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to be as light as possible, so it was far from luxurious inside. Everything in the interior of the LM had been sprayed with a dull navy-gray fire-resistant coating. To further reduce weight, nothing was covered unless absolutely necessary; all the wiring bundles and plumbing were completely exposed, and there weren’t even covers on the walls of circuit breakers and switches. There were no seats in the LM, or sleeping couches. We would sleep in makeshift hammocks hung from the walls, and we would fly the lunar lander while standing up, almost shoulder to shoulder, in our pressurized suits and helmets. We would be tethered to the deck of the LM by elastic cords. Two small upside-down triangular windows, one on each side of the control panels, provided our only sight of the surface. It was going to be an interesting ride.

The time seemed interminable as Mike went through his checklist to make sure every item was carefully set up. If he botched the undocking and damaged the tunnel, Neil and I would have no way to rejoin Mike in the CM. At least not the way we planned. If we found that the tunnel was jammed after attempting to re-dock, then Neil and I would have no other option than to exit the LM for an EVA spacewalk, using our emergency oxygen containers, and follow the handrails outside the LM to the top to manually open the CM’s hatch and climb in. As commander of the Gemini 8 mission, Neil had not performed a space-walk, since no commanders participated in EVA prior to Apollo, but he was well trained to perform one if necessary. My five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk on Gemini 12 had been thrilling, and had set a world record for spacewalking in large part thanks to being the first astronaut to train underwater using scuba gear, and the first to use a system of greatly improved fixed hand and foot restraints I had suggested for the exterior of the Gemini spacecraft. But an emergency EVA was a different story. The timing, owing to the limited supply of oxygen in our emergency packs, would be critical. And if for some reason we could not dock at all with the CM, Neil and I would still need to exit the LM for a spacewalk so Mike could gently maneuver the CM in our direction to pick us up. Although far from ideal, an emergency EVA could be our only means of survival. One way or another, we would need to pass through the narrow tunnel connecting the two spacecraft to return home, or we wouldn’t return at all.

On our thirteenth orbit around the moon, we found ourselves on the far side when Mike informed us that we were ready to commence undocking. Until this point, our docked pair of spacecraft had simply been known as Apollo 11. Now, as we rounded the moon back toward Earth’s side and sealed off the hatches to become two separate entities, the CM would take on the name picked by Mike, the Columbia, and the LM became known to Mission Control and the world as the Eagle, the name selected by Neil and me. Houston began monitoring the data that was now streaming between the computers of the two spacecraft. Finally we heard the words from Mission Control: “You are go for separation, Columbia.”

Mike wasted no time. As though he were backing a truck out of a parking space, he pulled the Columbia away from the Eagle, releasing us with a resulting thump. At 1:47 p.m. (EDT), July 20, the Eagle separated from the Columbia. “Okay, Eagle” Mike said. “You guys take care.”

“See you later,” Neil replied, as casually as if we were back in Houston, heading home from another day of training.

As one last precaution before setting off on his own solo orbits around the moon—the first man in history ever to do so—Mike visually inspected the LM from his perspective in the Columbia, after we had undocked. “I think you’ve got a fine-looking machine there, Eagle, despite the fact that you’re upside down.”

“Somebody’s upside down,” Neil quipped in return.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, now it was our turn to focus on our lengthy checklist as we began flying the LM backwards, continuing in our own orbit around the moon. We flew around the moon once and