- Good morning, everyone. My name is Allan Needell. I'm a curator in
the National Air and Space Museum's
division of Space History with the responsibility
for the Apollo collection. We're here at the National
Air and Space Museum in our Moving Beyond
Earth gallery, and we're here to
discuss a book called Falling to Earth, which
Smithsonian Books has released at just the time 40 years
after the flight of Apollo 15. The subtitle of the book is An
Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey to the Moon, and we are very,
very pleased to have with us the command module pilot
for that mission, Al Worden. [APPLAUSE] - Thanks. First, it's my
pleasure to be here. Secondly, I'd like to
thank the Smithsonian for publishing the
book, and thirdly, welcome to the Al and Al show. - And just let me say to you
that I've had the privilege of being able to read the
book, and I enjoyed the book tremendously, and I want to
thank you and your co-author for the job that you did. - I'd like to introduce
the co-author. Francis French is sitting
down in front here. Actually, he did the
work on this book. All I had to do was talk,
and as most people know, that's not something that's
difficult for me to do. So I did a lot of talking,
he did a lot of recording, he did a lot of
transcribing, and he did a lot of writing on the book. So I owe Francis a
big debt of gratitude for this book, because I think
he did a wonderful job on it, and I guess we'll talk
about the book a little bit as we go here. - Well, let me start by-- the only time I'm
going to do this. I'm going to read a half of
a sentence from the book. And it says, "I
grew up in a place that was about as far away
from the high tech world as it's possible to imagine." And that was in rural Michigan. - Yes. - The question I wanted to
ask is you do talk about it in the book self-reliance and
about working on cars and about solitude and independence
and learning to do that. Much has been made about your
role as a command module pilot, of being the most isolated
person in the universe. And there's some
discussion in the book about the relationship of that. - I'm not sure about
the universe, Allan. I think-- - That's true. - There may be somebody
else out there. - More isolated. - Something out there that
could be more isolated. But I'm sorry, I didn't
mean to interrupt. Go ahead. - Point well taken. But the question still remains. You hint that there may be a
relationship to the comfort you had with being in that
position, of being isolated in the command module,
and your upbringing, and I wonder if you'd
talk about that. - Well, I think
there probably is. I think it's a personality
characteristic that you develop based on how you grow up and
the environment in which you grow up. My early years really
revolved around the farm. Every summer I went to
my grandfather's farm. Believe it or not,
my grandfather was a homesteader in Michigan. He's a wetback, OK? I call lots of people wetbacks,
but could be from anywhere. My granddad was a
wetback from Canada. He never went through
the official steps to become an American citizen. He just walked
across the border. And when he got to
a little town up in the northern part of the
lower peninsula of Michigan, he staked out 160 acres and
went down to the Land Office and signed all the paperwork and
it became his farm, 160 acres. He spent his lifetime clearing
that land, building a house, building a barn, digging a well. He was a very, very
competent individual who could do just about anything. He had his own little
blacksmith shop, so he took care of everything. He always had a team of horses. And one of the things I
found out very early on is that animals don't take
care of themselves very well. You have to be the one
to take care of them. If the cow's going to be milked,
you're the one going to do it. If they have to be let out
to pasture, you got to do it. They don't do these
things for themselves. So I guess what I'm saying
is, at a very early age, I learned a sense
of responsibility that I would not have
gotten any other way, and that is to take
care of those around you and those who work
with you and for you, be they dumb animals or people. Doesn't make any difference. But you develop that sort
of sense of responsibility. Also on the farm, you're out
there in the fields all day long by yourself with
a team of horses, and you learn that the
solitude and the great outdoors and the beauty of where
you are is all you need, and it's great, and you're very
comfortable in your own skin being by yourself, and I
kind of grew up that way. Then I became a fighter
pilot in the Air Force, which is a single seat fighter pilot,
and I was very comfortable doing that. Actually, I didn't
really want to be too responsible for anybody else. If it's something going to
happen, I'd rather it just be me. So, again, that's
that individual thing where you learn kind of
to take care of yourself and you don't worry
about being alone. - But there's an interesting
contrast, because you also emphasize in the
book, especially later on in your career, how
much teamwork is important and that we don't accomplish
anything unless we work together, and that there's
rules and there's organization and there's responsibilities
which are shared. Where did that come in? It came in the Air Force? - That's an
interesting question. Yes, it takes a tremendous
amount of teamwork to get one of these flights
off and do your thing and come back successfully. It's interesting in the way
the teams were organized, every Apollo flight
that landed on the moon had a commander and
a lunar module pilot, the commander was responsible
for landing the lunar module down to the surface,
taking it down and landing it. The lunar module pilot was
responsible for watching all the instruments. He was kind of the
systems engineer all the way to the moon. And then he was the
commander's co-pilot on the way down to the surface. He still watched the
