Falling to Earth Read online

  I like people. I am friendly to many, but I get close to few. And I never tried to be in a clique. In group endeavors—and NASA was always a group effort—I believed that my actions would speak for me much more than my network of friends. I watched my actions closely when at work and carried this attitude with me to Houston.

  Nevertheless, I missed some guys from Edwards. Hank Hartsfield was one. A real whiz in academics and an equally gifted flyer, Hank could have been one of NASA’s brightest stars during the Apollo era. But instead, for three years, he was stuck in the air force’s MOL program, which never did fly. Eventually, he was transferred to NASA, but by then Hank had lost any chance of a moon mission. Timing, as they say, is everything. Hank had to wait until the shuttle was flying, at which time he proved to be a huge asset to the space agency. But his disappointment with MOL made me doubly thankful I didn’t take that route.

  For those who did come to Houston from Edwards, our families stayed behind while we looked for permanent homes. I wanted to build a new house and contacted a developer in Nassau Bay, a pretty area across the street from the space center. At first, he drove me around and we looked at potential building sites right on the waterfront. But then he pointed to a tree with a mark on it eight feet up. That, he said, was the high-water mark from a recent hurricane. No thanks, I said, and asked to see sites two blocks from the shoreline, on higher ground. Even then, the builder had to sink concrete pillars deep into the soft clay to hold up the house.

  I labored over house plans and shared my ideas with Pam. She wasn’t keen; she worried about money. How could we afford something as extravagant as a custom-built home? I knew something that she didn’t yet know, however: a perk going back to the original Mercury astronauts. Long before I came into the program, they had signed a contract with the Time-Life magazine company and Field Enterprises media group for the exclusive rights to personal stories and pictures. The reasoning was that this arrangement would keep the rest of the press from hounding astronauts and their families on their doorsteps. The original seven did very well out of that deal; the extra money from the stories allowed them to enjoy activities that they could not otherwise afford, such as boat and auto racing.

  I was later told that there had been some debate within NASA and the White House about the ethics of such a deal. After all, the space program was taxpayer sponsored, and some argued that astronauts shouldn’t be paid extra for sharing their lives with the press. When Kennedy became president, he even considered canceling the contract renewal. After some candid discussions, however, the contract survived.

  The discussion ended long before I joined. I was still officially in the air force, on assignment to NASA, and only received my basic military pay, which was much less than the salaries of civilian astronauts who had exactly the same job. So, in my mind, the Time-Life contract was a good deal. As I also came to realize, we were often away from home for weeks, working long hours. Whether we liked it or not, we were astronauts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and never really off duty from our job. We more than earned that extra payment. My portion of the money was much less than what was offered in earlier years, since many more astronauts now had to share the deal. However, it was still a considerable amount.

  The Time-Life deal was my first realization that the earlier astronauts had developed some interesting business arrangements. As a test pilot, I had routinely risked my life for my country. My colleagues who did not come to NASA were beginning to head to Vietnam and combat. But readers were not interested in routine heroism. They were interested in the promised moon landing and the men who might fly there. I could hardly object to the interest, however unfair. I had a beautiful house because of it.

  I did hear later that NASA had also been extremely concerned about some of the other business deals the first astronauts wanted to take. There was discussion about the original seven being offered free cars and free homes in the Houston area, which some of them had wanted to accept. But the rulemakers said no. The agency also kept a close and disapproving eye on anyone offering the astronauts low-interest loans for houses.

  Despite Pam’s worries about the cost of our new home, the developer went ahead and built a three-bedroom Western-style ranch house for us, with a separate garage. With white bricks and an arched front entrance, it looked very Mexican. Until the developer finished the house, we had to live in rented accommodations. It was nice when my family could finally move in. Surrounded by huge oak trees, our home was close—but not too close—to the water. In fact, after we finally sold that house, at least three other shuttle-era astronaut families lived in it.

  It turned out that two other recently selected astronauts, Joe Engle and Owen Garriott, were also building homes on the same quiet cul-de-sac. I was glad to have them as neighbors. Owen ended up right next door, with Joe next to him. As the entire street was only about five hundred feet long, most of it was taken up by our three homes, facing each other in a semicircle.

  My daughter Alison quickly made friends with Owen’s five-year-old son, Richard. They grew up together, and I would see him running around the neighborhood with her every day. It was, therefore, a proud but surreal moment when, more than forty years later, I watched Richard on TV, floating around inside the International Space Station. That little kid became a space traveler, too.

  Finally, I was giving my family a permanent home and some security. We’d no longer move every year to a new city. But some things never changed. My job was just as dangerous and occupied all of my time. Would a new home, secure job, and extra money be enough to ease the tensions in my marriage? I didn’t know what else to do but hope, as I plunged into my new career.

  The space center itself, just a short drive from home, was a collection of spartan but functional buildings. My first view of it was nothing like my first look at West Point; this place was not designed to impress anyone. In addition to office suites, mission control, and testing facilities, NASA had constructed an office building for the astronauts, the trainers, and equipment managers; a cafeteria across the parking lot; a simulator building to the side; and a medical building at the back. It was nothing fancy. On my first day I showed up at the security office, received my ID badge, and attended a briefing in the astronaut office auditorium. They issued the new astronauts schedules, told us what NASA generally expected of us, assigned us to offices, and instructed us to show up the next morning. The orientation was brief and to the point. Nobody seemed to care too much. We were just there.

