Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (57 page)

Yet Collins, at least, was able to sleep. Did he dream of Ags and Pings, of REFSMMAT, IMU and EMU? Did he descend to the first disorder of the dream with DSKY in hand and DAP and POO? To bore with one’s brain into the hard-stuffed methods and modes of technology did one not also go back to those chaos-holds,
those ledges of meaning that meaningless words provided in infancy as a set of arbitrary stations of sound which were somehow better and less chaotic than no sound? Acronyms! Collins slept.

And in Mission Control down on earth in the black reaches of the night, the Black team would normally have been clowning around. They were the Blacks, they were the lonely, they were the youngest engineers with the lowest seniority, who invariably worked the consoles while the astronauts were asleep. Theirs was the job with the least to do. Whether called Black because they worked through the night, or Black out of some brimming class humor at NASA, their job had the pleasure of frequent breaks for coffee and wild technological discussions about how much it would cost to build an actual and real superhighway U.S. Moon 1—how many thousands or millions of Apollo-Saturns to send up to do it brute and direct, as opposed to how many if factories were built over lunar ground. On quiet nights they could put the question into an unoccupied computer and get back answers which opened other games. The computer on such nights was their farm animal washed and ready for picnic.

But the coffee was chilly coffee tonight, as cold and dank with anxiety as the plastic of their consoles. There were dungeons in the liberty of this moon-conquered night. The vault of silence in the Mission Operations Control Room (display for Eagle at rest; display for Columbia slowly crossing the screen) was there to offer a rebuke to any levity. In fact, the Black team was not even on. They would do work for the rendezvous later, on assignment out of turn—it was the plum which had been given them, even if the astronauts were to do most of the work.

Two hours of sleep. One hour to sleep. And no real sleep for Armstrong and Aldrin. They are heroes, they are first among their peers, the knights of the silent majority, but they are suffering
from insomnia. They have finally emerged onto the landscape of the modern novel. They emerge incidentally as promotion men as well.

At 12:53 on Monday morning, July 21, not twenty-two hours after they landed, with rendezvous radar put most carefully in Off position to avoid new program alarms, with hearts beating, fair to assume, and with minds wondering for the last occasion whether fire might not lose a vital property or two in the immediate domain of the moon—time, after all, was known to alter at the speed of light; with Pings loaded with every bit of data for Program 12, the Powered Ascent Guidance; with the simple ascent motor incapable of being run at anything other than full throttle they now put the master arm on, gave a last count to Mission Control, “Forward 8, 7, 6, 5, Abort Stage! Engine Arm Ascent! Proceed!” and fired off from the moon.

The detonator cartridges exploded on time to separate the thorax of the Lem from the sac; the ascent stage rose, the descent stage remained. Just before that separation, all signal and electrical power between the two was sundered. Then the nuts and bolts joining the stages were also exploded. In the same fraction of a second, an explosive guillotine severed the connecting spine of wires, cables, and water lines between the two stages. The ascent motor flamed up to 90 percent of full thrust in three-tenths of a second, and with hardly more than a big jerk and a blast! and a Proceed! they rose off the moon in a wobbling climb, oscillating from side to side as their fuel sloshed in the tanks.

Later Armstrong would say, “a beautiful fleeting final view of Tranquility Base as we lifted up and away from it.” Did they have the recognition at this instant that on another day there might be lunar cities under domes, and moondromes with their names? On climbed the ascent, up half a mile in the first minute, its direction no longer vertical, but tipping out, then pitching over toward the eventual curve of its orbit. Behind them was the memory of the blast-off, the Kapton and all the other loose-wrapped plastic insulations of the descent stage being blown in all directions, far out in the bulletlike trajectories of the moon, all that plastic, silver and gold debris, and behind them—first refuse of the first moon city—was already the handle of the rock contingency sample, the TV camera and its tripod, the staff for the solar wind experiment, the passive seismometer, the closeup camera, the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector and its packing materials and brackets—there had been over a hundred brackets and they were now strewn on the moon ground—and there were two backpacks of the PLSS also left behind and overshoes, and tramped ground for a hundred feet around the descent stage, ten thousand prints of the marks of their boots on top of other marks of their boots, messy as a bivouac where troops have been milling in the rain. If men never came back, those marks might remain for millions of years. And the motionless waving of the flag.

But that was behind them, and their little wobbling ascent stage climbed up through its oscillations and out into the sea of space.

Rising right out of their dread; they were leaving the loneliest death in the world. If that ascent engine had not worked—there were no suicide capsules on the Eagle. They would not have needed them. When the frustration of being trapped on the moon proved too great, they would only have had to open the hatch, and remove their helmets. That could not have felt much worse than being a drowning man. But now they slung themselves down that track, pouches of fuel tanks carried like chaws of tobacco, one for each cheek of the ascent stage. On they came up into orbit.

