Sometime around April 2010 I’m viewing the website for Kennedy Space Center, in particular reviewing the list of upcoming events and visiting astronauts. “Wouldn’t it be neat to see another Apollo-era astronaut” I was thinking to myself when suddenly there was Al Worden’s name on the list for visiting astronauts to the KSC Visitor’s Complex for the following month. Jackpot! “What’s this…? Lunch with an astronaut?” Turns out all I have to do is buy an additional ticket to have lunch with the man. Double Jackpot! Ok, it’s a room full of people and not one-on-one, but still, it sounded more personable than a formal presentation.
I called the number on the site, somewhat nervously as the event was not far off and surely this will be a coveted event that will sell out early. I actually was half expecting to hear just that from the lady who answered on the other end of the phone. “Yes, there are still tickets available” was her relaxed reply. Looks like I’m going further down the rabbit hole of space flight (hopefully not a black hole). It was just three months ago that I met Harrison “Jack” Schmitt of Apollo 17, two months since partaking in quasi-astronaut training at Kennedy Space Center with briefing by shuttle astronaut Robert Springer and just a few weeks since seeing Jim Lovell and Fred Haise at the 40th year anniversary event of the Apollo 13 mission. Then there was this NASA Tweetup thing I had registered for. Who was this space geek that I was starting to become?
On 11:30 am on May 2, 2010, I was in the rotunda of the Early Space Exploration building at Kennedy Space Center, awaiting entrance into the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Conference Facility where we were to have lunch with Al. In the rotunda, with general admission visitors passing through to the adjoined museum, the gathering crowd looked decent but lower than I was expecting. Surely more will join us as we get closer to noon? Well noon came, they began filing us inside, and it was apparent that we had already hit our attendance peak. Maybe it is possible that we are at full capacity for the dining room and I was lucky to get a ticket.
When I entered the dining room, the first thing that hit me was that it was bigger than I had expected. There was no way it would be at full capacity. To keep the setting more intimate, staff made sure to seat us all together at one end of the room. We only took up about a third of the tables in the room. My heart sank a little bit. Here was an Apollo astronaut who had been to the moon – one of only 24 people to have even have seen the moon from lunar orbit – and the best audience we can muster is a handful of tables in the corner? While many of the Apollo astronauts at the time of this writing still look and sound great, these guys are all at least 80 years old. We have no immediate plans to have mankind on the surface of the moon again – at least not within their remaining life spans. That means there will be a period in the not to distant future when there will be no living men that have walked on or experienced the moon up close. The most amazing journey we have ever achieved in the history of mankind and we aren’t stopping long enough to listen to the stories of the men that accomplished it before they are gone forever?
Prior to my lunch date with Al, I make sure to brush up on the history of Apollo 15 and Al’s role in the flight. Part of my research lead me to Al’s website where he acknowledges a book of poetry he has written entitled “Hello Earth! Greetings From Endeavour”. Wow, space poetry, who would have thunk it? Two of the poems from the book are posted on the site, one of these two stood out to me -
“Cycle” by Al Worden
Umbilicals
Breaking free
Being born
Eternity.
Growing Up
Getting wise
Being worldly
No surprise.
Learn to fly
Getting wings
Rise above
Those earthly things.
Something special
Comes along
Go to moon
As in the song.
Umbilicals
EVA
Out the hatch
In light of day.
Far away
Mother Earth
Floats along
Watching birth.
Cycle over
Doing fine
I was born
At thirty-nine.
The reason this poem got my attention was the final line “Cycle over…Doing fine…I was born at thirty-nine.” Here is a man between the Earth and the Moon and doing an EVA and he is realizing he is having a life-changing experience. He is no longer Earth-bound and cognizant of a much bigger picture. He is seeing the universe unlike anyone before him has. All his years from this moment on are as if another life. At thirty-nine years of age he is finding himself through the medium of space flight. When I read this poem, I related to that awakening. I too was learning to see beyond my own existence. I was seeing a universe open up before me, bought upon by the new knowledge being gained through listening to the history of spaceflight as told by men such as Al. When reading this poem, I too was thirty-nine.
