Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (54 page)

Lovell peered out the window and saw fumes spewing from the jagged hole in the side of his ship: the second oxygen tank, damaged by the unexplained blast, was rapidly venting the crew’s precious oxygen into space. The news kep
t getting worse: The oxygen supplied power to fuel cells that energized the electrical system, which was now dying; without electricity, there would be no lights and no access to the water supply. Nor would the crew be able to ignite the engines that would slow the ship and bring it into orbit around the moon. Apollo 13 seemed headed for oblivion.

The crew quickly powered down the command module, called
Odyssey,
to preserve what little electricity remained. Then Houston confirmed what the crew already knew: The three couldn’t survive in
Odyssey,
which would run out of oxygen in an hour. They’d have to use the lunar module as a “lifeboat.” The LEM, named Aquarius, which Fred Haise had already docked to the nose of
Odyssey,
carried only enough oxygen to sustain two men for two days. Now it would have to keep three men alive for four days—that is, if the crew could figure a way to whip around the moon and fly back to earth.

Lovell and Haise crawled through a hatch into the cramped space of the LEM while Swigert stayed in
Odyssey,
using a flashlight to shut down
Odyssey
’s systems; Lovell and Haise ran a hose from Haise’s now obsolete moonwalking suit through to the command module, to give Swigert enough oxygen to breathe. The next four days were among the most terrifying and ingenious in NASA’s history. Shepard, at Mission Control, assigned astronauts to climb into simulators to test theories on how to get the ship home.

Instead of turning Apollo 13 around and using the last bits of
Odyssey
’s fuel to propel the ship back to earth, Mission Control decided to let Apollo 13 continue coasting to the moon, to use small boosts from the LEM’s fuel supply to adjust its course, and then whip around the moon, using the momentum from that U-turn to swing it back to earth.

Other engineers, meanwhile, devised a makeshift canister that would filter carbon dioxide from the air inside Aquarius, and the crew used hoses, batteries, tape, plastic, and cardboard to r
ig a purifying system. Then they settled back to live in Aquarius, shivering at near-freezing temperatures, sharing little more than a pint of water among them per day. Deke Slayton tried to encourage the men: “Just wanted to let you know we’re gonna get you back. Everything’s looking good. Why don’t you quit worrying and get some sleep.” Finally, with a billion people around the world glued to radios and televisions, Apollo 13’s haggard crew crawled back into the cold, clammy command module, which Lovell felt looked “forlorn and pitiful,” and separated from Aquarius. “She was a good ship,”
Lovell reported with a catch in his voice. Sixty tension-filled minutes later, Apollo 13 was bobbing safely in the Pacific. Incredibly, they had landed within three miles of the recovery ship, USS
Iwo Jima,
the most accurate landing of the entire space program.

Weeks later Shepard met with Jim Lovell back in Houston, and Lovell asked Shepard how he felt now about losing Apollo 13. It would become a persistent joke between Shepard and Lovell. Every time the two astronauts bumped into each other, Lovell would joke, “Anytime you want Apollo 13 back, Al, you can have it.”

Apollo 14 was delayed for four months to allow crews to modify Shepard’s spacecraft and, they hoped, prevent a similar disaster. Those delays only prolonged the anxious agony Louise began to experience during the long countdown to her husband’s launch. If Shepard was a fair-weather Christian Scientist, Louise was a perfect specimen, everything a Christian Scientist was raised to be: self-reliant but not arrogant, confident but not confrontational, friendly but wary, uncomplicated and unopinionated but unyieldingly true to her beliefs. It was not always an easy balancing act.

At Principia she had been quiet, shy, and sometimes sickly. She avoided public speaking and crowds, and s
he rarely spoke her mind. Even with her children, she was a halfhearted disciplinarian, preferring not to get tangled in battles of will with her girls. Across their years of marriage, however, friends watched Louise blossom as Alan’s partner. Despite his infidelities and the long absences, he complemented her somehow. He gave her confidence, and she sometimes felt he had enough for the two of them. She learned to handle herself in the most demanding social situations: cocktails with Jack Kennedy and Cary Grant, dinner with kings and queens.

