Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin Read Free Book Online Page A

from the pad onto the ladder, and it didn’t look so bad. Now, with my boot down on the
Eagles
footpad, I made the small leap. But I underestimated the lunar gravity thinking it would be pretty easy to bounce back up. I missed by an inch, scraping the bottom rung of the ladder. Feeling pretty awkward, I now had some moon dust on my suit; my shins were smudged. Later people would wonder if I had fallen down, or knelt on the ground, but I had done neither. Just a minor scrape of moon dust that had been deposited from Neil’s boots on the ladder.
    For a moment, though, I lost a bit of confidence. Maybe it was not quite as easy as it looked to move around in the one-sixth-gravity environment. I decided this would be an excellent opportunity to relieve the nervousness in my bladder. I don’t know that history grants any reward for such actions, but that dubious distinction is my “first” on the moon.
    I then said to myself,
I’ll put a little more oomph in it
, and I jumped up, this time easily reaching the bottom rung. From there I dropped back down to the footpad and turned around to take in the panorama. In every direction I could see detailed characteristics of the gray ash-colored lunar scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters and with every variety and shape of rock. I saw the horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.
    “Beautiful view!” I said.
    “Isn’t that something!” Neil gushed. “Magnificent sight out here.”
    I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen.
Magnificent
, I thought, then said, “Magnificent desolation.” It was a spontaneous utterance, an oxymoron that would take on ever-deeper dimensions of meaning in describing this strange new environment.
    Turning in Neil’s direction, I tried out a few steps and a couple of short jumps to test my maneuverability and recovery, and to figure out the best way to maintain my balance. With the heavy backpack altering my center of mass, I leaned slightly forward in the direction I was moving to keep from falling backwards.
    Then for the first time since stepping on the surface, I looked upward, above the LM. It was not an easy thing to do in a pressurized suit, inflated as stiff as a football, with a gold sun visor jutting out from my helmet. But I managed to direct my view homeward, and there in the black, starless sky I could see our marble-sized planet, no bigger than my thumb.
    I became all the more conscious that here we were, two guys walking on the moon, our every move being watched by more people than had ever before viewed one single event. In a strange way there was an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and everyone back on Earth. Yet we were physically separated and farther away from home than any two human beings had ever been. The irony was paradoxical, even overwhelming, but I dared not dwell on it for long.
    Snapping out of my momentary reverie, I noticed some damage to the LM’s struts. “Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effect on it right here, Neil.” I pointed to the blackened area on the strut.
    “Yes, I noticed that,” Neil agreed. “That seems to be the worst, although there are similar effects all around.” Overall, though, at first glance, it seemed that the
Eagle
had landed with surprisingly few bumps and scrapes.
    The moon dust fascinated me. “Very fine powder, isn’t it?”
    “Isn’t it fine?” Neil responded.
    The lunar dust seemed to go down quite a ways into the surface. Although it was loose close to the surface from the many impacts of asteroid material, it was firm deeper down. Even our spacecraft only pierced the surface ever so slightly, about an inch or two beneath the dust.
    Once I set foot on the lunar surface, my first