My occasional disagreements with Dave never held up our work. Jim and I tended to follow his lead on everything. He really worked us hard and led us so well that we were soon obsessed with preparing Apollo 12 for flight. In fact, the more I trained with Dave, the more my respect for him grew. We didn’t have a bond of friendship; we had something rarer—a bond of competence and professionalism.
We three differed considerably from the prime crew. Pete Conrad, my racing colleague, was very close and loyal to his crew of Dick Gordon and Al Bean, both during Apollo and for the rest of his life. I believe Dick and Al had the same feelings of loyalty to him. Naval aviators who had all known each other long before they came to NASA, to the outside world they seemed like brothers. They did everything together, driving identical gold-and-black Corvettes with their crew positions painted on the sides. They showed the world that they were a tightly bonded team.
Our crew saw those Corvettes not only as a deliberate challenge, but also as a little tacky. So we did something a little different. We obtained matching Corvette models, but Jim’s was red, mine was white, and Dave’s was blue. Each had bold red, white, and blue stripes painted right down the center of the car. We were a team, but we were also individuals.
The different cars seemed symbolic of the differences between our crews. The Apollo 12 guys went everywhere together. If you saw one gold-and-black car, you would see three. Eventually, this caused some problems, because astronauts don’t always want to be recognized. Sometimes, it was better to disappear into the woodwork. Our crew didn’t have that problem, as you would rarely see our three cars together.
Although we didn’t socialize much as a crew, I spent a lot of time with Jim in Houston. Down at the Cape, the three of us played handball and tennis, and went out to dinner and the bars. Outside of those moments, however, our crew was never too close. I recall feeling like I could never completely let down my guard. There was always a little thought in the back of my head: I never wanted to put Dave Scott in a position where he could say anything negative about me. He never did during all of our training together, and I am not sure he ever would have. Nevertheless, I couldn’t quite shake that nagging feeling.
I admit I envied Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad’s command module pilot. I held the same position on the backup crew, and as Dick’s immediate backup I came to know him very well. He soon became perhaps my closest friend in the entire program. Gregarious and mischievous, Dick is one of those rare colleagues who can do excellent, hard work while keeping things fun. When the workday ended, he could really let loose. I enjoyed his company greatly. I still do.
The Apollo 12 support crew of PJ Weitz, Ed Gibson, and Jerry Carr were a bunch of pranksters, too. For the postflight party, they created a great home movie starring a guy in a gorilla suit and a girl in a bikini inside the spacecraft—zany stuff. They dressed me in a bald cap and glasses to play a mad scientist and filmed me speeding around the Cape in a Formula Vee racing car. The crew fell over laughing when they watched the movie.
Dick and I spent a lot of time together flying back and forth to Los Angeles, where we worked on the Apollo 12 command module at Downey. I had been making that trip so much by then that it was second nature to me. I knew where the pay phones were, the rental cars, and the hotels; I could have found them blindfolded. A good thing, too, because with no distractions, I could really zero in on the work.
I particularly recall one trip when Dick and I were flying from Houston to Los Angeles in a T-38. As usual, our clothes hung in wardrobe bags between the front and back seats. It was the only place to stuff them in that aircraft. We landed in El Paso for a quick refueling, opening the canopy while the aircraft was refueled by the ground crew. As we taxied back to the runway to take off, Dick started to close the canopy. Somehow, the clothing bags became caught in the mechanism, and before we could stop the process the canopy came loose. Crap, we thought, we really messed up. We couldn’t fix it ourselves, so we taxied back to the hangar, and let the maintenance crew take over.
We still needed to get to Downey and couldn’t wait around, so we grabbed our bags and parachutes, put our flying helmets in special bags, and rode over to the commercial flight terminal, where we could catch a passenger flight to Los Angeles. We were able to find seats on a Continental Airlines flight, one that was leaving immediately.
The flight crew put us in the front of the airplane, where we stowed our helmets and hanging bags, and belted up our parachutes. As the other passengers boarded, there we sat. They freaked out. “What is wrong with this airplane?” they demanded of us. “Are you guys going to bail out?” We couldn’t stop laughing. It was a great, inadvertent “Gotcha” on all of those passengers.
I had a great time working with Dick on his command module. I already knew a lot of the systems inside out, but being a backup crewmember brought a whole new level of training. If anything happened to Dick, I would be flying to the moon in his place. I needed to learn that spacecraft thoroughly. Considering it was such a small vehicle, it is amazing how complex it was.
Not many people understand that American spacecraft like Apollo were flown solely by the pilots on board. Mission control could never control a spacecraft from the ground. They could send us information, either verbally or by transmitting data, but the astronaut had to perform an action inside the spacecraft to carry out the request. It was different from how the Soviets operated at the time, because their spacecraft were far more automated. This difference was something very important to us as pilots.
Another misconception is that the Apollo spacecraft used cutting-edge technology. In fact, the spacecraft that flew in the late 1960s and early 1970s used equipment mostly designed in the 1950s. I believe this was a conscious decision by the designers at NASA and North American: better to have something reliable than cutting- edge. I think all of the astronauts were happy with this decision.
Simple systems either work or fail. There is nothing in between. If the systems were lost, we had no real backup for many of them. However, repeated testing over the years had proved that their success rate was very high. I would rather fly a proven system than the space shuttle, for example, which has many computers that all have to talk to each other and then mutually agree. There is an analogy with flying multi-engine versus single- engine aircraft. It surprises people to learn that there are more accidents in multi-engines. If you lose your only engine, you quickly look for a place to land. If you have multiple engines, you may try to keep flying, which becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous. Simpler is often better.
Our computer was a good example of spacecraft simplicity. It was designed by MIT as a rudimentary piece of hardware. It was literally hardwired: you could zap it, turn the power off, and do pretty much anything else to it, and when the power came back on you were right back where you had been before. It had no silicon chips to burn out, was extremely reliable and virtually indestructible. Of course, simplicity came at a price: our computer had less storage memory than the average modern wristwatch.
Many of the tasks the computer needed to perform on an Apollo flight were already hardwired inside. The lack of storage capacity, however, prevented us from preloading all of the programs needed for the flight. For a simple thrusting maneuver, for example, we had to load in the data. The computer had no room at all for a particularly important program, called “Return to Earth.” The ground would need to send that one to us when we were in lunar orbit.
To navigate in space between Earth and the moon, we required two pieces of information. One was the attitude of the spacecraft compared to some fixed frame, such as the field of stars all around us. The attitude—in simple terms, which way we were pointed—was needed so that we could aim the craft during thrusting maneuvers and keep on course. The spacecraft had a set of gyroscopes to tell us. Attitude was not something we could otherwise know for sure in zero gravity, where there is no up or down. It was the equivalent of an attitude indicator in an airplane, which tells you if your wings are level. Crucially, we could also measure acceleration forces on the spacecraft, so we could gauge the accuracy of our engines when we fired them.
The other information we wanted was the precise location of the spacecraft in the Earth-moon system. We always needed to know
