He also describes the sunrise he saw during his ninety minutes of orbital flight.
“When I emerged from Earth’s shadow,” he narrates, “the horizon was lit up in an orange glow, a bright strip, which passed into blue, followed by dense darkness.”
By the time his head hits the pillow that night, Gagarin’s mind has stopped racing with a myriad of thoughts and impressions. He’s calm. Quickly, he falls into a sound sleep, not fully understanding that his mission has turned the world itself into a spaceship on its own journey through the heavens.
IV
EARTH RISING
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SPACE BARRIER has been broken and two decades after the Dark Force, a spaceship leaves Earth’s orbit for the first time. It crosses interplanetary space to reach the Moon in a new feat of celestial aviation. After orbiting its dark side, three Apollo 8 astronauts see the blue and white planet rising over a lifeless lunar horizon. They are the first witnesses of the Earthrise.
The science is new but ace jet pilots with a zest for white-knuckle rides into outer space on giant rockets are lining up to become astronauts. The risks are high and the rewards are out of this world. It’s the time of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
As their bubble helmets swivel and fasten into place, the three spacemen of Apollo 11 draw in a final breath of air. They aren’t going to taste earth’s homebrewed oxygen for another eight days.
It has just gone 6 a.m. in the suiting-up room at the Kennedy Space Center and technicians are assisting the astronauts into airtight pressure suits, boots and gloves.
It’s July 16, 1969 at the Cape Kennedy spaceport.
Beyond the year in which they were born, 1930, and a love of flight and America, the three men have little in common. They’re individualists, amiable strangers, whom history has thrust together: Neil Armstrong, the quiet, enigmatic mission Commander, tenacious Buzz Aldrin, Lunar Module pilot and expert in space rendezvous, and Michael Collins, the easy-going, twinkle-eyed Command Module pilot.
By the time they arrive at the launch pad, it’s already warm. A scorching summer day lies ahead. The early morning is eerily quiet on the space coast with only the surf of the nearby Atlantic rolling softly in beneath an awakening sky. The silence is even deeper for the men now encapsulated in their space gear, clutching their portable supply of pure oxygen in ventilators that look like white suitcases they’re taking on board as cabin baggage.
As they step out of the transfer vehicle, there before them stands the greatest machine ever built. It’s gleaming white Saturn 5 launch rocket. A mighty, spear-shaped structure reaching over 360 feet high, equal to a 36 storey building, the rocket is an engineering masterpiece. Gigantic steel arms grip the space age machine to the launch tower of the mobile launch base as in a vice.
Even though rocketry is still in its infancy, from close-up Saturn 5 looks every inch a miracle of precision and power. Its multi-stage rocket stack is incredible, made up of about three million parts. The Lunar excursion module Eagle, embedded inside the stack, has been assembled from a million pieces. Beads of condensation glisten in the glow light of early morning on the skin of Saturn 5’s immense high-energy, liquid propulsion fuel-tanks.
Right at the apex, the slim, aerodynamic Launch Escape Tower, looking like a church steeple, pricks the air expectantly. It has been designed as an emergency escape unit to protect the manned spacecraft if the launch goes wrong.
Observing this monolith of power before them, the towering stack of the escape system and mission modules fitted into each other on top of the rocket, the hearts of the three men begin to beat fast.
Saturn 5’s research, design, manufacturing, testing and preparation, overseen by Dr. Wernher von Braun, has employed the services of over 300 000 scientists, engineers, technicians and craftsmen from more than 20,000 companies.
Despite its scale, standing proudly to attention on the launch pad, each part and sub-system has been constructed with the patience and care of a watchmaker. Everything has been put together with an intricacy that defies belief.
But Saturn 5 isn’t just about size and power. It’s the smartest rocket ever. Its brain and memory, with a deceptively modest name of Instrument Unit, is packed with computers, gyroscopes and guidance and control technology. The IU is able to drive the rocket’s automatic direction at phenomenal speeds, well beyond manual human control.
“This is Apollo Saturn Launch Control; T minus 2 hours, 40 minutes, 40 seconds and counting,” Jack King, NASA’s Public Affairs Officer, announces from his communications console at Launch Control Centre, in his well-modulated voice.
Buzz Aldrin, the last of the astronauts to board the space capsule, looks out over the flat coastline and, in the far distance, a gently curving horizon. He can see a swelling crowd of onlookers camped out on beaches and patches of ground. A few small campfires are still burning. There are also spectators on boats anchored in the Indian and Banana rivers near Cape Kennedy. It seems a peaceful scene. The astronaut enjoys a few minutes of quiet reflection. It’s going to be a clear, bright day on Home Earth.
He reflects on how far the Apollo space programme has progressed from its tragic beginning. Three of his fellow astronauts, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and his friend, Ed White, had burnt to death within 30 seconds when a fire ignited inside the Apollo 1 capsule during a pre-launch test.
Aldrin pats the pocket of his spacesuit, which contains a pouch carrying the mission patch of Apollo 1. He intends to leave it on the Moon in memory of this trio of fallen astronauts.
There are also medals in the pouch honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, killed on Soyuz 1, and Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, as well as a silicon disk with inscriptions of good wishes from leaders of seventy-three countries. There’s a gold pin in the shape of an olive branch, chosen as the Apollo 11 crew’s symbol of interplanetary peace.
While he’s only 60 percent certain they can land on the Moon, he’s 95 per cent certain Apollo 11 can return safely to Earth after the lunar mission.
Sure, there are still many imponderables. Will the guidance system perform impeccably when there’s such a small margin of error built into the whole flight plan? How will their bodies and minds respond to such a lengthy exposure to weightlessness in space? Will the surface of the Moon be so thick with dust that the Eagle won’t be unable to land stably?
Despite these nagging questions, Buzz is upbeat as the Sun rises.
As the countdown continues, the three crewmen, now strapped into their capsule couches, begin to sense the weight of history. They’ve been commissioned to carry out the most difficult human operation ever.
From lowly origins in the Cradle of Humankind, their species, through them, is on the brink of reaching a faraway celestial body, crossing a quarter of a million miles of cosmic ocean to the Moon.
“This is Apollo Saturn Launch Control; T minus 2 hours, 23 minutes, 46 seconds and counting,” Jack King states.
He’s narrating the countdown from Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Centre. But once Saturn 5 breaks free from the umbilical cords of the steel monstrosity of the launch tower, monitoring of Apollo 11 will pass over to Mission Control in Houston.