I found that the umbilical cord was loose in its socket. So I unplugged it and rammed it back in. That should do it. Then I locked the hatch again and floated back into my couch.
I hit the switch again, and the two spacecraft gently slid apart. “You’re on your own,” Jim radioed to me.
I looked out of the window as we flew in formation. Falcon hung above me, its coppery sides glinting in the sunlight. The spidery spacecraft looked scarily fragile out there in deep space. “You’ve got four good-looking gear,” I told Dave, confirming that their landing legs were fully deployed. They continued to busily check out their spacecraft for their descent to the surface.
I prepared to burn Endeavour’s engine again, to raise me into a sixty-mile circular orbit and leave Dave and Jim behind. Without Falcon attached I was much lighter, and I really felt the acceleration when the engine lit. “What a kick in the tail!” I radioed to Dave. I zoomed behind and above Falcon, leaving them to land.
But it was more than a kick in the tail. I had my heart in my throat. We had removed the center couch so Dave and Jim could easily float into Falcon, but I had not put it back. This meant that there was nothing to stop my own seat on the left side from shifting on its supporting strut. When the engine lit, my couch swung toward the middle of Endeavour, away from my instrument panel. To my alarm, I realized I could no longer reach the controls.
I held on and hoped the computer was performing the burn correctly. If I needed to reach over to shut it off, I’d be in trouble. Within a few seconds as the acceleration peaked, I could swing the couch back and reach the instruments again. But it had been a scary moment.
Meanwhile, Ed Mitchell gave Dave and Jim the call—Falcon was go for powered descent to the surface. We’d taken five days to get to this moment, and their landing would only take another twelve and a half minutes. I’d come almost the whole way with them so far, but now they would make this brief journey without me.
It felt odd to see them grow smaller, until they were just a speck against the lunar background. I shot way ahead and quickly lost sight of them. But I listened to Ed, Dave, and Jim on the radio as Falcon’s descent engine fired and the lunar module dropped through the mountain range toward their Hadley Rille landing site. Minutes later, I heard Jim shout “Bam!” Falcon had thumped down firmly onto the lunar surface. I smiled in relief. They had made it.
“Okay, Houston, the Falcon is on the plain at Hadley,” Dave announced. I grinned. The Plain was the name of the parade field back at West Point, and I knew Dave had just named the landing site as a tribute to our academy.
President Nixon issued another message. “The president sends his congratulations to the entire ground team and the Apollo 15 crew on a successful landing, and sends his best wishes for the rest of the mission.” Boy, he got that message out to us fast.
“Houston, this is Endeavour. Thank you very much,” I responded. Thank you, Mr. President, for keeping it short this time.
And then I slipped around the back of the moon once again. This time, I would be completely alone. A quarter of a million miles away, planet Earth was home to all but three humans. Two of them, Dave and Jim, were now two thousand miles away on the other side of a big, dead ball of rock. And then there was me. With the moon in the way, I couldn’t talk to Dave or Jim, or Earth. I was the most isolated human in existence. I’d be on my own for three days.
It would have been great for all three of us to go down to the lunar surface. It was an exciting time for Dave and Jim, and it would have been fun for me, too. But I was happy where I was. In fact, it was my favorite part of the flight; I had that amazing spacecraft all to myself. We’d been cooped up together so closely, I enjoyed stretching out. Plus now I really got to fly. Like a test pilot checking out a new airplane, I would gain stick-and-rudder time in this enhanced version of the command and service module.
I didn’t feel lonely or isolated. I’d grown up able to take care of myself and had become a single-seat fighter pilot. I was much more comfortable flying by myself than with others. In fact, I most enjoyed the back side of the moon, where Houston couldn’t get hold of me on the radio. I was fascinated by what I was seeing and happy that Dave and Jim had landed safely—but glad to be rid of them for a while, too.
I was also going to be intensely busy. I was my own solo science mission now, with my own CapCom so my work was not confused with Dave and Jim’s. I’d already begun turning on some SIM bay instruments as soon as we were in lunar orbit. But now, with Falcon gone, I could really focus on my science tasks. I turned the spacecraft to aim the SIM bay at the lunar surface.
I had a meticulously choreographed three days ahead of me. The spacecraft would be in sunshine, in shadow, in and out of radio contact with Earth. I needed to use the sextant, the windows, and the SIM bay, each of which would need to be pointed in different directions for different tasks. But I couldn’t just turn the spacecraft any time I felt like it: my fuel was precious, and finite.
I extended the mass spectrometer on a large boom, trying to sniff out any hint of lunar atmosphere or escaping volcanic gas. Scientists particularly thought that areas of lunar sunrises and sunsets might concentrate stray gases. They would be extremely tenuous, and that is where we ran into trouble. The spectrometer mostly picked up particles that we brought from Earth. We’d sprayed clouds of urine along our flight path all the way to the moon, and these urine dumps continued in lunar orbit. My frozen pee is probably sprinkled all over the moon. Add rocket engine exhaust, and it is no wonder our mass spectrometer had trouble finding anything else.
In another effort to get away from the effects of the spacecraft, I also deployed the gamma-ray spectrometer on a large boom, to search for radiation emitted by the lunar surface. I activated other instruments to look for X-rays, plus alpha particles such as radon which volcanic cracks in the moon might emit. If I found them, it could reveal activity deep inside the moon. I even bounced the spacecraft’s radio signal off the moon and back to Earth, which gave us more details of the surface composition.
I often needed to control the spacecraft to keep it steadily curving around the moon, so that the panoramic camera could look straight down and take clear shots. If I were out of place, the camera would only capture blurry photographs as the landscape sped past below. I was flying over uncharted parts of the moon’s far side, so I wanted to get great shots.
The camera was a modified version of the device used by the U-2 spy plane and air force spy satellites. It was now obsolete, so NASA could use it. That camera was a phenomenal instrument—the lens and film moved together in one precise motion to image a huge swath of landscape. Using more than a mile of film, I took over fifteen hundred photos, capturing details only a few feet across. When we returned to Earth I found I’d even captured the shadow of Falcon on the moon and the disturbed lunar dust around the spacecraft where Dave and Jim had walked.
The military had placed one condition on our use of the camera. So there was no question of any international incidents, I was prohibited from pointing it at the Soviet Union. This was nonsense—from a quarter of a million miles away, the best image I would have captured was a fuzzy continent. But it had been a spy camera, so the diplomats had to be satisfied.