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From this point forward is a transcript of Al’s presentation:
I’m going to talk about Apollo 15 a little bit and maybe talk about a few things that are a little different than the things you hear in the media. I want to give you a personal introduction to space flight and what it is all about. It’s a long and winding road to get on a space mission. It takes a lot of training, it takes a lot of school. I’ve had 24 years in the military – air force – and 18 of that was in training, one way or another. So it’s pretty tough – you have to have a lot of squares filled before you get into the program – going back to college and getting some masters degrees and going to test pilot school. And you start filling these squares and pretty soon you have pretty much everything you want, provided you don’t run out of age before you get there. I got in under the wire. The age limit was 35 when I was in the program and I got in when I was 34. It takes that long to get all this stuff in your background to make yourself available to the program. Primarily there’s a background check and there’s a lot of other things – a physical examination probably cut out more people than anything as we all had little things that weren’t good things to have hanging around once you get in the space program.
- Al Worden – Deserving of a bigger crowd
Apollo 15, as Jeff said in the introduction, was the fourth manned lunar landing mission. We were pretty different from anything that had flown before us. We flew an upgraded Saturn V rocket – it was the biggest and heaviest that was launched in the program. We carried a lot of extra equipment on our flight that had never been carried before. We carried the lunar rover, which was a 500 pound electric cart. You just have to consider how much energy or fuel it takes to bring an extra 500 pounds to the moon’s surface – and that’s a lot, let me tell you. We also carried the scientific instrument module into lunar orbit that had 2 large cameras, it had a series of remote sensing devices that we used to scan the lunar surface so we could determine it’s chemical composition. It’s an integrated program. The reason we go down to the surface of the moon is so we can get a rock. Why is it important to get a rock? Well, it’s what we call ground truth. If I get a rock from the surface of the moon and I describe everything around it and we take pictures of it and we know exactly where it came from and how it got there – we take that back to Houston and we analyze the composition of that rock and then we compare that with what we get from lunar orbit and remote sensing. What that allows us to do then is to build a program where we don’t have to land. We can fly over the moon with remote sensors and pretty much decide what’s on the surface and the chemical composition and everything we need to know about it. That’s basically the background as to why we sent men to the surface of the moon.
We also left a little sub-satellite before we came back home. So we did a lot of things on our flight that hadn’t been done before. It was a pretty successful flight. We had a lot of scientific objectives on our flight. There’s a nominal amount of science that is laid down for each flight and there’s so much time available you have to do these things and each of these science experiments takes a certain amount of time so you need to build them into the program. So for a nominal flight of 13 days – that we were on – 6 days at the moon there’s sort of a nominal number of science experiments that you can do. Well, we packed our flight plan with 25% more, because we figured it was easier to cancel something than it was to add it once you are in flight. The only thing was, we did all 125% of it, so we were considered the most successful scientific flight.
Let me just talk about the crew for a minute. The crew of Apollo 15 that you see on the screen here – Dave Scott is the commander. He had been on 2 flights before – he was on Gemini 8 with Neal Armstrong and then he flew on Apollo 9 with Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart, which was the first orbital checkout of the lunar module, so he was pretty familiar with all that. He was the command module pilot on Apollo 9 and then he became the commander of course on the backup crew of Apollo 12 and then Apollo 15 and I kind of took his spot as backup crewman on Apollo 12 as the command module pilot. Back in those days, the direct path to be a commander was to be a command module pilot first and then you trade positions into being commander.
Jim Irvin and I were making our first flights. Jim was a lunar module pilot and it was his job to watch all the instruments during flight – he was our systems engineer and didn’t get to fly anything. I flew the command service module all the way out to the moon and back, so I was kinda the bus driver for the other two guys. Dave’s job was to land the lunar module and then get it back into lunar orbit so we could dock and get back home.
The suits that we have on, that you see in the picture here – there’s a whole bunch of things about space flight that we didn’t know about and had to learn. When Al Sheppard flew in 1963 in that suborbital flight we didn’t know whether he could survive it – we didn’t know if a human body could survive going into space. I mean we were that ignorant of what space was all about. So from 1963 to 1971, that’s a big jump from not knowing whether you can survive in space to actually landing on the moon and coming back home safely. That’s a lot of stuff that happened over that 8 year period. These suits are part of that. You cannot exist in a vacuum. The reason you can’t exist in a vacuum is your lungs cannot exchange – well if there is no oxygen, there is no oxygen to keep you alive for one thing. So even if you could put some oxygen in your lungs, you couldn’t exchange it because the lungs require pressure to make that exchange work. So you have to have pressure on the body when you are out there. You can’t survive in a vacuum with it (pressure).
