Falling to Earth

wanted public support for NASA and space travel, we needed to inspire and inform the kids.

So a few weeks before the flight, I picked up the phone and called the Sesame Street production offices in New York. The children’s show had been on TV less than two years, yet it was already highly regarded as an educational and stimulating experience for young minds.

Reaching a producer, I explained my idea for an episode about an Apollo launch. Maybe, I suggested, they could send a film crew down to the Cape to capture the event. Vicariously, then, the kids would feel the impact and excitement. The producer didn’t sound too interested. “Most of us are beginning our summer break,” he explained wearily. “It might be hard to pull a crew together. Call me back in a week,” he sighed, “and I’ll let you know.”

I called him back in a week. They could come to the Cape, but the show wanted something in return, the producer declared rather pompously. Puzzled by his approach, I asked what it was. “Your spacecraft,” he responded. “We’d like you to name it ‘Big Bird,’ after our show’s lead character.”

I imagined for a moment our gleaming spacecraft. Then NASA’s reaction if I had asked to rename it after an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow canary. I looked at the receiver and said “Thank you very much and good-bye.” Screw Sesame Street.

I’d wasted a precious week, and we still needed kids. So I immediately called Pittsburgh, and another children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The producer put me right through to Fred Rogers, the show’s much-loved host. We chatted for a few minutes, I explained my idea, and he replied that it fit perfectly with a series he was filming about parents going away. He wanted to teach children about fathers leaving the house to go down to the store, leaving in the morning to go to work, or going on a trip. This was a perfect match, he told me—Dad is going to the moon for two weeks. As a father, I could relate. Fred proposed filming a show both before and after the trip. A great idea, I agreed.

Fred put me on hold for a few minutes and lined up the PBS Nova mobile filming crew in Boston, probably the best crew in the nation. They were available, and we scheduled it all in that first phone call.

Three days before I began my pre-launch quarantine period, the film crew arrived at the Cape. They filmed Fred and me talking about space in the launch control center, then I showed them how I put on a spacesuit and how each part worked. Fred worked through a long list of kids’ questions about astronaut experiences. I could answer many of them, but I had to confess I couldn’t answer others until after my flight. I asked Fred to let me take the list into space. I would think about them during the flight, I promised, and then answer them when I returned. Fred liked this idea. In fact, instead of making two regular shows out of the footage, he would now do a special.

I worked on a number of follow-up shows with Fred, and we really hit on what kids wanted to know. For example, children were fascinated by space food, so I took some to the show to reconstitute, and Fred and I ate it right there on air. I took a large moon rock to another taping so the kids could look at it. Those shows did a lot of good, bringing a human element into spaceflight. Many of the ideas evolved into a children’s book I wrote in 1974, named I Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon. Fred wrote the foreword.

But I did get some good-natured ribbing at the Cape. A few days before the flight, in quarantine, we heard an announcement over the PA system: “Everybody get to a TV set.” Sure enough, it was the Mister Rogers special. It was so far outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy. Astronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn’t do kiddies’ shows. They particularly made fun of me when I carefully navigated the inevitable “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” question. But I loved the final result, and Deke got a good laugh out of watching it. Most importantly, kids loved it.

Our quarantine at the Cape started a few weeks before the flight. Nobody wanted a slight sniffle to delay a multimillion-dollar lunar mission. Those who worked with us directly wore surgical masks. Everyone else we saw only on the other side of a glass window. Farouk and I continued to work on my geology training on different sides of the glass, and I chatted to a lot of visiting dignitaries, too.

My parents made a vacation out of the launch. They drove their tiny travel trailer all the way down from Michigan and stayed in a little trailer park in Cocoa Beach. We visited through the glass. My brothers and sisters arrived a little later, followed by my girls, Alison and Merrill. Their mother didn’t come with them, but NASA took good care of my daughters; they flew them down in a Gulfstream jet from Houston. Like most astronaut kids, none of it seemed like a big deal to them. Many neighborhood dads went to the moon, so this was no different from the stories their friends told.

I was very upbeat about the flight. I never said anything to my family about what might happen to me other than the positives of the mission. I never wrote letters to my daughters in case I didn’t survive or anything like that. Nevertheless, the thought was in my mind that I might never return. I never shared those feelings with anybody at the time. I didn’t see the point. But I did make sure my will was up to date. That was pretty simple: all my possessions would go to my daughters.

I talked to my closest friends a lot on the phone. But one night, I decided the quarantine was crazy—I would make a break for it. After the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, I silently snuck out to my car and drove into Cocoa Beach to meet up with my buddies at a pre-launch party. One was a very special lady whom I was close to at the time, and it meant a lot to me to say good-bye to her in person. I couldn’t stay out for long, and it was certainly against all the rules, but I took the chance. A close friend on the medical team was also there with me, and she could have lost her job if anyone spotted us. If my bosses had checked the space center gate logs, we would have caught holy hell.

The night before the flight, Jim Rathmann also threw a party for my family and friends. I couldn’t attend, of course, because we were watched far too closely at that point to sneak out, but I did get to chat with close friends over the phone. I remember thinking that this could be the last time I talked to them. However, the concern was less for myself. I strongly felt that if something bad happened and we died on the flight, it wouldn’t bother me. Danger came with the job. It would have really bothered me if I were the person who caused it. I think we all felt that way. None of us ever wanted to be the one who caused a major accident or incident. I never wanted to be the one my colleagues pointed fingers at and said, “Hey, you screwed up.”

Even though we were in quarantine, we could still keep ourselves sharp with some flying. We’d head over to Patrick Air Force Base, just south of our launch site, making sure not to interact with anyone on the way. Then we flew around in T-38s, which allowed us to have fun and shake off tension. There is a lot of pressure right before a flight, and flying allowed me to relieve it. Additionally, there was talk about people feeling disoriented, dizzy, and sick in weightlessness. I tried to put my inner ear through as many weird sensations as possible in a jet, hoping to prevent any motion sickness. I would roll, spin, and have fun. I don’t know if it helped, but it was a great way to blow off steam.

The last thing I wanted to do was crash, so I was particularly careful not to do anything crazy. Naturally we couldn’t fly too close to our launchpad, but I took the time to look over in that direction, miles away. What I could see was spectacular.

From a distance, I could easily spot two things. One was the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn V rocket was assembled. The largest one-story building in the world, it dwarfed everything in the area, except for one other, more temporary landmark. The gleaming white Saturn V rocket looked like a toy from ten miles away, but it was still very visible. As I flew closer and compared it to the surrounding landscape, the scale really hit me. Our rocket was enormous.

More than 360 feet tall, the length of one and a half football fields, the Saturn V was on top of a launchpad that pushed the tip of the rocket to about 500 feet above the coastal scrub. It was incredible to think I would soon be sitting on top of this leviathan. I took time to study it and drink in the experience.

The first stage of the Saturn V was enormous and squat, more than 130 feet tall, with five engine exhaust nozzles, each so big a person could crawl inside one of them. Capable of creating millions of pounds of thrust, the first stage could shove the entire rocket stack most of the way into space.

Despite its enormous size, that first stage wasn’t enough. Above it sat a second stage, more than 80 feet tall, to thrust us through the upper atmosphere. When the first stage ran dry, it would fall away as the second stage ignited its own five engines and slammed us upward.

The second stage could get us most of the way into orbit and was the last part of the rocket to fall back down through the atmosphere. Everything else would go to the moon. Above that second stage was a slimmer third