We would only learn of this near mishap later. As the second stage engines lit, we were once again pushed back into our couches. We were a shorter, leaner, lighter rocket now. We blew off our launch escape tower, as we were too high for it to do us any good. Now we could see out of all the windows, as the sky grew ever blacker. “How are we doing, Al?” Dave called across to me.
“We’re doing fine,” I responded, focused on my instruments.
“Man, I’ve got the moon in my window!” Jim exulted.
“Yes, sir, it’s out there,” I replied. Plenty of time to look at it later. “That sucker’s right on, right on,” I reported, impressed by the precise path of our rocket.
The second stage was a comfortable, soft ride, but not powerful enough to kick us into orbit. Having done its job, it also dropped away—a smooth, easy transition. We hurtled up at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour, while the second stage began a long, tumbling fall to the ocean. As the big engine on the third stage lit, we needed to raise our speed by only a few thousand miles per hour to reach orbit.
I watched the instruments as the third stage gradually arced us into a path that would keep us circling the Earth. During the last part of the burn, we even angled down toward Earth a small amount, so we could loop into orbit. We fell around the planet in a beautifully precise curve, not falling back to Earth, nor leaving it behind. Not yet.
At last, the third stage engine shut down. Less than twelve minutes had passed since we’d sat on the pad. Now we were traveling more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, and I was in space. After all the years of training, I was finally here.
Jim and I unstrapped ourselves and floated to the windows. Jim tried to dig the TV camera out right away, to capture the view. Dave had seen it before, of course, but Jim and I had never witnessed such a sight. The beautiful planet Earth stretched below us, with a thin horizon that knifed between sky and black space. It was stunning and strikingly delicate. And because we were so low, we zipped across oceans and continents in minutes. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it would be visibly this fast,” I murmured to Dave and Jim.
I could have spent the next hour just staring. All too soon, however, mission control in Houston radioed and reminded us to get to work. We busied ourselves with checklists. We didn’t have much time until we had to leave Earth orbit. Before we could do that, we needed to thoroughly check out our spacecraft and ensure it had reached space in good shape. If it hadn’t, we might have to return to Earth immediately. I tore my gaze from the window and got busy.
I’d spent years training inside command modules, but it had always been in Earth’s gravity field. Now I was weightless, and the command module felt very different. I had no walls or floors any more, no up and down, just surfaces and space to float around in. On the launchpad, the spacecraft looked cramped. Now it felt roomier. As we checked out the spacecraft, I floated under the seats and up into the docking tunnel. Endeavour still wasn’t big, but it felt different when all the interior space could be used.
Weightlessness felt odd—like swimming underwater, but without water pressure on me. I was concerned I might feel “space sick,” an affliction similar to motion sickness that affects some astronauts when they float around, so I used a trick to keep it at bay. On Earth, I had found that if I focused on a task, I didn’t have to worry about motion sickness. So I floated around as much as I could, figuring this was the quickest way to get over any nausea. Dave warned me to slow down a little, worried I might grow ill. But I would be weightless for two weeks and I didn’t want to just sit back and feel bad. “Get your big foot out of the way!” I joked as Dave floated into my face. “Push me down,” he instructed, and with a gentle nudge I floated him away. This was strange, but fun.
Jim tended to float to the top of the spacecraft, like a swimmer in a pool. Dave generally kept himself strapped in his couch, explaining that “Otherwise, you’re fighting the panel all the time.” He was right: the slightest movement in the couch floated us into the instrument panel.
There was nothing I could do about the stuffy feeling in my head—as if I were hanging upside down. I could see Dave and Jim felt the same. Their faces were flushed and puffy, and their eyes bulged a little.
There wasn’t time to let the discomfort affect me. We were all very busy. We were in a low Earth orbit—too low to linger long—and could only go around the Earth for a couple of hours before we needed to head to the moon. This was the only time in the mission I would see Earth up close, but so far I’d barely had a glimpse of it out of the window. The clock was ticking.
Fortunately, our spacecraft had made it into space in good working order. I now had time to briefly reflect on the mission so far. “That was a fantastic ride!” I shared with my crewmates. “I’m just now beginning to understand what went on. That first stage really does shake!” Jim’s wide grin told me he knew just what I meant.
After two revolutions of the Earth, it was almost time to relight the third stage of our booster, and head to the moon. Before we did, we all took a lingering look out of the window. I gazed at lightning skipping across the tops of distant clouds. “This is unreal to watch,” I said with amazement.
“It’s so pretty out here, Dave, I’d almost settle for an Earth-orbit mission,” Jim said wistfully.
“Don’t you say that!” Dave responded with mock authority, convulsing me with laughter. It was true: Earth was beautiful, but we ached to press onward to the moon.
The third stage engine relit. For more than five minutes, a soft but solid acceleration pushed us back in our couches again. Our speed climbed to twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Now, instead of falling around the Earth, we were fast enough to climb to a point, days away, where the moon’s gravity would capture us.
We were shooting for a moving target. Because the moon orbits Earth, we had to aim not for the moon itself, but where the moon was going to be. It was like firing two bullets, wanting them not to hit each other, but to barely miss. If we got it wrong, space was an unforgiving place. We had to trust the math in our flight plan completely. We checked our numbers a lot.
Once the burn was successfully completed, we had time to briefly look out of the window again. Earth had already begun to shrink. Our planet is only eight thousand miles in diameter, and we traveled three times that distance every hour. I could see our launch site in Florida, and the rest of the southeastern United States and Cuba, all in one view. How different it all looked from here.
Time to get back to work. One of my key jobs in the mission was right ahead. Our lunar module, Falcon, was bolted into the third stage, still below us. Three and a half hours into the mission, it was time to extract it. I floated over to the left couch, from where I could fly Endeavour while I peered out of the left window.
We blew the bolts that connected us to the stage, and with a delicate pulse of our thrusters I edged Endeavour away. Large hinged panels opened like petals on a flower and drifted away from the top of the stage, exposing the top hatch of the Falcon. We crept away a short distance, then I very slowly rotated us 180 degrees. What was the hurry? We had days before we would get to the moon, and my slow and careful piloting saved precious fuel. Out the window, I spotted a panel spinning away into the blackness. The shrinking Earth also fought for my attention. “What a view!” I remarked, then focused again on my target.