But as the launch of Apollo 14 neared, Louise was a wreck. She couldn’t sleep at night, and she couldn’t keep her food down. It wasn’t just that she feared his death. That fear had long since been accepted as just another one of the accommodations in a Navy wife’s life. What seemed to be bothering Louise was a culmination of all those years of waiting, of dealing with the brutal mornings of Alan’s illness, of watching him teeter on the edge of quitting NASA, only to rise and go to the office each frustrating day.

Louise thrived on evenness, and the ups and downs of Alan’s life took a toll on her delicate physiology. The first weeks of 1971 were a repeat of 1961, with reporters calling at all hours, showing up at the door, talking to neighbors, asking her all those questions about death and fear. Contributing to Louise’s unease in the days before Apollo 14 was the resurfacing of the occasional questions about Alan’s rumored infidelities. As newspaper stories about Alan proliferated, a bold young reporter from a Houston newspaper asked Louise how she handled those rumors. She gave the reporter a taut
smile and said, “What do you expect from a sailor?”

Some of the other NASA wives considered Louise “our Jackie O” (who also, for the sake of history, put up with her husband’s wanderings). “People wondered, ‘How did an asshole like that get a queen like her?’ ” Gene Cernan said of Alan and Louise. “But no one had the balls to question him publicly.” Alan
complicated the matter by forever refusing to deny anything. “It’s almost like he didn’t feel he had to,” Cernan recalled.

It’s possible Louise simply didn’t know the truth because she didn’t want to know. She had a “don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude toward such rumors, recalled Louise’s lifelong friend and former Principia classmate Dorel Abbot. “Some things you want to know, some things you don’t need to know,” Abbot said. Whatever combination of factors were nagging at her, the effects became more profound as the days counted down to Alan’s blastoff. He had been away from home many weeks at a time during his preflight training. And in the final two weeks before liftoff, he and his crew were held in quara
ntine—a new NASA prelaunch precaution.

Louise had seen very little of him. He still called at 5 P.M. on most nights he wasn’t home for dinner. But now he was headed someplace where he couldn’t call. She was tossing and turning at night, throwing up during the day. The launch date—January 31, 1971—couldn’t come and go soon enough.

To prevent Shepard and his crewmates from catching a bug or virus in the weeks before their mission, which might seriously sicken them in space, NASA created a strict preflight quarantine procedure that limited the astronauts’ exposure to other humans.

For three weeks the men were limited to the astronaut crew quarters in Hangar S or a nearby beach house on the Cape. They were occasionally allowed to climb into a T-38 to let loose with some spins and rolls, which NASA figured would help acclimate their bodies to the tumblings and gyrations of their upcoming mission. But whenever they were with other people, they had to wear protective surgical masks over their face.

During the final week the restrictions grew even tighter, and the crew of Apollo 14 was required to begin
sleeping inside an aluminum-sided recreational vehicle that NASA had converted into a quarantine room. The crew would also live in that room for two weeks after their return; NASA was afraid that some alien lunar microbe—a fungus, a spore, or a bacterium— might hitch a ride back to earth on an astronaut.

Not that Shepard exactly abided by all the restrictions. He felt cooped up inside the small quarantine room and had a hard time sleeping—he was too geared up. His crewmates would settle down at night and watch TV, but Shepard got dressed, left his surgical mask behind, and sneaked out for a few hours of who knew what. One night, with just eighteen hours before the launch, Shepard grabbed his backup commander, Cernan, and took him along for a drive out to the launchpad, where his skyscraper-tall rocket awaited.

Cernan had kept his promise to train as hard as Shepard, calling him “the old man” and threatening to steal Apollo 14 from him. A week before the launch, though, Cernan had dumped a helicopter into the Indian River and was lucky to escape the flaming wreckage alive. When he returned to the crew quarters that morning, burned and bleeding, he saw Shepard at breakfast and said, “Okay, Al, you win. It’s your flight.”

