Falling to Earth (29 page)

I wasn’t too surprised at that reaction. We were a hell of a long way up. And it didn’t matter how skilled we were flying aircraft, it felt very different in a jet. If you stand on a launchpad that high, your stomach naturally does flips when you look over the edge.

At the end of the catwalk, a little temporary structure kept birds and any other contamination out of the command module. Called the White Room, this was the domain of Guenter Wendt, the pad leader who saw off all the manned flights. We knew he’d take care of the final details, ensuring we entered the spacecraft smoothly and the hatch closed correctly.

Vance Brand, my backup for the mission, was inside the spacecraft when we arrived. Vance had been great to work with. A quiet fellow, he had just done his thing and not made any waves. He now checked all of the switch settings inside
Endeavour
, and prepared to help us slide inside. In the meantime, Guenter cracked some jokes with us over the radio headsets and generally eased the tension. But I was so focused on my job I don’t recall what he said.

It was a tight fit inside the spacecraft in those bulky suits. Each of us had to slide through the hatch into our individual collapsible couches, which were made of hollow steel and covered in fireproof cloth. Dave and Jim entered first, while Vance remained inside to help them. Engineers connected their oxygen hoses to the spacecraft, and tightened their couch straps. Then Vance exited, and I slid into the center couch. The engineers could then connect me and strap me in just by reaching through the hatch.

Guenter ran the process like clockwork, and soon it was time for the technicians to close the hatch. The last face I remember seeing was Guenter’s, smiling and waving an enormous crescent wrench at me. Then the heavy hatch closed with a deep
thunk
. That was it: we were truly on our own, cut off—committed.

About two hours remained until launch. Guenter and his engineers needed some of that time to break down the White Room, ride the elevator to the base of the pad, and drive away. It was as if they had placed a bomb on the launchpad and set the timer. Soon all but a few emergency teams were three and a half miles away, considered a safe distance. If something went wrong with the rocket, the explosion would be immense. Everyone was now safe. Everyone but us.

I had no sense that we were hundreds of feet up in the air on the tip of a rocket. It was dark, with only a tiny window letting in any light. In our spacesuits, squeezed in with our shoulders overlapping, we could have been in a simulator.

Dave was to my left, which was normally my seat, but he was responsible for the launch, so he sat there for now. We would trade places later. Jim, to my right, dozed off again. It grew really cold. Icy, chilled air blew into the cabin and into our spacesuits, because if something went wrong on the way into orbit there was an abort mode that could have heated the spacecraft a lot. To compensate, they cooled us down. There wasn’t much to do but wait, in the dark and cold.

We had scheduled holds in the launch countdown, in case we needed time to analyze any little glitches. But we never needed to, so the minutes kept rolling toward launch time. Every once in a while someone would report over the radio from launch control, but it was all very matter of fact. I could only hear an alternator and a low hum in the background, and it was easy to drift off to sleep while I waited.

Twenty minutes before launch, it got busy again. The access arm to the hatch pulled away, and sunlight flooded into the spacecraft through an exposed window. Soon afterward we went to full internal power. We were carefully severing our bonds with earth. In the final minutes, the automatic countdown system took over. If something didn’t look right, the countdown would pause, but otherwise the system would launch us at the precisely planned time.

Eight seconds before launch I heard a turbine crank up, which drove a fuel pump. I could only hear noises transmitted through the rocket’s metal structure, since the action all took place more than three hundred feet below me. I heard the valves in the fuel lines flip open and the propellant rush through. Then the engines ignited in a fury of flame. It was 9:34 a.m. We launched within a tiny fraction of a second of our planned time.

The launch of our immense Saturn V rocket

There was a part of me that had not mentally committed to launch until that moment. We could always have climbed out of the spacecraft. But now, it was all or nothing. It wasn’t a simulation. It was
real
. “Okay—liftoff!” I confirmed to launch control.

I was later told our Saturn V rocket could be heard a hundred miles away, shaking the onlookers with a popping and crackling vibration. Inside, I heard hardly any noise: only a muffled roar far beneath me, as the engine thrust vibrated up through the rocket structure. We began a smooth, slow rise from the launchpad in an eerie kind of silence.

Although the rocket pounded the pad with a punishing amount of thrust, we moved upward very slowly. The rocket was so heavy that it took us around twelve seconds to clear the launch tower. I could feel the engines swivel as they leaned the Saturn V away from the tower. We were so delicately balanced in those first seconds that a strong gust of wind could have blown us into the tower if the rocket had not tilted away.

I expected to feel more vibration and was surprised by how smoothly we rose. Almost as soon as we were above the tower, the rocket picked up speed and rolled automatically to place us on the right path for orbit. I stayed busy watching the trajectory on our instruments, checking my cue card, which told me that we had to be at certain altitudes at precise times, moving at a specific speed. Everything was going according to plan. I also kept an eye on Dave, who had a grip on the abort handle. If anything went wrong, a firm twist of his glove would activate the escape tower and shoot us clear of the Saturn V. The mission would be over.

During our training, Jim and I had jokingly pleaded with Dave, “Please let us hold hands with you when we lift off.” Not because we were scared, but because we wouldn’t let him end our mission. In fact, just before liftoff, Jim and I had each placed one of our gloved hands on Dave’s glove. To an outsider, it would have looked like a Three Musketeers “all for one, one for all” moment: a touching bond between three explorers. In truth, it actually was us reminding Dave, “Don’t you dare twist that damn handle.” I was glad we had an escape option, but I would rather have died than see Dave abort the mission unnecessarily. Fortunately, everything continued smoothly on our ride into orbit.