instruments more than he than he actually flew anything. The command module pilot kind of
did as-- he's all by himself . The command module pilot
takes the crew from Earth to the moon. He drops them off when
they're ready to go down to the surface. He stays in orbit
by himself and then he picks them up at the end
of all that and you come home. Now, there's a lot of teamwork
going out and coming back that the entire
crew is involved in, but the command module pilot
basically trains by himself, because what we trained for
more than anything else was, believe it or not,
rendezvous and docking. That's the thing in
everybody's mind. When you land on the moon and
you come back up into orbit, man, that just seems like a
really, really scary thing. So you spend a lot of time
talking about rendezvous and docking to make sure
that you've got everything under control and you can
dock with the lunar module and bring everybody back home. So, yes, there's
a lot of teamwork, but I found that I did a lot
of my training by myself. - Reading the book,
one gets to understand that the teamwork
between the crew is really only a small
part of the teamwork. For instance, you talk about
your experiences working with the workers, the blue
collar workers in North American aviation who are
building the ship that's going to take you, and the
relationship and the trust that you had to build with them. So it's not just
the three of you. It's a whole lot more. - Another good point. My first job when
I got to Houston, after we'd gone through the
initial training program, I was assigned as a
support crew for Apollo. Well, actually, it turned
out to be Apollo 8, but Apollo 8 was supposed to be
the first lunar Earth orbital checkout. Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott,
and Rusty Schweickart. Well, the lunar module
didn't get ready in time, so they reassessed
what they were doing and they sent Apollo
8 to the moon, as you all know,
with Frank Borman. My job was to go to North
American Rockwell and Downey and follow the spacecraft
through its final assembly and checkout. I did that, and by
doing that, I got to meet all the technicians
who were actually putting this thing together. And I found that there's
a magic connection that occurs when you get to the guys
who are actually building it, I would walk into the
clean room in the morning and the technicians who
were putting the spacecraft together, they're around. They're here and
they're in other places. And I would find out from them
what went on the night before and if there are any
problems, if there was a glitch, if
there was something they couldn't resolve. And I found out basically
before the program managers did because I was on a
name basis with these guys. In fact, I got to
tell you, we were so close to the technicians, we
actually organized a baseball game against them at one point. So we had fun with these guys. They were great guys. They were very, very
competent at what they did. Engineers, technicians,
and all of them. And I got on a personal
basis with them to find out anything
that could be a little off in a
spacecraft, and I think that really paid off. I think Apollo 8 had the fewest
in-flight problems of any of the lunar
flights, and I think that's because I knew all these
guys and they were all friends and it's not just we're fixing a
spacecraft to send to the moon. It's that we're fixing a
spacecraft for Al Worden to go to the moon,
and we're going to make sure that everything
on that spacecraft is it's supposed to be, and I
think that was very important. And I think that's also
kind of the outgrowth of the way I grew up. - Well, let's go back, just
try to keep a little bit chronology. As a historian, it's a weakness. Chronology guides probably too
much of what I think about. But the next step in the
career to become an Air Force, to go to West Point,
was a major, major decision. It didn't seem to be one that
was sort of foreordained, and it seemed to be
almost serendipitous. - Yeah, it was not at first. I never thought about it. I had a scholarship from high
school to go to Princeton, and a couple of months
before I was supposed to go, they did a recheck on
my records and found that I had not taken
Latin in high school, and that was something
they required. So that scholarship went by. My principal then
got me a scholarship to the University of Michigan,
and so I went down there for a year. It was quite obvious. I grew up in a
family of six kids. My father just worked in town. He had a regular job. He was a projectionist
at the local theater, did not make a lot of money. Could not afford to send
me to college full shot. They could help a little bit. So it became obvious that I had
to do something to complete. Either had to go to work or
find some way to go to college that didn't cost me anything. I had a very good friend,
a classmate of mine, whose brother had gone to
the Coast Guard Academy. And I was over talking to
he and his dad one day, and his dad said,
hey, you're perfect. You should apply to the academy. And don't just pick one. Apply to all of them. Don't just say military
or Navy or whatever. Put your application
out there for all. So I did. We had two senators. Some of you older
folks in the audience will probably remember
some of these people, but we had two
senators from Michigan who were quite well
known at the time. It was Senator Homer Ferguson
and Senator Vandenberg. And a local congressman. Went to the local congressman,
and he says, well, the first thing you've got to do
is take this competitive exam. It's a civil service
exam, and anybody who wants to go in
any of the academies needs to take this
competitive exam. And then the senators
and congressmen will pick off that exam,
doing background checks and all that kind of
stuff, who's going to go. So I took the
competitive exam and I got the results back
I think in December. I got an appointment from Homer
