The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The TLI burn began silently. But as the acceleration load went from zero to 1.5 Gs, our cabin began to shake. The Pacific tilted beneath us. Six minutes later, the burn stopped as abruptly as it had started, and my limbs began to rise once more in weightlessness. McCandless said the TLI burn had been excellent. We were travelling at a speed of 35,570 feet per second and were passing through 177 nautical miles above Earth. “Looks like you are well on your way now,” he added.

Next Mike had to carry out the “transposition and docking” maneuver he’d practiced hundreds of times in simulators. With the flick of a switch, Mike blew the explosive bolts and separated the CSM from the skirt holding us to the Saturn’s third stage, which contained the LM. At this point the CSM and LM were free of each other. Mike thrust ahead at slow speed and then used his hand controller to rotate us a complete 180 degrees. The big booster stage topped by the awkward-looking LM froze in place against the Pacific backdrop. Mike didn’t hesitate at all to gawk at the view. A few moments later, he moved our conical command module until the triangular probe at its apex was nestled firmly in the doughnut-ring drogue on the roof of the LM. We heard a reassuring clank and a whirring bump as the 12 capture latches snapped into place, forming an airtight tunnel between the two spacecraft.

We were kind of bizarre looking now with the bulletlike CSM wedged into the cement-mixer LM. Also, the bulky white tube of the S-WB was still firmly attached to the LM, and we couldn’t separate until we’d completed a long checklist. Finally, I was able to call, “Houston, Apollo 11, all twelve latches are locked.”

I looked out my window and could make out the cloud-covered mouth of the Amazon. Even at this speed, there was no way to actually sense Earth receding, but if I glanced away from the window then looked back, more of the planet was revealed. The next time I stared out, I was startled to see a complete bright disk. We were 19,000 miles above Earth, our speed slowly dropping as Earth’s gravity tugged at us and the distance grew.

Flying steadily this way may have given us a nice view of Earth, but it also meant that one side of the spacecraft was constantly in sunshine, while the other was in darkness. You can’t do this for very long because in space the sun’s heat will literally broil delicate equipment and burst propellant tanks on the hot side, while on the shaded side the gear will freeze in the deep cold. We had to begin the “barbecue roll” slowly on our long axis so that we would distribute the sun’s heat evenly. Mike fired the thrusters and tilted the spacecraft, making us perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, that invisible disk of Earth’s orbit about the sun. Most people probably thought Apollo 11 was shooting toward the moon like a bullet, with its pointed end toward the target. But actually we were moving more like a child’s top, spinning on the nozzle of our SPS engine.

This movement meant that every two minutes Earth disappeared, then reappeared from left to right, moving from one window to another, followed by the hot searchlight of the sun. We could see the crescent moon out a couple of our windows, though the view was obscured by the LM’s many bulges. By this point we had entered the limbo of so-called cislunar space, the void between Earth and the moon. We didn’t have any sense of moving up or down, but in fact we were climbing out of the deep gravity well of Earth. And as we coasted upward, our speed dropped. In 20-some hours, we would be over half-way to the moon, but moving at only a fraction of our original 25,000-mile-per-hour escape velocity. A little later, when we would reach the crest of the hill and come under the moon’s gravitational influence, we’d speed up again.

After five hours in space, we removed our bulky suits, and the cabin seemed more spacious. We could curl up in any corner we chose, and each of us soon picked a favorite spot. I settled in the lower equipment bay, and Neil seemed to like the couches. Mike moved back and forth between the two areas, spending as much time at the navigation station down below as with the hundreds of spacecraft system instruments grouped around the couches.

Our first Apollo meal went better than we expected. None of us was spacesick – we’d been careful with head movements – so we were actually quite hungry for the gritty chicken salad and sweet apple sauce. The freeze-dried shrimp cocktail tasted almost as good as the kind you get on Earth. We rehydrated food with a hot-water gun, and it was nice to eat something with a spoon, instead of squirting it through tubes the way we’d done on Gemini.