The call sign for the lunar module was a much easier choice. The Air Force Academy’s mascot is a falcon, the perfect name for the spacecraft that would glide and swoop down to the lunar surface. It also made a nice fit with the call sign for the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle. Coincidentally, the name El-Baz means “the falcon” in Arabic, so Farouk had a link to both spacecraft names.
Choosing the call signs was one of the few personal touches NASA allowed us. Another was to design a crew patch. We looked at hundreds of proposals and chose one submitted by, of all people, an Italian women’s fashion designer.
Adored by the jet set, Emilio Pucci was famous for creating dresses in vivid, swirling colors, and his initial patch design was much the same. It was rectangular, with fancy curlicues in the corners, and in a shockingly vivid range of purples, violets, greens, and blues. It would have been hard to win NASA approval for this artwork.
Nevertheless, there was something in Pucci’s design that really spoke to us. Most of the designs we had previously looked at were too complicated, too mechanical, or had little to do with the mission. The central feature of Pucci’s design—three stylized flying birds—was wonderfully simple, elegant, and charming.
So we made some changes. The patch became round; the colors American red, white, and blue; and the background showed the lunar surface. We chose to depict our landing site area, so the three birds now swooped over the region we would explore. In Pucci’s design, one bird flew higher than the others, and we made that bird white. That made sense to represent me, as I would fly alone in orbit while the other two swooped in for landing. It also matched the color of my Corvette. The red and blue birds were Jim and Dave, and if we kept with the Corvette comparison that would make Dave the blue bird and Jim the red bird.
We continued to tinker with the design until I believe we ended up with the best patch design of any Apollo mission. It described everything we planned to do, yet it was simple and recognizable. NASA wanted us to use the number 15 on the patch rather than roman numerals—and we did—but we also added something a little sneaky. By emphasizing some of the outlines of the lunar craters, we hid the roman numeral for 15 in the background. We were having fun.
Then, twenty-seven days before our launch date, we received a shocking reminder that we worked in a dangerous business.
On June 30, 1971, three Soviet cosmonauts were returning to Earth in their Soyuz 11 spacecraft after twenty-three days aboard the Salyut space station. It was an impressive achievement: the first successful visit to the world’s first space station, which also broke the space endurance record. The cosmonauts were no doubt looking forward to a hero’s welcome in the Soviet Union. Their spacecraft landed successfully under its automatically deployed parachutes. But when the recovery team opened the hatch, the three spacefarers lay in their couches—dead.
The cosmonauts were given a lavish state funeral in Moscow, with Tom Stafford invited to serve as a pallbearer. But the Soviets were cagey with details of how the three men had died. They told us they were investigating, and if they discovered anything important that might relate to the Apollo program, we would be informed. All we knew was that the crew had not worn spacesuits.
We prudently reexamined our schedule for wearing spacesuits during the flight, particularly for maneuvers that might expose us to vacuum, such as undocking. We had complete confidence in our spacecraft hatches and the tunnel between the command module and lunar module. But you never knew what might happen up there. This way, we would be doubly safe.
The Soviets eventually revealed that when the two modules of their Soyuz spacecraft separated before reentry, a pressure valve seal had unexpectedly jolted loose. In less than half a minute, there was not enough air left to survive. That was too short a time to take any action unless they wore protective spacesuits. It was a tragic way to end a successful mission. Just over a month later, Dave Scott would gently place a memorial to the three lost cosmonauts, and all known fallen spacefarers, on the surface of the moon. It was a moving reminder that although we were on opposing sides in the Cold War, we shared a brotherhood of exploration.
The Soyuz 11 tragedy also made me think about my colleagues flying in Vietnam. If anything, it made me feel less guilty. I had always figured I had the easier, safer job, even after the Apollo 1 fire happened. Now, with the Soyuz 11 tragedy, the risks of flying in space felt about the same as the dangers faced by my friends in combat.
If I had never been selected by NASA and had been shot down and killed in Vietnam, I might have gained a brief mention in my hometown newspaper. However, if something bad happened during the Apollo 15 mission, I knew I would be remembered in the history books forever, which almost balanced the fact that I might die out there.
Many of us at NASA thought the Vietnam conflict was pretty stupid. Nevertheless, while I served in the military, I would never have openly criticized or second-guessed my country’s foreign policy. The military enforces policy—they don’t decide. I would have followed the orders of my commanders even if I’d personally felt wary of their decisions. It was the way I had been trained ever since I enrolled at West Point.
So I may have felt less guilty, but I still felt awkward. War was what people went into the military for, and what we were trained to do. My two West Point roommates were now flying combat missions in Vietnam. Worse, one of the stars of my West Point class was shot down and imprisoned for half a decade over there, and was so mistreated that he never really recovered. He came back a broken man. They were over there, unknown, unsung, fighting a war that I believed could not be won. And what was I doing? I was sitting pretty in Houston, walking red carpets, designing pretty patches with a fashion designer. I always felt a bit funny about that.
I didn’t have time to think about the political scene during our intense training. But in addition to the difficulties, for the government, of an ongoing war, it was also a tough time for NASA. The Vietnam War was expensive. Washington wouldn’t give NASA the money they needed to develop the space shuttle. Repeat missions to the Skylab space station, which was growing closer to completion and launch, were scaled back. A more permanent space station would evidently not be funded until long after the shuttle flew. Had it not been for a planned joint mission with the Soviets, NASA would have faced a lengthy hiatus while shuttle development inched along.
I was insulated from most of this political wrangling, because my mission was already bought and paid for. Although NASA pilfered all the money it could from other programs to fund the shuttle, they could siphon nothing from Apollo 15. I suppose they could have canceled the mission, but thankfully they didn’t.
As we grew closer to the end of the Apollo program and fewer Saturn Vs thundered off the pads, jobs began to disappear down at the Cape. I heard stories not long after our flight about engineers who lost their jobs and simply walked away from their homes, defaulting on their loans. You could have bought hundreds of homes in Titusville back then by just picking up the bank payments. The boomtown that came with the early space program was going bust.
It was the start of a really tough time for the workers at the Cape, and there were rumblings of morale problems. But I never saw that myself. Despite the cuts which loomed over them, the people I worked with were so excited to be part of our moon mission that they poured their hearts and souls into the preparations. I loved those people: they did so much to make our mission a success.