Ferguson to go to West Point in like January. I knew I was going to
go there the next June. Guess what happened
to my studies at the University of
Michigan at that point? I had a great spring semester. Made several trips, went
skiing, did a lot of things. Anyway, in June
then I showed up. I went to West Point,
because that was my-- and I thought I was going
to be an Army officer. I was going to be
the guy leading the troops up the hill with
the enemy shooting at you and all that. That was my big goal. - You mentioned that your
experience with aviation before then was just
one plane that you saw landed in one of the fields. - That's right, Allan. One airplane. Before I went to West Point,
I had one airplane ride, and that was the flight
from Detroit to New York to go to West Point. That was my complete
experience with airplanes. While I was at
West Point, though, it's really interesting. The reason I decided not to
go Army and to go Air Force instead was that I had
two very, very interesting tactical officers that I
was very close to while I was at West Point. Again, the old folk,
you people would know. You people might. Back in the late '40s,
the Army football team was probably the most
powerful team in the country. We had Doc Blanchard
and Glenn Davis, and not too many people remember
who the quarterback was. Anybody here know? Can you remember? - Way before my time. - OK, well, that quarterback
was my tactical officer, and he was very, very powerful. The other tactical
officer I had was-- Arnold Tucker was his name, by
the way, if anybody remembers. My other tactical
officer was a fellow by the name of Jim
Allen, who ended up becoming the commander
in chief of Shafe, and then he became the
superintendent of the Air Force Academy, so he was a
very, very smart guy. They talked me into
going to the Air Force. And by then I'd had a little
experience in an airplane, so I knew what it was all about. But I had not a clue
that airplanes and me were a good match until
I went to pilot training. - One aspect that I think
actually reflects experiences later on as well is you
talk about the generational differences that you found
among the older officers at West Point and their emphasis on
on-the-ground activity and then the new guys who were coming in
with academic training and book smarts. - Yeah. Well, at West Point, of
course, that's an Army Academy, so you get a lot
of ground training. We had a lot of
interaction with officers who had been in World War II. In fact, one of our
political science professors, Colonel Ware, was a Medal of
Honor winner from World War II. A very, very famous
episode in World War II where he called in his fire on
his own position because they were being overrun. Saved his company. And then we had Iron
Mike Michaelis, who was a commandant at the time. He was very famous
in World War II. He was head of the
82nd Airborne Division. And he was famous because all
he wanted to do during the war was jump out of
airplanes, and they had to restrain him from
jumping out of airplanes. But he led the first
attack behind the lines. He was the 82nd of 101st. I forget now which it was. But these were the
kind of guys we had. The superintendent
was Blackshear Brian, who had just come
back from Korea, and he was an Army guy
through and through and through and through. So it was kind of a
departure from West Point to actually decide to go into
Air Force back in those days. But it was the
right move for me. - But you trained by
learning engineering and you trained by learning-- - Well, yes. Well, you mean at West Point? - At West Point. - At West Point we got a degree
called a Bachelor of Military Science, whatever that means. But we did get some
engineering, we got some math, we got all those other
courses, but we also did the military science thing. Military history and
topography and graphics and that kind of thing. So I had kind of a partial
engineering background when I left West Point, which
I expanded on later at the University of Michigan. - But the same tensions
later on in the Air Force is once you were on active duty
there existed to some degree, I take it, with the
older generations and the younger generations
who were actually learning. - Well, what I found when I got
in a squadron-- and, in fact, I was in-- I flew for six years
right out of Andrews here, and the 95th Fighter Squadron. And we were considered the
defenders of the nation's capital, and I always thought
that was a joke because we could hardly get an airplane off
the ground back in those days. We'd never had the parts. So it was very difficult to
get an airplane off the ground. But when I got to the
squadron, what I found was that the flight
commanders and up from there in our squadron were
by and large guys who'd flown in World War II. At the end of World War II, they
were busted back to sergeant. And then when the
Korean War came along, they got reactivated
as officers. And the problem was
that in World War II, they flew piston
engine airplanes. Now in our squad, and
we're flying F-86 jets. So these guys had to go back
through a retraining program to fly jet airplanes,
and some of them didn't make that
transition too well. They were very, very
afraid of the jet airplane and a little bit shaky
in what they did. But yet these were the guys
that were evaluating me and how I was doing,
and very few of them had college education at
all, any kind of training. They were mostly high
school graduates. And here comes
three or four guys into the squadron as
second lieutenants who are West Point graduates,
and that didn't sit well with these guys. So there was always
that little bit of friction in the squadron. - So I think I'm
stretching it a little bit, but I was thinking about
the parallel of when you're in the Astronaut
Corps and the various-- you were in the fifth
class to come in. - Right. - There were earlier guys
who had a lot of experience. There were other people who
are coming in with that, and then behind you were the
