Falling to Earth

by Al Worden

  So a few weeks before the flight, I picked up the phone and called the Sesame Street production offices in New York. The children’s show had been on TV less than two years, yet it was already highly regarded as an educational and stimulating experience for young minds.

  Reaching a producer, I explained my idea for an episode about an Apollo launch. Maybe, I suggested, they could send a film crew down to the Cape to capture the event. Vicariously, then, the kids would feel the impact and excitement. The producer didn’t sound too interested. “Most of us are beginning our summer break,” he explained wearily. “It might be hard to pull a crew together. Call me back in a week,” he sighed, “and I’ll let you know.”

  I called him back in a week. They could come to the Cape, but the show wanted something in return, the producer declared rather pompously. Puzzled by his approach, I asked what it was. “Your spacecraft,” he responded. “We’d like you to name it ‘Big Bird,’ after our show’s lead character.”

  I imagined for a moment our gleaming spacecraft. Then NASA’s reaction if I had asked to rename it after an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow canary. I looked at the receiver and said “Thank you very much and good-bye.” Screw Sesame Street.

  I’d wasted a precious week, and we still needed kids. So I immediately called Pittsburgh, and another children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The producer put me right through to Fred Rogers, the show’s much-loved host. We chatted for a few minutes, I explained my idea, and he replied that it fit perfectly with a series he was filming about parents going away. He wanted to teach children about fathers leaving the house to go down to the store, leaving in the morning to go to work, or going on a trip. This was a perfect match, he told me—Dad is going to the moon for two weeks. As a father, I could relate. Fred proposed filming a show both before and after the trip. A great idea, I agreed.

  Fred put me on hold for a few minutes and lined up the PBS Nova mobile filming crew in Boston, probably the best crew in the nation. They were available, and we scheduled it all in that first phone call.

  Three days before I began my pre-launch quarantine period, the film crew arrived at the Cape. They filmed Fred and me talking about space in the launch control center, then I showed them how I put on a spacesuit and how each part worked. Fred worked through a long list of kids’ questions about astronaut experiences. I could answer many of them, but I had to confess I couldn’t answer others until after my flight. I asked Fred to let me take the list into space. I would think about them during the flight, I promised, and then answer them when I returned. Fred liked this idea. In fact, instead of making two regular shows out of the footage, he would now do a special.

  I worked on a number of follow-up shows with Fred, and we really hit on what kids wanted to know. For example, children were fascinated by space food, so I took some to the show to reconstitute, and Fred and I ate it right there on air. I took a large moon rock to another taping so the kids could look at it. Those shows did a lot of good, bringing a human element into spaceflight. Many of the ideas evolved into a children’s book I wrote in 1974, named I Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon. Fred wrote the foreword.

  But I did get some good-natured ribbing at the Cape. A few days before the flight, in quarantine, we heard an announcement over the PA system: “Everybody get to a TV set.” Sure enough, it was the Mister Rogers special. It was so far outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy. Astronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn’t do kiddies’ shows. They particularly made fun of me when I carefully navigated the inevitable “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” question. But I loved the final result, and Deke got a good laugh out of watching it. Most importantly, kids loved it.

  Our quarantine at the Cape started a few weeks before the flight. Nobody wanted a slight sniffle to delay a multimillion-dollar lunar mission. Those who worked with us directly wore surgical masks. Everyone else we saw only on the other side of a glass window. Farouk and I continued to work on my geology training on different sides of the glass, and I chatted to a lot of visiting dignitaries, too.

  My parents made a vacation out of the launch. They drove their tiny travel trailer all the way down from Michigan and stayed in a little trailer park in Cocoa Beach. We visited through the glass. My brothers and sisters arrived a little later, followed by my girls, Alison and Merrill. Their mother didn’t come with them, but NASA took good care of my daughters; they flew them down in a Gulfstream jet from Houston. Like most astronaut kids, none of it seemed like a big deal to them. Many neighborhood dads went to the moon, so this was no different from the stories their friends told.

  I was very upbeat about the flight. I never said anything to my family about what might happen to me other than the positives of the mission. I never wrote letters to my daughters in case I didn’t survive or anything like that. Nevertheless, the thought was in my mind that I might never return. I never shared those feelings with anybody at the time. I didn’t see the point. But I did make sure my will was up to date. That was pretty simple: all my possessions would go to my daughters.

  I talked to my closest friends a lot on the phone. But one night, I decided the quarantine was crazy—I would make a break for it. After the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, I silently snuck out to my car and drove into Cocoa Beach to meet up with my buddies at a pre-launch party. One was a very special lady whom I was close to at the time, and it meant a lot to me to say good-bye to her in person. I couldn’t stay out for long, and it was certainly against all the rules, but I took the chance. A close friend on the medical team was also there with me, and she could have lost her job if anyone spotted us. If my bosses had checked the space center gate logs, we would have caught holy hell.

