I felt that my work was just as important as the lunar surface exploration. The rocks collected on the surface would be the ground truth, an important part of the puzzle. Dave and Jim would collect samples, identify where they found them, and take photos to mark the locations. When we returned them to Houston, those rocks could be analyzed in greater detail. We could then compare them to the data I would collect of that whole area from orbit and work out a system where the two sets of data agreed with each other. Since I would be passing over other sites where moon landings had been and would be made, we could build up quite a database of comparison. With this combination of information, we could learn about other areas of the moon without ever needing to land there. Since Apollo wouldn’t land on the moon as many times as originally planned, this information would be vital to collect.
It wasn’t going to be easy. As engineers and technicians finalized their work preparing the first-ever SIM bay, they constantly ran into technical problems. Some of the equipment came out from the spacecraft on long booms, and this was tough to replicate in Earth’s gravity. When the instruments were turned on, the data did not always flow well. The engineers made a lot of last-moment tweaks and adjustments. I was too busy training to be very involved and just had to hope it would all be ready in time for our flight.
I was fascinated by most space science, but not impressed with one area—medical experiments. We trusted our regular doctors to take good care of us, but we did not trust the medical team assigned to the flight. They were not our regular flight surgeons and didn’t have the normal doctor-patient relationship with us.
The mission doctors tried very hard to think up experiments for us to do in space, and most of them went way beyond anything we would consider. For example, they wanted to insert a catheter into one astronaut for the flight, threading it in through his veins into the heart. The doctors were curious to see how the heart worked during a spaceflight. We, of course, were horrified at this dangerous request. So we struck a deaclass="underline" if the doctors could prove it was a benign test, we would consider it. A flight surgeon volunteered to do the test while riding a bicycle ergometer. After about five minutes of riding the bike, he had a heart attack. That ended that possibility.
Fortunately, we could trust most of the other professionals attached to our mission. In fact, they were the best in the world at their specialist areas. A lot of my intense training still focused on geology, and I wanted to squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of our time at the moon. Jim and Dave, along with their backups, trained with Lee Silver, who was an incredibly skilled field geologist from Caltech. It’s hard to imagine a better person to bridge the gap between academic geology and the test pilot mentality. He was tough and never let up in his passion and intensity to push us as hard as he could. He would have his trainees up and about by five in the morning on those field trips because he was raring to go and explore. As well as pushing hard, he also used every trick in the book to keep his students excited and enthusiastic, knowing that he had to earn the attention of astronauts who were constantly pulled in different directions by demands on their time. He was just what NASA needed, and our expedition was immeasurably improved by his participation.
While Dave and Jim worked with Lee on what might be discovered on the surface, I studied with one of the most interesting and memorable characters NASA ever brought into its fold. “King” Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-born geologist, worked for the Bellcomm think tank at NASA headquarters. He was asked to help train me and the other command module pilots on what we might see from lunar orbit. It was the happiest part of all my training, because Farouk was a vast storehouse of knowledge.
To say that Farouk was eager and into his subject is an understatement. He was, and still is, a ball of energy and fun. Dark-haired and slim, Farouk was upbeat, not hyper but most definitely a type A personality. Simply put, he made everything interesting. Even if we spent a long day working together, I never grew tired of him, because he was so good at what he did. Farouk became like a brother to me: very close and very special. After a long day of intensive work, I would still want to spend time with him, and we would go out drinking together. While Farouk tried to match me drink for drink, we’d share stories about our backgrounds. Since he had grown up in such a different culture from mine, I found his tales enthralling. His childhood stories of the Nile Delta differed greatly from my snowy Michigan memories.
Farouk’s entire office was plastered with enlarged photos of the lunar surface. The first time I stepped in there, the black-and-white random swirls and patterns reminded me of a psychedelic hippie hangout, but every photo was a learning opportunity.
Farouk instinctively understood what was ahead of me. As well as teaching me surface features, he’d also use the maps to train me to work fast. I learned to recognize and name lunar features as quickly as if I were seeing them from a speedy lunar orbit. There was little point learning them if my mind was not fast enough to recognize them. I also wanted to ensure that all of the photographic equipment I carried with me could accurately record what I saw. We spent hours going over the maps and making notes about the direction the spacecraft would need to be oriented to take the best images. It would be a complicated ballet of movement for me to fly, especially if I didn’t want to use up too much fuel. But we knew the effort would have a huge payoff in scientific return.
As Farouk animatedly took me through the trajectories I would be flying over the moon, my appreciation of the lunar surface grew. He allowed me to get to know geology by really feeling it, not just by memorizing. We studied every tiny detail of the craters and other features I would be passing over. Not only would I come to learn all of their names, but I would also understand what was special about each crater, what I needed to look for in detail, and how to describe in it ways that would help the scientists listening back on Earth. I grew more and more confident in giving these descriptions.
Although I spent a great deal of time with many scientists involved with our mission, I probably spent more time with Farouk than with anybody else. When I worked with the other scientists, I was deliberating when to extend and retract experiment booms, when to report my findings, and other operational details. With Farouk I learned how to look for things we might not even know existed.
Our study together was so different and so much more interesting than my earlier classroom geology classes, partly because of a change in me, too. Geology wasn’t just academic to me anymore. We were preparing for a real flight, where I would look up close at something that was normally very far away. That perspective put a whole new spin on it for me.
I grew confident that when I reached the moon I would not only know what was going by, but also what I would see next. The lunar maps began to feel as familiar as my home street from childhood. When you drive down a familiar street, you know what is coming up soon and remember details such as who lives in which house. The moon began to feel the same way to me, even before I traveled there. The moon became a friendly place.
I went on almost all of the geology training field trips with Dave and Jim, but I was overhead in an aircraft, at a height and speed that best simulated how landscape would pass below me on the moon. While Dave and Jim studied the small picture on the ground, I made observations about the big picture from above. Jim and Dave trained with the same kind of equipment, maps, and time between sites that they would have on the moon. We even brought along our mission’s flight directors, so they could see firsthand what we’d have to do on the moon. This meant that they would truly understand what they would have to do to support us from Houston by radio, when we were hundreds of thousands of miles away. Our training and observations began to mesh. By coordinating what I saw from orbit with what Dave and Jim studied on the ground, we’d have a powerful combination of knowledge and observations.