Ignition! We could feel the vibration and hear the deep-throated rumble as eight huge rocket engines came up to full thrust. The spacecraft shook and rattled furiously. I thought the Command Module was going to snap right off the top of that Saturn.
Liftoff! The clock is running! The instant the tie-downs released us, we could feel a lessening of vibrations and noise. There’s no doubt about when liftoff occurs.
Bright orange flames burst forth from the base of the rocket. Great balls of black smoke billowed out and upward.
The whole ship vibrates and rattles. I think it’s only the rocket exhaust plume hitting the launch structure, and the vibrations reflecting back into our Saturn rocket. But is that all it is? Is the rocket really okay?
I quickly scanned the instrument panel in front of me. I learned long ago as a young pilot to trust the instruments rather than a physical feeling or instinct. And sure enough, the instruments showed that everything was normal—and launch control confirmed, “The booster is looking good.”
The Saturn stood still a few seconds, then slowly lifted away, trailing a stream of yellow fire. A deafening roar rolled across the flat wet marshes of the Cape. Two miles away where thousands of people gathered to watch, the ground shook and rumbled underfoot.
The toads, alligators, and crabs knew exactly what the noise and rumbling was all about. It was just another space shot. When you live at the Cape, you learn to live with this sort of thing. For years the humans had been sending things off into space. Yet even the Cape creatures probably knew that this was a big one.
Twenty seconds later, by the time we cleared the top of the launch gantry, all the shaking and rattling had smoothed out. The booster was tipping over now—that’s called the pitch program. It had to tip over as we climbed so that it was flying level with the earth when we reached orbit.
As the rocket climbed higher, it tilted to the east. Out across the ocean it raced, gathering speed and growing smaller in the distance. Inside the spacecraft we watched the instruments and reported to mission control. Once in a while, when there was time, we talked to each other.
One minute after launch and we were going through the speed of sound, or Mach 1. There was a little rumbling and shaking again, but it only lasted a moment.
“Oh, boy!” I exclaimed. “That was some shaky ride for a while there, but it’s pretty smoothed out now.”
“Yeah,” agreed Walt. “Pretty smooth now.”
Now we were really starting to move. The force of the rocket thrust pushed us gently but firmly against the back of our seats. 2 g’s, 3 g’s, 4 g’s—four times the force of gravity. The g-forces built up inexorably, mashing us harder and harder into our couches. But it felt comfortable and strangely reassuring, because we knew that the rocket was working, thrusting us faster and faster toward Earth orbit and outer space.
The forces built up to 4.5 g’s, then bam! The first stage burned out abruptly and separated, and we were abruptly thrown forward into the straps of our restraint harnesses. We went weightless for a moment and it was all quiet. Then bang! A noise like a cannon shot and lights on the control panel told us the first stage had separated and was falling away, back toward Earth.
We would fall back to Earth, too, if the second stage didn’t work right. We were traveling at nine thousand feet a second—about six thousand miles an hour. That’s fast, but not fast enough for orbit.
A yellow light went out on the panel, the g-meter went from zero to half a g, and we were pushed gently back against our seats. All of this told us the second stage had ignited and started its thrusting. Then came a reassuring call from Mission Control—the second stage, or S-IVB, was “go.”
A few seconds later, the booster inertial guidance system took over. The ship wiggled a little, then settled down again to the correct flight path, and we knew that booster guidance was “go.”
We were coming up on three minutes from liftoff now, and it was time to jettison the launch escape tower, the big rocket at the very top of the spaceship that would pull the Command Module—and us with it—away from the rest of the ship if we’d had to abort the mission.
We were high enough and fast enough now that we didn’t need the escape rocket anymore. And we had to get rid of it to continue the flight. If we didn’t, the booster may have gone out of control before we reached orbit. Worse than that, the landing parachutes couldn’t come out, and we absolutely had to have those parachutes for a safe landing at the end of the flight.
This was a moment of great tension for me as I glanced at the tower jettison switches and pondered the awful consequences of their not working. Either switch will do the job and there’s not much chance they both won’t work, but still—there’s that nagging shred of doubt in your mind.
I threw the switches. There was a loud crack and a brief muffled roar, followed by a throaty, low-pitched whoosh as the escape rocket tower departed—and I heaved a great sigh of relief. We called Mission Control—“Tower jett.”
