Falling to Earth (25 page)

Ed Mitchell and Stu Roosa, the lunar module pilot and command module pilot for the mission, were two of NASA’s best. In fact, many considered Ed the most talented astronaut of my entire selection group. But a crew is guided, both in training and in attitude, by its commander. Shepard made it clear to a number of geologists that rocks weren’t a priority for him.

When Al and Ed landed on the moon in February 1971, they managed an impressive amount of science work, but the rolling landscape and lack of clear landmarks could confuse anyone. They were soon lost during an ambitious excursion up the side of a large crater. As they pressed on toward the crater rim, the two of them grew tired and overheated. They had a choice: try and make the rim or carefully and scientifically document the rocks they were climbing past. They did neither. Out of time, never really sure where they were, Ed and Al no longer had the ability to accurately document and sample the hillside. They had to grab samples, snap a photo, and press on.

Perhaps the mission was too ambitious, and this was the best possible result. It was hard to understand a landing site until you were there in person. Nevertheless, the fact that NASA had launched both Apollo 13 and 14 to survey this one area, and that many geologists were understandably disgruntled by the results, made me even more determined to make our mission count.

We were now next in line to fly. We’d made it through the long training grind. NASA’s attention really turned in our direction, and I felt an intense focus on preparing our mission to launch. It was getting so close, I could almost taste it. And yet, in the spring of 1971, right as we neared the peak of our abilities and readiness to fly, I made a decision that fucked up my life completely, utterly, and irreversibly.

CHAPTER 7
TRAINING AND TEMPTATION

D
ecades later, I am still angry. Upset at myself and others. It seemed like an insignificant thing at the time, when I was concentrating on flying and science preparations for the mission. But eventually it overwhelmed all the good work that we did and ruined my career.

Unlike robot probes and satellites, we were human space explorers. This human component allowed us to do more than unmanned missions ever could. However, wherever humans go, human behavior goes with them. That included the urge to take care of our own interests.

When I joined the program, I soon heard how astronauts enjoyed the perks that came with the job. The original astronauts had succeeded in selling their personal stories to Time-Life and Field Enterprises, despite the concerns of a few officials. The Corvette-leasing deal had slipped by, too. Other offers, such as free houses and low-interest loans, had not been approved—although not for lack of trying. Then there were people like Al Shepard, apparently making millions on government time, while his bosses appeared to turn a blind eye. Earlier crews had even been able to accept gifts of free life insurance, although this perk was no longer offered by the time I flew.

I also learned that this kind of behavior, using astronaut status as a way to get a little something extra, even extended to the spaceflights. As far back as the earliest Mercury missions, astronauts carried personal items that no one at NASA checked too closely. To give just a couple of examples, Gus Grissom had coins and little Mercury spacecraft charms hidden in a spacesuit leg pocket, and Gordo Cooper stuffed paper currency in his spacesuit. Wally Schirra’s colleagues even tucked a tiny bottle of scotch and a packet of cigarettes in his spacecraft. Initially treasured by their recipients, over time many of these items have turned up for sale on the open market. If you have enough cash, you can buy them.

Yet I doubt money was ever the motive. I think the items were used to pull pranks, to give to family members, close friends, or coworkers who had supported the astronauts in some way. They were generally modest, almost worthless trinkets, other than their journey into space. Receiving one was a sign that you were in some kind of inner circle, with all of the unspoken affection, and trust, this gesture implied. It is a cliché, but it truly was a more innocent time.

The danger was, of course, that after flown items left an astronaut’s hands, they might end up anywhere. They might be sold. NASA wasn’t happy about that possibility, although they seemed to accept it was out of their control. But the trinkets came with an unspoken understanding and obligation not to embarrass the giver.

By the time I showed up, during the Gemini program, Deke Slayton had developed an informal system. Gemini astronauts could fill a tiny bag with personal items as long as he was given a list of the contents. The Gemini lists I have seen are about thirty words long, and give generalities such as “coin, tie tack, Masonic ring, various medals, flags.” They identified no recipients.

NASA also flew its own set of mementos. Senators and congressmen always welcomed a little flown flag of their home state. Other items were gifted to museums and cultural centers all over the world, at which point NASA lost any control over them.

Dave Scott, who had already flown twice and was about to fly again, knew the drill. But Apollo 15 was my first flight, and I didn’t know squat about souvenirs. NASA told me that Apollo astronauts could carry a couple of little bags in the command module called Personal Preference Kits, or PPKs. They couldn’t weigh more than a few pounds in total. In addition, smaller and lighter PPK bags would ride in the lunar module, down to the lunar surface and back. Looking like little lunch sacks, the PPKs were made of Beta cloth, the special fire-resistant material also used to cover our spacesuits. The bags that went to the lunar surface had to be light; they weighed less than a full cereal box.

As I recall, our Apollo flight carried five PPKs in the command module. Dave and Jim also took bags in the lunar module and kindly offered to carry some items of mine to the lunar surface. Additionally, I had a bag of music cassette tapes to listen to.

We were not required to publicly disclose the PPK contents, and I don’t know of any Apollo astronaut who ever did. In recent years, astronauts have sold a few items at auctions, so the public is discovering a little of what they took. At the time, we just gave Deke Slayton our lists. I believe Deke then told the mission director that the items met flight requirements for inflammability and toxicity and were not controversial.

It was relaxed and informal; often the lists weren’t even typed up. Looking for human-interest stories, the press often asked NASA about the personal items astronauts carried. But NASA never gave them any details. I understood that NASA only cared about their weight, so engineers could properly balance the spacecraft cabin contents.

