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

by Neal Thompson

  “Great,” said Mitchell. “Whew, that was close.”

  Shepard quickly dropped below eight thousand feet and then slowly coasted lower toward his destination, a deep lunar divot called Cone Crater, which appeared “fat as a goose” beneath him. He descended very slowly—at less than five miles an hour—while still moving forward between craggy lunar ridges and hillsides. When a rough patch of craters and rocks loomed below him, he’d veer right or left, keeping Houston informed of each move—“shifting course,” he once said, then dodged another rocky plateau. Finally he found the smooth, flat space that they’d chosen two years earlier as the ideal landing zone, and brought Antares down within fifty feet of the spot—closer to his target than the previous two moon missions. The only imperfection in the landing was that he touched down on a small slope that caused the LM to tilt a few degrees to one side.

  “Right on the money,” Shepard said, practically giggling at this point.

  “Not bad for an old man,” Fred Haise reported from Houston.

  “Okay, Fredo,” Shepard replied. “That was a real fine job. Thank you, buddy.”

  Neil Armstrong had never revealed whether or how he’d scripted his famous first sentence on the moon: “That’s one small step for man . . . one giant leap for mankind.” But they seemed the perfect words to immortalize the occasion.

  Pete Conrad, the five-foot-six-inch commander of Apollo 12, was somewhat less elegant with his first words: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it’s a long one for me.” (With those words, Conrad won $500 from Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer Shepard had antagonized, who during an afternoon of poolside drinks bet Conrad he wouldn’t dare attempt a glib remark at such a serious moment.)

  Shepard clearly didn’t give much advance thought to his first words. But for those who knew the rough route he’d taken to reach Fra Mauro, what he said seemed appropriate enough: “Al is on the surface. And it’s been a long way. But we’re here.”

  Shepard had about three minutes on the surface alone, waiting for Mitchell to finish his checklist and descend the ladder himself. Shepard tried to describe what he saw—“very impressive sight . . . boulders near the rim . . . Cone ridge going along to the north”—but nothing could accurately convey the lifeless gray-brown world splayed before him.

  Shepard then looked up and found the earth, two-thirds of it illuminated by the sun, a quarter of a million miles away and so tiny, just a crescent of blue and white suspended in a black sky. He was exhausted. There’d been so many close calls and near misses the past few days. And there was much work ahead. But the hardest part of the journey was over, and for those few solo moments before the mission would again consume him, Shepard was suddenly overcome by the silence, the stark beauty, the loneliness of it all. His distant and delicate home planet was “very finite . . . so incredibly fragile,” he reflected—just a tiny ball in space containing everyone he knew. He told himself, “Hey, not too long ago, I was grounded. Now I’m on the moon.”

  As the moment came to an end, a private moment he’d never forget, Shepard was surprised to feel tears welling up into his eyes. But he had no time to savor or consider his emotions, and the tears quickly dried inside his air-conditioned suit.

  With almost every second of their time on the moon accounted for, Shepard and Mitchell quickly set about performing the hundreds of tasks they’d been assigned. After punching a flag into the dust, they set up solar experiments and radar equipment, then rigged their TV cameras so the audience back home could watch their adventures. Each astronaut took scores of pictures—of each other, of the earth, of the LM, of space. Slayton broke in to relay a message from President Nixon; he wanted them to visit the White House when they returned. Great, they said. Then back to the schedule. Apollo 14 was the first mission to be equipped with a two-wheeled cart called a modularized equipment transporter, or MET. After yanking the MET out from its storage space beneath the LM, the two men quickly stocked it with rock-collecting tools, picks and shovels, hammers and tongs. No time to muse or gawk—there were many jobs to do. Shepard had had his personal moment, and now it was all about the work. As Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, would put it years later: “We weren’t trained to smell the roses . . . we had a job to do.”

  Fra Mauro had been chosen because lunar scientists had studied it for years and decided it likely contained some of the moon’s older rocks. The bulk of Shepard’s next thirty-three hours would be consumed with scientific experiments—primarily gathering weird rocks. Abiding by NASA’s tight schedule was difficult, and trudging along the powdery surface, Shepard and Mitchell felt like they were falling behind.

