Falling to Earth

by Al Worden

  I woke up to the sound of clanging. Our berth was right below the flight deck, and those guys started work early. A military ship is never a quiet place. I felt much better, though, and very well rested. Jim, however, still looked tired. He hadn’t slept well, he explained, because of the noise and also because he still felt odd, like his head was pointing toward the floor, even when he was sleeping flat.

  We headed up to the deck, and there was the beautiful Hawaiian island of Oahu. A helicopter waited to take us the short journey to Hickam Air Force Base. Touching down, I stepped off the helicopter and onto solid ground for the first time since I had made my way to the launchpad in Florida. It felt good to truly be back on earth once again.

  A crowd of thousands awaited us, along with some local dignitaries, so we gave some more brief speeches and thanked them. But there was no time in the schedule to enjoy Hawaii. After some hurried farewells, we were stuffed into a C-141 cargo plane for the long flight back to Houston.

  By this point in the mission, I had forgotten all about the space covers deal Dave had arranged. Until we were back on earth, I’d had no reason to think about them for months.

  But now here they were, as Dave pulled them out in the C-141. He’d not only had them stamped and postmarked to note the day of launch, he’d also managed to get them postmarked on the ship the day we splashed down. I looked at them with interest. I’d never seen one before. I’d never even seen the design.

  While aboard ship, Dave had mentioned that he would have his covers stamped on the Okinawa with the splashdown date. Good idea, I thought. We hadn’t gone back into Endeavour after splashdown, but a team of technicians had removed all the important items ready to transport to Houston. They returned our PPKs to us, which was standard procedure. So I had my covers postmarked. Mine were not postmarked on launch day because they had been stowed in my PPK inside the spacecraft, as per regulations.

  Then there was another surprise for Jim and me. We’d agreed with Dave to carry a hundred covers for Eiermann. But Dave unexpectedly pulled out a pile of about four hundred.

  Don’t worry, Dave explained. He’d had another hundred made for each of us. We should keep them for ourselves until we were all out of the space program, and until Eiermann and Sieger had concluded their business. Otherwise we’d be undercutting them.

  Dave was well prepared; he pulled out special pens for us to sign all of the covers. It was a smooth flight, and a long one, so we had plenty of time to sit there and sign away. I thought nothing of it. Once we landed I took my hundred covers with me to put in my safety deposit box. Jim took his, and Dave kept about two hundred, his own and the covers to send to Eiermann. It was done. I forgot all about them once again. In retrospect, I should have opened the door and thrown them out of the plane.

  Perhaps it was an ominous sign of things to come with those covers, but it was dark and rainy when we touched down at Ellington Field. Despite the weather a crowd of thousands had turned out, dressed in raincoats and carrying umbrellas. It was time to give another quick speech. “I’m on the last leg of a trip from Cape Kennedy to Houston,” I joked, “and I saw some interesting things along the way!”

  “We went as Americans,” I summed up, “but we really did it for all mankind.” These weren’t just PR words—I really meant them. It was also my opportunity to begin to thank the tens of thousands of people in Houston and around the world who had helped us with our flight. We got the glory, but we couldn’t have done it without an enormous team. I was—and I remain—very grateful to them.

  Deke Slayton also welcomed us and added his congratulations for a great job. To know I had pleased him meant more than all the other praise showered on us. He was usually sparing with congratulations, which was a good thing. When he gave it, you knew he meant it.

  At last I spotted Merrill and Alison, my beloved daughters, who ran over to give me an enormous hug. They had been caught up in the excitement of Dad flying to the moon and were thrilled to see me again. I had missed them a lot—and boy, did I have some stories to tell them.

  My parents were still in town. My father, so teary-eyed and emotional when I launched, was back to his normal self. “You’re back safe,” he whispered to me, “and I’m glad.”

  Have you ever been away on a long vacation? You’ll know the feeling when you first put the key in the door of your home and then close it behind you. After such an eventful time, the apartment seemed so quiet. Everything was where I had left it. I had mail to sort through, chores to do. It was time to get back to normal life.

  I had a strange experience the morning after I came home. When I walked out of my apartment door in the early morning to grab my newspaper, I saw the moon in the sky. It shocked me to see it. It was bizarre to think that I was there just a few days before, flying across its peaks and valleys. The moon looked so different now: so very far away. It really gave me a new perspective on how far we had traveled.

  I’d been asked to skip breakfast that morning, as I headed back to my workplace for some more medical tests. Then we began many, many days of debriefings. The mission planners wanted to go over every detail of our flight plan while it was still fresh in our minds. So we sat around a table and talked through every moment of the mission, reliving it for the engineers. We spent about as long debriefing as we had flying the mission. It also took us that long for our bodies to get back to normal.

  For several days I had to really watch how I walked and how I reached for something. It felt harder learning to adjust to Earth than it was to adjust to space, something mentally to do with coming home. In space, I was very aware of learning new ways of moving. Returning to Earth, everything felt familiar, so I relaxed and didn’t think about it. I would subconsciously push on a table to float away or try and leave an object hanging in midair. I had to teach myself how to live in Earth’s gravity again.

