‘You cats take it easy on the lunar surface,’ said Mike Collins to Armstrong and Aldrin, as he unhitched Eagle and sent them on their way to the moon. Two and a half hours later, he told Charlie Duke, down in Houston, “Listen, babe, everything’s going just swimmingly.’ Some people – writers, mostly, who would have fainted with dismay after one day of basic training – lamented that the men whom America sent into space were not articulate or impassioned enough to register the enormity of their undertaking, but such an ungrateful complaint is wrong in every respect. The astronauts knew full well that they were pioneers on behalf of a planet, and it was in the very ordinariness of the reactions that they carried the human voice – always impressionable, never free from caution, resting on dependable words when fancy ones sound too rich – across 240,000 miles. ‘It’s big, and bright, and beautiful,’ Neil Armstrong said as Eagle settled onto the surface. ‘Beautiful view,’ agreed Aldrin a while later, as he followed down the steps. ‘Isn’t that something?’ Armstrong said, as if they were stretching their legs at the end of an August picnic. When he went to launch-pad, Armstrong had in his pockets a roll of Lifesavers and a comb. After all, you never know whom you might meet.
–“Astronauts” Anthony Lane on the Apollo program