Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [5]
We needed this first moon landing to be a success to lift America, and to reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil. We needed this mission to succeed after eight years of national effort to get us here. Yes, we were determined to win the space race, to beat the Soviets to the moon. In the broadest sense, we hoped this mission would lift and unite the world, and stand as a symbol of peace for all mankind. That’s why we included an olive branch in the design of our Apollo 11 mission patch, which we wore on all our space-suits. Initially, the design depicted an American bald eagle (the inspiration for the name of our lunar landing craft) with its talons stretched out, about to land on the crater-marked surface of the moon. When we added the olive branch of peace to be carried in the eagle’s talons, that made it all the more significant to me. In addition, we departed from tradition and chose not to include our names on the patch. We felt the mission had a bigger meaning than that of the individuals involved.
On the third day of our journey, Apollo 11 flew into the shadow of the moon. We were more than five-sixths of the way to our destination. But for now we marveled at the unusual view ahead of us of a shadowed lunar sphere eclipsing the sun, lit from the back with a bright halo of refracted light. The soft glow of reflected light from the Earth helped us see ever more vividly the moon’s protruding ridges and the impressions of craters, almost adding a 3-D sensation to our view.
On the morning of day four, it was time to enter the moon’s gravitational influence. We needed two Lunar Orbit Insertion burns to move us into position before the command module could separate from the lunar module so Neil and I could begin our descent to the surface. For the first burn, we strapped ourselves in to swing around the moon’s far side, the rugged, dark side never seen from Earth, bombarded by meteoric activity And for the first time we would lose all communication signals with Mission Control during the forty-eight minutes it would take for us to traverse the far side. The burn had to be precisely orchestrated at exactly the right time for six minutes to slow us down to just over 3,600 miles per hour—the speed at which we would be “captured” by lunar gravity. But we were entirely on our own for this one. This had to go right. Mike punched the PROCEED button to fire the engine, and the timing was perfect—although Mission Control would not receive confirmation for another forty minutes.
Now that we were in lunar orbit, we had two hours to initiate one more burn to transform our wide elliptical orbit into a tighter, more circular one. We carefully aligned our navigation using star sightings. Through a complex series of star positioning checks and alignment of our CM platform, we were ready for our second burn. If we over-burned for as little as two seconds, we would be on a collision course back toward the far side of the moon. Working this time in full coordination with Mission Control, the tricky procedure came off perfectly as we sailed even closer to the moon.
The next morning at 8:50 a.m. (EDT) on Sunday, July 20, 1969, Neil and I floated up through the access tunnel that linked the CM to the LM, the spacecraft in which Neil and I would descend to the lunar surface. We were no longer in flight suits, but fully suited up in our twenty-one-layered extra-vehicular-activity (EVA) spacesuits that we would wear until returning to the CM. We hooked up the hoses from our suits to the oxygen supply on the LM, donned our helmets, and waited while Mike went through his lengthy preparations for separation. Our hearts pounded in anticipation of the “powered descent” to the lunar surface.
As lunar module pilot, I had previously entered the LM on the second day of our journey to check things out and prepare what would now be Neil’s and my home away from home for approximately twenty-four hours. The LM was the epitome of bare-bones construction. A technological wonder, it had