Next on our schedule was a practice test of the gun, to see how accurately I could use it. The ground called up, however, and said we didn’t have enough fuel left to do that, and for me to come back inside the Gemini and lock the hatch. As I stood in the open hatch, gathering up all fifty feet of the umbilical line, I had a brief moment to rest and to look around. I felt fine; the only part of me that felt tired was my fingers, which had gotten quite a workout inside those bulky pressurized gloves. I also realized with a start that the earth was down there! I hadn’t even noticed it during the time I had been outside, having been completely preoccupied with the Gemini and the Agena. My problem now was the umbilical line. Fifty feet of heavy hose, containing oxygen tubes and radio wires, is quite a bundle. In addition to its bulk was the distressing awareness that several loops of it were wound around my body. With John pulling, and me backing out of the cockpit a couple of times, we got rid of all but one last persistent loop. This was something I had never practiced in the zero G airplane, the matter of getting snarled in the umbilical, and I didn’t like to think about what it meant when I tried to squeeze down far enough to get that hatch closed. I looked down inside the cockpit and could barely make out John’s shoulder. Loops of umbilical were everywhere! Well, now was the time to find out. I wedged my body down through the nearly solid sea of coils, forcing my legs deep into the cockpit and jackknifing my knees so that my upper body swung downward and inward. I grabbed the hatch above me and pulled it inward. I knew it was going to hit either the hatch frame or my helmet. If hatch frame, fine, but if helmet, that meant I wasn’t down far enough, and I would have to go back outside and try again.
Which would it be? Click! The best sound ever, as the hatch slid smoothly into place. Now all I had to do was unstow the locking handle, and crank, and crank, until—finally—it was locked. Then I tried to be funny. “This place makes the snake house at the zoo look like a Sunday school picnic,” I said, referring to the fact that I couldn’t see much besides a jillion loops of umbilical line. John and I took a good fifteen minutes to get that umbilical and all the rest of the space-walk equipment under control. We put it all together into one large package, which we then dropped overboard, opening the hatch for the third time in two days. This time, with no umbilical, the inside of the Gemini seemed quite spacious, and it was really easy to squeeze down far enough to get the hatch locked for the final time.
After all this, it was time for a good meal and some sleep. It was suppertime, and I had missed lunch in the rush of preparing for the space walk, and I was really hungry. I unpacked a transparent plastic tube of powdered cream of chicken soup, and filled it up with water. The water came from a gray metal water pistol with a long skinny barrel which I stuck into a small opening in one end of the bag. The water gun was the same one John and I used to drink from, being attached by a tube to a large water tank in the back of the spacecraft. Every time you pulled the trigger, it would squirt one half ounce of water into your mouth (or wherever it was pointed). Now I mushed up the soup by squeezing the tube until all the water was dissolved, and cut off the end of the tube with a pair of scissors. I stuck the open end in my mouth and squeezed. Delicious! The best soup I had ever tasted, even if it wasn’t very hot (our water was kind of cold). Also, out my window I had the most exciting view I had ever seen, so my stomach and my eyes were very happy. Having finished my cream of chicken soup, I munched on squeezed bacon cubes and watched the world go by. To save fuel, we had turned off our control system, which meant that we were slowly tumbling. Having flown fighter airplanes for years, I was accustomed to rolling and looping and even spinning, but I had never flown sideways or backward before. Now the blunt snout of our Gemini was tracing graceful arcs in the sky, sometimes in front of our direction of travel, sometimes to one side or the other, sometimes behind. It was like a beautiful roller-coaster ride in slow motion, with no noise, no banging around, no hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach. It was really fun. We were supposed to be going to sleep shortly, and I was tired, but not sleepy, and I really wanted to take the time to enjoy what I saw and felt.
We were flying at an altitude of 200 miles above a sphere whose radius is 4,000 miles. In other words, we were skimming along just above the atmosphere, which is very thin, thinner proportionally than the rind on an orange. The curvature of the earth was apparent, but it was not startling. We were moving at 18,000 miles an hour, but there was not the blur of speed that one sees from a race car. The reason for this is that our higher speed and higher altitude combined to make things go by the window at the same rate as if we had been going lower and slower. The colors were also familiar, although the sky was absolutely black instead of blue, and one noticed the blue of oceans and the white of clouds more clearly than the green of jungles or the brown of deserts. Well, then, what was so different, so unusual, that I felt I could spend weeks looking out my small window?
It was simply that I knew how different it was, from a lifetime of crawling around the surface of this planet. It gave me a feeling of power to know I was circling the earth once each ninety minutes. Those weren’t lakes going by the window, those were oceans! Look at that! We had just passed Hawaii and here came the California coast, visible from Alaska to Mexico, and my bacon cubes not yet finished. San Diego to Miami in nine minutes, and if you missed it, it didn’t matter, because they would be back again in another ninety minutes. Another difference was that we were high above all weather, in pure unfiltered sunlight which cast a cheery glow on the scene below. It seemed like a better world in orbit than it did down on the surface. The Indian Ocean flashed incredible colors of emerald jade and opal in the shallow water surrounding the Maldive Islands, then on to the Burma coast and lush green jungle, followed by mountains and coastline. Then out past the island of Formosa, looking like a giant, well-fertilized gardenia leaf, and across the Pacific, over Hawaii, and now time for California once again. Incredible!
