_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [78]
“Mobility is very great under this ‘crushing’ one-sixth g-load,” Mitchell quipped.
He and Shepard gathered samples of rocks and soil into containers to please the scientists back home. They placed their remote television camera sixty feet away so those on Earth could watch them setting up their experiments. They unloaded a new device for hauling materials across the lunar landscape. The engineers named it a modularized equipment transport, or MET, but Mitchell and Shepard simply called it their lunar rickshaw.
The rickshaw carried an extensive supply of tools, cameras, instruments, safety line, core tubes for digging into the lunar crust, and maps and charts for the two moonwalkers to navigate their way through and around craters, gullies, and boulder fields.
Overhead, their command ship, Kitty Hawk, raced across the moon’s black sky. Crewmate Stuart Roosa had remained at Kitty Hawk’s controls, and he continued his circling of Earth’s natural satellite. Every two hours he was making one complete pass around the moon, and suddenly his voice became very excited. “I can see Antares on the surface!” he told Mission Control. Sunlight gleamed from the spidery moon ship surrounded by a bright and new wide area of dust that had been splayed outward by Antares’s landing.
When Roosa reached the moon’s other side, he made further thrilling discoveries. He swept Kitty Hawk’s cameras across craters never seen from Earth, including an extremely bright crater directly beneath his orbital path. Unseen, unknown by astronomers, it was a meteoric impact that was only weeks, possibly months, old—a virgin crater on a world that had been bombarded with such impacts for 4.6 billion years.
Back on the lunar surface, Alan Shepard was looking upward into the blackest of skies, thrilled at the blue-and-brown miracle that was his home planet. One-third of Earth hung magically suspended, floating. “That was breathtaking! The ice caps over the poles, the white clouds, the blue water…gorgeous, Barbree, just gorgeous!” he would tell me later with an excitement and a knowing he had seen something reserved for the gods.
“Earth,” he explained, “is limitless to everyone with its vast oceans and towering mountains. There’s always a distant horizon and changing dawns and sunsets. But looking at Earth from the moon, earth is in fact very finite, very fragile…so incredibly fragile. That thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the planet, it can be blown away so easily! A meteor, a cataclysmic volcano, man’s own uncaring.”
Suddenly this master of wings and rocket fire, hero to millions, confessed to me that he had unashamedly wept with his boots planted firmly in lunar soil. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he stood praying for our only safe port in this corner of the universe. Minutes passed before he could stop his tears and prayers, before he could force himself out of his introspection.
Not only was Alan Shepard a sensitive person, the future admiral was a tough, no-nonsense “get ’er done” leader, and he knew their assignments on the moon demanded attention and labor, so he and Mitchell continued their appointed tasks. They strode and bunny-hopped in their spacesuits hundreds of feet from the protection of their lander Antares. Those on Earth watching the moonwalkers’ television images learned quickly that the lunar landscape is a visual illusion. What seems flat and featureless is much like an ocean surface on Earth. The “flatness” is in reality a long-waved undulation of the moonscape, and several times during their moonwalk, the astronauts’ exertion while toting heavy loads, bending and stooping to lift rocks, gave Mission Control reason for alarm. They could hear the astronauts grunting, sometimes loudly sucking in oxygen. The flight controllers realized they were pushing too hard, overloading bodies already drained by the demands of launch and flight to the moon.
Shepard and Mitchell were ordered to slow their pace, and soon they were moving through their chores