The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

We were just 700 feet above the surface when Charlie gave us the final “go,” just as another 1202 alarm flashed. Neil and I confirmed with each other that the landing radar was giving us good data, and he punched PROCEED into the keyboard. All these alarms had kept us from studying our landing zone. If this had been a simulation back at the Cape, we probably would have aborted. Neil finally looked away from the DSKY screen and out his triangular window. He was definitely not satisfied with the ground beneath us. We were too low to identify the landmark craters we’d studied from the Apollo 10 photographs. We just had to find a smooth place to land. The computer, however, was taking us to a boulder field surrounding a 40-foot-wide crater.

Neil rocked his hand controller in his fist, changing over to manual command. He slowed our descent from 20 feet per second to only nine. Then, at 300 feet, we were descending at only three and a half feet per second. As Eagle slowly dropped, we continued skimming forward.

Neil still wasn’t satisfied with the terrain. All I could do was give him the altimeter callouts and our horizontal speed. He stroked the hand controller and descent-rate switch like a motorist fine-tuning his cruise control. We scooted across the boulders. At two hundred feet our hover slid toward a faster descent rate.

“Eleven forward, coming down nicely,” I called, my eyes scanning the instruments. “Two hundred feet, four and a half down. Five and a half down. One sixty…” The low-fuel light blinked on the caution-and-warning panel. “…quantity light.”

At 200 feet, Neil slowed the descent again. The horizon of the moon was at eye level. We were almost out of fuel.

“Sixty seconds,” Charlie warned.

The ascent engine fuel tanks were full, but completely separate from the descent engine. We had 60 seconds of fuel remaining in the descent stage before we had to land or abort. Neil searched the ground below.

“Down two and a half,” I called. The LM moved forward like a helicopter flairing out for landing. We were in the so-called dead man’s zone. You couldn’t remain there long. If we ran out of fuel at this altitude we would crash into the surface before the ascent engine could lift us back toward orbit. “Forward. Forward. Good. Forty feet. Down two and a half. Picking up some dust. Thirty feet.” Below the LM’s gangly legs, dust that had lain undisturbed for a billion years blasted sideways in the plume of our engine.

“Thirty seconds,” Charlie announced solemnly, but still Neil slowed our rate.

The descent engine roared silently, sucking up the last of its fuel supply. I turned my eye to the ABORT STAGE button. “Drifting right,” I called watching the shadow of a footpad probe lightly touching the surface. “Contact light.” The horizon seemed to rock gently and then our altimeter stopped blinking. We were on the moon. We had about 20 seconds of fuel remaining in the descent stage. Immediately I prepared for a sudden abort, in case the landing had damaged the Eagle or the surface was not strong enough to support our weight.

“Okay, engine stop,” I told Neil, reciting from the checklist. “ACA out of detent.”

“Got it,” Neil answered, disengaging the hand control system. Both of us were still tingling with the excitement of the final moments before touchdown.

“Mode controls both auto,” I continued, aware that I was chanting the readouts. “Descent engine command override, off Engine arm, off…”

“We copy you down, Eagle,” Charlie Duke interrupted from Houston.

I stared out at the rocks and shadows of the moon. It was as stark as I’d ever imagined it. A mile away, the horizon curved into blackness.

“Houston.” Neil called, “Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

It was strange to be suddenly stationary. Spaceflight had always meant movement to me, but here we were rock-solid still, as if the LM had been standing here since the beginning of time. We’d been told to expect the remaining fuel in the descent stage to slosh back and forth after we touched down, but there simply wasn’t enough reserve fuel remaining to do this. Neil had flown the landing to the very edge.

“Roger, Tranquillity,” Charlie said, “we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

I reached across and shook Neil’s hand, hard. We had pulled it off. Five months and 10 days before the end of the decade, two Americans had landed on the moon.

“It looks like a collection of just every variety of shapes, angularities, granularities, every variety of rock you could find,” I told Houston. Everyone wanted to know what the moon looked like. The glaring sunrise was directly behind us like a huge searchlight. It bleached out the color; but the grays swam in from the sides of my window.

Charlie said there were “lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.”

Neil grinned at me, the strain leaving his tired eyes. I smiled back. “There are two of them up here,” I told Charlie.