To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers

Foreword

I was born and raised, along with five brothers and sisters, on a small farm in Michigan. By the time I was twelve I was working full days in the fields and milking cows. This was just after the Great Depression and at a time before space travel, before jet engines, in a year when the world’s most sophisticated rockets were generally not getting much higher than a couple of hundred feet—if they didn’t blow up first. It would have been hard for me to imagine that only two decades after leaving that farm, I’d be heading into space on a rocket as large as a fortystory building—a rocket so huge that I was a long, long way above the ground even before we lifted off. It was so tall, in fact, that it was not a noisy ride—because the noise was generated about three hundred feet below us, about the length of a football field. But I could feel the force of rocketing into orbit. As the fuel burned out of the first stage and the vehicle became lighter we accelerated to about 4 g’s, which was like four people sitting on me, and it was not pleasant. The Saturn V rocket, which took three of us all the way to the moon, was an incredibly accurate machine, operating to the precise split second planned. Our crew spent a lot of time training in case something went wrong during launch: for example, if the engines quit, an escape tower would pull us away to safety. But we never needed that training —the rocket worked just fine. I even wrote a couple of poems about that beautiful, majestic Saturn V rocket. The Apollo 15 mission that I flew has been called the high point of human exploration. The rocket launch was just the beginning of the lunar journey, but I’d already taken a long journey in my career to get to that point. Foreword Alfred Worden Apollo  Astronaut As a teenager, working on that farm, I realized that farming was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I decided that I wanted to go to college, and I ended up with the equivalent of an engineering degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point. I still didn’t have any real interest in flying or rocketry, but decided to go into the air force because I heard that the promotions were quicker there than in the army. I was wrong about that, but in the process I found out something else. I got really interested in how to fly an airplane, especially flying on instruments. I soon realized that I had a gift for it; I could do it pretty well. Flying airplanes is not the same as flying rockets, but it wasn’t long until rocketry also became part of my career. My first real interaction with rockets was when I was assigned to an air defense squadron in Washington dc. We were flying live missiles and rockets on those aircraft in defense of the nation’s capital, and without a lot of flying time available I got really interested in the maintenance activity going on. Soon, I was running the section: we rebuilt the armament shop and turned it into a modern repair shop like you see today. Air Defense Command liked it so much they wanted me to head up a program to help other fighter squadrons do the same thing. Instead, I went back to college, this time to learn about guided missiles. That led me into being a test pilot— the top of the heap in aviation. I ended up teaching as well as flying, at the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. For a while I was training the pilots on the X-15 rocket plane in landing techniques. I was even training astronauts like Gene Cernan and Charlie Bassett in a zero-gravity simulator that we had. I wrote and taught a number of the courses in spaceflight that the test pilots had to pass; my transition from flying planes to flying rockets was getting ever closer. Although it was always something to work toward, I hadn’t thought about being an astronaut; when I became a test pilot, there just weren’t any openings. But after about a year and a half, they had a selection. I’d always thought of it like winning...