Falling to Earth (30 page)

Jim tended to float to the top of the spacecraft, like a swimmer in a pool. Dave generally kept himself strapped in his couch, explaining that “Otherwise, you’re fighting the panel all the time.” He was right: the slightest movement in the couch floated us into the instrument panel.

There was nothing I could do about the stuffy feeling in my head—as if I were hanging upside down. I could see Dave and Jim felt the same. Their faces were flushed and puffy, and their eyes bulged a little.

There wasn’t time to let the discomfort affect me. We were all very busy. We were in a low Earth orbit—too low to linger long—and could only go around the Earth for a couple of hours before we needed to head to the moon. This was the only time in the mission I would see Earth up close, but so far I’d barely had a glimpse of it out of the window. The clock was ticking.

Fortunately, our spacecraft had made it into space in good working order. I now had time to briefly reflect on the mission so far. “That was a fantastic ride!” I shared with my crewmates. “I’m just now beginning to understand what went on. That first stage really does shake!” Jim’s wide grin told me he knew just what I meant.

After two revolutions of the Earth, it was almost time to relight the third stage of our booster, and head to the moon. Before we did, we all took a lingering look out of the window. I gazed at lightning skipping across the tops of distant clouds. “This is unreal to watch,” I said with amazement.

“It’s so pretty out here, Dave, I’d almost settle for an Earth-orbit mission,” Jim said wistfully.

“
Don’t
you say that!” Dave responded with mock authority, convulsing me with laughter. It was true: Earth was beautiful, but we ached to press onward to the moon.

The third stage engine relit. For more than five minutes, a soft but solid acceleration pushed us back in our couches again. Our speed climbed to twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Now, instead of falling around the Earth, we were fast enough to climb to a point, days away, where the moon’s gravity would capture us.

We were shooting for a moving target. Because the moon orbits Earth, we had to aim not for the moon itself, but where the moon was
going
to be. It was like firing two bullets, wanting them not to hit each other, but to barely miss. If we got it wrong, space was an unforgiving place. We had to trust the math in our flight plan completely. We checked our numbers
a lot
.

Once the burn was successfully completed, we had time to briefly look out of the window again. Earth had already begun to shrink. Our planet is only eight thousand miles in diameter, and we traveled three times that distance every hour. I could see our launch site in Florida, and the rest of the southeastern United States and Cuba, all in one view. How different it all looked from here.

Time to get back to work. One of my key jobs in the mission was right ahead. Our lunar module,
Falcon
, was bolted into the third stage, still below us. Three and a half hours into the mission, it was time to extract it. I floated over to the left couch, from where I could fly
Endeavour
while I peered out of the left window.

We blew the bolts that connected us to the stage, and with a delicate pulse of our thrusters I edged
Endeavour
away. Large hinged panels opened like petals on a flower and drifted away from the top of the stage, exposing the top hatch of the
Falcon
. We crept away a short distance, then I very slowly rotated us 180 degrees. What was the hurry? We had days before we would get to the moon, and my slow and careful piloting saved precious fuel. Out the window, I spotted a panel spinning away into the blackness. The shrinking Earth also fought for my attention. “What a view!” I remarked, then focused again on my target.

Within ten minutes, we slid back to the third stage.
Falcon
looked delicate, as if it was made of smoothed tissue paper. Better dock with it carefully, I thought. Its round hatch looked back at me like a dark pupil in the enormous round eye of the third stage. Wow, our rocket was
huge
. I pulsed the thrusters again a tiny fraction and nosed up toward our lunar module, head to head. I ignored the hatch and focused instead on a small white target off to one side. Using an optical sight, I placed my crosshairs firmly on the center of the target. As my crosshairs drifted off, I gave the thrusters a little squirt to edge back toward dead center.

I nailed it. “We’re sliding in there,” I told Dave. “I feel it.” The docking probe on the top of
Endeavour
touched the edge of the concave cone on top of
Falcon
, then slowly slid down the cone into a hole barely large enough to encompass three spring-loaded latches. Were we in enough to latch together? I pulsed the thrusters, and pushed into the hole a little faster. The latches sprang into place and held the spacecraft loosely together—a soft dock.

