Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [8]
Nevertheless, we weren’t thinking about aborting; we didn’t want to get this close to landing on the moon and have to turn back; we were intent on fulfilling our mission. On the other hand, the alarm was ominous. If the 1202 alarm meant an overflow of data in the computer, we might not be able to rely on the very computer we needed to land on the moon. Either the computer’s programs were incapable of managing all the landing data coming in to it at once, or perhaps there was a hardware problem caused by all the jostling around since wed left Earth four days ago. Maybe something inside the computer had broken, just as might happen to a home computer. In any case, we had no time to fix it. The potential for disaster was twofold: first, maybe the computer could not give us the accurate information we needed to land; or, second, if in fact we succeeded in landing, the computer’s malfunction could prevent us from blasting off the moon and making our rendezvous with Mike the next day. The demands on the computer then would be even greater.
While we grappled silently with these possibilities, we continued descending toward the moon pushing through 27,000 feet. The large red ABORT STAGE button on the panel loomed large in front of us. If either Neil or I hit the button, the Eagle would instantly blast back up toward Columbia, and America’s attempt to land on the moon would be dubbed a failure.
“Roger,” Charlie’s voice broke through the static into our headsets. “We’ve got you … we’re go on that alarm.” Even from 250,000 miles away, I could hear the stress in Charlie’s voice. Yet for some reason the experts at Mission Control judged the computer problem an “acceptable risk,” whatever that meant. There was no time to discuss the situation, or to remedy it; we could only trust that Mission Control had our best interests at heart and would guide us in the right decisions. Of the hundreds and hundreds of people who had helped get us here, nobody wanted to abort the mission. Yet at the same time we knew that Mission Control would not jeopardize our lives unnecessarily. Two nights before we launched, NASA’s top administrator, Tom Paine, had eaten dinner with Neil, Mike, and me in the crew quarters. “If you have to abort,” he said, “I’ll see that you fly the next moon landing flight. Just don’t get killed.”
Just as I was getting over my concern about the first alarm, another 1202 alarm appeared on the display, another computer overload problem. Nearly seven minutes in, we had descended to 20,000 feet. I felt a shot of adrenaline surge through my system. I’d been a fighter pilot during the Korean War and had shot down two Russian-built MiGs that had been gunning for me. I knew instinctively the sense of danger a pilot experiences when he is in serious trouble and knows he needs to head back to his home base. Neil and I were in serious trouble, and we were a long, long way from home.
At Mission Control in Houston, twenty-six-year-old Steve Bales— about the average age of most of the guys in the Mission Operations Control Room—was the expert in the LM guidance systems. When the alarms started flashing in the Eagle, they showed up on Steve’s computer as well. He immediately realized the problem, but determined that it would not jeopardize our landing. He based his decision on the fact that the computer was receiving an overflow of radar information; it had been programmed to recognize the radar data as being of secondary importance and would ignore it while it did the more important computations necessary for landing—he hoped.
Forty years later, I can now tell you why that computer overloaded, although at the time it never occurred to