Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (55 page)

Finally NASA reported that after studying the problem with the docking mechanism, they had decided to allow the lunar landing to proceed as planned. “You are go for Fra Mauro,” came the message from Mission Control, followed by Shepard’s response: “Hot damn.”

The blueprint for Apollo 14’s mission was essentially a duplicate of what Apollo 13 had planned: to land in and explore the rocky hills of Fra Mauro, which scientists believed contained some of the oldest rocks in the universe. Three days after leaving the earth’s orbit, the linked-together ships of Apollo 14—the combined command-service module and, docked to that, the lunar module—reached the moon and fell smoothly into orbit. On the far side of the moon, the cabin grew dark and eerie, followed by the sudden burst of sunlight as they swung around the other side.

After a few such loops Shepard and Mitchell exited the command module,
Kitty Hawk,
through the yard-wide port in its nose and entered the LM, which Mitchell had named
Antares,
the brightest of the stars in the constellation Scorpio (which happened to be Shepard’s astrological sign).

Mitchell stood at the controls, Shepard beside him. To conserve weight, the LM, with its paper-thin aluminum walls and spidery legs, had been designed without seats. Then they separated from Roosa and
Kitty Hawk
and prepared to descend toward a land of deep craters, undulating gray deserts, and house-sized boulders. “This is really a wild place,” Shepard said as he looked out his window down onto the brown and gray surface, finally breaking out of his tense silence. Mitchell called it “the most stark and desolate-looking piece of country I’ve ever seen.”

But then another glitch reared up and threatened to keep them off the moon. A signal on the LM’s dash lit up, indicating that its abort program had been triggered. Mitchell immediately assumed that the signal was erroneous, a
nd when he tapped on the control panel the light blinked off. It came on again a few minutes later but disappeared once more when Mitchell tapped it with his pen. He and Shepard assumed a loose ball of solder was floating back there, but they had no way to fix it. “Houston!” Shepard radioed. “What’s wrong with this ship?”

The LM’s automated abort procedure was designed to kick in during an emergency. If Shepard experienced a sudden problem just prior to landing, the abort program would automatically ignite the engines beneath the LM and blast it away from the moon and back into orbit, where it could join again with the command module. Fortunately for Shepard and Mitchell, the abort program worked only when the LM was in the final stages of its descent to the surface;
Antares
was still in orbit and ninety minutes away from that descent. But if the problem wasn’t fixed and the signal was trigger
ed again during their descent, they’d be irrevocably blasted away from the moon.

A similar glitch had threatened to abort Apollo 11’s lunar landing, but twenty-six-year-old NASA engineer Steve Bales made his split-second decision that it was safe to ignore the beeping computer overload signal and allow the historic landing to proceed. But Shepard’s problem was more complicated; it
could not be ignored, nor could it be fixed by Shepard or Mitchell. So NASA turned to another twenty-something engineer at MIT’s Draper Labs, who had helped design
Antares’
computer software.

While Shepard continued to orbit the moon, an Air Force officer screeched to a stop in front of Donald Eyles’ Massachusetts apartment and pounded on the engineer’s door—at 2 A.M.—to tell him that he had ninety minutes to create a new program that would override the faulty abort switch. Eyles threw a coat over his pajamas, and the Air Force officer drove him to his nearby computer lab at MIT. Eyles sat before his computer terminal and tapped away on his keyboard, struggling to create from scratch a substitute software program that would eliminate the erroneous abort signal.

Most of the LM’s computer program was locked inside the computer’s memory and couldn’t be altered. So Eyles had to devise a patch that advised the computer program to essentially ignore the abort signal. Eyles had only ninety minutes because that was the window Shepard had in which to land on the moon. If Eyles missed that deadline, Shepard would have to return to the command module and fly home. The astronaut’s life’s goal now rested in the hands of a computer geek.

Sixty minutes later the engineer looked up from his computer. “Done,” he said. The ingenious little program was transmitted by radio to Houston, which ran it through a simulator, to make sure it worked, and then transmitted the instructions by radio to
Antares.
While Shepard continued to fly
Antares,
Mitchell entered sixty new codes into the computer, using a keyboard on the control panel. Shepard watched in helpless, anxious silence.

By now the window for a lunar landing was down to about twenty minutes. One of the reasons Shepard had chosen Mitchell—“the Brain”—was for his computer expertise and his knowledge of the LM. But one wrong computer entry, one slip of the finger, could cause the whole computer system to crash, so Shepard tried hard not to rush his partner. M
itchell finished in about five minutes, which left a fifteen-minute window to start the landing procedures. Shepard reported back to Mission Control that they were ready to land. “Houston, we’ve got it. We’re commencing with the descent program.”

But Mission Control ordered Shepard to wait while it checked to make sure the new software program was working, and Shepard gritted his teeth through ten more long minutes of delay. Finally, with just sixty seconds to spare, capsule communicator Fred Haise gave the okay to land: “You are go for Fra Mauro.” “Thank you,” Shepard replied sarcastically. “You troops do a nice job down there.”

Shepard quickly fired the engine that slowed
Antares’
orbit, and the LM immediately began dropping toward the moon’s surface. “All righty. It’s a beautiful day to land at Fra Mauro,” Shepard reported back to Houston, relieved that his mission was back on track. All the training he had done in the LLTV had prepared him to carefully keep the LM at just the right angle. The LM was still traveling at thirty-seven hundred miles an hour, but because it was angled with the bottom flying first, the thrusters slowed its speed and helped it drop lower. Flying backward and at an angle
meant Shepard was flying blind, lying on his back and facing up into space, relying on his instruments to tell him where he was in relation to the surface. It was just like instrument flying in an airplane.

