it on, just in case, but at the time I hadn’t yet learned that it was the rendezvous radar that had overloaded our computers during our landing on the moon. I acquiesced to Mission Control and turned the radar off.

  We performed an intricate series of star-sightings through our telescope, ascertaining our position vis-à-vis several different stars including Rigel, Navi, and Capella, to align our guidance platform prior to liftoff. By averaging our readings, we would know what kind of orbit we needed to rendezvous with Mike again.

  The liftoff from the moon was intrinsically a tense time for all of us. The ascent stage simply had to work. The engines had to fire, propelling us upward, leaving the descent stage of the LM still sitting on the moon. We had no margin for error, no second chances, no rescue plans if the liftoff failed. There would be no way for Mike up in Columbia to retrieve us. We had no provision for another team to race from Earth to pick us up if the Eagle did not soar. Nor did we have food, water, or oxygen for more than a few hours.

  As we completed all the liftoff procedures, Ron Evans gave me one last bit of instruction. “Roger, Eagle. Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for takeoff.”

  Knowing the pressure everyone felt, I spontaneously injected a touch of humor into the situation. Maintaining a steady, serious tone to my voice, I responded, “Roger. Understand. We’re number one on the runway.”

  Unfamiliar with my sardonic sense of humor, Evans paused for a few seconds as he processed my remark, and then simply replied, “Roger.”

  The computer continued to count down the seconds to liftoff. Standing side by side again, Neil and I looked at each other, took one more furtive glance at that impaired circuit breaker, threw the switches, and held our breath. The LM engine fired, belching a plume of flame and blasting lunar dust as we rose off the surface. The liftoff went as smoothly as could be. I wanted to cast a last look back at the surface, but our attentions were focused on navigating the spacecraft. The ascent of the Eagle was strikingly swift compared with the liftoff of the huge Saturn V rocket from Cape Canaveral. For the Eagles liftoff, we had no atmosphere resisting us, and only one-sixth gravity to overcome, so even though we had worked on this aspect of the flight in simulators, the Eagle’s speed in whisking us into space was almost surprising. Nothing we had ever practiced in simulators could compare with our swift swoop upward. Within seconds we were streaking high above the moon’s surface.

  Unfortunately, I neglected to turn the camera on just before our ascent, so we didn’t get a good shot out the window as we left the ground. It would have been interesting to study the effects of our liftoff around the descent stage that remained on the moon. But I was more concerned with our actual liftoff than with getting good pictures. It was critical to get into orbit with the right speed. As the ascent engine sent us into orbit, we sort of wallowed around, momentarily struggling to correct the center of gravity with the four rod thrusters. It was a little unnerving.

  In fact, we were somewhat concerned because we knew that shortly after liftoff the spacecraft was going to pitch forward about 45 degrees, so it could be more nearly horizontal as it gained more velocity and not so much altitude, a procedure necessary for us to rendezvous with Mike, who was guiding Columbia around the moon in an orbit sixty miles high.

  Despite the surprises, I described our liftoff to Houston as, “Very smooth, a very quiet ride.”

  We lifted off the moon at 1:54 p.m. (EDT), and, within a couple of hours, we had completed the first of two orbits necessary to rendezvous with Mike. During our second orbit, the Columbia came into view. We had a little jolt at the moment of docking because Neil and I had arbitrarily altered the flight plans slightly in a spur of the moment decision opting for a more direct path to Mike. Nobody at Mission Control seemed to mind, although there were probably a couple of rendezvous experts sitting there staring at their computers fretting, “What are they doing? What are they doing?” But I was known as “Dr. Rendezvous” around NASA—sometimes respectfully so, and at times derisively— because of my passion for the subject and my rendezvous doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I didn’t really mind; in fact, usually after my fellow corps of astronauts hemmed and hawed, balking and complaining at my ideas, they more frequently than not embraced them and incorporated my ideas and calculations into their plans. I just took it as a backhanded compliment. Perhaps when the guys on the console noticed Neil and me changing the rendezvous details, they figured, “Well, Buzz knows what he’s doing.”

  Overall, the rendezvous and docking with Mike were absolutely beautiful. We came up from below, evenly, steadily, as if we were riding on a monorail. Nothing disturbed our line of guidance. It was the kind of thing I had dreamed of while developing my theories and techniques at MIT on manned rendezvous. During the Gemini 12 mission, we had faced some challenges in our rendezvous and docking maneuvers with the Agena target vehicle, when our guidance radar went down. I pretty much had to calculate the coordinates in my head, with the help of my Pickett slide rule that I had brought along just in case. But it gave me a chance to test out the theories I had developed, and they worked!

