USS Hornet (CV-12) 27 March 1967. She reached Japan exactly a month later and departed the Sasebo base on 19 May for the war zone. She operated in Vietnamese waters throughout the first half of 1967. "Hornet" recovered the astronauts from the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11, on 24 July 1969. President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard "Hornet" prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. The first steps on Earth of returning moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, are marked
Buzz Aldrin Moon. This mission allowed Aldrin to maintain his record EVA duration until it was surpassed in the Apollo 14 mission. He was also the first person to urinate while on the Moon. Aldrin's first words on the Moon were "Beautiful view", to which Armstrong asked "Isn't it magnificent?". Aldrin answered, "Magnificent desolation." Most of the iconic photographs of an astronaut on the Moon taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts are of Aldrin; Armstrong appears in just two color photographs. "As the sequence of lunar operations evolved," Aldrin explained, "Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of