Falling to Earth (20 page)

Once the hatch was closed, I headed down the elevator to a waiting car to take me back to the viewing stand for the launch. It was raining really hard by the time I reached the stands, but I never gave it a thought. The Saturn V was a tough rocket, and I figured that it would take more than a little water to postpone a launch.

The rocket lifted off, right on schedule. And then, less than half a minute after launch, a huge lightning bolt struck the spacecraft. The Saturn V was poking up into the clouds, and the lightning found a perfect grounding through the spacecraft and rocket exhaust all the way down to the pad. We scrambled to find a radio. I could hear Pete talking a mile a minute as they tried to work out what had happened. NASA could have called off the mission right then, but they decided to keep going and see if everything still worked. The command module had temporarily lost its internal systems, but the separate system that guided the rocket was still functioning and kept them on course.

By the time they got into orbit, the mission was in pretty good shape. Basic, well-insulated equipment meant that the spacecraft survived. With some quick thinking, the power and instruments were brought back online. Once again, I was glad that it had been designed with such well-tested components. It was amazing—everything was fine—but I bet that the launch was a very scary experience for the crew. I know I would probably have crapped myself.

A couple of days later, Pete Conrad was ready to make his first step on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on the moon—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—were famous by then. Pete was Neil’s polar opposite in temperament, and many people wondered what he would say when he made his own first step. We had sprinkled a whole bunch of suggestions throughout Pete’s in-flight checklist, many of them so risqué that he would have been fired if he’d dared say them. He ended up using one that we’d written down: a joke about his height, or lack of it, that had been going around the astronaut office for a while.

As the world listened, Pete brought the house down with his clever wisecrack. Making his first step, he quipped, “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!”

Days later, when the Apollo 12 command module splashed down, Dave, Jim, and I were a backup crew without a purpose. We hoped the pattern would hold, and we’d be the prime crew three flights down the line. Nothing was certain, however, until there was a public announcement. Some Apollo backup crews did not make it to prime. Our work performance was key, but NASA also scrutinized any personal issues. Part of the concern was rooted in fear of negative press coverage. In the past, divorce had been one of those dreaded areas, and many astronauts held crumbling marriages together in the hopes of getting one more flight.

Pam and I had been separated for about a year by this time, and the marriage was beyond hope of repair. We had drifted further and further away from each other until there was just no other way for us to go. It was obvious to us both by then that a final, official divorce was the only option. Now came the toughest part: I had to go and tell Deke.

I certainly had reason to worry. I would be the first astronaut to publicly divorce before flying in space. There were really only two precedents I could look at. Duane Graveline had been selected as a scientist-astronaut in 1965, but his wife almost immediately threatened him with divorce, and NASA asked him to resign right away. It all happened so fast, I heard, that most astronauts were never even aware he had been at NASA in the first place. Apollo 7’s Donn Eisele was the only other astronaut who divorced while in the program. He had done so in 1969 after his flight, only to be completely ostracized by the other astronaut families. Donn was hanging in there, but it seemed there was no chance he would ever fly in space again. I heard different reasons about why, but I knew one thing for sure: I did not want that to happen to me.

Perhaps, I thought, my choice was either to fly to the moon or to divorce. I might not be allowed to do both. If so, this was a hell of a place to find myself. I knew that I could have asked Pam to delay a divorce for another couple of years, until I had flown in space. If it had been a one-sided decision to split up, I may well have done that, and I think she would have done it for my sake. But it would not have been fair to her. I had too much respect for Pam to ask her to stay with me.

It was a very tough moment. My marriage had suffered for years because I had pushed my career so hard. And now here I was so close to the golden prize. I suspected I was weeks away from being named to a prime crew for a lunar mission. I might have been throwing it away by being honest, but I decided that if divorcing was going to take me out of the program, then that was just too bad. I’d have to live with it.

It was with a bad case of nerves that I asked to meet with Deke in his office, where I laid out the facts clearly and honestly. Deke, to my immense relief, was supportive. In his brief, precise way, he told me that if there was no funny business going on, and if it was just that Pam and I were splitting up, then he had no problem with it. “Keep your nose clean, don’t get into a public squabble, and keep it out of the newspapers,” he told me, “and you’ll be fine.” That was all he said, and all he needed to say. I knew that Deke would be true to his word, as long as I was true to mine.

I also needed to talk with Dave Scott, which was equally nerve-wracking. He was a straight-arrow guy, who I feared might frown on a divorce. I never wanted to give him any reason to think less of me, either for my work or my personal life. But, like Deke, Dave was supportive. He soon proved that he would protect me on this particular issue.

There was a neighborhood party going on right after my divorce became official, and I heard that some astronaut wives didn’t want me there. I talked to Dave about it, and told him, “I am not sure I want to go, because I don’t think some of the wives are really happy about my divorce. I think it is because if I can go through a divorce and everything goes alright for me, they are going to think, ‘Oh, shit, I’m next.’ Their marriages might be in jeopardy, too. It could happen to them.”

