Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) Read Online Free PDF

grace, since the agony of the lungs when straining is not alien to the agony of the soul. Leave it that Aldrin was so strong he had a physical presence which was bigger than his bulk.
    He talked like a hardworking drill. He had the reputation of being the best physicist and engineer among the astronauts—he had written a valuable thesis on Orbital Rendezvous Techniques at MIT, but he put no humor into his presentation, he was selling no soap. If you did not read technologese, you might as well forget every last remark for his words did not translate, not unless you were ready to jog along with him on technology road. Here is the way he gave himself to the Press: “We do have a few items on the Lem side of the house on this particular mission. We’ll be picking up where Apollo 10 left off when they did their phasing maneuver. And at this point after departing the Command Module, coming down in the descent orbit, we’ll be igniting the descent engine for the first time under a long burn condition when it is not docked with the Command Module. And executing this burn under control of a computer, being directed towards the various targets that are fed into the computer will be new on this flight. Also we’ll be making use of the landing radar and its inputs into the computer. Inputs in terms of altitude and velocity updates which will bringus down in the prescribed conditions as we approach the surface of the moon. Of course, the actual control of the touchdown itself will be a rather new item in that it will be testing this man-machine interface to a very sophisticated degree. The touchdown itself will be the ultimate test on the landing gear and the various systems that are in the spacecraft. The environment of one-sixth G will be seen for the first time by crews and spacecraft. We’ll also be exposed to thermal conditions that have not been experienced before. The two-man EVA is something that is a first in our program. Sleeping in the Lem on the lunar surface, which we hope to be able to do, will be another new item in that flight.”
    He went on to talk of star sightings and the powered ascent from the moon—that moment when, having landed successfully and reconnoitered the moon ground, they would be back in the Lem and ready to ascend—would the motor ignite or did the moon have a curse? Aldrin spoke of this as a “new item,” then of rendezvous with the Command Module, which would return them to earth, of “various contingencies that can develop,” of “a wider variety of trajectory conditions”—he was talking about not being able to join up, wandering through space, lost forever to life in that short eternity before they expired of hunger and thirst. Small hint of that in these verbal formulations. Even as the Nazis and the Communists had used to speak of mass murder as liquidation, so the astronauts spoke of possible personal disasters as “contingency.” The heart of astronaut talk, like the heart of all bureaucratic talk, was a jargon which could be easily converted to computer programming, a language like Fortran or Cobol or Algol. Anti-dread formulations were the center of it, as if words like pills were there to suppress emotional symptoms. Yet Aldrin, powerful as a small bull, deep as his grasp of Celestial Mechanics, gave off in his air of unassailable solemnity some incommunicable speech about the depth of men’s souls and that razor’s edge between the hero’s endeavor and vainglory. Vainglory looked real to him, one might assume, real as true peril—he had the deep gloomyclumsy dignity of a man who had been face to face in some stricken hour with the depths of his own nature, more complex than he had hitherto known.
    Collins, in contrast, moved easily; Collins was cool. Collins was the man nearly everybody was glad to see at a party, for he was the living spirit of good and graceful manners. Where Armstrong referred to Wapakoneta, Ohio, as his hometown, and showed a faint but ineradicable