Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  Deke shifted in his chair and locked his gaze with Shepard’s. “Look, I’ve got to find somebody with the guts to stick their necks out. I need your help, Al.”

  Shepard stayed low-key. Deke had enough fire going for both of them. He thought of the astronaut team’s flight surgeon. “Well, what about Chuck Berry? He put you on the vitamins?”

  “Hell, Chuck’s got the guts, all right,” Deke said quickly. “He’s on my side all the way. But not even Berry can get me restored to flight status. Not by himself. NASA insists I’ve got to have what they call an eminent heart authority to certify I’m healthy to fly. And that,” Deke sighed, “we haven’t been able to do.”

  Shepard weighed Deke’s words. No question this man had gone the proper route from start to finish. And if his heart was performing as he’d confirmed, then it wasn’t a medical problem keeping him strapped to earth. Once again “safe politics” and “cover your ass” were the culprits.

  Alan rose from his chair; Deke stood. Shepard walked around the desk and put his arm around the man who had walked side by side with him from the first days of the manned space program. “Deke,” he said carefully, “Of course I’m going to do everything I can,” he reached to shake his hand. “It’s you and me buddy—always.”

  Several months later, in an ancient land on the other side of the world, Dr. Chuck Berry found the solution.

  Berry was then attending an international medical conference in Istanbul, Turkey. There he spent time with Dr. Harold Mankin, a world-renowned cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Berry grasped the moment to explain Deke’s barriers to making his long-wanted space flight. “What can you do to help?” Berry asked.

  Mankin answered, “Send Slayton up to Mayo. If nothing else, I’ll be able to tell the man once and for all if he’s still got his chance to”—he smiled—“get out of this world.”

  Deke was on his way north as soon as Chuck Berry passed him the word. Dr. Mankin lowered the medical boom on Deke, putting him through “a whole enchilada of tests. It was a pretty dynamic probing. They nearly turned me inside out. They hung me upside down on a treadmill, poked holes in me, pumped dye into my system, and examined parts of my body I didn’t even know I had.”

  They scheduled Deke for an angiogram. He balked. Other doctors had tried to run him through an angiogram before. They had pumped him full of good cheer about how much it could tell about his heart, and then they added there was a “minimum” risk factor.

  “There’s a chance the angiogram will kill you,” was their message. “And, if you clear the test satisfactorily, that’s just the test. There’s no guarantee the results will clear you for flight status.”

  Deke had answered in his customary manner for decisions up against the wall. “Screw that,” he told the doctors. “At least give me something worthwhile for risking my life.” They had nothing better to offer, and Deke had gone back to trying to prove in every other way he could that there was nothing, medically, to keep him out of a spaceship.

  Dr. Mankin changed Deke’s mind. “All your other tests are good,” he said. “If the results of the angiogram I run on you are good, Deke, then as far as I’m concerned, you get a positive reaction out of it. I’ll support you all the way to fly.”

  “Hell, Doc, that’s worth the risk,” Deke responded. They gave him another “enchilada,” he later recalled, grinning. “Poked a hole in my arm and ran this probe through the opening all the way to my heart.”

  He fretted impatiently for the final word from Dr. Mankin. The surgeon came right to the point. He called Chuck Berry. “Your man, Deke Slayton? This guy is as good as gold.”

  The door to upstairs had opened just a crack.

  While Deke was battling the medical fraternity, the launch center on the Florida coastline was still running on all cylinders. On July 26, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden flamed into the long journey moonward. Scott and Irwin rode their lander, Falcon, right to the foothills of the Appenine Mountains while Worden, overhead in Endeavour, began an intense photographic survey for future landing sites.

  Scott and Irwin stepped onto the lunar surface to stare in wonder at the Appenines, towering fifteen thousand feet above the plain where they stood. The mountains rose impressively on three sides about them, and on the fourth side plunged a mile-wide gorge, Hadley Rille. By now astronauts knew what to expect in the way of problems and had the knowledge and equipment to make great strides forward in geological surveys and scientific exploring. This was the first mission carrying a lightweight electric car, a cross between a golf cart and a dune buggy. Battery-powered electric motors drove the less than elegant go-cart at speeds on level ground up to seven miles an hour, but zipping downhill in the 77-pound buggy (462 pounds on earth) they managed the breakneck speed of eleven miles an hour. Most importantly, this lunar rover could climb and descend slopes of twenty-five degrees and carry heavy loads of tools, rocks, cameras, and the two astronauts.

  With the ability to travel six miles from their lander, they increased tremendously the area to be traversed, studied, and sampled. The six miles was a safety feature. If the moon buggy broke down, the men would still have enough power and oxygen in their suits for a steady walk back to Falcon.

  In three separate excursions during their three-day stay on the moon, the two men drove about in an exploration of nearly nineteen hours outside their lander, on the surface, climbing slopes, driving into wide, shallow craters, probing the edge of Hadley Rille.

  Before returning to Endeavour and earth, Scott and Irwin placed on the surface a plaque honoring three more casualties of the drive to conquer space. Just four weeks before the Apollo 15 launch, three Soviet cosmonauts had died while returning to earth after a record earth orbit flight of twenty-four days. The Soyuz 11 crew, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev, had been killed almost instantly during reentry when a leak developed in their spacecraft and the cabin lost pressure.

