Falling to Earth (31 page)

“I’m eating my heart out,” Karl responded, and I knew he meant it.

Fourteen hours into the mission, we wished mission control a good night and prepared for sleep. We were already out of our spacesuits, which we’d carefully stowed under the couches with their arms and legs folded in. One tear in those suits and the moon walks were canceled, so we treated them with reverence. Our lives depended on them.

It hadn’t been easy taking the suits off in the spacecraft while we floated around, but we helped each other and managed the task without brushing against any switches. We still had on our long johns, and if we wished, we could wear cloth flight suits, too. Without the spacesuits it felt cool inside the spacecraft, so we each had a sleeping bag. We placed metal shades over the windows to block out the glare of sunlight. Jim took his sleeping bag under the couches while Dave and I stayed above. I tied my bag between two spacecraft struts, floated inside, and drifted off to sleep.

My stomach knotted and my arms flailed. I was falling from a great height. In terror, I snapped awake. Just a dream. I was okay. I fell asleep again, only to snap awake once more. What was going on?

The sleeping bag zipper only came up to my neck. I didn’t need a pillow in space, so my head and neck were totally unsupported. As I slept, I moved a little. My confused inner ear told me that I must be falling and jolted me awake. I wasn’t adapted to weightlessness yet. I unzipped my sleeping bag a little and stuck my head inside, where my shoulder had been. Now snugly cradled, I drifted off into a deeper sleep.

I woke up many hours later with a painful backache. What had I done to myself? By stuffing myself in my sleeping bag, had I hurt myself? I looked over at Dave, who was already awake, and asked him. “No, that’s normal,” he said with a little smile. “Your spine stretches in space, and your back hurts at first. Guess I forgot to tell you that.”

I didn’t have time to ponder Dave’s humor. It would be another busy day. While we slept, engineers on the ground continued to troubleshoot the faulty switch problem, and Dick Gordon headed to a simulator to test procedures for an engine burn. We started discussing the day’s plans with Houston over the radio. They wanted us to try a test burn, to confirm what they thought was wrong. They read up the instructions to us, which we carefully wrote down. It now took about a second for our radio signals to get back to Earth, even at the speed of light, and the delay on the radio was noticeable. Boy, we were far from home.

Joe Allen was serving that morning as CapCom, the astronaut communicating with us from Houston. He started to read a pompous message from President Nixon. If Nixon hadn’t been slashing NASA’s budget that same year, I may have given his words some more consideration. And if I had to suffer through them, then so do you.

“
Apollo 15 is safely on its way to the moon—and Man is on his way to another step across the threshold of the heavens. Man has always viewed the heavens with humility, but he has viewed them as well with curiosity and with courage; and these defied natural law, drawing Man beyond gravity, beyond his fears, and into his dreams, and on to his destiny
 …”

There couldn’t have been a better time for us to have a minor communications glitch. Sadly, it was brief, and Joe soon continued wading through the president’s message. There was no escape.

“… 
The flight of Apollo 15 is the most ambitious exploration yet undertaken in space. Even as it reflects Man’s restless quest for his future, so it also re-enacts another of the deeper rituals of his bones, not only the compulsion of the inner spirit to know where we are going, but the primal need in Man’s blood to know from what we have come. We hope, by this journey, to know better the origins of Earth, the moon, and other planets. We hope to understand something more of the mysteries of God’s great work. And, in this seeking, we hope to understand more of Man himself. To the men of Apollo 15, for all men, I say Godspeed.
”

Godspeed, Mr. President. True, this was the most ambitious space exploration mission ever. But now I could get back to my relentless quest to ease my backache and take a piss. No, there was more. A message from Vice President Spiro Agnew. Thankfully, his greeting was short, personal, and ended with best wishes for a successful mission. Much better—thanks, Spiro.

Back to work. Mission control had some more troubleshooting suggestions. We pushed on the instrument panel to see if the instrument light would come back on and help them understand where the short was located. No luck. So we then tapped on the faulty switch, and the light blinked on. Good—the problem was in that switch alone.

Joe also passed up some helpful advice from Dick Gordon, who’d finished a test procedure in the simulator. I would manipulate the circuit breakers to ensure the engine could not light accidentally, then burn the engine for just over half a second.

We were a little more than halfway to the moon when it lit. We felt a brief jolt of acceleration, and loose items floating in the cabin jerked downward. The burn worked perfectly and even gave us the exact little boost of speed we’d needed from our canceled midcourse correction. “Al Worden always did have a very fine touch on the circuit breakers,” Joe radioed after the successful firing. “Yes, sir,” Dave responded. “We call him nimble finger up here.” That got me laughing.

We wove science experiments around everything else we did, such as taking ultraviolet-light photos of the ever-shrinking Earth, but our next major task was to inspect
Falcon
. We had not entered the lunar module since we docked with it, and Dave and Jim needed to check it out. We purged and replenished
Falcon
’s oxygen supply, then removed the hatch between the two spacecraft for the first time and floated it into
Endeavour
to stow beneath the couches. Dave and Jim drifted inside
Falcon
to begin work, and I followed not long after with a TV camera, so the ground could see what they were up to. It was tiny in there—barely room for the two of them—so I floated with my legs in the tunnel and watched.

Then Dave saw a problem. “The outer pane of glass on the tapemeter has been shattered,” he reported to the ground. This was
not
good. Some time during or after launch, the glass cover of an instrument had broken, and debris was drifting loose in the cockpit. “I’ve found one piece almost an inch in size,” Dave announced. But I was more concerned about smaller fragments. Jagged shards of glass inside a small spacecraft could float into the equipment, the spacesuit hoses, our eyes and our lungs. I could see floating fragments when the bright sunlight shone through
Falcon
’s windows and lit them up. Dave pulled out some duct tape and a vacuum cleaner and began to collect the debris before it could spread farther. However, he could only find “maybe 50, 60 percent of what was broken,” he told the ground, before it was time to head back into
Endeavour
.

