As the red smoke cleared, Al saw widening holes in one of their parachutes, collapsing it into a useless strip of cloth. “We’ve got a streamer on one,” Al reported.

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On Hadley Plain, at 171:37 GET, right on schedule, Falcon’s engine lit, hurling the ascent stage upward in an impressive flurry of dust and debris, captured for the first time on camera and transmitted live to a world-wide audience.

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After being cooped up together so closely with his fellow astronauts inside Endeavor, Worden enjoyed stretching out for his solo flight.  Now he really got to fly.

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“We pray for one last landingOn the globe that gave us birth;Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skiesAnd the cool, green hills of Earth.” Robert A. Heinlein

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Both men realized what they had discovered. The rock was almost entirely plagioclase. This was surely a chunk of anorthosite, a piece of the primordial crust, the Genesis Rock.

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Suddenly, Scott called out that the Rover was beginning to slide down the hill.  As the back wheels came off the ground, Scott quickly got back on to hold the rover down.

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The whole stripped-down rover weighed about 455 pounds on Earth but only 76 pounds on the moon and was built to carry 2 1/2 times its weight at a maximum speed of about 10 miles per hour.

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After a good nights sleep, Houston woke the astronauts up an hour early the next morning because of a slight oxygen leak.

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It was immediately clear that Falcon had landed on uneven ground, right on the rim of a small crater; the LM was tipped backward at a slight angle. It turned out that one of the rear feet had landed in … Continue reading →

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Craning to look through the triangular window for a glimpse of the land ahead, Scott saw no sign of Hadley Rille.

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