32 minute read
Memories of Apollo
MEMORIES OF APOLLO
BY EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN Photos courtesy of NASA
For those people involved in the lunar voyages of the Apollo era, memories of those epic events still remain vivid, wistful, and poignant. Here are firsthand accounts, gathered over the years, of some of Apollo’s most memorable missions.
APOLLO 1
- Apollo 1 astronaut Roger Chaffee
It was a Friday night at 6:31 p.m. And all of a sudden you hear, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” And of course we jumped to attention without any question to see what was going on. And that was the horrible thing that happened. Now [Director Flight Crew Operations] Deke Slayton was in the blockhouse and Rocco Petrone was our launch director, and the first thing Rocco did was turn off all the phones. I told Rocco I had to have a phone, because I had to let our people know in Washington, and for our planning as far as handling the press was concerned. So he gave me back the phone. And we had to wait for an hour or so, before anybody was able to go up to open the hatch in the spacecraft. The reason for that was you had a 155,000-pound thrust escape rocket sitting on top of the Apollo spacecraft. Now of course what happened was you had that spark and pure oxygen in the spacecraft, pure oxygen at [over 14] psi [pounds per square inch]. Once that spark happened, the fire and explosion occurred. The spacecraft actually ruptured. Ed White made a move to try to open the hatch, but there was no way he could the way it was constructed at that time. That was changed later.
Astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee pose in front of Launch Complex 34, which is housing their Saturn I launch vehicle. The astronauts later died in a fire on the pad.
We had to wait about an hour or so before anybody could go up there. Deke and I talked, and I made a deal with Deke that I wouldn’t say anything about the astronauts having perished, which we assumed that they had at that point … I made a deal that I wouldn’t make any announcement until the three wives, now three widows, were informed. … I was criticized at that time because a number of the news guys said that the astronauts’ death was like a presidential assassination or a presidential death, so you had no reason not to announce that immediately. I have no regrets about that whatsoever. Betty Grissom as it turns out was my next-door neighbor, across the fence on the next street in Houston. … I could not live if I was the one, and my voice was the one that Betty Grissom heard that Gus had perished. So I stand by that without any question. Jack King, Public Information Officer
It was something that shocked us all because we didn’t think of that as dangerous. We knew flying spaceships was dangerous, but we didn’t think the testing was. Which showed we didn’t know everything, and we were shortsighted. People just said, “We’re going to have to solve this problem and get on with the program.” This is not going to deter us, but it does let us know this is a dangerous business and we’ve got to try to correct this and try to foresee any others. And of course we did, and Apollo 13 – that could have been a huge tragedy, but it wasn’t. We were able to solve it. Humans are just humans. We do the best we can but we just aren’t perfect. … When we were taking crews, we took three extra crews – that’s nine astronauts. We built three extra command modules, three extra rockets, and all that other stuff, because we knew this wasn’t going to be easy and we were probably going to lose some people along the way. And of course we lost them in a different place than what we thought. But you know that’s life. And that’s exploration. Remember what happened to Magellan. So exploration is dangerous, and for us to lose a shuttle once every 57 flights, although it’s sad and you don’t want to be on that flight, that’s what it’s going to take. And when people go back to the Moon, you are going to lose people there, too. No doubt about it. Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot
APOLLO 7
- Handwritten sign shown by Apollo 7 Commander Wally Schirra during the first live television broadcast from space
APOLLO 8
That started the illness in flight business. It actually was a situation influenced by the fact that when Wally was in Navy flight training, he had a rapid descent in an aircraft, and he had plugged his sinuses and his ears, and he had blood in his oxygen mask. On Apollo 7, one of the crewmen started blowing blood. … So that really colored what Wally thought about this and brought all this on. The amazing thing about it was we got them to use the medication that we had in there to try to decongest them. It included Actifed, which Wally later did an advertisement for. He bought a sailboat by doing Actifed ads. Dr. Charles Berry, Chief Physician to the Astronauts
- Lunar Module Pilot Bill Anders beginning to read from the Book of Genesis during the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit
People often ask what our most exciting mission was. Most of us will say Apollo 8. How can you say Apollo 8? You didn’t land, you didn’t do anything. You just went around the Moon. I say, “You know how much guts it took to do Apollo 8?” … When the command and service module came around the Moon right on time to show they were actually in lunar orbit, I just stood up and yelled into the air, “The Russians suck!” Sy Liebergot, Apollo Electrical, Environmental and Communications Flight Control
This is how the Earth looked as photographed from a point near the Moon by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The Earth fills less than 1 percent of the frame exposed through an 80mm lens. North is approximately vertical.
