From Earth To Moon To Earth
By Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr.
There is something surreal that happens every time you take to the air. Whether it’s a commercial jet, a Cessna, a fighter, or a Saturn V rocket, there is an instant of disbelief, a hyperawareness of the moment when you defy gravity and become airborne. Disbelief is a natural feeling that accompanies flying because defying gravity is a pretty unnatural act for a human. Gravity is one of the fundamental forces that shapes our world and our universe. Escaping gravity is one of mankind’s ancient dreams.

In 1961, soon after Alan Shepard became the first American in space (and Yuri Gagarin became the first Russian), President Kennedy, in his characteristic ringing tones, expressed a vision that Congress and the public took up as their own:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

At the time I was an Air Force fighter pilot working on my doctorate. After tours in Korea and Germany I decided that I wanted to join the new NASA astronaut program. I knew that being a great pilot wasn’t necessarily enough to get me into the program, so I entered the astronautics department at M.I.T.

“Flying” a spacecraft is very different than flying a plane. There is no true up or down and the dynamics of orbital flight make maneuvering to dock, or rendezvous, two spaceships very complex. I focused my research on solving the problems of speed and centrifugal energy which lead to an “orbital paradox” – a situation in which a pilot who speeds up to catch another craft in a higher orbit will end up in an even higher orbit, traveling at a slower speed and watching the second craft fly off into the distance. The solution to this paradox is counterintuitive, and required new orbital mechanics and procedures. Later, after joining the NASA astronaut corps, I spent time translating complex orbital mechanics into relatively simple flight plans for my colleagues – they thanked me (with a mixture of respect and sarcasm) with the nickname “Dr. Rendezvous.”

After two and a half years training and watching space flights from Mission Control, my turn to fly finally came on the last of the Gemini missions. On November 11, 1966 Gemini XII launched from Cape Kennedy. Sitting in the capsule with Jim Lovell, I heard the last seconds of the countdown as if from a great distance through my earphones: “three, two, one, zero. We have ignition…” There was no noise at first, but then a growling rumble began as the spacecraft rose, slowly at first, from the ground. As the acceleration increased, the sky became a deeper blue. As we approached the speed of sound, the Titan booster rocket now sounded like a subway train and the horizon bent like a bow below us.

Twenty-one hours into the mission I began my first space walk. We were 160 miles above Ethiopia when I pushed the hatch open and floated out of the capsule, secured to the ship by a tether containing my oxygen hoses. I felt the immensity around me. We – the spacecraft and me – seemed to be stationary, while the gigantic polychrome sphere turned slowly beneath us. I had no sense of our actual speed – 17,500 miles per hour, or five miles per second. But I could feel the curve of the Earth. It wasn’t the flat, map-like landscape you see from an airplane. Africa’s Great Rift Valley snaked through the dry mountains and disappeared into the horizon to the south. As I studied the brown mass of East Africa I saw that the day-night terminator line stroked southeast to northwest, from the Indian Ocean through the Middle East. I felt a mental geometric tumbler fall into place. Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees on its axis, which explains the sloping line between day and night and the short winter days in the northern latitudes and short summer nights ahead of us to the south. I could actually see Earth’s relationship to the sun. I could also see flashing thunderheads over the Timor Sea and a shower of green meteors disappear into the cloudless desert void over central Australia. After two days in space, Gemini XII – the last mission of the Gemini program – splashed down, safely and successfully, just south of Bermuda.

The Apollo program, however, began tragically when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire in the cockpit during a test. After redesigning the program and the spacecraft, the Apollo program got back on track with a series of unmanned flights. The manned space program got started again with Apollo 7 and progressed mission by mission until Apollo 10 successful circled the moon, setting the stage for a landing.

At 9:32 on the morning of July 16, 1969, Mike Collins, Neil Armstrong and I lifted off the ground on our way to the moon. We spent only two hours in Earth’s orbit before firing our third stage rocket, accelerating towards the moon. Looking out the window as we left Earth’s orbit I could make out the cloud-covered mouth of the Amazon. Checking back out the window as we approached 19,000 miles above the Earth we were finally far enough to make out the complete bright disk.

On our second day outbound, Apollo 11 flew into the shadow of the moon. From here, the moon eclipsed the sun, but was lit from the back by a brilliant halo of refracted sunlight. There was a milky glow of Earthshine highlighting the biggest ridges and craters. After establishing our orbit around the moon, Mike remained in the orbiting Columbia module while Neil and I took the Eagle landing craft down to the surface. We touched down, shut off our engine and I stared out at the rocks and shadows of the moon. It was as stark as I’d ever imagined it. A mile away, the horizon curved into blackness. “Houston,” Neil called, “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

It was strange to be suddenly stationary. Space flight had always meant movement to me, but here we were rock-solid still. I reached across and shook Neil’s hand, hard. Five months and 10 days before the end of the decade, two Americans had landed on the moon.

Seven hours later we depressurized the landing module and Neil opened the hatch and moved carefully down the ladder on the forward landing leg. From the window I watched Neil move his blue lunar overshoe from the metal dish of the footpad to the powdery grey surface. “That’s one small step for… man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Lunar gravity was so springy that coming down the ladder was both pleasant and tricky. I took a practice run at getting up to that high first step, then hopped down beside Neil. For as far as I could see, pebbles, rock fragments, and small craters covered the surface.

One of the experiments we set up on the moon was an angled array of 100 small mirrors to reflect a laser beam from Earth to help measure continental drift. A main reason for coming to the moon was to gain perspective and better understand Earth.

I looked high above the dome of the landing module. 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. A wisp of color on the black velvet of space – a living Earth, floating like a space flower over the dead moon. 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. Looking back from the dust of the moon enabled me, and millions of others around the world, to truly see Earth as a finite oasis of life in the universe, an organism capable of death, an organism that requires our stewardship.

After 123 hours and 58 minutes on the moon, we lifted off to rejoin Mike Collins and headed back home.

Just three years after Neil Armstrong and I landed on the moon, the U.S. Congress set another goal for the nation, one that was perhaps as bold as the one President Kennedy set for us ten years earlier. In October 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act, setting a target of “fishable and swimmable” for all waterways nationwide by 1985. Now you probably realize that unlike the one President Kennedy set, we have not reached this national goal.

Getting pollution out of our waterways is difficult, but like all goals, entirely achievable. We will solve it using the same pragmatic, patient but unrelenting approach that I learned in the U.S. Air Force, at M.I.T. and at NASA, where we achieved one of the biggest aspirations ever conceived by humankind – flying to the moon.

This is Waterkeeper Alliance’s approach to achieving the national clean water goal. Their local-based approach is laudable. Waterkeepers have managed to remove problems and allow natural processes to repair themselves. One of the ways they’ve done this is by using airplanes. Light airplanes, at a couple of thousand feet, allow tremendous views that are not obvious to people looking horizontally – you can see subsurface features, structures and sediment, even swimming mammals and schools of fish. The human eye is superior to any other sensor or equipment for scanning a wide area and detecting problems or areas of interest for future study.

I believe that despite the delay, Waterkeeper’s approach will inevitably get us clean water.

Incidentally, President Kennedy also said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” I would add that achieving the goal of clean water is not only hard, but necessary for our very survival.