  Of the three of us, Jim was in the worst shape. He was still unsteady on his feet and felt off balance when he lay down to sleep. I’d always thought of him as the weight-lifting, exercise-conscious guy, so I was surprised to see him so worn out.

  Then, in the debriefing period, I was finally told what had happened to him during the flight. I felt confused, more than anything else. Why hadn’t they told us during the mission? There were ways we could have talked about private medical matters with the ground without the whole world listening in. I never got a good answer.

  Dave was also having trouble sleeping because of an ache in his shoulder, something which our flight surgeons dismissed. But Dee O’Hara arranged for some private treatment and he improved. I had trouble sleeping for a different reason. I couldn’t get all the damn people out of my apartment.

  Unlike the crews of earlier moon missions, we did not enter any medical quarantine, because the doctors had decided there was no risk of any possible moon germs returning with us. I would almost have welcomed the quarantine, because we could have debriefed without any distractions.

  As it was, I would go to work, debrief all day, and there was always something going on when I got home at night. Many of the people in my apartment complex would drop by for a drink and a talk. They just wanted to be around somebody who had returned from the moon. I’ve always been a social guy and enjoyed their company, but eventually I had to kick them out every evening.

  Then I would sit in my living room, turn all the lights out, and still not feel sleepy. I was overtired. I would finally get around five hours’ sleep, drag myself out of bed, and shuffle back to the debriefings day after day.

  With three worn-out astronauts, the debriefings soon became dull. At first, I felt proud to talk about what we’d done. Under Dave’s excellent command, we’d really done our jobs, and felt delighted with the way things had turned out. The mission had been what Apollo was truly all about.

  But after a few days of constant talking, I grew wearier. The room was windowless and the sessions were long. Ironically, the mission was tough to discuss since it had gone according to plan—ther
e was little new to say. Much of the debriefing was record keeping, so planners could match the scientific data and photos with specific locations and times in the flight plan. Each mission controller asked endless questions about his own area of responsibility.

  I only really enjoyed my conversations with Farouk, who was like a kid in a candy store when I shared what I had learned. But even he was being pulled in two directions: he had to brief the crew of the next mission, Apollo 16. I told him everything I could to help prepare them.

  I would also have loved to talk more with the scientists responsible for all the SIM bay experiments. But first they needed to work on the raw data before finding time to talk to me. They also needed to concentrate on Apollo 16.

  Even though I talked about the flight every day at work, the mission began to take on an air of unreality. It was as if I had gone to my father’s theater as a child and become totally immersed in a movie, forgetting there was another world out there. Now the movie was over, and I was out on the street as cars and people went by, back in the real world again. The moon flight was an episode in my life that felt totally out of context; I didn’t know how to place it in my mind.

  I would sit in my living room at night, wide awake. It was quiet and peaceful, but my brain still went a mile a minute. So I grabbed some old coffee-stained legal pads and began to write down my vivid impressions of our flight. Unlike the technical debriefing, I relived the flight in emotions and remembered images. The words flowed freely and easily, and after letting them sit to one side for a while, I realized I had written something that might best be described as poetry.

  I didn’t do anything with those papers for years. But when I mentioned them to some friends in a Houston poetry group, they grew excited about the first poems written by someone who had traveled to the moon. They said I should publish them. I left the poems in a drawer for a few more years, but eventually I did publish them, in a volume called Hello Earth: Greetings from Endeavour.

  The poems are about as good as you might expect from a pilot. I hope I did a better job than a poet would if asked to fly a jet with no training. And on those long nights when I couldn’t sleep, the writing helped me. It was my own personal, emotional debriefing.

  I went to the office every day and life seemed to return to normal. The debriefings only lasted a few weeks. Then it was time for NASA to send us on our next mission. This assignment would last for the rest of the year, and this time it was all about public relations. NASA needed to keep the tax dollars flowing. Sending us around the country, then around the world, allowed them to celebrate and show off their successes.

  Our first stop, in early September, was Washington, D.C. Vice President Agnew decorated each of us with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award that NASA could bestow upon us. He was extremely friendly and made us feel very special. The next day, we headed to the Capitol building. From the podium where so many historic speeches had been given, we addressed a joint meeting of Congress, an unusual honor for an Apollo crew, given only to Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 before us. This experience certainly felt a little different from office work.

  We were escorted into the chamber by a group of politicians including Congressman Chuck Chamberlain, who had helped me attend West Point all those years before, and Congressman Gerald Ford, also from Michigan. I’d cross paths with Ford again before too long, under very different circumstances.

  Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House, introduced us in some of the most glowing words I could recall. “It is our great honor today to welcome to this chamber the recently returned heroes of Apollo 15’s epic journey into space,” he began. “I feel privileged to introduce to you three Americans who are such a credit to their country and who represent the highest qualities of human aspiration and courage.”

  Oh shit, I thought to myself, how the hell do I give a speech to match that introduction?

  I had a little time to think about it while Dave made his remarks. They were excellent, inspiring, and a tough act to follow. But then Dave mentioned “my trusted colleague, Colonel Al Worden.” It was my turn.