These suits replace the command module and they actually replace the spacecraft by providing us with a pressurized environment in which we could survive. They are made by International Latex Corporation of Dover, Delaware. They’re very complicated, expensive suits made up of some 27, 28 different layers of fabric and material all sewn in by hand also all tailored just for us. We didn’t have exchangeable arms and legs – it was all one suit. If you have the fingers of your suit an inch too long, you really have a hard time doing something out there. So everything had to be tailored very close to our bodies so when they were inflated they weren’t out of reach. They weigh about 90 pounds. They are a pain in the neck here on Earth because they are very heavy things to drag around, especially down here in Florida. We flew in July and during June and July we were down here training and I gotta tell you that 95 degree weather and one of these suits is not a good thing. They’re pretty hot. Incidentally, they cost a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s the price you pay for space flight – these things are expensive particularly when you haven’t done it before. So you gotta make sure you have all the bases covered when you have to do everything you’re going to do.
I want to talk for just a minute about the crew patch. One of the interesting things about the program back then was that we worked out all the details of the flight with a very very sophisticated, professional, competent ground crew, all before mission control. So the things we were allowed to do on our own were to name our own spacecraft, the two of them, and to pick our own crew patch. Both of those turned out to be the most important things on the flight, by the way. We named the lunar module the Falcon, because it is the Air Force Academy’s mascot and we were all three Air Force and we named the command module Endeavor – and you will notice that the last shuttle flight is named “Endeavor”. It is the same name that we used and it is spelled the same way – it’s the old English spelling. The name comes from a sailing ship from the 1700’s that was commanded by Sir Frances Cook when he made the first scientific voyage of the Pacific Ocean from England. So, we picked up on that name because we figured here we were going to be the first scientific voyage to the moon. So, it was kind of an appropriate name for us.
Incidentally, and this is kind of funny, we carried a little piece of a mast of what we thought was the Endeavor – an original piece of the ship. We got it from a museum in Rhode Island that we carried on our flight and then gave it back to the museum after the flight. It has been on display for 38 years as a piece of the mast from Captain Cook’s Endeavor. Turns out it was a piece of Captain Cook’s Resolution and not the Endeavor. Turns out they got it all mixed up. The reason they got it mixed up was because they could never find the Endeavor – the Endeavor was sunk in the harbor of Rhode Island – Providence. And they just found it a few years ago and they realized “hey we got the wrong piece of mast here”.
Anyway, so the crew patch was important to us – we had like 800 designs from different people who liked to do that sort of thing, and we didn’t like any of them. So, we asked a friend of a friend if he would help us with the design. Our friend was a Frenchman and his friend was an Italian, and some of you ladies will remember his name, because his name is Amelio Pucci and Pucci was a great designer of silk clothing and he worked only in pastel colors – all those swirly, swoopy colors – you can still buy his scarves in stores today. Amellio was a graduate of the university of Georgia back in the early ‘30’s and he had a degree in aeronautical engineering. He went back to Italy and became a pilot – a fighter pilot during World War II. After the war, he did what all Italian fighter pilots wanted to do… he got into ladies clothes. And quite successfully, as a matter of fact. But he helped us design this crew patch, which we still think is the best of the bunch.
I will tell you one thing about the patch – the background of the patch is our landing site. But if you notice behind the tail, there is sort of a strange crater pattern that looks like an “X” and a “V”. Now XV is the Roman numerals for “15”. We were told before our flight that we could not use Roman numerals on our patch. All of them up to ours had used Roman numerals and all the sudden they’re saying “no you gotta use numbers”. We thought “well, that’s not fair” so we kinda rearranged the crater pattern behind the bird’s tail. You know it’s kind of funny because the sun would have to be shining both ways for that to work. So we sent it up to Washington and figured some smart person up there would see what we done and slap our wrists and say “you can’t do that”, but they didn’t. That just comes to show you the type of oversight we have in Washington these days. So we got our Roman numerals on our patch.
We launched out of here on July 26, 1971. We got up really early in the morning that day – put on a bathrobe, we go down to get our physical exam, we went down to the next room and we got a hair cut – a hair cut on launch day! Kind of unusual. It made us wonder who we might see out there that we might need a haircut for because explorers don’t do that kind of thing.
Then we had our last breakfast. We went to the suit room and put on our suits and started breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from our systems so we wouldn’t get the bends if we lost cabin pressure on the way to orbit.
