Falling to Earth

“Houston, this is Endeavour. Thank you very much,” I responded. Thank you, Mr. President, for keeping it short this time.

And then I slipped around the back of the moon once again. This time, I would be completely alone. A quarter of a million miles away, planet Earth was home to all but three humans. Two of them, Dave and Jim, were now two thousand miles away on the other side of a big, dead ball of rock. And then there was me. With the moon in the way, I couldn’t talk to Dave or Jim, or Earth. I was the most isolated human in existence. I’d be on my own for three days.

It would have been great for all three of us to go down to the lunar surface. It was an exciting time for Dave and Jim, and it would have been fun for me, too. But I was happy where I was. In fact, it was my favorite part of the flight; I had that amazing spacecraft all to myself. We’d been cooped up together so closely, I enjoyed stretching out. Plus now I really got to fly. Like a test pilot checking out a new airplane, I would gain stick-and-rudder time in this enhanced version of the command and service module.

I didn’t feel lonely or isolated. I’d grown up able to take care of myself and had become a single-seat fighter pilot. I was much more comfortable flying by myself than with others. In fact, I most enjoyed the back side of the moon, where Houston couldn’t get hold of me on the radio. I was fascinated by what I was seeing and happy that Dave and Jim had landed safely—but glad to be rid of them for a while, too.

I was also going to be intensely busy. I was my own solo science mission now, with my own CapCom so my work was not confused with Dave and Jim’s. I’d already begun turning on some SIM bay instruments as soon as we were in lunar orbit. But now, with Falcon gone, I could really focus on my science tasks. I turned the spacecraft to aim the SIM bay at the lunar surface.

I had a meticulously choreographed three days ahead of me. The spacecraft would be in sunshine, in shadow, in and out of radio contact with Earth. I needed to use the sextant, the windows, and the SIM bay, each of which would need to be pointed in different directions for different tasks. But I couldn’t just turn the spacecraft any time I felt like it: my fuel was precious, and finite.

I extended the mass spectrometer on a large boom, trying to sniff out any hint of lunar atmosphere or escaping volcanic gas. Scientists particularly thought that areas of lunar sunrises and sunsets might concentrate stray gases. They would be extremely tenuous, and that is where we ran into trouble. The spectrometer mostly picked up particles that we brought from Earth. We’d sprayed clouds of urine along our flight path all the way to the moon, and these urine dumps continued in lunar orbit. My frozen pee is probably sprinkled all over the moon. Add rocket engine exhaust, and it is no wonder our mass spectrometer had trouble finding anything else.

In another effort to get away from the effects of the spacecraft, I also deployed the gamma-ray spectrometer on a large boom, to search for radiation emitted by the lunar surface. I activated other instruments to look for X- rays, plus alpha particles such as radon which volcanic cracks in the moon might emit. If I found them, it could reveal activity deep inside the moon. I even bounced the spacecraft’s radio signal off the moon and back to Earth, which gave us more details of the surface composition.

I often needed to control the spacecraft to keep it steadily curving around the moon, so that the panoramic camera could look straight down and take clear shots. If I were out of place, the camera would only capture blurry photographs as the landscape sped past below. I was flying over uncharted parts of the moon’s far side, so I wanted to get great shots.

The camera was a modified version of the device used by the U-2 spy plane and air force spy satellites. It was now obsolete, so NASA could use it. That camera was a phenomenal instrument—the lens and film moved together in one precise motion to image a huge swath of landscape. Using more than a mile of film, I took over fifteen hundred photos, capturing details only a few feet across. When we returned to Earth I found I’d even captured the shadow of Falcon on the moon and the disturbed lunar dust around the spacecraft where Dave and Jim had walked.

The military had placed one condition on our use of the camera. So there was no question of any international incidents, I was prohibited from pointing it at the Soviet Union. This was nonsense—from a quarter of a million miles away, the best image I would have captured was a fuzzy continent. But it had been a spy camera, so the diplomats had to be satisfied.

Another device, the mapping camera, rose out of the SIM bay on rails. I used it to snap precisely measured images of smaller patches of terrain. Using a star-seeking camera and a laser beam that bounced off the surface, I could match every photo with the exact angle and distance from the landscape. Shooting stripes of overlapping photos, I mapped the moon as explorers of old had mapped the earth. As my orbit shifted slightly westward with every revolution, I mapped a new area on each pass.

I kept on a precise, intensely busy schedule to open and close lenses and shutters, deploy and retract booms, and orient the spacecraft. But there was more. I would also take scientifically valuable photos myself out of the windows.

The moon looked enormous from such a low orbit. From Earth, I’d had no sense of its vertical features. Now as I zipped across the landscape I saw the outer rings of molten waves formed by meteor impacts frozen into gunmetal-gray mountains that reached fifteen thousand feet up toward me. I glimpsed tall central peaks of craters before I saw the surrounding low rims. As I constantly rounded a curved and angled surface, the tops of these hills would peek out over the horizon before I reached them, and once I passed over them the landscape would plunge thousands of feet in steep, shadowed crater walls. With no atmosphere to soften the view, every crater and boulder was sharp and crisp.

It was an alien world, but nevertheless it felt oddly familiar. Thanks to Farouk, every time I slid back into sunlight I recognized features right away. Craters, rilles, and overlapping, intermingling lava flows marched past that I knew from my training. I felt strangely comfortable—I knew this place.

^{The moon was an alien world, but somehow reassuringly familiar.}

I wanted to see if I could spot Dave and Jim on the surface with my own eyes. I was not just curious: knowing their exact position would also help us dock three days later. Finding such a tiny object amid a plain of craters was not easy, but as I gazed through the sextant I caught a quick glint from Falcon’s shiny skin, then spotted their long shadow. “I’ve got the LM!” I announced to mission control. “He’s sitting right by a very small crater.” I rattled off their exact coordinates. “I hope the view is as fantastic down there as it is up here,” I radioed down to Dave.

“I’m telling you, it really is!” Dave assured me. “We’ll do the little things and you do the big things,” he added, as I studied the grand sweep of the landing region from above.

“I think we’re going to give lots of people lots of things to do for a while,” I told mission control. The three of us would be returning massive amounts of data to analyze.

Changes in color and shading fascinated me as I circled the moon. Looking toward the sun, the lunar surface appeared light brown. Away from the sun, it looked gray. I saw white splashes where fresher craters had blown out flour-like rays of powdery soil. Although I know this could not be possible, the bright rays often appeared to be suspended above the surface in a lacelike haze, not scattered across the mountains. The moon looked bleached and desert-like when the sun was directly overhead, as if clay had been mixed with sand. Then, as the sun lowered, evidence of long-ago violent events would appear in the lengthening shadows of old scars and wounds from impacts. I could see lava flows so thick that they must have crept across the surface in a slow, widening, sticky wave, filling old craters as they wound across the moon. It was like a jigsaw puzzle of features, each with its own secrets for me to piece together.

With no atmosphere, the line between day and night was strikingly distinct. Mountains cast long slashes of blackness across the landscape, and features stood out as if I had placed a flashlight against a rough stucco wall. I was fascinated by the starkness of the peaks. I loved to take photos in these shadowy regions—and not only because it helped the scientists. Back on Earth, they could use the shadows to measure the height of lunar features. But there was also a drama and beauty in these locations, and I concentrated much of my photography there.

Streaks of light would create alternating light and shadowy waves that once again stretched and seemed to billow and flutter as I curved into blackness. I felt like a sailor crossing a dark ocean. I knew photos could never