Falling to Earth (21 page)

With my daughters Merrill (left) and Alison in my space-age Houston apartment

Jack had had little time to practice the mission with his two new crewmates, but it didn’t matter much once the flight plan was scrapped. The mission was now to get home alive, and for that task Jack needed to know the spacecraft systems inside out. I was completely confident in his hard-earned knowledge of the command module. But the situation was dire, and my heart was still in my throat. Would I ever see my good buddy alive again?

We still didn’t know
why
it had happened, but mission control worked out that an oxygen tank must have exploded in the service module, damaging vital equipment. They quickly canceled the moon landing and pressed the lunar module into service as a lifeboat. The command module had lost its primary source of power in the explosion, and yet it was the spacecraft with a heat shield and parachutes. So the crew had to hang on as long as possible in the lunar module while they rounded the far side of the moon and swung back toward Earth. Then they would need to power up the command module just long enough to attempt reentry. So many things had to go right for the plan to work that I didn’t know if Jack, Fred, and Jim would make it. Both spacecraft would be pushed far beyond their design specifications.

Using the spacecraft simulators in Houston, we hoped to give the crew as much help as possible. We simulated and tested huge numbers of possible survival procedures. This had to be done fast, so we split the jobs between astronauts. I helped Ken Mattingly, Joe Engle, and Stu Roosa while they simulated the flight in both the lunar module and command module. Mission control hurriedly wrote procedures and raced them over to us. We’d test them, make changes, and run them back, over and over, until they were as good as we could make them in the small window of time the crew had left.

The trickiest simulation work was in the lunar module, the spacecraft the crew relied on the most. Designed to land two astronauts on the moon, the lunar module now needed to keep three people alive for a journey around the moon and back. Its engine also had to keep them on course. To fly a straight thrusting maneuver, one astronaut would have to think in terms of up-and-down motion, while the other needed to think sideways, just to keep from veering off course. The thrusting maneuvers had to be done manually, because the lunar module’s computer was not designed to calculate maneuvers with the extra mass of an attached command module. It was tough to simulate, completely backward to our prior training, and for three cold, tired, and hungry colleagues in space it was even tougher.

When I first heard the TV announcement in my apartment, I thought the crew had no chance; Jack, Fred, and Jim were going to die. But when we started testing the procedures I began to see that although it was a long shot, we might get the crew back. It still felt like a long shot until they swung around the moon and started home. It was then a question of whether the crew could survive long enough in the lunar module.

Without any power, the LM became painfully cold. Fred Haise felt increasingly sick as the days went by, and we were powerless to help. The three guys just had to endure. But we could help them find a way to keep the air-purification system working. The lunar module was not designed to keep three people alive for so long, and the canisters designed to purify the air in the command module were the wrong shape. Astronauts, mission controllers, and equipment specialists huddled together and quickly devised a way to jury-rig a system using materials we knew were on board: cardboard, plastic bags, hoses from spacesuits, and lots of duct tape. This hastily invented contraption allowed the command module’s square canisters to work in the lunar module that used round canisters.

As the flight progressed, I became increasingly impressed by Fred Haise. A great pilot and a very smart guy, his lunar module knowledge was vital to their survival. Now we had to hope the explosion had not damaged the command module’s electrical system. Once the crew floated back into that spacecraft and undocked from the lunar module, they only had a small amount of battery power for reentry. The crew could not use those batteries until the last moment. The team in Houston wrote an improvised timeline so the crew could quickly power up a cold, dead spaceship using only that tiny power supply. It all had to happen very quickly at the end of the mission.

Six brutal days after liftoff the crew made it safely back to earth, with a splashdown watched around the world almost as intensely as the Apollo 11 moon landing. Once I saw those main chutes fully deployed and knew that the crew was safe, I could join the cheers and celebrations.

We’d just had a major spacecraft failure that nearly cost us a crew. My own flight was only two missions away. It was evident that Apollo 15 wasn’t going to the moon any time soon—at least until we worked out what had caused the spacecraft explosion and fixed the problem. I didn’t have time to dwell on it. As far as our crew was concerned, our moon mission was on. We’d have to wait longer while the service module was modified, but we could use that time to train even harder. And boy, did we have some tough training ahead of us.

However, the Apollo 13 emergency wasn’t the only event in the spring of 1970 that threatened to delay our flight. A routine NASA physical revealed that I had a small abdominal hernia, and the doctors recommended surgery. Any medical condition when you are on a flight crew always results in a few sleepless nights.

NASA quickly set up an appointment for me at a hospital in downtown Houston. I stayed there for two days, trying to figure out how long it would take to get back to playing handball, my favorite sport. The day after the operation, a nurse showed up in my room with a wheelchair, asking if I’d like to tour the hospital. If anyone would be wheeled around, I replied, it would be her. She called my surgeon for support, but he told her to let me do whatever I wanted. So I gleefully pushed the nurse around the hospital. My recovery did not take long, and soon I was back playing handball. To my immense relief, the successful surgery did not affect my flight standing at all.

As we trained, and I came to know my crewmates even more, I discovered something I didn’t previously know about Jim Irwin. He was happily married—to his
second
wife. But Deke didn’t care about Jim’s fleeting first marriage, which had ended long before he came to NASA, and why should he? It created no drama, no publicity, and no impact on his work. If Jim’s divorce had made it into the papers and tarnished NASA’s reputation, Deke would have acted differently. Nevertheless, I was amused that for all of NASA’s worries about public perception, it managed to fly
two
divorced astronauts on Apollo 15. And that fact never made the press. But then, Jim and I weren’t playboys.

As a prime crew, we were allowed a lot more time in simulators than we’d ever been able to scrape together as a backup crew. It felt like I spent half my life in an Apollo simulator in those years. I probably worked in them for about fifteen hundred hours over a two-year period. The outside world, its problems, and personalities, shrank away to nothing as we gave all of our efforts to months of intense training.

