"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (22 page)

“Jay, this is Russ Tornabene.”

“Hi, Boss,” I smiled. “What’s up?”

“Following the splashdown,” Russ began, “President Nixon will be flying to Mission Control to congratulate the flight controllers, and then on to Honolulu to meet the
Apollo 13
astronauts. We want you to join the White House Press Corps in Houston and make the trip with the President.”

“You realize this is going to cut into my splashdown party big time, Boss?”

“Party on the plane,” Russ said, laughing.

A
pollo 13
was wrapped snugly in the arms of Earth’s gravity, racing toward reentry as Jack Swigert floated forward from
Aquarius
to start the “reincarnation” of the command ship
Odyssey.
He drifted into what had been a familiar spaceship cabin to find a cold and clammy flight deck. Every piece of equipment and instrument was soaked. His fear was that the icy water had seeped into electrical connections, and circuit points were waiting to arc into instant flame once power began to flow.

Swigert moved one switch at a time to return life to his Apollo, and because Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee had given their lives in the
Apollo 1
launch-pad fire, every circuit in
Odyssey
held solid. No arcing, no short circuits. Swigert peered down the connecting tunnel and called to Lovell and Haise, giving them a thumbs-up.

Lovell said a quiet prayer, giving personal thanks too to
Apollo 1
’s crew, and Swigert switched on the three batteries needed to power the command module during reentry. Two batteries were fully charged but
the third was low, so Swigert went back to
Aquarius
for a power cable. He returned and recharged the weak battery from the lunar module’s power supply.

Astronaut Haise called Mission Control. “What are you guys reading for cabin temperature in the command module?”

“We’re reading 45 to 46 degrees,” Houston replied.

“Now you see why we call it a refrigerator.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like a cold winter day up there. Is it snowing in the command module yet?”

“No,” Haise grinned. “Not yet.”

“You’ll have some time on the beach in Samoa to thaw out.”

“Sounds great.”

More fighter-pilot banter, good for the nerves as
Apollo 13
’s astronauts slipped into the final hours. They were getting set to fly a reentry from the moon on Friday morning, April 17, 1970, just over five hours before splashdown. One last time, Lovell fired the lunar module’s small steering thrusters to improve his landing-target accuracy.

An hour later, Swigert separated his command module from the
Apollo 13
’s battered service module. Lovell snapped several photographs as the section of the ship that had caused all the trouble drifted away. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported. “The whole panel is blown out almost from the base of the engine…It’s really a mess.”

Three hours later, just one hour away from punching through the atmosphere, Lovell and Haise moved into the restored command module. They closed the double hatches of the connecting tunnel, triple-checked the seals, and pressurized the connecting passageway. They fired the explosive bolts designed to separate Apollo from the lunar module, and, just as expected, the LM popped away like a champagne cork.

“Farewell,
Aquarius
, and we thank you,” Mission Control called with a salute to the astronauts’ lifeboat.

“She was a good ship,” Lovell said with emotion.

Odyssey
, along with its crew of three, plowed into Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour—a speed at which it would take the astronauts only six minutes to cross the United States. Instantly, they were feeling
the pressures of deceleration, and instantly they were surprised. It wasn’t snowing, but it was raining inside
Apollo 13
’s command ship. As the temperature rose and the forces of gravity grew, the icy mush that had saturated the command module’s interworks broke free in a sudden shower, pooling along the bottom around their booted feet.

Then,
Apollo 13
was deep into the fires of reentry. For three minutes the ship was encased in heat hotter than a volcano’s bowels. A plasma sheath formed around the spacecraft, cutting off all communications.

Clocks crawled.

Mission Control was a church of silence.

Squawk boxes crackled. A tracking aircraft over the Pacific radioed. It had picked up a signal from
Apollo 13
. No one cheered. Not yet. What about the heat shield? Had it held? Or was it damaged in the explosion? And what about the parachutes? Had they opened?

Apollo 13
broke through a cloud deck two thousand feet above the ocean riding beneath three huge orange-and-white parachutes. Mission Control went mad with relief, applause, and cheering.

Unbelievably,
Apollo 13
splashed down only three miles from the
Iwo Jima
.

Jim Lovell and crew were lifted by helicopter to the deck of their prime recovery ship, and splashdown parties worldwide burst into wild and thankful celebrations.

In Houston it was 12:07
P.M
. April 17, 1970, three days and fifteen hours to the minute since
Apollo 13
’s oxygen tank 2 exploded.