While the ground puzzled over the glass, and another popped circuit breaker, we finished up for the day. I noticed that I was growing accustomed to weightlessness. I’d experienced the sensation before in the zero-G airplane, of course, but it was very different to live with it full time. At first I had overdone it when pushing myself away from a wall, not realizing the delicate touch needed. It was nothing like a swimming pool; I always felt conscious that I was floating free. I learned to grab parts of the spacecraft to help propel myself. To go under the couch, I would hold on to the front and curl my body right around and under in one movement.

Once I was used to moving quickly and accurately, it was fun to float down into the equipment bay, or up into the tunnel. Unlike Dave and Jim, who would walk around in the light gravity of the moon, I would float for twelve solid days. As my aching back and stuffy head gradually eased, I grew very comfortable.

As well as gravity, I had also lost any sense of day or night. These concepts meant little out there in deep space. I felt no sense of motion either. Earth shrank and the moon grew, but it seemed more like the Earth moved away, not us. Earth shrank so slowly after the first few dramatic hours, it was hard to notice the change. We passed through silent, empty space with nothing going by the windows. No street signs, telephone poles, or trees—as if we were motionless. I could only measure our speed by looking at the instruments.

I could see the bright sunshine of day and the deep black of night—both at the same time. As our spacecraft rolled in barbecue mode, the moon and Earth passed by in the windows, both too distant to create sunrises or sunsets. We created our own time. We were fortunate, because we could stay on Houston time for the whole flight. We’d work their workday, eat meals when they ate, and sleep when they slept. The shades in the windows while we dozed helped to maintain this illusion, while the sun beat relentlessly on our rotating spacecraft.

Time for another meal before we slept. I now felt comfortable enough in space to play with my food. Soup was particularly interesting. On Earth, if I dipped a spoon into soup, it would stay in the cup of the spoon due to the pull of gravity. In space, the soup clung to the spoon in a large ball, held there by surface tension. It didn’t care which side of the spoon it was on. If the soup was too hot, I would let the spoon go until it cooled down. If the ball was too big and I didn’t pick the spoon out of midair very carefully, the soup would break off the spoon and form its own little planet in the middle of the spacecraft.

Overconfident, I pulled out too much tomato soup. It broke free of the spoon and floated, quivering a little in the air currents, a perfect crimson sphere. After our short circuit problems, the last thing I needed was a ball of soup floating behind an instrument panel. I imagined the headline: “Moon Shot Canceled Because Astronaut Played with His Food.” I briefly considered finding a straw and sucking it out of the air. But what if it broke apart into tinier balls of soup? I’d only make the problem worse. So I grabbed a towel. Sensing the air current from the approaching cloth, the soup quivered and moved away as if fleeing in terror. But it stood no chance. The towel engulfed the soup and quickly absorbed it. Good-bye, planet soup. I’d just wasted a clean towel, and some good dinner.

I looked again at the tiny Earth in the window, which looked smaller than my soup ball, before I blocked it out with the shade and headed for my sleeping bag. I felt space adapted enough to leave my head out this time. I slept wonderfully.

CHAPTER 9
EARTHRISE

“W
e certainly did have a nice sleep,” I reported to Joe Allen shortly after we woke for the third day of the mission. “The moon is getting bigger out the window.” I could see small details with my naked eye, such as little craters I had never glimpsed before without a telescope. The moon was bright and not quite half full. Dave and Jim needed to arrive at their landing site while the sun was still low. Any higher and it would be too hot for their surface equipment to function safely.

The three of us now looked a little scuzzy. None of us had shaved, and we wouldn’t for the entire flight. We were explorers. Have you ever seen a picture of an explorer without a long, straggly beard? We planned to embody that adventurous spirit.

We also decided not to wash. That was fine, because we didn’t need to. We were in the cleanest environment possible—a spacecraft assembled in a spotless room. Our air-conditioning system scrubbed out most of the odors. Jim had brought along a bar of soap, but not for washing. We put the soap inside a wet rag and whirled it around to make the cabin smell nicer.

I did, however, brush my teeth. Plus, of course, we all had to pee and take a crap. Just because we were away from Earth, that urge didn’t change. However, we had a challenge—in space, everything floats.

Peeing was relatively easy. The urine collection device was shaped like a condom, connected to a tube that fed into a plastic bag. Opening a valve, I could flush my urine out into the vacuum of space, where it froze into thousands of crystal flakes. I preferred to perform a urine dump right before we fired our engine. Otherwise, without any other gravitational attraction, the snowflakes surrounded our spacecraft in a large cloud. If I tried to sight stars though the navigational system, I might aim at my own urine and think it was a star. Firing our engine moved us away from the cloud, which, for all I know, is still out there, our personal contribution to the solar system.

Taking a crap was more primitive. We used plastic bags with a six-inch opening, surrounded by a circle of sticky tape. We’d roll down our long johns, slap the bag on and go. Then we’d wipe ourselves and throw in the used tissue, seal the bag, knead germ-killing liquid into the whole mess, and roll the bag into the smallest possible shape. We’d write our name and the flight time on it and float it to a container that held all these gift-wrapped goodies. Later, some lucky doctor back on Earth would get to work through them all.

Three of us shared this tiny space, so there was no privacy. On an earlier moon flight, one crewmember had tried to hold it in for six days and got pretty sick. It wasn’t pleasant to have someone float inches from your face with a bag stuck to his butt. That fragrant bar of soap was a welcome antidote. But we were grungy explorers and we didn’t let it bother us or give it a second thought.