scientist trained astronauts. - Well, there was a group of
scientists just before us. Group four was more or
less a science group too. But you're right, when we-- well, I'll tell you the story. When I first showed
up down in Houston, there were 19 of us
that got selected, and they broke us down
into various flights, and I was assigned to a guy
by the name of Wally Schirra. He was my flight
commander, flight leader. And I walked into his--
now, he was a Navy captain and I was an Air Force
captain, so, I figured, what the hell we're all equal. So I walked in and I said,
yeah, it's nice to meet you and I'm a captain and you're
a captain and that's great. That didn't sit well with Wally. And the next thing
I found myself doing was getting him a cup of coffee. But I've got to tell you,
he's maybe the greatest friend I've ever had. He was a wonderful guy and
we became very close friends. There was this attitude
in the program, and it's like anywhere. It's like your first
days in school, your first days in college, your
first days in flight training, your first days here. You're kind of the
outsider at first until somebody takes pity on
you and they kind of bring you into whatever the group is,
and I found that everywhere. When I got to the Astronaut
Corps down in Houston, what I found is you
got to earn your spurs. I don't care where you are. You've got to earn the
respect of everybody else. So what we found when we first
got to Houston was that, hey, you're the greeny. You're the guy who
sweeps the floor. You're the guy who
gets the coffee. And by and by, you'll learn
a few things here and there, and sooner or later, you'll
get on a support crew and then a backup crew and maybe
you'll get your own flight. - Reminded you of West Point? - Absolutely at West Point. The first year at West Point is
pure hell because you've, got upperclassmen who are
bracing you in a corner and yelling and screaming
at you all the time, and you're nothing. You're just dirt. Once you get through
that first year, what a wonderful
world that became after I got through
the first year because I didn't have anybody
screaming at me anymore. So, yeah, you you've
got to earn it. - And the first interaction
you had with astronauts was when you were still in
the Air Force at Edwards. I believe some of them would
come up and train there. - Right. - What was your impression
of the astronauts when you weren't an astronaut? - Well I have to tell you,
my hero, even at Edwards when I was there, my hero and
the guy that I hoped to follow was always Mike Collins. And a lot of you here know
Mike Collins quite well. He was the guy that
I always hoped to be. There were others. I taught a simulator at
the test pilot school, it was a space simulator,
and we had guys come out from Houston that were going to
do spacewalks, extravehicular activities, come out and
trained on our system. Charlie Bassett and Gene Cernan
were the two that came out. And so I got a chance
to meet them and realize that these guys were
really exceptional. They picked stuff up
like that, piece of cake. They really understood this
business about being in space and being in neutral gravity or
weightlessness or zero gravity if you want to call it. You know, there's no such
thing as zero gravity. We all talk about
zero gravity, but you realize there is no such thing
as zero gravity ever anywhere. I don't care where you go. You're either under
the gravity influence of the Earth or the moon or
the sun or something else, but there's always a
large body out there that it's gravity is affecting
you and any vehicle you're in. So anyway, that's
part of it too. But these guys came out and
trained on the simulator for their spacewalks, and I
found that they were just-- they picked it up like that
and they knew exactly what we're talking about. No problems at all. - Now, it's easy for us when
we think about Apollo to just think about it as the sort of
self-contained or the space program, but it wasn't. It was immersed in
a historical period. And at Edwards, if
you hadn't become-- what would have become of
you had decided not to apply or had not been accepted
into the Astronaut Corps? - I think I probably would have
taught for another year or two at the test pilot school or at
the advanced aerospace research pilot school. I probably would have
had a tour in Vietnam, and I would have come
back and either go back to Edwards in flight
test or picked up a squadron or something of all
weather fighters somewhere. But I think there
was a progression there that if I hadn't
gone into the program would have been kind of a
normal Air Force progression. - There was one other sort of
pre-NASA thing that struck me as interesting in your book,
and that was your discussion of the year or so
you spent in England. And the comparison you
made between the way that we did things
automated here and how self-directed
things were, that you took your own notes, you
did your own analysis, you did your own measurements. I wonder if you'd
talk about that. - When you read the book, you'll
find out that I went through test pilot school
in England back in the '60s, and the school was
called the Empire Test Pilot School. And it was a funny thing,
because the British still considered us part
of the empire. We had to dissuade them on
numerous occasions from that, but we were considered
part of the empire. There were four of us, two
Navy and two Air Force-- no, two Navy and two Air Force
guys from here, from the US, were over there
on exchange duty, and I went over and went
through the test pilot school over there. What Allan's referring
to is a feeling, is my understanding of all that. Back in those days, we were
flying World War II airplanes. We were flying-- well,
Hawker Hunter wasn't exactly a World War II airplane,
but a Meteor was. A Meteor was a twin
engine jet airplane that was built by
England and flew right at the end of the World War II. Non-pressurized, very