We couldn’t see the firing of the engine into lunar orbit because they were on the back side of the Moon. Here we are going into orbit 60 miles above the Moon, and by the way, [Associate Administrator, Office of Manned Spaceflight] George Mueller didn’t want to do that. Mueller wanted to do that at a higher altitude, because he said, “We don’t know how accurate we are going to be,” and I argued him out of it. I told him, “Hell, we are going to do this at the same altitude and the same inclination as a lunar landing mission because we want that data.” Anyway, we talked him into that. When it went behind the Moon I guess I was about as nervous as a cat on a tin roof. No question about that. Not half as nervous as I was when we fired the engine to come out of lunar orbit around the Moon on the back side. I guess those were the longest 20-some minutes of my life, both times. We were waiting for them to come back around the other side of the Moon and wondering where the hell they were going to be. We had it figured out from A to Z what we would have to do … if the engine had cut off early or the engine had burned too long or not at all. [Mission planner] Bill Tindall had that all worked out. But on both occasions they certainly came out perfectly, and we could predict within a second’s time what that time would be when we would reacquire the communications signal and we did it. When we lost them and when we gained them was within one second every time. Christopher “Chris” Kraft, Jr., Director of Flight Operations
The first time I [looked up at the Moon] with any thought in mind was when I was walking to the control center at 7 o’clock one night about three weeks before we were going to launch Apollo 8. I looked up at the Moon and said to myself, “God damn, by the time that thing is going to get back to the phase it is in now, we will have been there and back.” That shook me up and let me know we were about to do that mission. It was quite impressive. I don’t ever look at the Moon that I don’t see six spots up there where we set down. I don’t ever look at the Moon without thinking about some aspect of the flights, some aspect of how we worked our tails off to get there, some aspect of the people like Bill Tindall and John Mayer. Chris Kraft, Jr.
[On naming features on the backside of the Moon] I picked a bunch of craters along our track, and was politically correct in naming them after Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and [Manned Spacecraft Center Director] Bob Gilruth and the various big wigs. I picked out three for the deceased [Apollo 1] astronauts, and I picked out three for the Apollo 8 crew. The Apollo 8 crew ones I picked were just over the lunar horizon, and were just not visible from Earth. But from the spacecraft at 60 miles, I could see them and talk about them back to Earth. The people at Mission Control had maps with these names on them. … There probably were 20 or 30 craters that were named. I sent that map to the U.S. Geological Survey, and they totally ignored it [due to the role of the International Astronomical Union in naming celestial bodies]. Not only that, in naming craters for our crew later, they [the International Astronomical Union] picked craters which were in this tiny dark sliver on the back of the Moon [which was] the one place we couldn’t see. In my view they were either incredibly stupid or incredibly vindictive in that the explorers’ prerogative wasn’t exercised. And I never got my map back from them. William “Bill” Anders, Apollo 8 Lunar Module Pilot
The movie [2001: A Space Odyssey] had a very jagged, rough-edged Moon, and the Moon [was] sandblasted. So yes, it [the Moon] was quite different than the Arthur Clarke [Stanley Kubrick movie] version. At a reception shortly after we came back, Arthur Clarke was there and I said, “Arthur, I need to talk to you privately.” So we kind of got behind a cocktail table, and Arthur said, “What is it, Bill?” And I said, “Arthur, I haven’t told anybody, but there was an obelisk on the back of the Moon.” And for about 30 seconds he believed me [laughter]. Bill Anders
Actually, it wasn’t so much that photograph [the Earthrise], but others which would show the Earth about the size of your fist at arm’s length … without the Moon in sight, without the lunar surface in sight [that struck me]. And it struck me that the photograph made the Earth look not only very delicate, like a fragile Christmas tree ornament, but that it looked very small. I think one of the things that has not really emerged from that flight, but one day will, is that our Earth is quite small, almost physically insignificant, yet it is our only home. … I’ve thought and said it’s too bad we couldn’t put all the members of the U.N. in orbit around the Moon to look back at the Earth so that they could see how delicate our planet is, and we ought to quit fighting over it. Bill Anders
APOLLO 11
- Commander Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface
The secret of the thing was we were young and we were fearless, and after all, nobody had ever told us young guys that you couldn’t successfully land humans on another planet. Nowadays it would be a little bit different, I think. There’s a phrase that has crept into our lexicon called “risk aversion.” There are whole careers built on risk analysis and all that stuff. I get asked could we do it again in today’s atmosphere and I say, “No, I don’t believe we could.” We’d talk it to death. There would always be a lot of “Yes, buts.” We were ready to go. We were the ground astronauts, us flight controllers, which the astronauts didn’t like to hear. We were the guys looking out for their mission success and their safety. Sy Liebergot
I had a ritual when I drove out to the launch control center, and that was after I crossed part of the causeway and went over the Banana River bridge, which is heading toward the Kennedy Space Center. I pulled out to the side of the road and there was the Saturn V, this majestic rocket just standing there gleaming in the floodlights and I just paused and stood there for a minute or two and it was just the Saturn V and me. It was a thing that I particularly enjoyed. Jack King
An atmospheric photo of the Apollo 11 launch vehicle sitting on Launch Complex 39A.