They responded: “Roger, we confirm. Tower jett.”
We were about four minutes into the flight now and we talked to Mission Control in Houston once a minute. We called in that the spacecraft guidance system was good and that all systems were go. Everything was going just beautifully, like clockwork. We were moving toward orbit, climbing and picking up speed all the time.
Our spacecraft guidance and navigation system was not controlling the booster—but it was sensing the motion and telling us where we were. Since I was the navigator on this flight, it was my job to keep track of our position and operate the guidance equipment. Right then I was reading our velocity and altitude off the computer, and I could see that we were right on the money.
Launch plus five minutes now, and we were halfway to orbit. There was not much to do for a while except watch the dials in front of us and talk to Mission Control once a minute—just to be sure they were still there.
For the first time I had a chance to look out the hatch window, just above my head. What a sight! What a view! I could see the most spectacular view of the whole Atlantic Ocean—hundreds and hundreds of miles of it—all deep blue and shimmering in the reflected sunlight of the noonday sun, with little patches of white puffy clouds dotting it here and there. And in the distance, toward the horizon, the blue gave way to a sort of faint purplish haze in the atmosphere. The sky above the far horizon was black as coal. It was just beautiful! I’d never seen anything like it. But then of course I’d never been this high before. I said something marvelously memorable like, “Boy, what a view!” It was pretty exciting. But at a time like that, words only serve to tarnish the pristine beauty of the moment.
In a few seconds the S-IVB rocket engine would stop—that’s called cutoff—and we’d be in orbit. Our rate of climb was almost zero, which meant we were leveling off. The engine should shut down automatically, but we were ready to shut it off by manual control, if necessary.
Ready now? Standby—three, two, one, engine cutoff! We hit the straps again, but not as abruptly as the first time. I checked our computer and it said we had a good orbit, right on target. Mission Control gave us our orbit parameters based on radar tracking during launch. Spot on. I felt like ten million dollars. Altitude, 120 miles; rate of climb, zero; and velocity, 25,000 feet per second. Think of it! That’s 17,000 miles an hour—fast enough to stay up in space and to circle the earth every ninety minutes.
Our spacecraft was still attached to the S-IVB, and we were sailing along upside down. Imagine that—we were over a hundred miles high and floating on our backs. But it didn’t really matter, because we were weightless and there wasn’t any sense or feeling of up or down.
I looked out at the world down below, and it was just zipping by. We were really hauling the freight. It was beautiful. By the end of that trip we’d make 163 revolutions of the earth. Aloft for 260 hours, we would see all of the world—literally every square mile of it—between the thirtieth parallels, north and south. It was awesome and breathtaking to see entire continents go whizzing past our windows in a matter of minutes. It was almost unreal—as if we were watching some giant relief map of the world, instead of the real earth itself going by.
But there was work to do. We stayed strapped in our couches until MCC, the Mission Control Center, gave us a go to proceed past the reentry point for the first revolution of the earth. Wally and Walt stayed strapped in until we received a go for three revolutions.
Mission Control called. “Apollo 7, this is Houston. We have a ‘go’ for the third orbit. I repeat, you are cleared for three orbits. Acknowledge. Over.”
“Roger, Houston,” answered Wally. “Understand, we are ‘go’ for three orbits.”
First I removed my helmet and gloves and handed them to Walt and Wally. The cabin was quiet and peaceful now that the rocket had shut off. All I could hear was the soft whirr of some electrical equipment. Then I released my lap belt and floated slowly out of my seat—my first real test of weightlessness.
I’m free! I’m floating! What a feeling! It was a little strange at first, and my muscles were tense. I had a mild but disconcerting feeling of vague apprehension for a few minutes, and my head and face felt flushed, full, and stuffy.
But this feeling of being utterly free of gravity was simply beautiful—and after a few minutes it was no longer strange but very comfortable, and I could feel my muscles relax. The apprehension went away quickly, but the stuffiness persisted throughout the flight.
Wally and Walt got loose, took off their gloves and helmets, and gave them to me. My first chore was to stow them, and other loose items. I folded down the leg rests of my crew couch and pulled myself ever so slowly into the lower equipment bay of the spacecraft, easing myself feet first. I moved slowly to keep from bumping into things, plus the feeling of floating and turning felt strange and a little scary at first. I put them away along with my own, in a large bag under the center couch.
