No Turning Back
THE APOLLO 14 COMMAND SHIP, Kitty Hawk, appeared as if it were a thick-bodied creature about to devour the lunar module Antares. Its crewmembers sat three across, readying the spacecraft for its final shot at docking. Stu Roosa took his cue from Alan Shepard. He dismissed his concerns over fuel quantity in the tanks and brought his thrusters up for a full-power charge.
Three men braced themselves. Roosa brought Kitty Hawk alive with a powerful blast from the thrusters. Spears of transparent flame streaked back. Vibrating and shaking, Kitty Hawk burst forward. Shepard’s command to “Juice it!” still rang in Roosa’s ears as the probe at the tip of Kitty Hawk slammed into the lunar module cone.
Both ships rocked from the impact. No one dared to breathe, afraid the two spacecraft might once again rebound away from each other.
C’mon, grab, grab . . . grab you . . .
If Shepard’s force of will could have kept the two ships joined as one, it—
No rebound!
They listened with fierce intensity, knowing not only the future of their mission but also the whole Apollo program was hanging on just one sound.
Click! The capture light came on!
“Got it!” three men yelled as one, pent-up breath bursting from their lungs. As quickly as exultation swept through them, they were silent, their eyes riveted to Shepard’s data panel.
Alan turned his face slowly. The furrows that creased his forehead were swept away like smoke before the wind. His teeth flashed with that Tom Sawyer grin.
“We have a hard dock,” he said quietly.
Roosa jammed his transmit button. He wanted to shout, but soft words had the same effect. “Houston, we’ve got a hard dock.”
“Roger that, Kitty Hawk. We confirm.” They could hardly hear the words of CapCom. In the background Mission Control was a bedlam of whistles and cheering. Shepard took a deep breath. They hadn’t won this race yet. And they’d almost lost everything because someone had not done his job. A piece of dirt or debris had stuck in their docking mechanism, thwarting their plans and training.
He shook off the euphoria of the successful docking. “Houston, we’re ready for business up here.”
But Houston had applied the brakes. Controllers couldn’t keep Apollo 14 from its energy-impelled drift moonward, but they refused to clear Shepard and his crew to continue with the planned lunar touchdown.
They were justifiably edgy about making premature conclusions. Flight operations boss Sig Sjoberg told his team leaders he was going to be damned sure “that this thing is indeed satisfactory for docking— again—before we can commit to the moon landing.”
From his position, Sig was right. But the commander in Kitty Hawk, way out in the middle of nothing and on a planned collision course with the moon, was ready to chew his nails. He knew what Sig was doing, looking at all the possibilities. Suppose Alan and Ed made a great moon landing mission, boosted back up, and then failed to dock with the command module? Their only chance for survival, let alone making the mission pay off, would be a never-tried formation flight between Kitty Hawk and Antares—slinging rope tethers between the two ships, and performing an impromptu space walk, also moving boxes of moon rocks from one ship to the other.
Well, hell! Shepard would have paced back and forth if cramped quarters in zero-g had allowed it. Any test pilot worth an ounce of salt knows you can’t predict all the problems and possibilities. That’s why funereal smoke had drifted upward from test fields from the beginning of aviation. You knew the chances you were taking before you even slipped on your flight boots. It was no different now.
Besides, he and Mitchell had tested that jury-rigged ship-to-ship transfer in the astronaut water-training tank. They had had fits, frustrations, and snarls, but they’d done it. And they could do it again. They didn’t need another guaranteed hard dock. They could do the mission without—
CapCom reminded Alan and his crew they’d been up nineteen straight hours. “Get some rest,” they ordered.
That’s the great thing about flying on a centrifugal slingshot. They went to sleep, and Kitty Hawk kept chugging to the moon.
Shepard slept fitfully, alternating between brief periods of deep sleep and half-awake restlessness. Aware he faced unexpected problems, he was working out the solutions and alternatives before they happened. That way he could react to virtually any scenario instead of wasting precious time trying to figure out who or what was trying to take down his craft.
