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ingenuity and life was now compacted into the next sixty seconds and the judgement of one man. The room was held in an agonized silence.
    At thirty feet, Armstrong found
Eagle
to be drifting backward. He didn’t know why, but knew that landing while he couldn’t see where he was going would be extremely dangerous. He wrestled with the controls, eventually halting the backward movement, but picking up a horizontal drift in the process. He felt frustrated that he wasn’t flying well enough, and would have given anything to buy more time, but there was none to buy. They were now hanging twenty feet above the surface of the Moon and had entered the “dead-man’s curve” – the point at which bailing out becomes impossible and if the manoeuvre doesn’t work, you crash.
    From the earth: “Thirty seconds.”
    Aldrin: “Contact light.”
    Through the storm of dust, whiskery probes attached to the LM’s feet had made contact with something. The pilot had been instructed to cut
Eagle
’s descent engine at this height, because engineers calculated that it could be blown up by the back pressure from its own exhaust if he didn’t. But Armstrong didn’t do it. In his fight to keep the thing steady, he failed to hear Aldrin’s call.
    Fortunately, the engineers were wrong about the back pressure. Still firing,
Eagle
settled into the dust so easily that neither man felt the impact. Armstrong’s hand flew to the Engine Stop button and he announced, “Shutdown.” There was a whirr of action as he hit more switches and buttons and Aldrin ran through the post-landing checklist. Then there was a moment of stillness. The two men turned to face each other, grinning through their helmet visors, and clasped hands. After whatseemed like an age, Armstrong advised a waiting world that the
Eagle
had landed. The announcement that his words were coming from “Tranquillity Base” momentarily threw Charlie Duke, who became tongue-tied and began “Roger, Twan– ” before gathering himself and offering a correction.
    Tranquillity. They were on the Sea of Tranquillity. With ten seconds’ worth of fuel to spare, they were down.
    Those last ten minutes contained 600 of the most vivid seconds a human being ever lived and we knew nothing of them. Countless things went not exactly
wrong,
but different from plan and expectation,
below optimum
in NASA’s arid tongue, and for decades to come Steve Bales will find it hard to listen to tapes of the landing without feelings of discomfort and foreboding, even knowing that it turned out all right. Now Armstrong and Aldrin have to prepare the craft to take off again in a hurry, in case of trouble. After that, they are under orders to get some sleep, but Armstrong won’t sleep, because he’s trying to work out what to say when he becomes the first human to set foot on another world. No one seems to have noticed that this is also the first properly global media event: in a future the astronauts can’t yet see, politicians will have marketeers and spin doctors to help with this sort of thing. In July 1969, however, he’s on his own. It’s 3:17 PM Houston time, 1:17 PM in Orinda, California. The walk is set for ten hours from now. What are we going to do until then?
    What’s it like to be alive in 1969?
    Bobby Kennedy has just been assassinated and so has Martin Luther King. It’s a strange word,
assassinate,
which to my eight-year-old ears sounds sort of clandestine and exotic, not like the blunt and scary
killed
or
murdered.
The Kennedy shooting happened a year ago, but I recall it very clearly, because we were driving to Disneyland the next morning and I woke to Dad telling me that we might have to call the trip off because people might not want to skip around having fun at such a terrible time. But in the end they did, so we went. I don’t know why they shothim, or his brother. No one seems