I had stayed up all night long, slept on a cot, and got in a position to broadcast it. Just when we got to the final countdown, we were on the air live, Russ Ward and me, anchoring the NBC Radio network coverage … and we were ready to go. I had a little tap on my shoulder and I looked up and I heard this voice that was really familiar, and he said, “Awww, awww, awww, is it OK if we watch from here?” And it was Jimmy Stewart and his wife, Gloria. And, of course, as excited as we were about Neil, Buzz, and Mike lifting off to the Moon, I jumped straight out of my chair and said, “Well, Mr. Stewart, of course you can stand here and look over my shoulder.” Jay Barbree, NBC News Correspondent
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong going through flight training in the lunar module simulator at the flight crew training building at KSC.
On Nov. 24, 2008, NBC gave me a dinner down here [commemorating his 50th year with NBC], and Neil Armstrong came down and so did John Glenn. Later that night, Neil started telling us what happened actually when they landed on the Moon up there. It was all set up that they were supposed to take about a 6-hour sleep period so they could get well rested when they went out on the Moon. We bought that, but what was going on was that they felt like when they landed on the Moon, because of all the fluids involved in the lunar module Eagle, it would take them under this different gravity several hours to get everything settled down until it was working the way it should be where they would be comfortable enough that they could go out on the Moon. But they didn’t want us [reporters] sitting there worrying about that they were trying to get everything right and second guessing everything they did, so they put that in the flight plan that they were taking a sleep-rest period. Of course the plan was, once they had landed on the Moon, [they] would make sure all the systems were working properly. As soon as they were working properly, then they were going to open the hatch, they were going to go on the Moon, and the first thing that Neil Armstrong did after he stepped on the Moon and said his famous words was he reached out and grabbed a handful of lunar dust and put it in the pocket of his suit, just in case he had to hurry and scurry to get back on the lunar module if something had gone wrong and they had to get off the surface of the Moon. He wanted to make sure at least he had a sample. Jay Barbree
I was in the radio studio and Reid Collins was doing the play-by-play. He had on a big desk in this news studio the NASA map of the Moon with the approach of the landing on it. He was doing the play-by-play listening to NASA Select. We also had a television monitor in the radio studio, and the animation that CBS News was showing had the lunar lander touching the Moon, and something came up on the screen that said “Moon landing” or “Man on the Moon” and in one ear I heard Cronkite say, “Hot dog!” As far as the CBS television audience was concerned, the landing had taken place. Reid, with his finger on the trajectory listening to what was going on at NASA, said, “Apollo 11 is not down where it should be.” And I think he used the term, “It’s drifting, and it may be lost.” He didn’t mean that there had been a crash. He was just following it with his finger. But there was this concern that if it had drifted too much, it would crash land in some of the hillier mountainous areas of the Moon at the time it went down. So we on radio had it down at the time when it really landed, and TV beat us to it by at least a few seconds. … I don’t know if Walter really told what happened, but there were two landings that day: one on television, one on radio. Right after the landing, Reid and I talked for a while. He didn’t quite say, “How do you feel?” but he took a good breath, and I said, “I clearly felt as if I were … ” and he said, “Mugged?” And I said, “Yes.” It just took my breath away. It was such a profound happening. Morton Dean, CBS News Correspondent opinions was that we want it to be Armstrong. We just thought that Armstrong would be the best representative in the crew to be the first guy on the Moon. … I know damn well we made the right decision. …. I knew Armstrong from even before he was an X-15 test pilot. I worked at the NACA when he did. He was always a very good test pilot. A guy that was easy to get along with. He did great work as far as his testing was concerned at Edwards Air Force Base. He came to us from the X-15. And he had the kind of personality that you knew he would not be overbearing about the subject and he would be a damn good representative to the rest of the world for the United States. Chris Kraft, Jr.