Several times he awoke and was drawn to the viewing ports of Kitty Hawk, where he could convince himself again that he was actually living what for so long had been a dream. It was folly beyond comprehension even to consider backing out of this mission before they’d gone all the way. To have vanquished odds that would have felled a hundred men and then quit because of some mechanical hang-up went against every fiber of his being.
It wasn’t just his experience as a fighter pilot and test pilot that accounted for these feelings. Shepard believed absolutely that in almost every respect a man’s adult character is formed in his early years. He considered himself to have been blessed in many ways, not the least of which was having as a father a man with an innate ability to understand machinery. Making things work had been as commonplace to the young Alan Shepard as opening a book on flight, and he’d done that many a time. Even as far back as age four, when Charles Lindbergh had made his solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris. That’s when the love for aviation first had begun to grow inside him.
And what had been given as this gift by his father began to reap rewards while still in his teen years. Alan Shepard became, in the classic sense, an airport bum. There is no deprecation in this term. The airport bums were those kids who hung out at airports, doing odd jobs, seeking eagerly to sweep out hangars, to wash airplanes, to run the fuel hoses and change oil and clean windshields, all to hear the hallowed words, “Hey, kid, want a ride?”
That’s where it began, and from sweeping and cleaning, the local pilots learned that young Shepard had mechanical magic in his hands. He could repair broken fuel and oil lines, torque replacement spark plugs just so. He could be trusted to taxi planes from one part of a field to another. Through this process began the skills of knowing how to listen to an engine, how to feel what a winged machine is telling its pilot.
“The Fix-it Kid.” That was young Alan Shepard.
“A born pilot.” That, too, was the praise from the experienced flyers.
The teenager walking, bumming a ride, or pedaling between home and airport was beginning to realize his dreams. He would be among the best.
Yet his wildest dreams could not match the reality of this moment. The kid who had thought breathlessly of flying at a hundred miles an hour had made the long upward march from rag-wings to metal, from propellers to jets, and exchanged his greasy jeans and coveralls for g-suits and flight gear and the helmet over his head and went supersonic.
And in spite of the years of fighting his inner-ear problem, it had happened. He was here, moonbound, and he wasn’t going to let some mechanical burp or a piece of scratched metal screw up his mission. Not if he had to step outside and change the oil in this thing, if he had to fix a “flat” on Apollo 14, he was taking his lunar ship to a touchdown in the Fra Mauro highlands on the shore of the moon’s Ocean of Storms.
“To hell with worrying about docking after the moonwalk,” Shepard told himself. If Roosa was unable to complete a successful linkup on the return from the lunar surface, Alan had made up his mind to break all mission rules and fix the broken machine himself. He would have Stu hold the ships tightly with thrusters and in his pressure suit he’d climb into the tunnel between the two craft and manually pull them together.
He couldn’t tell controllers what he had planned. They would have ordered him not to proceed with so foolhardy a move. But he was determined to do whatever was necessary to go on with the mission.
Houston greeted them at the end of their ten-hour break. “How’d you guys sleep?” asked CapCom.
“My mattress was hard,” complained Roosa. A neat trick in weightlessness, but Stu carried it off with a straight face.
Alan was in no mood for casual banter. He glared at the cabin speakers until he heard Mission Control say, “You are GO.”
The moon landing was back on the schedule. Tests on the ground had proven even a small chunk of debris could have fouled Roosa’s docking maneuvers, that the astronauts could repeat their earlier “juice it” maneuver if it became necessary. Shepard lightened up when he heard the news. “Hot damn!” he exclaimed.
They sailed without a quiver through the halfway mark toward the moon. Gravitational pull from earth had slowed their speed to little more than a tenth of what it had been but they were still moving at a heady 3,200 miles an hour. To the impatient Shepard they were “crawling” through space.