dangerous airplane to fly, but this one here-- but the point we're getting
to is none of these airplanes were instrumented as we would
do it here in this country. When you flew a
program of flight test on one of those
airplanes, you had to take a ruler, a
handheld force gauge. Anything you needed
to measure, you had to stick it in your
pocket and take it with you so that you could measure
all these things in flight. Now, the advantage of that when
I got back to the classroom, I had to reduce
all that data and I had to understand what it all
meant, because I had taken it, I had recorded all
this stuff manually. So I had to understand what
it was about the airplane that I was trying to show,
and I didn't have somebody in the back room analyzing all
the data that was collected in some room somewhere,
where the pilot is only flying the airplane. And I thought that was a
tremendous advantage to me, because it forced me to
understand the systems, forced me to understand
the aerodynamics, forced me to understand
everything there was to know about the airplane, and I
thought that was really, really important. And when I got into
the program then, that same thing applied
to the command module. - Well, we should probably
spend a lot of time to actually talk about some
of your experiences going into space. The mission that you
were on was the first of the missions that was less
a engineering test mission than it was an actual
exploration scientific mission. Can you talk a little bit about
the training, your familiarity, what the issues were,
and what your goals were for the mission? - Well, yeah, we were
the first of what we called the J missions. The J mission,
everything was uprated because we were carrying a
lot of extra weight with us. The lunar rover, I forget
exactly how much it weighed, but it's like 500
pounds somewhere. And we carried the
scientific instrument module into lunar orbit,
which had a large-- that's kind of interesting. Had a large high resolution
camera designed in the '50s. We had a mapping camera with
a laser altimeter associated with it. We carried a series of
remote sensing devices that we would put out
on collapsing pole. We'd run the pole out
with the sensor at the end so that nothing
around the spacecraft would interfere with the
data we're collecting. This was the first time
that had been done. And so we were fairly confident
in flying the machinery at that point. So the last year and
a half of training were really focused
on the science. And the whole thing
about going to the moon is you've got to study geology. Interesting. What do we call the study
rocks here on Earth? - Geology. - What do we call study
rocks on the moon? - Geology. - Bingo. We're really, really
smart people, right? We call the study of
rocks on the moon geology. Makes me think when
we get to Mars, we're going to probably call the
study of rocks on Mars geology. I don't know. I don't know how far
we're going to carry that. But we really focused
on the geology. Now, Dave and Jim
spent days and days studying geology in various
locations around the world, actually, where
there were features that were very lunar-like. Craters and lava
flows and calderas and all kinds of things. While they were
doing that, I was working with Farouk
Elbaz studying lunar geology, which
meant that I was looking at the large features. I wasn't looking at micro
stuff like individual rocks. I was looking at large
features, and in an attempt to integrate those
large features with what we found
on the surface so that we kind of
understood the processes and how these things got there. So we really focused
on the science. - It sounds to me from reading
the book that you were always at peace with this idea that you
were going to go to the moon, but these other two guys
were going to go walk around and you were going to get
to stay up there and do other aspects of
the exploration. - Right. Well, I was very happy. People often ask,
how do you happen to be a command module
pilot or lunar module pilot or commander? I think it was true
back then that the best way to become a commander
is to be a command module pilot first. And it's a very
logical sequence. As a command module
pilot, you learn everything about the
command service module. And then if-- Farouk. then if you become
a commander, you've only got one vehicle to learn. That's the lunar module. If you're a lunar module pilot,
unfortunately, the lunar module pilot doesn't get
to fly anything. He's looking at all
the instruments. So he's got to learn
two vehicles to fly, and only one guy in
the program did that, and that;s Gene Cernan. All the other commanders
were old CMPs, if you will. We got selected for
the seats that we had based on our experience,
and I was out at I was out in Downey all the time
checking out the spacecraft that would become Apollo 8 when
we had the fire at the Cape. And I got a call
from Deke in Houston saying they had this
tragedy and for me to get-- I think Tom Stafford and John
Young and Gene Cernan I think were all out there. So I told them. We all went back to Houston. What happened after that,
they formed a committee to go back and redo all the fire
safety aspects of the command module. Well, since I knew so much
about it already, that was-- I mean, I was there. Didn't even have to be asked. Jim Irwin got
assigned to the crew that looked after the lander. So when the flight
assignments come up, it was pretty
obvious I was going to be a command module pilot. - So you mentioned Farouk Elbaz. I think people may not know that
Farouk was here at the museum when it was first opened,
and he started our Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. - Yes. - So we're familiar with him
and he's quite a character. Let me ask you about-- one question. I know that it's-- this question about how much
did you think about the danger and whether you might
have to come back alone. - I could give you a
