Falling to Earth (38 page)

A NASA artist’s impression of my spacewalk with Jim watching from the hatch

It was time to remove the mapping camera film cassette and bring that back inside, too. This time the cover didn’t cooperate, and I had to twist and pull hard three or four times before it came away. But after that, it was simple. I pulled the mapping camera film out and floated it back over to Jim, who grabbed it and unhooked the tether from me.

As we did this, I saw one of the most amazing sights of my life. “Jim, you look absolutely fantastic against that moon back there,” I exclaimed. “That is really a most unbelievable, remarkable thing!”

Jim was perfectly framed by the enormous moon right behind him. It looked as big as the spacecraft, and was dramatically lit by the sun, emphasizing the rugged craters. I could even see myself, floating in space, reflected in Jim’s visor. It could have been the most famous photo in the space program, if I’d been allowed to take a camera out of the spacecraft.

I’d argued for carrying one, but the mission planners had worried I’d be busy enough. Now, I really wished I’d had one. Not just for the photo of Jim. I could also have shown them what was wrong with the mass spectrometer instead of just describing it. And there was something else I spotted which would have been good to document: the thrusters on the side of the service module had bubbled and burned the module surface when they fired. We’d never been able to see this before, and it wasn’t good. It hadn’t damaged anything vital that I could see, but I guessed the engineers would want this problem fixed before the next mission.

Well, if I didn’t have a camera, I could at least take a look at where I was. After all, twelve people would walk on the moon during Apollo, but only three would make a deep-space EVA. I would forever be the first, and to this day I hold the record for floating in space farther away from Earth than any other human.

I realized I had a unique viewpoint: I could see the entire moon if I looked in one direction. Turning my head, I could see the entire Earth. The view is impossible to see on Earth or on the moon. I had to be far enough away from both. In all of human history, no one had been able to see what I could just by turning my head. It was
incredible
.

My major tasks outside were done. It had been so simple, I was amazed. I’d practiced so much back on Earth that my spacewalk went by very fast, so fast, I couldn’t believe it was already over. When mission control asked if I had any other general comments on the SIM bay before coming back in, I took the opportunity to make a third and final float down to the mapping camera to see if I could work out why it had jammed. I did a cartwheel motion on the handrail, examining the camera from many angles. With the sun angle so low, it wasn’t easy to inspect. In the vacuum of space the shadows on the spacecraft were a deep, impenetrable black. The camera cast a dark shadow, and I couldn’t see anything jamming it in place. It was time to float back inside.

I carefully pulled the hatch closed. It swung in smoothly and latched easily.

Right away, I wished I had spent more time out there just looking around. We had plenty of time. Those film canisters with their priceless images were now safely inside the spacecraft. But I could have soaked in the scene a little more, just for myself. I would also have liked to have floated all the way down to the base of the spacecraft to examine the engine bell. But I know mission control wouldn’t have liked that.

If I couldn’t take photos outside myself—and Jim had not taken any stills of me either—I knew that at least the fuzzy TV camera and the far sharper 16mm movie camera should have picked up some spectacular images. But I was wrong. The 16mm camera, we learned later, had jammed. It had captured only one frame showing me floating away.

I teased Dave and Jim about this when we got back to Earth. You guys have hundreds of photos walking on the moon, I joked, and I only have one shot of me doing my spacewalk. And is it of my head? No. It’s a photo of my spacesuited ass. Thanks a lot!

When I returned to Earth, to make up for the lack of photos,
National Geographic
magazine commissioned the talented artist Pierre Mion to paint my view of Jim framed by the moon. After I described what I had seen to him, Pierre did a wonderful job capturing it, the next best thing to being there. The image was printed in the magazine. I recommend you search out a copy and look for the little image of me reflected in Jim’s helmet visor.

We gradually brought the cabin pressure back up, until it was safe to remove our spacesuits. Jim’s heart had held out just fine. And Dave was delighted with the EVA. “You’ve done good,” he exclaimed with a laugh. “You’ve made a lot of people back there very happy!”

Karl Henize soon added more praise from Houston. “The guys down here would like to send up their warmest congratulations,” he radioed. “You sure made it look easy up there.”

I brought some of the SIM bay experiments back online, this time to point them at a mysterious X-ray source in a faraway binary star system. We continued to run other experiments, such as taking ultraviolet photos out of the window. We all felt more relaxed and happier—the key parts of our mission were now completed. I still needed to navigate our spacecraft, but other than that we simply prepared to get back to Earth. We chatted about how, compared to earlier flights, lunar landing missions had much less room for error.

“This is sort of an all-or-nothing kind of operation, you know?” Dave remarked to me, when Houston wasn’t listening in. “It really is,” I agreed. “All your eggs in one basket, boy. I got to thinking about that after you guys left for your descent. Once you start that descent, man, that’s it … It’s all hanging out from there on.”