As the long hours passed they marveled at the glow of a moon growing ever larger in their view. During their scheduled rest periods Alan Shepard took every opportunity to study both the diminishing earth and the expanding details of their destination. “Kitty Hawk, how big a moon are you seeing?” asked CapCom.
“Sort of half,” Alan replied. “It appears about the size of an orange held at arm’s length. The moon is starting to take on a little bit of brown and grayish colors about this point, as opposed to being as bright as it appears from earth. You can start to see a little bit of texture.”
When they awoke from their second sleep period, Alan and Ed floated into Antares for a meticulous checkout of their lander. Two hours later, they notified Houston their bird was “immaculate” and ready to go.
Terrestrial gravity diminished, and the moon’s grip assumed dominance, a steady acceleration toward the small world now less than forty thousand miles before them. Global size required new thinking. The diameter of the moon just about equaled the distance from Los Angeles to New York.
“The moon is out my rendezvous window right now,” Mitchell updated Houston. “We’re running downhill very rapidly toward it.”
The next day, they swept around the lunar far side into the thirty-three-minute radio blackout with earth. Thirteen minutes later, Roosa fired their big engine to reduce their speed by two thousand miles an hour.
“We’ve got capture orbit,” Roosa confirmed as they emerged from the far side.
“This is really a wild place,” Shepard sang out.
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Roosa. “You’re not going to believe this, but it looks just like the map.”
Mitchell gazed down with awe. “That’s the most stark and desolate-looking piece of country I’ve ever seen,” he added.
“Let’s get to work, troops,” Alan said, breaking up the sightseeing tour.
Roosa dropped them into an elliptical orbit with its low point ten miles above the surface. This would enable Shepard and Mitchell to save fuel for the critical phase just before touchdown. It was their best shot of making a bull’s-eye landing.
On the twelfth orbit, Alan and Ed, moonwalk suits pressurized, unplugged from Kitty Hawk. Stu Roosa watched every move as the two spacecraft separated. “Okay,” he called to Antares, “you’re moving out. You seem real steady. I’m going to back away from you.”
For the next four hours Shepard and Mitchell studied the lunar landscape on passes over their highland landing area at Fra Mauro and ran through their spacecraft systems and computer programs before being cleared to fire their descent engine and head for the surface.
As they swept above Fra Mauro, excitement grew in the lander. “There it is, big as life,” Mitchell radioed. “The sun angle looks real good for the next time around.”
Shepard was ready to drop the hammer with rocket fire. But not yet. He and Ed would take advantage of every allotted minute of checkout time, coordinating with Houston, to confirm Antares was in perfect shape for descent.
As they continued their sweep over their landing site, Alan recognized nearby craters. “I have Cone Crater, Triplet, and Doublet,” he told Mitchell. Both men watched more details flash past. “Star and Sunrise. Right down there . . . ”
“On the nose,” Mitchell confirmed.
“Got ‘em!” Shepard said, excitement rising in his voice. “Yep, sure do. Hoo-ha! I think we’ll know them next time.”
Mitchell called out their checklist items, watching every move Shepard made, backing him up on every detail, missing nothing. Then it was time to begin the complete dress rehearsal of their computer-controlled descent program.
“Final pre-landing check,” he announced to Alan. “Time to punch in.”
The rehearsal was a full practice run for the lander’s computers, for all its systems that would be used to fly the descent flight path to Fra Mauro.
“Got it,” Shepard replied. He activated the simulated lunar descent profile sequence just as he’d done so many times with Ed in the ground simulators. Only this, hopefully, would be the final, final run-through.
Numbers flashed by as the critical sequence moved through the computers. If there was going to be a problem in the system, now was the time to discover the glitch and get it fixed.
“Practice descent has started,” Shepard announced. “The computer is beginning the practice descent.”
“On the mark,” Mitchell confirmed.
They would do everything except fire the descent engine for this rehearsal.
But no sooner had the simulation begun than something did not click. Their monitors should have indicated that the computers had simulated engine ignition and that they were beginning their descent as if they were really on their way.
