I came around the first turn together, he went wide and started rotating as he slid on the shells. Yet he never took his foot off the gas. As soon as his car gained traction again, he shot across the track, right at me. There was nothing I could do. With a loud crunch he slammed right into the back of my car and almost tore the end off.
Although I escaped injury, the danger was clear. If I kept racing I might lose my chance to fly in space. Nothing was worth taking that risk, so with regret I sold my car and quit the sport altogether. Although I believe Pete Conrad continued to race a little longer, the team soon broke up.
Gordo Cooper wasn’t so lucky. He was one of my best friends by then, but I also knew he was bad news. He taunted authority. Deke pulled him out of a race at the Daytona racetrack, insisting that Gordo focus on spacecraft checkout work. Gordo had always pushed the rules a little, and this edict annoyed him no end. I think it had a lot to do with his leaving NASA altogether; he and the agency never recovered their faith in each other.
Car racing wasn’t my only leisure pastime. I played handball with Mike Collins, raced speedboats, and also found time to water-ski. My home was only a short stroll away from a little bay that opened onto Clear Lake, and I water-skied down there almost every weekend to relieve tension and forget about work.
Many people assumed that astronauts needed to be in top physical condition, and that NASA had some kind of exercise plan we all had to follow. Not true. Our bosses believed we were grown-ups who knew we had to stay in shape, and they allowed us to follow our individual sports and exercise pursuits. Ironically, we had some pretty unhealthy habits. For example, just about everybody smoked back then. It was not frowned on like it is today.
I’m still smoking today. In fact I am probably the only person in the whole goddamn program who hasn’t given it up. I have managed to kick the habit for a couple of years at a time, but never completely. I smoked all the way through NASA, and so did almost everybody I ever shared an office with. If I could have worked out how to do it safely, I’d have smoked all the way to the moon and back.
To keep up the waterskiing, I eventually bought a boat with one of the instructor pilots for NASA’s airplanes out at nearby Ellington Field. Another astronaut named Walt Cunningham soon joined us. Walt and I also began playing handball two or three times a week, and we became very competitive, which really kept me on my toes. The Ellington instructor who joined us was competitive, too, but in a way that eventually took a dark turn.
This guy was always jealous of the various perks that we received as astronauts. He could never understand why he wasn’t included in deals such as the Corvette leases. After all, he was one of our instructors, so he believed that he must be better than, or at least equal to us, and deserved any astronaut perks. Sadly, behind our backs, he turned to illegal activity to keep up with our lifestyles.
He started flying an airplane to help smuggle marijuana across the Mexican border. Eventually, of course, he was caught and sent to jail. Because of his jealousy, he lost everything. Ironically, he would have made a great astronaut. He was a talented pilot and very bright. Yet he wasn’t smart enough to see that smuggling wasn’t the way to make money and keep pace with us. It was a sad situation: a guy rubbing shoulders with NASA’s astronauts one day and the next day frozen out forever. We had to forget about him and move on with our careers.
Academic classes and weekend activities weren’t the only things we new guys were doing in our early years at NASA. When it fit around other activities, we did survival training. A spacecraft might have to come down almost anywhere on Earth in an emergency. We could spend days, or even weeks, on our own before help came, with only the items in our spacecraft for survival. Rather than carry out this training all in one go, we did it whenever there was time, often with months between sessions.
NASA left us in the large, arid deserts of eastern Washington State for around five days, giving us spacecraft parachutes and a basic survival kit, but not much else. Working in groups of three just like an Apollo crew, we’d make tents and clothes out of the parachutes, and construct solar stills to collect water. More exciting, however, was when they sent us down to the air force’s survival school in the jungles of Panama.
In the classroom for our initial briefing, I surveyed the room. Dozens of stuffed animal heads were mounted on the walls. Studying the decorations a little closer, I spotted something odd: some of them were moving. Each one had a live boa constrictor wrapped around it. This training would be quite an experience. The day grew even odder when the instructors grabbed one of the boas, then skinned and cooked it. This, we were told, was our lunch.