With most of the danger now over, we could ponder the amazing events of the last few days. “I wish I would have tried running alongside the rover at the same pace,” Jim chimed in. “It would’ve been neat to do a few things like that.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, I’m sure glad we got rid of that clothesline operation,” I added, thinking again of the original plan to bring in the film cassettes during my spacewalk. I’d loved every minute of my EVA. “It’s really a ball when you get all suited up, get cooled off, and get the hatch open.”

The television camera image of me floating in the deep blackness of space

I thought some more about the moon. It had been an incredible place to visit and a wonderful mystery to try and unlock, but it was scarred and dead. And what can the living truly learn from the dead? Earth, growing a little larger in our windows, looked beautiful and full of life. It was time to sleep once again, with a smile on my face. I was going home.

When we awoke for the twelfth day of the mission, we still had more than one hundred and fifty thousand miles to go before we’d reach Earth. Even though we sped along at more than four thousand feet per second, we had another day and a half of travel ahead of us. We were truly a tiny sliver of metal crossing this huge, dark void.

Despite the distance, we never felt alone. Houston continued to send us new changes for the flight plan, along with updated instructions for our science experiments. They reported that the weather looked good for our splashdown zone; I wouldn’t have to redirect our course. Dave stayed relaxed and happy. “Yesterday, we finally got to catch our breath,” he told mission control. “The hours are long, but the accommodations are palatial!”

Karl Henize radioed an unexpected update on one of the SIM bay experiments from its chief scientist. “On the gamma-ray experiment, Dr. Arnold reports that Al Worden probably performed the first recorded repair of a scientific instrument in space, because earlier in that day he’d begun to experience some problem with excess noise in the gamma-ray experiment. And when Al went out in the EVA—we don’t know what happened there—but at the end of the EVA, the gamma ray cleared up and has been doing beautifully ever since. You must have given it a pretty good kick there, Al.”

I didn’t recall accidentally kicking it, but I was glad to hear it worked again. “Not only is he a plumber, he’s an electrician as well!” Dave quipped.

Houston also reported with delight that a special mirrored device left on the lunar surface by Dave and Jim was bouncing laser beams back to Earth perfectly. The TV camera left at Hadley plain was less successful. It had been panning around the landing site when it suddenly stopped working. “Would you like us to go back up and check it for you?” Dave asked with a grin.

“Knew you were going to ask!” Joe Allen laughed in response.

Joe read us the morning news. “The government reports today the latest figures in the nation’s unemployment problem, and one private economist predicts the jobless rates probably will show still another rise.” I thought briefly about the Apollo program and the layoffs of all the amazing workers we’d collaborated with. There were only two more missions ready to go to the moon after ours. The moon landings would soon be over. A lot of people would lose their jobs, and many astronauts would sit around with nothing to fly.

I still wasn’t completely sure this would be my only spaceflight. I felt much more certain that it would be my only flight to the moon. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have spent more time in those last days enjoying the view and weightlessness, as I would never have them again. But I really only thought about the things I needed to do to ensure we returned safely home.

“Al, the way people talk down here, they’re going to give you a medal,” Karl Henize radioed, impressed by my continuing navigational accuracy.

“Congratulations, Al, you’ve just been voted to receive a second Vasco da Gama award,” Bob Parker on our support crew added. Thanks, guys, I thought to myself. That meant a lot to hear.

We had time to give a press conference in space, answering questions submitted by reporters. I enjoyed the conversation because it made us feel even closer to home. I was asked about the highlights of the flight so far. One, I said, was the engine burn into lunar orbit, when I saw the moon up close for the first time. The other was the successful burn out of lunar orbit, meaning we’d come home. That about summed it up—amazing exploration and staying alive.

After some other discussion about Apollo 15 “already being described as one of the great events in the history of science”—that was nice—they asked me about my spacewalk the day before.

“As far as what I felt like when I went out there,” I explained, “it was sort of like walking on stage at your high school dinner dance or something. We opened the hatch and it was pitch black, and as soon as we got out, the sun was beating down on everything, and it looked like a very large floodlight on a stage. And then putting the TV camera out on the door just added a little bit more to that sort of unreal feeling that it was time to get out on the stage and do something.”

“If you could see the size of the film magazines that Al brought in yesterday from those cameras,” Dave added, “you’d see that we have indeed at least a great deal of data on film alone.”

“Hopefully, we’ve added to our store of information about the moon and about ourselves,” I concluded, “greater than the capital that was spent on the flight itself.”

Before we turned the camera off, I flashed a quick victory sign at the viewers, as I had done on the way to the launchpad. We would be successful on the flight, much like going into combat, and we were sure of winning. Now we had succeeded in our mission, I made the gesture for a second reason—as a peace symbol. When looking at Earth as a whole planet, that seemed appropriate.

We spent much of the day stowing all the items in
Endeavour
’s cabin. The spacecraft’s center of gravity could not be off balance during our carefully planned plunge back through Earth’s atmosphere the next day. We handled the moon rock sample containers with particular care, until the space beneath our couches was jammed with carefully arranged white bags. It was time to settle in for my last sleep in space.

CHAPTER 11
CELEBRATION