  It was another reminder that space flight still had not become routine, that danger was always a companion.

  Armed with the endorsement of Dr. Mankin, Flight Surgeon Chuck Berry was deep into his personal crusade to return Deke Slayton to flight status. It seemed a race between getting that reinstatement and whatever missions might be left for Deke to fly. Berry hammered on the doors of the best people in the medical field. By the time he completed his rounds there still remained a few naysayers, but the majority of the specialists, deeply impressed with the findings of Dr. Mankin, gave their blessings for Slayton to be returned to the active flying list.

  Alan Shepard, who knocked on a few official doors of his own for Deke, had known this moment of triumph when he had overcome the debilitating problems of his balance system and gone on to the moon.

  Now it was Deke’s turn. On March 13, 1972, the doctors called him in for an intensely personal conference. It wound up with extended hands and one word: “Congratulations.”

  Deke Slayton’s decade of agony was over.

  Shepard banged him on the back. “The next step, my friend,” Alan said, “is to get you a flight. And you’ve got a hell of a lot of competition.”

  Deke nodded. He wasted no time in charging into the office of Chris Kraft, the same man with whom he’d worked hand in hand for ten years.

  “I’m no longer one of your managers, Chris.”

  The center director stared at him. What the hell was Deke talking about?

  A grin spread across Deke’s rugged features. “From this moment on, Chris, I’m a prime candidate for a flight crew.”

  Kraft pounded him on the back and shook his hand enthusiastically. Both men were willing to bypass the usual social rituals and cut to the quick. “Your news is wonderful, Deke. You know how I feel about your going all the way.” He sobered quickly. “But there’s also reality, my friend. Getting you a flight is not going to be easy. You can’t just walk up to a spacecraft and boot someone off a crew.”

  “I know,” D
eke grunted.

  “Look, the final Apollo crews are in training. We’re well aware of that. Sixteen is about ready to fly, and Seventeen’s been tighter than ticks the way they’re working together.”

  “Skylab?” Deke asked with raised brows.

  “We’ve already selected the crews for the three missions.”

  “Damn . . . I know.”

  “Well, you’re in a very special position, Deke. You could exercise your seniority and bump someone off Skylab, but if I know you—”

  “No, no, you’re right,” Deke interrupted glumly. “I wouldn’t. No way would I ever cut the feet out from under another pilot.”

  “Well, there’s the space shuttle,” Kraft went on. “But it’s at least six years down the line. You know that. But that ship, and its flights, are wide open.”

  “It’s a hell of a long way down the road,” Deke added.

  “Tell you what. Continue with your present job. You stay as tight as you have been with Alan to wind down Apollo, and we’ll see what comes along.”

  A month after Deke came back on active status, Apollo 16 astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly swung into lunar orbit. Young and Duke left Mattingly hung in the lunar sky aboard command ship Casper, while they rode Orion to a wide plateau edging the Descartes Mountains. The second lunar rover took the two astronauts through massive boulder fields, around and through craters, their moon buggy riding over unexpected chemical rock groups that surprised geologists with their high content of aluminum basalts. During three excursions, edging to the rim of such prominent features as North Ray Crater, hauling 213 pounds of rocks and other samples back to Orion, they headed home with more questions for perplexed scientists than answers to old questions.

  With Apollo 16 in the books, and the final moon landing gearing up for a last spectacular voyage, Deke Slayton’s last-chance flight into space was beginning to take shape.

  It was an old idea, long cherished but also held in great doubt. The United States had come from behind in the propaganda battle paraded as the “space race” and left the Russians choking on the exhaust of extraordinary Saturn V blastoffs to the moon. But could the fierce competition be transformed into a purpose of a higher order? Was space the new high ground where the United States and the Soviet Union might leave their angry confrontations on the earth’s surface and meet in a joint mission? If this could come to pass, it might just open the doors to future cooperative programs.

  The first seeds of what would become ASTP—Apollo-Soyuz Test Project—began to sprout in 1969. Thomas Paine, the NASA administrator, was aboard Air Force One carrying President Richard Nixon across the Pacific to greet the first astronauts returning from the moon.

  It was the perfect opportunity for Paine to review future space programs. One choice was obvious: The Russians were the only other space power sending men above the planet. Paine postulated that both countries could benefit from a program in which either nation could rescue the astronauts of the other in an emergency. This wasn’t feasible now with each nation employing not only different docking techniques in space but also using equipment that prevented linkup of American and Soviet craft. If, however, both countries could be brought to the bargaining table to launch such an effort, and would exchange scientists, engineers, and their best astronauts and cosmonauts, then in the future the planned space stations of both countries could gain an enormous safety factor when and if an emergency rescue came into demand.

  Nixon saw this as a possible avenue for thawing the cold war and gave Paine the green light to proceed. Immediately on his return to Washington, Paine established contact with the Soviets through the U.S. embassy in Moscow and presented the concepts of compatible docking systems and a proving flight with both an American and a Soviet spacecraft.

