Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [15]
Finally, seven hours after we had landed on the surface of the moon, we were ready. Neil opened the hatch and I helped guide him as he backed out on his hands and knees onto the small, shelflike “porch” just above the ladder attached to the forward landing leg, which steadied the LM on the surface.
Neil moved slowly down the ladder, making sure he was securely on each step before allowing his foot to move to the next. He took a strap with him, similar to a clothesline, that was fastened to a pulley, so when he got down to the bottom of the ladder I could put the still camera on the pulley and send it down to Neil. We would later use that same conveyor system to load the lunar samples and the boxes of rocks we collected from the surface and planned to take back to Earth with us. While I guided Neil out, and he was backing down, he reached over to the side of the spacecraft and pulled a lever, causing the equipment-bay side of the lander to open up like a desktop. The desktop fell open, revealing all our tools on it, including a television camera that was pointed at the Eagle. I pushed in the circuit breaker, and suddenly Neil was on live TV. “We’re getting a picture on the TV,” the new Capcom, Bruce McCandless, exclaimed. It was a good thing that the signal went to Mission Control first; as Neil was coming down the ladder, the video image was upside down. The experts at Mission Control quickly righted the image, and beamed it to the television networks, which sent it around the world. I had another 16-millimeter color movie camera loaded with film in my window, so I set that at one frame per second, to capture Neil’s first step on the lunar surface and everything that he did, albeit in a herky-jerky old home-movie sort of way. This same camera would shoot the color footage of Neil and me planting the American flag on the moon.
“I’m at the foot of the ladder,” Neil said. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches.” That was an intriguing point, since some scientists had speculated that the lunar surface could house a lot of dust, and that our landing pads might sink deep down into the dirt, possibly even dangerously deep.
“I’m going to step off the LM now,” Neil said, confidently but tentatively. It was 10:56 p.m. (EDT), and the world was watching the black-and-white live broadcast on their TV sets. I watched, too, from the window as Neil, with his right hand firmly grasping the ladder, moved his left blue lunar overshoe from the metal dish of the footpad to take the first step onto the powdery gray surface of the moon. He kept his right foot on the footpad until he could tell how the surface might respond to his weight. He paused briefly, and proclaimed those now famous, well thought-out words: “That’s one small step for … man, one giant leap for mankind.” He later said that he intended to say “one small step for a man …” but the “a” got lost in transmission. It didn’t matter; the world got the message, and it was good.
At first Neil was tethered to the ladder, because no one knew for sure if the surface would be like quicksand, literally sucking a person down into a quagmire of dust. “The surface is fine and powdery,” Neil said. “I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” Neil let go of the ladder and put both feet on the moon. He quickly found that it was solid below the immediate layer of dust, and it was relatively easy to walk around on the surface.
One of Neil’s first actions after he made those initial steps was to grab some samples of rocks and soil and place them in his thigh pocket. These were our contingency samples in case we had to leave in a hurry and had no time to gather other