Dan Snow's History Hit - In Conversation with Astronaut Al Worden

Episode Date: November 22, 2020

Al Worden was an American astronaut and engineer who was the Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is a very special podcast, one of my favourite podcasts I've ever, ever broadcast. It's a repeat of a podcast I recorded back a couple years ago now when the legendary, the legendary Alfred Warden was in the UK. Now very, very sadly he died on the 18th of March this year in 2020. He was a fighter pilot. He was a test pilot. And he was also a NASA pilot. He flew to the moon with the Apollo missions. He was on Apollo 15. And he told me what that was like. It was one of those experiences that I will never forget. In fact, I will take it to the grave and I've told my kids and everybody else I know all about it. And the best thing about having a podcast is you guys can all listen to it too. He flew to the moon on Apollo 15 with David Scott and James Irwin.

The two of them then went in the lunar module and landed on the moon's surface. Al Worden spent three days alone in the command module. In the process of that, he became the individual who's travelled furthest from any other human being in the history of mankind, a distinction that he still holds. He took lots of extraordinary photographs of the moon. And then on the way, this is the most amazing, on the way back, he performed a spacewalk, but not one of these spacewalks that you see in the International Space Station that is in orbit around the Earth. He performed a deep space spacewalk.

that is in orbit around the Earth. He performed a deep space spacewalk. So he could see the whole of the Moon and the Earth at the same time as he did his spacewalk in deep space. It is the spacewalk to this day that has taken place furthest from the Earth. As NASA and SpaceX have combined this week to send astronauts into space together for the first time in a while, I thought it'd be nice to rerun this podcast with the brilliant Al Worden. You can watch the documentary I made with him and many other documentaries at History Hit TV. It's like a Netflix for history. You head over to historyhit.tv,

use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and then you get a month for free and your second month is one pound, euro or dollar. Please, please go and check that out. But in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Al Worden. May he rest in peace. You were a fighter pilot. Correct. What gave you the first inkling that you could apply for this space program? Actually, it was when NASA had an application program. I was following my career as a test pilot and teaching at the test pilot school. Never gave NASA a thought, but they had an application program that came out in, I think, December of 65. I thought, what the heck, I'll just throw my name in and see what happens, because I

had lots and lots of squares filled, if you will, by then. So I threw my name in. There were 830 of us that were qualified by the minimum standards, and they picked 19 of us. The paperwork study or the paperwork review of our careers up to that point, like efficiency reports, health, our physical reports, and that kind of thing, health, our physical reports, and that kind of thing. That cut the list down to 75. That 75 went to an Air Force hospital in San Antonio, Texas to get physical exams. And then from there, that was cut down to 50. That 50 went to Houston and did written and audible. We actually met a board and answered questions and that kind of thing. And out of that, they picked 19 of us. But I never gave it a thought before then. I knew there was a space program.

Actually, I had entered my name back in 1964 when they had a selection. But I was already committed to coming to England to go to the Empire Test Pilot School. So they said, no, no, no, we can't touch that. So I missed that one. And then I left Empire Test Pilot School, went back to Edwards to teach at the Test Pilot School, and they had another selection program. It was kind of interesting because the age limit was 35, and I was rapidly getting to 35. And I'm thinking, ah, I'm just never going to make it, you know. But they had the selection program while I was still early. I had just turned 34.

And so I put my name in. And lo and behold, I got in. Why did they pick you? Well, I think a lot of it was because I had a pretty extensive engineering background. I had three master's degrees from the University of Michigan. I only needed three more hours of study to get a master's in math, so I was kind of well up on the academic side. As a matter of fact, I came to the Empire Test Pilot School

because of my academic background. They sent me here because of that, and I ended up doing very well at the Empire Test Pilot School. And then I got selected to come back early. I was supposed to go to Bedford on a two-year tour when I left the Empire Test Pilot School. But they cut all that short and brought me back so I could teach at the Test Pilot School. But were they looking for CV? Were they looking for boxes ticked?

Or were they looking for character? Oh, I think it's a little of each. When we met the board down in Houston, the board was comprised of like three astronauts and a couple of the support type crews, the management people. I guess there were maybe 10 people on the board. And they talked to all of us. And I happened to have several friends on the board that certainly didn't hurt. Mike Collins was probably my biggest supporter on the board that certainly didn't hurt. Mike Collins was probably my biggest supporter on the board, and I think he was very instrumental in making sure that I got selected. I think I would have been selected without him because, as it turned out, I ended up

pretty high on the list. Because of my academic and test pilot background, I had all of that that they were looking for. I was under the age limit. I was under the height limit. I was in good physical shape. I was 2010. My eyes were 2010 at the time. I was the perfect candidate that they needed. And we had, in my group of 19, well, let me back up just a little bit. The minimum requirement was 1, thousand hours of bachelor's degree in one of the engineering sciences and a thousand hours of flight time.

