_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [67]
Charlie Duke showed surprise. “We’ve got, uh, we’re GO on that alarm, Eagle.”
The beat speeded up.
Armstrong and Aldrin were four thousand feet above the moon. Flight director Gene Kranz opened his mike. “All right, you guys. It’s coming up on GO, or NO GO for landing. What’s it going to be?”
Every flight controller in the trenches responded with “GO.”
Charlie Duke called the American craft descending on the moon. “Eagle, you’re GO for landing.”
Three thousand feet up, another alarm rang in Eagle’s cabin. Steve Bales made an immediate judgment. Another “executive overflow.”
“You’re GO,” Charlie Duke told them.
Two thousand feet high, craters growing larger and larger below, and Neil called it out again: “Twelve-oh-one alarm.”
“What about it, GUIDO?” flight director Kranz shouted.
Director of crew operations Deke Slayton locked eyes with Steve Bales. The computer master read confidence in that look.
“GO!” Bales snapped. “Just GO!”
Charlie Duke looked at Slayton. Deke grinned and turned his right thumb upward with a quick, firm, stabbing motion.
Duke keyed his mike and swallowed hard. “We’re GO, Eagle. Hang tight, we’re GO…”
Inside our NBC broadcast studio, Russ Ward and I were hanging onto every word. No sooner than Apollo 11 had headed for the moon, we left the Cape on a National Airlines charter for Houston.
Now, Eagle was thirteen hundred feet above the lunar surface, beginning its final descent. Flames gushed downward as the craft slowed. Neil Armstrong had flown his mission right along the edge of the razor. He and Buzz were now so close that Neil had to fly this ship. He punched PROCEED into his keyboard. The computer would handle the immediate descent tasks. Buzz would back up both man and electronic brain so Neil could switch his eyes and senses to flying in vacuum.
Both men looked through triangular windows to study the surface of the moon. They’d made simulated runs so many times, they knew their intended landing site as well as familiar airfields back home. Almost immediately they noticed that they weren’t where they were supposed to be.
Damn!
Eagle had overshot the landing zone and Neil scowled at the surface rising toward them. Boulders surrounded a yawning crater wider than a football field, and Eagle was running out of fuel and headed straight for it. There was no time to waste.
In the lunar void there was no gliding to conserve fuel. Eagle was only dead weight in a vacuum. There also was no opportunity to orbit again for another try at landing.
Eagle was sailing down at twenty feet per second. Neil nudged the power, slowing to nine feet per second. He attuned his senses to the rocking motions, the nudges and skidding motions of the sixteen small positioning thrusters that kept Eagle aligned through its descent.
Mission Control listened, mesmerized and awed, to the voices closing in on lunar soil. Neil guided his bird without wings. Buzz watched the landing radar and called out numbers that bespoke volumes of split-second judgment and maneuvering.
Eagle was now in a directed hovering mode. There was no place to land. Rocks, huge boulders, and deadly craters were strewn everywhere.
Mission Control was dead silent.
Neil fired Eagle’s right bank of maneuvering thrusters, and the lunar module scooted across rubble billions of years old.
There!
There beyond a field of boulders, slightly to the left, the rocks were fewer, revealing a smooth, flat area. That’s it, Neil assured himself. That’s our new Home Plate.
The numbers ghosted back to Earth.
“Five-and-a-half down…five percent…seventy-five down…six forward…ninety seconds,” Buzz chanted. “Ninety seconds.”
Aldrin had been carefully watching the fuel gage, as had Mission Control. Ninety seconds of fuel left in their tanks for the descent. Eagle needed to land in ninety seconds, or—
No one wanted to think about it. If their engine gulped its last surge of fuel before they touched down, this close to the moon, they would crash, but Neil didn’t bother with if’s and could-be’s. He could feel what fuel they had left. His eyes and mind and