There were plenty of storage lockers, retaining straps, and elastic cords—and Velcro to stick things to the walls. I opened some metal boxes that were fastened to the floor and took out a camera bracket, a box of tissues, some books, and a special control box with a long cable. I put the books in the pockets of my space suit and gave the rest of the stuff to Walt and Wally. Then I floated slowly beneath the couches again and took out three long white bags. I gave one to Wally, another to Walt, and snapped the other onto the cabin wall. The bags were made of fireproof cloth with elastic around the top to hold them shut. We would use the bags to put things in—cameras, pencils, books, food bags, anything that might otherwise float away and get lost.
Everything had to be tied down or put away, or else we would have had objects floating all over the spacecraft. But it was no trouble, really, and in a very short time we fell quite naturally into the routine of housekeeping. Once in a while, though, something got away from us—a food bag, a pen, or a flashlight—and disappeared for a while. I once lost a checklist—I looked all over the spacecraft and couldn’t find it. About an hour later it reappeared, drifting slowly across the lower equipment bay.
There were plenty of things to hold onto to pull myself about when I wanted to move. The braces that held our couches, drawer latches, and hatch handles—any little knob or other object sticking out—would serve as a foothold or handgrip.
Being weightless was really a lot of fun. I was beginning to think that it is mankind’s natural state—that everybody ought to experience the delights of zero-g. It seemed a pity that everyone in the world but the three of us had to be plastered down against the earth by the force of gravity.
We were flying upside down on the forward end of the second stage, with Walt and Wally’s heads pointed toward Earth. But “up” and “down” have little meaning in space, and the two spacemen hardly noticed the inverted position. True, the angle of view was peculiar, but viewing the earth from far out in space is unusual from any angle. This attitude gave us a fantastic view of the earth through all five windows. Walt and Wally, still strapped in their seats, could look upward at an angle through the front windows and see the earth rolling by: oceans dark blue and shimmering in reflected sunlight, turning pale green in the shallows near islands and coastlines; white cotton puffs of clouds; the dark-green blankets that were jungles and forests; and beige-tinted desert sands in rippling waves of dunes, almost like the sea.
Walt looked out the side window by his right elbow. He saw nothing but black, the stark black emptiness of outer space. Walt knew the stars were out there, but he couldn’t see them because the spacecraft was still in daylight.
“How do you like the ride, Walt?” asked Wally, his face all crinkly with a smile.
“Swell,” replied Walt as he loosened his seat belt and shoulder harness. “What a gorgeous view—wish we had more time to look,” he added as he gazed through the window at the earth.
“Yeah, so do I,” said Wally, “but let’s get our work done first. We will have time for sightseeing later. Right now we have to get ready for separation.”
The navigation system optics pointed upward toward the sky and afforded an unobstructed view of the stars. We were still in daylight when I moved the optics controls to pop off the launch protective cover.
Wally looked at his watch and at the timer on the panel in front of him. The seconds were ticking away. “Hey, Donn,” he called, “better shake a leg. Ten minutes ’til sunset.”
“Okay, Wally,” I responded. “I’ll pop the optics cover. Hope it comes off all right.”
“Yeah, it will be tough to navigate if we can’t see out through the sextant,” Walt chimed in. A round plate covered the outer lenses of a telescope and sextant built into the side of the ship. The plate protected those instruments during launch, but to use them for star sightings I had to get rid of the cover plate. I looked into the telescope eyepiece and saw nothing but black. I pushed a small lever and—boingg!
“Wow! That’s spectacular!” I exclaimed.
“Did it come off okay? What do you see?” asked Walt excitedly.
“It popped right out there,” I answered. “I can still see the plate, drifting away slowly, wobbling and settling. Looks like a tin can lid sinking in water.”
I saw the cover through the telescope, light-bulb-bright in reflected sunlight against the black void of space, undulating in slow motion and floating eerily away, like a jar lid might move and settle under water.
“What color is it?” asked Wally.
“No special color,” I replied. “Just brilliant shining white in the sun. And there must be thousands of tiny snowflakes.”
A cloud of particles that looked like snowflakes made seeing the stars impossible. We had been wise in planning to do our star sightings on the dark side of the earth, where stray light would not obliterate our view of the heavens.