A reproduction of the television image that was transmitted to the world on July 20, 1969, as Armstrong egressed the ladder to the lunar surface.
We had had all those discussions [about conditions that would require an abort to the lunar landing attempt] with Armstrong, and I could tell from his attitude he was thinking, “I hear you, Chris, but when I get there I’m going to do what I think is the right thing to do.” And frankly, I was kind of glad that he thought that way. The guy on the scene is the guy that’s got to make the decision. It’s his life that he’s going to get rid of or keep. I knew damn well that regardless what happened there, he might try to do it [land]. Chris Kraft, Jr.
I am a great supporter of the flight director and his team in Mission Control and would not take lightly any recommendation they made. Nevertheless, an abort at low altitude over the lunar surface is a very risky business, requiring the blowing of explosive bolts, the physical separation of the ascent stage from the descent stage, and the ignition of another rocket engine, all before intersecting the lunar surface. So long as the lunar module was flying reasonably well and the risk of continuing was not substantially greater than the risk of aborting, I believe I would have continued toward landing. Neil Armstrong
There was a controversy regarding placing an American flag on the Moon. And that was one of the reasons why this little committee was formed at headquarters to make sure that nobody would think that we were taking it on behalf of the United States. The compromise was, OK, if you want to put a flag there, don’t say you are conquering it in favor of the United States, but make the astronauts say something that indicates we are not doing this. Because the treaty [United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space] had already spoken to this matter, and it said there would be no appropriation of any land or anything else on the Moon. Paul Dembling, General Counsel
There was a lot of resistance to putting a camera on [the Apollo command module and lunar module]. Not only [was there a] fear of astronauts that Big Brother was watching, but also the fact that every ounce that went on was another ounce that couldn’t be on for survival or anything else. They were actually taking things off of the lunar module to make room for an 8-pound camera. That didn’t sit well with the astronauts either. … Once we got to the Moon safely and landed and we then approached the time for them to come out of the spacecraft, no longer was TV thought of [as], “If we get it, fine, and if we don’t then it doesn’t matter.” It was then, “We better see TV or else,” because we had 600 million people worldwide waiting for that moment. So they could call it a non-requirement, but boy, that was probably the biggest requirement we had once they landed. Richard Nafzger
Neil Armstrong playing the ukulele while in quarantine, post lunar mission. (Photo courtesy of Don Blair)
The quarantine [of the astronauts] was a huge, huge problem. I did not agree with the National Academy of Sciences. Our official NASA position was we didn’t agree with that. We felt that there was no evidence that an organism could live on the Moon from any of the probes that had been there. The temperatures and the dryness, so forth, we felt that there would be no organism there. Any of the probes that had been sent there had been sterilized, so no organisms had been carried there. We argued this vociferously, and finally we ended up before President Johnson, and the Academy of Sciences said, “Well, you may be right when you’re saying you don’t think any organism could survive there, but you haven’t proved it.” Well, of course we hadn’t proved it, because we hadn’t got anything back from there. President Johnson then finally said, … he didn’t feel that he could be responsible for bringing lunar plague back to the Earth.
