“I felt the immensity around me. We, the spacecraft and me, seemed to be stationary while the gigantic polychrome sphere turned slowly beneath us. I had no sense of our actual speed of 17,500 miles per hour, or five miles per second.” The Gemini 12 mission objective was to test out improvements on the spacesuits and the spacewalking equipment. Buzz was on a tethered spacewalk for 2 hours and 20 minutes where he performed various tasks like taking photographs and working with equipment outside the spacecraft to show how well the improvements had worked. After the Gemini mission is when Buzz and his Apollo 11 mission mate Neil Armstrong made their marks in history when they were the first men to ever land and walk on the Moon in 1969. Buzz spent nearly two and a half hours walking the dusty terrain and picking up samples and learning how to get around on a place that wasnt Earth. He described the horizon as being much closer than hes used to and that the lack of color was quite striking. The Earth looked like a tiny blue marble in the sky and the sun much more brilliant than hed ever experienced. “It was too brilliant, almost like a floodlight of pure white light. The amount of light that was reflected off the lunar surface was so high, it was as if we were standing in brilliantly lit snow.”
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:24:43 +0000