Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Apollo 15 Astronaut Al Worden

Episode Date: August 29, 2011

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Music Apollo astronaut Al Worden, this week on Planetary Radio. Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society and I have a real treat for you this week. Al Worden went to the moon 40 years ago. Now he has written a book about that mission, how a Michigan farm boy became an astronaut, and what happened after Apollo 15.

We'll talk with him right where his command module was designed and built. All the other regulars will also join us. My conversation with Phil Plait is delayed due to technical problems, but the bad astronomer will join us again soon. Let's go now to Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and the editor of its blog. Emily, let's start today with the image of the week,

and that is this lovely thing that you've done of Hyperion. Yeah, Cassini flew past Hyperion recently, and it was one of the closer fly and that is this lovely thing that you've done of Hyperion. Yeah, Cassini flew past Hyperion recently, and it was one of the closer flybys it's had and produced some really gorgeous pictures, and among them was this crescent view. And Hyperion is so lumpy that it doesn't really, can't really call it a crescent, actually. It's just a strange, lumpy thing with lots of shadows, and it was a pretty fun one to put together. Beautiful image. You also attended something with a really ugly name last week called SBag. That's right. There's all of these groups that NASA put together to bring scientists together to provide scientific input into NASA's future plans, and they all have horrible sounding names like MEPAG, LEAG, VEXAG, SBag, IPIWG. They're

really terrible. And people insist on calling them by their acronyms.AG, SBAG, IPIWG. They're really terrible. And people insist on calling them by their acronyms. Anyway, SBAG is the Small Bodies Assessment Group. It's the group that advises NASA on really quite a diversity of objects, everything from asteroids to the Kuiper Belt to centaurs and Trojans. And, you know, that includes everything from Pluto to Ceres. And one of the things that was talked about a lot, of course, was all of the great new images from Vesta. Is there some controversy there about these images? Well, I wouldn't exactly call it controversy, but there's certainly a lot of speculation about what

they might mean. It's kind of funny because, you know, there's all kinds of crazy explanations for what the Vesta images are representing in the comments on my blog. And I have to say that the scientists' possible explanations are not much less crazy than what I'm reading in the comments on my blog. And I have to say that the scientists' possible explanations are not much less crazy than what I'm reading in the comments. So there's definitely not a lot of agreement. There's a lot of discussion about whether some of those features that we're seeing are double impact craters or not. There are several scientists warning me that a lot of the things that look like impact craters are probably collapse pits. So there's really a lot of interpretation yet to be done on those Vesta pictures.

Science is exciting, largely because people aren't always in agreement. We've saved a few seconds. Would you like to talk about the effort to preserve something that has done a terrific job of bringing astronomy to the world? Yeah, 365 Days of Astronomy is a project that I helped start. It's a really cool podcast that's entirely user-driven. So there isn't one broadcaster like you, Matt, who's coming up with all of the stories. The people who listen to this podcast are producing daily episodes. And there seems to have been a lull in signups, both for sponsorship and for production of episodes.

So if you've ever wanted to try doing a podcast and want to try one that might get listened to by thousands of people, this is your chance. Send an email to signup at 365daysofastronomy.org. Great podcast. We're out of time. Emily, thanks again very much. Thank you, Matt. Emily is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Hey, let's talk now with Bill Nye. Bill, thank you for joining us.

Why are you in Ithaca, New York, and it's windy outside? Oh, it's very windy. We have Hurricane Irene this weekend, and I'm here at Cuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and it is very windy. But the reason I'm in Ithaca, yesterday was the day that we dedicated the Bill Nye Solar Noon Clock here at Cornell University. As a thankful alumni, I have been putting money into a fund for quite a while to put a clock on this building. My father, as you may know, was a prisoner of war for 44 months, longer than any other U.S. internment. And he survived it. And he came back fascinated with sundials because they had no clocks, hardly any electricity. And so this clock on this building has a solar noon feature. At solar noon,

electronically controlled by a computer designed by Cornell students, it opens these damper doors, these butterfly valve doors, and light is piped from the roof to the front of the clock. And it's quite handsome. And I'm very proud and I'm very pleased. And we had a very nice day yesterday. So the reason this is so important to me, Matt, is because we should all understand the great process of thought that our ancestors went through to determine the apparent path of the sun through the sky and then eventually to discover that the earth goes around the sun and that we are not alone as a planet and that there are other stars with other planets. And all this started with reckoning time by the sun. It's a great topic, and I hope that it illuminates the days of many, many Cornell students for many decades to come. Thank you. And as far as I know, it's the only one of its kind. It's the only clock that opens up at solar noon and reminds everybody that solar noon is not the same as noon.

