Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (53 page)

Not, however, without various terrifying imperfections. Three days after leaving the Cape, Apollo 11 reac
hed the moon and began to circle it. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed through a hatch into their lunar module, called
Eagle,
and separated from the nose of the command module, called
Columbia,
piloted by Mike Collins. Standing side by side inside the backward-flying LM, Armstrong and Aldrin fired the thruster engines that slowed
Eagle
’s orbit and allowed it to be pulled by the moon’s mild gravity down toward the lunar surface.

But just six thousand feet above the surface, a yellow warning light began to flash, indicating an overload of data pouring into
Eagle
’s onboard computer. Mission Control staff turned anxiously for advice from the twenty-six-year-old whiz responsible for the LM’s compu
ter. Steven Bales knew the computer well enough to believe that the landing could proceed, even with the overload signal. For that bold decision, Bales would later stand alongside the three astronauts to receive a Medal of Freedom from President Nixon.

Moments later Armstrong gently brought the LM down onto a flat expanse called the Sea of Tranquillity and famously reported, “The
Eagle
has landed.” Mission Control reported back that its engineers had begun breathing again. During the six-hour rest period that followed, Aldrin silently celebrated the Christian rite of communion—he sipped wine from a chalice, ate a wafer, and prayed—while Armstrong ate a snack and described the gray land he saw outside his window. Finally Armstrong climbed backward out the hatch.

It was four minutes before 11 P.M., Eastern Daylight Saving Time, and the world below watched and listened to the scratchy television transmissions as Armstrong backed down the ladder, landed softly with a
poof
in the powdery grit, and said, “That’s one small step for man . . . ah . . . one giant leap for mankind.”

Fifteen minutes later Aldrin stepped down onto the surface— and immediately gave in to an uncontrollable urge to pee. He later called it a “unique feeling” to know “the whole world was watching” as he silently wet his space pants.

“Magnificent desolation,” Aldrin said as he took his first look around. After three busy hours, during which the two astronauts set up equipment for solar wind experiments, collected rock and soil samples, and spoke briefly with Nixon, they climbed back into the
Eagle,
threw out their garbage—food containers, urine collection bags—and closed the hatch for a seven-hour rest period before lifting off.

Neither man slept. They were elated, cold, and distracted— Armstrong looked through a telescope at the bright beauty of the earth. They finally launched and rejoined Collins, and on the three-day trip home, as a gag for Houston, listened to a tape of earthly sound effects, including diesel locomotives and dogs barking.

The Apollo 11 crew embarked on a boastful, celebratory around-the-world tour—Bonn, London, Rome, Belgrade, Ankara, Kinshasa, Tehran, Bombay, Sydney, Tokyo—as if the world needed to be reminded that the Americans had won the space race. Aldrin, meanwhile, began experiencing the emotional letdown that would afflict most future moonwalkers—and which would lead him to a nervous breakdown. Walking on the moon, it turned out, carried a hidden risk, in the form of a question:
What next?

When Gene Cernan learned he’d been named Alan Shepard’s backup for the upcoming Apollo 14 flight, he knew he’d never get a chance to go on that flight. No way would Shepard, after nearly ten years of waiting, let a backup pilot take his place. Still, Cernan thought he should let Shepard know that he was no rookie and wasn’t about to play the lackey’s role. After being selected as an astronaut in 1963, Cernan had flown twice—he walked in space on Gemini 9 and orbited the moon on Apollo 10. He strode into Shepard’s office one day, congratulated him on getting Apollo 14, then promised to
do everything he could to get his backup crew ready. If necessary, said Cernan, who
was ten years younger and a couple of notches lower in rank, he’d be ready to replace Shepard if something should happen.

Shepard was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, feet on the desk, giving a look that Cernan called his “big fucking deal” look. For the longest time Shepard said nothing, and Cernan didn’t know if he was angry or indifferent or what. He had come to like Shepard but knew the other man could “turn the ice water on in a second.” Finally Shepard stood up, grinned, and stuck out his hand. “Geeno,” he said, “we’re going to have a ball.”

Cernan felt like a thick wall—“not a veil, it was a wall”— had crumbled. Behind the wall was a door that Shepard rarely opened to others. But once Shepard let Cernan cross that threshold, “he let me realize what a tremendous man he really was.” He would recall later, “It’s almost like he was waiting for someone to crash through that barrier, someone who had enough guts to face off with him. But I don’t know how many people got into that inner sanctum.”

Two weeks after Neil Armstrong and his crew returned home, on August 6, 1969, NASA told the press that Alan Shepard was back in the game. It was already well known that Shepard was rich, his net worth somewhere between $1 million and $5 million (he’d never volunteer exactly how much, except to say, “I was storing a few nuts away for the winter”). When asked why a comfortably wealthy forty-seven-year-old would risk his neck for the moon, Shepard told the
New York Times:
“Because space is about the only business I know. It’s something I believe in.” Besides, he’d been trained his entire adult l
ife to be an aviator, and what aviator wouldn’t aspire to make the biggest flight of all?