  The night before the flight, Jim Rathmann also threw a party for my family and friends. I couldn’t attend, of course, because we were watched far too closely at that point to sneak out, but I did get to chat with close friends over the phone. I remember thinking that this could be the last time I talked to them. However, the concern was less for myself. I strongly felt that if something bad happened and we died on the flight, it wouldn’t bother me. Danger came with the job. It would have really bothered me if I were the person who caused it. I think we all felt that way. None of us ever wanted to be the one who caused a major accident or incident. I never wanted to be the one my colleagues pointed fingers at and said, “Hey, you screwed up.”

  Even though we were in quarantine, we could still keep ourselves sharp with some flying. We’d head over to Patrick Air Force Base, just south of our launch site, making sure not to interact with anyone on the way. Then we flew around in T-38s, which allowed us to have fun and shake off tension. There is a lot of pressure right before a flight, and flying allowed me to relieve it. Additionally, there was talk about people feeling disoriented, dizzy, and sick in weightlessness. I tried to put my inner ear through as many weird sensations as possible in a jet, hoping to prevent any motion sickness. I would roll, spin, and have fun. I don’t know if it helped, but it was a great way to blow off steam.

  The last thing I wanted to do was crash, so I was particularly careful not to do anything crazy. Naturally we couldn’t fly too close to our launchpad, but I took the time to look over in that direction, miles away. What I could see was spectacular.

  From a distance, I could easily spot two things. One was the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn V rocket was assembled. The largest one-story building in the world, it dwarfed everything in the area, except for one other, more temporary landmark. The gleaming white Saturn V rocket looked like a toy from ten miles away, but it was still very visible. As I flew closer and compared it to the surrounding landscape, the scale really hit me. Our rocket was enormous.

  More than 360 feet tall, the length of one and a half football fields, the Saturn V was on top of a launchpad that pushed the tip of the rocket to about 500 feet above the coastal scrub. It wa
s incredible to think I would soon be sitting on top of this leviathan. I took time to study it and drink in the experience.

  The first stage of the Saturn V was enormous and squat, more than 130 feet tall, with five engine exhaust nozzles, each so big a person could crawl inside one of them. Capable of creating millions of pounds of thrust, the first stage could shove the entire rocket stack most of the way into space.

  Despite its enormous size, that first stage wasn’t enough. Above it sat a second stage, more than 80 feet tall, to thrust us through the upper atmosphere. When the first stage ran dry, it would fall away as the second stage ignited its own five engines and slammed us upward.

  The second stage could get us most of the way into orbit and was the last part of the rocket to fall back down through the atmosphere. Everything else would go to the moon. Above that second stage was a slimmer third stage, almost 60 feet tall, with one big engine that would get us into Earth orbit. Once there, that engine would relight to accelerate us out to the moon.

  Above these three giant stages, I could see where the rocket again tapered in, this time quite dramatically. I knew that inside this flared fairing sat the Falcon lunar module, its legs folded up, bolted in, and protected for the ride into space. Then, at the very top, looking tiny compared with the rest of the rocket, was our command and service module. Perched beneath a launch escape tower, designed to pull us safely away if anything went wrong with the rocket beneath us, was the Endeavour.

  It was amazing to think that it would only take a few minutes for most of this huge, precision-constructed Saturn V rocket to do its job. Then it would be thrown away. Within the first day of the mission, two of the three stages would be in shredded pieces at the bottom of the ocean, while the other would be condemned to a collision course with the moon. Our Endeavour was the only piece of the spacecraft that would return, and even then it would never be used again.

  Reluctantly, I turned my T-38 away from the Saturn V gleaming in the distance and back to the airbase. The scale of the rocket had made me philosophical about my small part in an enormous program and an enormous concept. The idea of voyaging to another world was something much bigger than us as mere people. It was worth more than human lives. In that moment, I felt deeply that I was a small piece of something transcendent—something wonderful. I was ready to fly.

  The night before launch, still in quarantine, we had a last supper with our backup crew and support crew, plus some select engineers and technicians. The chef prepared a wonderful meal, accompanied by a couple of bottles of champagne. We eventually sent him out to get a couple more bottles. It certainly took the edge off. After I made a few final phone calls to some of the pre-launch parties going on around town, I fell into a dreamless sleep, comfortable and happy, fooling myself into thinking that tomorrow would be just another day. I surprised myself by being so relaxed.

  But who was I kidding? Tomorrow would be a very different kind of day. Space beckoned.

  CHAPTER 8

  LAUNCH

  You never forget launch day. Finally, your mission is about to begin. You are in a special zone, like an athlete walking out for an Olympic event. Whatever happens, you know the day will be extreme and unforgettable.

  It was Monday, July 26, 1971. Deke Slayton woke me up around 4:30 a.m. inside our windowless crew quarters at the Cape. I’d slept well and was ready to go. It was only a short walk to the medical room, where a flight surgeon gave me a brief physical. I’d had a physical every five days for the last three weeks and—once again—the doctors found nothing wrong with me.