In seven minutes and eighteen seconds after fires had been lit, they had consumed their fuel, turned off their ascent engine, and were coasting over a mile a second in an eccentric orbit around the moon, something like forty-seven miles from the surface at farthest point and nine and a half miles up at the nearest or perilune, at which point they had just arrived.

During the ascent, they had monitored the heart rates. Armstrong had been hardly above normal, pegged at 90, a low figure for him. Aldrin had been up at 120. It was the only time in the flight that his heartbeat had been higher than Armstrong’s. Is it possible that Aldrin was feeling a new sense of dread at the oncoming rendezvous? It would be a curious state to find oneself in after the worst technological moment has just been passed in a flying test.

To hold a gyroscope in the hand is to obtain an inkling of orbit. There is a sense of energy revolving in a powerful pattern, of rapid movement in some alliance with rest, for a gyroscope offers to the palm a sensation of high speed and high stability, as if all its activity is devoted to being precisely where it is.

So, now at high speed and yet in no more than a fast-moving corollary of the state of rest, the Lem is in orbit and the Command Module is in orbit, each traveling in elliptical rings around the moon, Columbia in the outer ring, which is close to a circle of sixty nautical miles in diameter, while Eagle is in the ellipse we have described of 46.7 by 9.4 nautical miles. It has taken a burn of 438 seconds in its ascent motor to reach this stage and it has consumed two thousand pounds of fuel and three thousand pounds of oxidizer in four tanks whose volume was each thirty-six cubic feet. Now it would go the rest of the way to joining the Command Module on small increments of velocity or small braking burns offered it by its four quadrants of thrusters and they are fed by two tanks of fuel and two tanks of oxidizer whose volume is no more than two cubic feet each, or taken all together, the four thruster tanks could fit into a cube with two-foot sides. The amount of energy capable of being released under fire by that much hydrogen
and oxygen will be sufficient to close the gap which remains between Eagle and Columbia.

In a sense, the critical part of rendezvous has been finished already. The Eagle was only obliged to get into some kind of orbit. If its ascent motor had failed any time in the last sixty seconds of ascent, its thrusters would have been able to drive it the rest of the way into that first planned ellipse, and then the Command Module could have descended for rescue. Indeed, once Eagle succeeded in getting into any kind of orbit at all, the Command Module would be able to come down for it, but all orbits below six miles of altitude were dangerous indeed, for then Eagle would have no ability to clear mountains. Rendezvous maneuvers might have had to be speeded up. One could even conceive of a cinematic rescue with Columbia accelerating down toward the moon, slowing just long enough only for Armstrong and Aldrin to open the hatch, crawl outside, get a handhold on a quadrant of Columbia’s thrusters and Sput! Sput! Columbia would be on her way up again as the Lem coasted into a lunar peak.

That was hardly the operation today. It proceeded smoothly. A little while after Eagle coasted up to her apolune of 46.7 miles above the moon, she fired her thrusters for a little more speed and was inserted into Concentric Sequence Initiation, a rough circle forty-five miles in diameter which was situated within the rough sixty-mile circle of the Command Module. Almost an hour later, halfway around from that position, came another burn, called the Constant Differential Height, whose purpose was to make certain that if both ships were traveling in concentric ellipses, the distances between them did not vary. (All this, well planned in advance, was readjusted in flight by measurements taken from the Inertial Measurement Unit, then calculated by the guidance computer, as well as by checks obtained from rendezvous radar.)

About thirty-eight minutes later, Eagle was ready to begin Terminal Phase Initiation. That was at a point where Columbia was thirty miles in front of her and seventeen miles overhead. Driving forward at a small increase of velocity, which closed distance at
about a nautical mile a minute, on an angle 27 degrees above her local horizontal, Eagle swallowed the last gap in something less than forty-five minutes. The two ships came within view of each other in less than four hours and less than two revolutions from the time lift-off had occurred. Collins reported a great feeling of relief at seeing them come up toward him. “I really got excited then because for the first time, it was clear they had done it. They had landed on the moon and got off again.” They had in fact come up all the way on their own power, with Columbia—power available not only in her thrusters but in her main propulsion motor—maintaining all the tools and options in reserve. It was more elegant to solve the problem with the lesser means. Besides, it left Columbia in possession of more fuel for the trip back.

Now came the last maneuvers. Little braking burns to put their velocity equal to one another were done in an operation called stationkeeping: now they could wheel through lunar space close enough to take photographs of one another. Let us listen to the transcript as they approach. It is very calm. What has happened to Aldrin’s anxiety of a few hours ago?