Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [4]
On the way to the moon, we slept only about five hours each night. Our excitement and adrenaline made sleep elusive; besides, our schedule was full of tasks and preparations. We constantly monitored our progress, and fired small guidance rockets to check and correct our course. We also sent back live television broadcasts to give people on Earth a glimpse of our activities inside the spacecraft, such as making a ham-spread sandwich with the bread floating in zero gravity. We had to coordinate our times with Houston, since there was really no telling day from night in space. The sun was always shining, yet the sky around us was a constant black blanket dotted with millions of stars. One thing was certain: with each passing hour, the Earth was growing smaller and the moon was getting larger when we looked out our windows.
Here and there, we had a few “blank pages” in our flight plan that allowed us the opportunity to reflect. As we moved outward into space, it was an interesting feeling looking back at Earth. Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were leaving behind.
The decade of the 1960s had been a tumultuous one. Camelot had fallen, marred by the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the 1968 assassinations of his brother, Robert Kennedy, during his presidential campaign, and of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. A few days after Dr. King’s death, I called my pastor in Houston to join me in a “walk”—as we participated in a memorial march through the streets of downtown Houston in honor of Dr. King’s life and all he’d fought for in the civil rights movement. There was the weight of global crises during this era as well. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had escalated with the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we were embroiled in an ongoing war in Vietnam, with no clear victory in sight. There arose social unrest and a cry for peace on many fronts, with war protests and civil rights marches, teach-ins at universities, the pacifist message of the Beatles, and the mobilization of the youth movement that would culminate in the Woodstock festival during the summer of 1969.
Our space quests continued through all of this. In the Cold War environment, it had to. The Soviets had jump-started the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, and the satellite’s strange new beeping sound startled the western world as it orbited the Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets sent the first human into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, for one full orbit around the Earth. NASA responded by sending America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, for a fifteen-minute suborbital ride, sixty-two miles up to the edge of space, on May 5. Three weeks after Shepard’s fledgling flight, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress and issued a stunning challenge to the nation to embrace a bold new commitment to land a man on the moon and bring him safely home before the end of the decade. It was May 25, 1961. We didn’t have the know-how, the technology, or the rocketry, but we had the willpower. NASA’s innovative engineers and rocket scientists, including the indomitable Wernher von Braun, along with the aerospace industry, congressional support, and teams of thousands throughout the country, worked together to bring us to this point of being on the verge