  Walking, they found, was easier if they kept up a one-two, one-two, one-two pace that was more like a horse’s trot than the left-right-left-right gait of a jogger. Also, they learned to lean forward to keep their balance. Fra Mauro turned out to be far more undulating than the photographs they had studied. The two previous lunar landings were in wide, flat areas known as “mare.” Apollo 14 was the first to land amid the moon’s jagged foothills, which made walking more difficult. The land bucked and buckled, but the harsh glare of the sun hammered the landscape flat, casting unreliable shadows. With no points of reference, craters seemed to appear suddenly beneath their feet. Boulders that seemed a mile away were suddenly within spitting distance. “As tough as trying to find your way around the Sahara Desert,” Shepard said.

  At the end of their five-hour first moonwalk, dusty and tired, they crawled back into the LM, took off their dirty boots, sipped water from a tube, emptied their urine bags, and crawled into their crisscrossed hammocks, Shepard on top, Mitchell beneath. But sleep was almost impossible. Shepard felt like he had no place to rest his head. Air hissed from the air conditioner. Mitchell kept raising the window shades to look outside. So, like two kids camping out, they kept whispering to each other.

  “Ed. Are you awake?”

  “Hell, yes, I’m awake.”

  “Do you feel like we’re tipping over?”

  “Yeah.”

  Because they’d landed at an 8-degree angle (which rankled Mitchell a bit), both men felt as if the LM was leaning too far, maybe even sliding down the slope. In the light gravity—with a pull one-sixth that of the earth’s—they feared that one false move would topple their only means of returning home. During their first fitful night Shepard awoke once when he thought he felt the LM slipping. As he scrambled to get out of his hammock and look out the window, he fell on top of Mitchell, who was bunked below.

  Through the “night” (actually a Friday afternoon back on earth), each time they drifted toward sleep they were awakened by the slightest sounds: the rustling of the paper-thin walls, the metallic pings of tiny particles hitting the LM, the slight change in pitch of the small on-board engine as an air-conditioning pump kicked in. Mitchell felt the weight of being “the only two living creatures on this dead world.”

  “Ed, did you hear that?” Shepard asked in an urgent whisper.

  “Hell, yes, I heard that.”

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ed?”

  “What?”

  “Why the hell are we whispering?”

  Unable to sleep, they radioed Houston two hours early, saying they were ready for Cone Crater. The majority of the second day’s moonwalk would be dedicated to reaching the rim of this wide, deep geological gold mine, which scientists guessed was actually the remains of an ancient volcano. The goal was to find rocks that had been ejected from the volcano billions of years ago—ancient slag that might harbor clues to the mysteries of the moon’s origins. With their hand-pulled golf cart full of rock-collecting tools and bags, the two men set off just before 3 A.M. Saturday for the mile-long hike—the longest, most difficult lunar trek two astronauts would ever make.

  More than an hour into the hike, Shepard stated—mistakenly, it would turn out—that Cone Crater “looks a lot farther than it is.” Mitc
hell and Shepard had studied maps and photographs of the terrain, had memorized all the landmarks—various boulders and smaller craters, each of which they’d named. But the more they walked, the farther away the lip of the crater seemed to be, as if it was taunting them. Finally the ground began to slope upward, and they sensed that Cone Crater might be just over the next rise. It wasn’t, and pulling the MET cart up the slope became more and more difficult. Mitchell suggested leaving the MET where it was and hiking up without it, but Shepard wasn’t about to lose a case of scotch. He’d bet a skeptical Gene Cernan that he’d be able to pull the MET all the way to the top of Cone Crater. “Okay, we’re really going up a steep slope here,” Shepard told Houston, where doctors listened to his heavy breathing and watched his rising heart rate. “It’s hard.”

