I’d fallen in love again, too. I hoped this lady would want to come with me to California. But her life was in Houston, so she didn’t. With much regret, we ended the relationship. It was another blow to add to my deep sense of failure.
Heading down the street to leave my neighborhood, I had to pass the space center. They didn’t want me anymore. No one had said good-bye. It was as if I were a ghost. Some of them, like Deke, never spoke to me again.
I’d arrived in Houston six years earlier feeling I’d gained the greatest job in the world. I left wondering if life were still worth living.
CHAPTER 13
REDEMPTION
To the outside world, it appeared that NASA had happily transferred me. But when I arrived at Ames Research Center, it seemed evident that I still had to go through a period of penance for daring to stay with the agency. Hans Mark assigned me to a tiny office at the very end of an enormous hangar, with crumbling paint, smudged walls and one little window that looked out on to the hangar floor. It hadn’t been used, or cleaned, in years. No one knew I was there. My boss in the airborne science division insisted that I give him everything I wrote for him to sign and pass up the chain of command. I sat in that office day after day and felt more alone than ever.
The center announced that they would host a meeting on space shuttle simulation work, and “an astronaut” would be in attendance. Unlike at Houston, this wasn’t an everyday occurrence, and a number of Ames workers grew excited. It turned out to be Karl Henize, who had yet to fly in space. It felt peculiar to see Karl lauded as the astronaut. No one at Ames seemed to think of me that way.
But the hangar was a good place for Hans to bury me while all the media interest about the covers ebbed. And the work was really interesting. It was a combination of the science experiments I had come to enjoy on Apollo 15 and rewarding flying time in a variety of aircraft. The airborne science group had a couple of Lear jets and an enormous Douglas DC-8. But they were dwarfed by the C-141 Starlifter. This specially modified airplane had a huge infrared telescope built in, and our research pilots flew it to the highest possible altitude, rolled up an opening on the side, and wearing oxygen masks, helped astronomers with their discoveries. We modified a Lear jet to do the same, installing a smaller infrared camera in the side. My workday often began at two in the morning, but the night flying was beautiful.
In December 1972 I did sneak back to the Cape for the launch of Apollo 17, the very last manned mission to the moon. It was a bittersweet moment. If it hadn’t been for those covers, I would have been strapping the crew into the spacecraft. Instead, no longer an astronaut, I watched as just another spectator. I went to a couple of the parties in Cocoa Beach, and Deke Slayton was there, but I didn’t try to speak to him. I felt a little awkward around him.
After about a year of hiding me in the deepest bowels of NASA, Hans promoted me. He quietly moved me over to an administration building and put me in charge of the futures forecasting division. Hans gave me forty talented people to manage, each of whom could look at cutting-edge science and engineering developments and report on how they might fit into NASA’s future plans. It was exciting work. Similar forecasting groups had tried to work in Washington, D.C., but they had found too much political pressure there to make objective reports. Out in California, away from the spotlight, technologies were much easier to assess fairly.
Hans was friendly, supportive, and seemed impressed with my work. After a couple of years, he put me in charge of the entire airborne sciences group. In addition to the astronomy work, we flew the Lear jets in zero-G parabolas to perform biological measurements. It felt nice to be weightless again. I also had three Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance airplanes. The U-2 had formerly been used as a spy plane to overfly the Soviet Union. We flew ours over agricultural areas instead. NASA used satellites to examine land use and gather crucial information about global food supplies. We proved that U-2s could provide information that was both clearer and cheaper.
Ames was a fascinating place—full of smart people who did impressive work, from cutting-edge flying to searching for evidence of alien life. But I was always curious about what was taking place in Houston. Dee O’Hara kept me in the loop. She never judged me or abandoned me. And a couple of years after I left, she was also growing restless. With the moon landings over there was little to do in Houston, she told me. The space shuttle was delayed; it would be years before it flew. Why not join me at Ames, I suggested? There was plenty going on there in the field of life sciences, her specialty. I helped set up an interview with our medical operations team, and they loved her.