We got in the spacecraft at about 7:30 in the morning and the ground crew got us strapped in, all ready to go, they closed the hatch and put the heat shield on and then we had a couple of hours to sit out there until launch time, which was kind of interesting because there wasn’t anything going on. We had a perfect launch – never had a problem – no glitches, nothing. And they have a bunch of holds in the launch countdown in the event there’s something that needs to be looked at they can just hold everything. Well we didn’t have any so there are these open spots in our launch countdown and we didn’t have anything to do, so Jim and I went to sleep for awhile. It was dark inside, cold, not much noise, so we just popped off for a little while – about 45 minutes. About 15 minutes before launch we did our final checks and got ready for launch. Now this thing weights almost 7 million pounds at launch – it is the largest object that has ever been launched from the surface of the Earth – or the heaviest, I should say as there are others the same size. Seven and half million pounds of thrust from the 5 engines at the base and they lifted us off very slowly because our weight was almost equal to our thrust, so we got off very slowly. It took us 12 seconds to get past the launch tower and then it took us 13 and a half minutes to get to orbit at 90 miles. We went around the world one and a half times and when we came over Hawaii we ignited our third stage engine again to accelerate from orbital velocity, which is about 17,500 miles an hour, out to about 25,500 miles per hour, which was the velocity we needed to get to the moon. That maneuver took about 10 minutes – we started over Hawaii and after 10 minutes the engine shut down, we looked out at the Earth to see where we were and we were going straight out over the state of Florida. We had gone from Hawaii to Florida in 10 minutes. Unbelievable! What a way to get around the world. I tell ya, I can see flights from Sydney to New York in 35 minutes, if we could do that…
Anyway, that was on our way. We extracted the lunar module from the third stage and with it stuck on our nose we went to the moon that way. Interestingly, there is a phenomenon that we had to contend with – when you get outside of the atmosphere there is no temperature because there is no molecules – temperature is just a function of how fast the molecules are going. If you have a thermometer, that’s all it registers is how hard those molecules are hitting that thermometer. When you get into a vacuum there’s no molecules so there’s no temperature. But, when the sun shines on a solid object, it acts the same way and that solid object heats up considerably. So when the sun hits one side of the spacecraft – if we held one attitude the whole way – that sunny side would heat up to 350 degrees and on the shadow side, the opposite side, it’d be about minus 250. So there’s like a 600 degree temperature deferential across the spacecraft and we couldn’t allow that, because as well as we knew the spacecraft, that type of temperature gradient could crack the hull. So what we did is we turned so that we were perpendicular to the Sun, Moon and Earth and we slowly rotated all the way out so we got even heating around the outside. And you’ll never guess what we called that maneuver – BBQ – and we did that all the way to the moon.
So we got to the moon, and when we got behind the moon we had to slow down, so we took the service propulsion system engine, which was our main engine then and we had to aim ourselves back along our flight path so that engine could slow us down. It would be like turning a car around backwards and then hitting the gas to try and stop. So we slowed down about 3,000 miles an hour and that put us in lunar orbit. We stayed there that night and the next morning Dave and Jim got in the Lunar Module and off they went down to the lunar surface. They went down for 3 days and I stayed by myself in orbit for 3 days.
Just a couple of things I want to mention about the long period of space flight – the 3 and half days to the Earth to the Moon and the 3 and a half days coming back. There are certain things that you do to keep you alive. For one, you go to sleep – a little hard going to sleep in space on the first night, because we don’t have gravity helping us. You know, we don’t even think about these things but when you go to bed at night and slide between the sheets and put your head on the pillow, what keeps it there? Gravity. You don’t even think about it – you relax. It’s done. When you get into space, that doesn’t work. And if you leave your head out unrestrained it starts wandering on you as you start going to sleep. And I tell you it wakes you up – it woke me up about 3 or 4 times the first night. The second night was better – didn’t even notice it or anything, you just curl up in a ball and fall asleep anywhere – it gets to be really comfortable. In fact, the space environment gets to be so comfortable you really begin to wonder if we genetically we don’t have a connection to this space travel business. It gets to be very comfortable.
The next then is food. We had fried dried food. We had enough for, I think, 15 days on board. We went through a 300 item menu that we could select from and then we had all these meals they had for us and it was kinda easy in flight – when it was lunch for the 3 of us, each of us had a meal locker that we’d pull a string and we’d pull out 5 packs – there would be a drink, a soup, a salad, an entree and maybe coffee or something. So we’d have 15 packs of food floating around that we put water in – it was all reconstituted. And that was kinda of a crazy event because what do you do with 15 little packs of plastic that got food in them? Well, we found out that the best thing was just to let them go – let them float. There not going to go anywhere. And we found out that the air conditioning system on board had a fan that moved all the air around in one direction in the spacecraft – put the food in that airstream and it stayed there – you’d have 15 pack of food floating around like a big lazy Susan – about the size of this table. You sat off to the side and when food with your color tab came by you pulled it out of the stream, popped the top off and ate it and put it back in and that was it. At the end of this, you gals will love this, at the end when all the food is gone one of us would sit in one spot with a fishnet, you know, a big open fishnet, and let all the food wander in there and then tie the end off and throw it in the garbage – and that’s your housekeeping.
And now I’m going to touch on a rather touchy subject – if you eat and drink enough, sooner or later there’s another function you have to perform. And I don’t care who you are – unless you’re a freak, you gotta do it. Ok, the urine – when we had to pee, you did it in a tube and collected it in a plastic bag. And there were times during the flight when we’d open a value to the outside and the vacuum would suck all that out. What do you suppose happened to it when it went outside? It turned into snow. It was a big snow cloud sitting outside the spacecraft. It was a great site too. The problem is that that cloud is going the same direction and the same time at the same speed as we are. So that cloud is there. Every once in a while on the way out and back we’d have to do a little mid-course correction to get away from it so we didn’t get the (dialog not clear). Now the solid stuff was different story. Apollo was a great spacecraft, but it was very, very elementary and crude. We didn’t have beds, we didn’t have showers, we didn’t have a food prep table, we didn’t have a toilet. We didn’t have any of it. All of that is on the shuttle, but we didn’t have it back then. So, we had to use plastic bags. Now this is kind of interesting – it worked, but it was pretty crude. The plastic bag we had was about this big around (holds hands up about a foot in diameter) and that long and on the open end it had a flange about and inch and half that had adhesive on it. I could explain that further if you need me too? I tell you – what a sight – I’m sitting back in my corner and here’s Dave Scott floating past me with this bag strapped to his you know what. Pretty crude. Anyway, when he was done, he cleaned himself up and he had to take the adhesives, put them together and seal the bag and then he had to write his name on the bag and the time of flight because the doctors back in Houston were determined they were going to analysis all that crap after the flight. So we collected it in a big can in space. That is how you lived and survived in space – the shuttle is a lot easier – they’ve got toilets, they’ve got showers, they’ve got beds, all that kind of stuff. But it was all we needed on the flight. And you know what, our attitude was we’re only going to be gone for 13 days – we’ll take anything. I’ll stand on my head for thirteen days if I can go to the moon, you know. We’d do anything. I’m just telling you because I don’t think people often realize how crude the living in space was back in those days. It was not comfortable, but it kept us alive.
Dave and Jim went down to the surface and got out the lunar rover and they rode around the moon – they put about 17 kilometers on this little lunar rover – electric. (They) collected about 170 pounds of rocks, put a flag in the ground and took lots of pictures of Jim saluting the flag. While they’re doing that, I’m floating around in lunar orbit with the remote sensors scanning the lunar surface, taking lots and lots of high resolution pictures of the lunar surface for the cartographers, taking lots and lots of photographs out the window and being very, very busy. I slept about 4 hours a night while I was there. See, that’s another thing, you don’t really need a lot of sleep in space because you don’t use a lot of energy. It’s so easy to do anything. You can move yourself or anything else very, very easily. All you got to do is just start moving and it’s just going to keep going until something stops it, so it’s pretty easy. I’ve seen pictures of the shuttle guys with one guy holding onto the end of a 20,000 pound cargo container maneuvering it around – one guy! It doesn’t take much.
I did a lot of visual observations. There’s a very positive thing when you have a guy up there looking with his eyes at things on the surface. A long, long discussion about the moon was what made the features on the moon. How did the features get the way that they are on the moon? We see those big dark circles on the face of the moon – we call it the face of the man on the moon. You don’t see those on the backside of the moon, because meteors that caused those circles didn’t hit on the backside. That’s meteor impact. There was a large contingency of geology guys who thought it was all about the volcanic – so there’s this question of whether it was meteor impact or volcanic and the answer is it is a little bit of both. But I saw one area of the moon that basically was volcanic and I reported that and as a matter of fact, when we got back they analyzed that area and we changed the landing site of Apollo 17 to go to that spot, just because of that. So these visual observations are really important.
