Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [0]
TO MY PARTNER and great love in life, Lois, who sustains my efforts to chart future pathways to the stars.
Contents
1 A JOURNEY FOR ALL MANKIND
2 MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION
3 HOMEWARD BOUND
4 AFTER THE MOON, WHAT NEXT?
5 REALIGNMENT
6 FLYING HIGH, FLYING LOW
7 DUTY AND DILEMMA
8 HUMAN SIDE OF HERO
9 A CONTROLLED ALCOHOLIC
10 TURNING POINT
11 REAWAKENING
12 FINDING THE LOVE OF MY LIFE
13 THE LOIS FACTOR
14 NEW BEGINNINGS
15 EVERY SUPERMAN NEEDS HIS LOIS
16 OH, THE PLACES YOU WILL GO!
17 ADVOCACY FOR AMERICA
18 POP GOES SPACE CULTURE
19 GOOD-BYE BLUES, HELLO SPACE VIEWS
20 A BLOW HEARD ’ROUND THE WORLD
21 WEIGHTLESS AGAIN
22 FINAL FRONTIERS
A Note About ShareSpace
Acknowledgments
1
A JOURNEY for
ALL MANKIND
Wednesday, July 16, 1969, 6:00 a.m. (EDT) Countdown: T minus three hours, thirty minutes to liftoff. Clear Florida sky.
ELEVATED 300 FEET IN THE AIR ON AN UPPER PLATFORM OF Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A, I stood alone on the grating of the towering gantry. A few yards away, loaded with more than 2,000 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellant, the giant Saturn V rocket also stood, primed for liftoff as the countdown progressed. Large shards of frost were already falling off its outer skin from the super-chilled liquid oxygen within.
Hours earlier my Apollo 11 crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, and I had enjoyed a predawn steak-and-eggs breakfast—an astronaut tradition—and had gone through an elaborate suiting-up with NASA’s equipment team helping us get into our pressurized suits, helmets, gloves, and boots. Along with our Pad Leader, Günter Wendt, a gray-haired man of German descent who had worked on almost every launch since the early days of the Mercury program, the three of us, carrying our portable air-conditioning ventilators as though we were heading off to work with our briefcases, loaded into the courier van for the short drive out to the launchpad.
Slowly we ascended in the gantry elevator, passing red metal grated walkways at various intervals leading to strategic areas of the rocket. Each of us had trained for his entire life leading up to this moment. As a crew, we had worked together for nearly a year, with Neil and I initially on the backup crew for the gutsy Apollo 8 mission, the first to fly around the moon after only two prior missions with the Saturn V, and then with Mike as the prime crew for the Apollo 11 mission. Because of the seating order in the cramped conditions of the Apollo command module—comparable to the interior of a small van in which the three of us would live and work for more than a week—climbing over one another to enter the craft while wearing our spacesuits was next to impossible. So Günter stopped the elevator about three-fourths of the way up, and dropped me off to wait there on the metal grating while he, Neil, and Mike proceeded two more flights up to where the elevator opened at the “white room,” the final preparation area leading to the narrow hatch opening to the spacecraft. In less than three and a half hours, if all went well, the enormous rocket, with the power of an atomic bomb, would release an engulfing fireball and lumber off the pad, slowly gathering speed as it rose majestically into the sky, launching America’s first attempt to land human beings on the moon.
The sun had not yet come up and was barely peeking above the horizon as I stood on the grating and peered through the clear bubble helmet I wore. The only sound I could hear came from my ventilation unit. Looking up and down the coastline, my eyes scanned the beaches for miles along the causeway near Cape Canaveral, where more than a million people had started gathering the night before,