Twenty-five hours into the mission, the spaceship has reached the midpoint of its outbound leg. Armstrong, an introspective man by nature, is deep in thought. The Moon to him is like a far-away desert he’s eager to explore, just much further away than deserts of the Western United States.
Armstrong is aware that robot crafts have reached the Moon before the coming of humans. The Soviet Union landed Luna 2 on its surface in 1959 and the US landed Ranger 4 back in 1962.
But now it’s time for humans to walk on its surface. The barrier between humanity and the Moon will thereby be forever broken.
As for Command Module pilot, Mike Collins, he’s content to let Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity guide the spacecraft on its trajectory to the Moon. NASA’s guidance and navigation control systems he knows are based on the theory and laws of celestial mechanics, as laid down by Kepler, Newton and Laplace. The Apollo computers do the minute-by-minute mathematical calculations along the way.
Buzz, too, often finds himself in a contemplative frame of mind during the voyage. He thinks of himself as a space adventurer. The Moon is simply foreign territory to be discovered. Space is an endless frontier to cross, an amazing new world to master. He’s a believer in celestial mechanics and in Providence. After the Moon, would come Mars… and then on to the next planet or moons of the entire solar system.
Having crossed over the invisible frontier between Earth and Moon, the crew seem to prefer to look backwards for as long as they can. The Moon ahead is silently awaiting their arrival.
Looking backwards, Aldrin notices a massive dark cloud over his home town, Houston.
“Houston, Apollo 11,” he asks. “You got a cloud over the Houston area right now?”
“Roger,” replies Charlie Duke at Mission Control. “We just had a really big thunderstorm here about an hour ago.”
What appears to Buzz from a great distance as a speck of cloud in the sky is a weather system enveloping a whole city and drenching it in a downpour.
It is almost the end of their second day in space.
“We do have a happy home,” Mike Collins remarks. “There’s plenty of room for the three of us and I think we’re all learning to find our favorite little corner to sit in. Zero g is very comfortable, but after a while you get to the point where you sort of get tired of rattling around and banging off the ceiling and the floor and the side, so you tend to find a little corner somewhere and put your knees up or something like that to wedge yourself in, and that seems more at home.”
“Hello, Apollo 11, Houston,” Charlie Duke says to the astronauts. “As the Sun sinks slowly in the west, the White Team bids you good night.” The “night” passes peacefully on board.
When morning breaks back in America, Mission Control radioes the Apollo crew.
“Good morning, Houston,” a sleepy Buzz responds. “Apollo 11.”
During their breakfast, the astronauts take pictures of the whole Earth showing Africa, Europe and Arabia.
Then the spacecraft leaves Earth’s sphere of gravitational dominance and passes into the Moon’s domain. Their craft has now been captured by the tug of lunar influence.
“We’ve got the Sun right behind the edge of the Moon now,” Collins narrates. “It’s quite an eerie sight. And the earthshine coming through the window is so bright you can read a book by it!”
“Houston, it’s been a real change for us,” Armstrong adds. “Now we’re able to see stars again and recognize constellations for the first time on the trip. The sky is full of stars, just like the night side of earth.”
As they get closer, the views of the Moon bedazzle them.
They fire up the engine to get into their planned lunar orbit altitude.
After passing over the far side of the Moon, the crew witnesses their first Earthrise. The small blue planet is illuminated in its delicate splendour.
The Apollo 11 spaceship completes its first lunar revolution. The windows of the Command Module face the Moon. Collins thinks to himself that he doesn’t sense any invitation from the celestial body urging them to come down and visit it. To him, it looks truly alien.
“And the Sea of Fertility doesn’t look very fertile to me,” he jokes.
Later, Armstrong and Aldrin open the overhead hatch and float into the Lunar Module. They must pressurise it with a valve in the tunnel hatch. The space vessel will stay pressurised for the descent to the lunar surface the following day.
Collins steers the spaceship into the correct lunar orbit for the start of the Lunar Module’s flight and descent. By now, the vessel has completed two orbits. They’re positioned about fifty-five miles above the surface.
In their final rest period before descending to the Moon, the crew don’t sleep as deeply as in previous “nights” of the space flight. They’re concerned about going down to the surface within a few hours. One scary thought is that there’s only one motor for the ascent stage back from the Moon. If that engine malfunctions, the decent will turn into a one-way trip.
The next “morning” arrives. Back home, it’s July 20th, 1969. Ninety-three hours and 30 minutes have gone by since lift-off. Would the human dream of moonwalking happen on this very day?
Houston calls Apollo 11 early. Ron Evans is on duty as CAPCOM. Members of Gene Kranz’s White Team of flight controllers have started drifting into the control room to relieve the night watch’s Black Team.
After breakfast and a news report from Houston, Buzz enters the Lunar Module to power it up and begin final checks. He’s followed in by Neil.
It’s going to be Eagle’s day.
The lunar lander is a unique, intricately designed space machine. With its spacecraft antenna and spindly legs, it looks like a giant bug. It’s clad in a thermal and micro-meteorite shield made of several layers of mylar, as well as an outer aluminium skin.
Eagle is composed of two stages, descent and ascent. The ascent stage makes up the main bulk and cabin of the craft. It contains a cylinder-shaped crew compartment, a mid-section and an equipment bay. The cabin has been pressurised and there’s a continuous supply of oxygen to the spacesuits and to the cabin itself.
There are two flight stations for the lunar pilots, equipped with control and display panels, arm-rests, body restraints and landing aids. There are two triangular-shaped front windows as well as an overhead docking window. Between the two flight stations is an alignment optical telescope.
The encased descent stage has been designed to double up as the launch pad for the ascent off the Moon.
The Lunar Module has a porch, or external platform, mounted on the forward outrigger just below the hatch. A ladder extends down from the porch. The lunar lander has footpads, fitted with lunar-surface sensing probes to signal when to shut down the descent engine upon contact with the surface.
The Eagle’s pilots stand upright while in flight and it’s not an easy machine to fly, something like a cross between rocket and helicopter.
Armstrong and Aldrin put on their spacesuits, which are lightly pressurized to prevent obstructing their movements. Once on the outside, during EVA, the suits will be fully pressurized.
“Eagle, you read Columbia?” Collins asks.
“Roger. Loud and clear,” Aldrin responds.
“Okay, everything’s going well. Everything’s quiet over on this side.”
“You bet,” Buzz acknowledges.
“You cats take it easy on the lunar surface. If I hear you huffing and puffing, I’m going to start bitching at you.”