1 A JOURNEY for ALL MANKIND Wednesday, July 16, 1969, 6:00 a.m. (EDT) Countdown: T minus three hours, thirty minutes to liftoff. Clear Florida sky. Elevated 300 feet in the air on an upper platform of Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39-A, I stood alone on the grating of the towering gantry. A few yards away, loaded with more than 2,000 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellant, the giant Saturn V rocket also stood, primed for liftoff as the countdown progressed. Large shards of frost were already falling off its outer skin from the super-chilled liquid oxygen within. Hours earlier my Apollo 11 crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, and I had enjoyed a predawn steak-and-eggs breakfast--an astronaut tradition--and had gone through an elaborate suiting-up with NASA's equipment team helping us get into our pressurized suits, helmets, gloves, and boots. Along with our Pad Leader, Günter Wendt, a gray-haired man of German descent who had worked on almost every launch since the early days of the Mercury program, the three of us, carrying our portable air-conditioning ventilators as though we were heading off to work with our briefcases, loaded into the courier van for the short drive out to the launchpad. Slowly we ascended in the gantry elevator, passing red metal grated walkways at various intervals leading to strategic areas of the rocket. Each of us had trained for his entire life leading up to this moment. As a crew, we had worked together for nearly a year, with Neil and I initially on the backup crew for the gutsy Apollo 8 mission, the first to fly around the moon after only one prior mission with the Saturn V, and then with Mike as the prime crew for the Apollo 11 mission. Because of the seating order in the cramped conditions of the Apollo command module--comparable to the interior of a small van in which the three of us would live and work for more than a week--climbing over one another to enter the craft while wearing our spacesuits was next to impossible. So Günter stopped the elevator about three-fourths of the way up, and dropped me off to wait there on the metal grat- ing while he, Neil, and Mike proceeded two more flights up to where the elevator opened at the "white room," the final preparation area leading to the narrow hatch opening to the spacecraft. In less than three and half hours, if all went well, the enormous rocket, with the power of an atomic bomb, would release an engulfing fireball and lumber off the pad, slowly gathering speed as it rose majestically into the sky, launching America's first attempt to land human beings on the moon. The sun had not yet come up and was barely peeking above the horizon as I stood on the grating and peered through the clear bubble helmet I wore. The only sound I could hear came from my ventilation unit. Looking up and down the coastline, my eyes scanned the beaches for miles along the causeway near Cape Canaveral, where more than a million people had started gathering the night before, trekking in cars, motorcycles, pickup trucks, campers, and large motor homes, inching their way through bumper-to-bumper traffic as they sought the perfect launch viewing location. Already people were filling in every available spot of dry ground, and thousands of boats were anchored on the Indian and Banana rivers near the Cape. Without a good set of binoculars, most of the spectators could not see me, and from my vantage point I could barely see them, but I could see the evidence of them in the flickering campfires that dotted the beaches in the darkness. Everyone knew that something big was about to happen. Because of the danger of explosion should something go wrong, the area immediately near the Saturn V was evacuated except for technicians making their final pre-launch checks. Even if the launch was perfect, no human could stay within several miles of it outside of the Firing Room Excerpted from Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon by Buzz Aldrin, Ken Abraham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