flip answer, but I won't. It's always in the
back of your mind, but it's like the more
you train for something and the more you know about
it, the more comfortable you are doing it. So we never-- the issue
of not coming back-- we didn't take poison
pills, folks, by the way. None of that nonsense that
you've maybe heard about. The most dangerous
part of the flight would be if Dave and Jim
couldn't get off the surface. That's where we could
have had a problem. If the engine misfired
or something happened and they couldn't get
off, then yes, I'd have to come home by myself. I have to say, I kind of held
that over their head too, saying, hey, guys, don't
forget, I can still go home, which was something
that they had to think about. But we never really-- in terms
of being concerned or nervous or really worried about
that sort of thing, I don't think we ever were. And our flight went
so flawlessly anyway that we never even-- I mean, it wasn't
even a thought. - Well, backing up, just one
other aspect I learned actually from your book is
how early you were aware that the
degree of support, the financial support
for the Apollo program was not going to last forever,
that they were already canceling flights. - Correct. - Which must have upped the
ante in the sense that, look, we've already invested
all of this stuff. We better really get
our money's worth out of the remaining missions. - Well, I think
that's part of it, Al, and I think mentally,
when you make a flight like this
to the moon, you're going to be there for six days. You're going to be on the
flight for up to 13 days. You're only going
to go that way once. You're never going back. You better do every single thing
you can while you're there. So you don't overlook anything. Kind of interesting,
in the flight plan, normally there's
a certain number of scientific
experiments that you do, and I don't know how you-- there's never any
official number, but let's say on a normal
flight there's a 100%-- you figure a number that's 100%. We had principal
investigators and scientists asking us to do things for
them that went beyond that, and we accepted all those. So we actually
planned for like 125% of what would be a
normal scientific load, with the understanding
that it's always easier to take something
out of a flight plan than it is to put something in. We were so dedicated to
getting everything we could while we were there,
we did everything. We did them all. - Now. All of the work that you
did or a great part, not all of it but a great
part of it depended on getting that data from the
[INAUDIBLE] of the service module, that is the film
from all of the work that you had done. And one of the
unique parts, and I think you still hold the record
of the deepest space EVA. Is that true? Talk a little bit about
your impressions of that. - OK. I think we still have the
record for the furthest out spacewalk to
recover that film. Interestingly, the
high resolution camera was the camera that was
originally developed for the U-2 back in the '50s. In fact, all the
equipment we had on board was basically late
1950s design, build, and the point of that
we wanted to make sure that whatever we carried
was very, very reliable, and so this stuff was tested to
the nth degree over the years until we were really, really
comfortable that it was good. That high resolution camera
which, is the old U-2 camera, had something like
100 feet of 8 inch film I think it was in
a big canister, which weighed about 90 pounds. So the whole idea
of the spacewalk was that you get out
of the spacecraft, you work your way to the back
end of the service module, you take that canister and
pull it out of its camera, and you bring it
back and you put it inside the command module,
because the only thing that survives the flight
are those things which are inside the command
module, like us, in addition to the camera. And then I had to go
back out and get the film canister from the mapping
camera and do the same thing. That was an
interesting experience. Talk about overtraining. I had trained so much for
that spacewalk and that EVA that I completed the
whole thing in less time that I was supposed
to, and then I couldn't figure
out a good excuse to stay out longer because
I'd done everything, so they're all saying, eh,
get back in, get back in. I think I was out
there, what, 38 minutes? - And you didn't have your
smartphone camera with you. - And I didn't have-- I did not have a camera. I wanted to carry a camera
out there because you never know what you're going to see. It could be all kinds of things. Well, turns out there
were some things that should have been photographed
that really weren't, like the scorching of the
outside of the service module where the reaction
control system rockets-- when they fired, they were
scorching and blistering the Mylar covering on the
outside the service module. I don't think anybody had
been aware of that before, and it probably made-- when they found that out,
it caused a few changes. But you never know
what you're going to see when you're out there. The wonderful part of it is I
could stand up on the outside the service module
and look and see both the Earth and
the moon, and that's kind of a unique place to be. - You could tell that Al and
Al could go on and on and on, but why don't we invite
people to step up to the mic and ask questions? If somebody there will moderate,
and if not, we'll just go on. So if anyone's interested,
please make your way to the microphone by the
spotlight there, and that won't beam you up,
Scotty, but it's just a nice microphone for you. Oh, and you'll have to
hand in your permission slips on the way. - Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Don't forget, you're on live TV. - First of all, it's
a great pleasure to be able to talk to you. After you returned
to Earth, what was the greatest
adjustment you had to make? - What was what? - He said, what was the greatest
