The second day of the flight was the toughest and busiest up there. We had to rendezvous with the booster. This was the high point of the mission for me, since I was the navigator and chief computer operator and had the most to do with getting us back to the second stage. What made it tough was that we had no radar on board to measure distance and closing speed to the target. It was all done through optical sightings and computer calculations. Of course, we had a lot of help from Mission Control in setting up the initial conditions. They had good radar track on both us and the target. But after we started the transfer maneuver it was all on board and up to us—which meant up to me, mostly.
That computer had a personality, however. It got smart-aleck over some landmark tracking, for example, when updating our position and velocity in relation to the earth. For a while, it kept telling me that one of our landmarks, a well-surveyed airport or peninsula, was 3,500 feet underwater. I thought it had a lot of nerve, trying to correct the cartographers like that.
We had a pretty good system worked out. I took charge and made decisions, operated the computer, and made the optical sightings on the target. Walt sat on the right and kept an eye on the other spacecraft systems and worked the backup rendezvous charts that could give us some answers we needed to make the rendezvous in case the computer crapped out. Wally sat on the left and did the manual maneuvering—a lot of it was automatic—and kibitzed.
The flight was going along butter smooth, and all of our equipment was working normally. And it was a good thing, because we would need everything we had to pull the rendezvous off.
We were going to rejoin our booster stage because we wanted to prove that on later flights the command ship could rescue the Lunar Module if it had to, if it couldn’t rendezvous for some reason. Of course on those flights, both ships had radar. We didn’t have radar, and without it, rendezvous in space was a pretty tricky deal. But we rehearsed it many times in the simulators, and I was sure we could do it.
We had a couple of hurdles to get over. The first one was to power up the guidance system and align the inertial measurement unit, or IMU, that we used to keep track of our directions and position in space. We’d turned off the whole system several hours earlier, to save electric power. Since then we had not had any control of our attitude—we had been rolling and tumbling, tilting at any old angle as we drifted along through space.
To align the IMU I had to measure angles between stars with the sextant and telescope built into the side of our ship. We had to be on the dark side of the earth; there was too much light on the sun side to see the stars. And the spacecraft had to be tipped the right way for me to see the sky through the telescope instead of the ground below us. I could turn on the control rockets to stop the motion, but I didn’t want to use them any more than necessary. We were trying to save rocket fuel, too.
The other hurdle was our main rocket engine. It had never been fired except on a test stand, on the ground, long before it was installed in the spacecraft. And we had to fire it twice to set up the rendezvous. We were not really worried about it—there was not much chance it wouldn’t work—but since this was the first time we wanted to be on our toes in case anything went haywire. For example, if the engine gimbal went hard over and we didn’t catch it right away, the ship would spin up like a top. That might not be disastrous, but it sure could ruin the day for us. If the main rocket engine didn’t start, or if it blew up, we would have to come down right away and use our emergency deorbit procedures. And if the rocket didn’t stop on time, we might end up in some weird orbit that would be hard to get out of.
We set up to do the first burn—we did it under computer control and punched in all the right numbers. We had a “go” from Mission Control and we sat strapped in our seats with arms folded, watching the instruments and the computer display as it counted down to ignition time . . .
T minus twenty seconds and we thrust forward with the small control rockets. We heard gurgling sounds as main rocket fuel sloshed and settled to the bottom of the tanks.
Three, two, one, ignition! And bam! We were thrown against the back of our seats by the sudden onset of thrust. We had been weightless for a day, and the sudden feeling of the equivalent of earth’s gravity slapping me in the back was startling. It felt like a steamroller was running over me. What a sensation! It was like that big jug was driving us straight for the moon. I felt like I was along for the ride, and I hoped it would shut off when it was supposed to. Then, abruptly, the thrusting stopped and we were thrown forward against our shoulder harnesses. It only lasted ten seconds, but what a kick in the back it was! And I made a mental note to myself, next time, to strap in a little tighter.
Our first rocket burn was a good one, according to the computer, and Mission Control confirmed our results. They were tracking us on radar from the ground. They were also tracking our S-IVB target and computing our flight path to the final approach to rendezvous. Thanks to them, we were sliding right up the pipe.
The next thing was the transfer maneuver that would carry us up to the higher orbit of our target. After that it was all on board because the ground couldn’t help us anymore. We had to do it all ourselves.
To track the target, I used the telescope and sextant, which were tied to the computer. I had to measure the angle to the target and let the computer calculate when, in what direction, and how much thrust to apply to reach the target. We did the thrusting here with the small reaction control rockets, not the big one. It was a little like joining up two airplanes, except it was all backward—to catch up you slow down, to fall behind you speed up. You know it’s all based on laws of physics, but it still seemed weird.