After three days Dave and Jim came back into lunar orbit and we connected and we got started on our way back home. At about 50,000 miles on this side of the moon I did what we call an Extra Vehicular Activity, or spacewalk. This was to recover the film canisters from the large cameras I had out in the SIM bay. That was a very quick thing – I did it in about 40 minutes. I over trained for that particular part of the flight – I would have liked to been out there an hour and a half, or two hours or something, but we worked so efficiently I did the 40 minutes and had nothing else to do so I got back in. I got to tell you, it’s a bit uncanny because on my third trip out I stood up on the outside of the service module – you figure we’re 50,000 miles this side of the moon and 200,000 miles from Earth – hooked my feet to the foot restraints and stood up and just looked around and – unbelievable site, I could see both the Earth and the Moon in the same phase. Really, really weird place to be, you know.
About three and a half days coming back home. We entered the atmosphere at 25,500 miles an hour. Gravity accelerated us all the way back. We put the heat shield first and that slowed us down. By about 50,000 feet we were down to about 500 miles an hour. A little drag chute came out and that slowed us down more to 10,000 feet and then our main chutes came out and put us in the water.
This is the point in most of my talks when I finally say something good about the Navy. The Air Force and the Navy always have this little contentious thing going and we where backup on Apollo 12 which was an all Navy crew so we learned very quickly how to handle guys in the Navy. On our flight, I will say this, the Navy Seals that recovered us where the most magnificent people I’ve ever run into. Absolutely, unbelievably good. The lead seal was at our spacecraft within 5 minutes of us touching down. (He) put the cover around, opened up the hatch, we got out in a little life raft and waited for the helicopter to come pick us up and take us back to our recovery carrier, which was the USS Okinawa, which is now an artificial reef off of San Diego – off of Long Beach, I think… out there in the Pacific… but it was a welcome sight. I will tell you this, when we got off the helicopter onto the carrier we had to walk down some steps and the guy at the bottom of the steps waiting for us was the Commander in Chief of the Pacific fleet, and it’s a name you all know. It was Admiral McCain, John’s father… and John was at the Hanoi Hilton at the time when he came out to meet us… and that was pretty special.
Anyway, we got out on the carrier and the first thing we did obviously, was a physical exam. My heart rate at that time was 125 at that point. A heart adjusts to zero gravity or neutral gravity very quickly. It doesn’t have to work hard. It doesn’t have to pull blood from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head against gravity – there isn’t that gravity to pull from. So the heart gets lazy. The heart can be a very, very lazy muscle unless you exercise it. Pre-flight, my heart rate was around 55 to 60. When we got into orbit it dropped to 15 and then as we went through the flight it gradually went back up to 60 and when we got on the carrier afterwards it was 125. So this is what happens – it takes a couple of weeks to train the heart muscle to get back in shape the way it was before. And then we had lunch with the Caption and while we were doing all this we steamed down to Pearl Harbor to wait for the airplane to pick us up and take us back to Houston.
I’m going to end with this – lots of people have asked me how much we were paid to make those flights. It seems like when you are on something like where there’s so much attention (we had 100’s of millions of people watch our flight – in fact, we were probably the last flight people really paid attention to) people think we got paid a lot. I’ll tell you, I was a Major in the Air Force at the time and I made $800 a month, and that included flight pay and for the flight I got travel pay. Now let me explain travel pay business to you. If you make out a travel voucher, you know, transportation – government furnished, lodging – government furnished, meals – government furnished, everything’s government furnished except… the last line is incidental expenses. So, I got $3 a day to make that flight. I got a check for $39 after we came back… for making that flight. And it’s always made me laugh when I think about it, because I think they must have figured that that incidental expenses… that we were going to spend that with the same people we need to get a haircut for… there must be somebody out there where we can spend our money along with looking good while we’re doing it.
One thing I learned about the program is that the training is long and hard. I tell you, 70 hours a week for 3 years with only a 10 day brake in the middle of that training for that flight… long and hard. I tell you what, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you’ll never make it. That’s just the way it is – you got to have a sense of humor about these things.
Folks, it’s a wonderful day out there. I urge you all to take the bus tour and see the Saturn V – that thing I flew on some 39 years ago. Please enjoy the day. Thank you.
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Al’s latest book is now out – Falling to Earth
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