Falling to Earth

fine. I suspected they hadn’t used it much.

I still needed to exercise, so I improvised. With the center couch removed, I could hold on to the two struts in the middle of the spacecraft and push against them. I could do knee bends and run in place with my legs freewheeling in air. I felt my heart rate rise and could watch the attitude indicator and see the entire spacecraft rocking back and forward.

I’d been looking at the Littrow region of the moon a lot, because scientists were curious about the darker soils there. Were they evidence of volcanic activity? On one pass, I spotted something unusual. “There are a whole series of small, almost irregular-shaped cones,” I reported, “and they have a very distinct dark mantling … It looks like a whole field of small cinder cones down there.”

Unlike craters created by meteorites, cinder cones build up as debris is pushed out from a volcanic vent. I was seeing features that met the definitions I had studied.

“They’re somewhat irregular in shape,” I continued. “They’re not all round … and they have a very dark halo, which is mostly symmetric, but not always, around them individually.”

Mission planners had told me I wouldn’t be able to see features that small. But that wasn’t true. If I stared hard at a fixed point, it was tough to resolve. But if I swept my eyes around the general area, I could pick up a lot more detail.

As I described these funnels surrounded by dark rings, the geologists back on Earth grew excited. So much so that the last Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, was targeted for the Littrow region. That mission didn’t reach any cinder cones. Instead they found an impact crater that had punched through the surface, throwing up an unusually dark ring of subsurface volcanic ash and bright orange glass beads. Good enough.

My work days were busy, but I was floating around so I didn’t burn up much energy. The ground had assigned me seven or eight hours to sleep. I found I only needed three or four. It wasn’t because I was nervous; it was more because I was excited. I had a lot to do. I didn’t bother telling mission control I was awake. I used some of the time to finish up experiments and take photographs, but I also had hours of free time around the moon to just look out, marvel, and think.

I orbited alone in a detached, eerie silence, my spacecraft on a smooth trajectory. When I flew jets back on Earth, I was used to little bumps as I cruised through air and the roar of the engine. Here there was stillness and peace. It was more like riding in a hot-air balloon, drifting with no sensation of motion. I felt like an imaginary alien might when visiting Earth in a UFO, that this was not my planet. I was not from here, and perhaps not even supposed to be here. I was spying on an alien place.

The only noise came from pumps and fans running in the background, which I only noticed if something did not sound right. Just like driving a car, you only snap alert when you hear something unexpected. Since my life depended on this machine, I was hyperaware of unusual sounds.

Sometimes I played music, which only heightened my sense of eerie detachment. I had a cassette filled with songs by Simon and Garfunkel, The Moody Blues, Judy Collins, George Harrison, The Beatles, and some spoken- word extracts from James Cook’s journals. Occasionally, I’d wind the tape to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Come Fly with Me” and hum along while I worked away on my experiments.

I would flip the cassette recorder and watch it lazily rotate while it played. It was odd to watch the laws of physics in action, as it would spin a couple of times, flip over, and continue to spin around a different axis. Space was weird.

I carried some songs by French singer Mireille Mathieu, who many called the successor to Edith Piaf. Her agent had contacted me to see if I would put some of her songs on my tape. I wasn’t sure that would be a good thing, but I asked what he had in mind. The next thing I knew, her agent had booked the two of them on a flight to Houston to talk to me. I told the center director about these uninvited guests, and he arranged a meeting in his office, where we met with her for a few minutes. Out of politeness, I took a couple of her songs on the flight. They were hauntingly good but very sad, so I only listened to them once. The moon was foreboding enough.

I knew I would never be coming back to the moon, so I took extra care to absorb every sensation, every experience. I also believed that it was not just for me personally. With only two lunar missions left after ours, I understood it would be years before humans would return. I needed to experience it for everyone.

I curved around the moon to where no sunlight or Earthshine could reach me. The moon was a deep, solid circle of blackness, and I could only tell where it began by where the stars cut off. In the dark and quiet, I felt like a bird of the night, silently gliding and falling around the moon, never touching.

I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars.

I could see tens, perhaps hundreds of times more stars than the clearest, darkest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light, I could see them all to the limits of my eyesight. There were so many, I could no longer find constellations. My vision was filled with a blaze of starlight.

Unlike some other astronauts who had time only for hurried glances, I had many hours, spread over many days, to look at this awe-inspiring view and think about what it meant. There was more to the universe than I had ever imagined.

It got me thinking about our whole concept of the universe. We can’t see much of it from Earth, at least with the naked eye. The more we learn, through telescopes, the more our view of the universe changes. We can only make sense of what we can see. Viewing so much more now with my own eyes, I could feel my own understanding changing rapidly. I sensed that there was so much more out there than our Earthly philosophies would lead us to believe.

With hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, I decided it was naive to believe we were the only life. If only a minuscule percentage of the blazing stars I saw had Earth-like planets, life could be everywhere. If our solar system is a natural process, then the rest of the universe should follow similar patterns. In fact, what if life came to Earth from somewhere else in the universe? My mind raced with possibilities.

Was the space program more than an engineering program—could it be part of our genetic drive? I might be circling the moon at that moment not because of politics or the Cold War, but because we are hardwired to explore space. In a few billion years, our own sun will die. Perhaps life wanders from star to star over the millennia, refusing to stay and die? Apollo might be the first step of that hardwired survival instinct.

I looked at the blaze of stars and imagined life out there as continuous, like seeds flying through the air, some surviving, some not. I imagined life spreading between the stars, timeless, always there, adapting, propagating, spurred by survival.

These feelings were amplified by the sensation of weightlessness. It seemed so natural, so comfortable—as if I were coming home. As if I had been that way before or belonged in space. Perhaps the natural state of humans was traveling through space.

I didn’t come to any conclusions. I still don’t know what is out there. What I strongly sensed was that we as a species have not yet experienced enough of the universe. Whatever we believe now is probably not accurate. We have developed our ideas based only on what we can see, touch, and measure. Now I was having a glimpse into infinity and could only dimly sense, not understand, the journey ahead for humans.

It was humbling for a Michigan farm boy, whose biggest worry at one time had been thirty acres of hay. Alone on the far side of the moon, in darkness, as far from other humans as it was possible to be, I drank in the experience, over days and long sleepless nights. Decades later, I’m still pondering what I absorbed in those intense hours.

Karl Henize tried to keep me grounded with world events each day. “President Nixon yesterday declared his administration is determined to revitalize the American country …”

I interrupted him. “That’s your world right now. Our world’s up here right now, Karl.” Then I gave him some more detail about ancient rock avalanches over the enormous cliffs of Tsiolkovsky crater. I could catch up on politics when I got back.

Then Karl relayed more personal news—that he and Vance Brand had visited my apartment across the street from mission control. Now this was more interesting.

“Your folks are there,” Karl relayed, “and I guess, as you know, they’ve got a squawk box listening in on our loop with great interest. Except when you go behind the moon, then they watch the other show that’s taking place on the surface.”