Falling to Earth (28 page)

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 was 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

Y
ou 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 don’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
.

The weather was humid, which was not unusual for a Florida summer. The Saturn V had been filled the night before with supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, and some of that deep chill had spread through the rocket walls to the outside. The humidity in the air stuck to the skin of the rocket and froze, so when the three of us arrived we could see ice everywhere.

The rocket was huffing as puffs of vapor vented from it; the tanks were continually topped off. The Saturn V reminded me of a tethered animal pawing at the ground, ready to run. It no longer seemed like a large chunk of metal—it appeared to fume with frustration, ready to be unleashed, unrestrained.

We stepped into the elevator for the long ride to the top of the rocket, hundreds of feet up. It was the equivalent of taking a ride to the thirty-fifth floor of a skyscraper. The elevator rose and rose. Wow, I thought, it is a long way down to those engines.

When we reached the top, I gazed down the beautiful coastline, and observed the distant buzz of spectator activity. As I looked down the immense rocket, I saw chunks of ice rain down as they sloughed off its skin. It was a weird surreal effect, like a science-fiction movie.

We walked across a metal catwalk to the spacecraft; a difficult task for some, the pad engineers told me. Other astronauts had looked down at their feet, saw the distant ground through the metal mesh, and that was it. Their hands went out to the handrails, and the pad engineers had to come and convince them to keep moving. Some had to have their fingers pried from the handrails.