Our command module was in Downey, of course, so we spent a lot of time there. Soon, one day melted into another. We’d work all day, then go over to the athletic club in nearby Long Beach and play handball with guys who were at least twenty years older. They beat the hell out of us, but at least we would get a good workout. We would have a beer, go back to the hotel, sleep, get up, and do it all over again. The schedule was not glamorous stuff; in fact, it could be extremely tedious.

I’d love to tell you that preparing to fly to the moon was always exciting and interesting. Frequently, however, it wasn’t. Much of our work was detailed testing, and we would work through the day minute by minute. In a test procedure, for example, we were told to flip a particular switch, and then wait ten minutes for the engineers to analyze what happened when it came on. Then we’d be asked to turn it off, flip another switch, and wait again. With hundreds of switches and circuit breakers in the spacecraft and thousands of different switch combinations, this process took a very long time.

Astronauts didn’t need to be there for these tests, and when we weren’t available, the engineers and technicians did it themselves. But I believe our presence had a tremendous psychological impact on the Downey workers. We made it our business to know all the technicians who worked on our spacecraft and implored them to tell us if they came across any problems. Over time we developed a great rapport, and eventually, when I walked in each morning, they gave me little hints about something I might want to take a look at, which we could then fix together. Working as a team, we caught things that might otherwise have caused an issue during flight.

Fortunately, we were not stuck doing spacecraft testing week after week. We planned to explore the moon, so we needed to know something about where we were going, which meant we had to become experts in geology. Dave Scott felt that the Apollo spacecraft engineering would be pretty tried and tested by the time we flew, so now we could devote more formal training time to science. We would not be test pilots this time: we would push the technology to its maximum potential.

Geology was far removed from test piloting. Yet we weren’t starting from scratch; we’d been studying the subject since joining NASA. We began primarily in the classroom and over time probably earned the equivalent of a geology college degree. I have to say, however, that the classroom work was as dry as dust, and I had a hard time keeping up with it.

We cataloged rocks in those classes and learned to recognize varying types, such as the differences between volcanic and sedimentary rocks, and how they came to be in the places where they were found. I learned that to be a true geologist, it was not enough to simply memorize what different examples looked like on sight. To really understand them and learn their secrets, we needed to get samples under a microscope and study them in greater detail. I found that the stories those samples told could be dramatically different. The rocks could have been hurled out of volcanoes, exposed and worn by erosion, folded by tectonic forces, or laid down at the bottom of a lake—there were thousands of intricate possibilities.

We wouldn’t have the luxury of microscopes on the moon, however, so we never fully studied all of the diverse peculiarities that true geologists find. Instead, our crew would identify lunar rocks by eye and examine large lunar features based on what we could see and photograph from lunar orbit. The rock samples could be analyzed by trained geologists once we returned from our mission. We’d have to choose good examples for them.

The dry training style our teachers used in the classroom never really gripped me, but my attention picked up when we started to make geology field trips. To be out in the wild landscape made a huge difference. We hadn’t been out of the classroom much in our first year at NASA, but now, instead of learning on a micro-level in the classroom, we studied huge expanses of terrain. I loved the feeling of being out in the field and so, it turned out, did my two Apollo crewmates.

We’d head to parts of the Rocky Mountains and survey the dramatic landscape. I would find sedimentary rocks on slopes, then hike across valleys and find the same type of rock on another slope, many miles away. From this exercise, I could understand that these rocks had been formed next to each other in flat, watery environments, and then volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or tectonic plate movement had thrust them up and away from each other. By looking at the rocks and the landscape, we could reconstruct what had happened as if the landscape were some giant, complex puzzle. Fieldwork was frequently hard work, both physically and mentally, but it was fascinating. Soon I could not only identify rock types on sight, but also explain the processes of their formation, and why they ended up where we found them. I could have happily pursued a career in field geology as readily as piloting.

The geologists who taught us were trying to prepare us to study the moon. The irony was that many of them disagreed profoundly about how the moon’s features were formed. For every geologist who said the moon’s craters were mostly formed by volcanoes, there was another who believed they were created by meteor impact. Being trained by experts who disagreed made our field trips even more interesting, and it caused me to have an open mind about what I might see when I did get up there. We would sit around the campfire in the evenings on our field trips, astronauts and geologists trading theories back and forth.

Our campfire conversations were greatly enlivened by vodka. We started a tradition of always taking a bottle or two on these trips, and our favorite was a Mexican brand called Oso Negro. It was very good—so much so, that as our flight grew closer, we joked about trying to smuggle a bottle aboard.

Listening to all the big questions the geologists traded around the campfire, I hoped that when I flew I’d be able to give them some answers. To do so, I needed to know what to look for. On these trips, I learned that when a volcano erupts the process is nothing like a meteor impact. So different, in fact, that it should be evident when studying a crater up close. When a volcano erupts, new material is blasted out on top of the landscape, so new rock is on top of old. With a meteor impact, the surface is blown upward and outward, folding the lower layers of ground on top of the upper ones, so old rock is on top of new. I was looking forward to trying to identify these features from low lunar orbit, while my colleagues did an even closer study on the moon’s surface.

We traveled all over the world to study as many moon-like geologic regions as we could. I spent around ten days exploring the volcanically active regions of Iceland, a place so stark and barren I felt as if I were already on the moon. Natural hot springs, warmed by underground lava, dotted the landscape. We had a wonderful time studying the rock formations, the volcanic fields, and the general topography of the island. It was a bizarre place; we were there in the summertime, and it seemed like the sun never set. You could be out at 3 a.m. and see people strolling the city streets, the stores still open.