In the Lovell home, Pete Conrad, the commander of
Apollo 12
, opened the first bottle of champagne. Buzz Aldrin grabbed the second, and he and Neil Armstrong popped the cork. Others followed. In the midst of hugs and screams of joy, Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, heard the phone ring. She ran into the master bedroom and picked it up.

“Mrs. Lovell?”

“Yes.”

“Hold for the President.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off the television. She watched her husband’s spacecraft bob in the Pacific as she danced in place, about to burst with joy.

“Marilyn, this is the President. I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”

“Mr. President,” she said, laughing, “I’d love to. How soon can you get here?”

Mr. Nixon was there bright and early the next morning, shaking the hands of the flight controllers who had snatched
Apollo 13
from the jaws of failure, and soon
Air Force One
was winging its way to Hawaii.

As ordered, I had joined the White House Press Corps for the trip. Amidst Hawaii’s swaying palms and a cheering assemblage of thousands, the President welcomed
Apollo 13
’s astronauts home. We reporters filed our reports and took to the Honolulu sun. We were walking on clouds instead of sand, but my thoughts were with my friend Alan Shepard. Thanks to pioneering surgery that had corrected Shepard’s inner ear problem, he was back on flight status and had been given command of
Apollo 14
.

We all knew the near-fatal flight of
Apollo 13
would delay
Apollo 14
. There could be no other way. Every nut, bolt, and inch of the Apollo’s service module would need to undergo inspection, review, and design improvement. And thanks to President Nixon, we also knew
Apollo 14
would fly. Mr. Nixon had promised NASA that America would return to the moon, and I knew the burden of saving the country’s space program would again fall on the shoulders of America’s first in space.

As darkness fell over the island, I found myself walking alone in the balmy spring night, trying to ease my thoughts. The success of the
Apollo 13
rescue gave all Americans great pride in the men and women of NASA. But I had been there from the beginning. The first Russian cosmonaut flights had mocked America’s stumbling efforts to ascend to Earth orbit. Alan Shepard was to have led the way as the first man in space, but the stumbling block then had been lack of confidence, not the reliability of the rocket, and Shepard had had to settle for being the first American in space.

He had been called upon then to save America’s space future from the myopic, from those who were so eager to quit in the face of what they judged to be Russian superiority. They were convinced the Russians could never be matched, let alone exceeded. The decade since has
shown them to be wrong, and we of confidence, this night, were aware that even though
Apollo 13
’s crew had been safely returned to Earth, the never-finish-anything crowd were certain the mission had been a failure.

It was equally clear to us that Alan Shepard had more than a space flight to command. He again carried the full weight of Apol
lo on his
shoulders. If
Apollo 14
succeeded, he would share the accolades. If it failed, he alone would bear the burden. I found comfort in the thought that I was damn sure Shepard was up to it.

Jack King (second from right) escorts astronaut Alan Shepard (third from right) and his crew as their mammoth
Apollo 14
moon rocket is moved to its launch pad.
(NASA).

The next morning,
Apollo 13
’s astronauts were headed home to take their place in NASA’s future. Instead of
Apollo 13
being NASA’s darkest defeat, it was clearly the agency’s finest hour, thanks to the men and women who would not accept failure as an option.

Inside the wings of
Air Force One
and the White House Press Corps’ jet on April 19, 1970, sat the mellow and satisfied. Who said a superb glass of wine wasn’t good for the soul?

Below, for that single day at least, all was right on a planet called Earth.

A
stronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell had named their lunar module
Antares
, and after their quarter-of-a-million-mile journey of fits and starts, they were on the moon, ready to plant their boots in lunar soil. Shepard was first. He stepped off
Antares’
s small porch and moved slowly down the ladder. He paused on the last rung. The last three-and-a-half feet were only a lazy drop for the carrier pilot.

Like the mythical bird of yore, NASA’s
Apollo 14 Phoenix
had risen from
Apollo 13
’s ashes, equipped with more reliable hardware and safeguards. But, more important to members of the space family, America’s first astronaut was in command. Alan Shepard would be the only one of the Mercury group to reach the moon. He had gone for all seven, for all of us who’d been there with him from the beginning. The lunar dust he’d kicked up with his drop to the surface settled quickly as he paused. “It’s been a long way,” the son of New Hampshire spoke quietly, “but…we’re here!”

