Just before Ground Elapsed Time of 121 hours, CAPCOM on duty, Ron Evans, radioes a wakeup call to Mike Collins. Then Jim Lovell sends a message.
“Eagle and Columbia, this is the backup crew,” he says. “Our congratulations for yesterday’s performance, and our prayers are with you for the rendezvous. Over.”
“Thank you, Jim,” Armstrong replies.
“Thank you, Jim,” Aldrin echoes.
After twenty-one and a half hours on the Moon, Eagle launches for the ascent.
Behind them, they’ve left their boot prints, as well as memorabilia and souvenirs, including marks of respect for US and Russian spacemen who’d died as the Space Age was born. There is also the microminiaturized photo-print of letters of good-will from representatives of other nations and the plaque of peace.
Armstrong fires up the engine, blasting them free from the bottom half of the module which will stay behind.
“The Eagle has its wings,” reports Armstrong.
In the low gravity world, the launch requires a mere touch of power.
It’s an encouragement to Mike in Columbia to see the Lunar Module floating up towards him.
The lunar pilots begin some braking manoeuvres to prepare for the docking of the two vehicles in orbit.
“We’re in good shape, Mike,” Aldrin reports. “We’re braking.”
The Command Module pilot then takes a photograph of the bug-like Eagle rising and gliding towards him above a grey moonscape, with blue and white Earth shining above it. As he snaps the picture, the Lunar Modules’s gold Kapton insulation layer glints in the brilliant sunlight. He hopes to God he’s immortalised in film such a memorable moment in their mission.
Steadily, Eagle comes closer, near the end of its gradual, three and a half hour ascension. The pilots are preparing the two vessels to join in orbit sixty miles up. It’s almost like two machines mating in space.
To minimize the spread of lunar particles and reduce the risk of contamination, the tunnel linking the Command Module to the Lunar Module is pressurised. At the same time, the Lunar Module, space suits and lunar surface equipment are all vacuumed by the astronauts.
“Houston, this is Columbia,” Collins says. “We’re all three back inside. The hatch is installed. We’re running a pressure check – leak check. Everything’s going well.”
The Apollo crew get ready to jettison the Eagle. It’s a sad moment, especially for Armstrong and Aldrin. After being discarded, it will be programmed to orbit the Moon and then crash down to its surface.
“Letting her go in ten seconds,” Collins states.
That task done, ahead of them is the Trans-Earth Injection. This will finally put Columbia back on its trajectory home on a sixty-hour trip along fields of gravity.
Armstrong and Aldrin remove their space suits. It’s been another good day in space. But it’s time to go. They burn the engine to increase their speed. The crew shoots their final close-up pictures of the Moon. They know they’ll never return.
Next stop on the ride will be their fall into the Pacific Ocean after re-entry.
“Purring across the deep,” reports Collins, content to see their spaceship heading along its path to home.
V
TIMELESS JOURNEY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
76 YEAR old Ayak Svenson doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. He’s pretty sure, though, that he’s in a spaceship gliding through zero gravity.
The motion is agreeable and the temperature pleasant. Although he’s probably in a deep sleep, he can sense that he’s strapped in by a seat belt across both his shoulders. Body and mind feel secure.
When he awakes, he’s clear-minded. The old man sees that he is, indeed, alone in a small vessel sailing like a submersible in outer space. The interior of the vessel is bathed in a soft, restful indigo glow. There’s a purring sound of effortless motion.
His spacecraft is travelling dead straight. There isn’t even a hint of pitch or yaw. The stability is perfect. At this stage, he can’t form any idea how fast it’s going.
His inner spirit seems light, almost like the sensation of weightlessness in the cabin. He’s at peace, as if in balance. There appears to be nothing immediate to worry about.
Directly in front of Ayak is a flight deck and a wide windscreen. Made of thickened glass, it gives him a Cinerama-like perspective on the cosmos. The cockpit is spacious and well-served by communication and navigational technologies. By comparison, the fuselage behind him is modest in size. Clearly, the ship’s design is focused on rapid solo transport. This is no cargo vessel. Unless he’s the cargo, that is.
In addition to the curved front window, the diplomat notices that there are three square-shaped panes on each side, bending around the nose of the spacecraft. He can watch outer space float by.
If he cranes his neck he can see that there’s a round rear window pane, too, like a porthole. In its centre is the Sun, like a ball of gold, fading in size. A silhouette of Earth is at the bottom right, half obscuring the smaller planet of Mercury between Earth and Sun. The Moon is on the right side of Earth, looking like a little ball in space. The bigger sphere of Venus is orbiting at the left side.
Given this picture, he concludes that he’s heading away from the centre of the solar system, an emissary of Earth on an unknown mission. He looks out of the windows at his right side. Just a couple of inches away lurks a black, airless vacuum, which he understands to be hostile to life. Space itself appears to be the only danger around.
At that moment, he happens to wonder why space is black. After all, there are hundreds of billions of stars. Then he remembers photos of the Apollo lunar landings –there was always a black sky: with no atmosphere, the Moon had no sky.
Svenson sometimes spots a meteorite, star clusters or just some trails of hydrogen gas and dust particles flickering in faraway stray starlight.
The Under-Secretary-General (USG) of the United Nations is on the journey of a lifetime. He has a vague recollection of an accident he was in during his last moments on Earth, but the memory is so sketchy he surmises he must have fallen asleep behind the wheel of a vehicle before disaster struck. But the reason he’s in the spaceship doesn’t matter to him.
He leans forward and touches the glass that is the only material separating him from certain extinction. It’s lukewarm. The windscreen has been thickened to withstand immense pressure. At the same time, it’s being lightly heated to prevent ice, or moisture, forming on the surface.
After a while, he understands that he isn’t in control of the flight. The ship has been programmed to take him somewhere. It’s fixed on autopilot mode. But who’s running the flight control system? And what’s the destination?
Despite these unknowns, neither fear, nor anxiety, creep into the passenger’s mind. The plane is in a hold pattern and, because it’s so painless, he accepts its control.
The space traveller spots a computer console on the cockpit instrument panel. It has a touchscreen keypad. He’s immediately tempted to use it to search for the details of the computer network to which the spaceship is connected. He wants to find out more about what’s happening to him. Although everything is peaceful, nothing makes sense yet.