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area.”
    Charlie Duke summed up what we were all feeling. “It was beautiful from here, Tranquillity.”
    Neil could hardly wait to describe to Mission Control what he saw out his window. “The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain,” he reported, “with a fairly large number of craters of the five-to fifty-foot variety, and some ridges which are small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little one-and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.”
    Mike Collins chimed in from high above the moon in the
Columbia
, “Sounds like it looks a lot better than it did yesterday … It looked rough as a corn cob then.”
    “It really was rough, Mike,” answered Neil. “Over the targeted landing area, it was extremely rough, cratered, and large numbers of rocks that were probably larger than five or ten feet in size.”
    “When in doubt, land long,” Mike replied.
    Charlie Duke wanted us to reset the gravity-alignment circuit breaker, and the mission timer, which for some reason had blown a circuit breaker, so Neil’s commentary was momentarily interrupted. When he continued, he attempted to describe the stark, bland landscape. “I’d say the color of the local surface is very comparable to what we observed from orbit at this sun angle—about ten degrees sun angle, or that nature. It’s pretty much without color. It’s gray; and it’s a very white, chalky gray, as you look into the zero-phase line. And it’s considerably darker gray, more like ashen gray as you look out ninety degrees to the sun. Some of the surface rocks in close here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket engine plume are coated with this light gray on the outside; but where they’ve been broken, they display a very dark gray interior; and it looks like it could be country basalt.”
    We wanted to get these descriptions on the record as early as possible, should we for any reason have to make a hasty departure. Morethan anything, however, we wanted to get out there and explore the moon’s surface for ourselves.

    T HE PREPARATION TO go outside was complex; finalizing our suiting-up process from our visor-protected helmets down to our overshoe moon boots would alone take us several hours in the cramped space of the
Eagle.
With just enough room to maneuver, Neil and I helped each other one at a time to put on the 185-pound life-support backpacks, still large and cumbersome even with their lunar-equivalent weight of thirty pounds in the one-sixth gravity. We switched over our life-support connector hoses from the onboard supply of oxygen and electricity to the backpack, fully equipped with its own electrical supply, water connector, communicator, and oxygen inlets and outlets. With no air on the moon, and plenty of heat from the sun and cold in the shadows, our suits and backpacks were truly our life-support system, a 100-percent fully contained living environment. In them, we had cooling provisions in our underwear, thanks to an ingenious system of plastic tubing, about 300 feet worth, that could circulate the ice water that was being produced by the backpack. We had electrical power and enough oxygen for four hours, and antennae connections for radio communications between Neil and me, but also so our conversations could be heard back on Earth. On top of our large backpacks, we had an additional emergency supply of oxygen in a separate container, in case we needed it while on the moon, or for an emergency EVA spacewalk upon re-docking with
Columbia
after liftoff from the moon.
    Since we were ahead of schedule, we took our sweet time, making sure that everything was correctly in place. That we weren’t rushed helped us to relax as we