by Jay Barbree
Shepard and Mitchell were ordered to slow their pace, and soon they were moving through their chores with ease. Four hours and fifty minutes into their first moonwalk, they returned to Antares and loaded on their samples.
Their first excursion was complete, and like little boys crawling into their tree house, Shepard and Mitchell eased their way back into Antares’s cabin, sealed the hatch behind them, pressurized their ship, and ate and drank their fill. They replenished their spacesuits’ containers with oxygen and water, checked the battery packs and systems, and enjoyed the pleasure of being free of their cumbersome exoskeletons.
Exhausted, they slept.
Antares’s astronauts were up and ready to go two hours early. They had slept well and were telling the 150 people in Mission Control and its back rooms to get the lead out.
“Hey, we’re up and running this morning,” the forty-seven-year-old Shepard boasted. “The shape of the crew is excellent.”
The flight surgeon nodded, the flight director was delighted, and CapCom told the moonwalkers, “We’re turning you loose.”
Shepard and Mitchell bounced down Antares’s ladder eager to top every item on their moonwalk work list. This was the first full “geology field day.” They loaded their lunar rickshaw for the trip to Cone Crater, sure it would carry their heavy load, giving them a break from lugging rocks as big as bowling balls. But the rickshaw failed to fulfill its promise. Fra Mauro was covered with thicker and deeper dust than that found at the Apollo 11 and 12 landings sites, and pulling the rickshaw was like plowing through deep sand.
“This is ridiculous,” Mitchell called to Shepard. “Let’s pick up the damn thing and carry it.”
There was no argument from the commander, and the two carried the rickshaw loaded with supplies only to be fooled by the undulating nature of the terrain. It was like looking at mountains across a desert on Earth. In clear air, a mountain peak or range might appear to be only a few miles away when it is actually forty or fifty miles distant.
The navigation charts seemed to have been prepared for some other planet, and distance measurement proved to be misleading. The sun angle and the crystal-clear sharpness of a world without atmosphere threw off their depth perception.
Their journey had become a fierce slog. Frustrated, their strength sapped, they lost sight of where they were, and more important, where they were going. Every time the astronauts stopped they referred to their checklist, collected samples, and noted lost time. They were gulping oxygen, drenched in perspiration, but they weren’t giving up. “There’s the rim of Cone,” they assured each other. “We’re getting close now.”
Houston was concerned and told them to take it easy. Keep moving, but take it easy.
Then, finally, before them a steep climb loomed. It was a slope longer than a football field to the rim of Cone Crater. To get there, they would have to slug it out through a massive boulder field. There was rubble and smashed rocks everywhere, and they knew they were almost out of time. They pushed themselves as hard as they could—fighting up the slope in ankle-deep moon dust.
“You take two steps up,” Shepard told Mission Control, “and you slip back one. It’s like a day at the beach, plodding through deep sand.”
Suddenly, Shepard slipped to one knee and Mitchell had to come to his rescue and help him up. It was becoming obvious they were nearing the end. Houston would soon be ordering them to start back to Antares. They gulped in air and kept on pushing and pulling, digging their boots into the loose, dusty surface. But it was painfully clear Cone Crater had won.
Time, oxygen, and physical strength were all running out, and Mission Control knew Shepard and Mitchell were at the very edge of their endurance. They were still about seventy-five feet from the top.
“Alan, Ed, you guys have already eaten into your thirty-minute reserve,” said CapCom. “We think you’d better proceed with the rock sampling where you are.”
The high rim of Cone Crater would remain unchallenged.
“I think we’re looking at what we want right here,” Shepard told Mitchell, trying to put the best face on their failure.
They gathered samples from the boulder field and started back. Coming down the slope was much, much easier. They could almost fly. Striding downhill, the moon’s weak gravity permitted them to leap over rocks as they went, and soon they had reached the lunar module. They loaded their booty aboard and were ready once again to climb into Antares’s cabin.
Well, almost ready.
“Houston,” Shepard called Mission Control, removing a small metal flange from his suit pocket. He carefully attached it to the long aluminum handle of the collector he’d used to pick up rock samples.
I was co-anchoring the NBC Radio Network’s coverage in our broadcast trailer outside Mission Control, and I laughed loudly. I knew what was about to happen. Shepard had let me in on his secret. I turned to my stunned co-anchor. “Russ, have you ever wondered how far an average golfer could hit a ball in lunar gravity? Well, Mr. Ward, you’re about to find out.”
“Houston,” Shepard paused for effect, “you might recognize what I have in my hand…the handle for the contingency sample. It just so happens to have a genuine six-iron on the bottom.”
Those in Mission Control were now laughing.
Shepard reached into a pouch of his suit and held up a golf ball.
“In my left hand I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”
The flight controllers grinned.
Alan Shepard, an avid golfer, dropped the ball into the moon dust. He made his best effort to assume a normal two-handed stance to address the ball, but his bulky spacesuit would permit only a one-handed swipe.
