by Jay Barbree
A mission demands attention and labor, and Alan and Ed bent to their timelines and tasks. They walked off hundreds of feet from the security and protection of their moon ship. Observers on earth, watching the television images from Fra Mauro, learned quickly that the moon is a great harbinger of visual illusion.
What seems flat and featureless is much like an ocean surface on earth. The “flatness” is in reality a long-waved undulation of the moonscape, rising and falling in misleading, gentle swells. If this could not be discerned with a long look at that surface, the sight of Shepard and Mitchell bounding about in the distance dispelled such error in viewing.
As they approached the site for scientific experimentation, some two hundred fifty paces from their landing ship, the two men seemed to be sinking into some great bowl of moon dust. They would appear to walk along flat ground when their legs disappeared and reappeared, like small ships on a heaving sea. In reality, they strode through great shallows in the plains of Fra Mauro.
At one point CapCom was driven to expressing the surprise of Mission Control. The two men had slid from sight, rose slowly, and marched along with most of their bodies concealed by a long undulating swell.
“You’re visible from the armpits up,” CapCom told them, bemused.
Shepard laughed as he waded through thick layers of the moon’s topsoil. “Nothing like being up to your armpits in lunar dust,” he said.
Several times during their moonwalk and the exertion of carrying heavy loads, especially of bending and stooping and carrying rocks, Houston found reason for alarm at their physical exertions. The physicians monitoring their progress could hear them grunting, sometimes loudly sucking in oxygen to sustain themselves. Then they realized they were pushing too hard, overloading themselves. Immediately they slowed their pace, calmed their intensity of effort. The results were everything the doctors could have hoped for.
“They’re doing terrific,” was the consensus in the control center.
“Their schedule calls for four hours and ten minutes on the surface,” noted one doctor. “But the way they’re handling things now, let them know they can have an extra half-hour beyond that time.”
They stretched the extra time allotment to four hours and fifty minutes for the first moonwalk so they could carry additional rocks—two the size of footballs—back to Antares. They used a long pulley to haul the rocks in vacuum-sealed containers into the upper stage of their moon vehicle—home and hearth while on this alien world.
They brushed and pounded and swept as much moon dust as they could from their suits, ascended the ladder back to the porch, each stopping for a final look about them, still filled with wonder at all that had happened and at the deep stirring of their souls amid their scientific work.
Mitchell took a hard look at Cone Crater and its four-hundred-foot slope, which they were to ascend on their second excursion. Indeed, the climb to the summit of Cone was the major objective of their mission. Mitchell judged it was less than a mile from Antares. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting up there tomorrow. There are certainly a lot of boulders on the side. I’d say some are at least twenty feet in diameter . . . I think we can make it to the rim.”
Shepard and Mitchell had practiced on earth for months in rocky country, digging, picking up rock samples, and learning to look for specific rock types scientists were eager to study. Geologists who had trained these men told them what they found at Cone Crater could alter much of what we believed about the formation and structure of the moon.
“You two could kick off a whole new renaissance of the moon,” a scientist explained. “It’s our belief that Cone was carved out of the moon’s surface more than four billion years ago. It should be one hell of a meteoric impact. But the way that crater is gouged, there’s every chance it ripped away rocks from maybe three hundred feet down and that these rocks were tossed about along the crater rim. If that’s what you bring back, then we’ll be able to study material that came into existence about the same time as the planets and moons. You two will be, in every sense of the word, traveling back in time. You’ll see what we’re after. No mistake about that.”
Shepard and Mitchell understood the importance of what the scientists were telling them, how crucial their journey was. The oldest rocks of the moon’s history could be lying at their feet when they reached Cone Crater. They would reach back billions of years with no more effort than bending down to pick up rocks that looked ordinary, coated with dust, but contained within their structure the secrets of the ages.
But that would be for the next day. Their first excursion was complete.