adjustment you had to make after you returned to Earth? - Getting used to
crowds of people. That was the big thing. You make a flight that last
two weeks, there's only three of you. Nobody else around. You get back, you go
through debriefing, and then the president
sends you on a world tour, and all you're doing is
talking to big crowds of people all the time. And everybody wants to buy
you a drink and this and that and the other thing, and
that's a big adjustment. - Thank you. - Go ahead. - First I wanted to
say I really admire your work with the Astronaut
Scholarship Foundation. I know you devote a
lot of time and effort to that worthy group, and thank
you very much for doing that. Can you tell us, when you were
conducting interviews and doing other research for the
writing of this book, was there anything that you
learned for the first time 40 years after the event? Something that you were maybe
surprised to find out about? - I don't think so. I relearned a few things. With the passage of
time, 40 years goes by, it's not the 40 years. It's the fact that 40 years
ago, I started out at 40. Now I'm 40 years older. And it's the last 10
years where I'm probably missing a few connections
here and there. I don't remember--
there are some things that we had to kind of dig
up, and Francis is very, very good at asking the
right question, and so you start
out with a question, and that triggers something,
and you go down that path, and that triggers
another question, and I'm sure you get
this all the time here. And pretty soon a
lot of it comes back, and we spent a lot of
time rehashing stuff like that to make sure
that we said it correctly. - Related to that,
while someone is-- I wonder if you'd
comment a little bit about the degree of tension
between the astronaut as a person, a
family man, someone with their hobbies and
individual interests, and working for NASA? The autonomy versus
the structure that you've found at JSC and
how that changed over the years? - Well, it was funny. When I was at JSC, there
wasn't a really firm style or discipline or regimentation
back in those days. I'm always glad
I flew back then. Back in those days, everybody
had a goal, one goal, and that was it. Every single person at the
old Manned Spacecraft Center or now the Johnson
Spacecraft Center, one goal. That's to get a guy on the
moon and get him back home. Everybody lived to that. Outside of that, we
weren't a number. We were people. We were basically left
to our own devices to do whatever
needed to be done. And some of us trained
exceptionally hard, worked exceptionally
hard to understand all the things we had to do. And I think there was a range
of interest in doing all that. But there's not a
lot of regimentation. This was self imposed
kind of stuff. A little different
than family, where you're more concerned about the
people than what you're doing. - We have a little person here. - How did the Earth
look from the moon? - How did the Earth
look from the moon? Is that the question? - Yes. - It looks like a big marble. Big blue and white marble. And it's hard to imagine
that that's home. That's where we live. It big. It's bigger than
the moon from here. - How do you respond to folks
that say we're not alone in the universe? - How do I respond
to the comment about we're not alone
in the universe? I agree with it. How could you not? The universe is a
pretty big place. One of the most
impressive things that I saw when I
was on the flight was the universe from the
dark side of the moon. As you know, the
backside of the moon is different from the dark side. Does everybody agree with that? When you're shadowed from
both the sun and the Earth, then you're really
in the dark side. There was a pie-shaped
section of the orbit where I was over the horizon from
both the Earth and the sun, and that made a huge
difference in universe. Instead of seeing
37 of the brightest stars, which were our navigation
stars, I saw a sheet of light. Hundreds of thousands
of millions more stars than we can see from here. That gets you
thinking about things. We're part of the
Milky Way Galaxy. This is a little off
the book, but we're part of the Milky Way Galaxy. We're about two
thirds of the way out from the center
of the galaxy. We look at the galaxy
through and that's why we see the Milky Way. Because we're looking
through this galaxy. Last count I heard of
the numbers of stars in the Milky Way exceeded 200
billion in our own galaxy, and about the same number
of galaxies out there. Are we unique? I cannot believe with the
billions and trillions of stars out there that there's not
another Earth out there and some somebody's
living there. - Let me ask-- - I can't believe that. - In that same vein, we
hear from other astronauts that the experience of actually
seeing with your own eyes some of these
things is something that can't be replicated either
by the Hubble Space Telescope pictures. Is that true? I mean, is there a unique
aspect of actually physically looking at it or do you get
the same feeling from looking at the Hubble images? - Oh, that's interesting. No, I think there's-- I never thought about
it before, but I do think there's a psychological
or emotional component, probably coupled with
the fact that you're quarter of a million
miles away from home, that has a huge impact
on you, much more so than just looking at a
picture that the Hubble took. - Thank you. It's a great opportunity to be
here and ask you a question, but I wanted to give you a
fact, before I ask the question. You were my boss in 1959
at Andrews Air Force base in the 95th Fighter
Interceptor Squadron, and one of the best bosses
I ever had, I'm glad to say. I know at that time
you probably didn't have any idea you were
going to be an astronaut. Am I correct? - Thank you. God, that's a long time ago. - That's a long time ago. You're right. My question really is, do you
think that we will go forward in the near future with
another type of an astronaut program to someplace,