As his Apollo 14 crewmates, Shepard had chosen Ed Mitchell, known as “the Brain,” a studious, serious Navy commander with a Ph.D., and Stu Roosa, an Air Force major and former smoke jumper from Oklahoma with a sweep of
red hair and a sly humor that Shepard liked. Neither had yet reached space, and their peers—and then the press—began calling the three-man crew “the rookies.” Cernan loved to tease Shepard about that.

Mitchell, the studious one, and Roosa, the beer drinker, were shocked at how Shepard—now the oldest of NASA’s sixty-plus astronauts—trained for Apollo 14 like a kid. He jogged a few miles each day (“although it’s rather distasteful to me,” he once admitted) and lifted weights (“not anything really heavy,” he said) at the astronaut gym.

Part of the crew’s training scheme took them to a remote part of the Bavarian region of Germany, where they sifted through ancient rocks and silt as part of an exercise to acquaint them with the rocks they’d have to identify and collect on the moon. Shepard’s crew and their three-man backup collected rocks and practiced “moonwalking” across the rocky terrain in their space suits. Each night they went out to throw back foot-tall steins of beer. They once climbed to the top of an old bell tower outside Munich, beer bottles in tow, and late that night had to bang on the door of their do
rmitory, which the proprietor locked at 10 P.M. Another time, during geology training in an Arizona canyon, at the end of a long day of hiking, Shepard nudged a public affairs guy along for the trip. “Let’s race,” he said, then sprinted the last quarter mile.

Shepard practiced for many hours on an ugly, ingenious contraption called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), which NASA designed to simulate the up-and-down flying that astronauts would do in the lunar module. Nicknamed the “flying bedstead,” the LLTV was a set of rocket thrusters bolted beneath a structure that looked like it belonged on a kid’s playground. Balancing the LLTV atop the downward thrust of its rockets and taking it up to five hundred feet or so was a delicate and dangerous endeavor. Neil Armstrong had almost killed himself a year earlier when a prototype of the
LLTV began rocking out of control, forcing Armstrong to bail out in his rocket-prope
lled ejection seat; Armstrong parachuted to safety as his flying bedstead spun, flipped, and exploded.

Colleagues were amazed at how many times Shepard took the dangerous LLTV up for a spin. Then, after a lifetime of airplanes and jets, Shepard learned to fly helicopters, too—also to help him prepare for flying his LEM down to the moon’s surface. Mitchell, Roosa, Cernan, and the others all found themselves asking, “This is the Icy Commander?” The ice man, it turns out, was having the time of his life.

During another trip to southern Arizona, for more geology training, a friend of Cernan’s invited him, Shepard, Mitchell, and Joe Engle (part of Cernan’s backup crew) to cross into Mexico and dine at his restaurant. The four astronauts were supposed to meet Cernan’s friend at a car dealership just across the border, but instead of Cernan’s friend, two chauffeur-driven cars picked up the astronauts. The cars stopped in front of a large, brightly lit complex with a motel, restaurant, and dance hall.

They were led into a motel room. On the dresser sat four square glass bottles of Ballantine scotch, with a room key sitting next to each one. The four astronauts tried to ask the chauffeurs what was happening, but they left without a word. A man wearing a huge sombrero finally showed up, wearing an impressive six-shooter on his hip. He spoke broken English, and none of the four astronauts spoke Spanish, but with some gesticulating they were finally able to discern that he was the local sheriff. “I thought we were going to dinner,” Shepard told Cernan. “What happens now?”

Just then, as the sheriff stood by the door smiling, four young women entered the room and sat on the bed, side by side, across the room from the four astronauts. They weren’t the most attractive of Mexico’s women; one had a wide gap between her front teeth, another was hefty. They all started giggling and fluttering their eyelashes. “Okay, Cernan, I think I know what’s supposed to happen,” Shepard finally said.

For the next forty-five minutes, in a mélange of tortured Spanish and charades, the spacemen tried to explain why they couldn’t stay. They each tried what little Spanish they knew:
el
presidente . . . no es possible . . . we can’t stay out late . . . we can’t drink . . .
have to train for mission in the morning . . . going to moon . . . la luna . . .
Finally the women realized they were not going to sleep with an American astronaut that night. The sheriff beckoned to the chauffeurs. During the ride back, the astronauts joked that they didn’t even get dinner, nor did they think to grab the bo
ttles of scotch.

“I think they just wanted to show us Mexican hospitality,” Cernan recalled.

Apollo 11 was followed by a near-perfect Apollo 12 mission, during which Pete Conrad and Alan Bean bounced, danced, and sang on the moon like awestruck schoolboys. Suddenly America was making lunar travel look easy, and Apollo 13—the mission that had briefly been Shepard’s—was up next, scheduled to explore the exotic and hilly lowlands of the moon, a rugged and geologically intriguing region called Fra Mauro.

Apollo 13 began uneventfully, but two days and two hundred thousand miles from earth—on April 13, 1970—one of the ship’s two oxygen tanks was ignited by a damaged wire and exploded, smashing a hole in the side of the service module (attached beneath the command module) and wrecking everything nearby. The blast violently rocked the spacecraft, and Jack Swigert’s message to Mission Control—“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here”—was followed by a more urgent confirmation from Jim Lovell: “Ah, Houston, we have a problem.”