The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

They stowed 40 pounds of moon rocks, left behind their life support back packs and overshoes, and ate and slept on the surface. Aldrin:

Finally it was time to eat and sleep. After we had snacked on cocktail sausages and fruit punch, I stretched out on the deck beneath the instrument panel, and Neil propped himself across the ascent engine cover. With the windows shaded, the LM grew cold. Neil was having trouble getting to sleep because of the glare of Earth reflected through our telescope on his face. We had moon dust smeared on our suit legs and on the deck. It was like gritty charcoal and smelled like gunpowder from the fireworks I’d launched so many years before on the New Jersey shore.

Seven hours later we prepared for ascent. There was an almost constantly active three-way loop of radio traffic connecting Columbia, Eagle, and Mission Control. We discovered during a long checklist recitation that the ascent engine’s arming circuit breaker was broken off on the panel. The little plastic pin simply wasn’t there. This circuit would send electrical power to the engine that would lift us off the moon. Finally I realized my backpack must have struck it when I’d been getting ready for my EVA.

Neil and I looked at each other. Our fatigue had reached the point where our thoughts had become plodding. But this got our attention. We looked around for something to punch in this circuit breaker. Luckily, a felt-tipped pen fitted into the slot.

At 123 hours and 58 minutes GET, Houston told us, “You’re cleared for takeoff.”

“Roger,” I answered. “Understand we’re number one on the runway.”

I watched the DSKY numbers and chanted the countdown: “Four, three, two, one… proceed.” Our liftoff was powerful. Nothing we’d done in the simulators had prepared us for this amazing swoop upward in the weak lunar gravity. Within seconds we had pitched forward a sharp 45 degrees and were soaring above the crater fields.

“Very smooth,” I called, “very quiet ride.” It wasn’t at all like flying through Earth’s atmosphere. Climbing fast, we finally spotted the landmark craters we’d missed during the descent. Two minutes into the ascent we were batting along at half a mile per second.

Columbia was above and behind us. Our radar and the computers on the two spacecraft searched for each other and then locked on and communicated in a soundless digital exchange.

Four hours after Neil and I lifted off from the Sea of Tranquillity, we heard the capture latches clang shut above our heads. Mike had successfully docked with Eagle. I loosened the elastic cords and reached around to throw more switches. Soon Mike would unseal the tunnel so that Neil and I could pass the moon rocks through and then join Mike in Columbia for the long ride back.

I hadn’t slept in almost 40 hours and there was a thickness to my voice and movements. Still I could feel a calmness rising inside me. A thruster fired on Columbia, sending a shiver through the two spacecraft.

Seven hours later we were in our last lunar orbit, above the far side, just past the terminator into dawn. We had cast Eagle’s ascent stage loose into an orbit around the moon, where it would remain for hundreds of years. Maybe, I thought, astronauts will visit our flyweight locomotive sometime in the future. Mike rode the left couch for the trans-Earth injection burn. Our SPS engine simply had to work, or we’d be stranded. The burn would consume five tons of propellant in two and a half minutes, increasing our speed by 2,000 miles per hour, enough to break the bonds of the moon’s gravity.

We waited, all three of us watching the DSKY. “Three, two, one,” Mike said, almost whispering.

Ignition was right on the mark. I sank slowly into my couch. NASA’s bold gamble with Lunar Orbit Rendezvous had paid off. Twenty minutes after the burn we rounded the moon’s right-hand limb for the final time.

“Hello. Apollo 11, Houston,” Charlie Duke called from Earth. “How did it go?”

Neil was smiling. “Tell them to open up the LRL doors, Charlie,” he said, referring to our quarantine in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

“Roger,” Charlie answered. “We got you coming home.”

The moon’s horizon tilted past my window. Earth hung in the dark universe, warm and welcoming.

Apollo 12 is struck by lightning