Alan was talking about all the years he and his friend Deke Slayton had been grounded with ailments, all the years they’d watched others go, and Deke in Mission Control answered with affection, “Not bad for an old man.”

Shepard had reached the moon at age forty-seven. The country’s
original astronaut turned slowly, pushing his boots into the grayish-brown dust, reminding himself no living creature had ever done this before in this desolate, silent world. “Gazing around at the bleak landscape, it certainly is a stark place here at Fra Mauro,” he said as if he were speaking only to Deke and those in Mission Control. “It’s made all the more stark by the fact that the sky is completely dark.” He surveyed the wide lunar landscape, turning his back to the dazzling sun. “This is a very tough place, guys.”

Ed Mitchell worked his way down the ladder. The MIT Ph.D. of everything technical dropped to the surface and quickly began moving about, testing his body’s reactions to the weak gravity in a world one-sixth the mass of his own. Mitchell was the first of a new breed of astronaut. He was a member of academia instead of flying warriors, and he found the moon a playground for learning.

“Mobility is very great under this ‘crushing’ one-sixth g-load,” Mitchell quipped.

He and Shepard gathered samples of rocks and soil into containers to please the scientists back home. They placed their remote television camera sixty feet away so those on Earth could watch them setting up their experiments. They unloaded a new device for hauling materials across the lunar landscape. The engineers named it a modularized equipment transport, or MET, but Mitchell and Shepard simply called it their lunar rickshaw.

The rickshaw carried an extensive supply of tools, cameras, instruments, safety line, core tubes for digging into the lunar crust, and maps and charts for the two moonwalkers to navigate their way through and around craters, gullies, and boulder fields.

Overhead, their command ship,
Kitty Hawk,
raced across the moon’s black sky. Crewmate Stuart Roosa had remained at
Kitty Hawk
’s controls, and he continued his circling of Earth’s natural satellite. Every two hours he was making one complete pass around the moon, and suddenly his voice became very excited. “I can see
Antares
on the surface!” he told Mission Control. Sunlight gleamed from the spidery moon ship surrounded by a bright and new wide area of dust that had been splayed outward by
Antares
’s landing.

When Roosa reached the moon’s other side, he made further thrilling discoveries. He swept
Kitty Hawk
’s cameras across craters never seen from Earth, including an extremely bright crater directly beneath his orbital path. Unseen, unknown by astronomers, it was a meteoric impact that was only weeks, possibly months, old—a virgin crater on a world that had been bombarded with such impacts for 4.6 billion years.

Back on the lunar surface, Alan Shepard was looking upward into the blackest of skies, thrilled at the blue-and-brown miracle that was his home planet. One-third of Earth hung magically suspended, floating. “That was breathtaking! The ice caps over the poles, the white clouds, the blue water…gorgeous, Barbree, just gorgeous!” he would tell me later with an excitement and a knowing he had seen something reserved for the gods.

“Earth,” he explained, “is limitless to everyone with its vast oceans and towering mountains. There’s always a distant horizon and changing dawns and sunsets. But looking at Earth from the moon, earth is in fact very finite, very fragile…so incredibly fragile. That thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the planet, it can be blown away so easily! A meteor, a cataclysmic volcano, man’s own uncaring.”

Suddenly this master of wings and rocket fire, hero to millions, confessed to me that he had unashamedly wept with his boots planted firmly in lunar soil. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he stood praying for our only safe port in this corner of the universe. Minutes passed before he could stop his tears and prayers, before he could force himself out of his introspection.

Not only was Alan Shepard a sensitive person, the future admiral was a tough, no-nonsense “get ’er done” leader, and he knew their assignments on the moon demanded attention and labor, so he and Mitchell continued their appointed tasks. They strode and bunny-hopped in their spacesuits hundreds of feet from the protection of their lander
Antares.
Those on Earth watching the moonwalkers’ television images learned quickly that the lunar landscape is a visual illusion. What seems flat and featureless is much like an ocean surface on Earth. The “flatness” is in reality a long-waved un
dulation of the moonscape, and several times during their moonwalk, the astronauts’ exertion while toting
heavy loads, bending and stooping to lift rocks, gave Mission Control reason for alarm. They could hear the astronauts grunting, sometimes loudly sucking in oxygen. The flight controllers realized they were pushing too hard, overloading bodies already drained by the demands of launch and flight to the moon.

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.

A
ntares
’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 car
ry 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).