Team Moon by Catherine Thimmesh

Author:Catherine Thimmesh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The lunar module, after a successful liftoff from the moon, approaches Columbia for the critical rendezvous.

But first, the astronauts had to get off the moon. And get home. And that had everyone—from the pot scrubbers to the grand Pooh-Bahs—everyone worried just a bit. The ascent from the moon would be a seven-minute exercise in who could hold their breath the longest. There was one chance—one—for the engine to fire properly and lift the Eagle into orbit. Either it worked, or it didn’t. If the engine failed midway through the burn, the LM would crash back onto the moon. If the engine failed to start altogether, there was enough oxygen to keep the astronauts alive for just one day. The ascent engine, made by Rocketdyne and Bell Aerosystems, had only four moving parts (simplicity, the thinking went, would carry them to success). And though workers at Rocketdyne were supremely confident, they would probably win the breath-holding contest nonetheless.

And then . . . ten-nine-eight . . . and they were off the moon.

This, despite the fact that, eight years before the launch, the prevailing wisdom was, as one of NASA’s chief engineers, Caldwell Johnson put it, “It just seemed absolutely out of the question to get up there and separate these craft, and one go down and one somehow launch again and meet up with the first one.” But that is exactly what happened. It happened exactly as planned, precisely on schedule. The Eagle and Columbia were able to perform a successful rendezvous, and Apollo 11 was now able to begin the roughly quarter-million-mile journey homeward-bound.

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