“Oops!” Mitchell exclaimed. “Hey, we’re not showing a descent sequence.”
Disbelief was clear in Shepard’s voice as he called Houston. “Hey, our abort program has kicked in!”
Everyone in Mission Control leaned toward monitoring consoles. They all shared the same thought. If this had been the moment of truth, if they actually had been trying to fire the engine and that abort program kicked in, Shepard and Mitchell would never reach the moon. The abort program called for a rapid-fire sequence of events. The ascent-stage engine of the lunar lander would hurl out fire, the two stages would separate, and the computers would set Alan and Ed on a rendezvous course with Kitty Hawk, the mother ship.
“We copy, Antares,” Houston responded. They had the currency of time in the bank for the fix. That’s why they have the rehearsal. “Try your descent program again.”
“Roger, Houston, we, ah—” Shepard’s voice cut off as their consoles indicated that this time their engine would have fired on schedule. Mitchell glued his eyes to the panel. His instruments showed the simulation was underway. “We show simulated engine start. Everything came on line.”
“Descent program commencing,” Shepard, confirmed to Houston. “It’s starting down.”
One man in Mission Control held up crossed fingers. “Now if it just runs like this when it’s time to really light the fire.”
“You bet.”
The simulation suddenly was hung up again. Shepard’s words burst through 240,000 miles of space. “Houston!” They could tell the vexation in his voice. “Our abort program has kicked in again.”
Mitchell turned to Shepard. “Al, are we snakebit?”
Alan studied his instrument readouts. They had a great ship, but somewhere in the innards of their computers a spurious signal was loose, like a virus, leaping from its assigned circuitry and kicking in the abort signal.
Suddenly that long pre-descent checkout period had become an invaluable blessing.
CapCom was as baffled as the two men swinging over rugged mountain lands. “This is Houston. You sure someone up there doesn’t have a thumb on the abort button?”
Both astronauts checked. The “panic button” to kick in an emergency abort was securely encased in a plastic shield that prevented accidental tripping. Yet that mysterious signal kept hamstringing their computer.
“Nobody’s on the abort button,” Shepard radioed.
Mitchell was scanning every switch, gauge, and control, looking for the spurious-signal needle in his or Shepard’s electronic haystack.
Everything checked out perfectly. Except that their mission was coming unglued before their eyes.
Mitchell’s voice remained the cool Mr. Unflappable that Shepard knew so well. “According to everything on the panels, Al, we’re smack on. Everything checks out normally.”
“Houston, come in,” Alan called. “What’s wrong with this ship?”
“Stand by, Antares.”
The two astronauts exchanged knowing looks. They’d have to wait for an answer. The established routine to handle a problem like the one they faced was to gather the best brains in Mission Control and hammer out a solution.
They were right. Top officials and engineers went into a huddle. Eyes kept looking to the timers on the walls. There was a finite period in which to produce a solution. Little more than three hours.
They went with the theory that if Antares’ computers were picking up a short circuit in the abort switch, it would cause the very problem being faced by the two astronauts. They soon isolated it to one set of contacts of the switch on the lunar module’s instrument panel. Recycling the switch, or tapping on the instrument panel, removed the signal from the computers.
The experts realized they could reprogram Antares’ computers so they would ignore the abort command. But this killed their automatic abort capability. That was taking one hell of a chance.
“They’re the best,” Deke Slayton said with steely authority. “Get with it!”
A telephone call roused Donald Eyles, MIT’s computer whiz, out of a sound sleep in Massachusetts. He threw a coat over his pajamas. By the time he reached the front door, an Air Force car was pulling into his driveway. Moments later he was on his way to his office at Draper Labs.
Eyles, who had helped develop the lunar module computer programs and knew them better than anyone, listened to the problem, nodded, sat before his computer keyboard, and began a new program to eliminate the glitch in the lunar lander quarter million miles away. He also found a way to dump the unwanted signal that would still leave the two men with their auto abort option.
