Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [29]
THE MOST OBVIOUS, inevitable question still remains the hardest to answer: What was it like, being on the moon? What did it feel like, what were your thoughts and feelings as you walked on the moon? I’ve grappled with those questions for forty years, and still have not come up with an adequate answer. As military men, we were not expected or inclined to express our thoughts or feelings. In some respects, it was distinctly discouraged by NASA during the course of our missions. Consequently, on the moon, our heartbeats and brainwaves were measurable, and our activities on the moon verifiable. But there was no “emotion recorder” to measure my feelings or capture my emotional response.
Simply stated, I was exhilarated, but also guarded. Neil, Mike, and I knew that our every move and word were on display to the entire world, even though we were the only living creatures within a quarter of a million miles. With the camera on the moon’s surface, Neil and I were visible to millions of people watching their TVs on Earth, and audible to millions more listening in on their radios. But we tried to force that awareness to the back of our minds. We had a job to do. I know I tried my best to focus my attention on the tasks at hand, and to make sure that I wasn’t making mistakes. Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that we were on a worldwide stage without precedent.
Many people have asked me since, “Weren’t you afraid up there, afraid that maybe something would go wrong and you’d never get off the moon?” Sure, my heart was pounding the entire time we were on the surface, but thanks to our preparation, I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. We had rehearsed nearly every possible scenario, and we encountered few surprises on the lunar surface. Similar to the apprehension an athlete feels before the beginning of a big game, or that an actor or musician feels before the curtain goes up on stage, certainly I felt some anxiety some concern about wanting to make our nation proud. But it was not fear. We were extremely confident in the outlook for the success of our mission.
I’ve often wondered why it is, to this day, that people feel compelled to tell me where they were the moment when we first landed on the moon. Of course I pause, and with a twinkle in my eye, I pull out my little black book and thank them, often adding, “Well, I’m trying to keep track of where everyone was!”
Over the last forty years I have had time to refine my insights with added perspective, and I have come to believe that the real value of Apollo 11 was not the experiments we set up or the rocks we brought back. It was in the shared experience in which people throughout the world who witnessed our landing participated. Nothing like that had ever happened before, no other single event had ever galvanized the world’s attention to such a degree; people on every continent shared in our triumph as human beings, and bringing the world together in that way was one of the most tangible, meaningful, and valuable aspects of our accomplishment. In my lifetime I have not seen any other single event evoke such a response.
We won the race to the moon. We demonstrated America’s potential to carry out a unique mission, and we made it before the end of the decade, with a few months to spare. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission was the direct result of our hundreds of hours of training and the indefatigable efforts of so many people working together. Other problems can be solved in similar ways, by taking the long view, and committing ourselves to accomplish the necessary tasks. To me, that is a big part of the shared experience, and one of the greatest lessons of realizing the Apollo dream.
4
AFTER the MOON,
WHAT NEXT?
WHAT NOW?” I SAID ALOUD TO MYSELF AS I CHEWED ON THE tip of the pipe I rarely smoked—the same pipe I had taken with me on my Gemini 12 mission. What’s next? I sat on a chaise lounge