Falling to Earth (27 page)

At first, Herrick lived up to his promises. I discussed a cover design with a commercial artist colleague of his, and about two months before the flight Herrick sent me 144 covers. Most had a design on them showing the phases of the moon. We’d agreed that I would keep around 100 of them, and he would get the other 44 back after the flight. I added them to the items I planned to put in my PPK. I also added a Wright Brothers commemorative cover, autographed by Orville Wright himself, sent to me by Forrest Cook, a friend of my parents. Forrest, who lived in a small town just outside of Jackson, was a kind, gentle man and asked me to take the cover to the moon for him. I was happy to help a family friend and right after the mission sent it back to him. I added all of these covers, and everything else I took, to the PPK contents list that I provided to Deke.

Jim Irwin added some postal covers to his PPK, too, and made sure Deke knew about them. He carried a few covers with a shamrock logo on them, many of which he gave to NASA friends after the flight. He even took more than eighty covers as a personal favor for Barbara Gordon, Dick Gordon’s wife. She was an avid collector, and although her covers took up a good amount of Jim’s PPK weight allowance, that was the kind of generous guy he was. Those envelopes flew on the mission and were given right back to Barbara.

I was done with my PPK list and thought I was done with thinking about covers for the flight. Then came another meal, another introduction to a new face, and another offer.

Dave, Jim, and I were in the middle of a tough training day at the Cape when Dave said all three of us were invited to dinner that night at the home of Horst Walter Eiermann, a German who I was told worked for a company that manufactured part of the Apollo launch vehicle. As Dave later explained to a congressional committee, he considered Eiermann a “rather close friend,” with whom he’d had dinner a number of times. Dave said he believed it would be a really good idea for us to go, so Jim and I said yes, without asking more.

We were having cocktails before dinner when Dave and Eiermann started talking about postal covers. As Jim and I sat there and listened to the conversation, Eiermann suggested to Dave that Apollo 15 should carry a hundred special covers for a stamp dealer he knew in Germany named Hermann Sieger. He had previously arranged signed stamp deals with at least twenty of my fellow astronauts.

Jim and I, the rookies in the room, were assured that all of the Apollo crews had done this before. It’s not a big deal, we were told. We’ll be covered. We were reminded, rather ghoulishly, that insurance companies were no longer offering free life insurance to Apollo crews, and we needed to think of our families by making deals such as this.

Here was the plan: Apollo 15 would fly the covers, the crew would sign them, Eiermann would give them to Sieger, and then Sieger would hold them until the Apollo program was finished, or until we had all left the program. At that point, Sieger would be free to sell them, but only through private sales—no public, commercial visibility.

In return, Sieger said he would set up bank accounts for us, place seven thousand dollars in each, and if we left the money there and let it grow, the funds should pay for our children’s college educations. Even back then it was not a lot of money, but when added to our small air force salaries, it would make a big difference. With the covers stored away after the flight, no one would know the plan until we were retired from NASA or the air force.

Dave and Walter both talked quite a lot about the plan that night. It was, essentially, a sales pitch. Everything was laid out for Jim and me, and already felt close to a done deal. Jim, who went along with everything Dave asked, said yes. Then it was my turn, and all heads turned to me.

I nodded my head and said, “Sure.”

It was, without a doubt, the worst mistake I ever made.

That was the last I heard or thought about the covers until after the flight. I never saw them, never heard about them—nothing. I never saw or signed any written agreement, and never met Eiermann again. I assumed Dave would place the covers on his PPK list to submit to Deke. I knew all the covers from Herrick were on mine. I listed all the stuff I personally took, held nothing back, and had nothing to hide.

Had I thought it through at the time, I would have realized that the agreement with Eiermann wasn’t right. No one was really supposed to arrange to make money from the program while they were still in it. Even if the money would only appear after we had left NASA, the whole proposal was still shady.