Ninety minutes remained as his fingers flew across the keys. He pushed back his chair and announced, “Done.” Immediately a specialist fired the program into the lunar module simulator computer in Houston. The test run flashed back in numbers.
“It’s perfect!” called out the monitor for computer systems.
Flight Director Jerry Griffin barked at his crew. “Let’s get it up to them!”
Antares hauled around the far side of the moon.
Alan and Ed had thirty minutes left before their lander would be over the point on the lunar surface where they must fire the descent engine for real. Or the mission went down the rat hole.
“This is CapCom, Antares. The new computer program has been checked. We’re sending it up to you.”
Electronic signals flashed at the speed of light to the spidery space vessel.
Finally: “Antares, transmission is completed.”
Shepard felt as if he and Ed were treading a minefield. Every minute lost now was gone forever. “We have it all,” he said clearly.
Alan turned to Mitchell. “This is your ball game, Ed.”
Mitchell lowered the lights, stared at the bright numbers, and raced against the clock to reprogram the computers with the new descent-flight profile data. Shepard watched in silence as Ed fed sixty new sets of information, in perfect order, in the system’s logic circuitry. Once again he lived up to his reputation as the smartest in the astronaut corps.
“It’s all yours, Al,”
“Houston, we’ve got it,” Shepard notified CapCom.
“Good show, Antares.”
Mitchell turned from his window. “Al, we’re coming up on point.”
“Got it.” Shepard, whose frustration had been rising, exhaled a great sigh of relief. Mitchell had completed the new computer program with barely fifteen minutes left in the bank before they would have been forced to head for a rendezvous with Kitty Hawk. He’d had to stand by with his hands itching to fix something. But you can’t climb into a computer, buried deep inside a spaceship, with a screwdriver or a wrench. Not unless you want to kill the thing. And Antares had needed perfect logic programming and exquisite accuracy to prevent that maddening abort signal.
Shepard swore that, no matter what happened from here on out, they were going down to the rugged surface. This wasn’t just his ship. If it didn’t land, Apollo 14 likely would be the last of its kind to try for the moon.
“Houston, we’re commencing with the descent program.” He didn’t ask controllers. He told them.
“Antares, you have a GO.”
PDI. That’s what they called it, and Alan Shepard worked his controls with the precision and experience of thirty years of flying as Antares’ descent engine came to life with transparent flame, danced on the fire, and arced moonward.
They were still racing at 3,700 miles an hour as they moved through 46,100 feet above the surface.
Twelve minutes and thirteen seconds from landing.
They went down, thrusters working to keep them perfectly aligned along their flight path. Dull thudding sounds, the ship rocking fore and aft, side to side. Airless turbulence. Every time a thruster fired, they heard the distant hollow sound, felt the punch through their feet and hands.
No longer could they see the moon. Blind faith in Antares’s systems was now their lot. They fell down and backward, their eyes looking out into space.
“Coming on down, just like the book says,” Mitchell announced as casually as if flying any airplane on final approach.
He grinned at his partner. “No more snake bites, Al?” he chuckled.
But the snake came back hissing with a vengeance. Shepard was looking from his panel to the outside and back again when Ed gave him the bad news. Mitchell’s voice had a distinct edge in it.
“Al, I’m not getting a landing radar update.”
Shepard didn’t blink. “No radar, you don’t land. You abort.”
The hell with that.
“I’ll punch it through again, Ed.”
“Okay,” Ed said. He paused just long enough to confirm radar function.
“Nothing, Al. No update.” Another pause.
They were still “visually blind” to the moon. Their only downward-looking eye was the radar, the dead radar. Without it there was nothing to tell the computer their precise altitude.
Twenty thousand feet.
“This is Houston.” That worried tone again. “We’re not seeing a lock on the landing radar system.”
Shepard was cool. “Roger, Houston, we’re on it, trying to activate it.”
“Antares, you’re at nineteen thousand feet.”
