Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (38 page)

In eastern Australia the landing occurred at 6:17am local time on the morning of 21 July. Although it would be seven hours before the Moon was high enough to be seen from Parkes, this was anticipated in the flight-plan.
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So when the crew decided to drop their rest period, the Parkes technicians feared the whole thing would be over before the Moon had risen above their part of the world. They would have to give way to Goldstone. But as the preparations aboard the LM dragged on, hope returned to Parkes. By the time Neil finally emerged from the hatch, six hours and 22 minutes after the landing, the Moon was just beginning to rise above New South Wales.
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Yet now the Parkes technicians faced a new problem. Parkes scientist John Sarkissian recalled that the winds were so high the huge dish was forced to operate well outside safety limits.
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The signal from Parkes was sent to Sydney, and there it was converted into a format suitable for domestic television before being distributed to the Australian TV networks. At the same time, it was relayed to a communications satellite over the Pacific and then passed to Houston, where a six-second delay was added in case anything happened to the astronauts. The pictures were then ready to be released to the rest of the world. Parkes, Honeysuckle and Goldstone received television from the Moon simultaneously and Houston briefly distributed the picture from Goldstone and Honeysuckle before deciding for technical reasons to stay with Parkes for the rest of the EVA.
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Before a television audience of 600 million people, a fifth of the human population, Neil slowly climbed down the ladder on the leading leg of the LM.
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The ladder stopped three feet above the ground to prevent it being bent by protruding rocks. In Mission Control the TV picture was projected on to a screen on the front wall, creating a ripple of excitement among Cliff Charlesworth's team of flight controllers.

Mission Control: 'OK. Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.'

Armstrong: 'OK. I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It's...the strut isn't collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up.'

Mission Control: 'Roger. We copy.'

Armstrong: 'Takes a pretty good little jump.'

Jumping down from the last rung, Neil found himself standing in the landing pad. Before he went any further he rehearsed the jump back on to the ladder to be sure it wouldn't be a problem later. He then jumped back down into the landing pad.

Armstrong: 'I'm at the foot of the ladder. The LM foot-pads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. Ground mass is very fine.'

Armstrong: 'I'm going to step off the LM now.'

Still tethered to the cabin by the LEC, Armstrong stepped off the landing pad, placing his left foot on the dust and tentatively shifting his weight. To Buzz it seemed like a 'small eternity' before he heard Neil say anything.
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Armstrong: 'That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.'

In the years after the mission, Neil's apparently tautological historic words have become the subject of much debate. Armstrong later said he intended to say 'one small step for a man' and believed he had done so. Yet, despite extended efforts by some to prove the contrary, the 'a' appears to be missing from the sound recording of Neil's transmission. Nevertheless, for most people his message was clear.
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Armstrong: 'The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.'

Having put both feet on the surface, for the first time Neil let go of the ladder and disconnected himself from the LEC tether. In front of him stretched an arid desert, bathed in bright daylight beneath a dark night sky. The silent wastes appeared to be tan, but their colour dissolved to shades of grey the closer he looked towards areas of shadow. Armstrong thought the ground beside his feet was a charcoal grey, 'the colour of a lead pencil'.
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Close to the spacecraft, light grey dust lay scattered across small rocks that had been thrown aside during the landing. Further away were two features that could be described as low hills, while several hundred feet to the right of the LM lay a boulder field. Without high ground or a hazy atmosphere to obscure his view Neil could see as far as the horizon, which curved away in all directions. For 360 degrees there was nothing but dust, rocks and craters. Only
Eagle
offered any relief from the stark landscape, its golden foil and silver-coloured components reflecting the dazzling light like a gleaming beacon of precious metal. Bathed in sunshine, the LM cast depths of shadow of breathtaking blackness.

Armstrong: 'There seems to be no difficulty in moving around - as we suspected. It's even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It's absolutely no trouble to walk around.'

Armstrong: 'OK. The descent engine did not leave a crater of any size. It has about one-foot clearance on the ground. We're essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.'

The airy black and white TV pictures gave Neil a ghostlike appearance, and at first it was hard to make out what was happening. In the Armstrong household, six-year-old Mark heard his father describe the lunar dust, and asked, 'How come I can't see him?'
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But to the technicians at Parkes, the controllers in Houston and fascinated TV viewers around the world, an astronaut was definitely moving about on the surface. The Moon was now within man's reach as much as next-door's back yard. Joan Aldrin clapped her hands and cried, 'I can't believe this.'
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While the TV pictures might have been a little murky, Neil and Buzz were equipped with a modified Hasselblad 500EL camera, capable of taking pinpoint photographs on 70mm film. Buzz used the LEC to lower the camera down to the surface, and once he had retrieved it Neil secured it to a mount on the remote control unit on his chest.

Armstrong: 'I'll step out and take some of my first pictures here.'

Mission Control: 'Roger. Neil, we're reading you loud and clear. We see you getting some pictures and the contingency sample.'

