disappeared. This meant no one could spend more than an hour outside, including the time it took him to reach the scene of operations and get back again. This reduced each man’s actual working time to a mere few minutes. But we did our best and, I must admit, achieved quite a lot under the circumstances. Twice a day we gathered inside the ship for meals and eight hours out of every twenty-four were spent resting. What with sorting and classifying the specimens, reporting our findings to base and reorganising the exploration schedule according to Control’s instructions, we had very little time to ourselves and no time at all, you might say, to enjoy the scenery.
The novelty of being in the centre of a moonscape where harsh, sharp-edged, deep shadows stood out in vivid contrast to the illuminated areas, where, in spite of the sunlight, the sky was always black and the stars always visible, soon wore off. We soon came to regard the Moon as an unfriendly, indeed extremely hostile planet where any kind of life was unwelcome. We were all looking forward to our return. The first thing we did each day when, armed with charts, theodolite, telescopic camera or other equipment, we left the ship to carry out our work under the fierce sun, was to glance at the waning Earth hanging in the sky. She looked so cool and friendly. We were all longing to go home.
In spite of the dullness, the exploratory routine was not without incident. First day out, Lemmy discovered that the low gravitational pull allowed him to clear greater heights than an Olympic champion. He startled us all by easily clearing a rock more than twenty feet high. The sensation pleased him so much he would have tried an ever higher one had not Jet commanded him to stop. The risk of accident was too great for that kind of game.
The second incident was far more serious. Mitch was out with Jet at the time. Luna had not landed on the exact spot intended. We were about 5000 yards out, in fact. Considering that our aim had been made from earth, nearly 242,000 miles away, that wasn’t too bad. But the miscalculation meant that our area of exploration had to be changed slightly, which was why we were continually receiving modifications to the schedule from Control.
Less than a hundred yards from us was a crater which, because of its peculiar shape, we were ordered to examine. We were to photograph it and extract soil and rock specimens from the rim, but not to go down into it unless instructed. Jet and Mitch undertook the preliminary survey while I remained on watch in the ship and Lemmy rested.
I watched them both approach the crater. It was quite a small one, being only about seventy feet in diameter and some twenty-five feet in depth. Its walls sloped gently downwards and inwards, giving the object the appearance of a washbowl. It even had a ‘plughole’ in its centre, about ten feet in diameter. So far as we could see, the hole was the opening to a well-like shaft, but how deep it went or what lay in its bottom we had no means of telling without closer examination.
Its rim, although a little crumbly in places, was almost perfectly circular, with a few large boulders resting on it here and there. Bright streaks, almost white in colour and contrasting strongly with the grey of the lava-covered Bay, ran from the rim in every direction. The closer they were to the crater, the brighter they looked. As they got further from it, they grew fainter until, a quarter of a mile away, they faded out altogether.
Jet and Mitch reached the rim and set about their work; Jet to collect samples of lava dust and Mitch to knock off chips of rock from one of the boulders. I kept them in view of the television camera and watched their every move. Jet had squatted down, rather awkwardly, in his space suit, while Mitch, holding on to the rock with one hand, began to work his way round to the inner side of the boulder. He was, I thought, taking unnecessary risks and I quietly brought his
The novelty of being in the centre of a moonscape where harsh, sharp-edged, deep shadows stood out in vivid contrast to the illuminated areas, where, in spite of the sunlight, the sky was always black and the stars always visible, soon wore off. We soon came to regard the Moon as an unfriendly, indeed extremely hostile planet where any kind of life was unwelcome. We were all looking forward to our return. The first thing we did each day when, armed with charts, theodolite, telescopic camera or other equipment, we left the ship to carry out our work under the fierce sun, was to glance at the waning Earth hanging in the sky. She looked so cool and friendly. We were all longing to go home.
In spite of the dullness, the exploratory routine was not without incident. First day out, Lemmy discovered that the low gravitational pull allowed him to clear greater heights than an Olympic champion. He startled us all by easily clearing a rock more than twenty feet high. The sensation pleased him so much he would have tried an ever higher one had not Jet commanded him to stop. The risk of accident was too great for that kind of game.
The second incident was far more serious. Mitch was out with Jet at the time. Luna had not landed on the exact spot intended. We were about 5000 yards out, in fact. Considering that our aim had been made from earth, nearly 242,000 miles away, that wasn’t too bad. But the miscalculation meant that our area of exploration had to be changed slightly, which was why we were continually receiving modifications to the schedule from Control.
Less than a hundred yards from us was a crater which, because of its peculiar shape, we were ordered to examine. We were to photograph it and extract soil and rock specimens from the rim, but not to go down into it unless instructed. Jet and Mitch undertook the preliminary survey while I remained on watch in the ship and Lemmy rested.
I watched them both approach the crater. It was quite a small one, being only about seventy feet in diameter and some twenty-five feet in depth. Its walls sloped gently downwards and inwards, giving the object the appearance of a washbowl. It even had a ‘plughole’ in its centre, about ten feet in diameter. So far as we could see, the hole was the opening to a well-like shaft, but how deep it went or what lay in its bottom we had no means of telling without closer examination.
Its rim, although a little crumbly in places, was almost perfectly circular, with a few large boulders resting on it here and there. Bright streaks, almost white in colour and contrasting strongly with the grey of the lava-covered Bay, ran from the rim in every direction. The closer they were to the crater, the brighter they looked. As they got further from it, they grew fainter until, a quarter of a mile away, they faded out altogether.
Jet and Mitch reached the rim and set about their work; Jet to collect samples of lava dust and Mitch to knock off chips of rock from one of the boulders. I kept them in view of the television camera and watched their every move. Jet had squatted down, rather awkwardly, in his space suit, while Mitch, holding on to the rock with one hand, began to work his way round to the inner side of the boulder. He was, I thought, taking unnecessary risks and I quietly brought his
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