The PPKs weren’t opened during the flight; they held nothing we’d need. Other personal items, such as sunglasses, combs, spoons, razors, and pens that we would use in flight were ours to keep afterward and do with as we wished. Many astronauts also stripped off little parts of their spacecraft at the end of a mission, particularly from the lunar modules that would not return to Earth.

In the middle of a very busy time when I had far more pressing concerns such as mission training, I thought briefly about what to take on the mission. To my recollection, almost everything I carried was taken for someone else. I included little items like jewelry, medallions and crosses for my kids and my ex-wife. For Beth Williams I took some jewelry, and for Farouk, some religious items. I packed a West Point flag, and University of Michigan flags and decals.

Many employees at the Cape and elsewhere, such as the space center guards, wanted to know if I would carry something for them. I said yes to anyone who asked, requesting only that the item be small and light, because I had a weight and size limit. If it reached a point where I was given too many items, I would have prioritized based on who was closest to me. But I never had to do that.

Jim felt the same way. His PPK list included little items such as wedding rings and cufflinks loaned by the flight crew support team, plus mementos for the backup and support crews. They had worked so hard to assist our flight and would already be going with us in spirit. Now they would also receive a very personal memento.

So I ended up with a bag of stuff, most of which was not mine. That was fine with me, because I didn’t care too much about souvenirs for myself, nor did I have time to think about it. The idea that someone might one day want my used comb or a bit of old, worn equipment as a collectible would have made me laugh. I should have cared—I was about to get in a shitload of trouble over the items we carried—but I didn’t. I had to train. The real treasures would be the scientific results, the photos, and measurements, not old toothbrushes or mementos stuffed in my PPK.

In order to recover these scientific treasures, I had to master another crucial skill—spacewalking. I could operate the panoramic and mapping cameras from inside the command module, but to retrieve the film I needed to go outside. On the way back from the moon, I would recover the large cassettes from the SIM bay. It was an opportunity to do something historic: the first deep-space extravehicular activity, or EVA. I would float outside a spacecraft farther from Earth than anyone had ever done before. And if I didn’t get it right and bring the cassettes back inside the spacecraft, we’d lose priceless pictures.

I did much of my zero-G training in NASA’s Boeing KC-135 aircraft. Flying the aircraft in a shallow dive to gain speed, the pilots would then pull up in a climb. As the aircraft reached the top of the arc, the pilots would let it fall forward, eliminating all sensation of gravity inside the fuselage. We would briefly experience the feeling of weightlessness in the spacious interior, and the effect lasted long enough to perform some meaningful tests and training.

On a normal flight, we would fly fifty or sixty parabolas. One day, however, I asked if we could keep going. Dave Scott was also on that flight and kept asking if I was done. No, I wanted to try some more maneuvers. What Dave didn’t know is that I had asked Harry, the pilot, to smash the world record. And we did it—we flew an unprecedented 125 parabolas.

I trained underwater, too. I’d already passed the arduous training at the SCUBA underwater school in the Florida Keys, where the military underwater demolition teams honed their skills. It taught me what to do if I were training in a water tank in a spacesuit and something went wrong. It supplemented some water survival training we did out in the Gulf of Mexico. Our spacecraft would splash down in the ocean at the end of the mission, and we’d need to know the procedures if everything went correctly, but also if something bad happened. We floated around in a replica of the command module, and worked with our recovery crew to climb out into a rubber raft and wait for an airlift. The Navy SEALs we trained with also worked with us on our actual flight. They were professional, highly competent, and after my SCUBA training I had an extra appreciation for their toughness.

But I learned more in the KC-135 airplane than I ever did underwater. Our water tank was a good place to test some procedures, but not to practice moving objects around. The engineers tried to make our training equipment neutrally buoyant, and the right size and shape, so the objects felt right and wouldn’t float or sink. Nevertheless, anything we pulled through water was going to drag. We tried boring a large number of holes in the film canisters so the water passed through, but they still didn’t react the same way as they would in space. We didn’t have that problem on the parabolic flights.

The water tank could also be misleading, as NASA engineers discovered. They had already looked at and rejected a number of options for retrieving the film cassettes, such as a large robot arm to grab the canisters. By the time I started EVA training they had settled on a looping clothesline. I would place a pole in the open hatch. Then I’d float down to the other end of the SIM bay holding a second pole, and place it in a bracket. A looped line with clips would be strung between the two poles on pulleys; I was then supposed to clip the containers onto the line, and Jim would reel them into the spacecraft.

It worked fine underwater, but I wasn’t convinced it would work in space. Although the big film cassettes would be weightless, they still had mass. I doubted Jim, or anyone else, could pull that clothesline so smoothly that the film canisters would not whip sideways as they were pulled in.

I insisted we try the procedure in the KC-135; so we created a mock-up of the SIM bay, like a lengthwise slice of the command and service module, right up to the open spacecraft hatch. Once we were in a zero-G parabola, Jim delicately and precisely pulled on the clothesline. Sure enough, the film canisters began to sway—so much that one canister knocked a rocket thruster right off the side of the service module. The engineers agreed: we needed to find a better way.

Forget all the fancy stuff. The simplest and best way, I proposed, was to grab a handle on each canister and bring them back one by one, like carrying a briefcase. I thought I could do most of the EVA with one free hand. If I needed to let go of the handle for any reason, the canister would still be attached to my wrist with a short tether, a snap hook, and a pin. That container wouldn’t float away very far.