After some classes on edible jungle plants and animals, a helicopter dropped us off in the rain forest with some air force survival instructors, and we set up camp for a couple of days. The jungle turned out to be quite different from my expectations. A real jungle doesn’t have any undergrowth, because little sunlight makes it through the thick tree canopy. The trees were nearly a hundred feet tall, and we could see for more than half a mile under them.
Once again, we only had the same equipment stowed on an Apollo spacecraft. We made hammocks, slung between two trees to keep us off the wet ground. Not surprisingly for a rain forest, it rained on us a lot, which made conditions pretty miserable. Soon we all stripped down to our long johns; we must have looked pretty amusing. We ate emergency rations and monkeypod tree seed pods, which had a sweet edible pulp.
On the last day, we broke camp and trudged down a path to the nearby river. On the way, one of our instructors showed us how to milk the venom from a fer-de-lance snake, which is an extremely venomous creature. Lord knows what he was thinking, but Bruce McCandless then grabbed the snake and stuffed it in a burlap sack.
We put on life preservers, jumped into rafts and floated downstream to a Choco Indian village, with Bruce still holding his bag. The Choco put on a grand welcome. We made our way up through the bamboo houses to the chief’s hut. Four live iguanas, their legs tied behind them so they couldn’t move, lay in a corner. Guess what we had for lunch? The roast iguana was actually very good; it tasted exactly like chicken. The meal was better than I thought it would be, and a suitable feast to end our time in Panama. The survival practice was a learning experience we hoped we’d never have to carry out for real. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun, an escape from the technical work we did back in the States.
Bruce brought his snake all the way back to Houston, where he donated it to the zoo. But first, he had to get it through the customs and agriculture inspection. The customs officer, not keen on dealing with a venomous creature, asked his supervisor across the room to make the inspection. Looking in his rule book, the supervisor found out that the regulations required a “visual inspection for external parasites.” Staying far on the other side of the room, he warily eyed the snake for a moment, then called out, “Looks good to me from here!” And so Bruce’s snake became a U.S. citizen.
I received my first real assignment at NASA that first year. With the Gemini program at an end by late 1966, NASA was gearing up to fly the first Apollo missions. The plan was to land on the moon by the end of the decade, and the clock was ticking. NASA would first fly a simpler version of the Apollo command module spacecraft known as Block I, before progressing to more complex missions with a more sophisticated version, Block II. The program was trying to hustle; NASA pushed ahead without waiting for Block II to be ready for all missions. I was assigned to work in Downey, just south of Los Angeles, where North American Aviation was building the Apollo command module. I was already familiar with their work; I’d been flying the airplanes they built for years.
The assignment quickly grew into something even more important. Ed Mitchell, Fred Haise, and I became the first of our group to be assigned to help with a mission. Each Apollo flight had a prime crew of three astronauts who flew the mission and a backup crew who were ready to fly if the prime crew could not. Then there was the support crew: three more astronauts assigned to help with any other jobs the prime and backup crews didn’t have time for. In November, the three of us were named as the support team for the second manned Apollo flight. It wasn’t a seat on a space mission—not yet—but it was the beginning of working into a system that could place me on a backup and then a prime crew. To get a foot in the door this early in the Apollo program meant that I must have been doing something right. I saw this posting as a sign that my bosses, especially Deke, were happy with me.
It made sense to assign a test pilot with an engineering background to this job. Even though every Apollo flight was, in a sense, a test flight, the plan wasn’t to go up into orbit and only then find out how a spacecraft performed. Instead, astronauts would fly in space the way they had been trained in simulations on the ground: the way the flight plan told them to. The procedures in each flight plan would be well defined, and created through careful engineering analysis and testing. We had to know exactly what each spacecraft would do long before we sent it up. That would be my job: as part of a team, to thoroughly test the Apollo command module while it was built.
