07-22-2009, 06:18 PM
Steamtrains Wrote:A follow-up....Is that incident about them using a pen someone dropped in the command module, to activate the ascent engine in the lander, true..??
(Pheewww...some sentence structure...)
The documentary did include the story of Buzz Aldrin using a pen to activate the ascent engine in the lander. Something on the switch broke so they couldn't fire it up. For a while things looked grim. Then Aldrin used the pen. The documentary had footage of him years later holding the pen and talking about it. Apparently Nixon was so worried that the astronauts wouldn't get off the moon that his speech writers wrote an address for him to read to the nation mourning the lost crew.
Ralph