“Those are probably dust particles that shook loose when the cover plate popped off,” explained Wally. “The sun is so bright up here it makes them look like snow.” He had seen them before, on his other spaceflights.
“I can’t stand the suspense,” announced Walt. “I’ve got to see this.” And with that, he unbuckled his harness and floated toward the optics panel, taking care not to tangle himself in the suit hoses.
“Oh, sob,” moaned Wally. “Just what we need. A couple of spaced-out sightseers.”
“Get him,” said Walt, jerking his thumb toward Wally. “He’s just sore because he didn’t think of it first.”
“Well, Walt, you know how it is. As you get older you lose your enthusiasm,” I declared, moving aside to let Walt peer through the ’scope. I glanced sideways to see if Wally would react to this remark. Wally was a little older than us two, and he didn’t like to be reminded of it.
“All right, you turkeys, out of the way!” ordered Wally, sounding very stern. “I’m coming down there.”
“Hey, wait!” I protested. “There isn’t room for all three of us down here. Wait till I get out of the way. Besides, who is going to watch the instrument panel?”
“The instrument panel is your problem,” snorted Wally as he unbuckled and started drifting down. I scurried to get out of the way but my hoses became tangled. As Wally came gliding in, he jammed himself next to me into the left corner of the lower bay area. Walt, in the center with his eye glued to the telescope, didn’t even notice.
“Hey, Walt, move over, will you? I’m stuck,” I pleaded.
“Huh?” said Walt, looking to his left and then laughing.
Wally looked through the telescope but didn’t see any of the snowflakes. Walt and I exchanged wide-eyed, baffled glances. How could he not have seen all those brilliant flakes? And then it dawned on Walt.
“Wait a minute,” he exclaimed. “No wonder. We just passed sunset. No more daylight!”
And sure enough, as we looked out the spacecraft windows, we saw not the bright earth but only darkness.
“I hope you can see some stars,” I commented.
“Yes, I can make out a few of the brighter ones,” announced Wally. “Should be good enough to navigate by.”
“Good, how about letting me take a crack at it?” I asked.
“She’s all yours,” said Wally as he drifted away and back to his seat.
I grabbed the couch struts and slowly pulled myself toward the optics panel. I came slowly to a stop with my eye against the telescope. The stars were hard to see at first, but as my eye got used to the darkness I could see more and more. Finally, the familiar patterns of constellations began to appear—Orion the hunter; Taurus the bull; and the Gemini twins. And with those patterns I could spot several “Apollo” stars. Of all the thousands of stars in the heavens, thirty-eight had been picked to use with the Apollo guidance computer. I knew if I used any others the computer would get confused and line up the guidance system wrong.
“Apollo 7, Houston here, over.”
“Roger Houston, Seven here,” answered Wally.
“The flight director advises, proceed with IMU alignment. We’re monitoring your computer readings,” advised capcom.
“How about that?” I said, checking first to be sure my microphone was turned off. “The very first alignment, and I’ve got an audience already.”
“What do you mean?” asked Walt.
“Everything I do shows up on the computer and gets telemetered back to Houston,” I explained.
“Oh, that’s right,” Walt said. After a moment’s thought he added, “Well, I hope they enjoy the show.”
The inertial instrument unit, or IMU, measured changes in the ship’s velocity and kept track of which way it pointed in space. And the IMU had to be lined up right with the stars by use of a sextant, an instrument much like a telescope that could be used to see stars and measure angles. I worked swiftly through the alignment sequence, driving the sextant to point toward one star and then another. I used a tiny control stick, the size of my little finger, which was mounted on the optics panel near the sextant. Each time I centered the sextant on a star I pressed the “Mark” button. That told the computer to measure the sextant angles.
The computer figured out how much the inertial unit had drifted from where it should be pointing, and drove the unit back to the correct position by sending small pulses to tiny electric motors. The IMU was only off by one degree, but it was important to get it lined up just right. I succeeded in getting a good platform alignment with star sightings on the second revolution. We went through some systems checks and got ready to separate from the second stage.
