by Al Worden
In my training I had calibrated my eye for a specific part of the atmosphere. Between Earth’s surface and the blackness of space, the atmosphere looked like narrow bands of different colors, mostly subtle differences of reds, magentas, and blues. I had experimented in simulations on Earth to identify a thin color line I could find consistently. I looked for a particular light blue within the atmosphere when navigating, and this reduced the fifty-mile width to a much smaller path as we left the moon. It worked even better than it had in the simulators—we stayed firmly on track.
Mission control called again and jokingly congratulated me on the accurate navigation. “They’re awarding the honorary ‘Vasco da Gama Navigation Award’ for excellence in this,” Joe Allen teased, referencing the early Portuguese explorer who’d sailed from Portugal to India—and back again, which was more on my mind at that moment.
“Be advised,” Joe added, “you are leaving the sphere of lunar influence and it’s downhill from here on in.” We were still much closer to the moon than the Earth, but because our planet is so much larger, its gravity pulled on us more. We were now truly falling to earth. It meant nothing to us in the spacecraft—there was no physical sensation of movement, no outside indication of our incredible speed as we shot through the empty black void.
There was a slight sense of disconnectedness on the long journey out and back between moon and Earth. At every other time in my life, even in Earth or moon orbit, there was a sense of the ground being below me. Here, both Earth and moon were remote, faraway places. I found it really stimulating. To see the sun, Earth, and moon in sequence as our spacecraft slowly spun made me think more about the moon rotating around Earth, which in turn rotated around the sun. I’d read about this in school and knew it intellectually. However, to be out in deep space and see it firsthand made me sense it on a deeper level. The human species seemed both more and less significant now: less, because I felt dwarfed in this vast blackness; more, because I was able to see it and explore it.
It was time for the three of us to float back into our spacesuits and help each other zip up. We placed guards over the control panel switches so I wouldn’t kick them as I floated outside. I disabled some spacecraft thrusters: the last thing I needed was a thruster to fire as I floated by. We also stowed and tied down loose items in the cabin. After the work Dave and Jim had done to collect moon rocks and place them in sample containers, we didn’t want our prizes to float out of the hatch. We worked slowly and carefully through our preparations for my spacewalk, and everything went very smoothly. I was glad because we were about to do something never tried before in the program.
“You have a go for depress,” mission control told us. We slowly began to let the oxygen out of the cabin through a special valve in the hatch. Everything in the spacecraft looked the same, but I knew now that if I took off my helmet, I would die. The inside of Endeavour was soon as airless as the deep space we traveled through.
“We’re getting ready to open the hatch,” Dave reported. “Okay. Unlatch.” I depressed the safety lock that meant the hatch couldn’t be accidentally opened, always a wise precaution in space. I pumped the hatch handle to rotate the latches out of their locked position. Then, with a careful push, I swung the hatch open.
Apart from briefly floating inside Falcon days before, I hadn’t left the confines of Endeavour for eleven days. I’d last slid through this hatch on the launchpad in Florida. Now I was about to float out of it more than 196,000 miles from home, into the deep space between Earth and moon. It was a thrilling thought.
“The hatch is open,” I announced. The open, square hatchway now framed only deep blackness. I poked my head outside and carefully mounted a TV camera and a movie camera on the hatch so they could capture my spacewalk. Then, grabbing the nearest handrail, I soundlessly floated outside into the void.
I paused a moment and waited for Jim to poke his head and shoulders out of the hatchway behind me. He would stay there and keep an eye on me while I made my way down the side of the spacecraft. Other than our service module glinting in the sunlight, it looked really black out there. I looked down the length of the SIM bay. “The mapping camera is all the way out,” I reported to mission control. It was one of the pieces of equipment that had begun to fail as the flight went on, and I had suspected it could no longer retract all the way back into its housing. Sure enough, it was sticking out. This could complicate my spacewalk a little as I would have to float over it without losing my grip on the handrails. “You ready, Jim?” I asked. “I’ll work my way down.”
After eleven days in space, I was accustomed to weightlessness. Working outside turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought. With one hand on a handrail, I could turn my body with my wrist. The SIM bay was slightly to the left of the hatch, so I first needed to swing across the face of Endeavour. I let my legs float up, and then I swung around and worked my way down the side of the spacecraft, hand over hand, never using my feet. It was even easier than in the water training tank.
I floated over the stuck mapping camera, then rotated myself on the handrail, placing my feet in special restraints. I took a quick look around while Jim floated into position.
I hadn’t really had a sense of where I was until this moment. Standing upright on the side of the spacecraft, attached only by my feet and the umbilical that loosely snaked back to the spacecraft hatch, I had a fleeting sense of being deep under the ocean, in the dark, next to an enormous white whale. The sun was at a low angle behind me, so every bump on the outside of the service module cast a deep shadow. I didn’t dare look toward the sun, knowing it would be blindingly bright. In the other direction, and all around me, there was—nothing. It’s a sensation impossible to experience unless you float tens of thousands of miles from the nearest planet. This wasn’t deep, dark water, or night sky, or any other wide open space that I could comprehend. The blackness defied understanding, because it stretched away from me for billions of miles.
But there wasn’t time to ponder it too much. I had work to do. I pulled the cover off the panoramic camera, released the film cassette and tethered myself to it. It came out even easier than I expected, although it felt a little bulkier than in simulations. Keeping one hand on its handle, I used my other hand to pull myself back toward the hatch. When I came to the stuck mapping camera again I had to let go of the handle for a second to maneuver over it. But it was only for an instant as I swung my legs out wide, then I had a firm grip once again.
Jim waited for me at the hatch. “Would you like to get hold of it?” I asked with a laugh as I passed him the film. Jim tethered it inside, released the tether attaching me to it, and I was free to float back down again. It was all going so simply. If I had known that Jim, now blocking the hatch, had heart problems, I may have felt much less secure. If he’d had a heart attack at that moment, we’d all have been in danger.
But Jim was okay. While Dave stowed the panoramic camera film deeper in the cabin, I floated back down the side of the spacecraft. “Beautiful job, Al baby!” Karl Henize radioed from Earth. “Remember, there is no hurry up there at all.”
“Roger, Karl,” I replied as I grabbed the handrail again. “I’m enjoying it!”
I floated back down the SIM bay, much faster this time. I’d been asked to look at one of the panoramic camera’s sensors. It hadn’t worked well during the mission, and the engineers on Earth wondered if there was perhaps a crack or contamination in the lens. I floated over it and peered in. “There’s nothing obscuring the field of view. The glass is not cracked,” I reported. “It’s perfectly clear.” Engineers would later find that the problem with the sensor wasn’t with the lens after all, but the signal.
I also had a look at the mass spectrometer. We’d had trouble with its boom, and when I peered at it closely I could see it hadn’t completely retracted, a problem that seemed to happen only when the equipment was in shadow. It had been too cold to work correctly. I could explain exactly what the problem was, a luxury mission contr
ol rarely enjoyed with instrumentation on the outside of a spacecraft.
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.
