Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [16]
After Neil had been on the surface for about twenty minutes, it was time for me to join him. It was my turn to ease out of the hatch and back down the ladder. Neil stood on the surface taking photos of my progress and offered watchful comments much like a rock climber relaying helpful hints from below as I commenced my rappel. I arched my back to clear the bulkhead, and continued to the edge of the porch to position my feet on the ladder. I remembered that the checklist said, “Do not leave the hatch wide open.” For some reason we never completely figured out, the checklist instructed me to partially close the hatch.
My gloved hand on the hatch door, I attempted a touch of humor to ease the tense moment. “Okay, now I want to back up and partially close the hatch,” I said, “making sure not to lock it on my way out.”
Watching me from the surface, Neil cracked up laughing. “A particularly good thought,” he quipped.
We had just discovered what would happen if that door was shut, with a very small amount of oxygen inside. With no handle on the outside to unlatch the hatch after returning from our EVA, it would take only a trace of cabin pressure to make it nearly impossible to open. We certainly did not want to lock ourselves out by allowing the hatch to seal shut due to a variance in the external pressure on the moon.
“That’s our home for the next couple of hours, and we want to take good care of it,” I said. “Okay. I’m on the top step … It’s a very simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.” As I descended the ladder, I began to get my bearings, making sure that I knew how to operate in lunar gravity and that I wouldn’t roll over with my heavy backpack, and fall off the ladder. There was a distance of about three feet between the bottom rung of the ladder and the surface, so I jumped down from the ladder to the footpad.
Our procedure was that at the bottom of the ladder, we would jump back up again just to be sure we could comfortably make that first step when we returned from our moonwalking EVA. From within the Eagle looking outside the window, I had watched Neil when he checked getting back up from the pad onto the ladder, and it didn’t look so bad. Now, with my boot down on the Eagles footpad, I made the small leap. But I underestimated the lunar gravity thinking it would be pretty easy to bounce back up. I missed by an inch, scraping the bottom rung of the ladder. Feeling pretty awkward, I now had some moon dust on my suit; my shins were smudged. Later people would wonder if I had fallen down, or knelt on the ground, but I had done neither. Just a minor scrape of moon dust that had been deposited from Neil’s boots on the ladder.
For a moment, though, I lost a bit of confidence. Maybe it was not quite as easy as it looked to move around in the one-sixth-gravity environment. I decided this would be an excellent opportunity to relieve the nervousness in my bladder. I don’t know that history grants any reward for such actions, but that dubious distinction is my “first” on the moon.
I then said to myself, I’ll put a little more oomph in it, and I jumped up, this time easily reaching the bottom rung. From there I dropped back down to the footpad and turned around to take in the panorama. In every direction I could see detailed characteristics of the gray ash-colored lunar scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters and with every variety and shape of rock. I saw the horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.
“Beautiful view!” I said.
“Isn’t that something!” Neil gushed. “Magnificent sight out here.”
I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues,