Our planet was the only place with color—distant blues, browns, and greens—all focused in one tiny globe. Ethereal and small, it shone in the deep black of space, much brighter than the full moon appears from Earth. Photos of Earth from the moon have a flat quality, but looking at it with my own eyes Earth felt alive and captivating. It seemed to beckon like a warm refuge. More than a gorgeous sight, it was home.
Earth had seemed limitless when I had walked out on launch morning. Now it was a faraway sphere, so small that it was hard to believe everything I had done, everything I had seen, had happened down there. I now felt apart from Earthly affairs in a way I can’t describe. Perhaps you have to go to the moon to feel it. But I could see that Earth was truly finite. That distant ball could only support so many people and contain so many resources. Once it is gone, it’s gone. If humans didn’t unite and organize their lives, I pondered, we’d be in trouble. Our parochial interests, whether religious, economic, or ethnic, are all best served by trying to keep our tiny island in space livable. In fact, to live any other way suddenly felt like insanity to me.
It sounds cliché to write, and perhaps a little surprising coming from a military officer, but the experience was mind altering. And when I experienced the feeling for myself, I knew in my gut it was the truth. Ironically, I had journeyed all this way to explore the moon, and yet I felt I was discovering far more about our home planet, our Earth.
As the days passed I watched the Earth change phases just as the moon does from Earth. When I arrived, the Earth was about half full, but it gradually diminished to a delicate crescent. Only when I looked back at the Earth rising did I understand how far I had traveled. I was isolated, with only the radio to stay in touch. If I thought about it too much, it was almost a little scary—not the isolation, but the sheer distance. We had a long journey back.
Farouk and I had worked on something special for every time I saw the Earth rise. I’d noticed that, to the public, guys flying around the moon seemed kind of ho-hum, nothing exciting. How could I make it interesting? I talked about it with Farouk, and we decided the best way might be for me to say something interesting every time I came back into radio contact. We came up with a phrase that we thought might grab everyone’s attention: “Hello Earth, greetings from Endeavour.” Farouk wrote it out for me phonetically in nine foreign languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, German, Spanish, and even Russian. Along with English, I’d have ten different ways to say hello to the citizens of our planet and make the point that the Apollo program was for the whole Earth, not just America.
It worked. I tried to transmit a different variation on every solo orbit, and the world press paid a little more attention.
I had brief opportunities each day to talk to Dave and Jim down on the surface. It sounded like they were toiling through an impressive science exploration schedule of their own. I could even look down into the deep rille while passing over the Hadley plain and see enormous rocks in the canyon at the exact same moment Dave and Jim were parked at the rim in their rover.
“Pretty spectacular up beside that mountain, I bet,” I asked Dave one time.
“Oh man, it was super, just super,” he replied. “We’ve got some great pictures for you.”
“I hope I’ve got some good ones for you, too,” I happily replied. It was great to hear from them.
But I guess Jim was feeling grungy from all that moon dust. “Hey, Al, throw my soap down, will you? And my spoon,” he radioed. “I really need my soap.”
“Don’t mind if I use it, do you?” I responded, teasing him a little.
“Save me a little bit!” he pleaded in return.
Dave and I then bantered about saving the soap until we were all back in lunar orbit again. The conversation was lighthearted, but once again we were reassuring ourselves that everything would go to plan. Falcon would lift off and rendezvous with me in space. We were going to survive and see each other again.
I looked for Dave and Jim every time I flew across the landing site. It was never easy to find them, and usually I only caught a quick reflection from Falcon before I lost them. And yet I felt closer to them than the people on Earth I was talking to all the time. It was reassuring to chat briefly every day and confirm I was still there for their return trip. “Save us some food!” Jim quipped as I sailed overhead.
While they were roaming the surface, I was hanging in weightlessness, so I needed to exercise. I had a small cylindrical device called the Exergym. A nylon rope wove through a series of friction pulleys, so when I pulled on it the friction created tension that I could exercise against. It was a great idea, but the damn thing didn’t work.
We hadn’t even reached the moon when the nylon started to fray. It heated up when we used the device and stretched the rope into useless threads. This was puzzling, because crews before us had taken it and said it worked fine. I suspected they hadn’t used it much.
I still needed to exercise, so I improvised. With the center couch removed, I could hold on to the two struts in the middle of the spacecraft and push against them. I could do knee bends and run in place with my legs freewheeling in air. I felt my heart rate rise and could watch the attitude indicator and see the entire spacecraft rocking back and forward.
I’d been looking at the Littrow region of the moon a lot, because scientists were curious about the darker soils there. Were they evidence of volcanic activity? On one pass, I spotted something unusual. “There are a whole series of small, almost irregular-shaped cones,” I reported, “and they have a very distinct dark mantling … It looks like a whole field of small cinder cones down there.”
Unlike craters created by meteorites, cinder cones build up as debris is pushed out from a volcanic vent. I was seeing features that met the definitions I had studied.
“They’re somewhat irregular in shape,” I continued. “They’re not all round … and they have a very dark halo, which is mostly symmetric, but not always, around them individually.”
Mission planners had told me I wouldn’t be able to see features that small. But that wasn’t true. If I stared hard at a fixed point, it was tough to resolve. But if I swept my eyes around the general area, I could pick up a lot more detail.
As I described these funnels surrounded by dark rings, the geologists back on Earth grew excited. So much so that the last Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, was targeted for the Littrow region. That mission didn’t reach any cinder cones. Instead they found an impact crater that had punched through the surface, throwing up an unusually dark ring of subsurface volcanic ash and bright orange glass beads. Good enough.
My work days were busy, but I was floating around so I didn’t burn up much energy. The ground had assigned me seven or eight hours to sleep. I found I only needed three or four. It wasn’t because I was nervous; it was more because I was excited. I had a lot to do. I didn’t bother telling mission control I was awake. I used some of the time to finish up experiments and take photographs, but I also had hours of free time around the moon to just look out, marvel, and think.
I orbited alone in a detached, eerie silence, my spacecraft on a smooth trajectory. When I flew jets back on Earth, I was used to little bumps as I cruised through air and the roar of the engine. Here there was stillness and peace. It was more like riding in a hot-air balloon, drifting with no sensation of motion. I felt like an imaginary alien might when visiting Earth in a UFO, that this was not my planet. I was not from here, and perhaps not even supposed to be here. I was spying on an alien place.