But all good things must come to an end, and now it really was time to sleep, so John and I put thin metal plates over our windows and blocked out the spectacular view. I slept well, being by now much more accustomed to my surroundings, and, besides, I was tired and pleased from my day of space walking. After a hearty breakfast, John and I performed a couple of hours of experiments, and then it was time to come home. We did this by firing our retro-rockets, four solid-propellant rockets mounted in our tail. We were to point backward when we fired them, so that they slowed us down enough to allow gravity to bend our orbit back into the atmosphere. We were scheduled to fire our retro-rockets over the Pacific Ocean, west of Hawaii, whereupon we would begin a gradual descent and finally splash into the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida thirty minutes later.
Before we could retrofire, however, we had a long checklist to wade through. And did John and I take our sweet time! We could fire those rockets only once, and everything had better be right. If we fired them while we were pointed forward instead of backward, instead of reentering the atmosphere we would be boosted into a higher orbit, with no way to get down from it. So as we went around on our final orbit, we double-checked everything except the direction we were pointing. We checked that at least ten times. It was also traditional to use the last orbit to say goodbye to the people in the various tracking stations who had helped us. “We’ll be standing by,” they told us. “Have a good trip home.” “Roger,” said John. “Thank you very much. Enjoyed talking to you. It’s been a lot of fun … Want to thank everybody down there for all the hard work.” John wasn’t kidding. The people on the ground had really been helpful, especially in thinking up ways for us to save fuel after we had used so much in finding our first Agena.
Finally the moment arrived, and a voice from below counted us down: 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - RETROFIRE! After nearly three days of weightlessness, I had forgotten what acceleration felt like, except for those brief bursts from the Agena. Now I counted the four rockets as they fired one after another, and they really felt powerful. I was pushed back in my cou
ch with an acceleration of one half G, but it felt more like 3 Gs to my sensitized body. As we descended, John flew the spacecraft while I worked with the computer to figure out where we would come down. As we entered the upper atmosphere, there was a five-minute period in which we were “blacked out”; that is, we couldn’t talk on the radio. This strange fact is caused by an electric charge which surrounds the spacecraft, and which in turn is caused by the great friction produced when the spacecraft hits the atmosphere at high speed. Our heat shield was forward and our heads were pointed down toward the earth. John banked this way and that, depending on the steering information coming from our computer. It was like making gliding turns to an airport, except that we were coming in upside down and backward.
As I looked out behind us, I could see that we were developing a long tail. This was caused by little pieces of our heat shield burning up and coming off, as it was supposed to do, to protect us from the searing frictional heat. At first the tail was very thin, but then it became thicker and brighter, glowing red and yellow in the dark sky. It was very pretty. As our G level built up to 4, I really felt heavy, but it didn’t last long, and then we were down below the greatest heat and deceleration, and it was time to try the parachutes. First out was the drogue, a small parachute (six feet across) designed to slow us down enough to open our main chute. When the drogue came out, we began to swing back and forth wildly and I got slightly nervous, but then things quieted down a bit, and at 10,000 feet we unfurled our main chute, nearly sixty feet in diameter. It inflated with a great whap and filled our windows with red and white nylon. Beautiful! Soon after the main chute deployed, we noticed a strange thing. In addition to coming straight down, we were turning sideways. Apparently we were spinning on the end of our parachute line, and I didn’t like that a bit. I figured it would make us descend faster and we would hit the water like a ton of bricks. We didn’t, though. We must have caught the edge of a descending wave, because there was a gentle splash, and then our windows were full of white foam and blue-green water.
The sea was quiet, which was really helpful. A spacecraft does not have a keel or a deep hull like a boat, and it bobs and weaves with even the slightest wind or waves. I did not want to get seasick. Outside, I could see one of our thrusters still smoking, and then a helicopter flashed by the window. Inside, it was hot, and I suddenly realized how dry and cool it had been for the past three days. Now that we were back on earth, it was moist and smelled like burned chemicals, but mostly it was hot. I had my pressure suit half filled with sweat by the time we got our hatch open, and were out into a rubber raft, and up into a helicopter, and back onto the deck of our aircraft carrier. The flight was over, and I was ready to get out of that pressure suit.
9
Now I was a real astronaut, not just a rookie who hoped to fly in space. John Young was off to Orlando, Florida, for a home-town parade, but I didn’t really have a home town, so after a brief vacation at the beach I was ready to start working on Apollo. I had thought that the Gemini spacecraft was pretty complicated, but it seemed like a toy compared with the Apollo equipment. There were two Apollo spacecraft—the command module and the lunar module. The command module was scheduled to fly first, and my first job was to learn it. It was so complicated that I really felt stupid when I got inside it. There were so many pipes, valves, levers, knobs, brackets, dials, and handles—and I didn’t have any idea what most of them did. Not to mention switches. In the command module, there were over three hundred of one type of switch alone. I was assigned to a crew with Frank Borman and Tom Stafford. Frank was the commander, Tom was the command-module pilot, and I was the lunar-module pilot (although we didn’t have a lunar module yet). At that time we were the only crew with no rookies on it, and I thought we had a good chance to be the first men on the moon. I liked that idea.