Dave sat me down, and with the calm words of a born commander said, “Al, you cannot let that bother you. You go to that party, you look them in the eye, and just be yourself. The worst thing you could do is not show up.” Dave was right. I went to the party and was glad I went.

A couple of the wives continued to disapprove of me for years. One of them was Deke’s wife, Marge, which was always a little frightening, because I imagined Deke hearing all about it when he was at home. And yet, over time, the wives came to understand that I was no threat to them, and in fact Marge eventually became one of my biggest advocates.

When Pam and I split up we took apartments across the street from each other and sold our beloved home. We now lived even closer to the space center than before: I only had to come out of my front door, walk one block, and I was at NASA’s front gate. The kids came over to stay with me on the weekends, and seemed to do fine with the separation. In many ways, nothing much changed for them, as I had always been away during the week. Pam was well liked by the other astronaut families and stayed in town, but she left the astronaut family circuit. That was, after all, what she had wanted to get away from all those years.

The divorce had been smooth and civil, with no allegations of wrongdoing, and little in the papers. It seemed that I hadn’t disappointed Deke or Dave, because events moved very quickly after that. Apollo 12 flew in November 1969. The next month, my divorce was final. And about a week later, Deke called us into his office and told us that we were going to be the prime crew for Apollo 15. We had to wait until March of 1970 for an official, public announcement. It was possible the decision could have been reversed in that time, but it never felt like that would happen. Dave, Jim, and I were elated. This was the big one. We were in. We were going to the moon.

CHAPTER 6
UNVEILING THE MOON

A
funny thing happened when Pam and I divorced. It seemed that once she didn’t have to worry about me dying in a jet or in space, we could be friends again. Living across the street, with our kids going back and forth between us, our interactions became easier and more relaxed.

As a newly single astronaut, I think people assumed that I would burn through women quicker than rocket fuel. Astronauts were like rock stars back then; groupies were everywhere, and you could take your pick. Friends advised me not to jump back into a relationship and a second marriage, but to take the time to sort out my life. The same well-intentioned friends tutted that it was a shame about Pam: she would probably never marry again.

And yet, a couple of months after our divorce, Pam came over to my apartment and introduced me to her new boyfriend. His name was Jim and he liked to work a nine-to-five job, come home, put on his slippers, and smoke his pipe. The day Pam brought him over, Jim and I sat and talked all afternoon, laughed, and got on great. She called me the next day, telling me that she couldn’t handle how weird it was, her new boyfriend and her ex-husband getting along so well. She didn’t allow him to spend much time with me after that.

Pam had found happiness at last; she and Jim married within a year. On the other hand, it was a long, long time before I married again. Although I will always regret that my marriage to Pam did not work out, once it ended I saw I never could give her what she needed in life. She wanted stability and comfort. That wasn’t me.

My new apartment was small but suited me just fine. I put up with jokes about my “bachelor pad,” but in truth I worked so much that I was hardly ever there. It was more of a community apartment for visiting friends and family members, plus a host of secrecy-minded married astronauts who sometimes asked to borrow my key. They likely saw more action in my so-called bachelor pad than I ever did.

First, I had to furnish the place. All of the family furniture went to Pam in the divorce, so I started from scratch. I found a couple of interior decorators in town, who decided that a newly-single Apollo astronaut needed a hip black-and-white fiberglass sofa with black cushions, and a grand piano. They covered and constructed almost everything else from silver Mylar and glass. Even my bed, surrounded by black-and-silver walls, had a Mylar canopy. A thickly-carpeted circular staircase dominated the place. Although very hip for the time—in truth, too hip for me—it was a little too edgy for comfort. But I was amused by the buzz in the papers and magazines, which appeared to be more excited about the single astronaut and his “spacey” apartment than I was.

If I needed a reminder of the dangers of my job—and I didn’t—one came right after our formal announcement as the Apollo 15 prime crew. Just a month later, in April of 1970, Apollo 13 launched. It was the third manned lunar landing. That was the plan anyway. I had my own mission to train for now and wasn’t involved at all in Apollo 13. I was sitting on my spacey sofa in my apartment watching TV two days after the launch when Jules Bergman, the ABC channel’s space commentator, interrupted the show with a news flash.

I listened to his hurried report with alarm. I thought I heard Bergman report that there had been an explosion in the spacecraft en route to the moon, and the crew only had three hours to live. It was a confusing, shocking moment. What the hell was going on?

I sped over to mission control, a block away, joined a growing crowd of other concerned astronauts, and quickly learned that although the crew had escaped to the lunar module and had enough oxygen to survive for a short time, they were losing spacecraft power fast. It still wasn’t clear what had happened to the command and service module, but it was something bad.

The command module pilot on the flight was Jack Swigert. I knew him well, of course, from our intense collaboration on spacecraft emergency procedures following the Apollo 1 fire. He had been the Apollo 13 backup command module pilot until just a couple of days before launch. After a possible exposure to German measles, NASA pulled Ken Mattingly from the prime crew. Jack took his place, demonstrating why backup crewmembers must always be fully prepared. Jack was prepared. But now he was aboard a crippled spacecraft alongside Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, speeding toward the moon.