Only a dozen men have walked the airless, forbidding surface of our Moon. One day, others will too - but until then, only those 12 can ever know what it is like … and Buzz Aldrin was the lunar module pilot on the very first mission.
Nothing prepared me for the starkness of the terrain. It was barren and rolling, and the horizon was much closer than I was used to. Earth's diameter is such that its inhabitants have no personal awareness of the curvature; it's easy to understand why, for centuries, it was believed to be flat … but on the smaller Moon, my impression was that we were on a ball; or on the knoll of a hill that extended more than 2 km, and was neatly rounded off. I even felt a bit disoriented because of the nearness of the horizon.
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