Free Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin Page A

module, and we opened the hatch. It was great to see Mike’s smiling face at the other end of that tunnel!
    We carefully transferred the rock boxes and the cameras’ film magazines, and then Neil and I went back into the
Eagle
for a final look to make sure we’d gotten all that we needed to get out of it. We knew we were saying good-bye to anything we left inside the LM. Our home on the moon would not be making the trip back to Earth with us. Before leaving lunar orbit, we would cut the
Eagle
loose, this time letting it fly on its own around the moon for what we thought might be hundreds of years. In fact, it crashed on the moon shortly after its fuel and batteries ran out. But this was no time to be sentimental. We still had a long journey ahead of us.
    We prepared to leave lunar orbit, firing an engine burn on the backside, while out of radio communication with Houston. I had barely slept in more than three days, and had been running on adrenaline for the last two days at least. Now, as I sat in the command module, I could feel my body winding down. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep all the way back to Earth, but we still had several critical moves to make before we could relax.
    The first came up soon enough, when Mike guided us into the Trans-Earth Injection burn, the extra push that would consume five tons of propellant in less than two minutes, boost our speed by 2,000 miles per hour, and, most important of all, break us free of the moon’s gravitational pull, sending us on our way back to Earth. Once again, there was no room for error; we had only one chance to get this right. If we failed, we’d share the fate of the LM, orbiting the moon until we ran out of fuel and batteries, and eventually crashing into the barren gray surface we had just left.
    Mike eyed the guidance computer as he counted down, “Three, two, one …” barely breathing. The
Columbia
’s engines flared and ignited,just as we had hoped, right on the mark. Twenty minutes later we emerged from the back side of the moon for the last time. Once that maneuver was done, we could watch the moon getting smaller and smaller in our windows. I leaned back and closed my eyes. We were on our way home.

    T HE THREE-DAY journey back to Earth’s upper atmosphere was relatively uneventful. On the last night before splashdown, we took the opportunity to share some prepared remarks with the world via a live television broadcast. The words I chose to share remain deeply meaningful to me:
    We’ve come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the moon. More still than the efforts of a government and industry team. More, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Neil’s statement the other day upon first setting foot on the surface of the moon, “This is a small step for a man, but a great leap for mankind,” I believe sums up these feelings very nicely. We accepted the challenge of going to the moon. The acceptance of this challenge was inevitable. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission, I believe, is a tribute to the timeliness of that acceptance.
    Today, I feel we’re fully capable of accepting expanded roles in the exploration of space. In retrospect, we have all been particularly pleased with the call signs that we very laboriously chose for our spacecraft,
Columbia
and
Eagle.
We’ve been particularly pleased with the emblem of our flight. Depicting the U.S. eagle, bringing the universal symbol of peace from the Earth, from the planet Earth to the moon, that symbol being the olive branch. It was our overall crew choice to deposit a replica of this symbol on the moon. Personally, in reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from Psalms comes to mind: “When I considered theheavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art