Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [10]
“Okay,” Neil said quietly. “Pretty rocky area …”
“Six hundred, down at nineteen.”
Neil had made up his mind. “I’m going to …” He didn’t have to finish his statement. I knew that Neil was taking over manual control of the Eagle. Good thing, too, since our computer was leading us into a landing field littered with large boulders surrounding a forty-foot-wide crater. Neil made a split-second decision to fly long, to go farther than we had planned to search for a safe landing area.
“Okay, four hundred feet,” I let him know, “down at nine.” Then, for the first time, I added, “Fifty-eight forward.” We were now skimming over the moon’s surface at fifty-eight feet per second, about forty miles an hour.
“No problem,” Neil responded, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that he still wasn’t satisfied with the terrain. I started to be concerned about our fuel. It would be problematic to get this close and run out of “gas.”
“Three hundred,” I called. “Ease her down. Two-seventy”
“Okay, how’s the fuel?” Neil asked without taking his eyes from the surface.
“Eight percent,” I responded.
“Okay, here’s a … looks like a good area here.”
“I got the shadow out there,” I said, referring to the shadow cast by the Eagle as it flew, and thinking it might be some sort of aid to Neil in landing. I might have seen the shadow earlier, but I was staying extremely focused on the instrument panel and calling out the numbers, rather than looking out the window.
“Two hundred fifty. Altitude-velocity lights.” I was letting Neil know that the warning lights indicated that the computer was not getting good radar data. “Two-twenty, thirteen forward. Coming down nicely.”
“Gonna be right over that crater,” Neil said more to himself than to me, Mission Control, and the rest of the listening world.
“Two hundred feet, four and half down,” I responded.
“I’ve got a good spot,” Neil said.
I looked at our fuel gauge. We had about ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, and Neil was still searching for a spot to bring us down. Once we got down to what we called the “bingo” fuel call, we would have to land within twenty seconds or abort. If we were at fifty feet when we hit the bingo mark, and were coming down in a good spot, we could still land. But if we still had seventy to one hundred feet to go, it would be too risky to land; we’d come down too hard. Without wanting to say anything to Neil that might disrupt his focus, I pretty much used my body “English” as best I could in a spacesuit, as if to say, Neil, get this on the ground!
“Sixty seconds,” Charlie warned. Our ascent engine fuel tanks were filled to capacity, but that fuel did us no good, since the descent engine tanks were completely separate. We had sixty seconds worth of fuel left in the descent tanks to either land or abort. I glanced furtively out my window and saw that we were at eye level with the moon’s horizon. Off in the near distance was nothing but blackness.
“Sixty feet, down two and a half.” Neil had slowed our descent to two and a half feet per second. “Two forward,” I said. “That’s good.” We wanted to be moving forward when we landed to make sure that we didn’t back into something we couldn’t see, or some crater shrouded by darkness. “Forty feet … Picking up some dust.”
We were moving over the lunar surface like a helicopter coming in for a landing, but we were now in what we sometimes referred to as the “dead zone.” Any touchdown from higher than ten feet was sure to damage the landing gear. Moreover, if we ran out of fuel at this altitude, we would crash onto the moon before our ascent engine could push us back into space. “Four forward. Drifting to the right a little …”
“Thirty seconds,” Charlie said, the nervousness evident in his voice.
Neil slowed the Eagle even more, searching … searching … we’d come so far, surely there was a safe place where we could come down.
Then I saw