Like young boys on all fours crawling into a tree house, the moonwalkers eased their way back into the cabin, sealed the hatch behind them, pressurized their ship, and “let go.” Houston admonished them to eat their fill, to drink all the water they could absorb. They replenished the pressure suit containers with oxygen and water, checked the battery packs and systems, and reveled in the pleasure of being free of their cumbersome suits.
Weary in body and mind, they slept.
They were alert, raring to go, well before the end of their scheduled ten-hour rest-and-sleep period. They had breakfast and knocked on the door of Mission Control. “Hey, we’re up and running this morning,” Shepard told CapCom with impatience. “The shape of the crew is excellent.”
They wanted to get out ahead of their timeline, to start the most critical day of the moonwalks two hours ahead of schedule. Cone Crater awaited their presence.
The medical teams nodded, the mission directors were delighted, and they passed the word to CapCom:
“Turn them loose.”
Shepard and Mitchell emerged from Antares eager to exceed every item of their moon work list. This was Project Apollo’s first full “geology field day.”
They reloaded the MET for the trip to Cone, anticipating an easier trek than lugging about large rocks like bowling balls. Carrying a dozen of those even in lunar gravity was a back-wrenching experience.
Their MET, or rickshaw, turned out to be less than advertised. Fra Mauro was thicker and deeper in dust than the sites encountered by the earlier Apollo landings. Moving the rickshaw was like plowing through the equivalent of deep sand.
“This is ridiculous,” Mitchell groused to Shepard. “Let’s pick up the damn thing and carry it.” Shepard agreed, and the moonwalk became more and more difficult. Not only because of the dust and their increasingly heavy load of rocks, but they were once again “snared” by the undulating nature of the terrain. Optical illusion plagued them from the outset. It was much like looking at mountains in the desert of home. In clear air a mountain peak or range might seem to be just a few miles distant but in actuality could be forty or fifty miles away.
The navigation charts seemed to have been prepared for some other planet rather than the Fra Mauro area. The cartographers had done their work well enough, but they’d never encountered the “mine fields” into which Shepard and Mitchell laboriously fought their way.
Distance measurements proved to be grossly misleading. The sun angle seemed to change and twist shapes into unrecognizable features. The crystal-clear sharpness of a world without atmosphere threw off the depth perception they had honed to such sharpness as pilots. Worst of all were the gullies that had never been predicted or shown up in photographs.
The moonwalk had become a fierce, slogging journey, sapping their strength and frustrating them repeatedly as they lost sight of where they were, and then found them unable to confirm their bearings without loss of precious time.
Every time they stopped they went through their checklist, collected interesting-looking samples. At every turn they kept their major goal in mind, confirming to each other, “There’s the rim of Cone. We’re getting close now.”
They were gulping oxygen at a fearsome rate. Both men were drenched in perspiration; suit internal temperatures were shooting up. They stopped often to rest.
There are times when the moon can be cru
el. “Damn crater,” Shepard grunted through deep breaths. “It’s like it’s challenging us to make it to the top.”
Houston was concerned about their well being, told them to take it easy, but urged them to keep moving. Everything was reduced at this time to reaching Cone Crater, to search for those rocks more than four billion years old.
Then, finally, before them loomed a steep climb, a slope that extended four hundred feet to the rim of Cone.
To reach that goal, they would have to climb through a massive boulder field. The scene was utter devastation, rubble and smashed rocks everywhere, some the size of small houses.
They knew they were almost out of time, that soon Houston would order them to start back to Antares. They pushed themselves as hard as they could. The slope fought back, deep dust grabbing at their ankles. It was like climbing a steep hill of dry sand.
“You take one step up,” Shepard called Houston, “and you slip back half a step.”
Suddenly Alan slipped to one knee, mired in gravelly dust, trapped in bone-dry muck. He fought to get up. Quickly, Mitchell came to his side and helped his moonwalking partner to his feet.
They were gasping for breath. “Let’s keep going.” Alan labored to get the words out.
The slope resisted every move they made. Judging their tortuous progress, Shepard was beginning to accept that Cone Crater would win.