The three of us worked like beavers. Walt engrossed himself in checking the instruments on the panel in front of him: propellant temperatures, oxygen pressure, and battery voltage. Wally talked at length to Mission Control. I stood in the lower equipment bay. Or rather, I floated, since I was weightless like everything else in the spacecraft. But staying put wasn’t too hard, I discovered. The stiff white air hoses attached to my space suit tended to hold me still in one place. And the suit was so large and bulky that there wasn’t much room to move around anyway.
All the measurements of our spaceship systems—pressures, temperatures, and so on—were sent to Mission Control and they could tell better than we could what shape our craft was in. There were hundreds of those measurements and we could read only a small part of our spacecraft. Those guys could really do a job for us—if anything started to go wrong, they would know about it sooner than we would—and they would have a procedure worked out to get us around the problem.
As spaceflights go, ours was in a pretty low orbit—that was so we could get down in a hurry if we had to. But we were out of contact with Mission Control a lot of the time. So it was up to the three of us to keep an eye on our instruments and to know our emergency procedures: even to reenter and land on our own if we had to. And it was the training before the flight—all those hundreds of hours in simulators, and studying checklists and emergency procedures, which really goes to work for you up there in orbit. Up there, it was just the three of us and our spacecraft—and the skill and experience from all that training that stood between success or failure. Our training made it possible for us to do that job, make the flight that thousands of people in dozens of different places all worked hard for years to prepare for. That flight, Apollo 7, the maiden voyage of Apollo, was the payoff—for us and for them. And for all the millions of people in our country and around the world who were rooting for us, praying, and cheering us on. That is what it was all about for the three of us then.
We finished all our systems checks—Apollo 7 was in great shape. Mission Control cleared us to separate. It was a simple procedure, but we went through it step by step using our checklist just to be sure we did it all in the right order. We did everything by checklist, even though we knew it all by heart. We’d throw a switch to ignite an explosive charge. The charge was shaped to cut the metal skin holding our spacecraft and the rocket stage together.
Time passed slowly for us as we waited for the exact minute to separate Apollo 7 from the rocket stage. We were once again strapped snug in our seats, with all the right switches in the correct position and ready for separation.
“Apollo 7, Houston here. Five minutes to separate. Please confirm.” The hollow-sounding voice of capcom crackling in our headsets interrupted our reveries, for we were all strangely quiet, each alone in our private thoughts.
“Roger, Houston, we’re ready,” affirmed Wally. “Five minutes, the timer is counting.”
He sat comfortably in the left crew couch, the flight instruments and maneuvering controls before him. I watched the computer carefully as it blinked and flashed its eerie green-colored numbers. Walt kept an eye on the instruments in front of him. The time passed in painful slowness as the tension built up.
Until finally—“Apollo 7, Houston here counting down to separation. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .” Capcom counted the last few seconds. “Two . . . one . . . separate!” At that instant Wally pushed forward on the T-shaped thruster, and I flipped the separation switches.
A loud crack like a rifle shot resounded through the ship as a small explosive charge cut us loose. The ring-shaped explosive charge had done its work and cut the spacecraft free from the booster. A soft muffled “whoosh” told us the thrusters were working, and the computer clicked off the small changes in speed as Apollo 7, free at last, moved away from the huge S-IVB rocket.
“Boy, that was some crack!” exclaimed Walt. “Sounded like the whole rear end exploded.”
We thrusted away slowly using our small reaction control rockets. The booster was behind us and we couldn’t see it, so I had the computer running to tell us how fast we were moving away.
The ship drifted slowly forward. At exactly sixty seconds after separating, Wally began to turn the ship around. He used a small control stick called the attitude controller to point the ship in the right direction. The little thruster rockets on the outside of Apollo 7 went ffft! ffft! as they fired in short pulses, slowly pitching the spacecraft through a half somersault to face the S-IVB.
We turned around so we could see the booster, then used our reaction rockets to stop drifting away and move in close.
“Beautiful! Beautiful!” Walt cried out.
“Okay, Walt, can you see it?” asked Wally with excitement. “Get the camera ready and take some shots as I move in close.”
The S-IVB loomed large and awesome in the front windows as Wally maneuvered closer. It looked like a large black and white tin can, about twenty feet across and sixty feet long. On the end facing us were four large tapered panels partly spread like petals on a flower, which had opened when we left it. The whole thing looked like a giant four-jawed garfish, or some giant whale waiting to swallow us up if we got too close.
“Look at that!” I exclaimed. “A giant squid in the sky!”
