Falling to Earth (32 page)

Back to business. Mission control asked Dave and Jim to carefully vacuum the surfaces inside
Falcon
where glass may have stuck, and then leave the vacuum cleaner running in there to catch any additional floating shards.

Before that, we carried out an unusual experiment. Each of us had seen bright flashes when our eyes were closed, and so had crews before us. Scientists believed these flashes were cosmic rays whizzing through space and passing through our heads. We placed the shades in the windows, put on eyeshades, and reported how many flashes we saw in an hour—and there were many. The effect was like flashbulbs going off across a crowded sports stadium as these high-energy particles zapped through our skulls. We reported the many directions the streaks of light seemed to be coming from. Were they striking our retinas or hitting a deep part of our brain, activating our visual senses there? We didn’t know.

We were close to the end of our day’s tasks when Dave announced to Houston that we had another problem. Down in the equipment bay, Jim spotted the outlet for our water supply leaking right around the cap. In weightlessness, a wobbling ball of fluid grew around the leak, while water also slowly crept across the surrounding surfaces. This was
not
good. Had a pipe broken? Would we be able to stop the leak?

Karl Henize asked a question from the ground. “Can you give us an estimate of how many drips per second?”

Jeez, Karl, I thought, we’re in space. Water doesn’t drip in weightlessness. But we worked through this brief confusion. NASA engineers and contractors around the country began to look for a solution.

“It’s accumulating at a pretty good rate,” Jim informed Karl with a slight note of alarm. If this water floated into our electrical systems, there would be hell to pay. Following instructions from the ground, we begin to turn off pressure regulators and tank inlets, hoping to stop the leak. We also began to soak up the growing water sphere with towels.

Within fifteen minutes, Houston radioed a solution. I later heard they tracked down a technician who was on his way home, and he knew exactly what to do. We pulled out the tool kit, tightened the fitting, and the leak stopped. If it hadn’t, we would not have landed on the moon. It made me think, as I floated there, why it was important to send people into space. A robotic spacecraft couldn’t fix itself.

“Nice to have the quick response … we about had a small flood up here,” Dave radioed with relief. It was teamwork at its finest. Mission control later told us that Captain Cook’s
Endeavour
had also sprung a leak on one of its voyages, which made us feel even more like grizzled explorers. “You guys didn’t strike a coral reef there, did you?” they joked with us. “Sounds to me like the
Endeavour
has a few plumbers aboard.”

The plumbing work had made me thirsty. Surrounded by wet towels, I decided to make a hot coffee. I had three kinds made up for me on the flight: black, black with sugar, and black with cream and sugar. If I couldn’t have a slug of the Oso Negro vodka I’d hoped to sneak aboard, a jolt of black coffee would be the next best thing.

Instead of coffee, Jim and Dave had loaded up their drink menus with hot chocolate. I’d warned against it. Sweet and sticky, it was sickly, nasty stuff for a spaceflight. Interestingly enough, I hadn’t seen Dave or Jim drink much of it so far. And, looking at my meager coffee supply, I noticed the number of packages was going down awfully fast. I’d need to protect my supply before they drank it all.

Although there was no sense of it in the spacecraft, we’d slowed down from twenty-five thousand miles per hour when leaving Earth orbit to a relatively sluggish three thousand miles per hour. Earth continued to pull on us. But now the moon’s gravity tugged more strongly on us than Earth’s. As we fell toward the steadily growing moon, our speed began to pick up again.

We would reach the moon the next day. It was time to sleep. I felt so comfortable in space now that I didn’t bother with the sleeping bag. Instead I flattened out my couch, put a strap around me so I wouldn’t float into the instrument panel, and slept.

All too soon, it was morning. Time to put my spacesuit back on—just as a precaution. It was a lot easier putting it on in space. I simply let the suit drift in front of me and floated into it.

We prepared to jettison the door covering the SIM bay. Better to do it now, we reasoned, than in lunar orbit, in case it hit the large engine bell at the rear of the spacecraft. This operation was a first for the Apollo program, which is why we suited up. That door was a hunk of metal five feet wide and more than nine feet long, and we were going to release it with explosives.

After another quick course correction burn, we blew off the door. I felt a faint shudder through the spacecraft as the explosives fired and the panel slowly tumbled away. The detonation jolted a thruster valve closed, but we quickly reopened it from the control panel. My bay of prize experiments was now exposed to space, ready to whir into action when we reached lunar orbit.

“You’ll be interested to know that there’s a very thin crescent moon in front of us,” I told Houston. “It may be thin, but it’s big.”

The sunlit part of the moon had shrunk to a delicate sliver. And in the faint reflected light from the distant Earth, the rounded bulk of the shadowed side loomed at us as we approached. For the first time, I could see that the moon was truly three-dimensional. It was eerie.

Less than an hour before arrival we dropped into its shadow. Picking up speed, we fell toward the moon’s western edge as its dark mass grew in our windows. We turned the spacecraft so our main engine faced forward, ready to slow ourselves into lunar orbit. We’d make that engine burn behind the moon.

“Have a good burn,” Karl radioed as we prepared to lose our radio signal.

“We’ll see you on the other side,” Dave replied. Then we lost them.

We hurtled behind the moon for eight minutes, then lit our engine. It was a beautifully smooth and precise burn. For six long minutes we slowed down, gently pressed into our couches, curving our path so that we fell around the dark surface: not too close, not too far. “Looks like it’s running smooth … Holding steady,” I told Dave and Jim as I monitored the engine thrust. We were ready to intervene if the burn didn’t end at the correct moment. But it did. “Shutdown. Fantastic!” Dave announced. We were in lunar orbit.

