The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster by Richard Russell Lawrence

Author:Richard Russell Lawrence [Lawrence, Richard Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780333663
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

One of the first things Neil did on the surface was take a sample of the lunar soil in case we had to terminate our moon walk early. Now he started working with his scoop and collection box while I set up the metal foil “window shade” of the solar wind collector. The moon was like a giant sponge that absorbed the constant “wind” of charged particles streaming outward from the sun. Scientists back on Earth would examine the collector to learn more about this phenomenon and, through it, the history of the solar system.

As we removed the flag from the equipment compartment at the base of the LM, I suddenly felt stage fright. Since childhood I’d been fascinated by explorers planting flags on strange shores. Now I was about to do the same thing, but on the most exotic shore mankind had ever reached.

Of all the jobs I had to do on the moon, the one I wanted to go the smoothest was the flag raising. Bruce had told us we were being watched by the largest television audience in history, over a billion people. Just beneath the powdery surface, the subsoil was very dense. We succeeded in pushing the flagpole in only a couple of inches. It didn’t look very sturdy. But I did snap off a crisp West Point salute once we got the banner upright.

I noticed that the legs of my spacesuit were smeared with sooty dust, probably from the LM footpad. When we removed our helmets back inside Eagle, there would be no way we would be able to keep from breathing some of that dust. If strange microbes were in this soil, Neil and I would be the first guinea pigs to test their effects.

Bruce told us that President Richard Nixon wanted to speak to us. More stage fright. The president said, “For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”

I looked high above the dome of the LM. Earth hung in the black sky, a disk cut in half by the day-night terminator. It was mostly blue, with swirling white clouds, and I could make out a brown landmass, North Africa and the Middle East. Glancing down at my boots, I realized that the soil Neil and I had stomped through had been here longer than any of those brown continents. Earth was a dynamic planet of tectonic plates, churning oceans, and a changing atmosphere. The moon was dead, a relic of the early solar system.

Time was moving in spasms. We still had many tasks to accomplish. Some seemed quite easy and others dragged on. It took me a long time to erect the passive seismometer (the “moonquake” detector). We were supposed to level it by using a BB-type device centered in a little cup. But the BB just swirled around and around in the light gravity. I spent a long time with that, but it still wouldn’t go level. Then I looked back, and the ball was right where it should be.

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