Falling to Earth (18 page)

As the countdown approached zero, I stared transfixed at the gleaming white rocket, set against a bright blue morning sky. The Saturn V was beautiful. Three hundred and sixty-three feet tall, it was as big as a skyscraper, and even from our safe viewing point three and a half miles away it looked impossibly large. Although I understood the physics and knew that this huge vehicle was about to lift itself off the ground, it was hard to believe that an object longer than a football field could actually propel itself into space.

When the rocket engines fired, the experience became even more unreal. Glowing clouds of smoke billowed outward as a stab of bright light flared from the rocket’s base. But it all happened in silence; the sound wave took time to reach our ears. As the rocket slowly began to rise on a column of yellow fire, the noise and thunderous vibration caught up to me. It was overwhelmingly, mind-blowingly immense. Someone told me later that it was heard a hundred miles away. That humans could create something this powerful amazed me.

The Saturn V rose so slowly that the noise beat into the ground and into my chest for about twenty seconds, vibrating everything around me, before the massive rocket picked up speed and arced away and up into the sky. Soon it looked like a tiny white needle, curving out over the ocean and disappearing into the blue haze.

The spacecraft I had labored over was now safely in orbit. Humans were heading to the moon for the first time. And that command module worked like a dream, with the fewest problems of almost any flight in the program. After orbiting the moon ten times, my colleagues returned safely to Earth without a hitch. We grew ever closer to a lunar landing. First, however, was the Apollo 9 mission.

As a member of its support crew, Apollo 9 was the first flight in which I truly had a stake. We only had two months after the Apollo 8 mission to finish planning and prepare to launch. NASA was hustling to get the lunar module ready for its first manned test flight, while I worked on the command module, finalizing the checkouts and the docking tests. We were acutely aware of time running out. It was the spring of 1969, the year NASA planned to land astronauts on the moon. We had a lot of test flying to do before that could happen.

When the Saturn V carrying the Apollo 9 crew thundered off the launchpad in early March, I was aware that three friends—Jim, Dave, and Rusty—were aboard this time, which was quite a different feeling. I had worked with these guys for a year and naturally felt very relieved when they safely reached orbit. Although they were not going to journey to the moon, in many ways their mission was even more important. They tested all of the elements required for a moon landing: the command and service modules, the lunar module, and the spacesuit designed for the lunar surface. When Jim and Rusty entered the lunar module and undocked from Dave in the command module, it was a real test of faith; Dave now had the only spacecraft with a heat shield. In order to return all three astronauts safely back to Earth once the test flying was done, it was vital that the two spacecraft find each other in orbit and redock.

Flying solo in the command module, Dave had an enormous responsibility shouldered by no astronaut before. He had to know how to hunt down and rescue his two crewmates if anything went wrong with their lunar module. Dave carried out his duties perfectly. After ten days, the crew returned safely from Earth orbit in the command module. The two spacecraft had successfully test-flown together, and we now knew that the lunar module was a great flying machine.

After Apollo 9, it was clear that Dave Scott was on a career fast track. Dave splashed down on March 13, and by April 10 NASA publicly named him as the backup commander for Apollo 12. For all NASA knew at that time, Apollo 12 might end up being the first lunar landing, so Dave had gained a plum assignment. He’d earned it.

As a backup commander, Dave needed two other astronauts on his crew. I was in my office in Houston one day when Dave put his head around the door and asked me to join him in a meeting with another astronaut, Jim Irwin. After the three of us sat down in his office, Dave came right to the point, telling us casually that he’d been assigned to the mission. Would we like to join him on the backup crew?

I answered right away: “Hell, yeah—absolutely!” I was enormously pleased that Dave wanted me on his crew. I had always been somewhat in awe of him, so his offer was a dream come true. Although the backup crew does not normally get to fly the mission, they generally became the prime crew three missions down the road. If we played our cards right, Dave explained that day, we would be the prime crew for Apollo 15. It looked like we were all going to fly to the moon, perhaps as early as the following year.

I have no idea why I was selected for that crew. I suspect that I would have been assigned to an earlier mission if it hadn’t been for the switches of missions with Apollo 8 and 9. As it was, I think my name, and Jim’s, were simply next on the list of eligible astronauts. I had a feeling that our peers rated Jim and me highly for the work we had done, and that Deke Slayton probably asked Dave if we’d be good additions for his crew. I believe that Dave was happy to have us. Certainly, if he’d had any objections, we would not have flown with him.

Whatever the reason for my assignment, I knew some of the hardest work of my life now lay ahead. A known perfectionist, Dave would be a tough boss. It wasn’t hard to see the signs of his disciplined West Point background. I knew that training with him would be a challenge, but if I could handle it, I would end up a better astronaut and a better person.

There were three different Apollo crew positions: commander, command module pilot, and lunar module pilot. There never seemed to be any doubt that I would be named as the command module pilot. Even for Apollo 9, I specialized in that spacecraft and its docking mechanism. I’d spent so much time working with command modules at Downey that I already had a lot of experience related to the position. It never felt like a conscious decision, simply the way my experience had directed me. Jim Irwin, on the other hand, had helped to develop and check out the lunar module. It made perfect sense that he would be the lunar module pilot.

