Credit: NASA
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they might still land “long”, and far
to the south of their intended spot.
This fear was confirmed by Capcom
Ed Mitchell; they were, indeed, 0.5
miles (0.8 km) or more south of track.
Scott knew that, even with the rover,
this might impair the effectiveness of
their explorations.
During those final moments, he
clicked his hand controller 18 times,
forward and to the side, adjusting
their trajectory to bring Falcon back
onto its prescribed path.
Those seconds were so unreal—the
clarity of the scene, the weird behavior of the lunar dust, the strange,
almost-unpowered sense of drifting
like a snowflake through the majesty
of the lunar mountains—that Irwin
mentally convinced himself that he
was still in the simulator back in Houston. If he had admitted to himself
that this was for real, he felt that he
would have been just too excited to
do his job properly. Yet if this was a
simulation, it was one of the smoothest that he had ever flown. They
were very close to the surface now
and lunar dust obscured the landing
site entirely, like a thick fog.
It was only Irwin’s call that the blue
Contact Light had illuminated which
finally convinced them that they had
touched down. The time was 6:16
p.m. EDT on 30 July 1971 and, with
a firm thud, the seventh and eighth
men from Earth reached the surface
of the Moon. “Okay, Houston,”
radioed Scott, “the Falcon is on the
Plain at Hadley!” His reference to the
landing site as a “plain” paid due
tribute to Scott’s alma mater, the Military Academy at West Point, whose
parade ground was also nicknamed
“The Plain”.
What did cause concern was that
Falcon had come down on uneven
ground and one of its rear footpads
had planted itself inside a small crater. (Mission Control would later call
their lander “The Leaning Tower of
Pisa”, an epithet which Scott did not
appreciate!)
Irwin remembered the landing
as the hardest he had ever been
involved in; “a tremendous impact
with a pitching and rolling motion.
Everything rocked around and I
thought all the gear was going to fall
off. I was sure something was broken
and we might have to go into one
of those abort situations. If you pass
45 degrees and are still moving, you
have to abort. We j