Falling to Earth

The third stage engine relit. For more than five minutes, a soft but solid acceleration pushed us back in our couches again. Our speed climbed to twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Now, instead of falling around the Earth, we were fast enough to climb to a point, days away, where the moon’s gravity would capture us.

We were shooting for a moving target. Because the moon orbits Earth, we had to aim not for the moon itself, but where the moon was going to be. It was like firing two bullets, wanting them not to hit each other, but to barely miss. If we got it wrong, space was an unforgiving place. We had to trust the math in our flight plan completely. We checked our numbers a lot.

Once the burn was successfully completed, we had time to briefly look out of the window again. Earth had already begun to shrink. Our planet is only eight thousand miles in diameter, and we traveled three times that distance every hour. I could see our launch site in Florida, and the rest of the southeastern United States and Cuba, all in one view. How different it all looked from here.

Time to get back to work. One of my key jobs in the mission was right ahead. Our lunar module, Falcon, was bolted into the third stage, still below us. Three and a half hours into the mission, it was time to extract it. I floated over to the left couch, from where I could fly Endeavour while I peered out of the left window.

We blew the bolts that connected us to the stage, and with a delicate pulse of our thrusters I edged Endeavour away. Large hinged panels opened like petals on a flower and drifted away from the top of the stage, exposing the top hatch of the Falcon. We crept away a short distance, then I very slowly rotated us 180 degrees. What was the hurry? We had days before we would get to the moon, and my slow and careful piloting saved precious fuel. Out the window, I spotted a panel spinning away into the blackness. The shrinking Earth also fought for my attention. “What a view!” I remarked, then focused again on my target.

Within ten minutes, we slid back to the third stage. Falcon looked delicate, as if it was made of smoothed tissue paper. Better dock with it carefully, I thought. Its round hatch looked back at me like a dark pupil in the enormous round eye of the third stage. Wow, our rocket was huge. I pulsed the thrusters again a tiny fraction and nosed up toward our lunar module, head to head. I ignored the hatch and focused instead on a small white target off to one side. Using an optical sight, I placed my crosshairs firmly on the center of the target. As my crosshairs drifted off, I gave the thrusters a little squirt to edge back toward dead center.

I nailed it. “We’re sliding in there,” I told Dave. “I feel it.” The docking probe on the top of Endeavour touched the edge of the concave cone on top of Falcon, then slowly slid down the cone into a hole barely large enough to encompass three spring-loaded latches. Were we in enough to latch together? I pulsed the thrusters, and pushed into the hole a little faster. The latches sprang into place and held the spacecraft loosely together—a soft dock.

“We’re off at a little bit of an angle,” I noted to Dave and Jim. We were slightly misaligned with Falcon. But it was no big deal. I retracted the docking probe, which pulled the spacecraft together and swung us into exact alignment. With a loud bang and a shudder, twelve more capture latches pulled us into a hard docking. “Great! Boy!” I laughed.

Soon after we docked, Dave noticed a problem. “The SPS Thrust light on the EMS is now on,” he radioed to mission control. The instrument panel light told us that Endeavour’s engine valves were open, and our enormous main engine should therefore be firing. But it wasn’t, and we did not want it to. We immediately pulled the circuit breakers so that a short circuit couldn’t inadvertently light the engine and thrust us hard against our fragile Falcon. While the ground puzzled over the problem, we connected umbilicals between Falcon and Endeavour through the docking tunnel, checked the docking latches, and prepared to pull Falcon out of the spent third stage. I tried not to think about serious engine problems, but I knew that engine was our only way to return from lunar orbit. If it didn’t work, our mission might be scrubbed after only four hours in space.

We pressed ahead. Closing the docking tunnel hatch again, I armed the explosives that would cut Falcon loose from the third stage. Springs would push the lunar module out while we backed away with it, firmly attached. I felt the thump as we separated and slowly drifted away from the last piece of Saturn V. It had given us a good ride. Now it would follow us on a slightly different path and crash into the lunar surface in three days’ time, an hour after we were due to enter lunar orbit. I couldn’t see it anymore, as Falcon filled my window. Now it was time to work through some troubleshooting procedures with the ground for our faulty engine light.

About an hour after we first spotted the light, the ground sent us potential solutions. They suspected a short circuit, and we hoped to isolate its location. I floated over to the left-hand couch and carefully checked circuit breakers and switches, moved the hand controller, and watched for the light to go out. The light didn’t change.

Shortly afterward, Karl Henize radioed to say that the tests had only proven the problem was not a simple one to isolate. Mission control would ponder the evidence and get back to me. Damn. Nothing to do but continue our busy day, and hope.

I’d made a quick navigation check while still in Earth orbit, and now I needed to confirm our position between Earth and the moon. I floated behind the couches and peered through the optics to check our journey against the backdrop of Earth, moon, and stars. Working the computer, I checked the angles between the ever-shrinking Earth and a couple of stars, fine-tuning our position in space.

Once I’d finished navigating, I placed the spacecraft into passive thermal control mode—or “barbecue mode,” as we called it. With no atmosphere in space, the heat from the sun was brutal, and it could scorch the spacecraft skin while the shadowed side chilled far below freezing. Spacecraft systems could fail and windows could crack if we allowed this extreme temperature difference. A slow, gentle spin maintained an even temperature. We’d spend most of our time rotating this way.

Mission control called with more tests for that pesky light, so we teased switches back and forth to see if the light flickered. Dave gently tweaked a switch to halfway on, and the light flickered off. “Gee! Good grief! Wonder why it’ll do that?” I queried.

“It’s a switch problem,” Dave theorized, to me and the ground. “I bet we’ve got a little solder ball in that switch or something.” He was right, although we couldn’t confirm this until we returned to Earth. A tiny piece of wire, less than a tenth of an inch long, was stuck inside the switch, creating a short circuit. Such a tiny object, but it could have canceled a moon landing. Even after all the meticulous work we’d done in Downey, it had been impossible to catch everything. But now that we knew the problem and that fortunately it was isolated to a small area, we could come up with a procedure to work around it.

We’d planned a small engine burn that first day, to refine our course to the moon. Luckily, my navigation sightings showed we were sufficiently on course. The burn could wait until the next day, while mission control refined their solution for the faulty engine switch.

Eleven hours into the flight, and we were already a quarter of the way to the moon. But Earth pulled on us; we constantly fought its gravity as we sped away. After a fast start, it would take us two and a half days to reach a point where the moon pulled on us more. Until then, we’d steadily slow down.

It was time to eat. We had sliced roast beef, hamburgers, hot dogs, sliced chicken breast, and other goodies. Sounds tasty—until I tell you they were all sealed in little plastic bags and irradiated to kill any bugs. They had a shelf life of twenty years. Our meals were also freeze-dried and had to be reconstituted with water. It was government food, all right, but it kept us alive.

We were supposed to have some variety. Before the flight, we’d worked with a dietician to create a menu of freeze-dried items. She gave us a checklist and around three hundred samples, and asked us to check off what we liked and didn’t like to create individual food menus. It sounded wonderful to me, so I worked through the samples and rated them all.

Two weeks before the flight, Jim and I were in our office and decided to compare our menus. They were exactly the same. That’s peculiar, we thought. So we found Dave and compared his list. Identical, too. Puzzled, we tracked down a member of the Apollo 14 crew. Same result.

We contacted the dietician, who confessed that if one person didn’t like a choice, she took it off everyone’s