I had the only window at this point, and I looked out, and doggone if the moon wasn’t visible in the daylight right straight out the top of the window. I know they’re doin’ their job right because the moon’s right straight ahead and that’s where we’re pointed and they’re gonna launch us right straight to this thing.
In Africa, there are a lot of nomads out in the desert. Clear desert nights you see the fires from all of them. These little yellow dots that represent fires from all these nomads camping out. Then you recognize the broad area you’re looking at and each of the little dots represented people, other humans that are out there in an environment that I would consider more strange than the environment they might think about me.
When you’re out there in this little command module you see the risk you’re taking because you realize if the glass breaks or the computers quit working or the electrical system quits working you’re not going to get back. You have time to contemplate this, you have time to think about it, you have time to run it through your mind a lot of different times.
My mind’s one that just goes constantly. I took a sleeping pill, slept like a baby. I had one dream that was very vivid. In my dream we were driving a rover up to the north and you didn’t really feel like you were out there. It was untouched. The serenity of it… had a pristine purity about it We crossed a hill, I felt, “Gosh I been here before,” and there was a set of tracks out in front of us. We asked Houston if we could follow the tracks and they said yeah. We turned and followed the tracks, within an hour or so we found this vehicle, looked just like the rover. Two people in it, they looked like me and John, had been there for thousands of years. It was not a nightmare type situation, nothing like that. Probably one of the most real experiences of my life.
All four of the excepts above are from Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary, For All Mankind, a film cut from the images taken during the Apollo missions, in the words of the twenty four astronauts who went to the moon. A couple of notes- the first picture, of the moon hanging above the launch pad, is actually a photo that the director and his film crew pasted on a hatch cover at the Johnson Space Center to illustrate Ken Mattingly’s description of what he saw in flight. This was done without much controversy (director fakes moon launch!) and in is an example of Herzog’s ecstatic truth in action. The fourth excerpt is an account of the first remembered dream a human being has had on the moon, a dream about déjà vu. Small steps take us back.
wild walking snorks!