Musketeers “all for one, one for all” moment: a touching bond between three explorers. In truth, it actually was us reminding Dave, “Don’t you dare twist that damn handle.” I was glad we had an escape option, but I would rather have died than see Dave abort the mission unnecessarily. Fortunately, everything continued smoothly on our ride into orbit.

We quickly went supersonic; the engine noise could no longer reach us. We passed through the period of maximum dynamic pressure on the rocket in the second minute, and I felt us shake and roll a little, but we held steady. Stay cool, I told myself. I’m not nervous, I can do this. Even if the ground finds out I am nervous, it will be too late. We’ll be in space.

Our trajectory was arcing, but it still felt as if we were heading straight up because the acceleration pressed me back into my couch. As our propellant burned the rocket grew lighter and faster, and the G forces built up until we felt four times heavier than normal. We were high above the thickest part of the atmosphere, and the rocket pushed forward, faster and faster.

The feeling was not uncomfortable. I didn’t notice it in most of my body, because I was wearing a heavy spacesuit. I really felt it in my hands. I needed to use the instrument panel in front of me and I grew a little concerned trying to reach those switches. Not only did I have to move the weight of my arm against that acceleration, I also had to move the weight of the suit. Luckily, it never grew so bad that my arm was pinned down.

Less than three minutes into the flight, we were already fifty miles from the launchpad. The first stage had done its job, and it was time to separate and let it drop into the ocean. We’d talked about this moment a little in training, but not much. I knew the first stage would shut down, we would separate, the second stage would light, and away we’d go. Sounded simple enough. I was in for a surprise.

We were pressed down in our couches, feeling heavy, when the first stage engines shut down. It felt like we’d slammed on the brakes of a speeding sports car. Jim and I instinctively threw up our arms, fighting the feeling that we would break through our restraining harnesses and smash right through the instrument panel. Dave, on the other hand, hardly moved. After we finished flailing around, I looked over at him, took a deep breath and asked, “Dave, what is happening?” Dave gave us the confident smile of someone who had flown a Saturn V before. “Oh, that’s normal. No big deal. I just forgot to tell you about it.”

“Man, you aren’t kidding,” I replied, with a raised eyebrow. It had scared the hell out of me.

It turned out that not everything was going to plan. Back on the ground, flight controllers had just lost the instrumentation from the first stage. The thrust from the first stage engines had decayed more slowly than expected. The stage had small retrorockets to pull it away before the second stage lit. They had halved the number of retrorockets on our Saturn V to save weight, but it was a cut too far. The stages stayed dangerously close to each other, and when the second stage engines fired the exhaust fried the electronics on the first stage. We were lucky not to collide with it.

We would only learn of this near mishap later. As the second stage engines lit, we were once again pushed back into our couches. We were a shorter, leaner, lighter rocket now. We blew off our launch escape tower, as we were too high for it to do us any good. Now we could see out of all the windows, as the sky grew ever blacker. “How are we doing, Al?” Dave called across to me.

“We’re doing fine,” I responded, focused on my instruments.

“Man, I’ve got the moon in my window!” Jim exulted.

“Yes, sir, it’s out there,” I replied. Plenty of time to look at it later. “That sucker’s right on, right on,” I reported, impressed by the precise path of our rocket.

The second stage was a comfortable, soft ride, but not powerful enough to kick us into orbit. Having done its job, it also dropped away—a smooth, easy transition. We hurtled up at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour, while the second stage began a long, tumbling fall to the ocean. As the big engine on the third stage lit, we needed to raise our speed by only a few thousand miles per hour to reach orbit.

I watched the instruments as the third stage gradually arced us into a path that would keep us circling the Earth. During the last part of the burn, we even angled down toward Earth a small amount, so we could loop into orbit. We fell around the planet in a beautifully precise curve, not falling back to Earth, nor leaving it behind. Not yet.

At last, the third stage engine shut down. Less than twelve minutes had passed since we’d sat on the pad. Now we were traveling more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, and I was in space. After all the years of training, I was finally here.

Jim and I unstrapped ourselves and floated to the windows. Jim tried to dig the TV camera out right away, to capture the view. Dave had seen it before, of course, but Jim and I had never witnessed such a sight. The beautiful planet Earth stretched below us, with a thin horizon that knifed between sky and black space. It was stunning and strikingly delicate. And because we were so low, we zipped across oceans and continents in minutes. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it would be visibly this fast,” I murmured to Dave and Jim.

I could have spent the next hour just staring. All too soon, however, mission control in Houston radioed and reminded us to get to work. We busied ourselves with checklists. We didn’t have much time until we had to leave Earth orbit. Before we could do that, we needed to thoroughly check out our spacecraft and ensure it had reached space in good shape. If it hadn’t, we might have to return to Earth immediately. I tore my gaze from the window and got busy.

I’d spent years training inside command modules, but it had always been in Earth’s gravity field. Now I was weightless, and the command module felt very different. I had no walls or floors any more, no up and down, just surfaces and space to float around in. On the launchpad, the spacecraft looked cramped. Now it felt roomier. As we checked out the spacecraft, I floated under the seats and up into the docking tunnel. Endeavour still wasn’t big, but it felt different when all the interior space could be used.

Weightlessness felt odd—like swimming underwater, but without water pressure on me. I was concerned I might feel “space sick,” an affliction similar to motion sickness that affects some astronauts when they float around, so I used a trick to keep it at bay. On Earth, I had found that if I focused on a task, I didn’t have to worry about motion sickness. So I floated around as much as I could, figuring this was the quickest way to get over any nausea. Dave warned me to slow down a little, worried I might grow ill. But I would be weightless for two weeks and I didn’t want to just sit back and feel bad. “Get your big foot out of the way!” I joked as Dave floated into my face. “Push me down,” he instructed, and with a gentle nudge I floated him away. This was strange, but fun.

Jim tended to float to the top of the spacecraft, like a swimmer in a pool. Dave generally kept himself strapped in his couch, explaining that “Otherwise, you’re fighting the panel all the time.” He was right: the slightest movement in the couch floated us into the instrument panel.

There was nothing I could do about the stuffy feeling in my head—as if I were hanging upside down. I could see Dave and Jim felt the same. Their faces were flushed and puffy, and their eyes bulged a little.

There wasn’t time to let the discomfort affect me. We were all very busy. We were in a low Earth orbit—too low to linger long—and could only go around the Earth for a couple of hours before we needed to head to the moon. This was the only time in the mission I would see Earth up close, but so far I’d barely had a glimpse of it out of the window. The clock was ticking.

Fortunately, our spacecraft had made it into space in good working order. I now had time to briefly reflect on the mission so far. “That was a fantastic ride!” I shared with my crewmates. “I’m just now beginning to understand what went on. That first stage really does shake!” Jim’s wide grin told me he knew just what I meant.

After two revolutions of the Earth, it was almost time to relight the third stage of our booster, and head to the moon. Before we did, we all took a lingering look out of the window. I gazed at lightning skipping across the tops of distant clouds. “This is unreal to watch,” I said with amazement.

“It’s so pretty out here, Dave, I’d almost settle for an Earth-orbit mission,” Jim said wistfully.

Don’t you say that!” Dave responded with mock authority, convulsing me with laughter. It was true: Earth was beautiful, but we ached to press onward to the moon.

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