Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [2]
Finally, Günter was ready for me. I ascended the remaining twenty feet or so, and Günter helped me into the hatch, strapping me into my seat in the center couch, between Neil on my left, strategically situated near the abort handle, and Mike on my right. As we settled in, there was nothing left to do but wait while the countdown continued.
AT 9:32 A.M., as the five large Saturn V engines ignited, we heard the final sequence of the countdown in our headsets: “T minus ten, nine, eight …” I quickly glanced at Neil and Mike, and we exchanged nervous but confident grins. Outside, at the base of the rocket, gases rushed out of each of the engine nozzles as we built up thrust. “T minus five, four, three …” With the engines running at full power, the gantry latches released and for a couple of seconds that seemed like forever, the rocket was standing unsupported, free as an eagle ready to soar.
“Two, one … zero …” The normally calm voice of Public Affairs Officer Jack King cracked with emotion from the Firing Room. “All engines running!” Even inside the command module with our helmets on, we could hear the mighty rumble. What looked like hundreds of tiny amber lights blinked on the instrument panels in front of us as the controlled but excited voice cried, “Liftoff! We have a liftoff!”
The rumbling sound grew louder and the huge rocket felt as though it swayed slightly as it smoothly inched off the pad. In fact it was so smooth that at first we couldn’t detect the exact moment we left the ground. More large shards of frost fell from the sleek metal sides as blue sky seemed to move past the hatch window directly above me. Below us an inferno of flames, steam, and gases billowed all around the launch pad. With 7.6 million pounds of thrust pushing all 3,240 tons of the rocket and spacecraft, we cleared the tower and rapidly accelerated, the g forces dramatically building up and pressing against us. We were on our way to the moon!
Twelve seconds into our flight, shortly after we cleared the tower and were streaking from a straight vertical shot to a gradually changing angle of inclination into the blue sky above, the hundreds of technicians hovering over their displays and consoles in the Firing Room at Cape Canaveral could breathe a little easier. At that point their main job was done and control of our mission moved to the nerve center at Mission Control in Houston, where hundreds of other technicians and engineers manned their consoles and displays, monitoring every aspect of our flight. In the main control room, whimsically known to NASA’s engineers as the “bat room” because of the darkened area in the front where large video screens tracking the flight covered the walls, dozens of people worked at separate stations, with each console controller monitoring one specific aspect of the spacecraft and reporting to the Flight Director if everything was “go,” or if anything was wrong. Although the room was filled with experts handling vital information, only one person communicated directly with us in the Apollo 11 spacecraft: the Spacecraft Communicator, or “Capcom,” a fellow astronaut. All the information that we needed to know from the many monitors in Mission Control, and feedback on what we were experiencing in space, flowed through the Capcom.
Three minutes into the flight, the g forces had increased to the highest point, as we felt nearly four times heavier than our normal body weight. We were forty-five miles high, at least six times higher than most commercial jets can fly, traveling at a speed of nearly 6,500 miles per hour. Neil, Mike, and I had all been in space on previous missions, but it was nonetheless thrilling to look out our window and see the curved Atlantic horizon rapidly receding from view as we looked back at Earth. Within four minutes we were approaching the sixty-two-mile mark,