Falling to Earth

by Al Worden

  In the meantime, other engineers prepared the equipment we’d use for this ambitious flight. Although I wouldn’t be driving it myself, I found the work on the lunar rover fascinating. The rover was designed to address a fundamental need: without some kind of vehicle, astronauts would not be able to explore as much of the moon’s surface. But the rover wasn’t the only design that had been put forward.

  During one of my visits to North American Aviation, I remember talking to some of the engineers over lunch, and they mentioned something fun they had out on the backyard that I could try if I wanted. When I agreed, they took me to the most bizarre flying vehicle prototype I had ever seen, a small, flat, circular platform, with a four-foot pole sticking out of the top. On the top of the pole was a set of bicycle handles, looking a little like a pogo stick. The engineers put me in a protective suit, strapped me into a safety harness, then asked me to stand on the platform and grip the handlebars. They quickly explained that one handle had a throttle control, and when I twisted it I would activate an air hose that blew down at high pressure from under the platform, counterbalancing my weight. It would probably be unstable, they warned me, so the harness was there in case the platform started to tip over.

  I turned the throttle control and, wow, that thing was a kick! It took a lot of getting used to, trying to balance on a carpet of air as I revved it up and slithered and shimmied around. The vehicle was possible to master after some practice, but it took skill. With no control system to keep the platform stable, I had to use my natural instincts to stay upright. It was tough but great fun to fly.

  Sadly, it was just a rough prototype of an idea, and nothing like that ever flew to the moon. It would have been a great experience to fly over the lunar surface surveying large areas much faster than walking would allow. But the budget cuts that whittled away the Apollo program meant NASA abandoned ambitious plans such as lunar flyers. Fortunately the lunar rover idea survived, although in a stripped-down, basic version of earlier designs. We also had to wait until the end of 1969 for the green light to develop and build the final version.

  The Boeing Company had only about eighteen months to design and build the first car to drive on the moon. It was a crazily short amount of time to come up with something so innovative, especially since the lunar rover needed to fold up like a pretzel on the side of the lunar module for the journey to the moon’s surface. When it reached the moon, the rover had to be unfolded again and ready to drive in a short amount of time. It amazed me how fast Boeing came up with a working vehicle.

  But not everything went smoothly. I distinctly recall one time that Boeing was having a real problem getting the rover’s electrical system to work. Fortunately, General Motors was Boeing’s prime subcontractor for the vehicle, and the astronauts had some great contacts within that company because of our Corvette deal. On this occasion a discreet phone call was made to Ed Cole, the president of General Motors and a good friend, describing what was not working. He immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and what needed to be done. The prototype car underwent some General Motors tests that Boeing may not have thought to do, and soon afterward the problems were fixed. Although NASA managers generally frowned on astronauts being cozy with the captains of industry, on occasions like this our personal relationships helped move the program forward and cut through a lot of red tape.

  Our crew with full-size mockups of the lunar rover and lunar module

  But the rover was of more concern to Dave and Jim. They would be the ones driving it on the surface, so they spent a huge amount of time together training with it. There were other new pieces of equipment that directly affected me, and I wanted to focus my time on them instead.

  The Apollo service module had been modified after Apollo 13 to make it much safer. I’d had a number of conversations about it with Jack Swigert, while the engineers and technicians tried to work out what had gone wrong on his mission. Jack had followed the flight plan to the letter, and yet an oxygen tank had exploded. The two of us had worked hard on the spacecraft’s malfunction procedures, so we were concerned that a normal procedure might somehow have caused the damage. It was almost a relief when we learned the oxygen tank had an undetected flaw: an easy fix. There was nothing that Jack could have done to prevent the explosion.

  For Apollo 15, there would be even bigger changes to the service module. While I orbited the moon alone, I would operate an entire bay of instruments built into the side of the service module. We called it the SIM bay, or Scientific Instrument Module, and it contained a huge amount of scientific equipment to study the moon in great detail. For example, I would have two different cameras to extensively photograph the surface. A high-resolution panoramic camera would take long, thin photos, capturing objects as small as three feet on the lunar surface while I flew overhead. I also had another, wider-range camera that I could use to help cartographers create a detailed map of the moon. To help calibrate the photos, a laser beam would fire at the surface so we could tell exactly how high up I was, and therefore the distances and feature sizes in the photographs.

  I would also have instruments that could detect gamma rays, alpha particles, and X-rays, all of which could tell us a great deal about the composition of the moon’s surface. If volcanic gases were also still escaping from the moon, even in minute quantities, we should be able to measure them. When added to the photographs I would take with a handheld camera through the spacecraft windows, I would be an independent scientific laboratory, able to gather data on the moon from above like no human ever had before. At the end of the mission, I’d even get to launch a tiny satellite, which we would leave in lunar orbit to continue making discoveries.