Under 35, under six feet tall, it could pass the physical. Those were the kind of the minimum requirements. And the way it turned out, once they selected the 19, I would say the average academic level was at least a master's degree. We had like two PhDs in my group. There was only maybe two guys out of the 19 that were not test pilots. So everybody kind of fit in that mold of academic background and test pilot training. There are lots of others who are minimally qualified, but it's like any job you go to. You can apply for any job, and there might be 100 people that apply for it, but there are only two or three that are ahead or above the others that are going to be pretty much the target

group. Al, as you're talking, I'm feeling worse and worse about myself. Every single one of those minimum requirements you just mentioned, I now fail. Every single one. So thanks very much for that. No, don't feel bad about that. You didn't want to be, you're too tall anyway. That's what I mean. Okay. So why did you, you applied more than once. I mean, you were pumped about this. Was there a feeling that this was the way everything was going? If you want to reach the pinnacle of your career, it involved going to space. Well, we felt back in the day that being an astronaut was the pinnacle of a flying career. And probably the greatest day I ever had in my life was when I got a call from Deke Slayton,

who was one of the original seven guys, who was the director of flight crew operations. And he called me on the phone and said, we'd like you to come down in Houston and join us. And that was probably the greatest day of my life. And I felt that way until I walked into the astronaut office down in Houston. And I was given a ration of truth. The guys who were there who'd made flights didn't take well to us. Oh, really? Well, we're new guys.

We don't know anything. And so we're the gophers. We go get coffee and we sweep the floors and we do that kind of thing when you first get there. And it's like everything you do in life. You go to school and then you go to college. And when you go to your first time in college, when you go as a freshman or whatever,

you feel so overwhelmed because all these other people are all up there, juniors and seniors, and they're way ahead of you. It's very intimidating until you've been there a while and you get adjusted to all that and you say, hey, I'm as good as them, so I can do okay. I felt the same way when I went to West Point. West Point. I was in awe of the other cadets who went to West Point at the same time. Until I'd been there a couple of months, and I realized, hey, those guys are just like me. There's no big deal there. Just do your thing, keep your nose clean, work hard, and you'll be okay. And I was. So the astronaut office was the same kind of thing. You get there, and you are the slime on the floor to the guys who have already flown. And it takes a while to get, we really spent a lot of time in the classroom that first year. And once you get through that and you get assigned as a support crew engineering, I was support crew engineering on Apollo 9. And my responsibility was a docking tunnel between the lunar module

and the command module. And I did that. And gradually, the older guys begin to accept you. And once you get assigned to a backup crew, then you're part of the group. You're not really an astronaut until you've made a flight. But that's my question. You can train on your fighter jet. You can train even if you weren't in combat, you could do very realistic training simulations. How do you train for a mission into space without actually going

into space? How do you create realistic training? Well, yeah, it's very different from flying an airplane. If I'm training in an airplane, I get in the front seat and the instructor gets in the back seat. You go up and you fly and you do all kinds of things. You come back and you make a bunch of landings and you learn how to land it and the instructor talks you through it. And then you just do that. That's how you train is you just fly and like an hour and a half at a time and you make landings and you do this and do that. Spaceflight, first time you go is it. You only got that one shot. So you have to train in a different way. You cannot fly an Apollo spacecraft with an instructor to find out how to fly it, right? You got to do it the first time.

So we had simulators that were absolutely spectacular. The only thing they lacked was the motion. And we spent countless hours, over a three-year period training for my flight, I spent about 1,500 hours in a simulator. Now, if you figure that a normal working year is 2,000 hours, which is kind of generally accepted, 500 hours a year, that's 25% of your time you're sitting in a simulator. The rest of the time you're in a classroom,

you're doing geology field trips, you're flying, you're doing this, you're doing that, making public appearances around. But that simulation is the biggest block of time you spend getting ready for a flight. And those simulators were absolutely superb. I don't think there was anything except for the lack of gravity in flight. But everything else was perfectly as we had trained in a simulator. How did it feel making backup? Were you pleased to do that or were you sad you didn't make the full team?

Oh, as a backup, that's the step. That's your step up. You have to be assigned to a backup before you can get assigned to a flight. That was the normal rotation in the program back then. As a matter of fact, I was support crew on nine, backup on 12, prime crew on 15. So it's three flights down the line is how that would go back in the day. Once you get assigned to a backup, unless you mess up some way, when that crew that you're backup to has made their flight, then you get announced as the third flight down. So there was 13, 14, and then 15. We got announced in December after Apollo 12 came back.

So we had another year and a half of training to do to get ready for 15. So you kind of knew you were going into space when you were announced as backup. What was the big moment for you? Well, the big moment, of course, you can be backup and you never know. Until you are announced on that crew, the prime crew, there's always a chance that something could change. So the really big time is the time you get told by Deke Slayton, big time is the time you get told by Deke Slayton, we're going to announce publicly next week that you're going to be on a crew of 15. And once they make that public announcement, you know, you're kind of there unless you mess up. You're going to be there. You're going to be okay. And what was that moment like? What was that moment like?

Oh, that was almost as good as getting the call from Deke to say, would you like to come and join us? That's your second big one. The problem is a year and a half away from flight, everything is peachy keen. Can do anything. We're going to max this thing. We're going to kill it. It's going to be a piece of cake. It's going to be easy to do. As you get closer to a flight, you begin to rethink all of that. And it's sort of like the day before the flight, you say to yourself, what the hell am I doing? Why am I here? And then you realize that it would be, it would take a lot more courage to back out of a flight at the last minute than it would be to go. So you strap yourself in and go. You got no choice at that point. So in the week leading up to it, if someone had offered you a way out, would you have taken it? No, no, no, no way. We had developed kind of

what I think of as a far Eastern mentality that making a space flight like we were going to do was much more important than us. There's a bigger calling out there. There's a bigger thing that we're responsible for than just us. So we didn't worry about it. If we didn't come back, you know, there's an old joke about it. If you don't come back from a space flight, at least your name's going to be in the history books forever. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's going to be a lot of, that's going to be a lot of joy for the guy that's there, you know? But I would say we developed a mentality

that was sort of like, I don't care if I don't come back. Is that tough for your families? Because you're basically saying to your families, this means more than you guys. Well, I, well, I was divorced at the time. I was a bachelor. It was kind of, kind of, kind of funny because my two daughters were in mission control during my flight and there are some pictures in Life magazine back in the day that show them sitting in mission control. One of them is sleeping, the other's yawning. So they're not terribly excited about what I'm doing, but you see they're the next generation and they're growing up in a community of all astronauts and astronaut families.