I could’ve killed [author] Michael Crichton. He was a medical student at Harvard. And that damn book The Andromeda Strain came out. That added fuel to the fire for the quarantine, definitely. Dr. Charles Berry
That night [of the Apollo 11 splashdown], after having been on our feet for 16-18 hours, I should have had enough sense to hit the bunk. I had done my job. They were safe in the trailer. What else can we do? But I had two cameras around my neck and … I went down and walked down the length of the hangar bay. … As I approached the trailer looking into the window at the back end, I noticed there was a person in that little living room, and of course it turned out to be Neil Armstrong. I had black and white Kodak Tri-X film in the camera, and I said to myself, “Here goes, for better or for worse, here is this man who just made world history, walking on the Moon, standing in the room playing his ukulele.” I popped off three shots, one of which turned out to be a little bit sharper or clearer than the others. … The fact that I didn’t use flash and only used the high speed of the black and white film, the neon-like lighting in the ceiling of the trailer was diffused, almost halo like, which I thought was very appropriate considering where they had just been. Pretty close to the heavens. … I turned around and walked away and I wasn’t more than 100 feet from the trailer and I turned around again and looked and he was gone. … It was pure, one-of-a-kind, good luck, good timing photography. I sent him [Armstrong] a copy at the University of Cincinnati. In 2004 at a reunion of the USS Hornet [Apollo 11 recovery ship], he wrote his regrets, and he said, “Tell Mr. Blair, I was not playing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ on my ukulele.” He said, “I am not much of a musician. I was plinking. It was relaxation time.” Don Blair, Mutual Radio Network Correspondent
APOLLO 12
- Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad’s whimsical suggestion to Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean
You’ve already made up your mind that, first of all, you could very easily get stuck there. But you decided long before you went that the gain was worth the risk, and so you’re not as worried about that as you are about being careful, and watching where you are landing, and not getting too near the edge of deep craters that you couldn’t get out of if the side gave way, if the edge gave way. I’m sure if you got close enough to the edge of any crater, since they are all 3 billion years or older, then suddenly the sides could slump away and you could slide down to the bottom. If you did, you’d be there now. So you’re careful. Alan Bean
Every once in a while [on the lunar surface], I would look up and see the Earth up there, and I would say to myself, “That’s the Earth. This is the Moon!” I could hardly believe it myself, that we were running around on the Moon, and the Earth was way up there 239,000 miles away. That was kind of my connection with being on the Moon. It never dawned on me, I never said, “Gee, I’m the fourth man on the Moon.” I didn’t come down the ladder and think about how … you know, none of those thoughts were on my mind at all because it wasn’t my job. My job was different. Alan Bean
The Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) in the Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) during the fourth television transmission from the Apollo 13 mission in space. Eugene F. Kranz (foreground, back to camera), one of four Apollo 13 flight directors, views the large screen at the front of MOCR. Astronaut Fred W. Haise, Jr., is seen on the screen.
I entered art training at night school when I was a test pilot, even before I became an astronaut. … Claude Monet was my favorite artist, so I painted the kind of things he did and other artists did that I admired. Then my astronaut friends said, “Look, Bean, you need to quit painting the Earth things, you’re the first artist in history – of all the artists who have ever been on this Earth, millions and millions and millions – you’re the first one who has ever gone anywhere else besides the Earth. You need to paint there.” … And I thought, “You know, they are right, because I know about spacesuits, and I know all about lunar modules. I spent 18 years doing this stuff and liked it. That’s why I became an astronaut.” … So when I began to paint [space scenes] it began to be obvious to me that I was the first artist in all history to go anywhere else. These paintings I do are the first paintings of another world by someone who actually went there. Period. They will always be the first paintings of another world. I never thought of that initially. But now I realize that these paintings that I’m doing, whether I am a good artist or not – I am a good artist – they are the first paintings of another world. Now as the centuries unfold, there will be many, there will be other artists that go to the Moon, artists that go to Mars, to the Moons of Jupiter, to the surface of asteroids and all those things as the centuries unfold, but the very first paintings of another world besides this Earth are the ones I’m doing right now. Alan Bean
An interior view of the Apollo 13 lunar module (LM) during the troubleplagued journey back to Earth. This photograph shows some of the temporary hose connections and apparatus that were necessary when the three Apollo astronauts moved from the command module (CM) to use the LM as a “lifeboat.” Astronaut John L. Swigert Jr., command module pilot, is on the right. An unidentified astronaut on the left holds in his right hand the feed water bag from the Portable Life Support System (PLSS). It is connected to a hose (center) from the Lunar Topographic (Hycon) Camera. In the background is the “mail box,” a jury-rigged arrangement that the crew men built to use the CM lithium hydroxide canisters to scrub CO 2 from the spacecraft’s atmosphere. Since there was a limited amount of lithium hydroxide in the LM, this arrangement was rigged up to utilize the canisters from the CM. The “mail box” was designed and tested on the ground at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) before it was suggested to the Apollo 13 astronauts. An explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module (SM) caused the cancellation of the scheduled Moon landing, and made the return home a hazardous journey for astronauts Swigert, James A. Lovell Jr., commander, and Fred W. Haise Jr., lunar module pilot.
