To the moon - part two
Lessons from Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke
Note: I was saddened to read that Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell died this week at the age of 97. What a legacy.
I interviewed Gen. Charles Duke in 2018. This is the second part of our conversation about how spending time on the moon changed his view of Earth. Read part one here.
Kennedy Space Center - Vehicle Assembly Building (It’s bigger on the inside.)
Between two worlds
It seems fitting that Charlie Duke left the planet from a spot that is saturated with the rich greens and vibrant blues of Florida’s Space Coast. Land and water reach toward each other like fingers in an area that teems with life. White egrets nest on the site and its resident prehistoric throwbacks – giant American alligators – can rival the rumbles of engines in their full-throated hisses and roars. These days, visitors can ride a tame, air-conditioned tour bus past the oversized Vehicle Assembly Building, alongside the crawler track, and near the launch pads. If your timing is perfect, the weather smiles upon you, and an endless number of other factors big and small fall into place, you can be lucky enough to see a new generation of vehicles launch with the same fury and glory of the early days of space travel, though now the computers are a lot smaller, the spacesuits are sleek, and the video has moved from grainy black and white to full high definition that makes you feel like you are along for the ride.
In stark contrast to that lush Florida landscape, a primary part of the Apollo 16 mission was to survey and collect samples from the moon’s hilly Descartes landing site. It is almost inconceivable to me that humans can overcome the relative security of our home planet and just leave it. They venture off-world like a character in a Ray Bradbury story. It seems beyond the capacity not of our engineering prowess or collective brain power, but our primal instinct to survive. I learned in conversation with Duke that perspective really is everything. He told me that fear was kept at bay by training, training, training, and then, training some more. Study, work, and preparation from college to flight school to the deserts of the American Southwest meant that Duke and Young, the pair who would work on the moon’s surface, were ready to explore new territory. Duke knew what to do and how to do it, and he had teammates stationed on two worlds who were equally creative, confident, and qualified. Apollo astronauts honed their lunar geological skills with the closest facsimile they could get on their home planet. They trained in rugged desert terrain. It was still a far cry from operating off-planet, but it was a means to a remarkable end.
Time to go
Though there were some glitches on the mission, liftoff of Apollo 16 was textbook perfect, if not a gravity-defying assault on the blood and tissue bodies of those riding the power of the Saturn V through the atmosphere. Oh, but that view. It made all the hard work and the rollercoaster of emotions well worth it.
“The first time I really had a sense of awe in that mission was when we left Earth orbit and we turned our spaceship around. Looking out the window, the Earth came into view and we were about 20,000 miles away, and you could see the whole circle of the Earth. It was awe. It was breathtakingly beautiful to see the whole circle of the Earth just suspended there in the blackness of space. That awe that I had was really one of the deepest feelings I’d ever had of the beauty of the Earth – the blues and the whites and the clouds and the snow, the brown of the land. That jewel of the Earth was suspended in the blackness of space. It was just incredible.”
Can we share it even if we can’t see it? Hearing Duke’s nearly breathless sense of awe in recounting the memory of that overview of our planet makes me believe that we can. He passed it to me with the ease of someone sharing a segment from the juiciest orange. When we spoke nearly 50 years after the launch, he was effervescent about both the details and the grand philosophy of such an experience, and now I have a bit of it to carry with me, too.
Outside of time
“When you’re going to the moon, Apollo is a three-day trip but it’s always daylight. There’s no night in space. The sun is always shining, so you make your night by putting up curtains in the spacecraft and turning off the lights. You think about a trip to Mars, which could be six or seven months. They’re always in sunlight. You regulate your Circadian rhythm by lights and shades and the counts. In Apollo, we had a clock that started at liftoff and just kept counting – one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours – and your flight plan was based on that clock. We went to the moon at three hours-and-something, three or four, and at 15 or 16 hours was the first sleep period, so we put up our curtains and said good night to mission control and turned out the lights. You’re still so excited at that point that you don’t get much sleep, at least I didn’t. The other two guys did pretty good. It’s hard to get my mind in idle so you can drift off to sleep.”
Duke sees his voyage and his remarkable 21 hours and 38 minutes on the moon’s surface through the lens of a man of deep faith. He still speaks of it all as if it happened yesterday, but with the deepened sense of purpose that comes with reflection and sharing his stories with many. He said entering lunar orbit brought a new moment of awe.
“On the backside of the moon, it was dark in that area of the moon when we entered orbit. A few minutes later, we came into sunlight. That was a very awesome experience – and dramatic. As you look down on that part of the moon you can’t see from earth, as the sun rose, we were going around in orbit and the shadows got less and less, but it was very dramatic and an awesome feeling to look down and see the roughness and the hills. You couldn’t see individual rocks, but you saw piles of rocks from the center of some of those craters. It was a feeling of, as Buzz Aldrin said, ‘magnificent desolation.’
Then we came around the front side and saw Earthrise for the time, and it was Earth just suspended out there in the blackness of space. The awesome feeling I had of the beauty of it and thinking about the distance that we had traveled, and there it was: our island home, 240,000 miles or so away. One of my first thoughts was, ‘We’re a long way from home. I hope this thing works.’”
To be continued….
Photo by me, taken at Kennedy Space Center
Values check: awe, adventure, courage, faith, loving-kindness (Wondering what I’m talking about? Start here.)