“I’d say the rim is at least thirty minutes away,” Shepard notified Houston. He added it was now doubtful they could make it all the way unless they slowed their desperate effort, cooling down their suits and eliminating several of the important stops planned in their traverse mission after they visited Cone.
Mitchell fought not to yield to the dangerous slope. “Let’s give it a whirl,” he prompted. Then in controlled frustration: “Gee whiz, we can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater!”
Shepard still had the energy to continue but was judging from experience now. He wanted to make the best of a bad situation and bring back the rocks coveted by the scientists, which he felt were all about them.
“I think we’re looking at what we want right here,” he told Mitchell. “This boulder field is the stuff that’s ejected from Cone.”
“But not the lowermost part,” Mitchell said stubbornly, “which is what we’re interested in.”
They kept pushing and pulling and digging their boots and gloved fingers into the moon’s soil until it was painfully clear that Cone Crater had won.
Time, oxygen, and physical strength were down to nubs. They had battled the steep climb to the rim of Cone Crater for an hour and a half of all-out physical exertion, their breathing coming in shuddering swallows, their few words heard occasionally as choking gasps.
“It’s hard, hard,” said a weary and despondent Shepard.
Mission Control judged the two men at the very edge of their endurance, and they were still about seventy-five feet from the top. The team leaders told CapCom, “Tell them to call it off. Get back to the ship.”
“Al, Ed, you guys have already eaten into your thirty-minute extension, and you’ve passed that now,” came the unhappy news from Houston. “We think you’d better proceed with the rock sampling.”
The high rim of Cone Crater would remain unchallenged.
“I think you’re finks,” Mitchell told everyone.
The moon men moved to several large boulders nearby, chipping samples, recording every detail, and photographing the boulders before and after whacking samples from their structure. Only scientists would later be able to tell if these samples represented the debris of impact cataclysm so many eons ago. (Later studies revealed Shepard and Mitchell had gathered rocks more than four billion years old, among the oldest found on the moon.)
Coming down the slope was immeasurably easier than clawing their way upward. Quickly their suit temperatures returned to normal, and they went with renewed will and energy to complete the moonwalk experiments. Heading back to Antares, they stopped at Weird and other craters, moving documented rocks into the rickshaw. They pounded core sample tubes into the surface, dug trenches to determine how surface materials had stratified over eons, and amassed data that would keep scientists busy for years.
Then, their lander was before them. They had walked more than two miles across the lunar landscape, the longest in Apollo, and they loaded their booty aboard Antares and were ready once again to climb the nine steps to their cabin.
Well, almost.
“Houston,” Alan alerted Mission Control. They were already watching every move the two men were making, but Alan Shepard was out to cop an unquestioned first for a moon visitor.
From a suit pocket he withdrew a small metal flange and carefully attached it to the long aluminum handle of the collector with which he’d picked up small rock samples. In Mission Control eyes were riveted on the screen.
What was Shepard going to do now?
“Houston,” he paused for effect, “you might recognize what I have in my hand . . . the handle for the contingency sample. It just so happens to have a genuine six-iron on the bottom.”
Controllers gaped.
Shepard reached into a pouch of his suit and held up a round object for the world to see.
“In my left hand I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”
“It’s a golf ball!” came a yell from a controller.
Grins flashed throughout Mission Control.
Shepard, an avid golfer on earth, dropped the ball into the moon dust. He made a valiant effort to assume a normal two-handed stance to address the ball. No way in his bulky suit. He sighed. He would attempt the first out-of-this-world golf shot with a one-handed swipe.
“I’m trying a sand-trap shot,” he cracked as he swung awkwardly, the face of the six-iron spraying lunar dust and plopping the ball into a crater less than a hundred feet away.
“I got more dirt than ball,” Shepard apologized.
“Looked more like a slice to me,” Mitchell quipped.
Alan dropped a second ball, determined to do better. He slammed the face of the six-iron squarely into the small, white sphere, sent it sailing away against the perfect black of space in the weak lunar gravity.
