years many of them quit and returned to their scientific careers; the others endured a long wait of more than a decade before finally flying on the space shuttle. Some of those guys became great pilots and good friends of mine. But the writing was on the wall from the outset. They would not fly Apollo missions, and it was beginning to feel like not all of my group would get the chance either.
So 1967 was a gloomy and difficult time. At the end of the year, however, I received some good news. Ed Mitchell, Fred Haise, and I were reconfirmed as the support crew for a new version of the planned second manned Apollo flight. Despite losing colleagues, ominous budget cuts, and the gradual disintegration of my marriage, I kept some modest pride knowing that my hard work was paying off.
Our support crew didn’t stay the same for long: Jack Lousma soon replaced Fred Haise, who was pulled away to other duties. The planned mission was a prestigious one: the first test flight of the lunar module. Our roles, however, were anything but glamorous. We did the dog work, helping the crew with planning, meetings, and any other little details they needed to clear up. We even brought them coffee if they asked for it.
This would be the first mission where two American manned spacecraft would link together, and so the docking system was a vital new piece of engineering that could
Did the support role mean I might soon be on a backup crew? I didn’t know. I simply tried to do the best job I could. I was grateful to be working for one of the best prime crews that NASA had ever assembled. Jim McDivitt was mission commander. He knew not only what he wanted to do, but also how to do it: the sign of a good commander. He was very decisive, but also very nice about it.
Jim was a ball of fire. Slightly built and with a sunny disposition, he laughed a lot and made things easier for the crew. He was good at taking suggestions and making decisions. While training with him, I discovered that his parents had moved to Jackson, Michigan, when he was in college, and they now lived only two blocks away from my parents.
As I got to know him and his wife, Pat, we soon became like family. Through Jim’s parents, the two of them even uncovered the nickname my mother had used for me when I was young. Jim began to call me “Sonny” on every possible occasion. Four decades later, I have almost forgiven him.
At the time, I didn’t get to know the other two prime crewmembers well. Rusty Schweickart was the lunar module pilot, which meant that, like Ed, he spent most of his time on the East Coast with the lunar module, so I rarely worked with him. The other crewmember, command module pilot Dave Scott, was someone I only saw during the major tests and checks on the command module at Downey.
I remembered Dave Scott from West Point, and it was no surprise to me that his star had continued to rise. Like me, he’d spent some time at the University of Michigan and as an Edwards test pilot, although in different years. But he’d also managed to squeeze in graduate work at MIT, served in a fighter squadron overseas, and was selected by NASA as an astronaut a full three years ahead of me. He was four months younger than me, yet had outpaced me on all career fronts. The guy was damn impressive, and NASA’s golden boy. I think everyone in Houston believed one day Dave would be the chief of staff of the air force. He just seemed destined for greatness.
My good opinion of Dave grew as I got to know him better. He was at the very least the equal of anyone in the astronaut office—and I suspected he was better than all of them. When he came to check out the spacecraft, he took meticulous notes, then gradually checked off each item to ensure that everything was resolved to his satisfaction. Absolutely no detail, however small, got past him. He’d flown in space once before, on the Gemini 8 mission in 1966 with Neil Armstrong, bedeviled by a stuck thruster which spun the spacecraft out of control. Dave and Neil nearly passed out, but kept their cool and saved the spacecraft and their lives by regaining control and returning from orbit. They impressed their NASA colleagues, especially their fellow pilots. They had taken care of the problem and made it home. Less-skilled pilots would have died up there.
During my year preparing and checking the mission’s command module in Downey, I came to know every mechanic, test conductor, and technician who worked on the spacecraft. Every day I was sure to ask them if there were any problems. If something is wrong, I said, please share it with me. I assured them I would get the problem resolved. It was a lesson I’d learned when running the armaments shop back in my fighter squadron days. The spacecraft was the most important thing in the world to me; it had to be flawless. I told the team of technicians that if a problem arose with the command module, I would keep it within our small group while we fixed it. But I also promised there would be hell to pay if something was wrong with the space vehicle and they didn’t tell me about it.
In August of 1968, to our surprise, we learned that instead of testing the command and service module along with the lunar module in Earth orbit, the second manned Apollo mission would now fly all the way to the moon and back. The lunar module was slipping behind in its development and would not be ready in time for the proposed launch date. If America didn’t send astronauts to orbit the moon soon, the Soviets might beat us to it. So NASA shuffled the order of flights. Deke told Jim McDivitt that his crew would still be the first to test the lunar module, but they would now fly the third manned Apollo mission. The spacecraft I worked on for a year would now fly with a different crew—minus a lunar module—on the prior flight.
The stakes were now even higher for the command module. It would take humans around the moon, and the service module attached to it had only one engine to get the crew back to Earth. If something went wrong, three astronauts would be stuck circling the moon forever.
But before the command module I worked on could fly, NASA had to successfully carry out the first manned Apollo mission, our first flight since the fire. The Apollo 7 mission, as it was named, was commanded by my old mentor and friend Wally Schirra. It was a huge confidence booster for NASA to fly again after the tragedy of the fire, but I was so busy when Wally’s crew launched in October 1968 that I couldn’t pay much attention. Besides, I had every confidence in the Apollo spacecraft and knew that once they entered orbit they would be just fine. If anything went wrong, they could come home at once.
Apollo 8, the next mission, was a very different story. The crew would leave Earth orbit and eventually lose sight of our planet altogether as they orbited the moon’s far side. Nothing could go wrong with the spacecraft had worked on so hard.
In December of 1968, I watched the Apollo 8 liftoff at the Cape. In addition to sending that spacecraft around the moon for the first time, we launched it on the mighty Saturn V rocket. It was only the third time that this rocket had ever been launched; the prior two launches were unmanned flights. The previous test had not gone perfectly; severe engine oscillations violently shook the rocket as it climbed into space. Some of the engines had also failed to fire for as long as they should have. The designers believed they had fixed all the problems. Still, it was a gutsy decision to put people on top of the rocket on the next flight. That NASA was willing to take the chance demonstrated confidence in both the machine and its designers.
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
