Around him, it’s like a cosmic desert.
For a few moments, it’s just Armstrong out there, caught up in a state of wonder, sizing up the pockmarked environment he’s in, displaying its cosmic battle scars from countless bombardments.
Bootprints on a new world…
Around the astronaut, the landing area is fairly flat. In the background, there are hilly contours and craggy crater rims that jut out. As he surveys further afield, he’s surprised, once again, to see how close the horizon is, with a curvature much more pronounced than back home.
In Mission Control, more wild celebrations and applause break out again. Cigars are passed around. TV and radio audiences around the world are moved, awestruck. Euphoria has erupted on Earth. For one bright moment, the planet is rising again above all its problems, divisions and challenges.
Surrounding Armstrong is a brittle, rocky wilderness covered in powdery dust, some fine like flour, other parts more like coarser grains of sand. In the distance are imposing craters. Some mountains soar thousands of feet into the lunar void.
It’s a landscape with innumerable scars of time. Under the black arch of space, it’s virtually soundless on its lifeless surface. There’s only the periodic whoosh of pure oxygen feeding into his spacesuit and the occasional crackle of distant radio waves.
Although he’s alone, Armstrong isn’t lonely. The mother ship Columbia is circling only sixty miles above him. He has good radio links with Buzz and to Ground Control. And, besides, this is a mission with a friendly purpose. He’s no invader, but an emissary of all mankind.
After checking out the scene around him, and testing the nature of the ground beneath his boots, he grabs the side of the lunar lander to do some knee bends, staying close to Eagle, still strapped to it with a pulley line, like a child holding the hand of a parent in an unknown place.
Then, gaining confidence, he unfastens the line from the carabiner loop to detach himself from Eagle. The umbilical cord has been cut, freeing the spaceman to move on his own.
As he takes his first exploratory steps, he notices his boots don’t kick up any clouds of dust because the dislodged dust particles just don’t stick together. Rather, they seem to vaporise before his eyes in the frictionless space.
While it’s awkward to move in the bulky, stiff pressure suit, there’s a lightness which he eagerly embraces. The pressurised spacesuit is comfortable and well-regulated, its cool airflow pleasant.
Outside, the temperature on the surface around him is well above 100 degrees centigrade, three times as hot as a sweltering mid-summer’s day. If his spacesuit tears open, his blood will boil, and the extreme difference in pressure between that of his body and the void might cause his insides to implode.
“Absolutely no trouble to walk around,” he radioes.
The astronaut takes a panoramic shot. Then he collects a soil sample and four rocks.
“It’s a very soft surface,” Armstrong narrates, “but here and there where I plug with the contingency sample collector, I run into a very hard surface. It has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.”
The lunar astronaut tosses a stone away which he isn’t planning to include in his contingency sample.
“Didn’t know you could throw so far!” Aldrin remarks, watching from Eagle.
Armstrong chuckles at the first joke on the Moon.
“Are you ready for me to come out?” Aldrin asks.
“Yeah. Just standby a second. I’ll move this LEC over the handrail. All set.”
Armstrong stands to one side of the ladder to take pictures of Buzz coming out of the spacecraft.
Buzz jumps down to the footpad.
“Beautiful view!” he calls out.
“Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here,” the mission commander answers.
“Magnificent desolation,” Aldrin declares.
Holding on to the ladder with both hands, Buzz hops back onto the surface.
The astronauts’ next task is to unveil a plaque, fixed to the descent stage that would be left behind. It shows Earth’s two hemispheres and reads: “Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
They sense there’s something naked about the landscape, a world of pure matter, space without air, evocative of a curious timelessness, ghostly, like a place with no memory of its own history, its ages of boiling lava, its narrative of never-ending collisions, its ceaseless orbits around Earth.
The men complete their EVA tasks and then speak to the President via telephone linked to Mission Control comms.
Buzz is enjoying their lunar adventure. After the conversation with the President, he decides to test for himself the reaction of the Moon’s soil to being kicked. He observes that each time a spray of dust fans out, forming petal-like patterns before dissolving, the particles briefly knit together in a formation. The astronaut is like a boy playing in the sand on a beach.
Armstrong, meanwhile, is exploring a rim of craters nearby. He’s filling a box with rock and soil samples in an intensive period of excavation.
Earth has now risen to a position directly above them.
“Buzz, this is Houston. You’ve got about ten minutes left now prior to commencing your EVA termination activities. Over.”
“Roger. I understand.”
Armstrong goes over to a big crater behind the LM, a few hundred feet away, to take pictures of the formation. He completes his rock sample collection. He’s like a five-year-old boy in a candy store.
“Head on up the ladder, Buzz.”
Buzz jumps up onto the ladder and begins to ascend, moving his hands up the rails to pull himself up. He pushes the hatch inwards.
Neil is next up the ladder. He’s covered in silt-like particles of moon dust. He’s careful not to slip on any of the rungs. At the top of the ladder, he unhooks the waist tether from the porch rail to take it on board in case it’ll be needed during the ascent.
Once Armstrong’s back inside, Aldrin closes the hatch.
There’s lots of equipment and lunar materials lying around in the cabin, including two boxes of rocks and soil they’ve salvaged. It smells like wet ash or burnt gunpowder inside. What stories about the distant past, buried in their geology, will lunar scientists read into these rarest pieces of matter?
The men remove their helmets, tired but elated. Armstrong has some nasal congestion in reaction to the lunar dust. They take a few pictures and then have a bite to eat. After that, they begin to depressurise the cabin.
“That’s a real great day, guys,” Deke Slayton comments in Mission Control. “I really enjoyed it.”
The two lunar pilots then jettison some of the equipment out of the hatch to lighten the Lunar Module’s weight.
“It’s been a long day,” Aldrin adds.
“Yes, indeed. Get some rest there. Goodnight again. Tranquility Base, this is Houston. Over.”
Armstrong and Aldrin now prepare to sleep. They’ve decided to sleep with their helmets and gloves on to make it quieter and to avoid breathing in all the lunar soot, preferring the filtered oxygen pumping into their suits.
Buzz is sleeping on the floor, using his spacesuit as a sleeping bag, while Neil tries to make himself comfortable on the engine cover. He rigs up a loop with a waist tether to suspend his legs since there isn’t enough space to stretch them out.
It becomes very cold in the cabin. In addition, there’s a bright Earthrise pouring in. Although they’ve pulled down blinds, the bright Earth shines in through the Alignment Optical Telescope space. The reflection of the Sun off the Moon’s surface adds to the illumination. Warning lights and display switches in the cockpit are an added distraction. The temperature plummets and it is, at best, a fitful “night” for the men.