  I was assigned to a sparse-looking office with a linoleum floor, a window, and two desks, which I’d be sharing with another new astronaut. But we were rarely there. We were always in meetings, working on programs, or making trips to some facility or another. Work, it seemed, was done everywhere else but in the office.

  The first person sharing that small office with me had a sense of humor matched by few others at NASA. I had not known Paul “PJ” Weitz before we were selected, so at first I was a little wary of sharing an office with a stranger. I needn’t have worried. He kept me laughing the whole time and became one of my closest friends in those early years at NASA. I still look forward to spending time with PJ whenever I can.

  Pilots’ meetings are much the same all over the world. Our weekly gatherings felt like familiar territory, as if I were back at Edwards. Directed by Deke Slayton, a former Edwards test pilot himself, they were designed to update us on the status of the current programs. The astronauts who had been on the job for a while talked about what they had done, updated everybody on issues related to the various projects they worked on, and shared problems or concerns. Deke also handed out assignments: who would do what and where for the next week. He told us anything that we needed to be aware of when flying jets, such as new rules, regulations, and restrictions.

  Slayton and the air force had very different approaches, however, to personal responsibility. When the group discussed something that a fellow astronaut had done wrong, especially when flying a jet
, many embarrassing incidents were dealt with there and then and discussed nowhere else. There were dangerous moments in the air that were allowed to slide by because the astronaut office was a self-protecting fraternity.

  I remember one guy—his name is not important, he’s just an example—who destroyed a Bell H-13 helicopter. He was heading back to Houston on a Sunday night after spending the weekend at a hunting ranch. He wasn’t even wearing a flight suit; he was still in his cowboy clothes, with a rifle and all his hunting gear in the cockpit, already a dumb situation. Then it got worse. This supposed hotshot test pilot, at the top of his game, ran out of gas just south of the airport. He crashed the helicopter into a fence surrounding an open field, walked away, and nothing was ever said about it except in the weekly meeting. If he’d still been with an air force squadron, he would have been in deep trouble. As far as I know, NASA never reprimanded him. This kind of attitude didn’t help me feel protected. If anything, it scared me.

  At first, we new guys were clearly considered apprentices, not yet part of the group. When I joined the program, I thought, “Oh, man, this is great. I am now an astronaut.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t. The pilots who were already in the program didn’t really look on us as astronauts until we’d made a spaceflight.

  I felt a little like a West Point plebe again, or a novice back at Moore Air Base. I was at the bottom and had to work my way up. The feeling was nothing new: it happened every time I started in a new direction or made a new step in my career.

  My sense of being the “new kid” was particularly strong around the original seven astronauts, who had been selected back in 1959. By the time I joined the astronaut corps, six remained with NASA, and only four were on flight status. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, had left in 1964. I also never really got to know Scott Carpenter, who flew the next mission after Glenn, since he left within my first year. The other five, however—Slayton, Shepard, Grissom, Schirra, and Cooper—were kings of the hill. A mystique surrounded them, which they happily cultivated. In their minds, we new guys hadn’t yet proved ourselves. That was fine by me, because it was true: we hadn’t.

  This mystique, I learned, extended to generous car dealers. Many of the astronauts were friends with Jim Rathmann, a fun guy who had a Chevrolet dealership just down the coast from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launched its rockets. Jim, in turn, was a close friend of Ed Cole, the president of General Motors. Rathmann acted as the go-between for the astronauts and General Motors, leasing cars to us. General Motors would send the cars to Jim, he’d lease them to us on a six-month basis for a small amount, and at the end of the six months we’d turn them back in and get another one. General Motors would take the cars back and resell them as astronaut-driven vehicles. They didn’t lose any money, and it didn’t hurt their image for the astronauts to be seen driving shiny new Corvettes. It was smart business sense, and Ed and Jim also did it out of admiration and respect for the spacefarers.

  I assumed the deal had also been okayed with the NASA administrators, or that they had decided it was out of their control. To be honest, I am not sure. I know that the first astronauts organized it back in the early days. Was there any official resistance behind the scenes? I don’t know. Certainly by the time I showed up, no one officially seemed to care about it.

  My reaction, naturally, was to ask one of the original astronauts how I could also get a Corvette. He slapped me down so fast it shocked me. “You new guys won’t be part of that,” he barked at me. “You don’t deserve that.” I got the point: I was being put in my place and reminded that I didn’t yet count for jack. I later became friendly with this guy, eventually talked about the deal again, and discovered that General Motors didn’t restrict their offer to certain astronauts. This guy had no power over the choice. Yet, in my first few months on the job, I wasn’t supposed to know that.

  Deke assigned all of us new guys to one of the more senior spacefarers while we found our feet and our place in the program. It was a good arrangement. He assigned me to Wally Schirra, a respected former navy test pilot who had commanded both Mercury and Gemini space missions, including the first-ever space rendezvous. As I shook his hand, Schirra looked me right in the eye. “You know, Worden,” he told me sternly, “you’ve got to understand something from the start. You don’t count for anything around here.”

