Headline Sep4,2012/

"THE PRIDE OF MOTHER EARTH!"

Astronaut Neil Armstrong smiles inside the Lunar Module on July 20, 1969

Saturday, July 1969. Houston time: 5:30AM. Mission Elapsed Time : 2 days, 21 hours. Apollo 11, 177,000 miles from Mother Earth.

all was still inside the command module Columbia, only the hum of cabin fans broke the total silence of the void. All three heroes slept though fitfully! Before departing Earth all three had agreed to take it easy on the way to the Moon knowing that it would be a mistake to arrive in a lunar orbit tired.

Aldrin was up early, the end of the rest period wasn't for another two hours, but he knew they would be reaching the moon in about  7 horus. And he wanted to know if there was a last midcourse correction. He keyed the mike: Houston Apollo 11.

Neil Armstrong and Aldrin hadn't gone inside the Eagle until the day before. The topsy turvy passage "up" from the command module and "down" into the lander had brought to the fore the strangest sensation imaginable. Now, as they finished breakfast, a sudden darkness came around them, and for the first time in the flight the sky was full of stars, each with a steady gemlike brilliance. They had flown into the lunar shadow. Through the windows of the slowly turning aircraft they looked out at the place where the Sun had once been, and there was the Moon: a huge magnificent sphere bathed in the eerie blue light of earthshine, each crater rendered in ghostly detail, all for a third of the globe, which was a crescent of blackness.

As their eyes adapted to the darkness they saw that the entire moon was set against a gigantic ellipse of pearly white light, the glowing gases of the sun's outer atmosphere , which stretched beyond the moon into the blackness. Somehow in these strange, cosmic illuminations the moon looked decidedly three dimensional, bulging out at them as if to present a welcome, or, perhaps a Warning.

Over dinner they were quiet. Each hero lost in his own thoughts of what fate awaited them. "Amazing how quickly you adapt" Collins said brightly striking up a conversation. "Why, it doesn't seem weird at all to me to look out there and see the moon going by, you know?" But Collins harboured unspoken concern for his crewmates. He looked a them carefully but could not tell whether  they felt anxiety, for they seemed entirely relaxed. Of the three of them, he was least comfortable with the risks they were undertaking and most conscious of the "fallibility of Complex Machines!"

In his very private thoughts, he had come to see the flight as a long and fragile daisy chain of events, and was only too aware that at any time the chain could break. Now he felt something like an anxious parent with the two children about to go away on a long trip. he offered to take the watch for the night, encouraging Armstrong and Aldrin to sleep underneath their couches. "You guys ought to get a good night's sleep!" As they readied supplies Collins touched emotions, "today went well! If tomorrow and the next day too, we'll be safe. "

Good night and God bless

Sam Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless