Falling to Earth (35 page)

Sometimes I played music, which only heightened my sense of eerie detachment. I had a cassette filled with songs by Simon and Garfunkel, The Moody Blues, Judy Collins, George Harrison, The Beatles, and some spoken-word extracts from James Cook’s journals. Occasionally, I’d wind the tape to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Come Fly with Me” and hum along while I worked away on my experiments.

I would flip the cassette recorder and watch it lazily rotate while it played. It was odd to watch the laws of physics in action, as it would spin a couple of times, flip over, and continue to spin around a different axis. Space was
weird
.

I carried some songs by French singer Mireille Mathieu, who many called the successor to Édith Piaf. Her agent had contacted me to see if I would put some of her songs on my tape. I wasn’t sure that would be a good thing, but I asked what he had in mind. The next thing I knew, her agent had booked the two of them on a flight to Houston to talk to me. I told the center director about these uninvited guests, and he arranged a meeting in his office, where we met with her for a few minutes. Out of politeness, I took a couple of her songs on the flight. They were hauntingly good but very sad, so I only listened to them once. The moon was foreboding enough.

I knew I would never be coming back to the moon, so I took extra care to absorb every sensation, every experience. I also believed that it was not just for me personally. With only two lunar missions left after ours, I understood it would be years before humans would return. I needed to experience it for everyone.

I curved around the moon to where no sunlight or Earthshine could reach me. The moon was a deep, solid circle of blackness, and I could only tell where it began by where the stars cut off. In the dark and quiet, I felt like a bird of the night, silently gliding and falling around the moon, never touching.

I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars.

I could see tens, perhaps hundreds of times more stars than the clearest, darkest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light, I could see them all to the limits of my eyesight. There were so many, I could no longer find constellations. My vision was filled with a blaze of starlight.

Unlike some other astronauts who had time only for hurried glances, I had many hours, spread over many days, to look at this awe-inspiring view and think about what it meant. There was more to the universe than I had ever imagined.

It got me thinking about our whole concept of the universe. We can’t see much of it from Earth, at least with the naked eye. The more we learn, through telescopes, the more our view of the universe changes. We can only make sense of what we can see. Viewing so much more now with my own eyes, I could feel my own understanding changing rapidly. I sensed that there was so much more out there than our Earthly philosophies would lead us to believe.

With hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, I decided it was naïve to believe we were the only life. If only a minuscule percentage of the blazing stars I saw had Earth-like planets, life could be everywhere. If our solar system is a natural process, then the rest of the universe should follow similar patterns. In fact, what if life came to Earth from somewhere else in the universe? My mind raced with possibilities.

Was the space program more than an engineering program—could it be part of our genetic drive? I might be circling the moon at that moment not because of politics or the Cold War, but because we are hardwired to explore space. In a few billion years, our own sun will die. Perhaps life wanders from star to star over the millennia, refusing to stay and die? Apollo might be the first step of that hardwired survival instinct.

I looked at the blaze of stars and imagined life out there as continuous, like seeds flying through the air, some surviving, some not. I imagined life spreading between the stars, timeless, always there, adapting, propagating, spurred by survival.

These feelings were amplified by the sensation of weightlessness. It seemed so natural, so comfortable—as if I were coming home. As if I had been that way before or belonged in space. Perhaps the natural state of humans was traveling through space.

I didn’t come to any conclusions. I still don’t know what is out there. What I strongly sensed was that we as a species have not yet experienced enough of the universe. Whatever we believe now is probably not accurate. We have developed our ideas based only on what we can see, touch, and measure. Now I was having a glimpse into infinity and could only dimly sense, not understand, the journey ahead for humans.

It was humbling for a Michigan farm boy, whose biggest worry at one time had been thirty acres of hay. Alone on the far side of the moon, in darkness, as far from other humans as it was possible to be, I drank in the experience, over days and long sleepless nights. Decades later, I’m still pondering what I absorbed in those intense hours.

Karl Henize tried to keep me grounded with world events each day. “President Nixon yesterday declared his administration is determined to revitalize the American country …”

I interrupted him. “That’s your world right now. Our world’s up here right now, Karl.” Then I gave him some more detail about ancient rock avalanches over the enormous cliffs of Tsiolkovsky crater. I could catch up on politics when I got back.

Then Karl relayed more personal news—that he and Vance Brand had visited my apartment across the street from mission control. Now
this
was more interesting.

“Your folks are there,” Karl relayed, “and I guess, as you know, they’ve got a squawk box listening in on our loop with great interest. Except when you go behind the moon, then they watch the other show that’s taking place on the surface.”

That was good to hear. NASA had installed a device in my apartment so my parents could listen in to our conversations, including this one. I hoped they were enjoying themselves.

“They said to say hello,” Karl added. “Great, very good,” I replied. “Hello, folks!” A quarter of a million miles away, I imagined them smiling.

I looked in their direction. The crescent Earth was bright, the white clouds reflecting the sunlight perfectly. The moon below me was bright with Earthshine. It did not look the same as when it was bathed in direct sunlight. It seemed to glow with a ghostly radiance, like the pulse of a phosphorescent ocean.

I prepared for the sunrise. Faint streamers and tendrils of light arced above the lunar horizon, glowing gases from the corona around the sun. They were beautiful in their delicacy. Then, with an intensity that made me snap my head away, the white-hot glare of the sun rose above the moon.

I put the shades over the windows and settled in for my last sleep alone around the moon. It had already been the experience of a lifetime. We still had many days and adventures ahead until we’d find Earth once more.