I didn’t break any formal rules, but in hindsight I broke an unspoken trust. As NASA Administrator Robert Frosch later admitted to a Senate committee, the agency’s casual stance was that it was “generally understood—but not explicitly stated—that PPK items were personal memorabilia and not intended for future commercialization.” Nevertheless, in hindsight, I believe that agreeing to Eiermann’s deal was wrong.

So there you have it. To say I trusted my commander instead of my conscience is not much of a defense, I admit. Nor to tell you that I truly believed what I was told: that every other crew did it with no risk. Nevertheless, that is the truth. That is what I believed. And unless you have been in the military, particularly in situations of danger and split-second decisions, it is hard for me to explain how ingrained it is to trust your commander. If you trust him with your life, you trust him about a few lousy envelopes.

Therefore, after one evening of conversation, I forgot all about the covers. What arrangements Dave, Eiermann, and Sieger made to get the covers onto the flight, I never knew until later. Dave later told a congressional committee that he had placed them in a pocket of his spacesuit, but he never shared that information with me. All they had needed from me was a yes.

Completely unaware, foolishly naïve, even, about the ticking time bomb I had now thrown into my future, I continued furiously with my training.

We were almost ready to fly. But as we neared the launch day, I feared we were missing something. NASA was leery of letting little children witness live launches and imposed age restrictions. This limitation may have protected them, but it also missed an opportunity to engage them. I knew a Saturn V launch was a pretty astounding experience, and children grasped the excitement of flying to the moon in ways that adults did not. If we wanted public support for NASA and space travel, we needed to inspire and inform the kids.

So a few weeks before the flight, I picked up the phone and called the
Sesame Street
production offices in New York. The children’s show had been on TV less than two years, yet it was already highly regarded as an educational and stimulating experience for young minds.

Reaching a producer, I explained my idea for an episode about an Apollo launch. Maybe, I suggested, they could send a film crew down to the Cape to capture the event. Vicariously, then, the kids would feel the impact and excitement. The producer didn’t sound too interested. “Most of us are beginning our summer break,” he explained wearily. “It might be hard to pull a crew together. Call me back in a week,” he sighed, “and I’ll let you know.”

I called him back in a week. They could come to the Cape, but the show wanted something in return, the producer declared rather pompously. Puzzled by his approach, I asked what it was. “Your spacecraft,” he responded. “We’d like you to name it ‘Big Bird,’ after our show’s lead character.”

I imagined for a moment our gleaming spacecraft. Then NASA’s reaction if I had asked to rename it after an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow canary. I looked at the receiver and said “Thank you very much and good-bye.” Screw
Sesame Street
.

I’d wasted a precious week, and we still needed kids. So I immediately called Pittsburgh, and another children’s show,
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
. The producer put me right through to Fred Rogers, the show’s much-loved host. We chatted for a few minutes, I explained my idea, and he replied that it fit perfectly with a series he was filming about parents going away. He wanted to teach children about fathers leaving the house to go down to the store, leaving in the morning to go to work, or going on a trip. This was a perfect match, he told me—Dad is going to the moon for two weeks. As a father, I could relate. Fred proposed filming a show both before and after the trip. A great idea, I agreed.

Fred put me on hold for a few minutes and lined up the PBS Nova mobile filming crew in Boston, probably the best crew in the nation. They were available, and we scheduled it all in that first phone call.

Three days before I began my pre-launch quarantine period, the film crew arrived at the Cape. They filmed Fred and me talking about space in the launch control center, then I showed them how I put on a spacesuit and how each part worked. Fred worked through a long list of kids’ questions about astronaut experiences. I could answer many of them, but I had to confess I couldn’t answer others until after my flight. I asked Fred to let me take the list into space. I would think about them during the flight, I promised, and then answer them when I returned. Fred liked this idea. In fact, instead of making two regular shows out of the footage, he would now do a special.