The [television] camera got pointed at the sun and it caused a burn. Before they realized what had happened, they tried to trouble shoot, and unfortunately Pete [Conrad] used a hammer. One time he hit it and it seemed to loosen something up that they thought was a problem that needed jostling. That was a misconception. When he hit it again, it crumbled the coating on the pickup lens. That was unfortunate, but that’s what happened due to error. We couldn’t have probably saved it anyway because of the sun burn already, but there was further damage done because of the hammering. We were all very depressed because we were still in the mode that every mission and downlink was our lifeline to what we do for a living. It was kind of crushing. Because if I don’t get TV down, everything I did was for naught. Richard Nafzger
APOLLO 13
- Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert upon hearing from Houston that Apollo 13 was under the Earth’s gravitational influence and heading home
[Upon being pulled out of a shower to get a phone call from Gene Kranz about the Apollo 13 explosion] I was scared to death. He told me they’d had an explosion of some kind. He didn’t explain any further than that. He just said, “We’ve got a hell of a problem here, we’ve just had some kind of explosion with the spacecraft, you’ve got to get here quickly.” I said, “I’ll be there in 15 minutes,” and I was. I’m glad there were no cops on the road that night. When I arrived, I [had] one hell of a lot of confidence in the flight control guys, and I knew that whatever happened, if it could be done, they could do it. When I arrived in the Mission Control room … I just watched. Kranz gave me a 30-second briefing on what happened, and they were still in the middle of figuring out what happened. The damn telemetry was all screwed up from a standpoint of so much had failed you couldn’t tell whether it was instrument failure, or true instruments, or nothing, or static. The guys who were responsible for the systems were really struggling to figure out what happened. And Kranz made one of the greatest decisions he ever made in his life, in that there were three small oxygen bottles which were always being filled or kept full to be used for reentry for when you got back to the Earth. That line was therefore open if you didn’t do something about it. And had he not made the command by way of the astronauts to seal off those three bottles so that amount of oxygen would be preserved for re-entry if we got it back, that was a very, very extremely important decision, because if he had not done that, all of that oxygen would have gone overboard, over the next hour, would have just gone away. …
I have to say, within about 2 ½ to 3 hours I felt reasonably confident that we would get them back. It was a hell of an evening, I can tell you that. … I felt very good about the mission. And I was one among others, I suppose, that talked them into using the lunar module engine. … It was a very important decision to get back 24 hours early to make sure we had enough power, and you have to give credit to [Electrical Systems Flight Controller] John Aaron. He was the guy who figured out the use of electrical power every minute of the time. Chris Kraft, Jr.
My producer Mark Kramer and I met the famous oil well fire fighter Red Adair at a restaurant after Apollo 13. … He told about fighting one fire in Libya and he said, “There I was, seven seconds from death.” And I said, “How did you know you were seven seconds away from death?”
He said that he knew he had a pretty good feel for what his lung capacity was and he could feel the gases building up and he knew he was seven seconds from death. And I said, “What did you do?” And he said, “I turned myself off and I thought about it.” I sort of knew what he meant, you know, how you slow yourself down at times, and every millisecond is stop action. He then said, “As a matter of fact, when the boys came back from Apollo 13, the commander [Jim Lovell] is a good friend of mine, and I saw him about a week or so after and I told him I thought he had done a hell of a job. And he said, ‘Well Red, you know what I did when we were in trouble on the back side of the Moon spinning almost out of control. I turned myself off and thought about it.’” Red had told Jim the story about being seven seconds away from death some time before. I always thought it was interesting in that time of stress, Lovell had thought about it and tried to make use of what Red Adair had offered him. Morton Dean, CBS News Correspondent
The LM lifeboat is something that had shown up previously in one of our lunar orbit simulations. I think it was on Apollo 10. I don’t remember what failure they instigated, but it required depressurizing the CM and cabin. So the idea was to put the people in the lunar module, seal it off, depressurize the CM, and then repressurize it. The second part of it was we had found some failure mode – this may have been on Apollo 8 – where they simulated getting trash into one of the air circulation fans, and they pulled a circuit breaker on a simulated loss of a power converter on another command, so you were left with no cabin air … and somebody said, “Well, we’ve got a vacuum cleaner. It’s just a fan. Why don’t we use it to blow air through the lithium canister?” The fascinating thing about this is almost everything except the [command module] power up sequence; we had at some time in the mission simulation history done something very close to what we were facing. That to me is magic. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly, Grounded Apollo 13 Command Module Pilot
