Falling to Earth (24 page)

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 never 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.

We didn’t need pilots on our support crew; we needed colleagues who could help us with all this science. So we picked up Joe Allen, Bob Parker, and Karl Henize, three of the scientist-astronauts selected in 1967. They wouldn’t fly during Apollo—they’d have to wait for the space shuttle—but they could do their part. Joe and Bob worked with Dave and Jim on surface geology and put their hearts and souls into our mission.

Karl was an astronomer, so he spent a lot of time helping with my tasks. He did a large amount of work on my experiments, kept me updated on their preparation, and checked out details. He was six years older than me, and I saw him as a crusty old guy at the time. Had I not known better, on first glance I would never have guessed he was a college professor and a highly-regarded research astronomer. Karl just didn’t have the look of a sophisticated, scholarly guy. He looked far more down-to-earth, rugged, and in good physical shape.

Underneath that crusty exterior was an extremely smart guy, who understood our mission well. I remember feeling a little sad, thinking that Karl would never get to fly in space himself. That was certainly the general opinion around the office. He was already forty-one when NASA sent him to learn how to fly jets, and the space shuttle was a long way off in the future. Time was not on his side. It was, therefore, a special moment for me when I heard in 1985 that Karl was flying in space at last, personally conducting astronomy experiments in orbit. He was fifty-eight by then and became the oldest person to fly in space at the time.

With Apollo 13’s problems fixed, the Apollo 14 crew was preparing to fly. One of the crewmembers, Ed Mitchell, lived with me for a while at my apartment. He and his wife were separating, but Ed didn’t want to proceed with a full-blown divorce. He was worried how a divorce might affect his astronaut career and preferred to wait until after his flight.

I liked Ed. He was different from your average astronaut. Fascinated by psychic phenomena and spiritual energy, he studied “new age” ideas that were far outside the scientific mainstream. It didn’t fit our NASA work, so Ed kept his interests pretty much to himself for a long time. At my apartment, however, we’d have long discussions into the night exploring what he called “the nature of consciousness,” including his plan to try ESP experiments on his moon mission.

Ed’s Apollo 14 mission would set down where Apollo 13 had planned to land; NASA was investing two missions in one landing zone. We hoped their geological survey would bring new scientific knowledge to help justify the huge investment. The mission commander, however, was Alan Shepard.

Grounded for years by an inner-ear condition, Shepard had sat out most of the space program in a desk job. Eventually he underwent an operation to fix the problem, jumped back into the flight roster, and tried to grab the next available mission. NASA insisted he needed more time to train and knocked him back to Apollo 14. Although Shepard had two excellent crewmembers, I heard grousing that Al didn’t take the science seriously.