Free Moondust by Andrew Smith Page A

issued manually to the guidance computer. This risk was worth taking.
    Unfortunately, no one foresaw that it would also prevent the LM’s landing radar from locking on to the echoes it bounced offthe lunar surface. As Edgar Mitchell scanned his instrument panel with increasing despair, caution lights warned that the radar had gone for a walk. He knew that if there was no radar at known mountaintop level, the mission rules called for them to abort the landing. They were halfway there already and sinking fast and if the radar wasn’t working now, there was no very good reason to think that it would be anytime soon. They had thirty seconds. Mitchell found himself muttering, “C’mon, radar – c’-mon!” then trying to calm himself, as other LM pilots did, by saying, “It’s just like a simulation.”
    In these moments, Deke Slayton noticed a different tone in his friend Shepard’s voice as it crackled into the control room, and he thought: “Jesus, he doesn’t care. He’s going to land anyway.” Commander Shepard later claimed that he had run this notion past Mitchell, who replied, “Okay, Al. As long as we both know the risks,” adding doubtfully, “Promises to be interesting” (oddly enough, the LM pilot has no recollection of this exchange). Yet the charm of Apollo is that while a babyish room-sized computer ostensibly ran the show, the technology still had a physical presence, leaving open the ancient “just give it a whack” route to deliverance. Thus, when the abort switch was playing up, the engineers’ first instruction was for Mitchell to tap it with a screwdriver, and when Buzz Aldrin accidentally snapped a key used to arm the
Apollo 11
ascent engine, so apparently condemning himself and Neil Armstrong to a whimsical death 240,000 miles from home, the day was saved by jamming a pen into the lock (Aldrin still has the pen). And now, after much scratching of heads, the brains at Mission Control suggested that Mitchell “recycle” a circuit breaker, which is to say, pull a knob out and push it back in again. With time rapidly running out, Ed did, there was an interminable pause … and data started appearing. The radar was on. Human beings number five and six landed safely among the hills, valleys and craters of the rugged Fra Mauro region. Legend has Mitchell asking his commander afterwards, “just between you and me,” whether they really would have risked landing without radar, only to be told with a wink, “You’ll never know, Ed. You’ll never know.”
    * * *
    Following a first, acclimatizing stint on the surface, Mitchell and Shepard climbed back into the LM and tried to get some rest in advance of their arduous main task – the ascent of Cone Crater. As with other crews, any sleep was hard won and shallow when it came; uncomfortable in spacesuits on hammocks, with life-support machinery whirring, pulsing, ticking in the background and the occasional micrometeorite clattering into the ship’s thin skin. At one point during their “night,” an unfamiliar
bang
emanated from somewhere and they woke with a jolt and a fear that the craft, which had come down with one foot in a small crater and so tilted disconcertingly, was about to topple over. Mitchell had only been half gone anyway, in a private realm of “edgy half-dreams,” because his mind was still outside, revelling in the eerie drama of the landscape he’d stepped into – a stark and sun-soaked land where the lack of atmosphere caused shadows to be sharper and more clearly defined than on Earth, almost as if they were produced by backlighting or had a solid, three-dimensional presence of their own. And the stillness, the silence, was like nothing that could ever be experienced on a living planet such as his own. He loved being there.
    The pinpoint landing of
Apollo 12
had emboldened mission planners to shoot for