Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [22]
Although the world’s attention focused on Neil and me as we bounded along on the moon, Mike was an indispensable team member. Clearly we could not have accomplished our mission without him. We were looking forward to making our rendezvous with him and Columbia later that same afternoon.
Back in the Eagle, Neil and I took time to eat—snacking on such tasty goodies as cocktail sausages and fruit punch, since we had no hot food on the LM—and to grab some much-needed rest. The LM had no space for cots or beds of any kind, and we had been so busy we really hadn’t decided who was going to sleep where, so I put my dibs on the floor. Neil said he was going to sit on the ascent-engine cover and lean back, and after rigging up the waist tether for a hammock to hold up his legs, he felt he could sleep okay there.
The ascent engine cover was where we put the contingency sample of rocks that Neil picked up and put in a pouch in his pocket when he first climbed out, in case we had to make a hasty exit. When Neil and I got back in the LM, we watched carefully to see if the sample was affected by the oxygen in the cabin. Some “extravagant science” people had warned that lunar dust and rock might burst into flames if they were exposed to oxygen.
Certainly, both Neil and I did not believe that the rocks or dust would combust, and in fact they did not, but the night before the launch, I had met with my uncle Bob Moon, who had come to the Cape for the launch of the flight, and was then going on to Houston to stay with my family during the remainder of the mission. In the course of our conversation, I told Bob that we had attended an unusual briefing that day. “Some harebrained chemist is afraid that lunar rocks and dirt might be combustible once they are introduced to oxygen.”
“Are you worried about that?” Bob asked.
“Naah, not at all.” I told Bob that most NASA scientists scoffed at such nonsense, but we would take no chances, especially in light of the Apollo 1 accident. I explained what we planned to do with the rock samples we gathered from the moon’s surface, which was basically to store them in vacuum-sealed, flameproof boxes. But we would take time to place the contingency sample on the ascent-engine cover while we were still in our pressurized suits. Then, as we turned on the oxygen in the cabin, if smoke started to come out of the rock sample, we could still open the hatch and toss it out. All of this was planned, just in case. If any problems ensued, we could dump the samples immediately.
On the plane back to Houston, the person sitting next to Bob struck up a conversation with him. Bob told him why he was on the trip, and, in the course of the flight, mentioned his conversation with me about the rocks. Turns out that Bob’s seatmate was a reporter— although he never identified himself as such. A few days later, Bob was appalled to see a headline in a newspaper: ALDRIN FEARS LUNAR ROCKS. I didn’t fear lunar rocks; I feared unscrupulous, inaccurate reporters.
WITH NEIL TRYING to sleep leaning back on the ascent engine cover, I curled up on the bottom of the LM, where I noticed some of the moon dust on the floor. It had a gritty charcoal-like texture to it, and a pungent metallic smell, something like gunpowder or the smell in the air after a firecracker has gone off. Neil described it as having a “wet ashes” smell.
In my fatigue, I was still thinking about the dust when I noticed something lying on the floor that really did not belong there. I looked closer, and my heart jolted a bit. There in the dust on the floor on the right side of the cabin, lay a circuit breaker switch that had broken off. I wondered what circuit breaker that was, so I looked up at the numerous rows of breakers on the instrument panel without any guard protectors, and gulped hard. The broken switch had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine that would lift Neil and me off the