The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  Astronaut Eugene Cernan

  and America’s Race in Space

  The

  Last Man

  on the Moon

  EUGENE CERNAN AND DON DAVIS

  St. Martin’s Griffin New York

  THE LAST MAN ON THE MOON. Copyright © 1999 by Eugene Cernan and Don Davis. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Bonni Leon-Berman

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Cernan, Eugene.

  The last man on the moon: astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s race in space/Eugene Cernan and Don Davis.—lst ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-19906-7

  ISBN-10: 0-312-19906-6

  1. Project Apollo (U.S.)—History. 2. Space flight to the moon—History. 3. Space race—

  History. 4. Cernan, Eugene. I. Davis, Don (Donald) II. Title.

  TL789.8.U6A52435 1999

  629.45’0092—dc21

  [B]

  98—48206

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-26351-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-312-26351-1 (pbk.)

  Tenth Anniversary Edition: June 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Jan and Robin

  Contents

  1

  Fire on the Pad

  2

  Taps

  3

  Sold by the Nuns

  4

  Wings of Gold

  5

  Albino Angels

  6

  Two Commander Shepards

  7

  Max and Deke

  8

  Any Astronauts Around Here?

  9

  The Suit

  10

  Crash

  11

  The Mayor of Pad 19

  12

  The Angry Alligator

  13

  The Spacewalk from Hell

  14

  Redemption

  15

  Annus Horribilis

  16

  Phoenix Rising

  17

  The Magnificent Beast

  18

  Burn, Baby, Burn

  19

  There Is No End

  20

  Hauling the Mail

  21

  The Gamble

  22

  The Ice Commander

  23

  Secret Mission

  24

  Beep, Beep

  25

  Fire and Water

  26

  Dr. Rock

  27

  I Can’t Walk!

  28

  Top of the Pyramid

  29

  Falling to the Moon

  30

  Down in the Valley

  31

  The Search

  Index

  For many years, I have wanted to write a book for my grandchildren. I wanted Ashley, Carson, Kaylee, Katelyn, Whitney and those yet unnamed who are sure to follow to hear from me this story of what it was like to live out a dream, with the hope that someday they might understand their grandfather a little better. And I wanted to create something special for the many, many people who helped to reach the Moon, for without their commitment, dedication, and personal self-sacrifice, I would never have been able to reach so far, nor would I have had the opportunity to share my story. Although it would be impossible to name them all, I am deeply grateful to each of them.

  I want to thank those who critiqued various parts of this manuscript during the many preliminary drafts, particularly my peers, whose insights were invaluable. I hold them all in the greatest esteem. In addition, I will always treasure my friendship with Deke, Al, Roger, and Ron, who, while they were with us, played such significant roles in my life.

  Special thanks to my agent, Jane Dystel and her staff, and my editor, Charlie Spicer and the team at St. Martin’s Press, who believed in this project, made it happen, then improved it. And to Don and Robin Davis, my co-conspirators, without whom I could never have done it.

  Most importantly, I want to thank my family and close friends, whose support and help was so important throughout this long project. Mom and Dad were with me in spirit every step of the way. Dee and Jim gave safe haven while providing background about our growing-up years. Barbara Cernan dug deep into the past to help recall and document long-ago events. Martha Chaffee painfully recalled her family’s story and gave reassurance during critical moments. Max Ary, Norma Van Bunnen, and the staff at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center lent timely and invaluable assistance, uncovering documents and film that had lain unseen for more than a quarter of a century. Skip Furlong, Fred Baldwin, and Tom and Carol Short helped steer the story through our early years together. Claire Johnson somehow survived the writing and publishing ordeal with her usual charm and efficiency.

  My daughters Tracy, Kelly, and Danielle were a wealth of encouragement when the task seemed insurmountable, and the end of the book was nowhere in sight.

  A simple “thank you” does not seem enough for my wife, Jan, who endured the difficult months of my reliving a life of which she was not a part. Her love and understanding made it all possible.

  And to everyone who helped put American astronauts on the Moon, where ever you are today, I salute you.

  Eugene A. Cernan

  Houston, Texas

  September 1998

  1

  Fire on the Pad

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 1967, was another balmy southern California winter day with temperatures in the low seventies, but a blizzard might as well have been hammering the North American Aviation plant in Downey. Inside the altitude chamber, where Tom Stafford, John Young and I were buckled into a titanium container not much larger than a kitchen table, there wasn’t any air, much less any weather. Time, not snowfall or sunshine, was our concern. The most experienced astronaut crew in the U.S. space program, with five completed missions between us, we were trying to bring a new, untried and stubborn spacecraft up to launch standards, and we weren’t having much success.

  On the other side of the United States, in Florida’s afternoon sunshine, three of our fellow astronauts were conducting similar tests in an identical spacecraft perched atop a giant Saturn 1-B rocket at Cape Kennedy. The world knew Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee as the crew of Apollo 1, and they were scheduled to lift off in less than a month. They weren’t having much luck either.

  The days of the one-man Mercury missions seemed like distant history, and the two-man Gemini series had proven we could walk in space, rendezvous, and endure long flights. Now the time had come for the start of Apollo, the gigantic undertaking that would realize President Kennedy’s dream of putting an American on the Moon, and bringing him back alive, by the end of the decade.

  My gut feeling as a test pilot was that as badly as the program needed this flight, the bird simply wasn’t ready. In fact, I was amazed that we were so far along the path toward launch with so many things still going wrong. Before Apollo could fly, tens of thousands of parts in both the rocket and spacecraft had to work flawlessly, and so far, they hadn’t. But the damned Russians were breathing down our necks, and we were going to force that spacecraft to do what it was supposed to do, even if we had to bend some mechanical and physical laws through sheer willpower. Despite the problems, all signals remained go for Apollo 1

  In Florida, the prime crew was atop an empty rocket for what was called a “plugs out” test, which meant that everything was being run as it wo
uld be for a real mission, except the Saturn was not fueled. In California, our crew was in a duplicate spacecraft in the middle of a chamber that simulated the vacuum of outer space. The cone-shaped command module had given fair warning that this was not going to be a good day even before I climbed aboard. The forty-pound hatch fell on my foot and I could have sworn the bird had dropped it on purpose, part of its evil plot to keep me, Gene Cernan, from ever flying in space again.

  I wormed in through the small hatch, slid onto the middle canvas couch, then moved over to my own position on the right side of the crew compartment. Although spacious in comparison to the tiny spacecraft of Mercury and Gemini, there still wasn’t much room in Apollo, and I carefully eased my feet down among a clutter of unprotected bundles of wires. A technician helped buckle me in and attach the hoses to my suit, then the radio in my helmet came alive with a burst of static. While waiting for the others to climb in, I stuck a checklist onto the Velero that wallpapered the interior of the Apollo spacecraft. We had discovered that the sticky stuff was the best way to keep things from floating around in zero gravity.

  Tom Stafford, the mission commander, squeezed through the hatch and scooted into his place on the left side. Finally, John Young, the command module pilot, settled into the empty couch in the middle, and, with the help of the guys outside, hauled the big hatch into place over his head and screwed down the multiple clamps that locked it. The thing was heavy and awkward, a big pain in the ass, and in my case, a pain in the foot as well.

  When we were all on board, the cabin was pressurized with 100 percent oxygen, the same way all American space missions were flown. Then the air was pumped out of the altitude chamber to simulate the environment of space, although we were really at sea level, only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. When the desired pressure was reached, we checked the suit loops, those serpentine hoses which delivered our life-support systems, and verified the ability of the spacecraft to withstand the vacuum of the “space” now surrounding us. The pressure of the oxygen inside the command module was higher than was the vacuum outside, and pushed against the inward-opening hatch, sealing it so securely that a herd of elephants couldn’t have pulled it open. Nobody wanted a hatch to accidentally pop off on the way to the Moon.

  Tom, John and I were anxious to complete our work that Friday so we could peel off the bulky suits, jump into a couple of NASA T-38 jets that we had parked at Los Angeles International Airport several days earlier, and fly home to Houston. But first we had to finish the test, even if it took us into the weekend. So we lay there on small couches that looked like little trampolines and monitored the electronic guts of Apollo.

  Our work continued in stops and starts. A leaking hose dripped poison glycol coolant onto the floor of the spacecraft, and electrical short circuits disrupted communications with the control booth just outside the chamber. After a few irritating hours, Tom grumbled, “Go to the Moon? This son of a bitch won’t even make it into Earth orbit.” Left unsolved, such glitches could stack one atop another and come back to haunt us. Every problem we could find and fix on the ground was one less the guys would have to worry about in space, so we remained locked in our seats, running endless checks of systems, dials, and switches.

  Time was the enemy, the pages falling quickly from the calendar toward the launch date of February 21.

  At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Gus Grissom was bitching about communication problems. “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying,” he barked to the launch team. “Jesus Christ… I said, how are we going to get to the Moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?” Gus didn’t mince his words or his actions. As one of the Original Seven astronauts, he had already flown in space twice, and now commanded Apollo 1. Everyone in the program knew that Gus firmly believed that when the first American stepped onto lunar soil, the name patch on his suit would read: GRISSOM. If Gus didn’t like something, he let people know; at one point he had hung a huge lemon on a balky command module simulator to compare the malfunctioning space-age machine to a broken-down automobile. Such outbursts added even more color to his crusty reputation.

  Ed White, suited up in the capsule with him, was another celebrity in the astronaut ranks. A West Pointer and the son of a general, slender and good-looking and straight as an arrow, Ed had been the first American to walk in space, just eighteen months ago. The third crewman was a nugget, a rookie. Roger Chaffee had never flown in orbit, but had so impressed our bosses that they assigned him a coveted spot on the first Apollo. Roger was my next-door neighbor and one of my closest buddies.

  THE LITANY OF PROBLEMS we were experiencing both at the Cape and Downey had strained the already uneasy relationship between the astronauts and North American Aviation. All of the spacecraft of the Mercury and Gemini programs had come from the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, and a strong bond of trust had grown between the McDonnell engineers who built the machines and the astronauts who flew them.

  The news that North American had won the bidding to be the prime contractor for the Apollo command module had come as a shock to us. We knew the company had a tremendous reputation for building airplanes, but spacecraft were entirely different animals. As the months passed, many of us felt the North American design teams seemed determined to reinvent the wheel rather than build upon what already had been proven to work, an attitude that was difficult to accept in a program that had already endured 20,000 system failures.

  In our opinion, they also showed little or no interest in astronaut suggestions. Just because we had already flown in space and would be the pilots to fly their new creation did not make us experts in their eyes. The North American engineers were working under immense pressure and were not about to let some astronaut “wish list” further complicate the program’s already staggering costs and tight schedules. The result was more of an uneasy truce than a full partnership between us.

  The pair of spacecraft being tested that day, known as Block One models, were never meant to go to the Moon, but only to orbit the Earth. Each Apollo flight would build upon the experiences of those before it and stretch our space bridge a little closer to the lunar surface. The Block Ones were little more than buckets of bolts, but damn it, they were the only buckets we had, and by God, we were going to make them fly!

  The Block Two versions, true spaceships that would carry some of us to the Moon, were coming down the line, but would not be ready any time soon, and we desperately needed a launch now. The Russians had put up three unmanned lunar probes in the past year and the space race was scalding hot.

  Our work in Downey was only about half done when the disembodied voice of a technician crackled in our headsets: “We’re going to terminate the test now and bring you guys down.”

  Terminate? groaned in disbelief. There were always hiccups in such tests, “holds” that stopped the clock while something was checked out. We would sit tight and work on other things while the problem was fixed. It might be a few minutes or it might take hours, but it was part of the job.

  A “hold” was one thing, but “termination” was something else. No one, especially the crew, wanted to stop a test before it was complete, because the whole thing might have to be run again, which could take us into the weekend. Besides, dumping the vacuum from the chamber, undoing that damned, complicated hatch, and climbing out while wearing our space suits was not easy.

  “Why?” barked Tom. We didn’t really want to get out. We’d rather hang on, finish, and go home. After several hours of work, the problems seemed to be mounting rather than diminishing. Patience was never an astronaut virtue.

  “Tom’s got an important telephone call,” came the answer. Now that was strange. We never took calls, no matter how important, during a test, but they had already started bleeding air into the chamber.

  “Who is it?” Tom pressed. “Tell them I’ll call them back.”

  “No,” came the voice. “We’ve been told to get you on the phone now.” In minutes, technicians would
unlock the hatch and help us out.

  As I began to unlock my hoses, my mind raced with possibilities. Maybe something had changed. Something was always changing in the space program. Maybe we had been assigned to be the prime crew on a lunar landing mission. Why not? We had more total hours in space than any other crew in the program, and we were already the official backup crew for the next Apollo flight. But a telephone call about something like that could wait. Whatever it was had to be important.

  Hell, maybe our crew was even being tagged to make the first lunar landing. Or maybe it was our worst nightmare come true, and the Russians were on their way to the Moon. The only other time I could recall such vagueness had been when we lost two astronauts in an airplane crash just before the Gemini 9 mission. I kept it all to myself.

  I glanced over at Tom, whom we always kidded about going into politics. “Might be your campaign manager, Senator,” I said. “Maybe the president is calling,” cracked John. Tom, disgusted with the termination, didn’t think we were funny.

  It took about fifteen minutes for the guys to haul us through the hatch, like pulling sardines from a can. John and I stretched our aching muscles as we walked to the Ready Room while Tom snatched the telephone from the hand of a technician waiting right outside the command module. We didn’t bother getting out of the suits because we might have to return to work, and taking off a space suit wasn’t as easy as slipping out of a sports coat. John and I relaxed for the first time all day, sipping cups of hot coffee and talking about whether we would get home earlier than usual or have to remain in California and start this test all over again tomorrow.

  Tom joined us in about five minutes, his face chalky white. I had shared some pretty hairy experiences with T.P., and knew the man to be totally unflappable, always in control. I had never seen him like this. Before we could ask what was wrong, he stared at us and spoke with a halting voice. “There’s been a fire on the pad.”

  John and I traded quick looks. Fire on the pad? What did that mean? “Are the guys all right?”