“I’m trying a sand-trap shot.” He laughed as he swung awkwardly, the six-iron spraying moon dust and dropping the ball into a crater only a few feet away.
“I got more dirt than ball.”
“Looked more like a slice to me,” Mitchell quipped.
Shepard wasn’t to be stopped. He dropped a second ball and the home-rigged golf club found its target, sending the white ball racing away into the black sky.
“There it goes! Miles and miles and miles!” Shepard said with pride.
Some argued the golf ball sailed only a few hundred yards while others, taking the weak gravity into account, suggested it could have gone into its own lunar orbit.
With his Tom Sawyer grin Alan later told me, “I really don’t know where the damn thing went.”
Shepard and Mitchell ran through their pre-lunar-launch checklist, made sure everything that was suppose to be on board was on board, and Shepard turned to the remote television camera.
Alan Shepard’s golf shot on the moon. (Shepard Collection).
Apollo 14 moon rocks. Alan Shepard (right) leans over to view a basketball-size rock being examined by Ed Mitchell (table, left). (NASA).
“Okay, Houston, the crew of Antares is leaving Fra Mauro Base.”
“Roger, Antares.”
With mixed emotions, Shepard and Mitchell closed their lander’s hatch and monitored the countdown timers as they flashed away the minutes and seconds. Antares’s ascent rocket shot flaming thrust into its descent-stage launch pad. The lunar module leapt from the moon and sped into the black sky, into its rendezvous orbit with Apollo 14’s command ship Kitty Hawk.
The docking of the two spacecraft was perfection. Kitty Hawk fired up and carried its smiling crew home.
The legacy of Apollo 14 went far beyond returning the lunar landing program to safe flight. The three remaining Apollo lunar landings, which had been on the edge of cancellation, would not be cut.
On July 26, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden flamed onto the lunar highway. Scott and Irwin rode their lander, Falcon, to the foothills of the Apennine Mountains while Worden, overhead in Endeavour, began a photo survey for future landing sites.
Dave Scott and Jim Irwin became the seventh and eighth astronauts to step onto th
e moon. They had been given a great landing site. They stared in wonder at the Apennines, mountains towering fifteen thousand feet, as they drove the first lightweight electric car, a cross between a golf cart and a dune buggy, over the lunar surface. They drove it up and down slopes heavily laden with tools, moon rocks, and other lunar samples as well as cameras. With the ability to travel a distance of six miles, the two astronauts did little moonwalking. They increased the area to be traversed, studied, and sampled. The six miles was a safety limit. If the “moon buggy” broke down, the astronauts would still have enough power and oxygen in their suits for a steady walk back to their lunar landing craft. Apollo 15’s Scott and Irwin spent three days at the feet of one of the moon’s largest mountain ranges.
In April of 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly flew to the moon. Young and Duke left Mattingly in lunar orbit babysitting their command ship, Casper, while they rode their lunar module, Orion, to a wide plateau on the edge of the Descartes Mountains. The second moon buggy took the two astronauts through massive boulder fields, around and through craters, and through some chemical rocks with aluminum basalts. They came home with 213 pounds of samples for happy geologists.
Late that year, on December 7, 1972, shortly after midnight on a Cape Canaveral coast mantled in darkness, people within fifty miles thought the sun had come up. What appeared to be daylight flared along the beach, spreading outward as the Saturn V rocket with Apollo 17 went to full thrust. It rose atop its own blazing fireball, leaving a light that was seen five hundred miles away atop Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Astronauts Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ron Evans were on their way to what would be the last landing on the lunar landscape for half a century. Gene Cernan had traveled the same path to the moon before on Apollo 10. He and Jack Schmitt, the only geologist to sink his pike into the lunar crust, landed 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 moon buggy 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. They managed to load 243 pounds of rocks and soil aboard their lander, conduct dozens of scientific experiments, and strip away many of the moon’s secrets that had confounded people on Earth for centuries. The Apollo 17 finds have kept scientists of many countries intensely busy well into the twenty-first century.
What emerged from Apollo is a picture of a moon that was born in searing heat, lived a brief life of boiling lava and shattering collisions, then died geologically in an early, primitive stage. It came into being some 4.6 billion years ago, when great masses of gaseous matter called the solar nebula began condensing to form the sun, Earth, and other planets and moons of the solar system. The nebula first condensed into chunks of space debris—from small pebbles to miles-wide boulders—that crashed together and fused to form celestial bodies. This compacting of debris generated intense heat that turned the lunar surface into a sea of molten lava, to a depth of several miles. The cooled lava became the moon’s primitive crust. Debris left over from the creation of the solar system continued to bombard the moon, carving out giant craters and valleys and forming mountains by piling up large piles of rocks.