“We’re off at a little bit of an angle,” I noted to Dave and Jim. We were slightly misaligned with
Falcon
. But it was no big deal. I retracted the docking probe, which pulled the spacecraft together and swung us into exact alignment. With a loud bang and a shudder, twelve more capture latches pulled us into a hard docking. “Great! Boy!” I laughed.

Soon after we docked, Dave noticed a problem. “The SPS Thrust light on the EMS is now on,” he radioed to mission control. The instrument panel light told us that
Endeavour
’s engine valves were open, and our enormous main engine should therefore be firing. But it wasn’t, and we did not want it to. We immediately pulled the circuit breakers so that a short circuit couldn’t inadvertently light the engine and thrust us hard against our fragile
Falcon
. While the ground puzzled over the problem, we connected umbilicals between
Falcon
and
Endeavour
through the docking tunnel, checked the docking latches, and prepared to pull
Falcon
out of the spent third stage. I tried not to think about serious engine problems, but I knew that engine was our only way to return from lunar orbit. If it didn’t work, our mission might be scrubbed after only four hours in space.

We pressed ahead. Closing the docking tunnel hatch again, I armed the explosives that would cut
Falcon
loose from the third stage. Springs would push the lunar module out while we backed away with it, firmly attached. I felt the thump as we separated and slowly drifted away from the last piece of Saturn V. It had given us a good ride. Now it would follow us on a slightly different path and crash into the lunar surface in three days’ time, an hour after we were due to enter lunar orbit. I couldn’t see it anymore, as
Falcon
filled my window. Now it was time to work through some troubleshooting procedures with the ground for our faulty engine light.

About an hour after we first spotted the light, the ground sent us potential solutions. They suspected a short circuit, and we hoped to isolate its location. I floated over to the left-hand couch and carefully checked circuit breakers and switches, moved the hand controller, and watched for the light to go out. The light didn’t change.

Shortly afterward, Karl Henize radioed to say that the tests had only proven the problem was not a simple one to isolate. Mission control would ponder the evidence and get back to me. Damn. Nothing to do but continue our busy day, and hope.

I’d made a quick navigation check while still in Earth orbit, and now I needed to confirm our position between Earth and the moon. I floated behind the couches and peered through the optics to check our journey against the backdrop of Earth, moon, and stars. Working the computer, I checked the angles between the ever-shrinking Earth and a couple of stars, fine-tuning our position in space.

Once I’d finished navigating, I placed the spacecraft into passive thermal control mode—or “barbecue mode,” as we called it. With no atmosphere in space, the heat from the sun was brutal, and it could scorch the spacecraft skin while the shadowed side chilled far below freezing. Spacecraft systems could fail and windows could crack if we allowed this extreme temperature difference. A slow, gentle spin maintained an even temperature. We’d spend most of our time rotating this way.

Mission control called with more tests for that pesky light, so we teased switches back and forth to see if the light flickered. Dave gently tweaked a switch to halfway on, and the light flickered off. “Gee! Good grief! Wonder why it’ll do that?” I queried.

“It’s a switch problem,” Dave theorized, to me and the ground. “I bet we’ve got a little solder ball in that switch or something.” He was right, although we couldn’t confirm this until we returned to Earth. A tiny piece of wire, less than a tenth of an inch long, was stuck inside the switch, creating a short circuit. Such a tiny object, but it could have canceled a moon landing. Even after all the meticulous work we’d done in Downey, it had been impossible to catch everything. But now that we knew the problem and that fortunately it was isolated to a small area, we could come up with a procedure to work around it.

We’d planned a small engine burn that first day, to refine our course to the moon. Luckily, my navigation sightings showed we were sufficiently on course. The burn could wait until the next day, while mission control refined their solution for the faulty engine switch.