Mission control, of course, had no idea that our burn had been successful. All they could do was wait for more than half an hour to pick up our signal as we rounded the moon’s eastern limb. If they acquired us early, that would mean our burn hadn’t been successful and we’d be hurled away from the moon, back toward Earth.

We curved around the moon’s far side, intensely studying our instruments. Then, out of the window, I saw what looked like a series of ghostly ocean waves coming toward me from the deep blackness. This was weird, and unexpected. What was I seeing?

The waves seemed to billow and grow as my confused mind tried to make sense of the glowing, shifting patterns. Then I slowly began to comprehend the sight. Sunlight was hitting the top of the tallest lunar mountains as we passed over them, and the peaks were separated by deep black shadows. As we continued to round the moon into sunlight, the shadows grew thinner, and I could begin to make out surface features.

Even after the years of training, I never expected the moon to look this eerie and dramatic. After days of falling through empty space, I was vividly aware of how close we were to this immense landscape. It felt scary to be grazing over mountains and valleys which now filled our windows with an ever-changing drama. I’d never understood the word “unearthly” before, until I was somewhere that was literally not this Earth. This place was
different
.

We rounded the far side in 34 minutes and reestablished contact with Earth. We’d reacquire and lose them every time we circled the moon. “Hello, Houston, the
Endeavour
’s on station with cargo, and what a fantastic sight,” Dave reported. “Oh, this is really profound, I’ll tell you—fantastic!” Dave’s fascination with geology was kicking in, and he was overwhelmed by the vistas below us.

The moon looked ancient, battered, pockmarked—and dead. I didn’t feel a sense of foreboding, but of lifelessness. Compared to our beautiful Earth, I didn’t feel there was anything here that would support humankind.

Our Saturn V third stage had trailed us all the way to the moon. Now, out of our view, it slammed into the lunar surface and gouged out a fresh crater. The shock from the impact sent an earthquake-like ripple across the moon, picked up by seismometers left by the Apollo 12 and 14 crews. Our first surface experiment was complete, and we’d literally changed the face of the moon.

The magnificent lunar surface from orbit

Compared with prior missions that circled comfortably near the lunar equator, we were in a strange, complicated orbit. It took us much farther north into unseen territories, and Dave continued to report with both geological precision and wonder as we skimmed over regions no human eye had ever seen this close. He was in his element. Why choose between being a spacecraft pilot or an observational scientist? From our first moments in orbit, Dave showed that a good commander could do both.

With no atmosphere to soften the lunar features, they looked disturbingly close and sharp. It was the same moon I knew from photos in my training, but when it filled my window it looked strikingly different. Seeing a dark circle on a map is abstract, but skimming across that same five-hundred-mile-wide basin in person was
real
. The variety was fascinating: faults, swirls, wrinkles, powdery dustings, and features that looked weathered by Earth-like oceans and dust storms. Rivers of ancient lava rippled across the barren plains. I reported with excitement on subtle surface flows, patterns, and variations in colors and shades. “After the King’s training, it’s almost like I’ve been here before,” I remarked, using our nickname for Farouk.

The shadows lengthened again, until only mountain rims remained to catch the sunlight. We kept reporting until we sped into shadow once more. The ground radioed that Farouk had been listening in and was delighted with our descriptions so far. Then, once again, Earth slipped below the horizon and we were on our own.

We burned our engine once more, which dropped us into a lower orbit. “Man, it already looks like we’re lower,” Jim remarked, as lunar features zipped by. He was right—it felt as if we were diving toward the surface, and mountains ahead of us looked unnervingly higher than our flight path. The lowest point of our orbit was now less than eleven miles above the surface and coincided with passing over the planned landing site. Some of the mountains around that zone reached up fifteen thousand feet. I stayed
very
aware of our altitude as we slid around the moon, documenting the uncharted regions with photos and words. As we sailed toward the highest peaks, I almost felt like pulling my feet up.

Dave and Jim would land on the moon the next day. As we ate dinner, Jim was making plans. “I think the first thing I’m going to do when we get back,” he explained, “is a beautiful night in Tahiti.”

“Hey, you’re on, buddy, you’re on!” I replied. But I knew what he was really saying. Tomorrow would be a risky day for Jim. By planning ahead, he was telling me—and himself—that he would survive the mission. It was a good idea. But I momentarily thought of those old World War II movies, where the guy tells his colleagues how he is going to marry his sweetheart when he gets home. He always dies in the next reel.

Mission control woke us early the next day informing us that, while we slept, our orbit had dropped faster than predicted. Denser parts of the moon, called “mascons,” pulled harder on the spacecraft as we passed over them. Flying over unexplored regions, we found mascons the hard way. Taking the shades off the windows, I looked out with alarm as we passed an immense lunar mountain. It looked like the peak was
above
us. I could clearly see small boulders littering its side, although that might have been because my eyes were wide with alarm. How low were we? We were planning to land on the moon today—but not by hitting a mountain.

Mission control gave us the figures. We had dropped down under forty-six thousand feet. Phew, we were okay, still three times higher than the mountains around the landing site. I realized the spacecraft was tilted at an angle when I’d looked out the window, so the surface only appeared to be sloping above us. But boy, those boulders looked so close. I felt like I could reach out and touch one.

Another few hours, and that might have been true. Mission control calculated that we would drop even farther as the day went on, and their margin of error was getting too close to the top of those peaks. By the time we were over the landing site, we might be as low as twenty-four thousand feet and falling.

“You can see how, when you’re coming up at low altitude on these mountains, how striking they are in the distance,” I told mission control. “It’s really hard to miss them.”