  Explaining the SIM bay operations to the press using a model of the command and service module

  It was exciting stuff for me and for the scientists who hoped to unlock more of the moon’s secrets. We were moving into far more complex areas than previous missions, doing work that at times sounded more like science fiction. Soon I would be skimming across an alien world, studying and recording it in huge detail. I couldn’t wait.

  I worked with the scientists who designed the SIM bay experiments and with the flight planners who integrated our activities into a flight plan with an organized timeline. We ensured that my orbital operations fit well with the surface work, not just in an operational sense, but also in a scientific sense. It would be a powerful combination: Dave and Jim collecting rocks on the surface while I recorded the chemical composition of an entire region from orbit.

  This individual training meant I saw less of Jim and Dave as we began to concentrate more and more on the unique elements of our mission. The two of them spent a lot of time on Long Island working with the lunar module, as well as practicing the activities they would conduct on the lunar surface. Even when we trained together, I was often alone in the command module simulator, talking to them in the lunar module simulator. We were probably only in the same simulator for 20 percent of the training time. That made sense, as there were only a limited number of times, such as launch and reentry, when we would work as a trio. For maneuvers, midcourse corrections, and changing our orbit around the moon, it made more sense for me to train solo.

  I felt that my work was just as important as the lunar surface exploration. The rocks collected on the surface would be the ground truth, an important part of the puzzle. Dave and Jim would collect samples, identify where they found them, and take photos to mark the locations. When we returned them to Houston, those rocks could be analyzed in greater detail. We could then compare them to the data I would collect of that whole area from orbit and work out a system where the two sets of data agreed with each other. Since I would be passing over other sites where moon landings had been and would be made, we could build up quite a database of comparison. With this combination of information, we could learn about other areas of the moon without ever needing to land there. Since Apollo wouldn’t land on the moon as many times as originally planned, this infor
mation would be vital to collect.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. As engineers and technicians finalized their work preparing the first-ever SIM bay, they constantly ran into technical problems. Some of the equipment came out from the spacecraft on long booms, and this was tough to replicate in Earth’s gravity. When the instruments were turned on, the data did not always flow well. The engineers made a lot of last-moment tweaks and adjustments. I was too busy training to be very involved and just had to hope it would all be ready in time for our flight.

  I was fascinated by most space science, but not impressed with one area—medical experiments. We trusted our regular doctors to take good care of us, but we did not trust the medical team assigned to the flight. They were not our regular flight surgeons and didn’t have the normal doctor-patient relationship with us.

  The mission doctors tried very hard to think up experiments for us to do in space, and most of them went way beyond anything we would consider. For example, they wanted to insert a catheter into one astronaut for the flight, threading it in through his veins into the heart. The doctors were curious to see how the heart worked during a spaceflight. We, of course, were horrified at this dangerous request. So we struck a deal: if the doctors could prove it was a benign test, we would consider it. A flight surgeon volunteered to do the test while riding a bicycle ergometer. After about five minutes of riding the bike, he had a heart attack. That ended that possibility.

  Fortunately, we could trust most of the other professionals attached to our mission. In fact, they were the best in the world at their specialist areas. A lot of my intense training still focused on geology, and I wanted to squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of our time at the moon. Jim and Dave, along with their backups, trained with Lee Silver, who was an incredibly skilled field geologist from Caltech. It’s hard to imagine a better person to bridge the gap between academic geology and the test pilot mentality. He was tough and never let up in his passion and intensity to push us as hard as he could. He would have his trainees up and about by five in the morning on those field trips because he was raring to go and explore. As well as pushing hard, he also used every trick in the book to keep his students excited and enthusiastic, knowing that he had to earn the attention of astronauts who were constantly pulled in different directions by demands on their time. He was just what NASA needed, and our expedition was immeasurably improved by his participation.

  While Dave and Jim worked with Lee on what might be discovered on the surface, I studied with one of the most interesting and memorable characters NASA ever brought into its fold. “King” Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-born geologist, worked for the Bellcomm think tank at NASA headquarters. He was asked to help train me and the other command module pilots on what we might see from lunar orbit. It was the happiest part of all my training, because Farouk was a vast storehouse of knowledge.

  To say that Farouk was eager and into his subject is an understatement. He was, and still is, a ball of energy and fun. Dark-haired and slim, Farouk was upbeat, not hyper but most definitely a type A personality. Simply put, he made everything interesting. Even if we spent a long day working together, I never grew tired of him, because he was so good at what he did. Farouk became like a brother to me: very close and very special. After a long day of intensive work, I would still want to spend time with him, and we would go out drinking together. While Farouk tried to match me drink for drink, we’d share stories about our backgrounds. Since he had grown up in such a different culture from mine, I found his tales enthralling. His childhood stories of the Nile Delta differed greatly from my snowy Michigan memories.

  Farouk’s entire office was plastered with enlarged photos of the lunar surface. The first time I stepped in there, the black-and-white random swirls and patterns reminded me of a psychedelic hippie hangout, but every photo was a learning opportunity.