So everybody's kind of in the same boat. And so it's now, it's kind of like a whole home thing to them. They didn't really worry about it too much. It must have been tough saying goodbye to them though. Yeah, it was. It was. It was. But I knew I'd be coming back. I wasn't worried about that. The only thing I have to say about that is that we kind of gave our lives up on launch. have to say about that is that we kind of gave our lives up on launch. We kind of said to ourselves, we're probably not going to come back, but I'm okay with that. I'm comfortable with that, provided we do something that's good. And the second thought that comes right after that is if that happens on our flight, the only thing I'm hoping, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm concerned about is that I don't make a mistake that causes it. You want to make sure that you're not the cause of an accident that costs you your life. Uh, outside of that, if something mechanical happens, if something else

happens, you know, you don't come back, then you don't come back. What was in the buildup, in the training, the final bits of training? What is the thing that you you were you guys were trying to get just right? What is the main area concentrating on? geology You see the first year and a half of training when I was backup crew on 12 I Trained almost exclusively on the equipment the system The command module how to maneuver how to do everything that I need to do on a flight. That's kind of the major part of the training that first year and a half.

The second year and a half, see, I trained for three years for the flight. So the second year and a half after Apollo 12 had flown, we focused on the science that we're going to do. And we studied geology and I did extensive photography training. Geology was kind of split into two pieces. Dave and Jim are going to be on the surface picking up rocks. So their geology was kind of what I'll call microgeology. What does a rock look like? Can you see a crystal in it? Is there, you know, that kind of thing up close and personal. My geology was what I call macrogeology, because I'm looking at large features like impact, meteor impact craters, volcanic activity, lava flows,

kind of observing how the large expanse of the moon's surface was formed. And of course, there were all kinds of discussions going on about that at the time. So our observations helped clear up some of the mysteries about the moon. As an example, one of my primary tasks when I was in orbit by myself was to look for cinder cones. Cinder cones are kind of a last gasp of a volcano when it erupts. It's the light fluff that comes up at the last, and it goes up and then it falls back down,

and it forms a cone over the funnel. And you can see these here on Earth. They're all over. Any place there's volcanic activity, you'll see these things. And I actually saw a field of these. Now, I was told that I probably wouldn't be able to see them because your eye can only distinguish a certain angle. But what I found out was that if I scan the area, like night blindness, if you scan and you don't use, I forget what it's the rods or the cones or whatever, but if I scan the area, then I could pick out small features. And I found this whole field of cinder cones,

and I took some high-resolution pictures of it because I had a fabulous high-resolution camera on board. And when all that data got analyzed back in Houston, they actually changed the landing site for Apollo 17 to go to that area. So those observations were important. So this is the kind of thing, and I took a lot of photography. I could tell you all about the low light level photography that I took, which was the most fascinating thing to me of all. I had a Nikon camera, specially made.

It had a 1.01 lens, which is almost perfect transmission. And I carried film. Not too many of us remember back to the film days. But, you know, when you had a camera that had film in it, you would go out and buy a film that was like ASA 300 or 400, something like that. I had film that was ASA 5000. I could take a picture on a dark night, and it would come out and look like daylight. It was absolutely, Eastman Kodak really went to bat for that.

So I carried this very, very sensitive film in a Nikon camera that had almost perfect transmission through the lens and I took pictures of what we call low light level phenomena. From an astronomical point of view, one of the things that I focused on was a thing called the Gegenschein. Not too many people know the Gegenschein. But beyond Pluto, there is a ring of unconsolidated material that

never coalesced into a planet. And it's small meteors and small asteroids that are out there, and they're floating around, and they're in orbit around the sun. And the only thing you can see, you can't see it itself, but you can see, if you're in the right spot at the right time, you can see a reflection of the sun off that ring back there. And the only place here on Earth you could even have a chance of seeing it is on top of a mountain in Chile.

Well, with this very sensitive film, we figured, yeah, we could get that, and we did. The other thing that we looked at was a Lagrange point. The Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon are equilibrium points. There are three of them off the center line of the Earth and the Moon. One behind the Moon, one behind the Earth, and one in the middle. And then there are two offset. That's L4 and L5. There is a very large organization in the States called the L5 Society and they would really like to utilize L5 for all kinds of things. L5 is a positively stable location in space all by itself. And it's positively stable

because of the rotation of the Earth and the Moon and the Earth and the Moon around the Sun. And that all adds up to make this, if you throw something into it, it'll stay there forever. The idea was that if that is in fact the truth, nobody had ever seen one. I mean, it was all theoretical. If that was the case, then there should be a cloud of dust at L5. Because it's going to collect stuff from, you know, the atmosphere. So I got pictures of L5. And it was there.

