Space Mission
Apollo 11, 16-24 July 1969
Photographer
Neil Armstrong
Photo Description
Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based Kodak paper; ‘A Kodak Paper’ watermarks to verso. With red caption: AS11-40-5902
Essay
Standing beyond the north strut of the LM Eagle at Tranquility Base, Buzz Aldrin is surrounded by a vacuum atmosphere in the one sixth gravity environment. In this silent world he can hear only the crackling of communications, the sounds of his life support system and the echo of his breathing in his helmet.
The loneliness of space exploration is captured in this picture of Buzz Aldrin standing by Eagle’s foil wrapped footpad. But a tiny image of Armstrong taking the photograph can be seen in his reflective faceplate. (NASA SP-350, pg. 202)
“I quickly discovered that I felt balanced comfortably upright only when I was tilted slightly forward. I also felt a bit disorientated – on the Earth when one looks at the horizon, it appears flat; on the Moon, so much smaller than the Earth and quite without high terrain, the horizon in all directions visibly curved away from us.”
—Buzz Aldrin (from his 1973 book Return to Earth)
We felt very comfortable. It was, in fact, in our view both preferable to weightlessness and to the Earth’s gravity.”
—Neil Armstrong