  As the slope became even steeper, Shepard lifted the rear of the MET as Mitchell pulled the front handle. Shepard called out, “Left, right, left, right,” and they marched in sync. Tensions between the moonwalkers rose, and they began arguing about where the hell they were headed. When Shepard’s breathing became more labored and his heart rate reached a danger zone of more than 140 beats per minute, NASA’s doctors—already slightly edgy about a forty-seven-year-old man, recently recovered from a debilitating medical condition, trekking around on the moon—suggested a rest. While catching his breath, Shepard hinted that maybe it wasn’t their day to reach Cone Crater.

  But Mitchell wasn’t about to give up. “We’ve lost everything if we don’t get there,” he said. “Why don’t we lose our bet, Al, and leave the MET and get on up there? We could make it a lot faster.” Shepard finally agreed to “press on a little farther,” and Slayton got on the radio back at Mission Control and offered to cover the bet—he’d buy Cernan his case of scotch if Shepard and Mitchell decided to leave the MET behind.

  “We’ll get there,” Shepard said, and a few minutes later, at the top of a small rise, said he expected to “be approaching the rim here very shortly.” But one rise led to another, and another. They were already a mile away from the LM and should have reached Cone Crater by then. But their time was running out, and they were still a little unsure of their bearings. If they continued too far in the wrong direction, they risked depleting the oxygen supply strapped to their backpacks. Most of the time Shepard took the lead, but Mitchell kept stopping to warn Shepard that he was leading them in the wrong direction. At one point Mitchell pulled out a map and began gesturing at it as if they were just two travelers lost somewhere in Arizona. “Al? Head left. It’s right up there,” Mitchell said, pointing. “We’re down here. We’ve got to go there.”

  But it seemed as if there was no there there. A few minutes later Houston made the decision for them: time to collect a few samples and return to the lunar module. A frustrated Ed Mitchell told Houston they were “finks.” Later Shepard would learn they had been within seventy-five feet of the crater.

  The downhill walk back to the LM was faster, but both men were tired and more than a little disappointed. “Damn,” “hell,” and a terse “son of a bitch” littered their radio transmissions as they loped past Turtle Rock and Weird Rock toward Antares. “We’re going to have to mush, Ed,” Shepard said.

  His mood picked up a bit, though, once they reached the LM. “It’s fantastic up here,” he said. He and Mitchell now had just a few minutes to stow all their collected rocks into compartments in the LM and say goodbye to Fra Mauro before blasting off and reconnecting with Roosa’s orbiting Kitty Hawk.

  But first Shepard had a little surprise, which he had promised Slayton he would unveil only if the mission was proceeding on schedule and there were no unexpected glitches. Shepard moved quickly to set up the little performance he’d long planned, with hopes of distinguishing himself from all other moonwalkers.

  He adjusted the television camera, making sure it was aimed at him. Then he trotted over into the camera’s view, reached into his thigh pocket, and pulled out “a genuine six-iron” club head, which he attached to the end of the telescoping arm of a rock-collecting tool. He reached into another pocket and withdrew what he described to the camera as “a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”

  Louise had watched him practice this surprise many times in their backyard. But, except for Slayton, he’d kept it a secret. He didn’t tell his backup, Gene Cernan, or even Ed Mitchell or Stu Roosa. During the preflight quarantine he’d sneak out after hours, put on a space suit, and practice swinging without falling over.

  Now he dropped the ball to the moon and told Houston he was “going to try a little sand-trap shot.” He bent his knees, twisted back, and swung awkwardly at the ball, missing it completely. Fred Haise, commenting from Mission Control, said it “looked like a slice to me, Al,” and Shepard admitted that he “got more dirt than ball.” On his second swing Shepard caught a piece of the ball and sent it dribbling just a few dozen yards away. Then he pulled out a second ball, made “beautiful” contact, and watched it fly “straight as a die . . . miles and miles and miles.”

  Later he’d admit it went about two hundred yards. But he had done it—something no one else had done or ever would do again, something that put his personal stamp on Apollo 14. He’d golfed on the moon, a gesture that would forever endear him to golfers back on earth.