After taking a series of panoramic pictures while standing at the bottom of the ladder, Armstrong left the shadow of the LM and walked ten feet over to a sunlit area. Here, within the view of the 16mm film camera in Buzz's window, Neil took a tool from a pocket on his left leg and collected an initial sample of dust. He deposited the material into a bag, which he then returned to his pocket. If the EVA ended early, Armstrong still hoped to be able to bring home a small selection of material.

Armstrong: 'This is very interesting. It's a very soft surface, but here and there where I plug with the contingency sample collector, I run into a very hard surface. But it appears to be a very cohesive material of the same sort. I'll try to get a rock in here. Just a couple.'

Armstrong: 'It has a stark beauty all its own. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here. Be advised that a lot of the rock samples out here - the hard rock samples – have what appear to be vesicles [small cavities] in the surface. Also, I am looking at one now that appears to have some sort of phenocrysts [crystals].'

Mission Control: 'Houston. Roger. Out.'

Aldrin: 'OK. Are you ready for me to come out?'

Armstrong: 'Yeah. Just stand by a second. I'll move this [the LEC strap] over the handrail. OK.'

Fifteen minutes after Neil arrived on the surface, Buzz emerged from the hatch, guided and photographed by Armstrong.

Aldrin: 'OK. Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure not to lock it on my way out.'

Armstrong: 'A particularly good thought.'

As Buzz paused on the ladder, television viewers saw a man apparently taking time to reflect. In fact Buzz was relieving himself before jumping down to the landing pad. 'The whole world was watching, but I was the only one who knew what they were really witnessing,' he later remarked.
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Still holding on to the ladder, Aldrin marvelled at the emptiness stretching before him.

Aldrin: 'Beautiful view!'

Armstrong: 'Isn't that something! Magnificent sight out here.'

Aldrin: 'Magnificent desolation.'

'I felt buoyant,' Buzz wrote, 'and was full of goose pimples.'
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He was intrigued by the lunar dust; comparing it to sand on a beach he found it notably different. When kicking grains of sand, some quickly fall down while others scatter a little further, but Buzz discovered that in doing the same thing on the Moon
every
grain travelled the same distance. Both men found that as fine as the grains of dust were they had a tendency to stick together, forming clods of material that crumpled under their boots.
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Together with his suit and backpack, on Earth Buzz weighed a total of 360lb. On the Moon this was cut to 60lb. Taking his first few steps away from the LM, Aldrin found that it was easier to walk if he leant forward a little. With practice, he was able to move around as comfortably as if he were at home. When Buzz tried to run he felt himself to be much lighter, and realised that if he were to stop suddenly he would topple over. Instead he had to wind down slowly, being careful to avoid rocks near the LM which were slippery with dust. Neil tried jumping a few times but found that the PLSS had a tendency to make him tip over backwards, and after nearly falling he decided 'that was enough of that'.
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In the piercing sunshine, Buzz thought that Neil's pressure-suit gleamed 'like no white I had seen before', making Armstrong stand out on the surface almost as brightly as the LM.
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Neil found that the suit was largely comfortable and allowed him to move around freely – with the exception of bending down to pick up things from the surface. This had already been established during practice sessions at home, influencing the design of the soil-sample tools. The suits also prevented the men kneeling, and this fact, together with the difficulty of retrieving things with their hands, led to concerns about dropping things. Objects could be scooped up using tools but this was a time-consuming process. 'The suit was cumbersome and bulky and not really easy to operate,' Neil recalled, 'but on the whole, it performed remarkably well. When you think that the surface temperature was something north of 100 centigrade, in terms of the [air] flow and the cooling, it was really doing an excellent job, and allowed us to really do most of the things we planned to do – although perhaps not as quickly as we would have liked to do them.'
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After familiarising himself with the surface and the suit, Aldrin watched Armstrong remove the cover of the commemorative plaque that was secured between the rungs of the ladder. Since the ladder was attached to the descent stage, the plaque would remain on the Moon.

Armstrong: 'For those who haven't read the plaque, we'll read the plaque that's on the front landing gear of this LM. First there's two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says "Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." It has the crew members' signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.'

Aldrin later said, 'This was one place where I felt signing "Buzz" was too informal'.
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Neil then took the TV camera from the MESA and after changing its lens he carried it to a point some 60 feet away to the right of the LM, where it could cover a wider region of the surface. While looking for a suitable spot, something in a crater caught his eye. This was later thought to be a glassy material produced during the intense heat and shock of a high-velocity impact. 'We were supposedly in a nondescript area,' Aldrin recalled, 'but there was far more to investigate than we could ever hope to cover. We didn't even scratch the surface.'
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The camera's white cable, leading back to the LM, retained a spiral kink that left it sticking up above the surface. Once it became dirty it was hard to see. Neil caught his foot in it and needed help from Buzz to untangle himself.