But as
Antares
reached thirty-two thousand feet, the landing radar failed to accurately lock onto the moon’s surface. Instead of displaying
Antares’
exact position, the radar instruments in front of Shepard’s face were blank. If the screens didn’t light up with solid landing radar readings before they reached ten thousand feet, the rules required Shepard to abort the landing. “Houston, our landing radar is out,” Shepard reported. “Come on, radar!” Mitchell barked as they dropped to twenty-five thousand feet. “Come on.”

At fifteen thousand feet, as Shepard flicked his wrist left, right, forward, and back, each flick sending spurts of gas hissin
g from the small thruster valves, finessing the LM downward, Houston broke through to remind Shepard of the abort plan, which he would have to implement if the radar failed to lock onto the moon. That plan called for Shepard to stop his descent at ten thousand feet, ignite his main thruster engine, and blast away from the moon. Just the thought of it was sickening.
“Antares,”
said Haise, “we should go over the procedures to abort.”

“We’re aware of the ground rules, Houston,” Shepard snapped. But that didn’t mean Houston could stop him from violating those rules. Just three miles above the surface, Shepard wasn’t about to turn back now, and he told Mitchell about his plan: “If the radar doesn’t kick in, we’re going to fly her down.” A few minutes later, as
Antares
reached fourteen thousand feet, Houston suggested a laughably simple solution. They told Shepard to try resetting the radar’s circuit breaker. Just like in an ordinary earthly basement, he pulled out the breaker and stuck it back in. Still no radar. “Negative,”
Shepard reluctantly told Houston.

But a second later the radar system flickered to life, locked onto the moon, and gave Shepard a full view on his control panel of all the information he needed to land. “Houston, we have a radar lock,” Shepard practically yelled. The radar information was immediately relayed back to Houston, which gave the go-ahead for a landing. “You better believe, Houston,” Shepard said.

“Great,” said Mitchell. “Whew, that was close.”

Shepard quickly dropped below eight thousand feet and then slowly coasted lower toward his destination, a deep lunar divot called Cone Crater, which appeared “fat as a goose” beneath him. He descended very slowly—at less than five miles an hour—while still moving forward between craggy lunar ridges and hillsides. When a rough patch of craters and rocks loomed below him, he’d veer right or left, keeping Houston informed of each move—“shifting course,” he once said, then dodged another rocky plateau. Finally he found the smooth, flat space that they’d chosen two years earlier as the ideal lan
ding zone, and brought
Antares
down within fifty feet of the spot—closer to his target than the previous two moon missions. The only imperfection in the landing was that he touched down on a small slope that caused the LM to tilt a few degrees to one side.

“Right on the money,” Shepard said, practically giggling at this point.

“Not bad for an old man,” Fred Haise reported from Houston.

“Okay, Fredo,” Shepard replied. “That was a real fine job. Thank you, buddy.”

Neil Armstrong had never revealed whether or how he’d scripted his famous first sentence on the moon: “That’s one small step for man . . . one giant leap for mankind.” But they seemed the perfect words to immortalize the occasion.

Pete Conrad, the five-foot-six-inch commander of Apollo 12, was somewhat less elegant with his first words: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it’s a long one for me.” (With those words, Conrad won $500 from Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer Shepard had antagonized, who during an afternoon of poolside drinks bet Conrad he wouldn’t dare attempt a glib remark at such a serious moment.)

Shepard clearly didn’t give much advance thought to his first words. But for those who knew the rough route he’d taken to reach Fra Mauro, what he said seemed appropriate enough: “Al is on the surface. And it’s been a long way. But we’re here.”

Shepard had about three minutes on the surface alone, waiting for Mitchell to finish his checklist and descend the ladder himself. Shepard tried to describe what he saw—“very impressive sight . . . boulders near the rim . . . Cone ridge going along to the north”—but nothing could accurately convey the lifeless gray-brown world splayed before him.

Shepard then looked up and found the earth, two-thirds of it illuminated by the sun, a quarter of a million miles away and so tiny, just a crescent of blue and white suspended in a black sky. He was exhausted. There’d been so many close calls and near misses the past few days. And there was much work ahead. But the hardest part of the journey was over, and for those few solo moments before the mission would again consume him, Shepard was suddenly overcome by the silence, the stark beauty, the loneliness of it all. His distant and delicate home planet was “very finite . . . so incredibly fra
gile,” he reflected—just a tiny ball in space containing everyone he knew. He told himself, “Hey, not too long ago, I was grounded. Now I’m on the moon.”

As the moment came to an end, a private moment he’d never forget, Shepard was surprised to feel tears welling up into his eyes. But he had no time to savor or consider his emotions, and the tears quickly dried inside his air-conditioned suit.

With almost every second of their time on the moon accounted for, Shepard and Mitchell quickly set about performing the hundreds of tasks they’d been assigned. After punching a flag into the dust, they set up solar experiments and radar equipment, then rigged their TV cameras so the audience back home could watch their adventures. Each astronaut took scores of pictures—of each other, of the earth, of the LM, of space. Slayton broke in to relay a message from President Nixon; he wanted them to visit the White House when they returned. Great, they said. Then back to the schedul
e. Apollo 14 was the first mission to be equipped with a two-wheeled cart called a modularized equipment transporter, or MET. After yanking the MET out from its storage space beneath the LM, the two men quickly stocked it with rock-collecting tools, picks and shovels, hammers and tongs. No time to muse or gawk—there were many jobs to do. Shepard had ha
d his personal moment, and now it was all about the work. As Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, would put it years later: “We weren’t trained to smell the roses . . . we had a job to do.”