Walking on the moon - Moon walker - part one

WALKING ON THE MOON – DAVID R. SCOTT – PART ONE

Sixty feet above the moon, the blast of our single rocket churns up a gray tumult of lunar dust that seems to engulf us. Blinded, I feel the rest of the way down “on the gauges”. With an abrupt jar, our lunar module, or LM, strikes the surface and shudders to rest. We have hit our target squarely a large amphitheater girded by mountains and a deep canyon, at the eastern edge of a vast plain.

As Jim Irwin and I wait for the dust to settle, I recall the twelve revolutions we have just spent in lunar orbit aboard our Apollo-15 spaceship Endeavour. Each two hours found us completing a full circuit of earth’s ancient satellite – one hour knifing through lunar night, then sunrise and an hour of daylight. As we orbited, I found a particular fascination in that sector of the darkened moon bathed in earth shine. The light reflected by our planet illuminates the sleeping moon much more brightly than moonlight silvers our own night. The mountains and crater rims are clearly seen.

I will always remember Endeavour hurtling through that strange night of space. Before us and above us stars spangled the sky with their distant icy fire; below lay the moon’s far side, an arc of impenetrable blackness that blotted the firmament. Then, as our moment of sunrise approached, barely discernible streamers of light – actually the glowing gases of the solar corona millions of miles away – played above the moon’s horizon. Finally the sun exploded into our view like a visual thunderclap. Abruptly, completely, in less than a second, its harsh light flooded into the spaceship and dazzled our eyes.

As we looked into the early lunar morning from Endeavour, the moonscape stretched into the distance, everything the colur of milk chocolate. Long angular shadows accentuated every hill, every crater. As the sun arched higher, the plains and canyons and mountains brightened to a agunmetal gray, while the shadows shrank. At full lunar noontide, the sun glared down upon a bleached and alost featureless world.

Now we have come to rest on the moon, and the last of the dust settles outside the LM. We throw the switches that convert this hybrid vehicle from spacecraft to dwelling. Thus begin our 67 hours of lunar residence. We are on a still and arid world – where each blazing day and each sub – freezing night stretch through 355 earth hours. We have landed in the bright morning of a moon day. When we depart, the sun will not have reached zenith.

It is sobering to realize that we are the only living souls on this silent sphere, perhaps the only sentient beings in our solar system not confined to earth. Though we have slipped the bonds of our home planet, we remain earthmen. So we keep our clocks set to Houston time and gear our lives to the 24 – hours cycle we have always known.

Opening the top hatch for a preliminary reconnaissance, I peer out at a world seemingly embalmed in the epoch of its creation. Each line, each form blends into the harmonious whole of a single fluid sculpture. Craters left by “recent” meteorites – merely millions of years ago – stand out, startlingly white, like fresh scar tissue against the soft beige of the undulating terrain.

Too be continue part two

Here...feeling’s...the original contents by www.sensualityface.com or www.fairyage.com / describe with the help of Modern English & David R. Scott