Free Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure by Dan Parry Page A

the LM which were slippery with dust. Neil tried jumping a few times but found that the PLSS had a tendency to make him tip over backwards, and after nearly falling he decided 'that was enough of that'. 19 In the piercing sunshine, Buzz thought that Neil's pressure-suit gleamed 'like no white I had seen before', making Armstrong stand out on the surface almost as brightly as the LM. 20

Neil found that the suit was largely comfortable and allowed him to move around freely – with the exception of bending down to pick up things from the surface. This had already been established during practice sessions at home, influencing the design of the soil-sample tools. The suits also prevented the men kneeling, and this fact, together with the difficulty of retrieving things with their hands, led to concerns about dropping things. Objects could be scooped up using tools but this was a time-consuming process. 'The suit was cumbersome and bulky and not really easy to operate,' Neil recalled, 'but on the whole, it performed remarkably well. When you think that the surface temperature was something north of 100 centigrade, in terms of the [air] flow and the cooling, it was really doing an excellent job, and allowed us to really do most of the things we planned to do – although perhaps not as quickly as we would have liked to do them.' 21
After familiarising himself with the surface and the suit, Aldrin watched Armstrong remove the cover of the commemorative plaque that was secured between the rungs of the ladder. Since the ladder was attached to the descent stage, the plaque would remain on the Moon.
Armstrong: 'For those who haven't read the plaque, we'll read the plaque that's on the front landing gear of this LM. First there's two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says "Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." It has the crew members' signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.'

Aldrin later said, 'This was one place where I felt signing "Buzz" was too informal'. 22

Neil then took the TV camera from the MESA and after changing its lens he carried it to a point some 60 feet away to the right of the LM, where it could cover a wider region of the surface. While looking for a suitable spot, something in a crater caught his eye. This was later thought to be a glassy material produced during the intense heat and shock of a high-velocity impact. 'We were supposedly in a nondescript area,' Aldrin recalled, 'but there was far more to investigate than we could ever hope to cover. We didn't even scratch the surface.' 23 The camera's white cable, leading back to the LM, retained a spiral kink that left it sticking up above the surface. Once it became dirty it was hard to see. Neil caught his foot in it and needed help from Buzz to untangle himself.

While Armstrong was working on the camera, Aldrin set up the solar wind collector about ten feet to the right of the LM. Looking like a narrow flag, one foot wide and four and a half feet tall, the SWC was made of thin aluminium foil. Deployed facing the Sun, it was designed to capture particles of helium, neon and argon that were found in the solar wind.

After setting up a table at the MESA, Buzz helped Neil remove the US flag from its case beneath the ladder. They carried it back towards the TV camera and chose a spot around 15 feet from the LM. The flag was designed to hang from a telescopic arm that extended perpendicularly from the pole. But despite pulling as hard as they dared, the arm wouldn't properly extend and Armstrong and Aldrin feared an imminent public relations disaster. 24 The flag was left distinctly ruffled – as were conspiracy theorists, who later wanted to know why it looked as if it were being blown by the wind. After coping with this problem, the flag still threatened to upstage the men when it refused to be pushed into the ground. The