They stared, mystified. Shepard looked at Mitchell. None of this made sense.
“Houston,” Alan called, “the onboard navigational system is not receiving any data. Our landing radar is out.”
They were flying to the moon without their electronic seeing eye. Belly up, it was worse than useless.
Mission Control was considering the options. “We could have them pitch over before they hit ten thousand feet. They’ll have a longer look at the surface that way.”
“Sure, that way they can land without the radar.”
“No! They’ll burn too much fuel. They’d go empty before touchdown. It’s too risky. We could lose them.”
Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell knew the rules.
CapCom: “Seventeen thousand five hundred feet.”
Think Shepard think. “Roger, Houston. You guys find anything?”
“Negative, Antares.”
Mitchell was incredibly calm as he supported Shepard. “Seventeen thousand,” he said quietly.
“Antares,” came the dreaded words, “we should go over the procedures to abort.”
And there goes our landing and the Apollo program, Shepard and Mitchell thought together.
From the surface of Fra Mauro on the edge of the moon’s Ocean of Storms, it wasn’t yet possible to make out Antares against the velvet black sky, a star blazing in dazzling transparent flame with a purple glow, falling steadily, a startling traveler from outer space.
Aliens come to visit.
Except tense humans in a control center on the aliens’ home world, that dazzling blue jewel suspended against the velvet blackness, were about to extinguish the flame.
Shepard called out the abort procedure. “Okay, at thirteen thousand we pitch over, activate the ascent program—” He almost choked on the words.
A morose CapCom answered, “That’s affirmative, Al.”
Shepard, testily, “We’re aware of the ground rules, Houston.”
CapCom: “Countdown to mission abort will commence at fourteen thousand feet.”
The hell it will!
That was it. He turned to look at his partner. “Ed,” and he announced, “if the radar doesn’t kick in, we’re going to turn her over and fly her down.”
He never knew if Mitchell was surprised or not. Ed didn’t say a word.
“Dammit,” Shepard snapped. “We both know we can do it!”
“That’s what we came here for,” Mitchell answered after a pause.
“Antares, you’re at fifteen five.”
“We copy, Houston,” Shepard acknowledged. He wasn’t saying a thing about abort procedures.
Deke Slayton sure as hell wasn’t missing anything. He knew Alan Shepard too well; Alan wouldn’t quit easily. The tone in Alan’s voice made it clear to Deke the man would do whatever was necessary to plant that ship on the moon. By God, he’s gonna take her all the way down with or without his radar.
Deke smiled and knew others in Mission Control were sharing the same thought.
“Antares, you’re at fourteen thousand seven hundred.”
“Copy, Houston. We’re still trying to reactivate.”
“We still see no apparent malfunction,” CapCom called, a flat, puzzled tone.
“Ed,” Shepard said with quiet intensity to Mitchell. “I know we can bring it down.”
Mitchell never hesitated to push back the unknown. That was his whole life. He studied Shepard. “Got to admit, Al, it would be a first. Promises to be interesting.”
The icy commander managed a laugh. They were a team. Two test pilots fully aware of the dangers.
“Fourteen thousand two hundred,” CapCom announced.
No reply from Antares.
“Antares, we’re going to try something,” CapCom called with a sense of excitement. “We want you to reset your circuit breaker.”
“Houston, we copy,” Alan answered. “Pull the plug, huh?”
“Hell, it works for my computer,” Mitchell offered. “Let’s do what the man says.”
Shepard yanked the circuit breaker, killing the main power to the radar. He shoved the breaker back in to bring the radar back on line.
CapCom sounded like doom. “Thirteen thousand six hundred. Have you got anything yet, Antares?”
“Negative,” Alan said crisply.
Jesus, he doesn’t care. He’s gonna land, Deke told himself.
Flame began to reflect off the higher peaks below. Mountains, boulder fields, gaping craters waited.
Gloom filled Mission Control. No way out. Time to abort.
“Hold on, Houston!” Mitchell’s voice burst from the squawk box, through headsets.