  We docked with Mike at 5:35 p.m. (EDT), nearly four hours after lifting off from the Sea of Tranquillity The sound of those latches snapping shut as Mike secured the Eagle to the Columbia was one of the sweetest I’d ever heard. Neil and I vacuumed up as much moondust as we could, so we would be able to get into the command module without carrying too much of it in from the lunar module. No one knew the effects the dust might have on our skin, lungs, or blood, so Mission Control didn’t want us to drag along any more of it than necessary.

  Once we were certain it was safe to do so, Mike unsealed the access tunnel between the LM and the command module, and we opened the hatch. It was great to see Mike’s smiling face at the other end of that tunnel!

  We carefully transferred the rock boxes and the cameras’ film magazines, and then Neil and I went back into the Eagle for a final look to make sure we’d gotten all that we needed to
get out of it. We knew we were saying good-bye to anything we left inside the LM. Our home on the moon would not be making the trip back to Earth with us. Before leaving lunar orbit, we would cut the Eagle loose, this time letting it fly on its own around the moon for what we thought might be hundreds of years. In fact, it crashed on the moon shortly after its fuel and batteries ran out. But this was no time to be sentimental. We still had a long journey ahead of us.

  We prepared to leave lunar orbit, firing an engine burn on the backside, while out of radio communication with Houston. I had barely slept in more than three days, and had been running on adrenaline for the last two days at least. Now, as I sat in the command module, I could feel my body winding down. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep all the way back to Earth, but we still had several critical moves to make before we could relax.

  The first came up soon enough, when Mike guided us into the Trans-Earth Injection burn, the extra push that would consume five tons of propellant in less than two minutes, boost our speed by 2,000 miles per hour, and, most important of all, break us free of the moon’s gravitational pull, sending us on our way back to Earth. Once again, there was no room for error; we had only one chance to get this right. If we failed, we’d share the fate of the LM, orbiting the moon until we ran out of fuel and batteries, and eventually crashing into the barren gray surface we had just left.

  Mike eyed the guidance computer as he counted down, “Three, two, one …” barely breathing. The Columbia’s engines flared and ignited, just as we had hoped, right on the mark. Twenty minutes later we emerged from the back side of the moon for the last time. Once that maneuver was done, we could watch the moon getting smaller and smaller in our windows. I leaned back and closed my eyes. We were on our way home.

  THE THREE-DAY journey back to Earth’s upper atmosphere was relatively uneventful. On the last night before splashdown, we took the opportunity to share some prepared remarks with the world via a live television broadcast. The words I chose to share remain deeply meaningful to me:

  We’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the moon. More still than the efforts of a government and industry team. More, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Neil’s statement the other day upon first setting foot on the surface of the moon, “This is a small step for a man, but a great leap for mankind,” I believe sums up these feelings very nicely. We accepted the challenge of going to the moon. The acceptance of this challenge was inevitable. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission, I believe, is a tribute to the timeliness of that acceptance.

  Today, I feel we’re fully capable of accepting expanded roles in the exploration of space. In retrospect, we have all been particularly pleased with the call signs that we very laboriously chose for our spacecraft, Columbia and Eagle. We’ve been particularly pleased with the emblem of our flight. Depicting the U.S. eagle, bringing the universal symbol of peace from the Earth, from the planet Earth to the moon, that symbol being the olive branch. It was our overall crew choice to deposit a replica of this symbol on the moon. Personally, in reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from Psalms comes to mind: “When I considered the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him.”

  We were rapidly nearing the expansive oceanic beauty and the cloud-covered landmasses of the Earth, a welcome sight in contrast to the monochromatic moon we had just left. All too soon, we were getting ready for one last tense, action-packed portion of our mission. We had to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, and we had to do it just right, without getting incinerated.

  In many ways, this last part of our mission was as dangerous as the liftoff, the lunar landing, and the ascent from the moon. By this point, the service module that had been integral to Columbia had been discarded and with it our remaining fuel to maneuver our craft. Now we were operating with the command module only, and a minimal fuel reserve that limited our guidance control to minor “attitude” changes. The CM was the only part of our enormous spacecraft and rocket launch system that had stood so gallantly at Launch Pad 39-A and that was designed to return intact to Earth—we hoped. When the command module hit the Earth’s atmosphere, we would be traveling at over 25,000 miles per hour, about ten times faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. Again it had to be right. If we hit at the wrong angle and came in too steep, the g forces would be too high, our heat shield would be ineffective, and the intense heat of reentry would be fatal. If we came in too shallow, we would skip out and be deflected by the atmosphere, shooting off into space, where our fuel and other consumables would run out long before we could return. If this occurred, NASA was on alert to discontinue the live TV feed to the public. Lots of things could have gone wrong upon our reentry. Thankfully, none of them did.