  Despite the high-flying aspirations of NASA and the clear superiority of the United States with the Apollo program, Russian distrust of the U.S. and its intentions held fast. They wanted more than embassy contacts and generalizations, and they balked at an agreement.

  What Tom Paine had started but could not finish because of deep Russian suspicions became the task of Dr. Philip Handler, president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

  On May 11, 1970, after weeks of preliminary discussions, Dr. Handler met with his counterpart in the USSR. The Soviet group included, as its head, academician M. V. Keldysh, and president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Handler seized the moment to emphasize the values of a “common docking mechanism” and the enormous potential of achieving such a mutual system.

  The idea was planted. The Russians moved with agonizing slowness, and not until May 24, 1972, at a Moscow summit meeting between President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, was a pact finally signed. It called for, among other space efforts, its stated purpose of “the docking of a Soviet Soyuz-type spacecraft and a United States Apollo-type spacecraft” with visits of astronauts and cosmonauts in each other’s ships.

  The Russian signatures on those documents did more than signify unparalleled cooperation in a vast science program.

  The Russians had just punched the ticket for Deke Slayton’s upcoming ride into space.

  Nixon and Brezhnev inked their joint declaration just two months after medical teams removed Deke’s grounding shackles.

  He didn’t waste a moment. Once again he sailed into the office of Chris Kraft, leaned on his desk, and stared into Kraft’s eyes.

  “Chris, Apollo-Soyuz is going. I expect to be a candidate for that mission. As of right now I’ve thrown my name into the hat.”

  Chris held Deke’s gaze. “Give me a recommended crew, like you’ve always done,” he replied.

  Deke answered immediately. “Okay, you’ve got it. I’ll put myself number one on the list.”

  Kraft nodded.

  “And I’m very strong on Vance Brand,” Deke said. “I’ve been impressed with his work as a backup to the Skylab crews. Now, you tell me who else should be on this team.”

  Kraft leaned back in his seat. He ran names through his mind, considered experience, leadership, and even juggled some political considerations into the stew. “All right, Deke. I opt for Tom Stafford. He’s got two Gemini flights and the Apollo 10 mission under his belt. Now, just as important for this caper is that we sent him as a representative from NASA for a cosmonaut funeral. He was there long enough to make some friendships with a lot of cosmonauts and their program officials. That could open the way for a joint project better than anything else.”

  Slayton accepted Kraft’s recommendations. But they weren’t through yet. “One more thing. I’ve got the seniority to command this mission. Seniority does count. I’ve never used it before, but I’ve got it and I’m using it now.”

  Kraft turned him down. Tom Stafford had both the experience and the all-important relationship with and trust of the Russians.

  Alan Shepard was waiting for the outcome of the meeting between Deke and Kraft. Deke came into Alan’s office with a mixture of exuberance and grumbling. “I’ll tell you what, Al, this was what the word bittersweet is all about. As you know, I’ve wanted to command this damn Russian thing from the beginning. Damn if Chris didn’t go and give it to Tom Stafford.”

  Shepard laughed. “C’mon, buddy, what’d you expect?”

  Deke had a rueful grin. “You’re right. I put myself in Chris’s shoes, I’d make the same decision.”

  “That’s right,” Alan said quietly. “The whole thing is to fly. To get out there. Doesn’t really matter what seat you’re in. They’re all in a row. Nobody up front, nobody in the back.”

  “Yeah,” Deke said comfortably. “And we both know this is my only ticket. The shuttle is too far down the line. The clock runs out on me after this flight.”

  Apollo-Soyuz was three years away.

  December 7, 1972.

  Shortly after midnight on a Cape Canaveral coast mantled in darkness, thousands were convinced the sun had come up.

  Light flared alon
g the beach, spreading outward like a glowing shock wave. Nine seconds later the Saturn V booster of Apollo 17 went to full power and rose atop a blazing fireball, which split the night darkness like a great knife ripping apart the heavens. Where there had been blackness was now eye-searing light. Five hundred miles away, atop Stone Mountain in north Georgia, astonished observers saw what looked like an atomic bomb fireball accelerating ever higher above the world, its flame turning from blinding white to yellow and then crimson, and finally it became an enormous plume, ghostly, eight hundred feet of violet magic rushing away from earth.

  Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ron Evans, in their space-going vessel named America, were on their way for the final round of the great voyages of lunar exploration, following the first and only after-dark launch of a Saturn V.

  Cernan and Schmitt, the latter the only geologist to ride the fire trail to the moon, landed their Challenger in the Littrow Valley of the Taurus mountain region and capped the most incredible series of expeditions in the history of the human race. They spent three days on the lunar surface, including more than twenty-two hours in a trio of stunning geological journeys, riding their lunar rover to fields of enormous boulders, to the slopes of steeply rising mountains, and along the edges of precipitous gorges from where they stood in awe of the chasms torn in the moon’s surface. Before they ended the exploration, they had loaded 243 pounds of rocks and soil aboard Challenger, conducted dozens of scientific experiments, and stripped away many of the moon’s secrets.