[On T.K. Mattingly’s exposure to German measles] We ended up about two days before the flight where we were going to have to make a decision. I had a meeting in my office down at the Cape … and I had all this stuff on the chalkboard about the incubation period and where we were, and what we found out was that Charlie Duke and his family had visited some friends in San Antonio on the weekend before the 21-day isolation period started. And two of the children they visited had rubella and that’s where he was exposed. We weren’t told about this. This came out as we tried to piece this thing together. So the situation was if Ken was going to come down, it would happen when he’s alone in the command module and the other two guys are down on the lunar surface. … I talked to people in and out of the country, everybody who was an expert, and I said, “So, OK, we have to make a decision. We can either hold the mission and wait until T.K. has passed the incubation period and make sure he isn’t going to come down with it, or we can go ahead and launch, which I think is somewhat of a risk, or we can do what we’ve never, ever done before and take the backup Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert, and put him on the crew to replace Mattingly.” Well [Commander] Jim Lovell was mightily against this… but as a matter of fact, he [Jack Swigert] was very well trained on the command module. … And so we had to make that decision, and from that meeting the decision was made. I said, “My vote is I think we are going to have to make that switch.” It became a unanimous condition we had to say we are going to do it, and we did. So we launched a tired crew because they ended up doing a lot more trainer time with Jack to make sure that Fred and Jim were comfortable with it. Dr. Charles Berry
When you are in that position you’re not thinking logically. I look back at it and I was profoundly devastated. I thought it was crazy. I’d been sick before and you don’t stop working because you are sick. I just couldn’t come to grips with the idea that it was not the right thing to do. Looking back, I can’t imagine making any other decision. Nor can I imagine why it took them so long to come to the conclusion. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly
Keep in mind the cryogenic tanks, oxygen, and hydrogen tanks we had on board Apollo 11 were identical tanks to the ones we had on Apollo 13. It was just an incredible set of circumstances that [it] took … years for Apollo 13 to occur. They were the same tanks. They had the same design flaws. Sy Liebergot
We didn’t know Fred Haise had the urinary infection in flight until after the flight, as a matter of fact. The reason we didn’t was everything was so oriented to how could we make sure all these systems in the LM were going to bring them back and to save power and everything, one of the things I did right early was say, “OK, we will stop the medical monitoring and save that portion of power,” which we did. Dr. Charles Berry
APOLLO 14
- Commander Alan Shepard describing his golf shot
[Alan Shepard’s golf shot] wasn’t a real great surprise to me. Although we hadn’t talked about it, I knew about it. Then I used the staff from the solar wind experiment, and used it as a javelin to throw after his golf shot. We’ve got a photograph showing what we call the first lunar Olympics — one golf shot, one javelin throw, and my javelin outdistanced his golf shot by about four inches. We’ve got a picture to prove it. After the flight when he kept claiming that it went miles and miles, and the more distance we got from the mission, the more miles and miles was the distance of the golf shot. And every once in a while I had to pull out this photograph and tell him, “Alan, miles and miles is really enough. It was more about 50 feet [laughter].” Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot
APOLLO 15
- Commander David R. Scott
At one point, we decided [to] just leave the camera and the dish powered up [on the lunar rover] and point it and start moving and see if we can keep [the signal] locked. And we kept locked about 30 seconds where the camera is like a headlight in front of the rover looking at the terrain. And although they were going about 5 miles per hour, it looked like they were going 80 miles per hour across the Moon. It was the most amazing picture I think I’ve seen other than the first step on the Moon, but it wasn’t for public release at the time. They were just scooting across the lunar surface and it looked like a dune buggy that was out of control. Richard Nafzger
An image from Apollo 15, taken by Commander David Scott at the end of EVA-1, shows Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin with the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which made its debut during the mission. Mount Hadley is in the background. The TV camera is pointed down, in the stowed position.