The dust was there. Yeah, it was dust. Yeah, a big cloud of dust. L5 would be the perfect place to launch to Mars. See, that's the key to something like that. I think we've all, we've probably all watched Star Trek. And if you remember some of the episodes in Star Trek where they had to come back and resupply and do maintenance work, where did they go? Well, they went to a warehouse or a repair station in space. Had to be L5. So that's what L5 would be good for.

Les, I need to take you back because we're getting too excited here. Let's go back to the launch. How do you get to the rocket for that final trip? Do you walk? Is there a vehicle? How do you get to the rocket for that final trip? Do you walk? Is there a vehicle? How do you get to the rocket on the big day? Oh, okay. Well, we were in crew quarters. We had been in crew quarters for a month in isolation. Why?

Just so you don't get distracted. Okay. Well, if you remember back on Apollo 11 and 12, they put them in quarantine after the flight. And that was because we wanted to make sure that they didn't pick up some bugs or something on the way. On Apollo 13, we had to change the command module pilot out because they suspected Ken Mattingly, who was assigned to that flight, they suspected he had German measles. So they put Jack Swigert in,

Apollo 13. Because of that episode, and they realized in the meantime that we're not bringing any bugs back. So they said, well, you know, we've got to protect these guys to make sure they're okay on launch day. So we went in quarantine a month before the flight. The day of flight, we got up, kind of a funny little thing. We got up early in the morning. Deke Slayton was there, our boss, and he came, woke us up, and we went through a little routine. The routine was we go to the bathroom

and give them a little sample, which is kind of funny because we never knew what they were going to do with it, but they got their little sample, which is kind of funny because we never knew what they were going to do with it. But they got their little sample. And then we went down to see the flight surgeon. We got our final little physical check. And we went down to another room down the hall where we got a haircut. I had never quite figured out what that was all about. Why were they giving us a haircut when we're not going to see anybody for two weeks, you know? But we got a haircut. So we went down to the dining room and had our last breakfast,

which is a low residual breakfast. Then we went down to the suit room, put on those suits. We started pre-breathing pure oxygen because if we lost cabin pressure on the way to orbit, we'd be susceptible to the bends just like deep sea divers do. So we pre-breathed the oxygen. We carried little portable oxygen containers with us. We walked down the hall, elevator down to the ground, got in a van, and the van drove us out to the launch pad. When we got out there, we got an elevator, went up to the platform, the launch, platform, the launch, that mobile launch platform, got up to the top of that, walked around the spacecraft to another elevator, and went to the 35th floor, which is where our spacecraft was. And is your heart thumping, or has the training prepared you for this moment? Yeah, we'd been through that dozens of times. It was kind of fun that day because it was for real.

But I can't remember getting overly excited. It was just, you know, you can mentally, you can put yourself back in training and you say, well, this is another kind of training thing. And you get up there and you get in the spacecraft. And then when they close the hatch and they put the heat shield on and your ground crew gets in the elevator, they go down, they drive their cars three and a half miles away. Then you realize that, hey, this is going to happen. Yeah, here we go. And was there conversation there or was it all totally professional?

No, we had very little conversation. We as a crew didn't talk much anyway. We were not bonded that tight. Dave and Jim did most of their training on their own because they were doing lunar module and they were doing all the ground stuff and I was kind of on my own. So we never became a family, if you will.

Now, which is different from Apollo 12. Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and Al Bean were like three brothers. They were three peas in a pod. You never saw one without the other two. You never saw one of their cars without the other two. We were not quite like that. We were different. And in fact, I would have to say that Dave and I professionally worked extremely well together,

but we were not good friends. And so it was very easy not to say anything. And so we sat there in the spacecraft. It was dark. They had it chilled down to 45 degrees because that was one of the abort modes would be very high heating rates on the spacecraft. So they chilled us down inside so that we'd be okay.

There was very little chatter on the radio. The only thing I heard at the time, we had an inverter down in the corner of the spacecraft that made a little noise. It was just, you know, kind of an electronic converter. Made a little humming noise. And that was it. And to be honest with you, Jim and I went to sleep. So how long were you on the ground for? We were there two and a half hours. We slept about 45 minutes. 15 minutes before flight, they woke us up and we did our final checks and off we went. It's easy. We didn't even know we're off the ground as a matter of fact, because on my flight, we had the heaviest flight in the program.

We were almost 7 million pounds on liftoff and we were lifted off the ground with 7.5 million pounds of thrust. So the weight was almost equal to the thrust. And we lifted off first. We didn't even know it. The ground had to tell us we were on our way. And it took us 13.5 minutes to get into orbit. Compare that to the shuttle. The shuttle jumps off the launch pad rather quickly because the shuttle has the same thrust, but it only weighs 4 million pounds. We weighed 7. So it's a whole different thing.

It took us a long time to get to orbit. And is it physical? I mean, can you feel it? Not at first you can't. I tell people it's kind of like the launch itself, right off the pad. It's a little bit like driving a car with an automatic transmission. You come to a stoplight and you stop.

You put your foot on the brake. And then when the light changes, you take your foot off the brake, but you don't put it on the accelerator. What happens? You start creeping. And you go a little faster and a little faster. And that's how we got off the launch pad. We didn't even know it.

