Although Jim and I became very good at geology, Dave absorbed the geology training better than anybody. He didn’t just know the facts, he truly understood them, which is the ultimate goal of any training. We lived it, day and night, and so the geology seeped into us all. Dave had every excuse to skimp on the subject if he’d wanted to: we had so many other things we needed to learn for our mission. But he was a true believer and his enthusiasm motivated everyone involved in the mission.
Dave’s backup commander, my good friend Dick Gordon, also put everything he had into training. With so many flights canceled, Dick had little chance to rotate into an Apollo command position before the program ended. Yet I never had the feeling that he was only doing all of this work for the possibility of another flight. Dick is a trouper and seemed delighted to be on a crew backing us up. If he was sad that he would probably never walk on the moon, he never let on.
I received some additional training from the photo geologists of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and learned a good deal about how they analyzed images for information. This training helped me when learning how to take photographs. Nevertheless, for three years before the mission, I also did personal training, which helped me even more. I figured that learning to take photos was like practicing the piano: it takes a long time just to learn a little bit, but the more you play the better you become. So I carried a camera with me at all times and took photos of just about everything, trying to perfect my technique.
I was particularly interested in taking photographs at low light levels. I would often go to places such as parking lots in the middle of the night and test my camera. Even though it looked very dark to my eyes, I knew there was a little bit of glow in the sky at all times, and with sensitive film I would get a good picture. Luckily, the police never saw me lurking around in odd, dark places in the middle of the night with a camera. I doubt they would have believed my explanation.
I spent a lot of time trying to learn the best settings and fine-tuning my ability with high-speed film because of some of the difficult experiments I planned to try on the flight. I wanted to take photos of star fields that were extremely faint. It was kind of chancy that I would get anything on the film, but I would give it my best shot.
I was even hoping to pick up on film the Gegenschein, a faint reflection of sunlight from interplanetary dust orbiting the sun. There are also stable equilibrium points in our Earth-moon system where the gravitational pull of Earth and moon balance, and I planned to aim a camera at them. A spacecraft placed in one of these points should stay in the same place forever, unless it used its rockets to leave. Scientists believed one point in particular might gradually trap dust over time. I planned to mount a camera in the window, gently move the spacecraft, then try to keep it steady while I took photos. For an exposure as long as ten seconds it would be impossible to hold the command module completely still, and any photos were likely to be a little shaky. Nevertheless, we hoped to capture images of some of the faintest and strangest things in our astronomical neighborhood.
We didn’t need pilots on our support crew; we needed colleagues who could help us with all this science. So we picked up Joe Allen, Bob Parker, and Karl Henize, three of the scientist-astronauts selected in 1967. They wouldn’t fly during Apollo—they’d have to wait for the space shuttle—but they could do their part. Joe and Bob worked with Dave and Jim on surface geology and put their hearts and souls into our mission.
Karl was an astronomer, so he spent a lot of time helping with my tasks. He did a large amount of work on my experiments, kept me updated on their preparation, and checked out details. He was six years older than me, and I saw him as a crusty old guy at the time. Had I not known better, on first glance I would never have guessed he was a college professor and a highly-regarded research astronomer. Karl just didn’t have the look of a sophisticated, scholarly guy. He looked far more down-to-earth, rugged, and in good physical shape.
Underneath that crusty exterior was an extremely smart guy, who understood our mission well. I remember feeling a little sad, thinking that Karl would never get to fly in space himself. That was certainly the general opinion around the office. He was already forty-one when NASA sent him to learn how to fly jets, and the space shuttle was a long way off in the future. Time was not on his side. It was, therefore, a special moment for me when I heard in 1985 that Karl was flying in space at last, personally conducting astronomy experiments in orbit. He was fifty-eight by then and became the oldest person to fly in space at the time.
With Apollo 13’s problems fixed, the Apollo 14 crew was preparing to fly. One of the crewmembers, Ed Mitchell, lived with me for a while at my apartment. He and his wife were separating, but Ed didn’t want to proceed with a full-blown divorce. He was worried how a divorce might affect his astronaut career and preferred to wait until after his flight.
I liked Ed. He was different from your average astronaut. Fascinated by psychic phenomena and spiritual energy, he studied “new age” ideas that were far outside the scientific mainstream. It didn’t fit our NASA work, so Ed kept his interests pretty much to himself for a long time. At my apartment, however, we’d have long discussions into the night exploring what he called “the nature of consciousness,” including his plan to try ESP experiments on his moon mission.
Ed’s Apollo 14 mission would set down where Apollo 13 had planned to land; NASA was investing two missions in one landing zone. We hoped their geological survey would bring new scientific knowledge to help justify the huge investment. The mission commander, however, was Alan Shepard.
Grounded for years by an inner-ear condition, Shepard had sat out most of the space program in a desk job. Eventually he underwent an operation to fix the problem, jumped back into the flight roster, and tried to grab the next available mission. NASA insisted he needed more time to train and knocked him back to Apollo 14. Although Shepard had two excellent crewmembers, I heard grousing that Al didn’t take the science seriously.
Ed Mitchell and Stu Roosa, the lunar module pilot and command module pilot for the mission, were two of NASA’s best. In fact, many considered Ed the most talented astronaut of my entire selection group. But a crew is guided, both in training and in attitude, by its commander. Shepard made it clear to a number of geologists that rocks weren’t a priority for him.
When Al and Ed landed on the moon in February 1971, they managed an impressive amount of science work, but the rolling landscape and lack of clear landmarks could confuse anyone. They were soon lost during an ambitious excursion up the side of a large crater. As they pressed on toward the crater rim, the two of them grew tired and overheated. They had a choice: try and make the rim or carefully and scientifically document the rocks they were climbing past. They did neither. Out of time, never really sure where they were, Ed and Al no longer had the ability to accurately document and sample the hillside. They had to grab samples, snap a photo, and press on.