In the aftermath of Apollo 13, NASA canceled three of its future lunar missions—Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They even discussed canceling Apollo 15, 16, and 17, which would have put Shepard in line to become the last man to walk on the moon (a title Cernan would later earn on Apollo 17). That night, standing beneath his rocket with Cernan by his side, Shepard was destined to soon become the fifth human to step onto the gritty lunar ground—the oldest, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to do so.

A decade had passed since Bob Gilruth had picked Shepard to be the first American spaceman. Public interest in space had waned some in the months after Neil Armstrong touched the moon’s surface, but the near-fatal flight of Apollo 13 reminded the
nation once more of the dangers and drama of space exploration. NASA was now hoping that Apollo 14 would prove to the world that Apollo 13 had been a fluke, that America’s space program could execute a perfect lunar mission.

Launchpad 39-A was alive with engineers twittering around the rocket, pumping it full of fuel. The rocket’s thin walls groaned as the pressurized liquid surged inside. A symphony of hisses and spurts, hums and clacks filled the Florida air. Shepard and Cernan drove through a security checkpoint and walked out to the launchpad. Wordlessly the two men approached the enormous Saturn 5 booster rocket, then stood beneath holes that would soon expel enough pressurized fire to shake the earth.

Shepard had to realize, at some point, how lucky he was to have come so far. If not for the Ménière’s disease, he might have been sitting in Gus Grissom’s seat four Januaries earlier and been consumed by flames. Or, if not for NASA’s caution, he might have flown the ill-fated Apollo 13. It was about 9 P.M. He and Cernan looked like ants beneath the rocket engines’ gaping maw. The capsule Shepard would soon ride sat four hundred feet above them, atop a rocket nearly five times taller than the old Redstone that had given Shepard his first space ride. They spoke very little, but
Cernan felt he was standing beside a man who had “redefined the meaning of the word
commitment.”

He was even afraid to look at Shepard, for fear of seeing his hero in tears. “It may have been the first and only time I’d seen Alan humble,” he said. Finally Shepard put his arm around Cernan’s shoulder and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

19

“What’s wrong with this ship?”

In the VIP launch viewing area, as menacing clouds tumbled overhead and a light drizzle began soaking the crowds on the beach, Louise stood beside a white Chevy convertible with the women closest to her in life. There was her mother; her two daughters and her niece Alice; her friend and embroidering partner, Loraine Meyer; her best friend, Dorel Abbot; and two other astronauts’ wives, Marge Slayton and Jo Schirra.

As the Sunday afternoon launch neared, the drizzle became a downpour, and the launch was put on hold for forty minutes. The delay was almost too much for Louise to take, so Dorel led her away from the others to a quieter spot. Huddled beneath Dorel’s umbrella, they stood beside a hurricane fence, and Louise confessed that she was a lot more nervous than she’d been pretending. She looked beautiful, as always, in a navy blue pantsuit, a white blouse, and blue boots. But her stomach was doing acrobatics.

The day before, she’d visited Alan for the last time. She and Ed Mitchell’s and Stu Roosa’s wives, but no other family members, were briefly allowed into the quarantine room for a quiet dinner. After dinner Louise left the quarantine room
and turned for one last goodbye. Standing on opposite sides of a thick window, Louise and Alan pressed their lips to the glass. Then Alan told her he wouldn’t be making his customary 5 P.M. phone call the next evening. “I’m going to be leaving town,” he said.

That night Louise attended a reception held by Alan’s friend John King, the millionaire oilman and rancher from Colorado (for whom Wally Schirra had recently gone to work). As soon as she arrived, she saw Cary Grant standing by the bar getting a cocktail. Louise’s friends dragged her over to meet her favorite actor, and in no time they were all laughing about that day more than twenty-five years ago when Alan and Louise, bound for Corpus Christi and a new life together, had seen Grant outside a southern California realtor’s office, and Louise had insisted that Alan pull over. Grant aske
d her about the next day’s flight, and Louise told him what she’d been telling the newspapers in recent weeks. “I’m constantly aware of the moon these days,” she said. “It takes on a whole new look when you know your husband is going up there for a visit.”