It was really weird. And what can you see? Are there windows? Nothing. We're all tucked inside. There's one little window that you can see out of, but it was worthless. So basically, until we lost the heat shield, which was up around, oh, maybe 100,000 feet, until we got rid of the... See, the heat shield went off with our abort launch system, which is a rocket that stuck out the nose. And if we had to abort, that would pull us up high enough, even off the launch pad,

so that we could come back down to Earth on the parachutes. Until we got rid of the abort launch system, which was attached to the heat shield that was around the front of our spacecraft. Once that was gone, then all the windows opened up and we could see. What was that like? Oh, fantastic. In fact, I still think back about it. We went into orbit.

We didn't really do much looking until we got to orbit because you're too busy looking at making sure everything's right. Once we got into orbit, it was like every man for himself. Get unbuckled as fast as you can and get to a window. And you got to look out and you got to see the earth going by. And you got to get the TV camera out and start taking pictures. You got to do this. You got to do that. And you completely forget where you are and what you're doing until ground control, mission control, I should say, they start getting rather severe, getting us back on our flight plan to make sure we got all the final checks before we went to the moon. But that first inclination when you get into orbit is to go to a window and watch the Earth go by. Amazing.

land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History,

a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week. So I'm not a scientist. How do you fly around? It's like when you're in orbit, are you just being held in orbit? And then do you have to just turn right and put the accelerator on and go for it? You're going to have to get my lecture. Uh-oh. It's pretty simple, actually. Let's say I got a small stone and I'm up on the top of a tower and I drop the stone and go straight down. What people don't realize is that that stone is on a trajectory, an orbit around the center of gravity of the earth. It happens. the Earth happens to get in the way

and it hits the Earth, okay? But if the Earth weren't there, it would be going down to the center of gravity and back up again. It would be in orbit. If I throw it out a little ways, the only thing that happens is that that orbit gets, instead of going straight up and down,

that orbit begins to look oblong, okay? And the stone is going to go out a ways, still going to go towards the center of gravity, still going to orbit around the center of gravity and come back up again. Now, if I throw that stone at 17,500 miles an hour, still trying to do the same thing, except that when it's trying to get back

to the center of gravity of the Earth, the Earth is going out underneath it. So you never get back to Earth. You just go around it. But it's exactly the same idea. I understand. That's amazing. So you're in orbit. And NASA like, guys, come on, let's go. I mean, could you just choose when you wanted to go to the moon? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We were there. We were on a very, very tight timeline because of the weight that we had, the mass that we had in our flight we couldn't go to a safe altitude uh that would allow us the the the pleasure if you will of deciding when we want to go we could only get up to 90 miles we didn't have enough fuel on board to go higher than that um if if you were to look at look at the launch altitude of most flights, even the shuttle,

you're looking at 120, 130, 140 miles. We can only go to 90 miles. There's enough atmosphere, the molecules in the atmosphere are enough to hit us and slow us down. So we only had maybe six or seven revolutions around the Earth before we were slowing down to the point where we'd have to come back in then. So we had a limited time to get everything squared away to go to the Moon. We actually did it in one and a half revolutions. That would be about two and a half hours. We came up over Hawaii the second time and fired our third stage engine to get us the velocity. Now I'm going to go back to the gravity thing because now instead of trying to get back to the center of gravity of the Earth,

we're going to raise that orbit higher and higher and higher and higher. We're still trying to get back to the center of gravity of the Earth until we reach a point where the moon's gravity became greater than the Earth's gravity. And that captured us. And then we go around the backside of the moon. So we were under the influence of the moon's gravity at that point, not the Earth. That's how you get to the moon. And how long was that trip then? It's about three and a half days going on.

How much sleep did you do? First night, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep because it's different. We don't think about it very much. We take gravity kind of for granted. But gravity does

a lot of things for us. For instance, when you go to bed at night, you put your head on a pillow. What keeps it there? Gravity, okay? When you're out there, you don't have that gravity working. You're still under the influence of gravity,

but the centrifugal force is balancing gravity, so you're floating. What happens is, as you try to go to sleep, your head kind of gets a mind of its own and it starts wandering around on you. And I'll tell you what, there's nothing that'll wake you up faster than that. It's like, and I think most people have had this feeling. If you've ever been in bed and all of a sudden had this feeling like falling off a cliff, I know a lot of people have had that. Well, see, that's exactly what we were doing, was falling off that cliff.

We were in free fall. That woke me up four or five times the first night. And I had to figure out a way to stabilize my head so that it wouldn't wander around on me. And only then could I go to sleep. The second night was a little better, and the third night I didn't need anything. I just let it wander. I'd go to sleep anywhere the third night.

And the rest of it was pretty easy. Space is a very easy thing. It's very comfortable. We are, I have to say, we're very used to that environment. Now, a lot of people liken it to being in the womb as a baby, right? You're in the fluid and all that kind of, I'm not sure about that. I just think that human beings have a history in space that we don't even know about. It's a genetic thing. And I think that

we're very comfortable being in space. So the rest of the flight being in space was just a joy. As a pilot, is it easier to fly from 90 miles up to the moon or make a deck landing on an aircraft carrier in a crosswind on a foggy day in the North Atlantic? I would not make a landing on a carrier in any weather, regardless of the wind. That's the most dangerous thing I can think of. Going to the moon's not safe either. I mean, don't get me wrong. Things could happen, but you're going in one direction. You don't have to do a thing. You're going to keep going. In fact, we went, because of the heating rates due to the sun, we had to turn perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, which is the thing that contains all the planets.

