console. I was sitting next to Glynn reading his log and preparing for shift handover when Dr. Berry pulled up a chair. When the surgeon visited the flight director for a powwow, you knew he was unhappy about something. In a hushed voice he said, “Glynn, we saw a bunch of heart irregularities on Irwin. We also saw some on the moon during the third EVA.”
Those sitting next to the flight director cocked an ear, edging over to hear what was going on. Berry continued his discussion, now using words that were new and strange to us. He talked of a “bigeminal” rhythm, where both chambers of the heart try to contract at the same time. Berry said they had also seen PVCs, premature ventricular contractions, probably caused by the crew’s working to near-exhaustion levels. Glynn and I were doing a slow burn; we should have been told about this much sooner.
To control the risks of spaceflight, the flight director must have all the facts from his team members, and he must get them in a timely fashion. In this case he did not. If Lunney had been aware of the medical problems, he would have given the crew a rest period, delayed the jettison, or simply had the crew go to sleep. We were going to remain in lunar orbit for two more days; we could have given the crew some slack—if we were given the information in a more timely manner. The surgeons’ concerns about medical privacy, and their consequent reluctance to give the flight directors the full story, almost got us into a heap of trouble.
Slayton had been previously alerted to the medical problem. After instructing Irwin to downlink the biomed data, Deke got on the air-to-ground loop: “I want the commander and the lunar module pilot to each take a Seconal and get a good night’s sleep.” This was the typical Slayton imperative. Irwin said, “Thanks, Deke.”
Two hours later, they finally signed off. The crew had been awake for twenty-two hours. Lunney’s handoff to me was brief. “Good luck,” he said, wearily.
My team spent most of the night reviewing the data on the suit and cabin pressure to make sure that the systems were fully operational. We remained in lunar orbit for almost two more days, mapping the surface, assessing the radiation environment, deploying a small satellite. Finally, after six days at the Moon, I gave the Go for trans-Earth injection.
For the first time in spaceflight, I had been truly rattled. Working with a chronically fatigued crew was bad enough, but when you added disorientation and memory loss the crew could have been experiencing because of dehydration and changes in blood chemistry (especially potassium deficiency) due to exertion, you were skating on very thin ice. I thought of the sign in my office:
Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.
I now mentally added a word to the text: “ignorance.”
The work on the final two missions continued unabated, each one more difficult than the last, with landings at more rugged and desolate sites. It seemed to be a “can you top this” contest among the lunar geologists, with the astronauts cheering them on. Given the focus on science in the Apollo program it was certain that a scientist would soon fly. The controllers—Llewellyn and I in particular—were ecstatic when Jack Schmitt was selected for the final mission, Apollo 17. In my mind, no one deserved a flight more.
The cheering didn’t stop there. Ron Evans, the command module pilot, was one of the CapComs most familiar to the Mission Control team. Along with Ken Mattingly, Charlie Duke, and Fred Haise, Evans had been the CapCom for four Apollo missions.
The commander on 17 would be “Captain America”—Gene Cernan, the Navy’s red-white-and-blue answer to Dave Scott. I thought this was fitting. I had launched Cernan on his first mission on Gemini 9 and now we would fly our last mission together.
Lunney, now in the Apollo program office, “borrowed” Aldrich for a trip to Russia to set up the joint U.S. and Russian working groups for a planned 1975 rendezvous mission. Aldrich, a pioneer in operations and developer of many great MCC systems engineers, was about to move on.
The new year got off to a gloomy start. We were told there would be no hiring and no promotions for the entire year. The misery continued as Apollo 16 was delayed for a variety of technical problems related to the LM batteries, pyrotechnics, experiments, and space suits. Another reason for the delay was that Charlie Duke, the Apollo 16 lunar module pilot, caught a flu bug and was unable to train for the mission.
John Young, Duke, and Ken Mattingly were assigned to Apollo 16, aboard the command ship
My third Saturn launch was routine, if launching the world’s most powerful machine is ever routine. But, after achieving Earth orbit, we had one of those failures that the designer claims will never happen. Both regulators on the attitude control system were dumping gas overboard. With one eye on the Saturn IVB’s attitude control fuel and the other on the clock we raced through the Earth orbital check-out and briefed the crew on assuming manual attitude control. It was a tight race to get the spacecraft injected to the Moon and to extract the lunar module. Once again we lucked out.
The mission continued normally through the lunar orbit and the preparation for landing. The White Team had the shift preceding Griffin’s landing shift and had worked the usual “nits.” Phil Shaffer, an ex-FIDO now training as flight director, had been working with my team throughout the mission, assessing the impact of various anomalies and making sure that there were no modifications to the landing plan.
After the mission debriefing with Kraft and Dr. Berry on Apollo 15, the flight directors were once again in the loop on crew status, and crew potassium intake was now the main concern of the surgeons. We hoped to prevent problems of the type experienced on Apollo 15, so the astronauts were provided orange juice spiked with potassium that added electrolytes to the fluid. The concoction did not taste quite like nectar, and John Young was quick to inform us that it made his crew gassy and nauseated, not a good state for a confined cockpit in zero-G. The crew began a semicomic rebellion, with sharply reduced fluids and a reluctance to increase the orange juice intake.
The crew’s orange juice protest was becoming the “ditty” for the mission press conferences. To better understand the crew’s problems, and answer the questions at the press conference, I asked my ever-patient White Team flight surgeon to get me some of the juice. Within minutes a courier arrived from his back room with the infamous OJ. One dose was enough for me to get the crew’s point. It tasted thick, heavy, almost metallic. I offered the remainder to Shaffer, who wisely demurred. I leaned over the console and yelled to my surgeon, Dr. Z ( John Zieglschmid), “John, it tastes like crap. How about taking some to the press conference and let them take a shot?” Fortunately, there was no press conference scheduled for the shift and Dr. Z was not about to add to the controversy.
Shaffer and I concluded the handover to Griffin noting, “Looks like both spacecraft are clean going into activation and descent. Good luck.”
The lunar module power-up, undocking, and visual inspection went off without a hiccup. At undocking, we swung into a dual team operation. Don Puddy, formerly a TELMU, responsible for life support, electrical, mechanical, and EVAsystems on the LM, picked up flight director duties for the command module while Griffin followed the LM. The aerial ballet continued, with Puddy giving Mattingly the “Go for the circular maneuver” on the Moon’s back side