Of those two positions, which was the better one? It was a tradeoff. The command module pilot was able to fly a spacecraft, but the lunar module pilot set foot on the moon. I guess if your goal was to walk on the moon, disregarding everything else, then being a lunar module pilot was the safest bet. But despite the title, you were essentially a systems engineer in the lunar module. You monitored the spacecraft while the commander, in this case Dave, flew it from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back. In the meantime, the command module pilot flew the command and service module to and from the moon, as well as solo in lunar orbit, and was responsible for docking with the lunar module. I was keener on the idea of actually flying something. Less glory, but more flying—that was my tradeoff.

There was another consideration: the best route to become a mission commander was to first serve as a command module pilot. Dave Scott had just done that. The reason was simple: if you spend years training to be a command module pilot, then you only have to learn how to fly one other spacecraft when you become a commander. A lunar module pilot would have to learn how to fly two. It wasn’t impossible, just much harder, because it took at least a year and a half of full-time training to understand just one of those vehicles.

I was proud to be the first person in my selection group to be assigned a command module pilot crew position. In fact, I was the first person with no prior space experience to
ever
be assigned that slot for a lunar flight. It felt like a huge honor; the kind of thing Deke only did if he thought you were up to the task.

Jim Irwin and I had joined NASA at the same time, and this was the first backup crew assignment for both of us. An air force test pilot and University of Michigan graduate like me, Jim and I didn’t know each other before the space program. He had been at Edwards a few years before I got there. He worked on the precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. He’d originally applied to NASA in 1963, but was rejected because of injuries he received in a horrific air crash two years earlier. There had been some doubt that he would ever pass the physical, but he got in on his second try, because he worked hard to get back into condition.

Jim and I, now sharing an office, quickly became good buddies. Slim and sleek, Jim was a runner and a weight lifter, muscular with dark, slicked-back hair like a beach boy. He was also very handsome, and probably could have used his good looks to get his way with a lot of people. But I never saw him play that card. During our training, Jim was mostly quiet and withdrawn. He could be very thorough and detail oriented, which was a great asset for a crew. But he was also extremely laid-back. There were times when I felt like shaking him and shouting “Jim, are you there?” He was so restrained and reticent; I really wished he would come out of his shell.

An interesting dynamic soon developed between the three of us. Dave was the quintessential professional, thinking way ahead of everyone, and Jim never disagreed with him. As I grew in confidence, occasionally Dave and I had differences of opinion. There were mission tasks I thought should be done a certain way, and I believe that I thought them out pretty well. Dave, however, had also considered them closely, and he had a different twist on them. He wanted things his way, but on a few occasions I had to tell him, “Well, Dave, I am not sure I want to do it like that.” Jim never said a word.

I always really liked Jim, and I would have done anything for him. Still, I often wished that he would get angry, or at least say
something
, when these disagreements came up. He was not assertive about his input into the flight preparations, such as procedures and flight plans. Jim’s reticence left me to argue with Dave. Our arguments were a healthy process, but Jim receded in the face of even a healthy conflict. I would get so frustrated, because Jim would never stand up for anything, or even tell me if he agreed or disagreed with me. I began to think of him as Dave’s shadow.

Oddly enough, it all worked out; we trained very well together. Perhaps we needed different personalities to make a good team. With Jim as his yes-man, Dave could get everything done his way, in a thorough, detailed manner. Jim wouldn’t have much to do on the flight except watch over the systems, and he excelled at that. In a way, he would be along for the ride until he stepped on the moon. Jim didn’t really have the kind of personality to become a mission commander. He would be an extension of Dave’s thoughts and actions, which was not necessarily a bad thing in a lunar module. If Jim was a follower not a leader, he had a great leader in Dave.

With Dave Scott (left) and Jim Irwin in front of the spacecraft simulators

My occasional disagreements with Dave never held up our work. Jim and I tended to follow his lead on everything. He really worked us hard and led us so well that we were soon obsessed with preparing Apollo 12 for flight. In fact, the more I trained with Dave, the more my respect for him grew. We didn’t have a bond of friendship; we had something rarer—a bond of competence and professionalism.

We three differed considerably from the prime crew. Pete Conrad, my racing colleague, was very close and loyal to his crew of Dick Gordon and Al Bean, both during Apollo and for the rest of his life. I believe Dick and Al had the same feelings of loyalty to him. Naval aviators who had all known each other long before they came to NASA, to the outside world they seemed like brothers. They did everything together, driving identical gold-and-black Corvettes with their crew positions painted on the sides. They showed the world that they were a tightly bonded team.

Our crew saw those Corvettes not only as a deliberate challenge, but also as a little tacky. So we did something a little different. We obtained matching Corvette models, but Jim’s was red, mine was white, and Dave’s was blue. Each had bold red, white, and blue stripes painted right down the center of the car. We were a team, but we were also individuals.

The different cars seemed symbolic of the differences between our crews. The Apollo 12 guys went everywhere together. If you saw one gold-and-black car, you would see three. Eventually, this caused some problems, because astronauts don’t always want to be recognized. Sometimes, it was better to disappear into the woodwork. Our crew didn’t have that problem, as you would rarely see our three cars together.

Although we didn’t socialize much as a crew, I spent a lot of time with Jim in Houston. Down at the Cape, the three of us played handball and tennis, and went out to dinner and the bars. Outside of those moments, however, our crew was never too close. I recall feeling like I could never completely let down my guard. There was always a little thought in the back of my head: I never wanted to put Dave Scott in a position where he could say anything negative about me. He never did during all of our training together, and I am not sure he ever would have. Nevertheless, I couldn’t quite shake that nagging feeling.