A geologist once told me to look for the rabbit in the moon instead of the man. That’s what the Chinese did, he said while pointing up to a gibbous moon from a plateau in the Fort Rock Basin of eastern Oregon. We were at an archeological dig site, and his job was to look at the earth, yet he couldn’t help but stare at the moon.
We’ve been staring at the moon for quite some time, now, and we manage to make of it what we wish. Some cultures see a man in the moon, some see a rabbit, some see cheese or the Roman huntress Diana, goddess of the moon, twin sister of Apollo. The moon has been a symbol of birth and death as it rises and sets, waxes and wanes, going black every month before reappearing. The moon’s gravity controls the tides of the ocean. A synonym for crazy comes from the Latin word for moon, luna, which means “moonstruck.” Lunacy? Lunar Sea? Yes, and I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
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A quarter century ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Buzz Aldrin for an article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We met at his home in California, where lunar paraphernalia festooned the walls and shelves, including an Andy Warhol silkscreen of him on the moon next to the American flag. If Neil Armstrong had been a bit of an enigma over the years, leaving the astronaut life for academia and not likely to grant interviews, Aldrin became our pop version of the “Astronaut”—with the kind of name that spawned a beloved Disney character in Pixar’s Toy Story movies. (Armstrong may have been the first man on the moon, but it’s Aldrin who’s in all the pictures.)
It’s perhaps unfair to think of Aldrin in this way. When I interviewed him he tended to avoid sentimentality and focus on strategy and mission. “Apollo really was an engineering feat of the greatest magnitude—based upon advanced levels of understanding of science, of mathematics, of computer processing, of information for navigation and autopilot control,” he said while spinning a paperweight globe on his desk.
And, yet, Aldrin seems to have been born for the moon and all the symbolism attached to it. His father was an aviation pioneer and student of renowned rocket developer Robert Goddard. His mother’s maiden name was Marion Moon. In the years since I interviewed him, Aldrin has settled into his image with a sense of humor, appearing on at least four episodes of The Simpsons, and putting a plastic Buzz Lightyear through a battery of tests in a YouTube video with the tagline, “Just remember one thing, I’m the real Buzz.”
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After Apollo 11 reached Earth orbit on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s heart rate clocked in at 110 beats per minute. Michael Collins, who would pilot the command module, Columbia, while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the lunar surface, was 99. And Aldrin? A cool 88.
Three days later, on the morning of July 19, 1969, Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit. Aldrin entered the lunar module Eagle through the tip of the command module. Armstrong followed, and a few hours later, Eagle detached from Columbia. Up to this point all stages had been performed by previous missions, but now Aldrin and Armstrong were on the verge of a novel voyage.
The following day, after orbiting the moon 30 times, Eagle began its descent burn toward the lunar surface. But just two minutes into descent, Eagle’s onboard computer (far less powerful than your smartphone) started blaring. Aldrin announced, “Program alarm. It’s a 12-0-2.” The system was overloaded.
As the alarm continued, Houston’s computer expert and command chief considered the implications. Armstrong asked for a reading. Finally, word came. “We’re go, Eagle. Hang tight, we’re go.”
Eagle eased down toward the surface as Aldrin read off the numbers. In retrospect, he told me, he wished he had spent more time looking out the window. “We were going forward with the landing gear this way, facing down, with the rocket in front,” he explained, using his fist to demonstrate the flight path of the lunar module, his fingers sticking out to form its buglike legs. “At a certain point we yawed around, and shortly thereafter we pitched forward. . . . Earth was in view for just a moment, and then it went high in the window and behind us.”
Aldrin couldn’t spend his time musing about the view, however. Soon it became clear that they were overshooting their target and running low on fuel. “It was as low or lower than it had been in any of the simulations or training,” Aldrin said. Other obstacles also appeared. Huge boulders and craters were strewn about the moonscape, and Eagle needed a smooth surface to land on.
All Apollo missions after 11 used an updated autopilot system that could handle such predicaments. “If you put that into a video game for some kid to play with, it’d be a rudimentary, simple task,” Aldrin told me, “unless something went wrong. That’s why you’ve got test pilots out there.”
And that’s where Armstrong’s experience paid off. Once before, in Gemini 8, he had masterfully righted the capsule out of a wild spin caused by a stuck thruster. Now he needed to bring Eagle down safely, with the constant reminder from Mission Control that fuel levels were dropping. At the time his heart rate spiked to 156.
We know the story well. The Eagle lands. Armstrong takes one small step, mankind a giant leap. Twenty minutes later, Aldrin follows. They plant a flag and leave footprints.
Taking his foot off a bookshelf, Aldrin leaned forward in his chair, describing the brevity of his lunar walk: “It was too short. And it was a very focused time with history-making events like getting on the surface and putting the flag up, talking to the president—things that were somewhat interrupting the normal explorer’s prudent tasks, And it was prudent to get outside and look at the spacecraft you just landed in.” He gave a chuckle. “Really the challenge was to land safely, do a few things and get back in and leave.”
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One of my favorite movies is It’s a Wonderful Life, and I say that knowing how cheesy and sentimental it can be. But it’s George Bailey’s desire to see and do things, to explore the world, to lasso the moon, that moves me more than the tear-inducing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” at the end. Going to the moon required a kind of buckaroo mentality at a time when America was all about new frontiers. Jimmy Stewart, who played George Bailey, had his share of cowboy roles. And in the early 1960s, just before JFK proposed that we land on the moon before the end of the decade, the three top-rated TV shows were Wagon Train, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke.
Recently, I watched La Voyage Dans La Lune (“A Trip to the Moon”), which was produced in 1902. This silent film is known for it’s iconic image of a spacecraft landing in the eye of the Man in the Moon. What was that spacecraft? A bullet. Look at the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 and you are essentially looking at a giant bullet.
I prefer lassoes, however, perhaps because such lunar wrangling seems more ambitious and heroically absurd, perhaps because a lasso orbits its target before cinching in: Apollo 11 did not shoot the moon so much as circle it until it pulled close enough to secure touchdown.
In La Voyage Dans La Lune, the traveling French astronomers are chased by the local moon people, or Selenites, to the precipice of a cliff, from which they can fall back to Earth inside their bullet. Leaving the moon was considerably different for Apollo 11. During one test of the lunar module on Earth, Armstrong had to eject himself in order to survive a crash. Another test pilot also had to eject. But as it turned out, leaving was not an issue—at least not from an engineering perspective.
Yes, we went back, at least for a few years. We saw astronauts drive a lunar rover that resembled a dune buggy. We saw Alan Shepard, who had been previously grounded due to an inner ear problem, hit a golf ball in low gravity.
And then we stopped going.
There are rumblings of new adventures, of sending the first woman to the moon by 2024, but a lot of that talk sounds suspect given the current political climate. As Buzz Aldrin told me a quarter century ago, it was too short. We landed safely, we did a few things, and then we left.