LOS ANGELES - Fifty years after their history-making voyage to the moon, Buzz Aldrin recalls the first moments of the Apollo 11 launch being so smooth that he and his two crewmates, Neil Armstrong and
Mike Collins, were unsure precisely when they left the ground.
Aldrin says he and his crewmates were so absorbed in doing their jobs that they were oddly disconnected from how momentous the occasion was as it unfolded for hundreds of millions of people on Earth, watching it all on live television. It was 50 years ago to the day on Tuesday that Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins were launched into space atop a Saturn 5 rocket from Florida's Kennedy Space Center."We did not know the instant of leaving the ground. We only knew it from the instruments and voice communications which confirmed liftoff," he recalled. "We sort of looked at each other and thought, 'We must be on our way.
"We knew we were continuing to burn fuel. We knew what we had, then we heard '30 seconds left.' If we ran out of fuel, we knew it would be a hard landing. We saw the shadow cast in front of us. That was new, not something we saw in the simulator," Aldrin recounted. Seconds later came Armstrong's famed radio announcement to mission control in Houston - "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
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