|
|
|
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin flew on Gemini 12 and Apollo 11. With Neil Armstrong, he made the first human landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.
On Apollo 11: "So it surprised me that during that time, Neil chose to make
the call to Houston Tranquility Base that the Eagle has landed."
As soon as we touched down, I knew we'd done it, but I knew that there were
certain discrete times after the nominal touchdown, if something was wrong, you
don't want to abort right away, you want to wait until this discrete time,
because there are more favorable rendezvous conditions. After about two
minutes, then it's too late really, because if you were to lift off after two
minutes after the normal landing, Mike Collins is going around and around and
he's too far ahead for you to catch up to him in a reasonable time, and he's
going to have to do some other maneuvers so that you can catch up with him. So
those first couple of minutes are very crucial to look around and see if
everything is okay and hope that the Earth is measuring everything of the
status of all your pressure systems, and your tanks, and your electrical
systems, because if you do have to abort, you should do it right away. And I
felt that that was a fairly critical time, so it surprised me that during that
time, Neil chose to make the call to Houston Tranquility Base that the Eagle
has landed. It surprised me a little bit, because we never trained to do that,
because we didn't want to tell them back in the simulators in the training what
we were going to say after we landed, and I expected he would wait until we'd
been there [and] that we could monitor those things. But it's something that is
a surprise, but then you understand—well, that's the way you should do it;
you should call right away, things like that.
On Apollo 11: "Well, the first thing that I wanted to do when I got on the surface was to
hold on and to just sort of bounce around."
Well, the first thing that I wanted to do when I got on the surface was
to hold on and to just sort of bounce around and check the mobility that I had
and then let go and see what the footing was like. All that took was maybe 30
seconds or a minute to feel that I knew how to move around with great
confidence, and that's all the later crews really needed to do. So I was doing
that for my benefit but for their benefit too. And later on in the spacewalk
outside, when I jumped around and pranced around, again I was doing that for
the benefit of the people back on Earth to see, and to measure what the
mobility was like, so that it would give something in addition to our verbal
description of observations when we got back. The things that we did on that
first mission I felt were done to make later missions more successful. So we
would look and see what the condition of the lander was, take pictures of it,
so that later on the people wouldn't have to spend the time doing that. Our
mission really was to put out some simple experiments: the laser reflector, the
passive seismometer, to verify that the leveling devices and the antennas
worked, to do some quick sampling of the surface. Because our lander was
heavier than the later landers, we didn't have the room for the consumables, or
the margin, to be able to stay out to go twice, for example, or to stay out
even longer. Whatever the flight plan, and the engineers decided what our
mission was going to be, and how many hours we could stay out, that was it;
there wasn't any point in saying "Well, hey, let's change that so instead of
staying out two and a half hours, we can stay out four hours." Gee, the guys
did the calculations and they said that's what you could do, so that's what we
stuck with.
Back to Hear the Space Pioneers
Photo: NASA
Explore the Moon |
Lunar Puzzlers |
Last Man on the Moon
Hear the Space Pioneers |
Origins |
Resources
Transcript |
Site Map |
To the Moon Home
Editor's Picks |
Previous Sites |
Join Us/E-mail |
TV/Web Schedule
About NOVA |
Teachers |
Site Map |
Shop |
Jobs |
Search |
To print
PBS Online |
NOVA Online |
WGBH
© | Updated November 2000
|
|
|