Eleven hours into the flight, and we were already a quarter of the way to the moon. But Earth pulled on us; we constantly fought its gravity as we sped away. After a fast start, it would take us two and a half days to reach a point where the moon pulled on us more. Until then, we’d steadily slow down.

It was time to eat. We had sliced roast beef, hamburgers, hot dogs, sliced chicken breast, and other goodies. Sounds tasty—until I tell you they were all sealed in little plastic bags and irradiated to kill any bugs. They had a shelf life of twenty years. Our meals were also freeze-dried and had to be reconstituted with water. It was government food, all right, but it kept us alive.

We were supposed to have some variety. Before the flight, we’d worked with a dietician to create a menu of freeze-dried items. She gave us a checklist and around three hundred samples, and asked us to check off what we liked and didn’t like to create individual food menus. It sounded wonderful to me, so I worked through the samples and rated them all.

Two weeks before the flight, Jim and I were in our office and decided to compare our menus. They were exactly the same. That’s peculiar, we thought. So we found Dave and compared his list. Identical, too. Puzzled, we tracked down a member of the Apollo 14 crew. Same result.

We contacted the dietician, who confessed that if one person didn’t like a choice, she took it off everyone’s menu. What was left is what we all got. So much for variety.

Still, the food wasn’t
too
bad. Our bags were color coded: mine were white, just like my Corvette, while the other guys had red and blue. Once I had a food bag, I’d squirt in some water using a little water dispenser. In a stroke of genius by the spacecraft designers, the water was a byproduct of our fuel cells that powered the spacecraft’s electrical systems. I was drinking the exhaust fluid of our batteries, which in turn supplied the power to the water dispenser. Nothing was wasted, and we even had a choice of hot or cold water. I’d push the dispenser into a little nipple in the corner of the bag, and give it a squirt. For a meal, I’d normally have four to five bags at once: a drink, soup, a main course, and a dessert. Each took about twenty minutes to reconstitute once I put the water in and mushed it up a little. So I left the bags while the water soaked in, and in the meantime they floated away. Since we usually ate at the same time, the spacecraft was soon full of color-coded bags which tumbled and drifted as if they had minds of their own.

Because the air in the spacecraft slowly circulated, we didn’t have to worry too much about losing a bag. Eventually my food would drift by and I’d grab it out of the air, cut the top off, and eat the contents. I started to imagine if we all stayed completely still the bags might drift around the inside of the spacecraft in a perfect oval. I could picture lying in my couch, plucking bags out of the air as they marched past in perfect procession, then releasing empty bags back into the air current. At the end of our meal, I could hold up a net and all of our trash would neatly float inside. It would have been fun to watch, like something out of Disney’s
Fantasia
. The reality was more chaotic, but no less fun.

There was nothing to clean up after the meal. We simply folded the bags inward, then stowed them inside a trash bag. No washing up meant more time for other tasks.

Karl Henize, who had been so much help readying me for the mission, called up and asked, “How’s the view up there?”

I looked out of the window at the shrinking Earth. Even though I could see the curved horizon, from orbit Earth had seemed mostly flat. Now we were far enough away that Earth looked like an enormous sphere. It looked
phenomenal
. I could see oceans, clouds, and familiar landmasses. The clouds were piercingly bright as they reflected the sun, much brighter than how we see the moon from Earth. And the oceans were a deep, seemingly bottomless blue. The brightness and intensity is something photos cannot capture.

Although our planet is thousands of miles across, the atmosphere is only fifty miles thick. It is one thing to read that but quite another, believe me, to see it with your own eyes. The horizon was paper thin. There seemed to be nothing that separated the surface from the deep blackness of space. Earth looked very vulnerable, in a way I had never understood before.

There were times I could see North America, glimpse the outline of Florida, and in my mind’s eye I could zoom in to Galveston and Houston, even right down to the street where I lived. But it was all in my imagination. It felt weird to be so far away, and not be able to distinguish anything clearly. It all blurred into one landmass.

“It is fantastic, Karl,” I replied wistfully. “You ought to be here, man.”