I had an unwelcome surprise. The computer took around four minutes to think over its solution for the transfer burn. In the simulator, it had also continued to track the target. But here in space, it stopped tracking when I had to change from one computer program to another. I didn’t worry, thinking I could pick it up again in our telescope.
About fifteen minutes before the critical transfer burn, the computer finally finished its computation, and I had something of a crisis. I had been making sightings on the flashing light affixed to our target. But now I had lost sight of the target completely—we were in total darkness, and the target’s tracking light was too dim to show up in the telescope. The sextant had a narrow field of view, and once it got off target I couldn’t find it. Wally couldn’t see it out of the window either. It was pretty traumatic for us. What we had to do now was rely on the computer and hope it was right. The numbers we were getting looked good. I decided to go ahead with the transfer burn, since successive computer solutions for it had converged and tallied pretty well with Walt’s results from the backup charts. Afterward, perhaps, we could reacquire the target. Maybe by then we would be close enough to see the light in the telescope.
We did the burn, recycled the computer into the next program, and it worked! It worked! The burn went okay and we appeared to be on the proper track to the target. I found the flashing light again, with the help of the computer, and resumed tracking. We were preparing for the first midcourse correction when Wally started hollering for a floodlight shield to keep the light from reflecting in his eyes and blinding him while he was trying to look out of the front window.
In the ensuing scramble for the light shield, I lost my checklist. Somehow in all the confusion it got loose and drifted off. In looking for the checklist, I got behind in the rendezvous sequence and missed some measurements and calculations. There was a pretty frantic free-for-all in the cockpit for a while. But I found it again, beneath my couch—just in time to do the midcourse correction. It turned out great, and we slid right up the pipe to the target. It was a great feeling.
During the final phase—the last mile or two—it was pretty much on Wally. All the maneuvers and corrections were manual and the measurements by eyeball out the front window as the rocket stage loomed larger and larger. If he came in too fast we’d whistle on by. If he came in too slow we’d stall out and never get there.
We were in daylight from about two miles on in, and we got our first good look at the target. Look at that monster—we were really getting in close!
When we got within a mile of the target, Wally was supposed to estimate by eyeball the remaining distance, since the computer’s accuracy degraded at close ranges. With less than a mile to go, the computer wasn’t much help anymore. Without radar, we had to judge our distance and closing rate by eyeball, according to how big the target looked. We had a scheme to help Wally by use of a chart or target’s subtended angle (measured visually) versus distance. For some reason Wally was reluctant to do this, and kept asking me for range-to-go readings off the computer. It was strange that he was skeptical of the computer, yet perversely insisted on relying on it when its calculations were the least reliable.
I think his behavior reflected an insecurity and lack of confidence about the rendezvous and his ability to complete it without the crutch of radar data to lean on. And of course if it didn’t work out, he would need something—or someone—to blame it on. The computer would have made an excellent scapegoat.
Actually, Walt and I shared his uneasiness about doing rendezvous without the benefit of radar. That’s why we spent so much time on it in the simulator and tried—unsuccessfully—to get Wally to do it. We knew it was a tough job but figured that with lots of practice, and assuming no equipment failures and a reasonable initial setup from Mission Control’s radar data, we could do it with reasonable facility.
Wally could see the rocket stage, but I couldn’t see it from the middle seat. He yelled at me to tell him how far away we were. I refused, because I didn’t believe the computer’s numbers anymore. “If you tell me how big the booster looks,” I told him, “I’ll tell you how far away we are.” We argued back and forth about whose job it was to decide how far away we were.
Quarter mile, one hundred yards, one hundred feet, and stop! We made it! We’re here! Despite the difficulties, Wally had milked it in to within 150 feet or so of the booster target. We were afraid to go closer because the thing was tumbling and gyrating wildly, like a huge, enraged animal. That big moose had gone wild. I’ve never seen anything that big move so fast. The flashing light had been so erratic and jumpy farther out, in darkness. Now I knew why. Every time that monster rolled over it blanked out the light for several seconds. Then the light would reappear, flash, jump to a new position, jump again, and so on.
We didn’t dare go any closer. But that was okay, we didn’t have to go closer. We made it and that’s what counted.
We were really elated over our success with the rendezvous. So were our friends in Mission Control. The long months of training had paid off, and I had a great sense of fulfillment. A quick check of our reaction control system showed we had used a little more fuel than was planned for this phase of the mission but were in good shape as far as the total mission was concerned.
Most of the extra fuel was used during the closing minutes of rendezvous. Wally hosed out an awful lot in controlling and nulling cross plane velocities (up-down and left-right). It was a tough problem, with the target spinning around like that.