  I was not keen on the doctors and their tests. I remembered when Wally Schirra told me a story about the urine sample he’d given just before his Gemini flight. He asked the doctor why they needed another sample and was told it would be carefully analyzed and compared to a postflight sample to see if any changes took place in the flight. When Wally visited that same flight surgeon’s office six months later, just for kicks he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. His sample still sat in there, untouched.

  But I was delighted to see Dee O’Hara, our astronaut nurse. Dee came to the program long before I arrived. She started at the same time as the Mercury astronauts and quickly became good friends with them. While our flight surgeons came and went, Dee was always there for us. Officially, she checked each astronaut just before every single manned launch. Unofficially, we also went to her with any minor ailments because we knew we could trust her. She was kind enough to look out for our wives and kids too.

  Since my divorce, I had come to know Dee even better. We palled around together; there was quite a bond there. I cared for her like you care for a close sibling. I was very pleased to see her that morning for my final medical checks.

  I was behind a stall providing a urine sample and figured it was time for a bit of good-natured fun.

  “Hey, Dee,” I called out from behind the partition, “I’m stuck. Can you come and give me a little help?”

  “Dream on, Al!” Dee replied with a laugh. “By the way, I know where I plan to watch the launch from today, but how about you?”

  “Gee, I have no idea,” I quipped back. “Maybe I’ll head down in the direction of the beach.”

  Dee had a comeback for everything. “I know this is your first launch, rookie,” she added, “so you might want to try and find a spot that is up high. You’ll get a better view.”

  Dee was exactly what I needed that morning to make me laugh, but our time together was all too brief. I headed to the room next door, where a barber gave me a quick haircut. Who knows why—it was part of the pre-launch protocol, and I just went along with it. Perhaps we would see some strange aliens up there and we had to look our best.

  It was time to join Dave and Jim for breakfast around a big table, along with Deke and our backup and support crews. Everyone else was dressed by then, but I stayed in my bathrobe. I was about to put my spacesuit on, so why dress just to undress again? A meal of steak, scrambled eggs, and toast was a good way to start the morning, but it was also a carefully designed menu. Our low-fiber diet meant we could delay taking a crap in space as long as possible. I washed it down with a last cup of hot coffee.

  Soon enough we had to walk over to the suit room, where we dressed in our spacesuits. First, however, we strapped on biomedical harnesses to keep track of our breathing and heart rate. Then a urine collection device, so we could take a leak in the hours ahead without removing the suit. Next, a pair of long johns, followed by the bulky spacesuit. Once the suit was all zipped and buttoned up, the suit technicians put on my helmet. I was now in my own enclosed world. It was odd for me to think that the next time I took my helmet off, I would be up in space.

  After the technicians ran a pressure check on my suit, I settled in a reclining chair and started to breathe pure oxygen. I lay there alongside Dave and Jim while we purged the nitrogen from our blood just like deep-sea divers. The ceiling lights bothered Jim, so he asked for a towel to be placed over his helmet. With nothing else to do but lie there, all three of us soon dozed off.

  It didn’t seem long before we were awake again, as the calls came in from the launch control center. Everything looked good for an on-time launch. We each grabbed a portable ventilator, headed along the hallway to the elevator, and descended to where a transport van awaited us. The hallway was crowded with well-wishers from the flight crew quarters, all waving good-bye and wishing us good luck. With my helmet on, I couldn’t hear them well—only the sound of my own breathing. And in my bulky spacesuit, that hallway felt pretty narrow. I was excited and flashed a quick V-for-Victory sign to the cameras.

  As I came out of the doorway of the building and over to the van, I had a nice surprise. Some of my family were there, along with Deke Slayton. My father and I exchanged grins, and he held out his hand. I didn’t even have time to break step, we were on such a tight schedule, but I grasped his outstretched hand as I passed him and gave it a quick squeeze. My sisters and brothers were there too. I do
n’t know how they got out there—it wasn’t where families normally stood—but I suspect Deke worked it out for them. He was very good to my family in the days around the launch.

  The seven-mile drive to the launchpad dropped us off two and a half hours before liftoff. Through the van windows, we could see the crowds of people lining our route. It looked chaotic, and we were glad to have a police escort. We joked that if the liftoff was scrubbed, we had better find a different way back, because we didn’t want to run that gauntlet in reverse. Especially if some of those people were upset that we hadn’t launched.

  I was pleased so many people were there. If public interest in Apollo was tailing off, you couldn’t tell that day. Tens of thousands of people were gathered inside the space center perimeter, including more than five thousand specially invited guests. Outside the center, the press reported that around a million people had gathered to see the launch, and the nearest vacant hotel room was more than fifty miles away.

  It looked like we wouldn’t disappoint them. The weather was perfect for launch. As I stepped out of the van, I looked at the clear blue sky and grinned. Up close, the Saturn V looked amazing—it gleamed in the morning sunshine. I thought back a couple of nights, when we had all driven our Corvettes out to the launchpad. The white rocket had been lit up by bright spotlights; it looked spectacular against the black sky. In the morning it was still gorgeous, but I always thought the most impressive sight was at night, lit by all those spotlights.

  My father (far left) reaches out his hand to touch mine as I head for the launchpad.