“Well, I’ll tell you, I’m sure glad we got rid of that clothesline operation,” I added, thinking again of the original plan to bring in the film cassettes during my spacewalk. I’d loved every minute of my EVA. “It’s really a ball when you get all suited up, get cooled off, and get the hatch open.”
I thought some more about the moon. It had been an incredible place to visit and a wonderful mystery to try and unlock, but it was scarred and dead. And what can the living truly learn from the dead? Earth, growing a little larger in our windows, looked beautiful and full of life. It was time to sleep once again, with a smile on my face. I was going home.
When we awoke for the twelfth day of the mission, we still had more than one hundred and fifty thousand miles to go before we’d reach Earth. Even though we sped along at more than four thousand feet per second, we had another day and a half of travel ahead of us. We were truly a tiny sliver of metal crossing this huge, dark void.
Despite the distance, we never felt alone. Houston continued to send us new changes for the flight plan, along with updated instructions for our science experiments. They reported that the weather looked good for our splashdown zone; I wouldn’t have to redirect our course. Dave stayed relaxed and happy. “Yesterday, we finally got to catch our breath,” he told mission control. “The hours are long, but the accommodations are palatial!”
Karl Henize radioed an unexpected update on one of the SIM bay experiments from its chief scientist. “On the gamma-ray experiment, Dr. Arnold reports that Al Worden probably performed the first recorded repair of a scientific instrument in space, because earlier in that day he’d begun to experience some problem with excess noise in the gamma-ray experiment. And when Al went out in the EVA—we don’t know what happened there—but at the end of the EVA, the gamma ray cleared up and has been doing beautifully ever since. You must have given it a pretty good kick there, Al.”
I didn’t recall accidentally kicking it, but I was glad to hear it worked again. “Not only is he a plumber, he’s an electrician as well!” Dave quipped.
Houston also reported with delight that a special mirrored device left on the lunar surface by Dave and Jim was bouncing laser beams back to Earth perfectly. The TV camera left at Hadley plain was less successful. It had been panning around the landing site when it suddenly stopped working. “Would you like us to go back up and check it for you?” Dave asked with a grin.
“Knew you were going to ask!” Joe Allen laughed in response.
Joe read us the morning news. “The government reports today the latest figures in the nation’s unemployment problem, and one private economist predicts the jobless rates probably will show still another rise.” I thought briefly about the Apollo program and the layoffs of all the amazing workers we’d collaborated with. There were only two more missions ready to go to the moon after ours. The moon landings would soon be over. A lot of people would lose their jobs, and many astronauts would sit around with nothing to fly.
I still wasn’t completely sure this would be my only spaceflight. I felt much more certain that it would be my only flight to the moon. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have spent more time in those last days enjoying the view and weightlessness, as I would never have them again. But I really only thought about the things I needed to do to ensure we returned safely home.
“Al, the way people talk down here, they’re going to give you a medal,” Karl Henize radioed, impressed by my continuing navigational accuracy.
“Congratulations, Al, you’ve just been voted to receive a second Vasco da Gama award,” Bob Parker on our support crew added. Thanks, guys, I thought to myself. That meant a lot to hear.
We had time to give a press conference in space, answering questions submitted by reporters. I enjoyed the conversation because it made us feel even closer to home. I was asked about the highlights of the flight so far. One, I said, was the engine burn into lunar orbit, when I saw the moon up close for the first time. The other was the successful burn out of lunar orbit, meaning we’d come home. That about summed it up—amazing exploration and staying alive.
After some other discussion about Apollo 15 “already being described as one of the great events in the history of science”—that was nice—they asked me about my spacewalk the day before.
“As far as what I felt like when I went out there,” I explained, “it was sort of like walking on stage at your high school dinner dance or something. We opened the hatch and it was pitch black, and as soon as we got out, the sun was beating down on everything, and it looked like a very large floodlight on a stage. And then putting the TV camera out on the door just added a little bit more to that sort of unreal feeling that it was time to get out on the stage and do something.”
“If you could see the size of the film magazines that Al brought in yesterday from those cameras,” Dave added, “you’d see that we have indeed at least a great deal of data on film alone.”
“Hopefully, we’ve added to our store of information about the moon and about ourselves,” I concluded, “greater than the capital that was spent on the flight itself.”
Before we turned the camera off, I flashed a quick victory sign at the viewers, as I had done on the way to the launchpad. We would be successful on the flight, much like going into combat, and we were sure of winning. Now we had succeeded in our mission, I made the gesture for a second reason—as a peace symbol. When looking at Earth as a whole planet, that seemed appropriate.
We spent much of the day stowing all the items in Endeavour’s cabin. The spacecraft’s center of gravity could not be off balance during our carefully planned plunge back through Earth’s atmosphere the next day. We handled the moon rock sample containers with particular care, until the space beneath our couches was jammed with carefully arranged white bags. It was time to settle in for my last sleep in space.
CHAPTER 11
CELEBRATION
I was jolted awake by a Hawaiian war chant piped over the radio by mission control. Back in Houston, the flight surgeons saw my heart rate shoot up as the music blasted me into alertness. “That got everybody up!” Dave retorted. But the tune was appropriate, as only a few hours remained until we planned to splash down in the Pacific Ocean, a couple of hundred miles north of the Hawaiian Islands.
“We just got our first view of the Earth this morning,” Dave reported, “and can you believe it’s getting larger and it’s getting smaller? We see just a very, very thin sliver of a very large round ball.”
Earth didn’t seem to grow much in our window until that day. Like any massive but distant object, it doesn’t grow much as you draw close until the last few moments, when it looms up at you. In these last hours, the crescent Earth grew fast against the backdrop of space. It was clear we would hit it, and my calculations showed we would strike our target at the right place and the right angle.
I shut off the SIM bay experiments for the last time, retracted the booms, and powered down the experiments one by one. They had done an outstanding job, and in a few hours’ time they would become shooting stars streaking through Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, abandoned. But the data they had returned would keep scientists busy for years.
Houston, cryptically, asked both Dave and Jim to keep their heart rate monitors on all the way through reentry. They were not concerned about mine. Dave complied, still unaware of the reason.