  Farouk instinctively understood what was ahead of me. As well as teaching me surface features, he’d also use the maps to train me to work fast. I learned to recognize and name lunar features as quickly as if I were seeing them from a speedy lunar orbit. There was little point learning them if my mind was not fast enough to recognize them. I also wanted to ensure that all of the photographic equipment I carried with me could accurately record what I saw. We spent hours going over the maps and making notes about the direction the spacecraft would need to be oriented to take the best images. It would be a complicated ballet of movement for me to fly, especially if I didn’t want to use up too much fuel. But we knew the effort would have a huge payoff in scientific return.

  As Farouk animatedly took me through the trajectories I would be flying over the moon, my appreciation of the lunar surface grew. He allowed me to get to know geology by really feeling it, not just by memorizing. We studied every tiny detail of the craters and other features I would be passing over. Not only would I come to learn all of their names, but I would also understand what was special about each crater, what I needed to look for in detail, and how to describe in it ways that would help the scientists listening back on Earth. I grew more and more confident in giving these descriptions.

  Although I spent a great deal of time with many scientists involved with our mission, I probably spent more time with Farouk than with anybody else. When I worked with the other scientists, I was deliberating when to extend and retract experiment booms, when to report my findings, and other operational details. With Farouk I learned how to look for things we might not even know existed.

  Our study together was so different and so much more interesting than my earlier classroom geology classes, partly because of a change in me, too. Geology wasn’t just academic to me anymore. We were preparing for a real flight, where I would look up close at something that was normally very far away. That perspective put a whole new spin on it for me.

  Studying lunar geology with the irrepressible Farouk El-Baz (right)

  I grew confident that when I reached the moon I would not only know what was going by, but also what I would see next. The lunar maps began to feel as familiar as my home street from childhood. When you drive down a familiar street, you know what is coming up soon and remember details such as who lives in which house. The moon began to feel the same way to me, even before I traveled there. The moon became a friendly place.

  I went on almost all of the geology training field trips with Dave and Jim, but I was overhead in an aircraft, at a height and speed that best simulated how landscape would pass below me on the moon. While Dave and Jim studied the small picture on the ground, I made observations about the big picture from above. Jim and Dave trained with the same kind of equipment, maps, and time between sites that they would have on the moon. We even brought along our mission’s flight directors, so they could see firsthand what we’d have to do on the moon. This meant that they would truly understand what they would have to do to support us from Houston by radio, when we were hundreds of thousands of miles away. Our training and observations began to mesh. By coordinating what I saw from orbit with what Dave and Jim studied on the ground, we’d have a powerful combination of knowledge and observations.

  Although Jim and I became very good at geology, Dave absorbed the geology training better than anybody. He didn’t just know the facts, he truly understood them, which is the ultimate goal of any training. We lived it, day and night, and so the geology seeped into us all. Dave had every excuse to skimp on the subject if he’d wanted to: we had so many other things we needed to learn for our mission. But he was a true believer and his enthusiasm motivated everyone involved in the mission.

  Dave’s backup commander, my good friend Dick Gordon, also put everything he had into training. With so many flights canceled, Dick had little chance to rotate into an Apollo command position before the program ended. Yet I never had the feeling that he was only doing all of this work for the possibility of another flight. Dick is a trouper and seemed delighted to be on a crew backing us up. If he was sad that he would probably never walk on the moon, he neve
r let on.

  I received some additional training from the photo geologists of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and learned a good deal about how they analyzed images for information. This training helped me when learning how to take photographs. Nevertheless, for three years before the mission, I also did personal training, which helped me even more. I figured that learning to take photos was like practicing the piano: it takes a long time just to learn a little bit, but the more you play the better you become. So I carried a camera with me at all times and took photos of just about everything, trying to perfect my technique.

  I was particularly interested in taking photographs at low light levels. I would often go to places such as parking lots in the middle of the night and test my camera. Even though it looked very dark to my eyes, I knew there was a little bit of glow in the sky at all times, and with sensitive film I would get a good picture. Luckily, the police never saw me lurking around in odd, dark places in the middle of the night with a camera. I doubt they would have believed my explanation.

  I spent a lot of time trying to learn the best settings and fine-tuning my ability with high-speed film because of some of the difficult experiments I planned to try on the flight. I wanted to take photos of star fields that were extremely faint. It was kind of chancy that I would get anything on the film, but I would give it my best shot.

  I was even hoping to pick up on film the Gegenschein, a faint reflection of sunlight from interplanetary dust orbiting the sun. There are also stable equilibrium points in our Earth-moon system where the gravitational pull of Earth and moon balance, and I planned to aim a camera at them. A spacecraft placed in one of these points should stay in the same place forever, unless it used its rockets to leave. Scientists believed one point in particular might gradually trap dust over time. I planned to mount a camera in the window, gently move the spacecraft, then try to keep it steady while I took photos. For an exposure as long as ten seconds it would be impossible to hold the command module completely still, and any photos were likely to be a little shaky. Nevertheless, we hoped to capture images of some of the faintest and strangest things in our astronomical neighborhood.