So there you have it. To say I trusted my commander instead of my conscience is not much of a defense, I admit. Nor to tell you that I truly believed what I was told: that every other crew did it with no risk. Nevertheless, that is the truth. That is what I believed. And unless you have been in the military, particularly in situations of danger and split-second decisions, it is hard for me to explain how ingrained it is to trust your commander. If you trust him with your life, you trust him about a few lousy envelopes.
Therefore, after one evening of conversation, I forgot all about the covers. What arrangements Dave, Eiermann, and Sieger made to get the covers onto the flight, I never knew until later. Dave later told a congressional committee that he had placed them in a pocket of his spacesuit, but he never shared that information with me. All they had needed from me was a yes.
Completely unaware, foolishly naïve, even, about the ticking time bomb I had now thrown into my future, I continued furiously with my training.
We were almost ready to fly. But as we neared the launch day, I feared we were missing something. NASA was leery of letting little children witness live launches and imposed age restrictions. This limitation may have protected them, but it also missed an opportunity to engage them. I knew a Saturn V launch was a pretty astounding experience, and children grasped the excitement of flying to the moon in ways that adults did not. If we wanted public support for NASA and space travel, we needed to inspire and inform the kids.
So a few weeks before the flight, I picked up the phone and called the Sesame Street production offices in New York. The children’s show had been on TV less than two years, yet it was already highly regarded as an educational and stimulating experience for young minds.
Reaching a producer, I explained my idea for an episode about an Apollo launch. Maybe, I suggested, they could send a film crew down to the Cape to capture the event. Vicariously, then, the kids would feel the impact and excitement. The producer didn’t sound too interested. “Most of us are beginning our summer break,” he explained wearily. “It might be hard to pull a crew together. Call me back in a week,” he sighed, “and I’ll let you know.”
I called him back in a week. They could come to the Cape, but the show wanted something in return, the producer declared rather pompously. Puzzled by his approach, I asked what it was. “Your spacecraft,” he responded. “We’d like you to name it ‘Big Bird,’ after our show’s lead character.”
I imagined for a moment our gleaming spacecraft. Then NASA’s reaction if I had asked to rename it after an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow canary. I looked at the receiver and said “Thank you very much and good-bye.” Screw Sesame Street.
I’d wasted a precious week, and we still needed kids. So I immediately called Pittsburgh, and another children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The producer put me right through to Fred Rogers, the show’s much-loved host. We chatted for a few minutes, I explained my idea, and he replied that it fit perfectly with a series he was filming about parents going away. He wanted to teach children about fathers leaving the house to go down to the store, leaving in the morning to go to work, or going on a trip. This was a perfect match, he told me—Dad is going to the moon for two weeks. As a father, I could relate. Fred proposed filming a show both before and after the trip. A great idea, I agreed.
Fred put me on hold for a few minutes and lined up the PBS Nova mobile filming crew in Boston, probably the best crew in the nation. They were available, and we scheduled it all in that first phone call.
Three days before I began my pre-launch quarantine period, the film crew arrived at the Cape. They filmed Fred and me talking about space in the launch control center, then I showed them how I put on a spacesuit and how each part worked. Fred worked through a long list of kids’ questions about astronaut experiences. I could answer many of them, but I had to confess I couldn’t answer others until after my flight. I asked Fred to let me take the list into space. I would think about them during the flight, I promised, and then answer them when I returned. Fred liked this idea. In fact, instead of making two regular shows out of the footage, he would now do a special.
I worked on a number of follow-up shows with Fred, and we really hit on what kids wanted to know. For example, children were fascinated by space food, so I took some to the show to reconstitute, and Fred and I ate it right there on air. I took a large moon rock to another taping so the kids could look at it. Those shows did a lot of good, bringing a human element into spaceflight. Many of the ideas evolved into a children’s book I wrote in 1974, named I Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon. Fred wrote the foreword.
But I did get some good-natured ribbing at the Cape. A few days before the flight, in quarantine, we heard an announcement over the PA system: “Everybody get to a TV set.” Sure enough, it was the Mister Rogers special. It was so far outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy. Astronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn’t do kiddies’ shows. They particularly made fun of me when I carefully navigated the inevitable “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” question. But I loved the final result, and Deke got a good laugh out of watching it. Most importantly, kids loved it.
Our quarantine at the Cape started a few weeks before the flight. Nobody wanted a slight sniffle to delay a multimillion-dollar lunar mission. Those who worked with us directly wore surgical masks. Everyone else we saw only on the other side of a glass window. Farouk and I continued to work on my geology training on different sides of the glass, and I chatted to a lot of visiting dignitaries, too.
My parents made a vacation out of the launch. They drove their tiny travel trailer all the way down from Michigan and stayed in a little trailer park in Cocoa Beach. We visited through the glass. My brothers and sisters arrived a little later, followed by my girls, Alison and Merrill. Their mother didn’t come with them, but NASA took good care of my daughters; they flew them down in a Gulfstream jet from Houston. Like most astronaut kids, none of it seemed like a big deal to them. Many neighborhood dads went to the moon, so this was no different from the stories their friends told.
I was very upbeat about the flight. I never said anything to my family about what might happen to me other than the positives of the mission. I never wrote letters to my daughters in case I didn’t survive or anything like that. Nevertheless, the thought was in my mind that I might never return. I never shared those feelings with anybody at the time. I didn’t see the point. But I did make sure my will was up to date. That was pretty simple: all my possessions would go to my daughters.
I talked to my closest friends a lot on the phone. But one night, I decided the quarantine was crazy—I would make a break for it. After the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, I silently snuck out to my car and drove into Cocoa Beach to meet up with my buddies at a pre-launch party. One was a very special lady whom I was close to at the time, and it meant a lot to me to say good-bye to her in person. I couldn’t stay out for long, and it was certainly against all the rules, but I took the chance. A close friend on the medical team was also there with me, and she could have lost her job if anyone spotted us. If my bosses had checked the space center gate logs, we would have caught holy hell.