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.
Once the hatch was closed, I headed down the elevator to a waiting car to take me back to the viewing stand for the launch. It was raining really hard by the time I reached the stands, but I never gave it a thought. The Saturn V was a tough rocket, and I figured that it would take more than a little water to postpone a launch.
The rocket lifted off, right on schedule. And then, less than half a minute after launch, a huge lightning bolt struck the spacecraft. The Saturn V was poking up into the clouds, and the lightning found a perfect grounding through the spacecraft and rocket exhaust all the way down to the pad. We scrambled to find a radio. I could hear Pete talking a mile a minute as they tried to work out what had happened. NASA could have called off the mission right then, but they decided to keep going and see if everything still worked. The command module had temporarily lost its internal systems, but the separate system that guided the rocket was still functioning and kept them on course.
By the time they got into orbit, the mission was in pretty good shape. Basic, well-insulated equipment meant that the spacecraft survived. With some quick thinking, the power and instruments were brought back online. Once again, I was glad that it had been designed with such well-tested components. It was amazing—everything was fine—but I bet that the launch was a very scary experience for the crew. I know I would probably have crapped myself.
A couple of days later, Pete Conrad was ready to make his first step on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on the moon—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—were famous by then. Pete was Neil’s polar opposite in temperament, and many people wondered what he would say when he made his own first step. We had sprinkled a whole bunch of suggestions throughout Pete’s in-flight checklist, many of them so risqué that he would have been fired if he’d dared say them. He ended up using one that we’d written down: a joke about his height, or lack of it, that had been going around the astronaut office for a while.
As the world listened, Pete brought the house down with his clever wisecrack. Making his first step, he quipped, “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!”
Days later, when the Apollo 12 command module splashed down, Dave, Jim, and I were a backup crew without a purpose. We hoped the pattern would hold, and we’d be the prime crew three flights down the line. Nothing was certain, however, until there was a public announcement. Some Apollo backup crews did not make it to prime. Our work performance was key, but NASA also scrutinized any personal issues. Part of the concern was rooted in fear of negative press coverage. In the past, divorce had been one of those dreaded areas, and many astronauts held crumbling marriages together in the hopes of getting one more flight.
Pam and I had been separated for about a year by this time, and the marriage was beyond hope of repair. We had drifted further and further away from each other until there was just no other way for us to go. It was obvious to us both by then that a final, official divorce was the only option. Now came the toughest part: I had to go and tell Deke.
I certainly had reason to worry. I would be the first astronaut to publicly divorce before flying in space. There were really only two precedents I could look at. Duane Graveline had been selected as a scientist-astronaut in 1965, but his wife almost immediately threatened him with divorce, and NASA asked him to resign right away. It all happened so fast, I heard, that most astronauts were never even aware he had been at NASA in the first place. Apollo 7’s Donn Eisele was the only other astronaut who divorced while in the program. He had done so in 1969 after his flight, only to be completely ostracized by the other astronaut families. Donn was hanging in there, but it seemed there was no chance he would ever fly in space again. I heard different reasons about why, but I knew one thing for sure: I did not want that to happen to me.
Perhaps, I thought, my choice was either to fly to the moon or to divorce. I might not be allowed to do both. If so, this was a hell of a place to find myself. I knew that I could have asked Pam to delay a divorce for another couple of years, until I had flown in space. If it had been a one-sided decision to split up, I may well have done that, and I think she would have done it for my sake. But it would not have been fair to her. I had too much respect for Pam to ask her to stay with me.
It was a very tough moment. My marriage had suffered for years because I had pushed my career so hard. And now here I was so close to the golden prize. I suspected I was weeks away from being named to a prime crew for a lunar mission. I might have been throwing it away by being honest, but I decided that if divorcing was going to take me out of the program, then that was just too bad. I’d have to live with it.
It was with a bad case of nerves that I asked to meet with Deke in his office, where I laid out the facts clearly and honestly. Deke, to my immense relief, was supportive. In his brief, precise way, he told me that if there was no funny business going on, and if it was just that Pam and I were splitting up, then he had no problem with it. “Keep your nose clean, don’t get into a public squabble, and keep it out of the newspapers,” he told me, “and you’ll be fine.” That was all he said, and all he needed to say. I knew that Deke would be true to his word, as long as I was true to mine.