The young Earth apparently underwent the same period of meteorite bombardment and volcanism that the moon did for about a half billion years. Then the histories of the two bodies diverged. The weak lunar gravity could not prevent volcanic gases from escaping into space, and the moon became a dead body where life could not exist. But the larger Earth, with strong magnetic and gravity fields, held onto its volcanic gases, and they formed an atmosphere and oceans, creating conditions for the development of life.
America’s lunar landings learned more about the moon and our solar system than humans had learned in their species’s history. Technology advanced fifty years ahead of where it would have been had we not gone. Apollo 17’s flight ended the four-year stretch when twenty-four Americans, some twice, rocketed through the vacuum from Earth to the moon. Twelve of the twenty-four descended from lunar orbit to walk and drive across the small world.
NBC Radio and Television was there for every flight, from launch to splashdown. We enjoyed an out-front position and first-place ratings. Jim Kitchell, our executive producer, was simply the best. He had cut his teeth in television news by directing the first newscast put on the air by journalists, not broadcasters, who simply read what they were given. The show was the legendary Huntley-Brinkley Report, where Kitchell was the first to cover a breaking news event live. When it came to covering space flights, he led, we followed; and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon, Kitchell’s space unit was given the Emmy for “Coverage of Special Events.”
But sadly, as quickly as Project Apollo had arrived, it was gone—gone for thirty-one years until January 14, 2004, when President George W. Bush dusted off its historic pages. As of this writing, astronauts not yet born when Apollo 17 returned from the moon December 17, 1972, will head back to the lunar surface as early as 2018.
And if you should be asked, the first Martians are already here. They are your sons and daughters, and as soon as they move through the halls of learning, they’ll be saddling up to fly to our planetary neighbor on rockets and interplanetary ships named Ares and Orion.
As history had its voyages to the New World, its wagons west, its Kitty Hawks, and its Lindbergh flights to Paris, Mars will be the next generation’s Apollo.
It just could be the greatest adventure of all.
SEVENTEEN
After the Moon
America was proud of its moonwalkers, but we who followed spaceflight daily knew earthlings’ first visits to the moon could have been different. Had Russian cosmonauts sustained their early lead, the number going there might have been two or three times twenty-four.
In the beginning, the competition was fierce. The Soviets had gone all out in their desperate attempts to be first. But costly failures slowed them to a halt, and then, only two weeks before Apollo 17 returned from the moon, the Russians were down to a last-gasp hope that their giant N–1 rocket would fly. They could no longer be first, but they still struggled to get their cosmonauts to the moon in the same period in history as American astronauts had. Such a landing would restore some Soviet pride.
It was not to be.
Martin Caidin was in Russia. It was N–1’s fourth launch attempt. The mammoth rocket was to boost a heavy, unmanned lunar-landing spacecraft directly to the moon in a rehearsal for a manned landing. It rose into the Kazakhstan sky only to be ripped apart again by a series of violent explosions, its wreckage tumbling earthward while sounding the death knell of the Russians’ last, slim hope.
From the ashes of N–1, the Russians returned to their proven rockets and spacecraft and became successful in their efforts to place a space station in Earth orbit. The Salyut station led the way, while the American road to space in the aftermath of the highly successful Apollo moon landings developed potholes and detours.
A simple “breaking and entering” burglary at the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate scandal propelled this country into a self-devouring frenzy that would last until a peanut farmer from Georgia was elected President in 1976. No longer was there the driving force in the country’s space effort that had carried America to the moon. NASA’s visions were lost on the floors of a disenchanted Congress and a public that rapidly became apathetic.
Slowdown was NASA’s new marching orders. The agency’s planners and builders were replaced by a new wave of bureaucrats who swayed with the political winds, sadly short on dreams, drive, and any determination to keep forging outward beyond Earth.
NASA’s new task was to build something that could be flown again and again. It didn’t have to go anywhere but into
Earth orbit and it didn’t necessarily need a mission, so bureaucrats inked their drawing boards with the STS—Space Transportation System—known as the Space Shuttle.
NASA failures were not with its equipment, but in promising that the Space Shuttle would be all things for all missions, that it would serve both civilian and military needs—and save truckloads of money in the process. The Space Shuttle program escalated swiftly in cost and decelerated just as rapidly in productivity. Weeks became months, and projects meant to take months stretched into years without a definite future.
Something had to fill the gap.
Engineers still on the job from Project Apollo dusted off the Saturn rockets and Apollo spacecraft left over from the three lunar landing missions that had fallen victim to the congressional ax. The few visionaries left in NASA proposed modifying this hardware into a modest space station where astronauts could study the sun and other stars, conduct experiments seeking pure materials and medicines, and learn to live in space for long periods just in case someone came up with a sensible thought of going somewhere else in the solar system. The cost would not be great, and the White House and Congress agreed what was left of the great NASA Apollo launch teams should be preserved. Thus Skylab, the country’s first space station, was born.