  As Shepard and Mitchell launched away from the moon, Roosa looked down at the stunning sight of the little bug spewing fire as it rose above the gray moon. He asked Shepard if he had anything profound or prophetic to say at that historic moment. “Stu, you know me better than that,” Shepard said.

  Minutes later Antares docked nose to nose again with Kitty Hawk, and Shepard knocked on the hatch between the two spaceships. “Who’s there?” Roosa replied. The two moonwalkers entered Kitty Hawk, vacuumed moon dust off their boots, and wrenched off their sweat-soaked suits. The ride home was unusually quiet, each of them contemplating what had just happened to them and what it meant. Then exhaustion struck and they slept.

  Except for Mitchell, that is. Halfway home Mitchell curled up inside his sleeping bag and again pulled out the flashlight Roosa had noticed a week earlier.

  Watching Shepard’s lunar landing on television, with a crowd of family and friends around her, Louise had burst out laughing, and then immediately broke into tears. “Good, good, they made it,” she said.

  Louise had long nursed an “I told you so” attitude toward those who’d hinted that her husband might be too old for the space game. There had been many references to his age in the press that had miffed her, and she tried to defend him at every opportunity. “It takes a pretty remarkable person to do it, as far as I’m concerned,” she told the Washington Star. “He won’t take second best,” she told the Washington Post.

  During the three days of Shepard’s tension-filled, problematic traverse to the moon, his thirty-three hours on the surface, and his three-day return, Louise had visited Mission Control a few times to listen to radio transmissions from her faraway husband. Once she ran into William House, the doctor who had performed the surgery on Shepard’s ear, whom Shepard had invited to the launch and to Mission Control. NASA flight controllers gave House a headset so he could speak to Shepard. “I’m talking to you through the ear that you operated on,” Shepard had told House.

  Questions, jokes, insinuations, and insults about his ear and his age had dogged Shepard in the months leading up to his launch. A New Hampshire politician wrote to Richard Nixon complaining that Shepard’s Ménière’s disease, regardless of the surgery, should have prevented him from taking other, healthier astronauts’ spots in space. At a press conference Shepard had even been asked about being the “granddaddy of space.” But he insisted he didn’t feel any historical significance. “Either you cut the mustard or you don’t,” he said.

  Still, the reminders had continued until moments before the launch. Guenter Wendt, who ran the flight pad and was the man who closed Apollo 14’s hatch, had presented Shepard with a white walking cane labeled “Lunar
Explorer Support Equipment.” At forty-seven, Shepard was by far the oldest lunar explorer. Six other men would walk the moon in the next two years (in Apollo 15, 16, and 17), for a total of a dozen men between 1969 and 1972. Among the eleven others, the average age would be thirty-nine. Shepard would later admit he sometimes felt he had to work harder to prove an older man could hack it. “Nobody said to me, ‘Look, you’re too old. You’ve been away from it too long. Forget it.’ Nobody said that to me directly,” he told Life magazine a few weeks after his return to earth. “But indirectly I’ve sensed that there are certain people who felt that maybe the old guy shouldn’t be given a chance.”

  He was the only active astronaut left from the Mercury 7. Slayton was still with the program but grounded. Grissom was dead. Schirra, Carpenter, and Cooper had retired. Glenn had suffered another political defeat, losing his second campaign for the U.S. Senate in Ohio in the primary, and then almost killed himself when he lost control of the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 and slammed into a flatbed trailer crowded with journalists.

  Other colleagues, like Bill Lawrence, his old flying buddy from the USS Oriskany and Patuxent River—who, like Slayton, had a slight heart murmur, which had kept him from becoming an astronaut—had been shot down and captured in North Vietnam. That war was born of the same communist threat that had inspired the space race, but Shepard’s race had existed on an entirely different plane, allowing Shepard to emerge unscathed from an era that damaged so many colleagues.

  Through luck, hard work, and arrogant persistence, through timing and shrewd political maneuvering, he had survived, and had now achieved what he called “the most personally satisfying thing I’ve ever done.” As he once put it: “Given a disciplined self, all things are possible.”