Flying to the Moon Read Free Page B

experience as pilots. I had studied a lot about Gemini and Apollo, the two spacecraft which were supposed to fly next (after Mercury), and I thought I gave good answers to most of the questions. But some I did not know; for example, I knew practically nothing about the Atlas booster, the one that was used to put a Mercury spacecraft into
orbit. Incidentally, the astronauts always call their machines spacecraft, not capsules. Capsules are something you swallow.
    I went back to Edwards Air Force Base after the interview and began the long wait to hear whether or not I would be rejected again. I figured this was my last chance, because I was just one year below the age limit of thirty-four, and I thought it would be years and years before NASA would pick any more astronauts. They already had sixteen—the original seven plus a second group of nine. After a month of waiting and worrying, I got a phone call from Deke Slayton. He said they would take me, if I still wanted to work for NASA. If I still wanted to? He must have been kidding—I had been thinking about nothing else for the whole month. Deke didn’t sound the slightest bit excited, but I certainly was, and so was my wife when I told her. She also had been nervous during the long wait. Our oldest child, Kate, was only four years old, too young to understand what was happening. I soon found out that NASA had selected fourteen of us. These men would all become close friends in the coming years. They were a grand group of people, easy to live and work with, and I enjoyed being with them. Their names were Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Charlie Bassett, Al Bean, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Dick Gordon, Dave Scott, Rusty Schweickart, and C. C. Williams. And, oh yes, I almost forgot, Mike Collins. Of this group of fourteen, three would orbit the earth, three orbit the moon, four walk on the moon, and four would get killed. There is a lot of luck in this life.

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    M y wife and three children (Kate, Ann, and Michael) and I moved to Houston in January of 1964. NASA was building a new center there, called the Manned Spacecraft Center. The astronauts’ offices were being moved into a brand-new building and I was assigned my own small office, with a big gray metal desk, several large bookcases, and a small blackboard on one wall. Inside the desk there were lots of pencils, a ruler, and several yellow pads of paper. That was all the equipment you needed to become an astronaut, or at least to start becoming an astronaut. No one told me how I should be spending every minute of every day; I had to decide
that for myself. I decided to begin by learning as much as I could about the history of the space program, about Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and to find out what was bothering the engineers who were designing the spacecraft of the future.
    One nice thing about studying the space program in 1964 was that it was quite new, and one didn’t have to go back very far in the history books to learn about it. Of course, people like Jules Verne (and how many before him?) had been dreaming of flying to the moon for centuries, and the Chinese had had small rockets for seven hundred years. But it had only been fairly recently that man had begun to think seriously about using rocket power to leave the surface of the earth. Piston and jet engines are of no use in space, because they require air to operate (to mix with the fuel before burning) and there is no air above the earth’s atmosphere, in the vacuum of space. A rocket solves this problem by carrying everything it needs with it, not only fuel but also the oxidizer needed to mix with the fuel and cause it to burn. It was the twentieth century before people thought seriously about this, and there were three men who seemed to be ahead of everyone else in the world.
    The first was a Russian by the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was born in 1857. Tsiolkovsky was almost totally