“Or a crocodile with four nasty jaws,” offered Walt. “Don’t get too close, Wally. The darn thing might eat us.”
Wally glanced over at his crewmates and shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. Just like a couple of kids at a carnival,” he smirked. “What imaginations!”
We went in close anyway, to get a good look and take some pictures. We all enjoyed looking at the booster from different angles as Wally flew the craft smoothly around the S-IVB. We reported what we saw to Mission Control.
It was time to leave our booster now. “Houston, Apollo 7,” I called, speaking through the small, stick-shaped microphone attached to my headset. “Have you got our attitude angles for the phasing maneuver?”
“Roger, Seven,” came back the metallic voice of capcom. “Here they are. Ready to copy?”
“Affirmative. Go ahead,” I answered.
“Okay. Pitch, zero three eight . . . Roll, two two seven . . . Yaw, three five two. Read back, please.”
I read the numbers back, to be sure I had gotten them right.
“Okay, you’ve got them,” reported capcom. “Also, your delta v is minus x, seven feet per second.”
“Roger, Houston, delta v minus x seven feet per second,” I acknowledged. That meant the spacecraft, when it was lined up in the right direction, should thrust backward seven feet a second, or about four miles an hour. This small change in velocity would be enough to make Apollo 7 drift hundreds of miles away from the S-IVB.
Walt and I floated loose in our straps as Wally steered the ship around to the correct angle. I punched some numbers on the computer’s keyboard that told it to measure the change in speed. At just the right moment, Wally pulled back on the T-shaped thruster control. The thrusters made their soft whooshing sound again as Apollo 7 slowly backed away from the S-IVB.
“Goodbye, old friend,” called Walt as the receding S-IVB got smaller and smaller. “See you tomorrow.” And then, “I hope,” he added wistfully.
“What do you mean, you hope?” I huffed. “Are you suggesting we might not make the rendezvous?”
“Listen, without any radar on this ship I’d say the rendezvous is at best an even bet. We may make it, we may not,” asserted Wally.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” I groaned.
“Who is little Faith?” taunted Walt. “I haven’t met her.”
“If you don’t thtop making joketh, I’ll thlap your fathe,” joked Wally.
“Oh, boy!” I moaned.
Wally burst out laughing. “Hah! That’s your first ‘Oh boy’ since lift-off,” referring to the fact that I was given to saying “Oh, boy” whenever Wally cracked a corny pun, which was pretty often.
“Anyway, we’ll be joining up again with the S-IVB tomorrow. And I say we’ll make the rendezvous, radar or no radar. I’ve got a feeling in my bones.” Wally patted the computer. “Old Nellie here won’t let us down.”
As Apollo 7 drifted on, Wally watched the S-IVB shrink to a dot of bright light while Walt switched inverters and checked main electrical system voltages. I floated casually in the lower bay area of the spacecraft’s cabin, gazing through the telescope at the earth below. A range of rough, rugged mountains in east Africa passed below. The sun was setting there, and from my vantage point one hundred and fifty miles above I could see the tall lavender-streaked peaks casting crazy-quilt patterns of long shadows over the broken, rumpled landscape. As we sped eastward the shades of lavender and pink faded to dull gray as the shadows softened, blurred and finally blended with the gray. And the gray quickly deepened into the blackness of night.
“Lovely, lovely,” I exclaimed.
“What’s lovely?” inquired Walt.
“The earth,” I replied. “A mountain sunset, from this angle, is really something to behold.”
“Sorry I missed it,” sighed Walt, disappointed.
“Don’t sweat it, Walt,” interjected Wally. “If this machine holds together like it’s supposed to, we’ll have a hundred and sixty more sunsets just like that one. You’re bound to see your share.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” agreed Walt. “It’s hard to realize that we go all the way around the earth in ninety minutes. Think of that—a sunrise and sunset every hour and a half.”
“Apollo 7, Houston, over,” called the voice of Mission Control in our headsets.
“Roger, Houston, go ahead,” answered Wally.
“Seven, the flight director advises you are cleared to doff your suits anytime you want.”
“Okay, thanks, Houston. I think we’ll doff suits right now,” Wally replied as Walt and I nodded vigorously in agreement.
“It will sure be nice to get out of this hot, lumpy thing,” Walt remarked.
