Falling to Earth

and weightlessness, as I would never have them again. But I really only thought about the things I needed to do to ensure we returned safely home.

“Al, the way people talk down here, they’re going to give you a medal,” Karl Henize radioed, impressed by my continuing navigational accuracy.

“Congratulations, Al, you’ve just been voted to receive a second Vasco da Gama award,” Bob Parker on our support crew added. Thanks, guys, I thought to myself. That meant a lot to hear.

We had time to give a press conference in space, answering questions submitted by reporters. I enjoyed the conversation because it made us feel even closer to home. I was asked about the highlights of the flight so far. One, I said, was the engine burn into lunar orbit, when I saw the moon up close for the first time. The other was the successful burn out of lunar orbit, meaning we’d come home. That about summed it up—amazing exploration and staying alive.

After some other discussion about Apollo 15 “already being described as one of the great events in the history of science”—that was nice—they asked me about my spacewalk the day before.

“As far as what I felt like when I went out there,” I explained, “it was sort of like walking on stage at your high school dinner dance or something. We opened the hatch and it was pitch black, and as soon as we got out, the sun was beating down on everything, and it looked like a very large floodlight on a stage. And then putting the TV camera out on the door just added a little bit more to that sort of unreal feeling that it was time to get out on the stage and do something.”

“If you could see the size of the film magazines that Al brought in yesterday from those cameras,” Dave added, “you’d see that we have indeed at least a great deal of data on film alone.”

“Hopefully, we’ve added to our store of information about the moon and about ourselves,” I concluded, “greater than the capital that was spent on the flight itself.”

Before we turned the camera off, I flashed a quick victory sign at the viewers, as I had done on the way to the launchpad. We would be successful on the flight, much like going into combat, and we were sure of winning. Now we had succeeded in our mission, I made the gesture for a second reason—as a peace symbol. When looking at Earth as a whole planet, that seemed appropriate.

We spent much of the day stowing all the items in Endeavour’s cabin. The spacecraft’s center of gravity could not be off balance during our carefully planned plunge back through Earth’s atmosphere the next day. We handled the moon rock sample containers with particular care, until the space beneath our couches was jammed with carefully arranged white bags. It was time to settle in for my last sleep in space.

CHAPTER 11 CELEBRATION

I was jolted awake by a Hawaiian war chant piped over the radio by mission control. Back in Houston, the flight surgeons saw my heart rate shoot up as the music blasted me into alertness. “That got everybody up!” Dave retorted. But the tune was appropriate, as only a few hours remained until we planned to splash down in the Pacific Ocean, a couple of hundred miles north of the Hawaiian Islands.

“We just got our first view of the Earth this morning,” Dave reported, “and can you believe it’s getting larger and it’s getting smaller? We see just a very, very thin sliver of a very large round ball.”

Earth didn’t seem to grow much in our window until that day. Like any massive but distant object, it doesn’t grow much as you draw close until the last few moments, when it looms up at you. In these last hours, the crescent Earth grew fast against the backdrop of space. It was clear we would hit it, and my calculations showed we would strike our target at the right place and the right angle.

I shut off the SIM bay experiments for the last time, retracted the booms, and powered down the experiments one by one. They had done an outstanding job, and in a few hours’ time they would become shooting stars streaking through Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, abandoned. But the data they had returned would keep scientists busy for years.

Houston, cryptically, asked both Dave and Jim to keep their heart rate monitors on all the way through reentry. They were not concerned about mine. Dave complied, still unaware of the reason.

We made one last minor change in our course—a burn of a few seconds with our little thrusters—and I headed back to the optics to check star alignments and confirm we were perfectly on course. We could have come back fine without firing the thrusters, but the small maneuver placed us in the middle of our reentry corridor. All looked good.

“I thought we’d let you know, from our preliminary tracking, you’re sitting right in the center of the corridor now,” mission control confirmed.

“Great! That’s a nice place to be!” Dave replied.

We grew busier inside the spacecraft, checking all the systems. Batteries would feed power to explosive devices that hurled out our parachutes, and they needed to work in a precise and accurate sequence for us to survive. I tested Endeavour’s reentry thrusters. They eventually responded with a reassuring snapping sound, and I could see the flashes of flame outside the windows as I pulsed them.

It was time to separate from the enormous service module which, in addition to the SIM bay, had carried our main rocket engine and all of the consumables we needed for the trip. I flipped a switch, and in a carefully orchestrated and speedy sequence, pyrotechnic devices neatly severed the water, oxygen, and electrical connections between the two modules. Then I heard a thunk as the service module separated and drifted away from us. “We got a good sep,” I reported to mission control.

I turned the lights down in the spacecraft a little and looked out of the windows. I hoped to use Earth’s horizon to orient myself. By now we were racing toward the shadowed side of the globe, a black sphere against a black sky. And yet if I looked carefully, I could see the milky, faintly glowing horizon looming in my window.

The explosive separation from the service module had jolted some little items loose from hiding places in the cabin, and some of them now floated by our faces. “Here, my friend, is a lunar rock,” Dave noted, spotting a moon nugget that must have lurked somewhere in the spacecraft for days.

All that remained now of the enormous rocket launched from Florida was our little Endeavour command module, its heat shield exposed for the first time during the mission and pointed firmly in our direction of flight. We plunged down into the darkness at more than thirty thousand feet per second and waited for the first sign that we had reached the outer fringes of Earth’s atmosphere.

“Look out the window, and you see ionization,” Jim remarked. The heat shield behind our backs was hitting the first wisps of air. Faint yellow-orange glowing tendrils appeared outside the windows as we pushed through the atmosphere and lit the air into hot plasma.

We broke into daylight. “Oh, that’s the Earth down there, baby!” I cried, as I peered through the glow and began to see familiar features. I could clearly see Alaska, down to Japan and beyond, a huge sweep of the Northern Hemisphere.

“Can you see it?” Jim asked us, straining for a view from his couch.

“Sure as hell can,” Dave confirmed. “It’s big and real!”

I had angled the spacecraft precisely so that our heat shield dug into the atmosphere. I began to feel a very gradual deceleration, a little like putting on the brakes when driving. I watched the earth zip by below us unbelievably fast. “Oh, man, are we moving, too!” I cried. “Son of a gun! Shee-hoo!”

Endeavour was designed with an offset center of gravity, so it had a little bit of lift. Not much, but enough to maneuver. By digging into the atmosphere, we made sure we didn’t skip back out into space again. The glow outside our windows increased, as did the feeling of deceleration. Looking up, I could see a long glowing trail behind us, like a lit neon tube, with flashes of pink, green, red, and yellow. We were slowing