We were perpendicular and we rotated very slowly so that the sun sitting over here heated the outside of the spacecraft at a constant rate all the way around. So about every two minutes we did a revolution. We had to stop that once in a while to do a little mid-course correction. I could put the numbers in the computer, and then I could move to the attitude I had to go to very easy, like flying an airplane. We had an attitude indicator just like in an airplane,

and I had a little control stick for attitude and one over here for translation. And I could go to that point and then set up the computer to fire the engine and go whatever, five feet per second or whatever we needed to do to make that little correction. And that was easy. It was no big deal. Are you just driving right there towards the moon? Can you see it? No. Well, yeah, because we were perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. Until we got close to the moon, I could sit in a window and I could watch the Earth drift by,

and then I'd watch the sun drift by, and then I'd watch the moon drift by, okay, on the way up. As we were approaching the moon, we had to turn around backwards because we had to slow down to stay in lunar orbit, and the engine is behind us. So we had to align the engine to fire forward along the line of our trajectory to slow us down so we'd stay in lunar orbit. So when we got close to the moon, we never saw the moon until we were there, until we were in lunar orbit. We never saw the moon. And I remember one thing that always has stuck with me. I said that as the point at which I really respected mission control. Because they had us in exactly the right spot.

If they had made a little mistake 50,000 miles out, we wouldn't have done that. We might have crashed on the moon. But they had us in the right spot. What's it like saying goodbye to the other two guys when they were going to go down to the surface? Have a good time. Have fun. The truth is, after being cooped up with those guys for four and a half days, I was really happy for them to go somewhere. So I had it all to myself and I could do whatever I wanted. I actually had so much work to do that I worked 20 hours a day. I got about four hours of sleep a night. I had just had so many things to do. So anyway, I was glad to get rid of them because

that gave me a lot of room to maneuver and do whatever I needed to do. And knowing that I had a very, very full flight plan to follow, I was happy to get rid of them. So you wave them goodbye. They detach, go down to the moon. Do you think about them much? Are you not able to see them or anything? So then it's just your mission from there. Yeah. I could keep up with them because if I'm in contact with mission control,

we had communications. They would transmit the mission control. Mission control would transmit it back up to me. So if I'm in view of the Earth, then I can kind of keep up with what they're doing. I didn't care much about what they were doing. I mean, they're on their own. You know, I didn't have much to do with that. I was concerned with the stuff that I was doing, which was rather important.

Speaking of on your own, lots of people like to say about you, the loneliest man in history and all this kind of stuff. I mean, how far away from you were from any other human being at that point in the universe? You know, I've never, I've never calculated. I've heard 3,500 miles. I've heard this. I've heard that. I don't know. I have a suspicion that, you know, Mike Collins, who was a command module pilot on Apollo 11, and I've talked about this lots. And we figured that it was probably pretty close. We're probably both pretty much in the same position. It's just that Guinness picked up on Apollo 15 and gave me the certificate,

which was kind of cool. And then they also gave me the certificate for the first deep space walk, which was that. Now, that one is real. And that's one that will always be there. They'll never take that away. Being the loneliest man, being the most isolated person, we go to Mars, that's going to be shattered.

I mean, somebody else will be doing that. Yeah, no question. So your job was to orbit the moon, doing geology, doing scientific research. Right, right. Interesting little sideline. When we got into lunar orbit the night before, well, we got into lunar orbit the day before they were going to land. I put us in an orbit that was 60 miles high behind the moon and 50,000 feet above the landing site.

So we're about 10 miles above the landing site. Dave had to fly the lunar module over Hadley Mountain to get to the landing site, and Hadley Mountain is 15,000 feet high. So we're 35,000 feet above the top of that mountain. And we went to sleep that night and got up the next morning, and I pulled the shades out of the window. I'm looking looking ahead and I'm looking up at the top of the mountain I'm thinking oh wow we got a problem so I called Houston they said good thing you called I said why is that

and they said well we think you're getting a little close to the mountain oh really yeah well I can kind of see that uh what are we going to do? Well, where are we now, I said. That was my question. Where are we? How low are we? Well, we've calculated your trajectory every time you've gone around the moon, every two hours. And your altitude above that mountain has dropped considerably over 9.

We now have you down to like 33,000 feet, plus or minus 9. And this is where I always, i get engineers and mathematicians i nail them on this because i tell the crowd i said if an engineer ever tells you a number with a plus or minus on it you know he does not know what he's talking about so 9,000 so we're 33,000 9,000 feet that's 24,000 we're seven eight nine thousand feet above the top of that mountain. And I'm thinking, ooh, wow, we're getting pretty close. Going over a mountain at the moon at 2 miles.

Well, yeah, 9,000 feet, something like that. We could see some pretty small rocks with our eyes. So very quickly got Dave and Jim in their lunar module and got them on the way, and I went back to a 60-mile orbit. But that was kind of exciting. Yeah. And so what was it like being up there by yourself looking out at the moon? I mean, you've talked about the things you observed,

but what was it like as an experience? Well, it's a mixture of a lot of things. I had a lot of projects to do, which required me to think a little bit. The low light level photography, as an example, I had to stabilize the spacecraft as best I could. You can't always do it because in space, there's nothing that provides stability. I mean, if you start moving in a direction a little bit,

there's no wind or anything to keep you in one attitude, so you're just going to keep moving. So you have to be very, very careful, set up the spacecraft to get the drift rates down as low as you can and then take a 10-second exposure with 5,000 ASA film, which is a tough thing to do. That was part of it, and that takes a lot of concentration, a lot of thought. Other things, visual observations of the moon. I had a high-resolution camera I used to photograph about 25% of the moon. I had a mapping

camera to take pictures of about 25% of the moon. I had a series of remote sensing devices like microwave and x-ray and all those kind of things that I used to scan the surface of the moon. These things were in operation all the time. So I was always going from one to another and running all that stuff. It kept me busy. And when did you do your spacewalk? On the way back home. So you finished orbiting the moon. You go and pick up the guys. Right, right. They come back up into lunar orbit.