a destination that we probably haven't
heard about yet or maybe we've heard about
it but we haven't had serious conversation
about it yet? - Did everybody
get the question? I don't think it's going
to be anytime soon. I think I think we've
really put the brakes on. I think it's sad. I think we're lacking leadership
in this country today. I don't want to point
any fingers, but how can you cancel the
Constellation program? It may not even be
the best program, but to just cancel it I think
really harms this country, and it's going to be
years and years and years before we're going to be
able to recover the momentum to go back. Now, I know there are
things on the drawing boards to just get people to
the Space Station and back. The longer term programs to
go somewhere else far away I don't think we're going to
see for 25 years at least. - 25. - For a long time, and
I think that's sad. It's not that
exploration is the thing. It's that exploration by
itself leads to things, and the byproduct of
that is new technology. And I think to me, the
most critical part of that is the excitement that
it brings to the country, the pride that it
brings to the country, and the motivation it provides
for students in school. I think you'll find that
in the last 40 years, the greatest motivator
for kids in school is the space program,
because every kid wants to be an astronaut or work
there, because it's exciting. When you kill that excitement,
you kill a lot of motivation to do things like get
yourself through school and be ready to take
advantage of it. - Well, thank you
for being here. - Thank you. Good to see you. - I think we have time
for a couple more. - Thank you for
the presentation. Just to build upon the
previous gentleman's question, so any thoughts or
opinions on what you think should be done going forward
in the future with regard to the space program? - What I think should be done? Yeah, I think we ought to-- I think we ought to
triple the NASA budget. I think that'd be the
best expenditure of money this country could have. I think we ought to
design some programs to go somewhere that's meaningful. I think we need to build
propulsion systems that will get us outside
the solar system. I think we need to go find out
where everybody else is living. That's a long term
project, but it's going to take a lot of
money and a lot of resources in the short term. I know we're getting
launch vehicles ready to put astronauts
up to the Space Station, either private or government. We're going to be looking a lot
at private industry to do that, but the problem with
private industry doing that is there's no profit
in sending a flight to Mars. And so why would they do it? That's something that the
government's got to do. - I have two questions
for Colonel Worden. The first one is, with
the private spacecraft, would you favor a ballistic
spacecraft like the Falcon or the winged spacecraft
like the Dream Chaser? - To answer your question,
I guess I don't care. If you can get people up
and people back safely, that's all I care about. I think Dream
Chaser is probably-- well, I don't know. Ballistic missile that
splashes down in the ocean is the most efficient
spacecraft you can build because you get
the most volume for the least weight. It doesn't have wings,
and they add weight. Dream Chaser is a lifting
body type machine, and you can maneuver it and you
can land somewhere, probably overall maybe a better choice. I don't know. But as far as I'm concerned,
either which way we go, I don't care as
long as it's safe. - My other question is,
during your years in Houston, did you ever have the occasion
to meet cardiologist Michael Debakey? - No, I never did meet Debakey. I met Cooley, but I
never met Debakey. We had our own
cardiologists down in NASA, so we dealt with them. - Thank you very much. - All right, I think we have
time for another one or two. - I was also-- - You're back. - Could you tell us,
was that anything that just because
of space limitations you had to edit out that you
wish you'd been able to keep and you could tell us about now? Something from the
book you wish you could have elaborated on more. - I honestly can't
think of anything that would have been important
to the book that's not there. I think Francis put
this stuff together in an extremely good way, and
we've been over it a thousand times, and I think that the
important stuff is all here. Thanks. That's a good question, though. - One more. - OK, Bob. - I had a chance to
speak to you earlier. - Is this a TV interview? - No, no, no, but a question. Can you explain to
everyone here the title of your book, what it means, so
that they have an idea of what you've put on paper here? - Yeah. OK, the title of the book,
Falling to Earth, in my mind it has a double meaning. When you are at the moon
and you start back to Earth, Earth's gravity pulls you in
and it pulls you towards Earth. It's exactly the same as if
you got on the top of a cliff and you jump off, and
the gravity is going to make you fall all the way
down, and the further you go, the faster you go. When you're coming back from the
moon, the same thing happens. The gravity of
Earth is attracting and you're accelerating
and you're literally falling into Earth. The important thing is
that you not hit it. The important thing is
that you hit the atmosphere at just the right angle so
you can slow down and then use the parachutes to land. The other side of
the title of the book is about what kind of
happened after our flight when we had a little problem
with some postal covers and we got reprimanded and
I had to leave Houston, and that was a real fall for me. So it's kind of both. It's both those things. - All right, I think
that's the time allotted. Now, I think you were
all asked to sit here while Al makes his
escape, but I wanted to thank you all for being
such a great audience, and I want to again
thank Al Worden. - Thanks, everybody. [APPLAUSE]