APOLLO 16
- Commander John Young’s first words on the lunar surface
There’s one part of the picture of flying in space that is particularly attractive to me that I don’t hear talked about very much. You’re in this environment which is generally very quiet. There are no vibrations. You’re able to float. You can look out the window to see remarkable sights. Now, what do you need to close the picture? For me, it was music. Starting with Apollo, we were able to take these little tape cassettes, maybe five per person. And you’d put your music on them. John [Young] and Charlie [Duke] liked country and western and I liked classical music. When they left, I had a chance to play my music. I’ll tell you, you cannot imagine what that does to complete the picture. It is really spectacular.
One of my selections was [a song by Maurice Jarre] from the movie Grand Prix. … It was a story about Formula One racers, and there are some scenes where the hero is running around with [the song] playing in the background. And it is punctuated by the sound of Formula One cars coming from behind and roaring by. I had been involved with engines and machinery since I was a little kid. So I have a special affection for the sound of high-performance vehicles. So here we have this melodic tune of these race cars roaring by, and I used it when we were tracking their landing sight with a sextant prior to their landing. … So, when I was tracking for the first time, you get a sense of motion because when you are down at eight miles you can actually tell there’s a fairly large velocity, that you are moving in a hurry. You hear this sound of race cars, and this music in the background, and you are tracking this target that’s trying to run away from you. And it’s surreal. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly
APOLLO 17
– Commander Eugene “Gene” Cernan speaking before entering the lunar module and closing out the first era of lunar exploration
I was doing it live [Apollo 17 launch]. I remember we all used the same line practically, night turned to day, and it really was that bright. It was like daylight again. But one of the things that I think I remembered more and I could tell it as I was reporting was the squawking of the birds and the seagulls and all the noise that they made when it lifted off. It was partly because of the noise and partly because of the light that got them off of their roosts. I remember that mixed in with the noise, the tremendous roar. Jay Barbree
This full disc of the Moon was photographed by the Apollo 17 crewmen during their transearth coast homeward following a successful lunar landing mission in December 1972.
RETURNING TO THE MOON
It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to really be able to accomplish. I think if I had to look at my life, I think probably that was the peak. I think the fact that we were able to show what the human could do in the space environment is a really great thing. We sort of put the ladder there that’s going to allow whatever we continue to do happen. And I think we’ve got to do it. I think we need to continue to do it. Dr. Charles Berry
The last two men on the Moon. During the first EVA of Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan photographed Harrison Schmitt with the American flag and the Earth in the background. Cernan is visible in the reflection in Schmitt’s helmet visor in the awkward position he assumed to obtain this image.
I look at [the Moon] differently than I ever did before. I look at it and I say, “Well, I know those places up there.” As a matter of fact, there is some of our equipment up there now. And I think about that every time I look at it. I was just talking to a school bunch in Dallas a week ago, and there was a teacher who came up to me and said he does not really believe that we went to the Moon. And I said, “You have got to be kidding. You are a teacher at this school, and you do not believe that we went to the Moon.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know that all those pictures and things haven’t been faked.” And I said, “Let me tell you. I can tell you that the people who went there, I was intimately familiar with them. I know that they were well taken care of and put into a spacecraft. I monitored them from the ground when they were going to the Moon, when they were on the Moon, and on the way back, and after they came back.” And I said, “I can guarantee you.” Dr. Charles Berry
We certainly need to get back there for several reasons. The first is if we are ever going to be real space explorers, we’ve got to develop some capability. And the capability we had was really short-lived and it was [50] years ago. If we are to going to go on to Mars, we’re going to need to build a capability at exploring alien planets, alien objects, before we start taking a year to get out to Mars and doing that. I think the Moon is an
appropriate training ground for doing further space activity and the possibility there might be some resources there that we can utilize on Earth. I don’t know if the Helium 3 that we have there is usable, but [Apollo 17 lunar module pilot ] Jack Schmitt seems to think so, and we need to investigate that. But I think we do have a destiny here in due course to explore the rest of the solar system with manned flight and eventually get outside of the solar system with manned flight. And it is just a matter of time, provided we don’t blow ourselves up with our stupidities and our nuclear weapons in the process. Edgar Mitchell
I believe that, sometime in the future, humankind will be required to expand their activities beyond Earth. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to begin to develop those options from which future generations will select. Scientific knowledge from unmanned probes will be most important in providing information helpful in learning what the possibilities might be, but it will take human involvement and human spaceflight to expand humanity’s boundaries. Neil Armstrong
