A Subject I Almost MISSed, Part 5

What's happening: In this 5-part series I'm talking about the different space books I've been reading this school year. Right now I'm talking about the Apollo 11 lunar landing. There have been alarms going off like crazy in the lunar module's computer, and the automatic system is taking Armstrong and Aldrin into a crater pit. That would not be a good landing. So Armstrong takes over manually, and is flying Eagle across the moon, looking for a suitable landing place. Just one small problem: Eagle's only got a minute's worth of fuel left, then mission rules call for an abort. ~Photobug

Amazingly, Armstrong settled Eagle on the moon with less than 30 seconds’ fuel remaining. Mission Control—and really the world—completely let loose and were absolutely ecstatic that man was on the moon.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Reading the story of the mission was just fascinating. I loved reading the script of what Mission Control and the astronauts said. I just thought it was really neat! And of course reading about the moonwalks were awesome too.

Okay…now for some more stories. Of course First on the Moon talked about the astronaut’s childhoods and previous careers, which I thought was interesting. It also talked about launch day. Nurse Dee O’Hara, who was the astronauts' nurse from Mercury to the Space Shuttle, teased Mike Collins as he was prepping to launch. I’m paraphrasing, but I remember the conversation something like this:

O’Hara: Hey, Mike, where are you going to watch the launch from?

Collins: Hopefully not the beach.

O’Hara: Well, I’ll use my powers and see if I can get you a seat high up…you know, the higher the better.

Collins: Thanks, and could you get seats for these two guys (Armstrong & Aldrin) over here too?

I thought that was pretty funny. Of course the astronauts were going to get a good seat…VERY high up…363 feet high!

With the epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon was 424 pages. I figured I needed to read at least 70 pages a day to finish it in a week, when the book was due back at the library! I read through the main part of the book, to the epilogue. That was page 370. But once I started reading the epilogue I decided not to finish it. It talked a lot about evolution and our future in space. (The book was written in 1970.) And considering I do not like evolution or reading about anything past Apollo, I decided to stop reading right there. But other than the epilogue which wasn’t written by the astronauts anyway, First on the Moon was awesome!

Somewhere in here I watched a really cool documentary from our public library entitled In the Shadow of the Moon. It was so totally awesome!! It was a documentary on the Apollo lunar (moon) missions. There was no narration, just the astronauts telling their stories. Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell, Dave Scott, Ed Mitchell, Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan and many more shared their vivid memories of going to, and in some cases landing on the moon. It was just such an awesome video!! The main story centered around Apollo 11, however, there was Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 coverage as well. It’s really hard to describe, it’s just so awesome. Let me just put it to you this way: In the week that we had this 2-hour documentary, I watched it 3 times!! :D

I don’t really know why I like reading about space and Project Apollo. Perhaps it’s the adventure, the excitement of leaving our mother planet and seeing ourselves—a fragile globe hanging in space—for the first time. Perhaps it’s the element of unknown, if everything is going to work out and Neil Armstrong will really make those first famous steps on the moon.

Or maybe it’s because there’s always another seat in the Lunar Module.

(Concluded. Courtesy Amazon for the book pictures.)