“You’re right,” I said. “And since I’m supposed to go first, how about helping me with this zipper?”
Because there were too many fittings and gadgets in the front, the large, cumbersome pressure suit had been built with its zipper in back. The wearer required the help of another person to zip and unzip.
The space suit was made entirely in one piece except for the gloves and the plastic bubble helmet, which fastened into metal rings at the wrists and neck. To put it on or take it off, we had to wriggle in and out through the full-length zipper opening in the back.
The suits protected us from the vacuum of space by keeping a blanket of air circulating inside. Astronauts on other missions wore these protective garments whenever they went for a walk in space or on the moon. And they wore them during launch from the Cape to guard against a loss of air from the cabin—an unlikely but possible happening. But Apollo 7 had been aloft for several hours now, and since everything on the ship seemed to be in good working order, the flight director had decided it was safe for us to take off the suits.
I glided from my usual position in the center couch to the equipment bay, where there was more room to move about. Drifting freely in mid-space I crouched, bent double, tucked in my chin, and pulled the suit’s neck ring over my head. Working free of the suit’s rubbery arms and legs, I folded the bulky garment carefully and stuffed it into a large white cloth bag beneath the center couch.
“Okay, Walt, it’s your turn,” I called as I slid out of the equipment bay to make room for my crewmate. Walt slithered out of his pressure suit with ease, quickly folded it, and placed the suit in the bag next to mine.
Wally, of stockier build and less flexible than his two companions, encountered some difficulty in extracting himself from his suit. He bent double and tucked in his chin, but could not compress himself enough for the neck ring to pass over the back of his head. “Help, somebody!” Wally cried, his voice muffled and his face buried inside the suit. “Give me a hand, will you?”
“Whatever you say,” said Walt agreeably, and began clapping his hands in applause.
“Not that kind of a hand, you knothead,” said Wally laughing at himself for the absurd posture into which he had gotten himself.
“Let me see if I can get you out of there,” I said. I grasped the neck ring, pulled it toward me, and pushed down on Wally’s head. I puffed and Wally grunted as we struggled with the suit. Together we managed to stretch it enough for Wally to pull his head past the neck ring and pop out through the zipper opening.
“Hello there!” I said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Just like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon,” Walt observed.
“I’m just so proud to be here!” quipped Wally, shucking off the arms and legs of his space suit.
Wally put his suit away with Walt’s and mine. From a small compartment he withdrew three sets of jackets and trousers, the coveralls we would wear throughout most of the flight. The coveralls were made of a special fireproof Teflon cloth which felt clammy and slick to the touch.
“Try these on,” offered Wally. “They’re just what the well-dressed spaceman will wear.”
“Oh boy!” I exclaimed with mock enthusiasm. “The latest style in men’s spacey sportswear.”
“Well, don’t knock it,” said Walt. “Sure beats those hot, lumpy things we just took off.”
We were supposed to stay up there for eleven days, but our flight was planned so that we could come down early if anything went wrong. Most of our tests were scheduled for the first two days, so that if we had to cut the mission short we could still complete most of our tests. But what we were really trying to do was prove that the Apollo spaceship design was flight-worthy to make trips to the moon and back—on later missions—and we had to keep it running for eleven days to do that.
The mission was going along very well and we were right on schedule. Our flight plan was carefully worked out so that we could make the most of our hours in space. We had to find out all we could about that spacecraft because the mission plans for later flights depended a lot on what happened and how we got along on this one.
The next few hours passed almost without notice as we busied ourselves with dozens of checks, tests, and inspections of the spaceship and all its equipment. Apollo 7 was a brand-new ship, the very first of its kind to fly in space. Some day, a craft just like this one would carry humans to the moon—if, that is, all went well on this first, maiden voyage of Apollo. There was much to be learned about the ways Apollo and all its different systems performed during flight through space.
Our daily schedule was set up for someone to be awake all the time, so we took turns sleeping. For eight hours every day I was awake by myself, while my crewmates slept. I expected to be bored and lonely, but somehow I was not. There was always something to do: clean up the cabin, write in the log book, eat, take pictures, and talk to my friends at Mission Control. And I enjoyed the quiet hours, the peace and tranquility; it allowed me a chance to think about how I got to be there—ponder what it all meant, reflect on the silent beauty of the earth going by—or gaze out at the stars, so clear and bright in the infinite blackness of space beyond Earth. I’m kind of a loner, and I like quiet times.
