The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

As we moved about getting ready to set up our experiments, I watched the toe of my boot strike the surface. The gray dust shot out with machinelike precision, the grains landing nearly equidistant from my toe. I was fascinated by this, and for the first time felt what it was like to walk on the airless moon.

One of my tests was to jog away from the LM to see how maneuverable an astronaut was on the surface. I remembered what Isaac Newton had taught us two centuries before: mass and weight are not the same. I weighed only 60 pounds, but my mass was the same as it was on Earth. Inertia was a problem. I had to plan ahead several steps to bring myself to a stop or to turn, without falling.

But after a few jogging turns, I figured out how to move quite easily. Time was going by quickly, I realized, when Neil signaled me over to unveil the plaque. We stood beside the LM leg and Neil read the words:

“HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH

FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON

JULY 1969, A.D.

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.”

One of the first things Neil did on the surface was take a sample of the lunar soil in case we had to terminate our moon walk early. Now he started working with his scoop and collection box while I set up the metal foil “window shade” of the solar wind collector. The moon was like a giant sponge that absorbed the constant “wind” of charged particles streaming outward from the sun. Scientists back on Earth would examine the collector to learn more about this phenomenon and, through it, the history of the solar system.

As we removed the flag from the equipment compartment at the base of the LM, I suddenly felt stage fright. Since childhood I’d been fascinated by explorers planting flags on strange shores. Now I was about to do the same thing, but on the most exotic shore mankind had ever reached.

Of all the jobs I had to do on the moon, the one I wanted to go the smoothest was the flag raising. Bruce had told us we were being watched by the largest television audience in history, over a billion people. Just beneath the powdery surface, the subsoil was very dense. We succeeded in pushing the flagpole in only a couple of inches. It didn’t look very sturdy. But I did snap off a crisp West Point salute once we got the banner upright.

I noticed that the legs of my spacesuit were smeared with sooty dust, probably from the LM footpad. When we removed our helmets back inside Eagle, there would be no way we would be able to keep from breathing some of that dust. If strange microbes were in this soil, Neil and I would be the first guinea pigs to test their effects.

Bruce told us that President Richard Nixon wanted to speak to us. More stage fright. The president said, “For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”

I looked high above the dome of the LM. Earth hung in the black sky, a disk cut in half by the day-night terminator. It was mostly blue, with swirling white clouds, and I could make out a brown landmass, North Africa and the Middle East. Glancing down at my boots, I realized that the soil Neil and I had stomped through had been here longer than any of those brown continents. Earth was a dynamic planet of tectonic plates, churning oceans, and a changing atmosphere. The moon was dead, a relic of the early solar system.

Time was moving in spasms. We still had many tasks to accomplish. Some seemed quite easy and others dragged on. It took me a long time to erect the passive seismometer (the “moonquake” detector). We were supposed to level it by using a BB-type device centered in a little cup. But the BB just swirled around and around in the light gravity. I spent a long time with that, but it still wouldn’t go level. Then I looked back, and the ball was right where it should be.

“You have approximately three minutes until you must commence your EVA termination activities,” Bruce told us. Our time walking on the moon was almost over.

I was already on the ladder when Neil reminded me about the mementos we had planned to leave on the moon. From a shoulder pocket I removed a small packet that held the two Soviet medals and the Apollo 1 patch, as well as a small gold olive branch, one of four we’d bought. We’d given the other three to our wives as a way of joining them to our mission. The packet also contained the tiny silicone disk marked “From Planet Earth” and etched with goodwill messages from the leaders of 73 nations, including the Soviet Union. I tossed the pouch onto the soil among our jumbled footprints. Once more I thought of Ed White. Only 10 years before we had talked about becoming rocket pilots. In a way, Ed had come with me to the moon.