how fast Boeing came up with a working vehicle.
But not everything went smoothly. I distinctly recall one time that Boeing was having a real problem getting the rover’s electrical system to work. Fortunately, General Motors was Boeing’s prime subcontractor for the vehicle, and the astronauts had some great contacts within that company because of our Corvette deal. On this occasion a discreet phone call was made to Ed Cole, the president of General Motors and a good friend, describing what was not working. He immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and what needed to be done. The prototype car underwent some General Motors tests that Boeing may not have thought to do, and soon afterward the problems were fixed. Although NASA managers generally frowned on astronauts being cozy with the captains of industry, on occasions like this our personal relationships helped move the program forward and cut through a lot of red tape.
But the rover was of more concern to Dave and Jim. They would be the ones driving it on the surface, so they spent a huge amount of time together training with it. There were other new pieces of equipment that directly affected me, and I wanted to focus my time on them instead.
The Apollo service module had been modified after Apollo 13 to make it much safer. I’d had a number of conversations about it with Jack Swigert, while the engineers and technicians tried to work out what had gone wrong on his mission. Jack had followed the flight plan to the letter, and yet an oxygen tank had exploded. The two of us had worked hard on the spacecraft’s malfunction procedures, so we were concerned that a normal procedure might somehow have caused the damage. It was almost a relief when we learned the oxygen tank had an undetected flaw: an easy fix. There was nothing that Jack could have done to prevent the explosion.
For Apollo 15, there would be even bigger changes to the service module. While I orbited the moon alone, I would operate an entire bay of instruments built into the side of the service module. We called it the SIM bay, or Scientific Instrument Module, and it contained a huge amount of scientific equipment to study the moon in great detail. For example, I would have two different cameras to extensively photograph the surface. A high-resolution panoramic camera would take long, thin photos, capturing objects as small as three feet on the lunar surface while I flew overhead. I also had another, wider-range camera that I could use to help cartographers create a detailed map of the moon. To help calibrate the photos, a laser beam would fire at the surface so we could tell exactly how high up I was, and therefore the distances and feature sizes in the photographs.
I would also have instruments that could detect gamma rays, alpha particles, and X-rays, all of which could tell us a great deal about the composition of the moon’s surface. If volcanic gases were also still escaping from the moon, even in minute quantities, we should be able to measure them. When added to the photographs I would take with a handheld camera through the spacecraft windows, I would be an independent scientific laboratory, able to gather data on the moon from above like no human ever had before. At the end of the mission, I’d even get to launch a tiny satellite, which we would leave in lunar orbit to continue making discoveries.
It was exciting stuff for me and for the scientists who hoped to unlock more of the moon’s secrets. We were moving into far more complex areas than previous missions, doing work that at times sounded more like science fiction. Soon I would be skimming across an alien world, studying and recording it in huge detail. I couldn’t wait.
I worked with the scientists who designed the SIM bay experiments and with the flight planners who integrated our activities into a flight plan with an organized timeline. We ensured that my orbital operations fit well with the surface work, not just in an operational sense, but also in a scientific sense. It would be a powerful combination: Dave and Jim collecting rocks on the surface while I recorded the chemical composition of an entire region from orbit.
This individual training meant I saw less of Jim and Dave as we began to concentrate more and more on the unique elements of our mission. The two of them spent a lot of time on Long Island working with the lunar module, as well as practicing the activities they would conduct on the lunar surface. Even when we trained together, I was often alone in the command module simulator, talking to them in the lunar module simulator. We were probably only in the same simulator for 20 percent of the training time. That made sense, as there were only a limited number of times, such as launch and reentry, when we would work as a trio. For maneuvers, midcourse corrections, and changing our orbit around the moon, it made more sense for me to train solo.
I felt that my work was just as important as the lunar surface exploration. The rocks collected on the surface would be the ground truth, an important part of the puzzle. Dave and Jim would collect samples, identify where they found them, and take photos to mark the locations. When we returned them to Houston, those rocks could be analyzed in greater detail. We could then compare them to the data I would collect of that whole area from orbit and work out a system where the two sets of data agreed with each other. Since I would be passing over other sites where moon landings had been and would be made, we could build up quite a database of comparison. With this combination of information, we could learn about other areas of the moon without ever needing to land there. Since Apollo wouldn’t land on the moon as many times as originally planned, this information would be vital to collect.
It wasn’t going to be easy. As engineers and technicians finalized their work preparing the first-ever SIM bay, they constantly ran into technical problems. Some of the equipment came out from the spacecraft on long booms, and this was tough to replicate in Earth’s gravity. When the instruments were turned on, the data did not always flow well. The engineers made a lot of last-moment tweaks and adjustments. I was too busy training to be very involved and just had to hope it would all be ready in time for our flight.
I was fascinated by most space science, but not impressed with one area—medical experiments. We trusted our regular doctors to take good care of us, but we did not trust the medical team assigned to the flight. They were not our regular flight surgeons and didn’t have the normal doctor-patient relationship with us.
The mission doctors tried very hard to think up experiments for us to do in space, and most of them went way beyond anything we would consider. For example, they wanted to insert a catheter into one astronaut for the flight, threading it in through his veins into the heart. The doctors were curious to see how the heart worked during a spaceflight. We, of course, were horrified at this dangerous request. So we struck a deal: if the doctors could prove it was a benign test, we would consider it. A flight surgeon volunteered to do the test while riding a bicycle ergometer. After about five minutes of riding the bike, he had a heart attack. That ended that possibility.
Fortunately, we could trust most of the other professionals attached to our mission. In fact, they were the best in the world at their specialist areas. A lot of my intense training still focused on geology, and I wanted to squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of our time at the moon. Jim and Dave, along with their backups, trained with Lee Silver, who was an incredibly skilled field geologist from Caltech. It’s hard to imagine a better person to bridge the gap between academic geology and the test pilot mentality. He was tough and never let up in his passion and intensity to push us as hard as he could. He would have his trainees up and about by five in the morning on those field trips because he was raring to go and explore. As well as pushing hard, he also used every trick in the book to keep his students excited and enthusiastic, knowing that he had to earn the attention of astronauts who were constantly pulled in different directions by demands on their time. He was just what NASA needed, and our expedition was immeasurably improved by his participation.
While Dave and Jim worked with Lee on what might be discovered on the surface, I studied with one of the most interesting and memorable characters NASA ever brought into its fold. “King” Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-born geologist, worked for the Bellcomm think tank at NASA headquarters. He was asked to help train me and the other command module pilots on what we might see from lunar orbit. It was the happiest part of all my training, because Farouk was a vast storehouse of knowledge.
To say that Farouk was eager and into his subject is an understatement. He was, and still is, a ball of energy and fun. Dark-haired and slim, Farouk was upbeat, not hyper but most definitely a type A personality. Simply put, he
