It looked like we wouldn’t disappoint them. The weather was perfect for launch. As I stepped out of the van, I looked at the clear blue sky and grinned. Up close, the Saturn V looked amazing—it gleamed in the morning sunshine. I thought back a couple of nights, when we had all driven our Corvettes out to the launchpad. The white rocket had been lit up by bright spotlights; it looked spectacular against the black sky. In the morning it was still gorgeous, but I always thought the most impressive sight was at night, lit by all those spotlights.
The weather was humid, which was not unusual for a Florida summer. The Saturn V had been filled the night before with supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, and some of that deep chill had spread through the rocket walls to the outside. The humidity in the air stuck to the skin of the rocket and froze, so when the three of us arrived we could see ice everywhere.
The rocket was huffing as puffs of vapor vented from it; the tanks were continually topped off. The Saturn V reminded me of a tethered animal pawing at the ground, ready to run. It no longer seemed like a large chunk of metal—it appeared to fume with frustration, ready to be unleashed, unrestrained.
We stepped into the elevator for the long ride to the top of the rocket, hundreds of feet up. It was the equivalent of taking a ride to the thirty-fifth floor of a skyscraper. The elevator rose and rose. Wow, I thought, it is a long way down to those engines.
When we reached the top, I gazed down the beautiful coastline, and observed the distant buzz of spectator activity. As I looked down the immense rocket, I saw chunks of ice rain down as they sloughed off its skin. It was a weird surreal effect, like a science-fiction movie.
We walked across a metal catwalk to the spacecraft; a difficult task for some, the pad engineers told me. Other astronauts had looked down at their feet, saw the distant ground through the metal mesh, and that was it. Their hands went out to the handrails, and the pad engineers had to come and convince them to keep moving. Some had to have their fingers pried from the handrails.
I wasn’t too surprised at that reaction. We were a hell of a long way up. And it didn’t matter how skilled we were flying aircraft, it felt very different in a jet. If you stand on a launchpad that high, your stomach naturally does flips when you look over the edge.
At the end of the catwalk, a little temporary structure kept birds and any other contamination out of the command module. Called the White Room, this was the domain of Guenter Wendt, the pad leader who saw off all the manned flights. We knew he’d take care of the final details, ensuring we entered the spacecraft smoothly and the hatch closed correctly.
Vance Brand, my backup for the mission, was inside the spacecraft when we arrived. Vance had been great to work with. A quiet fellow, he had just done his thing and not made any waves. He now checked all of the switch settings inside
It was a tight fit inside the spacecraft in those bulky suits. Each of us had to slide through the hatch into our individual collapsible couches, which were made of hollow steel and covered in fireproof cloth. Dave and Jim entered first, while Vance remained inside to help them. Engineers connected their oxygen hoses to the spacecraft, and tightened their couch straps. Then Vance exited, and I slid into the center couch. The engineers could then connect me and strap me in just by reaching through the hatch.
Guenter ran the process like clockwork, and soon it was time for the technicians to close the hatch. The last face I remember seeing was Guenter’s, smiling and waving an enormous crescent wrench at me. Then the heavy hatch closed with a deep
About two hours remained until launch. Guenter and his engineers needed some of that time to break down the White Room, ride the elevator to the base of the pad, and drive away. It was as if they had placed a bomb on the launchpad and set the timer. Soon all but a few emergency teams were three and a half miles away, considered a safe distance. If something went wrong with the rocket, the explosion would be immense. Everyone was now safe. Everyone but us.
I had no sense that we were hundreds of feet up in the air on the tip of a rocket. It was dark, with only a tiny window letting in any light. In our spacesuits, squeezed in with our shoulders overlapping, we could have been in a simulator.
Dave was to my left, which was normally my seat, but he was responsible for the launch, so he sat there for now. We would trade places later. Jim, to my right, dozed off again. It grew really cold. Icy, chilled air blew into the cabin and into our spacesuits, because if something went wrong on the way into orbit there was an abort mode that could have heated the spacecraft a lot. To compensate, they cooled us down. There wasn’t much to do but wait, in the dark and cold.
We had scheduled holds in the launch countdown, in case we needed time to analyze any little glitches. But we never needed to, so the minutes kept rolling toward launch time. Every once in a while someone would report over the radio from launch control, but it was all very matter of fact. I could only hear an alternator and a low hum in the background, and it was easy to drift off to sleep while I waited.
Twenty minutes before launch, it got busy again. The access arm to the hatch pulled away, and sunlight flooded into the spacecraft through an exposed window. Soon afterward we went to full internal power. We were carefully severing our bonds with earth. In the final minutes, the automatic countdown system took over. If something didn’t look right, the countdown would pause, but otherwise the system would launch us at the precisely planned time.
Eight seconds before launch I heard a turbine crank up, which drove a fuel pump. I could only hear noises transmitted through the rocket’s metal structure, since the action all took place more than three hundred feet below me. I heard the valves in the fuel lines flip open and the propellant rush through. Then the engines ignited in a fury of flame. It was 9:34 a.m. We launched within a tiny fraction of a second of our planned time.
There was a part of me that had not mentally committed to launch until that moment. We could always have climbed out of the spacecraft. But now, it was all or nothing. It wasn’t a simulation. It was
I was later told our Saturn V rocket could be heard a hundred miles away, shaking the onlookers with a popping and crackling vibration. Inside, I heard hardly any noise: only a muffled roar far beneath me, as the engine thrust vibrated up through the rocket structure. We began a smooth, slow rise from the launchpad in an eerie kind of silence.
Although the rocket pounded the pad with a punishing amount of thrust, we moved upward very slowly. The rocket was so heavy that it took us around twelve seconds to clear the launch tower. I could feel the engines swivel as they leaned the Saturn V away from the tower. We were so delicately balanced in those first seconds that a strong gust of wind could have blown us into the tower if the rocket had not tilted away.
I expected to feel more vibration and was surprised by how smoothly we rose. Almost as soon as we were above the tower, the rocket picked up speed and rolled automatically to place us on the right path for orbit. I stayed busy watching the trajectory on our instruments, checking my cue card, which told me that we had to be at certain altitudes at precise times, moving at a specific speed. Everything was going according to plan. I also kept an eye on Dave, who had a grip on the abort handle. If anything went wrong, a firm twist of his glove would activate the escape tower and shoot us clear of the Saturn V. The mission would be over.
During our training, Jim and I had jokingly pleaded with Dave, “Please let us hold hands with you when we lift off.” Not because we were scared, but because we wouldn’t let him end our mission. In fact, just before liftoff, Jim and I had each placed one of our gloved hands on Dave’s glove. To an outsider, it would have looked like a Three