I was supposed to go to sleep at six o’clock Eastern time. I unrolled my sleeping bag under Walt’s couch and crawled in. But who the hell can go to sleep at 6:00 p.m. the first day in space? Not me. I might as well have been sitting on my head on top of a flag pole. It was the wrong time of day, and I was still exhilarated by the experiences of the past few hours. In fact, I had trouble sleeping the whole time we were up there, on account of the weird hours of my sleep schedule and Walt and Wally’s activities and conversation. That first night I spent more time looking over Walt’s shoulder at the instruments (our sleeping bags were slung beneath the left and right couches) than I did sleeping. Every now and then he would turn around expecting to see me asleep, and instead he found himself staring into two beady eyes. I was preoccupied with thinking about the rendezvous coming up the next day. After that night I’d get by on catnaps for two days and collapse every third night for a solid six to eight hours.
“Well, I’m glad we’re through with all of that,” sighed Wally as we finished the last of our long list of checks and tests.
“Yeah, so am I,” said Walt. “I’m really tired,” he added, yawning and stretching. “Is it time to turn in yet?
“Just about,” I replied. “Why don’t you go on and get some sleep? It’s been a long day. There is nothing left to do that I can’t manage on my own.”
“Yes, I think you’re right,” said Wally. “Come on, Walt, let’s hit the sack. Donn, keep an eye on things. If anything important happens, be sure to wake me up.”
“Right, Wally. Don’t worry, I will,” I responded.
Walt and Wally slipped beneath their couches, where sleeping bags hung suspended by straps attached to opposite walls. The two men unzipped the thin cloth bags and snuggled themselves inside.
“Good night, all,” Walt called out.
“Pleasant dreams,” I said.
Wally didn’t say anything, but he moaned contentedly as he got himself into a comfortable position and promptly went off to sleep. Walt at first missed the familiar, comforting feeling of a mattress pressing against his body. But the strange new feeling of floating while trying to rest soon gave way to weariness, and in a very few minutes Walt, too, fell fast asleep.
I had work to do while Wally and Walt were sleeping. One thing was taking pictures of the earth. That’s pretty important. Photographs taken at that altitude show a lot of things about the earth that people just can’t see when they are right down on the surface. Down there, you can’t see the forest for the trees. I reached down into one of the long white storage bags and took out a box-shaped camera. Stowing the lens cover so it wouldn’t float all over the cabin, I snapped some pictures.
I always powered up the guidance system in the computer to prepare for the next day during my night watch. I did it one orbit earlier than the flight plan asked for, so it would all be ready when Walt and Wally woke up, and they would not have to rush. I also liked to align the platform using no fuel, and sometimes I could fly an entire orbit and not see any stars because Apollo 7 was tipped at the wrong angle. If I started early on a dark pass with a spacecraft attitude where I could see stars, I could align without using fuel.
We found a number of times in the flight where we could perform tests in a more effective and efficient way than the flight plan called for. Conserving fuel was very important, because we always wanted to keep a little in reserve as a backup for when we deorbited, in case we lost our thrusters. We didn’t have fuel gauges, so had to rely on the ground to tell us how much fuel they believed we had left.
“Talking to yourself again, Donn?” grumped Wally one morning, unzipping his sleeping bag and floating feet first from under his couch.
“Huh?” I grunted, startled. “Ah, no. I think I was singing ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home.’”
“You are home,” quipped Walt, swinging a snappy half-somersault feet first over the end of his couch. “And the next line to that song is ‘I’m tired and I want to go to bed.’”
“Yeah. So go, man,” ordered Wally. “To bed, that is. Pretty good sleeping, I might add. Once you get used to not having a bed under you.”
“Yeah, that is a little weird,” echoed Walt. “Anything happen while we were sleeping?”
“No, nothing special. Everything is normal,” I answered. “I did all the checks as scheduled. You will find all the readings and results in the crew log. Got a couple of flight plan updates from Mission Control. Wrote them down in the plan. Any more questions?”
“No, guess not,” groaned Walt, stretching and yawning.
I floated down beneath the couches and wriggled into my sleeping bag. “Good night, you guys,” I called out.