  I knew he was testing me. I remembered a flippant saying from West Point that the only people whom the students outranked were the superintendent’s pet cat and anyone serving in the navy. Taking a risk, I stared right back at him and said, “Sir, I realize I am only a captain in the air force, but I know for sure that I outrank a captain in the navy.”

  Schirra paused for a split second, and I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. Then he broke into a loud, booming laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. “You don’t have to report to me?” he continued. “Screw that—go and get me a cup of coffee!” I’d had my first experience with Wally the prankster; he never took himself too seriously. From then on we were great friends.

  I was one of nineteen guys chosen for the fifth astronaut group, the largest ever selected at the time. NASA had told Deke Slayton that the forthcoming Apollo program could result in dozens of flights and that he should select enough people to fly them. He, therefore, took everyone he felt was qualified from the top group of finalists. It’s no wonder that some of the older astronauts didn’t warmly welcome us, and in fact resented us showing up. Once you were in the program, Deke often said, you were as qualified to fly into space as anyone else already there. More competition for seats meant fewer flights for the older guys, and for at least the first year they kept us a little isolated from the rest of the team.

  NASA’s confident prediction of dozens of Apollo flights was wrong: eventually the budget was slashed, flights were canceled, and money siphoned into the development of the space shuttle. Some of the guys in my group had to wait two decades before their first flight into space. That’s a hell of a long time to wait until you are allowed to do the job you trained for, and I doubt I would have waited that long.

  Amongst the nineteen were pilots I knew well from Edwards. Charlie Duke, Ken Mattingly, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell had all been at the Aerospace Research Pilot School with me. Fred Haise had attended, too, although he had left to do other test pilot work by the time I arrived. While at Edwards, we used to have parties at Stu Roosa’s house every weekend, some of the craziest drunken parties I have ever been to. We’d wake up in the morning, find that we’d set fire to objects on his front lawn, and have no memory of doing so. The five of us already knew each other well, and our camaraderie continued when we moved to Houston. We socialized for a while before we were absorbed into the wider program, and we were bad boys—really bad. In the end, all of us flew to the moon during the Apollo program.

  Then there was Joe Engle. He’d been at Edwards, too, but I didn’t know him too well because he’d been off flying the X-15 rocket plane. Unlike most of us, Joe already knew all of the senior astronauts before he arrived in Houston. He had even flown in space before he became a NASA astronaut. As an X-15 pilot, he’d taken that rocket plane higher than fifty miles three times, each considered a suborbital spaceflight by air force definitions, and had earned air force astronaut wings.

  Joe Engle is the best formation pilot I have ever seen. He’d chosen a different career specialty than me, flying in close combat formation in a tactical fighter squadron. He could do a tight barrel roll around me from one wing to another, and then gently drop right back into position right off my wingtip. The first time he performed that maneuver with me, on a flight out to Edwards, I was in awe—I had no idea airplanes could do that.

  By far the most experienced aviator in our group, Joe was kind of the big man on campus. When he narrowly missed out on flying during Apollo, many people were surprised. He served on an Apollo backup crew, but then had to wait until a space shuttle flight in 1981. It went to show, no one co
uld assume anything when it came to getting a spaceflight assignment.

  In the end, fewer than half of my group would fly to the moon. Most of the others trained to fly there, but budget cuts meant that they would fly in later programs instead. In addition to my Edwards friends, fellow group members Ron Evans, Jim Irwin, and Jack Swigert made it onto missions to the moon. PJ Weitz, Jack Lousma, Jerry Carr, and Bill Pogue missed out on lunar flights but did fly to the Skylab space station. Pogue was the officer who had greeted me when I arrived in England a few years before, and I knew by reputation that he was an exceptional pilot.

  Vance Brand ended up with a seat on the last Apollo mission in 1975, Apollo-Soyuz, the first joint mission with the Russians. Others had to wait even longer. Along with Joe Engle, both Bruce McCandless and Don Lind did not make their first flights until the space shuttle was operating. Don ended up flying his first, and only, mission in 1985, a full nineteen years after he became an astronaut.

  I guess, for some, the lure of flying in space kept them in the program for so long. Many of my group of nineteen stuck around for a long time even after making a first flight. Fred Haise did some shuttle test flying. Ken Mattingly, PJ Weitz, and Jack Lousma all stayed to fly the shuttle into orbit. And Vance Brand flew until 1990, making his fourth spaceflight that year. In fact, until his retirement in early 2008, he still worked for NASA, albeit in a management role. He was the last of our group still on the roster.

  Two of my group never had the chance to fly in space. John Bull was quiet and modest, yet highly skilled. He had been a navy test pilot before joining the program. I believe Deke considered him one of the top guys in our group. However, in 1968 the doctors discovered that he had a rare pulmonary medical condition. He had to leave the astronaut corps, and there was also no place for him back in the navy. He found a job as a flight test researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Years later, when I had to leave the astronaut group and wound up at Ames as well, John was still there. It was a strange irony.