We didn’t have much maneuvering propellant—about half as much as later ships had—so we had to be pretty miserly with it. Also, since this was the first flight, we wanted to keep some fuel in reserve for deorbit in case the main rocket engine didn’t work. The amount required for deorbit varied according to the weight of the spacecraft and the orbit we were in: the heavier and higher we were, the more it would take to get down. Our red line for fuel quantity decreased throughout the flight as we burned off main rocket fuel and worked our way into lower orbits. We had a “how goes it” chart to help us keep track of fuel consumption as the mission wore on. We had to rely on Mission Control for quantity calculations based on telemetered signals from the spacecraft.
I hadn’t slept much the first night. By bedtime the second night, after the rendezvous and all, I was really pooped and had no trouble falling asleep for a solid eight hours.
After the rendezvous most of the flight was pretty much routine and unexciting. But that was as it should be, really—the fewer surprises, the better chance we had of staying up the full eleven days. Not that we were bored, either—there always seemed to be enough to do. We had a little trouble with one of the three fuel cells overheating, but we could solve that by taking it offline for a while and letting it cool down. The water evaporators, used for heat rejection in the environmental control system, dried out and shut off now and then and were a real nuisance to start up, but we didn’t really need them. The ship stayed cool enough with only the coolant radiators in operation.
We had a little problem with water accumulating in cold places inside the cabin. It would form in golf-ball-sized globs on coolant pipes. Beneath the center couch we would find a pint or quart of water between the “floor”—really the back side of the main heat shield—and the white glass fiber bag where our pressure suits were stowed. Occasionally, water would form in one of the suit hoses we had rigged to transport cabin air to and from the conditioning unit in the environmental system. We could tell when water was in the hose by the slurping noise. To get rid of the water, we used the overboard dump equipment that normally disposed of urine. We found that we could disconnect the overboard dump line from the urine collection bag and use the open end of the line like a vacuum cleaner to suck up the water.
One of the most surprisingly beautiful moments was the blinding snowstorm of particles that drifted away from the spacecraft when we dumped water or urine overboard. At sunset or sunrise, Apollo 7 would make a shadow against the cloud, like a dark funnel in the middle of the white snow. One time, the spacecraft was perfectly silhouetted against the cloud, and I could see our outline down to our big engine bell.
The spacecraft made a lot of gurgling, hissing, and thumping sounds. Evidently, main rocket fuel slopped around in the tanks back in the service module every time we rotated the ship or did any thrusting with the small reaction control maneuvering rockets. Those little rockets had a sound all their own, too. The pitch and yaw thrusters, when fired in short bursts—pulse mode, we called it—made resonant, musical thumps. The pitch jets were a higher frequency—about “C” above middle C, I’d say—and the yaw jets were a half-octave or so lower. They didn’t really ring—it sounded more like “plink” and “plunk.”
With a few more notes we could have played “Yankee Doodle.” The roll jets weren’t musical at all. They just went “thud.” All these peculiar noises gave the impression that we were flying a large tub or barrel half full of water. And I suppose we were, in a way. The service module was a large, mostly empty, and presumably resonant cylinder that did contain fluids of diverse sorts in a variety of tanks and bottles. Come to think of it, before the flight I had wanted to call our ship “Rub-a-Dub-Dub” but no one else thought much of the idea.
We weren’t allowed to name our ship anything, as a matter of fact. James Webb, the NASA administrator, didn’t like it. He was a real sore head in some ways, and stuffy as hell. He wanted the entire agency to be faceless, amorphous, impersonal—except for himself, of course. He was forceful, dynamic, flamboyant—and his ego could not tolerate the competition of other personalities, like the astronauts. He had a particular dislike for the Mercury guys because once they tried to go over his head to Congress and the president to get an additional Mercury flight approved. The flight would have been Al Shepard’s, and at the time there seemed to be good technical reasons for it, but I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t merely an effort to get Shepard into orbit (his first flight was only suborbital). In fact, I wonder if Al had made orbit in Mercury whether he would have hung around for an Apollo flight. He must have eaten his heart out all those years, some days crying on his way to the bank(s), feeling cut off, left out, and denied his legacy as an original Mercury astronaut.
Jim Webb’s successor, Tom Paine, was a different man altogether. A gentle, sensitive man, he had wit, wisdom, and humor. Our first encounter came right after splashdown: Paine puckishly sent us all navy submariners’ dolphin insignia as recognition of our sensational upside-down landing. On the strength of this unplanned test of the uprighting system and a few wrinkles we ironed out in flight, Paine was impelled to announce that Apollo 7 was a little better than perfect: 101 percent successful.