I also liked some of the training I was getting. For example, before anyone could fly a lunar module, he had to have several hundred hours of practice in a helicopter. We had a couple of small helicopters in Houston, and I enjoyed flying them. Learning to fly a helicopter takes some getting used to: it’s sort of like rubbing your stomach with one hand while patting the top of your head with the other. Try it. In a helicopter, both hands are busy all the time. Your left hand holds a stick which contains the engine throttle, plus the control which makes the helicopter go up and down. If you want to go up, you pull up with your left hand. This causes the rotor blades to twist slightly and grab a bigger bite of air, and up you go. At the same time, the blades tend to slow down, so you have to twist your left wrist to add throttle, to keep the blades turning at the same speed. While all this is going on, your right hand is holding a different stick, and your feet are on the rudder pedals. Your right hand cannot let go, even for a second, or the helicopter will tilt out of control, up-down or left-right. The rudder pedals keep the nose pointed straight. You are busy, but after you get the hang of it, it is great fun—a lot more fun than rubbing your stomach while patting your head. Although helicopters don’t fly very fast, in many ways I prefer flying them to a speedy jet, because you can do more things with them.
The reason we had to practice in helicopters was that the lunar module’s descent to the surface of the moon was very similar to a helicopter’s vertical descent and landing. In Houston we even had an imitation lunar surface, a slagcovered field with make-believe craters in it. Slag looks like pieces of porous rock but actually is the cinders left over when iron ore is melted down to make steel. It was gray in color and when you flew over this field in your helicopter it looked just like the photographs of the moon. As we glided in toward a landing in the early morning or late afternoon, we could judge how high we were by the shadows on the craters, just as we would on the moon. Sometimes I also chased birds in the helicopter, but of course that was not part of our training. I did learn, however, that even the most awkward bird is a much better pilot than I.
In addition to flying the helicopter in Houston, I was spending a lot of time flying back and forth to Los Angeles, where the command module was being assembled. The one assigned to Borman and Stafford and me was coming along nicely, and I was finally getting to feel at home in it and learn what all the switches did. At about this time, however, the whole series of planned Apollo flights was rearranged. In the process, Tom Stafford was assigned a crew of his own, and I took his place. Bill Anders took mine, making the new lineup Borman—Collins—Anders. The only problem with this rearrangement was a rule which said no rookie could stay in the command module by himself. It had to be someone who had flown in space before. That meant me, because Anders was a rookie, and that meant that I got “promoted” from lunar-module pilot to command-module pilot. From that day on, although I later changed crews, I never changed specialties. Today a lot of people ask me: “On the Apollo 11 flight, how did you and Aldrin and Armstrong decide who was going to stay in the command module and who was going to walk on the moon?” I usually just mumble, because it is very difficult to explain all about these rules and crew changes. At the time I was very sad, because that was the end of my helicopter flying and my bird chasing, and because I suspected that once I became a command-module specialist, I would never be anything else again. But, on the other hand, I was pleased to be on any crew, and Borman—Collins—Anders had a fascinating earth-orbital flight planned, one that was supposed to take us up to 4,000 miles, far higher than anyone had ever ventured. From 4,000 miles, we would be able to see the whole earth, from North Pole to South Pole, something no one had ever been able to do before.
In January of 1967, the first Apollo crew was about ready to fly. Gus Grissom had flown twice before, once aboard the Mercury Liberty Bell 7, and once aboard the first manned Gemini. Ed White, my old partner, had been our nation’s first space walker. Roger Chaffee, who had been picked to be an astronaut in the same group as me, was a rookie—and the third man on the crew. The three of them were sealed up inside their Apollo command module on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy when a fire broke o
ut inside the spacecraft. The atmosphere inside the spacecraft was 100 percent oxygen, instead of normal air, which is only 20 percent oxygen. The difference is that things burn much more rapidly in 100 percent oxygen, and within seconds the inside of their spacecraft was filled with smoke and flames. The three astronauts died almost instantly, without any chance of escaping. As soon as this tragic news reached Houston, our whole community was filled with a great sense of shock. For years we all had known that space flight was dangerous, and could actually kill someone, but now it had happened—and on the ground, at that. What had gone wrong? What were we supposed to do now? Were Grissom, White, and Chaffee the only ones who would die, or just the first in a long series? Of course, no one knew the answer to the last question, but as several months went by, answers to the first two became apparent. Something had gone wrong in the electrical system of the command module, resulting in a short circuit. This, in turn, caused a spark, which caused some flammable material to burst into flames.
Flying to the Moon Page 8
