No Dream Is Too High - Buzz Aldrin Page 0,31

Neil and I didn’t make it. His words are honoring though sobering:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

The president was wise to consider the possibilities and would have been remiss had he not. All these years later, when I read President Nixon’s prepared but undelivered speech, written for him by presidential speechwriter and noted journalist William Safire, it reminds me that failure is always an option.

IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT, something noble, something that perhaps has never been done before, you must be willing to fail. And don’t be surprised or devastated when you do. It is not the end of the world, and untold numbers of people have experienced major failures and have come back from them, not only as more successful, but also as better, stronger people.

I failed miserably during one of my first experiments on the Moon. With Neil already on the lunar surface, I made my way out of the Eagle’s hatch and began carefully descending the ladder, stepping slowly until I became more accustomed to how the heavy life-support backpack was going to affect my sense of balance in an environment with only one-sixth the gravitational pull of Earth’s. When I reached the last rung on the ladder, I jumped down to the Eagle’s footpad, solidly planted on the surface.

According to our flight plan’s checklist, I was supposed to jump back up again to the bottom rung, as an experiment from which I could learn how much energy I needed to expend after Neil and I returned from exploring the Moon’s surface. Because it had never been done before, we wanted to make sure that we could comfortably negotiate that first step after our extravehicular activity.

Neil had easily made the jump from the lunar module’s pad back to the first step, a leap I had watched him make as I peered out the window before going down the ladder myself. It didn’t look too hard.

But when I tried to jump back to the first rung, I underestimated the gravitational pull of the Moon, didn’t jump high enough, and missed the step by about an inch. My shins skidded against the step and scraped the bottom of the rung, smearing Moon dust on my space suit just below my knees. The dust was apparently a residual effect, left over from the bottom of Neil’s boots on the ladder.

So my first experiment on the Moon was a failure. How embarrassing! I thought.

My botched jump shook my confidence a bit. Maybe moving around on the Moon would be more difficult than I’d anticipated. I stood on the LM’s footpad for a few moments to regain my composure, and that’s when I decided to test the urine-collection device.

I’ll put a little more oomph in it, I thought to myself before jumping up again, and this time I easily ascended to the bottom rung. I was back to where I started a few seconds earlier but now with greatly improved self-confidence and a much lighter bladder. I dropped back down to the footpad and stepped out to where only one human being had ever gone before me, and that only a short time earlier—I stepped onto the surface of