How tricky is it to join two spacecraft together? Well, we had to do it a certain way. Part of the problem is that when the lunar module went down to the surface, it was a 37,000-pound vehicle. They're little reaction control engines that they use for translation and attitude control. They're just little bitty rocket engines. And they're sized for 37,000 pounds. Those same rocket engines are on the ascent stage,

coming back up off the surface of the moon, which only weighs 2,500 pounds. So these rocket engines are way too big for precise flight of the ascent stage. Once they got in orbit, just a little touch on one of the RCS quads would cause a fairly big motion, right? So the idea was that Dave slowed down, got those motions as close to zero as he could get them, and then I did the docking from about 50 feet away. So I did the docking on that. They didn't do it. I did. And did that go smoothly, or did that take a few goes?

Oh, no. That went, man, perfect. I did the same thing after we left Earth orbit. I had to do the same docking maneuver because the lunar module was stored in the nose of the Saturn, of the S4B stage, and then we're sitting in front of that. So it's in a hold that is protected because the lunar module was designed only to work in a vacuum in 1-6 gravity.

So coming off the Earth, we really had to tie it down and protect it and all that. But once we got on our way to the Moon then, I had to move out from the S-4B, move forward, explosive bolts that released us go forward a little bit, turn around and go back in and dock with the lunar module sitting inside. So it's just floating around for a while. Well, it's, yeah, but I go out and turn back and it's pretty stable.

So I had to go back in and dock with it. And that was the first time I did it. And we had no problem. And it was the same procedure when i picked up the guys coming around the moon because now they're in an asset stage it's really really light so i had to be a little more careful and make sure that the docking was pretty much on center um which was no problem we did it what did the guy did you say hey what's the moon like and they were like pretty good no no i i gotta tell you what I,

what my thoughts when I, when they first came back, my thoughts were, you guys are too dirty to come in my spacecraft. Cause he got all that lunar dust on him. So I said, go back to the lunar module, take the vacuum and get yourselves cleaned up before you come back.

We never really talked much about the moon. I talked about their, about their being dirty. And then you start heading back towards Earth and you go for the first deep space war in history. Well, that's because we had two large cameras. They're in an open bay back in the service module. They're about 30 feet in back of the spacecraft. Those cameras were the ones that I used to photograph like 45% of the lunar surface. They come in a cassette. It's a 90-pound cassette. It's like 8-inch, 9-inch film. Had 1,100 feet of it wound on this cassette. so it's a fairly big, you know, like 28, 30 inches in diameter.

Weighed 90 pounds. Had to bring that back inside the command module because the only thing that survives the flight is what's inside the command module. So I had to bring those back in. So I made two trips out and brought it back. And I did have a chance to put my feet in some foot restraints out there and just kind of look around and probably the first time in history that anybody's ever been able to see both the earth and the moon at the same time so i did that it was pretty cool problem i had was that i had trained so well to do that uh that we finished the whole thing in record time and and then I had no excuse to stay out there.

So I had to get back in. You should have said, oh, I'm just a little tricky. I know, I should have. I should have been smart enough to figure out something I could say to stay out there longer, but no, we didn't do that. And what's going through your head? Are you just focused on the task in hand, or are you thinking this is pretty extraordinary?

I'm the first human being in the history of the race to see this no i tell you how that goes you when you're on the flight and and all through the flight as a matter of fact not just that one time um you never really think about it too much but you store it all away in your head and you start thinking about it after you get back home so then it's when you relive it and how all these other ideas and I've gotten a little bit far out into the universe in my thinking based on because of the flight. Didn't think about it that much when I was on the flight. So go on then when you go back to earth how did it change you? I don't I'm not sure it changed me it just made me more conscious of our place in the universe our place me more conscious of our place in the universe,

our place in the solar system, our place in the universe, the rest of the universe that you can see out there, like we're in the Milky Way galaxy as part of that. And then you do a little study, and all of a sudden you find out that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is our galaxy. And then you find out that there are 200 billion galaxies out there that we know of. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

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Holy mackerel. Yeah, you go back to Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, his big theory was that there's so many stars out there that there's going to be a finite number of them that have a sun the size of our sun, and of those that are going to be a finite theory, they have a planetary system, and there's going to be a finite number of those that are going to be on Earth, and there's going to be a finite number of those that are going to be on Earth. And there's going to be a finite number of those that are going to have intelligent beings, intelligent life. You can't escape it.

There are just too many of them out there. It's got to be. So that's kind of the path I've been following. Why is it important that we keep exploring space? Because it's not so much, well, it is exploring. I think it's critically important, not just to go to Mars. I could care less about going to Mars. I could care less about going back to the moon.