CHAPTER 10
FALLING TO EARTH

O
n my last morning alone around the moon, I woke to a breezy blast of mariachi trumpets. With the serene lunar surface gliding by below me, Herb Alpert’s “Tijuana Taxi” was about the strangest music mission control could pipe up over the radio. But still, it got me awake. “Allo, Terre. Salut de l’
Endeavour
,” I replied in French.

“You can expect that you’ll have some company later this afternoon,” Karl Henize told me. On the surface, Dave and Jim suited up for their final moon walk before they began preparations to lift off and rejoin me. We all had a busy day ahead—even if everything went according to plan. If not, it would be even busier.

My orbital path had drifted during my three days alone, so that I no longer passed over Hadley plain. I fired the engine for eighteen seconds to get back over the landing site. “It looks like a beautiful burn,” Karl remarked, adding that he was also watching the television images of Dave and Jim exploring Hadley Rille. “Save a copy for me,” I requested. I wanted to see it all when I got back to Earth. I glided over the landing site, noticing how much the sun angle had changed in the three days since they landed. The plain was almost in shadow when we arrived. Now the sun was much higher: the plain would be growing warmer.

The scientists following the SIM bay experiments were delighted with the data rolling in. But the equipment was slowly failing. The booms still extended, but began to stick when I retracted them, forcing me to pulse them in short bursts to come in all the way. A sensor in the panoramic camera also acted up, resulting in fewer good images, and the laser didn’t fire as frequently as it should. For new and untried equipment, it had all worked magnificently, but it couldn’t last forever.

Karl told me some exciting news from the scientists in Houston. The laser had measured the height of the mountains, and the X-ray data showed what the mountains were made of. The scientists had already compared the data. It seemed the highest mountains contained the lightest materials such as aluminum. Lighter elements rise in molten lava, so these results strongly suggested that the moon had once been largely a ball of hot lava. It looked like we had just made a major discovery about how the moon formed. Not only that, but it also meant that, unlike Earth, the moon had probably not changed much since it cooled. “It gets rather exciting when the data starts adding up like that,” Karl added. “Lots of things are beginning to fall into place, and
what
a mission, that’s all we can say!”

I was delighted we had solved a major mystery. To me, that discovery alone was worth the cost of our flight. But now it was time for some more piloting. Back in the lunar module, Dave and Jim prepared to lift off. Ed Mitchell, the lunar module expert, was back as CapCom for this critical time. He read up a blizzard of numbers to me, telling me where and when I would need to rendezvous with my moving target. But then I lost his signal. I thought he was done. For twenty minutes he tried to raise me on the radio while, oblivious, I continued to prepare the spacecraft. With less than one minute to go before I slid around the moon and out of radio contact, Ed and I could finally talk again, and I hurriedly wrote down the last important numbers.

Dave Scott, alongside Neil Armstrong, had made the first-ever docking in the space program on his Gemini 8 mission back in 1966. Dave had refined the technique testing the first lunar module on Apollo 9. Now, around the moon, we’d use those proven techniques to dance a complex orbital ballet to find each other and link up once again. Instead of gradually catching up with each other after a few orbits, we would attempt a direct rendezvous.
Falcon
would launch, and
bam
, I’d snag them right away.

We’re all set,” Dave called from the lunar surface. “Ready to give us some warm chow? I tell you, cold tomato soup isn’t too good.” I guess he was fed up with the unheated food they had to eat in the
Falcon
, and was ready for the home comforts of
Endeavour
.

“You’re
go
for liftoff,” Ed radioed to Dave. “I assume you’ve taken your explorer hats off and put on your pilot hats?”

“Yes, sir, we sure have.” Dave responded. “We’re ready to do some flying.”

Back in mission control, Joe Allen paraphrased some poetry by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein. “We’re ready for you to come back again to the homes of men, on the cool green hills of Earth.” That sounded good to me, too.

On Hadley plain,
Falcon
’s engine lit, hurling Dave and Jim’s spacecraft upward. They quickly pitched over and zipped along the rille on the curving path needed to reach me.

As they rose, I turned on the cassette player. We were an all–air force crew, so I figured it would be fun to play the air force anthem to mission control to provide a stirring background. Bad move.

Perhaps it was related to the earlier communication problems and mission control was playing it safe, but my radio signal was not only heard on Earth. For some reason, mission control also patched it through to the
Falcon
. Dave and Jim, intently focused on their checklists, now had distracting music in their ears. The ground didn’t tell me—perhaps they didn’t realize what they had done themselves until later.

Had something gone wrong with
Falcon
at that moment, the music could have been a dangerous diversion. Fortunately, everything went to plan, and Dave and Jim zipped into an orbit below and behind me. I’d trained extensively to catch them if
Falcon
lurched into some other wilder orbit. But I never needed to. I soon had a good radar lock on them. Guided by Ed Mitchell back on Earth, Dave and I flew our spacecraft ever closer, mirroring each other’s moves. “You got your lights on, Jim?” I radioed, watching for
Falcon
’s flashing tracking light.

I looked through the sextant and the telescope to try and find them, but sunlight in the scopes made it hard to see anything. Finally, in the corner of my eye, I spotted a flash of light in the telescope. I manually drove the instruments over to that point, and there it was—a very bright light. “I’ve got your lights now, Dave,” I told them. Soon afterward, on the far side of the moon, Dave spotted
Endeavour
, a dim star in the distance.