Man first walked on the Moon 45 years ago today

"There was little sleep for the more than 3,000 news personnel at the Houston Space Center during those two historic days. Meals were hasty. Pressure was immense. Time flew," AP staffer Richard Beene wrote in a story about AP's coverage of the mission launch and moonwalk.

"Everyone was just so energized and high on the excitement of the event," Boccardi said this week from his home in suburban New York. "It took people a while to come down from the high of when (Neil Armstrong) said, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' When we heard those words it was just electric; we knew then that the mission had been successful."

"There we were, a few feet from Mission Control talking to the guys up in the capsule, about the time that man landed and walked on the moon," Boccardi recalled. "I was directing the finest news staff you could imagine assembling and we were constructing part of history."

July 20, 1969 astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr.
walks on the surface of the moon

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“Obviously, when we touched down, we were very relieved. Neil and I acknowledged that with a wink, a nod and a pat on the shoulder. The immediate surface was very powdery, as best we could see looking down from 15 feet. Off in the distance was a very clear horizon, maybe with a boulder. And, of course, the brightness of the sunlit surface was almost like looking out at sunlit snow. Your pupils close down, just as in orbit when the sun is on the spacecraft. The sky is black as can be, but there’s no way you can see stars. They’re there, of course, but you can’t make them out because they’re too faint with all the ambient light in your eyes.

“I don’t think it occurred to either of us to say something private. It’s just not the way we related. The discussion had to do with procedure, not ‘Have a good time out there. I’ll see you in 20 minutes.’ Knowing we were going to call ourselves Tranquility Base — but we had never rehearsed that because we didn’t want people to know — we hadn’t inserted the historic announcement into our procedures checklist. So when Neil said, ‘Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed,’ it struck me as, ‘Gee, we’re in the middle of something, Neil. Don’t do that.’

“I don’t know what my first words were. I don’t know that they had any significance. The ones I felt most descriptive were very spontaneous and prompted by an observation of just looking around and responding. At the time, all I could come up with was an acute contrast. So I said ‘magnificent desolation.’ Those are opposing words. The magnificence of humans after millions of years being able to make a spacecraft capable of visiting another object, and then successfully landing it — what an achievement! But I was also impressed with the total desolation I saw in front of me: black sky, no stars and the horizon clearly curving away.”

“The landing was a very high-risk situation. Walking on the surface was, in my opinion at the time, far less risky. But it was genuine exploration at a place where no other human so far as we knew had ever stepped before. So we were focused on doing the very best job of completing our observations and experiments in the limited time we had available.

“We followed our checklist precisely. The real thing differed from simulation because it was ‘the real thing.’ It was a real Lunar Module, alive and operating. It was a real moon’s surface outside our window. It was really over 200 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

“I had been very concerned about the technical details of assuring that the ascent engine could be started and would do the job of getting us back into lunar orbit. But that was in the two years prior to the flight. On the lunar surface, it did not weigh on my mind at all. This was the time to think positively.”