Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [1]
Because of the danger of explosion should something go wrong, the area immediately near the Saturn V was evacuated except for technicians making their final pre-launch checks. Even if the launch was perfect, no human could stay within several miles of it outside of the Firing Room, the launch control center at the Cape. The hot gases and thunderous noise would consume anyone standing too close to the rocket at ignition. The VIP spectator area—from which former president Lyndon B. Johnson, the astronauts’ families, politicians, celebrities, and others with the coveted special pass would watch the launch—was a full three miles away. Even there, the vibrations would be felt, and the roar from the engines would be almost deafening.
I looked to the south, where some of the older launchpads were located, and I couldn’t help letting my eyes linger on Launch Pad 34, where, two and a half years earlier, three of my fellow astronauts—Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White—had lost their lives when they were trapped inside their space capsule in a torrid burst of flames during a pre-launch training test for Apollo 1. Ed had been a year behind me at West Point, where we became friends, and we’d later served together in the Air Force as fighter pilots in Germany, flying F-100s in the “Big 22” Squadron. He was the key person who had kindled and encouraged my efforts to contribute to the space program and ultimately become an astronaut, and now he was gone.
Instinctively my hand moved to a pocket on my spacesuit that contained a special pouch in which I carried an original mission patch honoring the men who had died aboard Apollo 1, as well as various medals honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, who had been killed on Soyuz 1, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. In that same pouch I carried a silicon disk inscribed with wishes from leaders of seventy-three nations of the world, and a gold pin in the shape of the olive branch of peace that we had chosen as a symbol of our mission for all mankind. I planned to leave these tributes on the moon.
Not too far from Pad 34, I could see the remnants of Pad 19, where Jim Lovell and I had crewed the last mission of the Gemini program, for a series of complex rendezvous maneuvers and the world’s first successful spacewalk. It was exhilarating to end that program on a high note and pave the way for Apollo. I thought about how far we had come since man’s dream of flight was first realized when the Wright Brothers’ Flyer took to the air on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, at Kill Devil Hill, near Kitty Hawk, in 1903—the very year my mother, Marion Moon, was born. Now, only sixty-six years later, we were aiming for a much longer, more daring, and dangerous flight.
For fifteen minutes I stood on that walkway, suspended from the steadily marching countdown, and enjoying a moment of peace and solitude as I contemplated the journey ahead. I recalled just how wonderful my life had been to get me to this point. All the facets and experiences had worked out along the way to put me in the right place at the right time. Now I was leaving Earth to land on another celestial body, and, if all went as planned, I would return to family and friends, to a full life. Our confidence was high—about 60 percent certain that we would succeed in landing on the moon, the part that had never been done before, and 95 percent that we would make it back home alive. We had trained, tested, and