The next day Louise declined NASA’s offer to watch Alan, fully suited, emerge from his crew quarters and ride a bus out to his rocket. Instead she stood in the rain with Dorel, three miles away from Apollo 14.

“I plan to cry a lot.” That had been Shepard’s response when asked what he planned to do on the trip to the moon. An extra oxygen tank and a backup battery had been added to his capsule, among other modifications, to prevent a repeat of Apollo 13’s woes. Still, Shepard almost had reason to cry before he got anywhere near the moon.

Following the forty-minute delay due to a thunderstorm— during which Shepard impatiently snapped, “Let’s get on with it”—Apollo 14 lifted off from the Cape on the afternoon of January 31, 1971, ten years after Shepard had become
the first American spaceman. Shepard was surprised at how much gentler the eighteen-thousand-mile-an-hour ascent was than his five-thousand-mile-an-hour
Freedom 7
launch had been. When Apollo 14’s spacecraft separated from its booster rockets, passed through the atmosphere, and settled into orbit around the earth, Shepard and his two colleagues unhooked their harnesses and floated giddily around the cabin. Compared to the brief taste of weightlessness
Freedom 7
had offered, floating freely inside the more spacious Apollo command module was a thrilling moment—“very smooth and strangely quiet,”
Shepard said later—and was alone worth the trip.

After the Saturn rocket’s third-stage engine had boosted them out of earth’s orbit and toward the moon, Shepard and Stu Roosa then swapped seats so that Roosa could take the controls and perform the mission’s first crucial task: docking with the lunar module. The LM rode in a “garage” beneath the conjoined command and service modules. Roosa’s job was to detach the LM (and its garage, the now used up third-stage engine), then turn the command module around and guide the tip of the module into the nose of the buglike LM, the vehicle Shepard and Ed Mitchell would later ride down to the moon’s
surface. Once the command and lunar modules were docked together, nose to nose, the two ships would continue coasting toward the moon, and the LM would shed the spent third-stage engine from its behind. Docking was a delicate maneuver, since both ships were traveling at nearly five miles per second, but the docking mechanism itself was one of the simplest on the entire spacecraft, and the procedure had been perfected on previous Apollo flights, none of which experienced any significant problems with docking.

Roosa turned around the command module, which he’d named
Kitty Hawk,
so that it was coasting backward. Shepard peered through a side window and coached Roosa as they neared the LM. Roosa lined up his capsule and tapped the thrusters so that it eased forward and hit the LM’s nose dead center. S
hepard and the other two astronauts then waited to hear the satisfying clacks of the command module’s arrowlike probe jamming into and then locking onto a port on the LM. No clacks. Or as Shepard reported to Houston in the sexually tinged language of the fighter pilot, “No joy.”

Roosa backed up
Kitty Hawk
and tried to dock a second time. Again he guided
Kitty Hawk
’s probe precisely into the center of the LM’s port and even held the thrusters on for a few seconds, trying to jam the two spacecraft into a “hard dock.” But when he eased up on the thrusters, the two ships again drifted apart. Now Houston was worried, and so was Shepard. If they couldn’t dock, their moon shot was over. In the next hour Roosa tried three more times. He was using too much fuel, and Houston was running out of hope. Shepard then suggested a never-before-tried spacewalk, in which he’d exit
Kitty Hawk,
float out to its nose, and pull the two ships together by hand. He knew it was risky and not likely to get an okay from the cautious flight directors. But he wasn’t going to give up without trying everything.

Mission Control overruled Shepard’s idea as too dangerous and began discussing whether to cancel the mission, which would have been devastating not only to Shepard but also to the entire space program, coming on the heels of the disastrous Apollo 13 mission. But first NASA advised one last high-speed stab at docking. This time, however, Gene Cernan—the capsule communicator stationed at the Cape—suggested that, a split second before the two craft touched, Shepard hit the retract switch that pulled the command module’s probe out of the way to allow the latches to slap closed and draw th
e two ships together. Shepard told Roosa to “juice it,” and as the command module again nudged against the LM, Shepard punched the retract switch and waited for the
clack clack clack
of the latches. For four long seconds nothing happened. “It’s not working,” Shepard said. A second later the cabin filled with the metallic
clack clack clack
of the twelve latches pulling the ships tightly together. “We have a hard dock,” Shepard reported to the cheers of Mission Control.