“Beautiful,” murmured Alan. Then, louder for his audience back on earth to hear, he called out: “There it goes! Miles and miles and miles!”
The argument would continue for many years whether it had been a shot of two hundred or four hundred yards or some spectacular distance beyond.
That was it. Both men checked to assure everything on the list to be returned to earth was aboard their ship. Shepard turned to look into the remote television camera.
“Okay, Houston, the crew of Antares is leaving Fra Mauro Base.”
“Roger, Antares.”
Later, the countdown timers flashed away minutes, seconds.
Flames ripped into moon dust. Gold foil tore away from the landing stage, showering outward in all directions.
The American flag whipped back and forth in the wind of rocket exhaust.
Antares climbed swiftly until, had anyone on the moon been watching, it dwindled to a sun-reflecting small star and then winked out of sight.
Shepard and Mitchell had been on the moon thirty-three hours and thirty minutes. One hour after liftoff they closed in on the waiting Kitty Hawk.
No docking hang-ups this time. Perfect linkup.
Everything destined for the homeward flight was floated into the command module. They closed and sealed off the tunnel between the two ships. Stu Roosa fired the LM ascent stage away from Kitty Hawk.
“And we say sayonara, good-bye, to Antares,” he said in a farewell salute to the now deserted upper stage of the lunar lander, destined to crash into the moon for seismic tests—the final bell to be rung on the moon by Apollo 14.
Transparent flame ghosted behind them as they powered their way up for the return flight. Three days without any emergencies, ending in the Pacific Ocean near the waiting aircraft carrie
r New Orleans.
The legacy of Apollo 14 went far beyond the scientific probing of the moon or the dedicated and exhausting struggle of two men fighting their way upward through a hostile surface, which resisted them at every step.
All that would pass into history.
But what would not be diminished were the three remaining Apollo explorations of the moon, which had been on the tremulous edge of cancellation. Those three flights would leave earth on the shoulders of Apollo 14.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
An Astronaut’s Heart and the Last Stages of Apollo
DEKE SLAYTON LOOKED UP FROM his desk, watching Alan Shepard easing into a chair before him. Apollo 14 was behind his friend and this was Deke’s first real chance to spend some time with Alan since his return from the moon.
“Remember, Al,” he began eagerly, “when I got that rotten cold just before Thirteen flew?”
“Yeah,” Alan smiled. “You were a sight.”
“You better believe,” he agreed. “Chuck Berry turned me onto a heavy vitamin kick.” Then the big grin. “It did a lot more than get rid of my cold.”
Alan’s interest quickened. “Do tell,” Alan nodded, waiting.
“Well,” Deke’s grin was the size of half of Texas. “I’ve been taking those vitamins for more than a year now and Al I haven’t had a single skip of my heart in all that time.”
“The hell you say,” he smiled one of his biggest Tom Sawyer grins. “What are you doing about it?”
Deke’s smile turned to a frown. “I’m telling every damn doctor and flight surgeon I see,” he pounded his desk. “I’ve been hooking myself up to a mobile heart monitor and recorder you strap to your chest, logging my heart actions for a whole day at a time. The whole thing is one big pain in the ass, but now I’ve got records showing that in all this time my heart hasn’t skipped a single beat.”
Shepard didn’t want to say aloud, not yet, that this could bring Deke back on line as a candidate for a launch. “What do the docs say?” he asked quietly.
Deke showed a flash of anger. “They haven’t cooperated one damn bit,” he growled. “Damn those people. They tell me to come down and take a battery of tests. Same old stuff I’ve been doing for years. All they see in me is a handy guinea pig. And whatever they do doesn’t prove anything. So I stay calm, and I’m patient with them, but when I tell them I’ve cured my heart by these heavy doses of vitamins, most of them give me that look as if to say they know I’ve gone off the deep end. Nine out of every ten doctors I’ve seen say it’s not possible, that it’s some kind of a phantom thing. They just don’t believe my heart is working perfectly.”
