The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The deep-space tracking station at Goldstone in southern California (there were two others, one outside Madrid and another near Canberra, Australia) wanted us to test our television system. Neil was the narrator and he gave the weather report for Central and South America. I got some good shots of Mike floating from one window to another, and then he held the camera while I took the TV audience on a little tour of the navigation station below.

When this impromptu TV show was over I realized I was very tired. It had been a full day, and we needed sleep. When I curled up in my lightweight sleeping bag, I couldn’t help thinking how adaptable humans are. There we were, three air-breathing creatures bedding down for the night in this tiny bubble of oxygen. Our spacecraft was like a miniature planet, built by humans like us. We were able to live inside it comfortably, though only an inch or two of alloy and plastic separated my face from the vacuum outside.

Somehow I still felt secure. Ventilators whirred softly and thrusters thumped at odd times. The radio was turned low; Houston would call us only in an emergency. We shaded our windows and dimmed the cabin. I hooked up my sleeping bag beneath the couch and stretched, floating in the luxury of weightlessness. It was time to rest.

When we’d finished our TV broadcast the next day, Charlie Duke, the capcom on duty, gave us some good news about the Soviet unmanned moon probe Luna 15. Three days before our mission lifted off, the Soviets launched this robot spacecraft in an attempt to beat America in returning the first sample of lunar material. But it now looked like their mission wouldn’t succeed. The Soviet probe was definitely in a lunar orbit, but it would not interfere with our flight path in any way. Charlie also told us that Pravda was calling Neil the “czar of the ship.” Mike and I had a good time with that. It was pretty funny to think of Neil, the pride of Wapakoneta, Ohio, as a czar.

At a ground elapsed time (GET) of 26 hours and 34 minutes, Mike fired the SPS engine for just under three seconds to begin our midcourse correction maneuver. Houston said the burn was “absolutely nominal” and that, so far, our flight path had been perfect. We were halfway to the moon.

After two full days into the mission we were 150,000 miles from Earth and our speed was less than 3,000 miles an hour. The moon was approximately 30 hours and 90,000 miles ahead of us.

We broke out the TV camera again. This would be our first time up into the LM, and Mission Control wanted to inspect it along with us. To give us room to pass through the connecting tunnel, Mike removed the probe and drogue assembly we’d used to dock the command module with the LM. We were immediately given a shock when we smelled the unmistakable stench of burned wiring that every astronaut dreads. But nothing seemed to be amiss and the electrical panel gave us good voltage readings for the circuits of the docking mechanism. Mike handed Neil the triangular spearpoint of the probe. This vital piece of equipment was in perfect condition.

“Mike must have done a smooth job on that docking,” Neil told Houston. “There isn’t a dent or mark on the probe.”

I floated up through the tunnel, dragging the portable TV camera with me. Because the command module and the LM were docked head to head, I expected a jolt of disorientation when up and down reversed themselves as I crossed into the LM cabin, but the transition seemed perfectly natural.

The LM flight deck was about as charming as the cab of a diesel locomotive. Weight restrictions prevented the use of paneling, so all the wiring bundles and plumbing were exposed. Everywhere I looked there were rivets and circuit breakers. The hull had been sprayed with a dull gray fire-resistant coating. Some people had said the first moon landing would be the culmination of the Industrial Revolution; well, the lunar module certainly looked industrial enough to prove it.

But the Eagle was a featherweight locomotive. It could accelerate from zero to 3,000 miles an hour in 2 minutes during the ascent. The walls of the pressure cabin were so thin I could have jabbed a screwdriver through them without a lot of effort. Everything had been stripped down to the extreme. Even the safety covers had been removed from the circuit breakers and switches.

After lunch that day I asked Neil if he knew what he was going to say when he stepped onto the lunar surface. He took a sip of fruit juice and shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, “I’m still thinking it over.”

On our second day outbound, Apollo 11 flew into the shadow of the moon, which was now less than 40,000 miles away. From where we were the moon eclipsed the sun, but was lit from the back by a brilliant halo of refracted sunlight. There was also a milky glow of Earthshine highlighting the biggest ridges and craters. This bizarre lighting transformed the moon into a shadowy sphere that was three-dimensional but without definition.