Ed glanced at Shepard. “Al, look at that.”
“Houston,” Al said smoothly, “we’ve got a radar lock.”
Mission Control hung by its fingernails from one moment to the next. CapCom’s voice went up sharply. “Antares! We’re confirming incoming data on the onboard navigation system.” Relief mixed with wonder. “All systems are functioning.”
“We copy that, Houston.”
“Antares, you have a GO to land.”
“You better believe, Houston.”
“Your altitude is thirteen thousand.”
Shepard whooped in an exuberant war cry, slammed a gloved hand against Mitchell’s back. “Hell, man, we’ve hung it out further than this before, Ed.”
“Ten thousand two hundred,” CapCom called.
“Houston, we’re pitching over.”
“You’re looking good.”
Mitchell chanted out the changing altitude and other readings from his consoles.
Seven thousand feet.
Now they had a visual on their landing site. The surface came through clearly through ghostly flame beneath them. “That’s a rough runway down there,” Mitchell remarked.
“What a sight!” Shepard yelled.
“Cone Crater,” Mitchell sang out, “and there it is right in front of us.”
Shepard stood braced at the helm, feet apart at the commander’s post, and he took Antares down on an invisible rail toward the ancient craggy highlands of Fra Mauro.
Alan Shepard, using thirty years of pilot skills, threaded a needle between the hills and ridges along their approach path and dropped his ship down into a narrow valley, craters and boulders everywhere.
“One thousand,” Mitchell called, “and we’re right on the money.”
“Antares, you’re GO for a landing,” CapCom announced.
Alan could be generous now. “Thank you, sir. Fantastic!”
His lunar module was a dancer balanced on flame.
Five hundred feet. Down steadily.
Shepard’s eyes darted back and forth as he sought a touchdown site. Antares was now more a helicopter riding on fire than a ship for deep space. The bug-eyed machine glowed in shimmering white and gold as the surface reflected backlight from its flame.
“Shifting course,” he murmured, avoiding scattered rocks and craters.
Antares skipped and floated like a huge insect skittering along invisible water.
Shepard dodged. Thrusters banged again and again to keep them upright. Alan locked his gaze on a rocky plateau dead ahead. “We’d better move it up a little,” he told Ed.
“Good move.” Mitchell pointed to his right. “Right there. We can land over there . . . coming down steady, down, down, down . . . there’s some dust, Al.”
Fifty feet up. Fire tore into ancient lunar soil.
Mitchell spoke steadily, calmly. “Twenty feet. Descending at three feet per second . . . ten feet . . . ”
A small probe beneath Antares jabbed into the moon.
“Contact!” Ed reported.
“Throttle’s off,” Shepard said.
Flame vanished.
Eerily quiet. Until Ed whooped it up. “Great! We’re on the surface.”
“We made a good landing, Houston,” Alan called CapCom. “About the flattest place around here.”
They were just sixty feet from the X they’d marked on their landing map many weeks before—within walking distance along a rugged incline to the rim of Cone Crater, their main geologic target. There they would retrieve debris blasted out of that crater by meteoric impact scientists told them had taken place more than four billion years ago.
Mission Control, emotionally drained, was bedlam once again. They’d ridden Antares’s problems all the way down with Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell, who had turned what appeared to be certain failure into a perfect lunar touchdown.
At her home, Louise Shepard shrieked with her own release of tension and joy at what her husband had accomplished. Laughing and crying, she told her family, “We can’t call him Old Man Moses anymore. He’s reached his Promised Land!”
The only two living beings on the moon shook hands.
Ed Mitchell gave his friend a long, hard look. The icy commander was gone, and the warm, charming Alan Shepard was on the moon beside him.
“Come on, Al. Just between you and me.” He poked a finger at Shepard, “Would you have really flown us down without the radar?”
The Tom Sawyer grin was never so wide. “You’ll never know, Ed.” The future Admiral laughed. “You’ll never know.”