NASA remained concerned, however, that the problem with the docking mechanism could recur after Shepard’s moon landing and might prevent the LM from docking again with the command module, which would spell disaster. They allowed Apollo 14 to continue toward the moon while engineers debated whether or not to allow the lunar landing to proceed. For the next three days, Shepard and his crew slept fitfully in their hammocks, listened to Roosa’s Johnny Cash tapes, ate food from cans, brushed and flossed, excreted in plastic bags (“a messy operation,” Shepard said, and a good time for the oth
er two to put on their oxygen masks), chatted with Houston, floated from floor to ceiling with just the push of a finger, and swiped at a few washers and screws floating in midair, left behind by sloppy workers. They watched the earth shrink away, becoming a small and lonely little ball, as the gray blur of the moon grew bigger and rounder.

Day and night became one. At one point, when he thought his two partners were asleep, Roosa saw a flashlight flickering inside Mitchell’s sleeping bag. He was too tired to ask, and never thought to mention it to Shepard, who wouldn’t learn about the secret behind Mitchell’s flashlight until they were all safely back on earth.

She thought it was “a beautiful launch” with a “Fourth of July” feel to it, but she wasn’t ready to go home yet. At the Cape, Louise felt closer to Alan, even though he was so far away. So Louise stayed an extra night at her Cocoa Beach motel, ate an omelet, watched TV reports on the docking woes, and flipped through a copy of the flight manual he’d given her, trying to absorb all the details of what he was doing each moment.

The next day she flew home to their eleven-room manse with the big white pillars in the Houston enclave that was home to oilmen, celebrities, and politicians. Louise’s parents and in-laws were already there. Louise’s mother, seeing how fragile her daughter seemed, invited her friend Dorel—pleaded with her, actually—to help around the house.

With all the bedrooms filled with family members and the Shepards’ daughters, Dorel slept in Alan’s spot, right beside Louise. That first night Louise was up most of the night. She finally fell asleep near dawn, but at 6 A.M. there was a loud knock at the front door and then the shrill ringing of the doorbell.

Louise sat bolt upright in bed and gasped. An early morning visitor could only mean bad news. She pictured a dark NASA sedan out front, a chaplain inside carrying a message of sadness and condolences. Dorel told Louise to wait upstairs while she answered the door. It wasn’t NASA. It was only the press—the jackals. They wanted a statement. Dorel was furious and kicked them all off the property, scolding them never to touch that doorbell again, especially not at six in the morning. She “really gave them hell,” then said that Louise would come outside with a statement when she was ready.

Later that day Louise pulled herself together, fixed her hair, put on a nice outfit, and went out to face the hungry press. She tried to exude confidence and gave a defiantly curt statement. “There are lots of other occupations that are demanding of men. I think you have to build a good mental attitude toward your husband’s occupation,” she told them, then turned and went back inside.

Meanwhile, inside the command module, Shepard was tense, and everyone on the ground at Mission Control felt it. Two days into the mission he abruptly canceled a scheduled television broadcast—they were “too busy” and the broadcast was “
not important, ” he said. His replies to questions from communicators in Houston were curt, sometimes rude, and the ground crew thought he was being “uptight” and “snappish.”

Shepard acknowledged later that he “found it difficult to relax” and was “very tired.” He tried to eat and drink a lot and to do some isometric exercises, but his body felt tense the first two days—especially his legs, which he kept braced against the wall to keep him from floating around—and he could only sleep a few hours at a time. Maybe it was the weight of taking center stage after a failed mission. Or maybe the earlier docking problem had spooked him. Whatever the reason, Shepard spoke very little en route to the moon, reporting back to Houston only what he felt was absol
utely necessary. He didn’t try to describe the dark vastness of the universe around him, nor the dead little planet ahead. He kept his thoughts and his words to himself.