Falling to Earth (19 page)

I admit I envied Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad’s command module pilot. I held the same position on the backup crew, and as Dick’s immediate backup I came to know him very well. He soon became perhaps my closest friend in the entire program. Gregarious and mischievous, Dick is one of those rare colleagues who can do excellent, hard work while keeping things fun. When the workday ended, he could really let loose. I enjoyed his company greatly. I still do.

The Apollo 12 support crew of PJ Weitz, Ed Gibson, and Jerry Carr were a bunch of pranksters, too. For the postflight party, they created a great home movie starring a guy in a gorilla suit and a girl in a bikini inside the spacecraft—zany stuff. They dressed me in a bald cap and glasses to play a mad scientist and filmed me speeding around the Cape in a Formula Vee racing car. The crew fell over laughing when they watched the movie.

Dick and I spent a lot of time together flying back and forth to Los Angeles, where we worked on the Apollo 12 command module at Downey. I had been making that trip so much by then that it was second nature to me. I knew where the pay phones were, the rental cars, and the hotels; I could have found them blindfolded. A good thing, too, because with no distractions, I could really zero in on the work.

I particularly recall one trip when Dick and I were flying from Houston to Los Angeles in a T-38. As usual, our clothes hung in wardrobe bags between the front and back seats. It was the only place to stuff them in that aircraft. We landed in El Paso for a quick refueling, opening the canopy while the aircraft was refueled by the ground crew. As we taxied back to the runway to take off, Dick started to close the canopy. Somehow, the clothing bags became caught in the mechanism, and before we could stop the process the canopy came loose. Crap, we thought, we really messed up. We couldn’t fix it ourselves, so we taxied back to the hangar, and let the maintenance crew take over.

We still needed to get to Downey and couldn’t wait around, so we grabbed our bags and parachutes, put our flying helmets in special bags, and rode over to the commercial flight terminal, where we could catch a passenger flight to Los Angeles. We were able to find seats on a Continental Airlines flight, one that was leaving immediately.

The flight crew put us in the front of the airplane, where we stowed our helmets and hanging bags, and belted up our parachutes. As the other passengers boarded, there we sat. They freaked out. “What is wrong with this airplane?” they demanded of us. “Are you guys going to bail out?” We couldn’t stop laughing. It was a great, inadvertent “Gotcha” on all of those passengers.

I had a great time working with Dick on his command module. I already knew a lot of the systems inside out, but being a backup crewmember brought a whole new level of training. If anything happened to Dick, I would be flying to the moon in his place. I needed to learn that spacecraft thoroughly. Considering it was such a small vehicle, it is amazing how complex it was.

Not many people understand that American spacecraft like Apollo were flown solely by the pilots on board. Mission control could never control a spacecraft from the ground. They could send us information, either verbally or by transmitting data, but the astronaut had to perform an action inside the spacecraft to carry out the request. It was different from how the Soviets operated at the time, because their spacecraft were far more automated. This difference was something very important to us as pilots.

Another misconception is that the Apollo spacecraft used cutting-edge technology. In fact, the spacecraft that flew in the late 1960s and early 1970s used equipment mostly designed in the 1950s. I believe this was a conscious decision by the designers at NASA and North American: better to have something reliable than cutting-edge. I think all of the astronauts were happy with this decision.

Simple systems either work or fail. There is nothing in between. If the systems were lost, we had no real backup for many of them. However, repeated testing over the years had proved that their success rate was very high. I would rather fly a proven system than the space shuttle, for example, which has many computers that all have to talk to each other and then mutually agree. There is an analogy with flying multi-engine versus single-engine aircraft. It surprises people to learn that there are more accidents in multi-engines. If you lose your only engine, you quickly look for a place to land. If you have multiple engines, you may try to keep flying, which becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous. Simpler is often better.

Our computer was a good example of spacecraft simplicity. It was designed by MIT as a rudimentary piece of hardware. It was literally hardwired: you could zap it, turn the power off, and do pretty much anything else to it, and when the power came back on you were right back where you had been before. It had no silicon chips to burn out, was extremely reliable and virtually indestructible. Of course, simplicity came at a price: our computer had less storage memory than the average modern wristwatch.

Many of the tasks the computer needed to perform on an Apollo flight were already hardwired inside. The lack of storage capacity, however, prevented us from preloading all of the programs needed for the flight. For a simple thrusting maneuver, for example, we had to load in the data. The computer had no room at all for a particularly important program, called “Return to Earth.” The ground would need to send that one to us when we were in lunar orbit.

To navigate in space between Earth and the moon, we required two pieces of information. One was the attitude of the spacecraft compared to some fixed frame, such as the field of stars all around us. The attitude—in simple terms, which way we were pointed—was needed so that we could aim the craft during thrusting maneuvers and keep on course. The spacecraft had a set of gyroscopes to tell us. Attitude was not something we could otherwise know for sure in zero gravity, where there is no up or down. It was the equivalent of an attitude indicator in an airplane, which tells you if your wings are level. Crucially, we could also measure acceleration forces on the spacecraft, so we could gauge the accuracy of our engines when we fired them.

The other information we wanted was the precise location of the spacecraft in the Earth-moon system. We always needed to know
exactly
where we were. The team on the ground could track the spacecraft by precisely angling their large antennas, located on different parts of the globe. By measuring the precise timing of a return signal from the spacecraft and comparing the results, mission control could compute our location and speed with great accuracy.

Without constant checking, however, uncertainties about our position could grow larger over time. And no system was foolproof. Mission control’s calculations of our location would be useless if our radio failed and they could not share them with us. We also had one gyroscope set in the Apollo spacecraft, which we tested mercilessly before flight. Yet no matter how perfect we could make it, a little friction would always be acting on the gyroscopes. We needed to be able to calculate and correct any drift.

