Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Final descent was so difficult ...the computer had a problem but we’d gone that far and we wanted to land
particular rocket, the Saturn 5, a 3,000 tonne machine with an energy enough to lift it off the pad.
The second and third stages are just as smooth as the first stage is shaky.
It was a striking event, leaving the planet and realising that there was no logical reason that you were ever going to fall back to that planet at some point.
It was a slowly changing panorama as you went from just the horizon to a large arc, to a larger and larger arc, and finally to a whole sphere.
The Earth is quite beautiful from space. It looks quite small and quite remote, but it’s very blue and covered in white lace, the clouds, and the continents are very clearly seen.
There were a thousand things to worry about in the final descent to the moon. It was hardest for the systems, it was hardest for the crew. It was the thing I most worried about, because it was so difficult. The unknowns were rampant.
And in the middle of the descent our computer complained at us that it was having a problem.
We had gone that far and we wanted to land. We were getting good velocities and good altitudes.
The navigation was working fin e. There were no anomalies other than the fact
four miles downrange from the planned site.
Toward the end of his historic moonwalk, Armstrong’s heart rate shot up to an alarming 160 beats per minute. Not wanting to alert the world to the problem, mission control made a disguised request for Neil to slow down by checking equipment.
Aldrin and Armstrong might have been that the computer was saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem’. My inclination was to keep going ahead as long as everything looked like it was fine. So we continued on toward the landing site, but then the computer showed us where it intended to land and it was a very bad location. It was on the side of a large crater, about 150 metres in diameter with very steep stranded on the moon. They discovered that one of the switches controlling the engine had broken off. Eventually, Aldrin armed the switch with a felt-tipped pen.
The astronauts relied on Earth’s atmosphere to slow them down on the trip home. But the angle at which they entered was critical with a margin of less than three degrees. slopes covered with very large boulders, not a good place to land at all.
So I took over manually and flew it like a helicopter, out to the west.
We started losing visibility when we got a little below 100ft. We starting picking up dust, and not just normal dust clouds like we would experience on Earth. This sheet of moving dust obscured the surface completely.
This very fast, almost horizontally moving sheet of dust did not billow up at all. It just moved out and away in a straight radial sheet. The visibility continued to decrease as we got lower.
I was able to get it down there safely before we ran out of fuel – we had about 20 seconds of fuel left.
After landing we took a handshake – “Congratulations, we made it this far”. But there was a lot of work to do at that point, we couldn’t luxuriate on those feelings.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
8 Days: To The Moon And Back is on tonight, BBC2 at 9pm.