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So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.” I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: “I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.

Neil watched respectfully, but made no comment to me at the time.

Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind—be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God. It was my hope that people would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning—a challenge, and the human need to explore whatever is above us, below us, or out there.

SHORTLY AFTER OUR touchdown, both Neil and I tried to describe for the people on Earth what we were seeing on the moon. Looking out the window, I said, “We’ll get to the details of what’s around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape, angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock you could find. The color is … well, it varies pretty much depending on how you’re looking relative to the zero-phase point (the point directly opposite the sun). There doesn’t appear to be too much of a general color at all. However, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders, of which there are quite a few in the near area—it looks as though they’re going to have some interesting colors to them.”

Neil wanted Mission Control to know why we had flown over our intended landing area. “Hey, Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase,” he said. “The auto targeting was taking us right into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around it, and it required us going in and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.”

Charlie Duke summed up what we were all feeling. “It was beautiful from here, Tranquillity.”

Neil could hardly wait to describe to Mission Control what he saw out his window. “The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain,” he reported, “with a fairly large number of craters of the five-to fifty-foot variety, and some ridges which are small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little one-and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.”

Mike Collins chimed in from high above the moon in the Columbia, “Sounds like it looks a lot better than it did yesterday … It looked rough as a corn cob then.”

“It really was rough, Mike,” answered Neil. “Over the targeted landing area, it was extremely rough, cratered, and large numbers of rocks that were probably larger than five or ten feet in size.”

“When in doubt, land long,” Mike replied.

Charlie Duke wanted