Falling to Earth

by Al Worden

  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.”

  “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 weigh
tlessness. 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.