Seconds to go: Aldrin aboard the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, preparing to land.
Credit: NASA
I did feel a tinge of stage fright. I think we both did. Perhaps the worst moment was when Houston announced that the President wanted to talk to us. My heart rate, which had been low during the entire flight, suddenly jumped. One quarter of the Earth's people were listening on radio or watching on TV.
We were alone, but the immense feeling of being watched probably hampered our operation slightly. But it also gave us the adrenalin to keep functioning.
My strongest memory of those few hours on the lunar surface was the constant worry that we'd never accomplish all the experiments we were scheduled to do. There wasn't time to savour the moment. It seemed as though what we were doing was so significant that to pause for a moment and reflect metaphysically was really contrary to our mission.
We weren't trained to smell the roses. We weren't hired to utter philosophical truisms on the spur of the moment. We had a job to do.
I do remember that one realisation wafted through my mind when I was up there. I noted that here were two guys farther away from anything than two guys had ever been before. That's what I thought about. And yet, at the same time, I was very conscious that everything we did was being closely scrutinised more than four hundred thousand kilometres away.
As we left the surface to re-enter the spacecraft, we performed a brief ceremony. I reached into my shoulder pocket, pulled out a packet, and tossed it out onto the surface. It contained a patch commemorating the three American astronauts who had perished when their spacecraft was engulfed in an explosive fire during the simulation test for the first Apollo flight. Next there were two medallions in memory of Russian cosmonauts who had also died. And then there was a disc containing messages from the heads of state of 72 countries.
We had thought long and hard to come up with what was - to me - the most important symbol of our flight: the olive branch of peace, carried to the Moon by our spacecraft, the Eagle (named after the American bald eagle). I had four olive branches made of gold pins. We left one on the Moon, and the three of us - myself, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins (who had been orbiting above on our craft Columbia) - kept one each for our wives on our return.
I thought it would convey a lot more of the significance of our first flight: that the mission was more than just a culmination of a long national effort to reach the Moon by the end of the decade. It carried greater meaning than that.
Dr Aldrin is a retired pilot and astronaut. The first Moon landing by Apollo 11 took place at 9.56pm on Sunday, 20 July 1969 (Houston time). A small crater on the Moon near the landing site is named in his honour. Dr Aldrin is also a member of the COSMOS Editorial Advisory Board.
