Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [11]
“Okay, engine stopped,” I answered.
It was 4:17 p.m. (EDT) on July 20, 1969, and we had less than twenty seconds worth of fuel remaining, but we were on the moon.
Feelings of elation threatened to overwhelm me, but I dared not give in to them. We still had a lot to do before we could breathe easier. I continued rattling off items from our flight-check list. We didn’t want to make any mistakes at this point. “ACA out of detent,” I said, reminding Neil to take the “Attitude Control Assembly,” the joystick with which he had manually landed us on the moon, out of MANUAL and put it back to AUTO for our ascent.
“Out of detent. Auto.” Neil replied matter-of-factly
I continued with our procedures, but just then Charlie Duke’s voice broke in. “We copy you down, Eagle,” he said with obvious relief.
For the first time I paused and glanced out my window. The sun was out, the sky was velvety black, and the surface appeared even more desolate than I had imagined. The gray-ash colored rocks and pockmarked terrain, which now for the first time in its existence hosted human beings, stretched out as far as I could see and then dipped into the horizon. With our engines stopped, the pervasive silence seemed surreal.
At that moment, however, Neil did something that really surprised me. “Houston,” he said calmly. “Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Neil’s statement must have surprised Charlie as well, since he seemed momentarily tongue-tied. “Roger, Twan …” he began, and then corrected himself. “Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
“Thank you,” I offered.
This was no time for celebration, but in the exhilaration of the moment, I reached over and gripped Neil’s hand. “We made it!” I whispered, almost as if I didn’t want to seem as amazed as I was at that moment. It was all starting to sink in, what we had just accomplished. For the rest of my life I would remember those few seconds after we saw the contact button light up when the first probe on one of the Eagle’s legs touched the surface of the moon.
Charlie broke in again. “You’re looking good here.”
“Okay,” Neil said to me. “Let’s get on with it.” Immediately, we were back to business. Then to Mission Control, he added, “Okay, we’re going to be busy for a minute.”
Neil and I went back to work. Although we were now perched on the lunar surface, we didn’t know yet whether we could stay, and we had only a tiny window of opportunity to find out. If something was wrong—if the Eagle was about to tip over, if we had a fuel leak, or if some part of the LM had been damaged upon landing and could impair our liftoff, or if some other dangerous situation existed—now was the time to find out, since we had a discrete time in which blasting back off the moon and catching Mike and the Columbia would be more favorable. Otherwise it would take another two hours for him to get around the moon and back to us. Mike would be passing by above us now, but after about two minutes it would be too late. We would need to ignite the ascent engines within those two minutes to rendezvous with him, or he’d be too far ahead of us to catch up. That’s why Neil’s taking even a few seconds to communicate our status to Houston had surprised me. At this point every second could be crucial.
We ran hastily down through our checklists, preparing as though we were going to lift off within the two-minute window. I had personally included this precaution in our flight plan, just in case of any mishap. Prior to our mission, there had been a lot of discussion and some question about