What's important is that we develop the capability to go to another Earth. And we'll do that someday. I think there's no question about it. And why do we have to do that? We'll do that someday. I think there's no question about it. And why do we have to do that? Because we know right now we can calculate exactly when the sun's going to die.

When that happens, we're going to be gone. We better be somewhere else. To me, that's the whole purpose of the space program. We don't even realize it. It's a genetic drive called survival. And that whole genetic drive is pushing us to the point where we are eventually going to have capability to go to another Earth-like planet and survive for the species to survive. When you came back, how did you make sure the whole rest of your life wasn't just a huge anti-climax? Oh, gosh. Well, okay, another lecture.

Making a space flight is a skill set. It's like flying an airplane. It's like driving a car. Once you learn all the things you need to know to drive a car, after you've been driving that car for six months, you don't even think about it anymore. You just drive it, right? That's a skill set.

I think intellectual curiosity is a different thing. So I've been much more interested since the flight in doing other things. As a matter of fact, I ran for political office back in the country because I tend to have a big mouth about certain things. And when I say what I think, then I rethink that a little bit. And I say, well, you really ought to put your money where your mouth is. So I ran for Congress. That was a very stimulating intellectual thing to do. I lost because I was an outsider to the party.

I believe that was why. But since then, I've taught in college. I've had my own companies. I've done R&D, invented some avionics things for airplanes, went to work for the company that was going to develop our product. And when I retired from them, it was a company called BF Goodrich, by the way. When I retired from BF Goodrich, then I got very involved with a charity foundation, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. And I spent a lot of considerable amount of time supporting that and raising money,

and I was chairman for seven years. And we now give out $400,000 a year in scholarships to the best and the brightest in the country. We have the colleges that we work with pick their one or two top STEM students. We don't care what discipline they're in. And then we will fund one of them, give them a check for $10,000, no strings attached. They can do anything they want with it. And I do that. And I work for a couple of other charities

and I keep going today because I like to get out and talk to school kids about STEM education because I think that's the thing that we've been losing in the last, I'll say the last eight, nine years. It's not been important to the leadership in the states. And so we're finding that the students who go to college in engineering, as an example, there aren't as many of them as there used to be. And that's because they're off doing other things and it's not it hadn't been important

but my opinion and I think a lot of people agree share it with me is that the future of civilization depends on these kids growing up and becoming the inventors and the innovators and the disciplined engineers that we're going to

need to develop the technologies that are going to get us further out there. It's going to come from the STEM courses. It's not going to come from philosophy or English or foreign language or any of that. It's not going to come from there. It's going to come from the STEM courses. And that technology is something that we critically need in the world, not just the U.S., but everywhere. I would love to see us very involved, as an example, with the Chinese. I think that's a mistake, that we're not heavily involved with them, because they got technology that is pretty much parallel with the kind of technology we got in

the U.S. And it should be, because we've taught most of them here in England, you got the same thing. But I think STEM is a critically important thing, and I spend taught most of them here in England. You've got the same thing. But I think STEM is a critically important thing, and I spend a lot of time. In fact, that's why I'm here. When we leave, we'll be doing talks all over England to schools and high schools talking about STEM education and trying to motivate that kind of thing. And so that's the intellectual part of what I like to do, and I think that's much more important than learning a skill set. Do you want to tell us about the book?

Well, the book, this book, we wrote in 2011. I was fortunate that the Smithsonian Institution published it, and they're very difficult to get to publish a book. Falling to Earth. It sounds to me like this is a gravity book from what you've done. Yeah, kind of. Okay. No, Falling to Earth, it has to do with a lot of things

that happened on the flight and some bad things, and not only coming back to Earth, but some bad things that happened on our flight that had to do with postal covers. And so that's all part of this book. Was there ever a moment on the flight when you thought you were not going to get back? No, that was not an issue at all. So anyway, I wrote the book, and it turns out that it's the bestseller that the Smithsonian's ever published. That doesn't surprise me. There are over 80,000 copies of that that are out now. And as a matter of fact, based on this, they've asked me to do a sequel.

So we're in the process of doing that now. And in the sequel, I'm going to talk about Sumerians. Uh-oh. I'm going to talk about... They go to space. The Sumerian space program. I'm going to talk about the universe. I'm going to talk about space. The Sumerian space program. I'm going to talk about the universe. I'm going to talk about other planets. I'm going to talk about the fact that we are.

Somebody asked me. I did. I did show you some. Oh, doing ITV the other day. They asked me about, did I believe in aliens? And I said, sure. What do you mean you believe in aliens? I said, have you ever seen one? I said, yeah, sure. Where have you ever seen an alien? I say, every time I look in the

mirror, because I happen to believe we came from somewhere else. That's a whole different. See, if we're establishing a space program so that we can escape here when we have to just survive, who's to say somebody else out there a million years advanced on us hadn't done the same thing and come here? And why are you doing this tool right at the moment? Okay, basically I'm here for World Space Week. We did New Scientist Live for the last few days, promoting space and selling a few books,

but bringing people into the British Interplanetary Society booth so that we can promote interplanetary society. I will be doing a tour around the UK over the next, well, actually the next 15 days, promoting STEM, STEM courses to schools and high schools. I'll be speaking at Sheffield University, speaking STEM, going to the National Science Museum, I think in a couple of days to talk about the same sort of thing.

I'm sort of evangelizing education, if you will, because I think it's so important, and that's what we're doing. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five- star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review I'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it I'd be very very grateful thank you Thank you.