I flew to Houston and drove Dee and her belongings—including her dog—out to California. It was the middle of the energy crisis, so we drove as long as we could, then waited in long lines at the gas stations until we could scrounge more fuel. It was a fun adventure, and we eventually made it to Ames. Dee has never left. She still works there as one of NASA’s longest-serving employees—and one of my best friends.
In the meantime, many officials who had honored our Apollo 15 crew left government office in disgrace. In October of 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned under a cloud of bribery allegations. Nixon needed a new vice president. And he chose Gerald Ford, the Michigan congressman who had helped escort me to the podium for my celebratory speech to Congress. Now someone needed to replace Ford.
Two other congressmen from Michigan called me to Washington to talk with them. Would I consider moving back to Michigan to run for his seat as a Republican, they asked? The next thing I knew they took me down the corridor to talk it over with Ford. He seemed keen for me to give it a shot and promised his support. I said I’d think about it.
Ironies were piling on ironies, I thought. I’d been honored by Congress, then questioned by them for wrongdoing. I’d been honored by a vice president who was then forced out for wrongdoing, and now I was being asked to help replace him. At least, I thought, this was a sign that the stain on my character following the covers incident must be lifting. People were thinking of me again in relation to the Apollo 15 adventure, not that damn little package of envelopes.
In the end, I turned the offer down. I would have had to give up my military pension, and I was only a couple of years away from the required two decades in the service. Plus, I wasn’t convinced I could win. The seat was traditionally a very safe Republican stronghold. No Democrat had won there since 1912. But times were changing: Nixon was plagued with his own scandals. Sure enough, in the spring of 1974 a Democrat won Ford’s seat in a huge upset, running on an anti-Nixon platform. It was a foreshadowing of further trouble that year for Nixon and the Republicans, which culminated in Nixon’s resignation that summer. Less than a year after my conversation with him, Gerald Ford was president.
I felt sorry for Richard Nixon. He’d been wonderful to me and my family. At the same time, I recognized he had brought his troubles on himself through behind-the-scenes deals and had been caught. But in reality I didn’t have too much time for national politics. I was more interested in what was happening to Dave Scott.
It seemed that Dave had shrugged off the covers scandal; he was promoted to important positions within the heart of NASA. By 1973 he was heading a technical delegation to the Soviet Union, working on ways for Apollo to dock with a Soviet spacecraft. This was not only a great technical assignment, but also important international diplomacy. Dave was soon promoted again to deputy director of NASA’s Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. This was a coveted assignment, since cutting-edge experimental flying took place there.
I tried not to feel sorry for myself. I’d landed on my feet, after all, and was doing interesting work. But it was hard for me not to make comparisons. Jim and I had stuck by our commander as loyal crewmembers. We’d been told to get the hell out of town. Dave got to stay—not only stay, but he was promoted. It was tough not to feel like I’d been screwed over.
I had been very naïve. I had believed all of those pep talks about acting as a crew. It was so deeply ingrained in me to follow my commander—in the military and in NASA—that it took me years to realize it had all just been bullshit. What had that loyalty got me? Nothing.
But it could be worse, I thought. I could have been Jim.
Jim’s ministry had been a phenomenal success. He asked me to join the board of his foundation, and I agreed. He was in demand worldwide to talk about the moon and his religious experiences. His schedule wasn’t unlike the world tour we’d taken after Apollo 15. I heard Jim’s speeches, but I didn’t always agree with his viewpoint. For years he tried to make an analogy between the twelve people who walked on the moon, and Jesus’s twelve disciples. He repeatedly tried to gather the twelve astronauts for a religious retreat, believing they were somehow specially chosen. Of course, the other twelve of us who had flown to the moon without landing found that a little strange. Jim never did gather his twelve moon walkers in one place.
Perhaps it was the stress of the nonstop travel, or possibly the aftereffects of the physical demands of our flight. Whatever the reason, Jim had a heart attack in the spring of 1973.
Jim called me from his hospital bed. He’d scheduled a large number of speaking events and didn’t want to let those people down. Could I fill in for him?