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 asked 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. Shepard 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 the 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 other 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 absolutely 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.
Finally NASA reported that after studying the problem with the docking mechanism, they had decided to allow the lunar landing to proceed as planned. “You are go for Fra Mauro,” came the message from Mission Control, followed by Shepard’s response: “Hot damn.”
The blueprint for Apollo 14’s mission was essentially a duplicate of what Apollo 13 had planned: to land in and explore the rocky hills of Fra Mauro, which scientists believed contained some of the oldest rocks in the universe. Three days after leaving the earth’s orbit, the linked-together ships of Apollo 14—the combined command-service module and, docked to that, the lunar module—reached the moon and fell smoothly into orbit. On the far side of the moon, the cabin grew dark and eerie, followed by the sudden burst of sunlight as they swung around the other side.
After a few such loops Shepard and Mitchell exited the command module, Kitty Hawk, through the yard-wide port in its nose and entered the LM, which Mitchell had named Antares, the brightest of the stars in the constellation Scorpio (which happened to be Shepard’s astrological sign).
Mitchell stood at the controls, Shepard beside him. To conserve weight, the LM, with its paper-thin aluminum walls and spidery legs, had been designed without seats. Then they separated from Roosa and Kitty Hawk and prepared to descend toward a land of deep craters, undulating gray deserts, and house-sized boulders. “This is really a wild place,” Shepard said as he looked out his window down onto the brown and gray surface, finally breaking out of his tense silence. Mitchell called it “the most stark and desolate-looking piece of country I’ve ever seen.”
But then another glitch reared up and threatened to keep them off the moon. A signal on the LM’s dash lit up, indicating that its abort program had been triggered. Mitchell immediately assumed that the signal was erroneous, and when he tapped on the control panel the light blinked off. It came on again a few minutes later but disappeared once more when Mitchell tapped it with his pen. He and Shepard assumed a loose ball of solder was floating back there, but they had no way to fix it. “Houston!” Shepard radioed. “What’s wrong with this ship?”
The LM’s automated abort procedure was designed to kick in during an emergency. If Shepard experienced a sudden problem just prior to landing, the abort program would automatically ignite the engines beneath the LM and blast it away from the moon and back into orbit, where it could join again with the command module. Fortunately for Shepard and Mitchell, the abort program worked only when the LM was in the final stages of its descent to the surface; Antares was still in orbit and ninety minutes away from that descent. But if the problem wasn’t fixed and the signal was triggered again during their descent, they’d be irrevocably blasted away from the moon.
A similar glitch had threatened to abort Apollo 11’s lunar landing, but twenty-six-year-old NASA engineer Steve Bales made his split-second decision that it was safe to ignore the beeping computer overload signal and allow the historic landing to proceed. But Shepard’s problem was more complicated; it could not be ignored, nor could it be fixed by Shepard or Mitchell. So NASA turned to another twenty-something engineer at MIT’s Draper Labs, who had helped design Antares’ computer software.
While Shepard continued to orbit the moon, an Air Force officer screeched to a stop in front of Donald Eyles’ Massachusetts apartment and pounded on the engineer’s door—at 2 A.M.—to tell him that he had ninety minutes to create a new program that would override the faulty abort switch. Eyles threw a coat over his pajamas, and the Air Force officer drove him to his nearby computer lab at MIT. Eyles sat before his computer terminal and tapped away on his keyboard, struggling to create from scratch a substitute software program that would eliminate the erroneous abort signal.
Most of the LM’s computer program was locked inside the computer’s memory and couldn’t be altered. So Eyles had to devise a patch that advised the computer program to essentially ignore the abort signal. Eyles had only ninety minutes because that was the window Shepard had in which to land on the moon. If Eyles missed that deadline, Shepard would have to return to the command module and fly home. The astronaut’s life’s goal now rested in the hands of a computer geek.
Sixty minutes later the engineer looked up from his computer. “Done,” he said. The ingenious little program was transmitted by radio to Houston, which ran it through a simulator, to make sure it worked, and then transmitted the instructions by radio to Antares. While Shepard continued to fly Antares, Mitchell entered sixty new codes into the computer, using a keyboard on the control panel. Shepard watched in helpless, anxious silence.
By now the window for a lunar landing was down to about twenty minutes. One of the reasons Shepard had chosen Mitchell—“the Brain”—was for his computer expertise and his knowledge of the LM. But one wrong computer entry, one slip of the finger, could cause the whole computer system to crash, so Shepard tried hard not to rush his partner. Mitchell finished in about five minutes, which left a fifteen-minute window to start the landing procedures. Shepard reported back to Mission Control that they were ready to land. “Houston, we’ve got it. We’re commencing with the descent program.”
But Mission Control ordered Shepard to wait while it checked to make sure the new software program was working, and Shepard gritted his teeth through ten more long minutes of delay. Finally, with just sixty seconds to spare, capsule communicator Fred Haise gave the okay to land: “You are go for Fra Mauro.” “Thank you,” Shepard replied sarcastically. “You troops do a nice job down there.”
Shepard quickly fired the engine that slowed Antares’ orbit, and the LM immediately began dropping toward the moon’s surface. “All righty. It’s a beautiful day to land at Fra Mauro,” Shepard reported back to Houston, relieved that his mission was back on track. All the training he had done in the LLTV had prepared him to carefully keep the LM at just the right angle. The LM was still traveling at thirty-seven hundred miles an hour, but because it was angled with the bottom flying first, the thrusters slowed its speed and helped it drop lower. Flying backward and at an angle meant Shepard was flying blind, lying on his back and facing up into space, relying on his instruments to tell him where he was in relation to the surface. It was just like instrument flying in an airplane.
But as Antares reached thirty-two thousand feet, the landing radar failed to accurately lock onto the moon’s surface. Instead of
displaying Antares’ exact position, the radar instruments in front of Shepard’s face were blank. If the screens didn’t light up with solid landing radar readings before they reached ten thousand feet, the rules required Shepard to abort the landing. “Houston, our landing radar is out,” Shepard reported. “Come on, radar!” Mitchell barked as they dropped to twenty-five thousand feet. “Come on.”
At fifteen thousand feet, as Shepard flicked his wrist left, right, forward, and back, each flick sending spurts of gas hissing from the small thruster valves, finessing the LM downward, Houston broke through to remind Shepard of the abort plan, which he would have to implement if the radar failed to lock onto the moon. That plan called for Shepard to stop his descent at ten thousand feet, ignite his main thruster engine, and blast away from the moon. Just the thought of it was sickening. “Antares,” said Haise, “we should go over the procedures to abort.”
“We’re aware of the ground rules, Houston,” Shepard snapped. But that didn’t mean Houston could stop him from violating those rules. Just three miles above the surface, Shepard wasn’t about to turn back now, and he told Mitchell about his plan: “If the radar doesn’t kick in, we’re going to fly her down.” A few minutes later, as Antares reached fourteen thousand feet, Houston suggested a laughably simple solution. They told Shepard to try resetting the radar’s circuit breaker. Just like in an ordinary earthly basement, he pulled out the breaker and stuck it back in. Still no radar. “Negative,” Shepard reluctantly told Houston.
But a second later the radar system flickered to life, locked onto the moon, and gave Shepard a full view on his control panel of all the information he needed to land. “Houston, we have a radar lock,” Shepard practically yelled. The radar information was immediately relayed back to Houston, which gave the go-ahead for a landing. “You better believe, Houston,” Shepard said.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 43
