Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [17]
Turning in Neil’s direction, I tried out a few steps and a couple of short jumps to test my maneuverability and recovery, and to figure out the best way to maintain my balance. With the heavy backpack altering my center of mass, I leaned slightly forward in the direction I was moving to keep from falling backwards.
Then for the first time since stepping on the surface, I looked upward, above the LM. It was not an easy thing to do in a pressurized suit, inflated as stiff as a football, with a gold sun visor jutting out from my helmet. But I managed to direct my view homeward, and there in the black, starless sky I could see our marble-sized planet, no bigger than my thumb.
I became all the more conscious that here we were, two guys walking on the moon, our every move being watched by more people than had ever before viewed one single event. In a strange way there was an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and everyone back on Earth. Yet we were physically separated and farther away from home than any two human beings had ever been. The irony was paradoxical, even overwhelming, but I dared not dwell on it for long.
Snapping out of my momentary reverie, I noticed some damage to the LM’s struts. “Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effect on it right here, Neil.” I pointed to the blackened area on the strut.
“Yes, I noticed that,” Neil agreed. “That seems to be the worst, although there are similar effects all around.” Overall, though, at first glance, it seemed that the Eagle had landed with surprisingly few bumps and scrapes.
The moon dust fascinated me. “Very fine powder, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it fine?” Neil responded.
The lunar dust seemed to go down quite a ways into the surface. Although it was loose close to the surface from the many impacts of asteroid material, it was firm deeper down. Even our spacecraft only pierced the surface ever so slightly, about an inch or two beneath the dust.
Once I set foot on the lunar surface, my first responsibility was to examine and photograph the condition of the Eagles landing gear. So I “borrowed” the Hasselblad camera from Neil and got busy photographing the pad, the thrusters, the slight crater underneath it caused by our landing, and any potentially damaged areas around the ascent stage, as well as the descent. I walked all around the LM, snapping photos as I went, including a couple of Neil. I passed the camera back to Neil, whose responsibility it was to take most of the pictures. We also needed to set up the black-and-white live-feed television camera in a panoramic position out from its stationary location attached to the LM, as far as the camera’s cable would allow. As Neil moved out with the TV camera, I fed the cable from the LM, until he reached an area just beyond a freshly made crater about fifty feet out. Perched atop a tripod, it could now record our activities as we moved around within its field of view.
Back on Earth, when we practiced deploying and extending that camera out from the spacecraft, the cable lay flat, but in lunar gravity it was almost floating above the surface, just waiting for some daydreaming astronaut to trip over it, pull over the camera, and really mess up the mission. Not to mention embarrassing himself in front of the world and for all of history. Those were the things that you just didn’t want to have happen in front of millions of people watching.
In commemoration of this first landing, we unveiled the plaque that was attached to the leg of the LM, and would remain on the lunar surface for eons to come. Depicting the two hemispheres of the Earth and dated July 20, 1969, the plaque stated our heartfelt desire:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT ON THE MOON. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.
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