I worked on a number of follow-up shows with Fred, and we really hit on what kids wanted to know. For example, children were fascinated by space food, so I took some to the show to reconstitute, and Fred and I ate it right there on air. I took a large moon rock to another taping so the kids could look at it. Those shows did a lot of good, bringing a human element into spaceflight. Many of the ideas evolved into a children’s book I wrote in 1974, named
I Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon
. Fred wrote the foreword.

But I did get some good-natured ribbing at the Cape. A few days before the flight, in quarantine, we heard an announcement over the PA system: “Everybody get to a TV set.” Sure enough, it was the Mister Rogers special. It was so far outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy. Astronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn’t do kiddies’ shows. They particularly made fun of me when I carefully navigated the inevitable “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” question. But I loved the final result, and Deke got a good laugh out of watching it. Most importantly, kids loved it.

Our quarantine at the Cape started a few weeks before the flight. Nobody wanted a slight sniffle to delay a multimillion-dollar lunar mission. Those who worked with us directly wore surgical masks. Everyone else we saw only on the other side of a glass window. Farouk and I continued to work on my geology training on different sides of the glass, and I chatted to a lot of visiting dignitaries, too.

My parents made a vacation out of the launch. They drove their tiny travel trailer all the way down from Michigan and stayed in a little trailer park in Cocoa Beach. We visited through the glass. My brothers and sisters arrived a little later, followed by my girls, Alison and Merrill. Their mother didn’t come with them, but NASA took good care of my daughters; they flew them down in a Gulfstream jet from Houston. Like most astronaut kids, none of it seemed like a big deal to them. Many neighborhood dads went to the moon, so this was no different from the stories their friends told.

I was very upbeat about the flight. I never said anything to my family about what might happen to me other than the positives of the mission. I never wrote letters to my daughters in case I didn’t survive or anything like that. Nevertheless, the thought was in my mind that I might never return. I never shared those feelings with anybody at the time. I didn’t see the point. But I did make sure my will was up to date. That was pretty simple: all my possessions would go to my daughters.

I talked to my closest friends a lot on the phone. But one night, I decided the quarantine was crazy—I would make a break for it. After the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, I silently snuck out to my car and drove into Cocoa Beach to meet up with my buddies at a pre-launch party. One was a very special lady whom I was close to at the time, and it meant a lot to me to say good-bye to her in person. I couldn’t stay out for long, and it was certainly against all the rules, but I took the chance. A close friend on the medical team was also there with me, and she could have lost her job if anyone spotted us. If my bosses had checked the space center gate logs, we would have caught holy hell.

The night before the flight, Jim Rathmann also threw a party for my family and friends. I couldn’t attend, of course, because we were watched far too closely at that point to sneak out, but I did get to chat with close friends over the phone. I remember thinking that this could be the last time I talked to them. However, the concern was less for myself. I strongly felt that if something bad happened and we died on the flight, it wouldn’t bother me. Danger came with the job. It would have
really
bothered me if I were the person who caused it. I think we all felt that way. None of us ever wanted to be the one who caused a major accident or incident. I never wanted to be the one my colleagues pointed fingers at and said, “Hey, you screwed up.”

Even though we were in quarantine, we could still keep ourselves sharp with some flying. We’d head over to Patrick Air Force Base, just south of our launch site, making sure not to interact with anyone on the way. Then we flew around in T-38s, which allowed us to have fun and shake off tension. There is a lot of pressure right before a flight, and flying allowed me to relieve it. Additionally, there was talk about people feeling disoriented, dizzy, and sick in weightlessness. I tried to put my inner ear through as many weird sensations as possible in a jet, hoping to prevent any motion sickness. I would roll, spin, and have fun. I don’t know if it helped, but it was a great way to blow off steam.

The last thing I wanted to do was crash, so I was particularly careful not to do anything crazy. Naturally we couldn’t fly too close to our launchpad, but I took the time to look over in that direction, miles away. What I could see was spectacular.