Collins, too, while waiting for the touchdown, the moon walk, the show for an estimated billion television viewers, and the take-off, had more time than the others to think about things that might go wrong. If the ascent engine wouldn’t fire, then Armstrong and Aldrin would be marooned with just a day’s supply of oxygen. “How would NASA handle that? Would NASA pull the plug or keep broadcasting their final words to the world? What would I say or do?” he wrote years later in his memoir Liftoff.
The duo made it safely, in a cliff-hanger landing. They also began their two-and a-half-hour extra-vehicular activity (EVA) and stepped from Eagle to the dust of the moon seven hours earlier than planned, because, as Aldrin put it in his book Men from Earth, “Whoever signed off on that plan didn’t know much psychology ... Telling us to try to sleep before the EVA was like telling kids on Christmas morning they had to stay in bed till noon.”
They stepped down, Armstrong said the bit that everybody in the world can quote, and then he said what he really felt: He turned to Aldrin and said: “Isn’t that something?”
HISTORIC
What followed happened according to a script already arranged, with an awkward few minutes of improvisation when former US president Richard Nixon telephoned from the White House: “Neil and Buzz ... this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made.”
The pair planted a flag and left a plaque (“We came in peace ...”) and a medal for the late Yuri Gagarin. They walked no more than 60m from the lander, gathered 20kg of moon rocks, and set up two experiments, one of which failed in the harsh lunar climate and one of which worked for 40 years. After that they prepared for the return journey.
It was then that they discovered something that very few others knew about at the time: One of them, in turning inside the lunar module while wearing the oxygen pack and helmet, had snapped off a little plastic circuit breaker. It was the circuit that would send electrical power to the engine to fire the rockets that would get them off the moon. Both men were by this time suffering from severe fatigue — they had barely slept at all in 36 hours — but, as Aldrin put it afterwards, “this got our attention.” They shoved a felt-tip pen into the slot, and luckily, it fitted. They consulted mission control, began the countdown and took off. This time everything went right: four hours later, they had docked with Apollo.
The return journey had its dangers. They had to hit the Earth’s atmosphere at a very precise angle at 40,000kph. The capsule had to survive friction that would generate several thousand degrees of heat. The parachutes had to open. And the splashdown had to be sufficiently near to the waiting naval craft and its frogmen.
But by 1969, US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts had survived many such landings. They could do it. The real heart-in-mouth moments had been when Eagle skimmed low over the surface of the moon, looking for somewhere it could safely land, and when it did, we all understood that an epoch had begun. A new era was to begin: there would one day be huge satellite cities in space, colonies on the moon, an outpost on Mars, and all before 2001.
A few days later Senator Teddy Kennedy, brother of the late John Kennedy, was trying to explain the mysterious death of a girl off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, Nixon was talking again about the war in Vietnam and Britain abolished the halfpenny. Somehow, we were back to business as usual.
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