Stepping down the ladder on July 21, 1969 to become the second man to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin had to remember not to shut his spaceship’s door. Nasa had omitted to put a handle on the outside and, if shut, neither he nor Neil Armstrong — already on the surface — could get back in. They would have died.
Just before, while suiting up in Eagle, the wardrobe-sized lunar excursion module, Aldrin’s backpack had knocked off a plastic switch on the control panel. This controlled the power supply to the craft’s ascent engine. A few minutes before take-off, Aldrin noticed the problem. He was able to operate the switch using a felt-tip pen. Had he not been able to do this, they would have died.
When Eagle separated from Columbia, the moon-orbiting mother ship, a tiny puff of air, unnoticed by anybody, added some unplanned acceleration. So, when Armstrong was guiding Eagle down, he noticed they were overshooting the landing site and his computer was taking him down into a field of boulders. Manually, he landed with a few seconds of fuel remaining. Had he hit a boulder, they would have died.
They didn’t die, of course, but, my God, they smelt awful. The Apollo 11 capsule in which they returned to earth was, basically, a toilet. When the US Navy frogman opened the door of the floating capsule, he reeled back, overcome by the stench. He nearly died.
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