  “First off, let me say I am overwhelmed by the reception. It is fantastic. I am proud to be an American. I am proud to be part of the Apollo 15 flight.”

  So far, so good. Time for me to share a message of what I experienced in space, beginning with our launch.

  “Our view out of the window was of an area surrounding Cape Kennedy and some of the ocean. After the launch the first thing we noticed, particularly when we got into Earth orbit, was that we had a further view—we were further away from the Earth, and our view was expanding. We did not see any area around Cape Kennedy. What we saw were continents and oceans, a great deal of the horizon. After we left Earth orbit, and for the remainder of our flight, our view was one of the Earth. Our horizons were not limited to the area around us during the flight. We saw the Earth as a single planet. There is a oneness about the Earth that we do not see from the ground. We do not see any boundaries from that particular vantage point. We do not see any differences in race, or religion, or political beliefs.

  “The thought struck me that there was an analogy between the Earth and between Endeavour. We were a team of three living in a spacecraft called Endeavour. We are all billions of people living on spacecraft Earth. We had to work as a team to survive and to maintain our own household during the flight. We must work as a team to maintain our household and to maintain our home called Earth.

  “One thing is quite evident—particularly during the flight—our destinies were bound together by what we did in the flight. We relied on each other; we worked with each other. The same thing must be true on Earth. We must work together. We must rely on each other. We must work together as a team for Earth.

  “We had the very crude beginnings of some tools to help us accomplish this goal on our flight. We carried many scientific instruments—a very crude beginning, admittedly—to do the kinds of work that have to be done to clean up spacecraft Earth. We carried scientific instruments that measured remotely. We carried some cameras that took pictures for analysis. As I said, this is a very crude beginning, but it leads into the kinds of things that can be done in a small way to help clean up our spacecraft Earth.

  “We cannot all go to the moon. The three of us were very fortunate to have gone. We sincerely hope that we can be your eyes and ears in providing the perspective of Earth that we had. Thank you.”

  Jim added his remarks, and then the chamber rose and gave us a thunderous standing ovation. I felt I had given a good speech, not only a perspective on what my government needed to do, but also using the close teamwork of my crew as an example. That day, I couldn’t have felt closer to Dave and Jim while we shared in this extraordinary outpouring of praise.

  President Nixon had called us while we were on the Okinawa and invited us to dinner at the White House. We were happy to accept. It was standard practice for invitees to bring their wives to dinner, too. Dave arrived with his wife, Lurton, and Jim brought Mary. I was single. It would have been fun to invite a date. After all, “Want to join me for dinner with the president?” was an unbeatable pickup line. But I doubt my NASA bosses would have liked that.

  We all brought along our children, and the kids were taken upstairs for dinner. Before the evening was over, the president gave them a special tour. He was a great historian, steeped in the history of the White House. He took a real delight in taking the kids up to what looked like blank walls, and pointing out a near-invisible line in the paint. Then he’d push on the wall, and a secret bathroom would be revealed. Nixon laughed with pleasure as he entertained the children. He was just wonderful to them.

  As I stand between Dave and Jim, my speech receives a standing ovation from Congress.

  Before we sat down to dinner, we stood with the president on the balcony that overlooked the South Lawn. As we looked at the city lights, Nixon told his butler to fetch his hundred-year-old scotch. The butler quietly reminded him that there was onl
y a tiny amount left. The president didn’t care—it was an appropriate occasion to finish it, he declared. So we gazed at the skyline and raised our glasses in a toast.

  It is strange to think now, but all five of the men who sat down to dinner that night—the president, the vice president, and the Apollo 15 crew—were marked for a dramatic fall from grace. At the time, all of us were riding high: Nixon and Agnew were on course to win a second term by a landslide the next year, and we were being honored by them with this special dinner.

  If only we could have foreseen the catastrophes just around the corner for us all. Vice President Agnew was forced to resign because of criminal charges in 1973. Facing even weightier accusations, Nixon would resign the year after, the only American president ever to do so. The fate of our crew would be decided even sooner.

  Although the seeds were irreversibly sown, this was still in our future. As an added honor, the president treated us to a weekend at his private mountain retreat, Camp David. After the grueling years of training, I enjoyed spending family time with Merrill and Alison, while watching Dave and Jim relax with their wives and kids. Mary and Lurton had seen precious little of their husbands in those busy and tense years, and now they could finally enjoy their company in beautiful and luxurious surroundings. I felt a momentary tinge of regret. I was at the pinnacle of my career, but my time around these happy families only reminded me of what I had sacrificed to get this far.

  However, it was a time to enjoy, not to reflect. We visited New York for a motorcade through Manhattan with the mayor. We sat in an open-topped car and waved at the crowds, then met with the secretary-general of the United Nations. He presented each of us with the UN Peace Medal.

  NASA never trained me in public speaking, but during our postflight itinerary, I grew to enjoy it. I didn’t have any particular axe to grind and just said what was on my mind, which is probably why I wasn’t bothered by giving speeches. I never used a script; I just tried to watch my audience and see what they responded to, changing pace if needed.