We quickly went supersonic; the engine noise could no longer reach us. We passed through the period of maximum dynamic pressure on the rocket in the second minute, and I felt us shake and roll a little, but we held steady. Stay cool, I told myself. I’m not nervous, I can do this. Even if the ground finds out I am nervous, it will be too late. We’ll be in space.

Our trajectory was arcing, but it still felt as if we were heading straight up because the acceleration pressed me back into my couch. As our propellant burned the rocket grew lighter and faster, and the G forces built up until we felt four times heavier than normal. We were high above the thickest part of the atmosphere, and the rocket pushed forward, faster and faster.

The feeling was not uncomfortable. I didn’t notice it in most of my body, because I was wearing a heavy spacesuit. I really felt it in my hands. I needed to use the instrument panel in front of me and I grew a little concerned trying to reach those switches. Not only did I have to move the weight of my arm against that acceleration, I also had to move the weight of the suit. Luckily, it never grew so bad that my arm was pinned down.

Less than three minutes into the flight, we were already fifty miles from the launchpad. The first stage had done its job, and it was time to separate and let it drop into the ocean. We’d talked about this moment a little in training, but not much. I knew the first stage would shut down, we would separate, the second stage would light, and away we’d go. Sounded simple enough. I was in for a surprise.

We were pressed down in our couches, feeling heavy, when the first stage engines shut down. It felt like we’d slammed on the brakes of a speeding sports car. Jim and I instinctively threw up our arms, fighting the feeling that we would break through our restraining harnesses and smash right through the instrument panel. Dave, on the other hand, hardly moved. After we finished flailing around, I looked over at him, took a deep breath and asked, “Dave, what is happening?” Dave gave us the confident smile of someone who had flown a Saturn V before. “Oh, that’s normal. No big deal. I just forgot to tell you about it.”

“Man, you aren’t kidding,” I replied, with a raised eyebrow. It had scared the hell out of me.

It turned out that not everything was going to plan. Back on the ground, flight controllers had just lost the instrumentation from the first stage. The thrust from the first stage engines had decayed more slowly than expected. The stage had small retrorockets to pull it away before the second stage lit. They had halved the number of retrorockets on our Saturn V to save weight, but it was a cut too far. The stages stayed dangerously close to each other, and when the second stage engines fired the exhaust fried the electronics on the first stage. We were lucky not to collide with it.

We would only learn of this near mishap later. As the second stage engines lit, we were once again pushed back into our couches. We were a shorter, leaner, lighter rocket now. We blew off our launch escape tower, as we were too high for it to do us any good. Now we could see out of all the windows, as the sky grew ever blacker. “How are we doing, Al?” Dave called across to me.

“We’re doing fine,” I responded, focused on my instruments.

“Man, I’ve got the moon in my window!” Jim exulted.

“Yes, sir, it’s out there,” I replied. Plenty of time to look at it later. “That sucker’s right on, right on,” I reported, impressed by the precise path of our rocket.

The second stage was a comfortable, soft ride, but not powerful enough to kick us into orbit. Having done its job, it also dropped away—a smooth, easy transition. We hurtled up at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour, while the second stage began a long, tumbling fall to the ocean. As the big engine on the third stage lit, we needed to raise our speed by only a few thousand miles per hour to reach orbit.

I watched the instruments as the third stage gradually arced us into a path that would keep us circling the Earth. During the last part of the burn, we even angled down toward Earth a small amount, so we could loop into orbit. We fell around the planet in a beautifully precise curve, not falling back to Earth, nor leaving it behind. Not yet.

At last, the third stage engine shut down. Less than twelve minutes had passed since we’d sat on the pad. Now we were traveling more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, and I was in space. After all the years of training, I was finally here.

Jim and I unstrapped ourselves and floated to the windows. Jim tried to dig the TV camera out right away, to capture the view. Dave had seen it before, of course, but Jim and I had never witnessed such a sight. The beautiful planet Earth stretched below us, with a thin horizon that knifed between sky and black space. It was stunning and strikingly delicate. And because we were so low, we zipped across oceans and continents in minutes. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it would be visibly this fast,” I murmured to Dave and Jim.

I could have spent the next hour just staring. All too soon, however, mission control in Houston radioed and reminded us to get to work. We busied ourselves with checklists. We didn’t have much time until we had to leave Earth orbit. Before we could do that, we needed to thoroughly check out our spacecraft and ensure it had reached space in good shape. If it hadn’t, we might have to return to Earth immediately. I tore my gaze from the window and got busy.

I’d spent years training inside command modules, but it had always been in Earth’s gravity field. Now I was weightless, and the command module felt very different. I had no walls or floors any more, no up and down, just surfaces and space to float around in. On the launchpad, the spacecraft looked cramped. Now it felt roomier. As we checked out the spacecraft, I floated under the seats and up into the docking tunnel.
Endeavour
still wasn’t big, but it felt different when all the interior space could be used.

Weightlessness felt
odd
—like swimming underwater, but without water pressure on me. I was concerned I might feel “space sick,” an affliction similar to motion sickness that affects some astronauts when they float around, so I used a trick to keep it at bay. On Earth, I had found that if I focused on a task, I didn’t have to worry about motion sickness. So I floated around as much as I could, figuring this was the quickest way to get over any nausea. Dave warned me to slow down a little, worried I might grow ill. But I would be weightless for two weeks and I didn’t want to just sit back and feel bad. “Get your big foot out of the way!” I joked as Dave floated into my face. “Push me down,” he instructed, and with a gentle nudge I floated him away. This was strange, but
fun
.