Jim waited for me at the hatch. “Would you like to get hold of it?” I asked with a laugh as I passed him the film. Jim tethered it inside, released the tether attaching me to it, and I was free to float back down again. It was all going so simply. If I had known that Jim, now blocking the hatch, had heart problems, I may have felt much less secure. If he’d had a heart attack at that moment, we’d all have been in danger.
But Jim was okay. While Dave stowed the panoramic camera film deeper in the cabin, I floated back down the side of the spacecraft. “Beautiful job, Al baby!” Karl Henize radioed from Earth. “Remember, there is no hurry up there at all.”
“Roger, Karl,” I replied as I grabbed the handrail again. “I’m enjoying it!”
I floated back down the SIM bay, much faster this time. I’d been asked to look at one of the panoramic camera’s sensors. It hadn’t worked well during the mission, and the engineers on Earth wondered if there was perhaps a crack or contamination in the lens. I floated over it and peered in. “There’s nothing obscuring the field of view. The glass is not cracked,” I reported. “It’s perfectly clear.” Engineers would later find that the problem with the sensor wasn’t with the lens after all, but the signal.
I also had a look at the mass spectrometer. We’d had trouble with its boom, and when I peered at it closely I could see it hadn’t completely retracted, a problem that seemed to happen only when the equipment was in shadow. It had been too cold to work correctly. I could explain exactly what the problem was, a luxury mission control rarely enjoyed with instrumentation on the outside of a spacecraft.
It was time to remove the mapping camera film cassette and bring that back inside, too. This time the cover didn’t cooperate, and I had to twist and pull hard three or four times before it came away. But after that, it was simple. I pulled the mapping camera film out and floated it back over to Jim, who grabbed it and unhooked the tether from me.
As we did this, I saw one of the most amazing sights of my life. “Jim, you look absolutely fantastic against that moon back there,” I exclaimed. “That is really a most unbelievable, remarkable thing!”
Jim was perfectly framed by the enormous moon right behind him. It looked as big as the spacecraft, and was dramatically lit by the sun, emphasizing the rugged craters. I could even see myself, floating in space, reflected in Jim’s visor. It could have been the most famous photo in the space program, if I’d been allowed to take a camera out of the spacecraft.
I’d argued for carrying one, but the mission planners had worried I’d be busy enough. Now, I really wished I’d had one. Not just for the photo of Jim. I could also have shown them what was wrong with the mass spectrometer instead of just describing it. And there was something else I spotted which would have been good to document: the thrusters on the side of the service module had bubbled and burned the module surface when they fired. We’d never been able to see this before, and it wasn’t good. It hadn’t damaged anything vital that I could see, but I guessed the engineers would want this problem fixed before the next mission.
Well, if I didn’t have a camera, I could at least take a look at where I was. After all, twelve people would walk on the moon during Apollo, but only three would make a deep-space EVA. I would forever be the first, and to this day I hold the record for floating in space farther away from Earth than any other human.
I realized I had a unique viewpoint: I could see the entire moon if I looked in one direction. Turning my head, I could see the entire Earth. The view is impossible to see on Earth or on the moon. I had to be far enough away from both. In all of human history, no one had been able to see what I could just by turning my head. It was incredible.
My major tasks outside were done. It had been so simple, I was amazed. I’d practiced so much back on Earth that my spacewalk went by very fast, so fast, I couldn’t believe it was already over. When mission control asked if I had any other general comments on the SIM bay before coming back in, I took the opportunity to make a third and final float down to the mapping camera to see if I could work out why it had jammed. I did a cartwheel motion on the handrail, examining the camera from many angles. With the sun angle so low, it wasn’t easy to inspect. In the vacuum of space the shadows on the spacecraft were a deep, impenetrable black. The camera cast a dark shadow, and I couldn’t see anything jamming it in place. It was time to float back inside.
I carefully pulled the hatch closed. It swung in smoothly and latched easily.
Right away, I wished I had spent more time out there just looking around. We had plenty of time. Those film canisters with their priceless images were now safely inside the spacecraft. But I could have soaked in the scene a little more, just for myself. I would also have liked to have floated all the way down to the base of the spacecraft to examine the engine bell. But I know mission control wouldn’t have liked that.
If I couldn’t take photos outside myself—and Jim had not taken any stills of me either—I knew that at least the fuzzy TV camera and the far sharper 16mm movie camera should have picked up some spectacular images. But I was wrong. The 16mm camera, we learned later, had jammed. It had captured only one frame showing me floating away.
I teased Dave and Jim about this when we got back to Earth. You guys have hundreds of photos walking on the moon, I joked, and I only have one shot of me doing my spacewalk. And is it of my head? No. It’s a photo of my spacesuited ass. Thanks a lot!
When I returned to Earth, to make up for the lack of photos, National Geographic magazine commissioned the talented artist Pierre Mion to paint my view of Jim framed by the moon. After I described what I had seen to him, Pierre did a wonderful job capturing it, the next best thing to being there. The image was printed in the magazine. I recommend you search out a copy and look for the little image of me reflected in Jim’s helmet visor.
We gradually brought the cabin pressure back up, until it was safe to remove our spacesuits. Jim’s heart had held out just fine. And Dave was delighted with the EVA. “You’ve done good,” he exclaimed with a laugh. “You’ve made a lot of people back there very happy!”
Karl Henize soon added more praise from Houston. “The guys down here would like to send up their warmest congratulations,” he radioed. “You sure made it look easy up there.”
I brought some of the SIM bay experiments back online, this time to point them at a mysterious X-ray source in a faraway binary star system. We continued to run other experiments, such as taking ultraviolet photos out of the window. We all felt more relaxed and happier—the key parts of our mission were now completed. I still needed to navigate our spacecraft, but other than that we simply prepared to get back to Earth. We chatted about how, compared to earlier flights, lunar landing missions had much less room for error.
“This is sort of an all-or-nothing kind of operation, you know?” Dave remarked to me, when Houston wasn’t listening in. “It really is,” I agreed. “All your eggs in one basket, boy. I got to thinking about that after you guys left for your descent. Once you start that descent, man, that’s it … It’s all hanging out from there on.”
With most of the danger now over, we could ponder the amazing events of the last few days. “I wish I would have tried running alongside the rover at the same pace,” Jim chimed in. “It would’ve been neat to do a few things like that.”