  Eight minutes after first entering the atmosphere, the command module slowed down enough for the three large red-and-white-striped parachutes to open. If the chutes failed to open on time, the capsule would hit the ocean too hard. If we landed too far off course, we could possibly sink before the recovery ship reached us. The timing was highly critical.

  With the precision that we aimed for throughout the Apollo program, the parachutes opened at exactly the right moment, and the splashdown worked as planned. As we floated down toward the ocean, we were all strapped into our seats, Mike on the left, Neil in the middle, and me in the right-hand seat, with our backs pressed against our couches, basically falling upside down. I reached over and braced my hand in position on top of the circuit breaker I needed to throw that would activate the switch on the other side of the spacecraft that Mike could pull to release the parachutes. This had to be done as quickly as possible upon impact so the chutes wouldn’t drag us under the sea. Mike and I had to be careful not to activate the circuit too early, or we could release the parachutes prematurely, thus making our impact with the ocean more dangerous. Even with the braking power of the parachutes, we hit the water with such force that my hand was ripped away from the circuit breaker. Mike pulled the switch to release the parachutes, but nothing happened. The spacecraft plunged into the water, and for a long moment or two, we hung upside down below the surface. I scrambled to pull myself up and push the circuit breaker in, and Mike was able to throw his switch to jettison the parachutes. At about that time, heavy balloons inflated—similar to the way an automobile’s airbags inflate upon impact—and turned the capsule upright.

  Even with the inflated stabilizing rubber ring around the capsule, we were tossed around, bobbing in the sea for several minutes. But almost before we knew it, a helicopter came over and dropped a diver, then a life raft, and then more Navy divers to help us out of the scorched command module. They handed us three quarantine suits to change into inside the CM. The divers were protected as well, in their fully masked and sealed suits. One by one, Neil, Mike, and I were lifted from the raft into the hovering helicopter to transfer us to a waiting ship.

  IN FULL QUARANTINE suits from head to toe, we were plucked out of the ocean and plopped onto the deck of the recovery aircraft carrier, USS Hornet, where we found our first quarantine quarters, a modified aluminum trailer similar to an Airstream camper, parked on the deck of the ship.

  The flight surgeon came into the trailer to give each of us a quick exam, and then my first act was to take a much-needed shower. We had been gone from Earth for eight days, so letting the hot water cascade over my body for what seemed like hours was a pleasure I relished. Since we had a little time to kill before President Nixon came down to the deck where our quarantine trailer was located, the flight surgeon had brought us a special treat—videos of newscasts from all over the world showing the crowds of people and their reactions as they watched us take those first steps on the moon. It was amazing to see their expressions of wonderment, their flag-waving cheers and celebrations. Across cultural barriers
, there was something taking place of historic proportions. Reports already indicated that our moonwalk drew the largest television viewing audience in history, estimated at 500 million people, about 20 percent of the world’s population at that time. It seemed like the entire world was having a party, and I couldn’t resist turning to Neil and saying, “Hey, look. We missed the whole thing!”

  Odd as it might seem, I have always wished that I could have shared that exhilarating experience with everyone else on Earth as they watched the electrifying moments leading up to our touchdown. We missed sharing in the reaction, the emotion embodied by the sight of broadcaster Walter Cronkite wiping away his tears.

  AFTER WE SHOWERED, we were given a more thorough medical exam. Then Neil, Mike, and I, dressed in our freshly provided light blue flight suits, replete with our Apollo 11 insignias and special pins reading HORNET PLUS THREE, went to the window of the quarantine trailer.

  The sight outside our window was a bit unnerving. A barrage of television lights nearly blinded us, about two hundred officers and dignitaries stood to the rear, and standing there amid all the hoopla was President Richard M. Nixon. The President had a reputation for being serious and stoic, cold and calculating, but on this warm morning in the western Pacific Ocean, he seemed ebullient. He practically did a little dance when he first saw us in our window; we looked more like a circus spectacle than space explorers. Nevertheless, the President leaned in toward the microphone by the window to talk with us. Millions of people watched on live TV as President Nixon welcomed us back to Earth. The ceremony lasted about ten minutes with a lot of smiles, and a lot of lighthearted banter going back and forth. The President remarked how the world seemed bigger now, but that its population had never before felt as close together as they did watching the mission unfold. Following the brief ceremony, President Nixon flew off and we relaxed as the Hornet carried us back to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.