Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [19]
EVERY STEP ON the moon was a virginal experience. Exploring this place that had never before been seen by human eyes, upon which no foot had stepped, or hand touched—was awe-inspiring. But we had no time for philosophical musings. Our time on the surface had been designed by Mission Control to be extremely limited—a mere two and a half hours outside the LM, and that included getting out and getting ourselves and our rock samples back inside the lander. There would be time for philosophizing later. Reflecting metaphysically was contrary to our mission. We weren’t trained to smell the roses or to utter life-changing aphorisms. Emoting or spontaneously offering profundities was not part of my psychological makeup anyhow. That’s why for years I have wanted NASA to fly a poet, a singer, or a journalist into space— someone who could capture the emotions of the experience and share them with the world. Neil and I were both military guys, pilots who were accustomed to keeping our feelings reined in. Right now, we couldn’t dally; we had a job to do, a mission to accomplish.
It was time to deploy a few scientific experiments that NASA planned to have us leave on the moon: the laser radar reflector, the passive seismometer to measure moonquakes, and the solar-wind experiment to catch particles from the sun. I was to erect the last two with their greater complexities, so I set about putting up the foil flag in the direction of the sun to catch the ions of helium, neon, and argon in the solar wind.
The seismometer experiment was more of a challenge, since it had to be leveled and aligned just right for the readings to be accurate. After moving it around on the uneven surface, pushing dirt aside where necessary, at last it appeared to be level. Apparently the sensors were working just fine. When I made a mistake of walking in front of it, which I shouldn’t have done, it registered the data back on Earth. I hoped that the guys monitoring it weren’t wearing headphones. It probably would have sounded like King Kong’s footsteps in their ears!
Neil was collecting additional rock samples and putting them in the rock box, so I retrieved the camera from him, and moved on to my next task, the “scuff/cohesion/adhesion” activity. With each step, I purposefully kicked up the lunar dust with my boots. I continued to be intrigued by the dust, as fine as talcum powder. It exhibited a most unusual quality. I must have kicked about a half-dozen sprays or more, and each time the dust flew out in front slightly, landing in a perfect semicircle, every grain spraying out uniformly and equidistantly without any rippling effect. I related my observations to Houston, and thought, This is surreal, how each grain of moondust falls into place in these little fans, almost like rose petals.
Nearby, with the camera in hand, I searched for a relatively flat area of the surface undisturbed by my dust-kicking, so I could take a photograph of a footprint. Finding a good spot, I first took a picture of the pristine surface; then, right in the middle of that flat area, I put my boot down, and then I moved my boot away and took a picture of that. Framed in the photo was the evidence of man on the moon—a single footprint, showing in perfect detail a reverse mold of the treads from the bottom of my moon boot. That is kind of lonely looking, I thought. So I’d better put my boot down, and then move my boot away from the footprint, but only slightly so it’s still in the fame, and take a picture of that. These were my small contributions to our lunar photography, but that single footprint shot became one of the most famous photographs in history, and a symbol of man’s need to explore.
NEIL SHOT MOST of the photos on the moon, having the camera attached to a fitting on his spacesuit much of the time while I was doing a variety of experiments. I didn’t have such a camera holder on my suit, so it just made sense that Neil should handle the photography. He took some fantastic photographs, too, especially when one considers that there was no viewfinder on the