So, Dick and I focused on discovering our attitude and location with no help from the ground. We could be in lunar orbit with no working radio, and three lives depending on our own calculations to thrust the spacecraft out of lunar orbit in the right direction for a precise reentry into Earth’s atmosphere many days later. We needed at all times to be able to independently work out our state vector—that is, to find out precisely where we were within the Earth-moon system, how fast we were going, and what direction we were headed. We were navigators, and although we had some sophisticated equipment, Dick and I still had to master the same skills that ancient mariners once used to cross the oceans.

We would navigate using a sextant much like those used for centuries by seafaring navigators. The sextant was located in the equipment bay, at the bottom of the footpads where our feet usually rested. In space, an astronaut could float down there and have enough room to look through the optical equipment while in a standing position. We’d peer through a telescope with a wide field of view to locate stars we used as guide stars, then shift to a telescope with a much narrower field. By using the optics for sighting and the onboard computer to measure the line of sight to a star, then repeating that procedure with several stars, we could determine our exact attitude in space. By sighting on different stars and measuring their angles, the computer could average out the information.

Using that same equipment but this time using a split prism to form both a fixed and a movable line of sight, we could also precisely measure the angle between stars and the horizon of Earth or the moon. Their positions would look different against the starry backdrop as we traveled between the two, and these differences could be measured. The more sightings we made, the more accurately the computer could calculate our location and direction, until we knew precisely where we were.

It sounds complicated, but it was technologically simple. There were no science-fiction–like computers to tell us what to do and make enormous calculations on our behalf. We relied on skills learned in extensive training and memorized the stars that would surround us on our journey. If we lost our navigation computer or our gyroscope, we had an even more basic backup method. We could resort to a World War II–era gun sight. We could clip this optical device to the edge of a spacecraft window, look through it just as you would with a hunting rifle, and line up the crosshair with a known star. We would then know the direction of the spacecraft’s line of thrust, and that information was better than knowing nothing.

This all required a great deal of astronomical knowledge on our part, learning and remembering dozens of different stars that we could use to help us navigate. This knowledge was vital, however, in case we ever lost radio contact with the ground. We would head to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, or the Morehead Planetarium in North Carolina, and use their planetarium domes to simulate the view of stars from space. Tony Jenzano, the planetarium director at Morehead, had a great way of training us. To begin, he would ask us to close our eyes. He would then spin the star field on the planetarium dome, ask us to open our eyes and tell him where we were. Over time, he would gradually decrease our field of view. It became increasingly harder to identify our position in the sky with fewer stars in our vision, so we really had to memorize them. Eventually he put us in a small box inside the planetarium with a ten-degree window cut into the front. Once again he’d spin the view and we would have to give him our position. Man, that was hard. But we were seeing the same view that would fill our spacecraft optics, so we had to master it.

The focus on astronomy meant that whenever I was flying anywhere in a T-38 at night, I spent far more time watching the stars than I did looking at the ground. On moonless nights, above the clouds and away from city lights, the star view from my cockpit was stunning, and all the more interesting because I could now name hundreds of those stars.

While I was spending time in Downey with Dick to ensure the Apollo 12 command module was ready and training with Dave and Jim in case we needed to fly the mission, other important events were taking place. After the success of the Apollo 9 mission, NASA felt confident about flying back to the moon in May of 1969. With Apollo 10, they sent both a command module and a lunar module. Some spectacular test piloting proved that NASA was ready to go all the way on the next flight: a lunar landing.

Apollo 11 was in many ways the whole point of NASA’s efforts over the preceding eight years. The Apollo program had been created to land humans on the moon and return them safely to Earth. I wasn’t going to get an opportunity to fly until after that mission had taken place at least once. Although NASA still had an ambitious schedule of lunar landing missions, I had noticed how politicians were still whittling back the budget. Rather than the fulfillment of an ambition, I hoped that Apollo 11 would be the beginning of sustained exploration of the moon. Not least, I will admit, because I wanted to fly there myself and didn’t want the program to end before I had my chance.

I vividly remember the moment in July 1969 when mission commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, his lunar module pilot, touched down on the moon. I had been on yet another trip to the North American plant and was in the cockpit of my T-38 at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, south of Downey, preparing to fly home. The tower at the airfield told me that Apollo 11 was about to land and asked me if I would like them to relay the audio coverage. “Absolutely,” I replied. “I am staying right here.” So I sat in the aircraft and listened to the magical, nail-biting, unreal moment as guys I knew gingerly guided a spacecraft to the lunar surface. We had done it. Humans were on the moon.

I didn’t linger long enough to hear live coverage of Neil setting foot on the surface. I headed back to Houston, looking up into the late-afternoon sky and thinking, “My God. There are people up there, on the moon.” My thoughts naturally strayed to my friend Mike Collins, orbiting the moon solo in the command module. It was a job I hoped I would soon be doing. For Apollo 12, I’d be one step closer to the action.

As Apollo 12’s backup command module pilot, it was my job to strap the prime crew into the spacecraft out on the pad just before launch. I was in the spacecraft on November 14, launch day, making sure all of the switch settings were correct before Pete and his crew arrived. As I stood in the foot well of the spacecraft, the crew arrived, laughing and cracking jokes, and I began strapping them in. When two of them were inside, I had to climb out as there wasn’t room for me anymore. After I squeezed out, Dick Gordon slid into the center couch, and I reached back inside to help strap him in.

As I wished him luck, I have to admit I was still a little jealous. Dick was about to fly to the moon with a couple of great guys. Pete Conrad’s fearless and fun streak created a freedom among his crew to bond in a way I had yet to experience.