Despite his fine qualities, the space agency fared poorly under Paine compared to its heyday under Webb. This I attribute more to the tenor of the times than to any superiority of leadership. Webb came in with everything going for him: strong presidential endorsement, good connections in a willing and receptive Congress (his close friend Senator Bob Kerr of Oklahoma got him the job), and the sheer weight and momentum of public acclaim and enthusiasm. I don’t know whether he sensed the coming debacle or not, but his timing was perfect. He rode the crest of NASA’s popularity wave for seven years, then got off just before it broke. By the time Tom Paine came along, the bloom was off the rose. Nixon came to power with words of praise but no real support for the program. Kerr, Kennedy, and other strong proponents for space in the early sixties were otherwise no longer in power. And the fickle public began clamoring for a new act to follow.
Meanwhile we kept circling the earth once every ninety minutes: a complete day-night cycle every hour and a half. The sunrises and sunsets were incredibly beautiful—and so was the earth as it whirled by beneath us, like a giant diorama in the sky.
We all had minor problems during our flight. Wally was constipated, Walt didn’t like the food, and I couldn’t sleep—except, perversely, when I wasn’t supposed to. Wally and Walt got cabin fever. Walt made it worse with his daily ritual of scratching the date off his wrist calendar. I didn’t get “go home fever” until the very last day, which was a very long one for me. The three of us got miserable with head colds that didn’t go away until after the flight. With no gravity, our sinuses could not drain. My head felt like it was stuffed and tamped full of cotton like a rag doll. Before the flight somebody asked us why we were taking nine large boxes of tissues. We said we didn’t know exactly but they might come in handy. They did. We used up all but one box blowing our noses incessantly for a week. Dispensing of the soiled tissues became a problem at first. Then we hit upon the idea of stuffing them back in the same containers they came out of. To avoid confusion we labeled the ones holding dirty Kleenex. I kept one as a souvenir (but not the tissues)—it says “SNOT.”
A bowel movement is something of an event in a spacecraft. The facilities are incredibly primitive, and the odor in so small a space is overpowering. The cabin gas filters remove the smell quickly and it’s all over in a minute or two, but that one minute is a beaut. I tried to do mine when the others were asleep. That seemed the most charitable and least embarrassing. Another reason was that the cabin was crowded when all three of us were awake and moving about. The other guys did the same for me. But one time Walt woke me out of a sound sleep—one of those rare occasions when I could sleep—with an aroma so devastating I fancied I’d stuck my head down the smoke stack of a paper mill. Wally found great amusement in my scrambling to get the emergency breathing masks. I fell asleep again with the mask on and the merciful relief it afforded.
Our daily television production, the “Wally, Walt, and Donn Show,” got off to a bad start when we refused to do the first scheduled appearance the second day out. The flight plan called for TV shortly before the first main rocket engine burn. We were preoccupied with preparations for that critical exercise and didn’t want to divert our attention with what seemed to be trivialities at the time. Our preflight encounters with the TV camera had been less than encouraging. We had seen some pictures that were nothing but blurs, had some difficulty with the power cable, and we felt foreboding of the hassle that was sure to ensue if the thing didn’t work. Down at Mission Control the reporters would be bugging the NASA public affairs types who would in turn lean on the flight controllers, and they would be after us to try a variety of their innovative procedures to get a good picture. We thought it would be better to wait until the third day, after our rendezvous was over and when we wouldn’t be so busy with firing the engine for the first time and with executing a rendezvous with no radar. Then, if we had a problem, we could take our time and solve it right.
Evidently the earth people felt differently; there was a real stink about the hotheaded, recalcitrant Apollo 7 crew who wouldn’t take orders. Sometime before the flight we had asked our flight planners and the public affairs guys to delete one item from our flight plan, but apparently our request had fallen through a crack.
The next day we did our first TV show and it came off perfectly. I felt a little foolish after the fuss we had made the day before—Wally had been mean as hell about it—and I guess you could say that we erred on the conservative side. But I’d rather we did that than run the risk of jeopardizing our critical test objectives and perhaps the mission itself. In fact, that has been my approach to flying in general. There are a lot of aviators of intrepid derring-do who are no longer with us.
The television episode was typical of our experience during the evolution of Apollo. We were frequently at odds with somebody. It’s amazing how many people there were who would unwittingly risk the mission and even our lives. Very early I learnt never to trust anyone’s judgment completely out of that entire lash-up of engineers, managers, and technicians. I might also include physicians. Apollo 1 would seem to be a good example of what happens when you do. We were insolent, high-handed, and Machiavellian at times. Call it paranoia, call it smart—it got the job done. We had a great flight. Anything less might have meant the end of the program. And I’d rather be called a shithead and live through it than have everybody remember what a nice guy I was.
Anyway, the television show was a big hit once we got rolling with it. We weren’t too busy after the third day, because most of our tests were crammed into the early part of the flight so we would have most of it if we had to come down early. Consequently we had plenty of the time to devote to TV programming. We heard our ratings were great, but ten days is a very short season.