And that's a long story called the equation of time. Really fun. Thanks for asking about it, Matt. I have my pleasure. And we look forward to having you back in town next week, Bill. Thank you so much. Bill Nye is the science and planetary guy. He's also the executive director of the Planetary Society. I'm going to be right back with Apollo astronaut Al Worden. Stay tuned. This is fun. Almost exactly four decades have passed since retired Air Force Colonel Al Worden went to the moon. He made the trip as Apollo 15's command module pilot, joined by mission commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin.

Now, all these years later, and after a lot of encouragement from other astronauts and friends, Al has written Falling to Earth, an Apollo 15 astronaut story. He waited so long because there are parts of the story that he has only recently decided to tell, and not all of them were pleasant experiences. It's an autobiography written with Francis French, and if you want a thrilling and informative first-hand account of one lunar astronaut's journey, this is it.

My conversation with Colonel Worden is more than twice as long as we have time for during the show. I highly recommend listening to all of it at planetary.org. Al and I met at the beautiful new Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey, California, right on the spot where North American Rockwell designed and built the Apollo command and service modules. Colonel Worden, it is an incredible honor to have you in front of our microphones here for Planetary Radio. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks, Matt. It's nice to be here. And where we are is pretty, got to be pretty special to you. Right where it all happened. If people read the book, they're going to hear that you spent a great deal of time right across the parking lot here. I spent about three years almost solid out here during the program, getting ready for our flight and getting ready for other flights,

checking out spacecraft and working on malfunction procedure. Oh, we just did a ton of stuff when I was out here back in the day. So you spent a lot of time flying between Houston and here, often in T-38s, cool little airplanes. Usually racing Southwest Airlines from Houston to L.A. and usually beating them, even though we had to stop in El Paso to refuel. And your old hotel, I think, is gone now. That's what I hear. I haven't been by there.

But, yeah, I understand that the Haitian village is gone. Engineer, geologist, people will learn in the book that you really took to geology. Later in your life, administrator up at Ames Research Center. But I wonder, you know, if you had to fill out a job application today and you could only put one of two careers, professions, would you put astronaut or pilot? That's a tough one. would you put astronaut or pilot? That's a tough one because today being an astronaut does not mean you've got to be a pilot also. I'd have to say astronaut because back in the day when I was an astronaut, we all had to be pilots.

And so that was kind of a piece of the whole picture of the jigsaw puzzle that made an astronaut. Today, I'm not sure I'd say that today. But that would be, probably astronaut, but I gotta tell you, when you talk about professions, you talk about being an astronaut, being a pilot, I guess I'd have to say I was an Air Force officer. Yeah, uh-huh. I'm not surprised.

Pilot or not, but I guess I'd have to say Air Force, being an Air Force officer is a big one, and being an administrator is probably the second one because I did a lot of that after I retired. But you were all pilots, and you weren't just pilots. You were the best of the best. You were part of that group that came out of Edwards. When we had that application program back in 1966, looking at the basic requirements to apply to be an astronaut, you find out that they wanted like a thousand hours of flying time, they had

to have a bachelor's degree in science or engineering, had to be less than 35, less than 6 feet tall and be able to pass physical. That's pretty generic kind of stuff and as I recall there were over 800 that were qualified on the minimum level, and they ended up picking 19 of us. And if you look at the 19 that were picked, you find that not 1,000 hours of flying time, more like 4,000 or 5,000 hours, and not just flying time, but most of us were test pilots at the time. Not just a bachelor's degree, but we had guys with PhDs, and we had most of the guys with multiple masters. I would say the average was at least a double master's in my group, all under 35, all under 6 feet, all past physical.

So that 19 out of some over 800 applicants, and I think that's true of any job that you apply for. If you're competing with other people, you look at all those and you say, you know, what have I got that I can compete with? And those with the best background are probably going to get it. And that's the way it goes. I mean, nothing against people that only have a bachelor's degree, but they're competing against guys who got PhDs, and that's pretty tough. I always wondered about you guys up in the command module who didn't get to go down and

walk on the surface. Don't say it that way. Okay. See, that's what I'm getting at. I take exception to didn't get to because that is absolutely 180 degrees out. But you had the time of your life up there. I did. Well, it's more than having a good time.

I was so happy to get rid of those guys, I've got to tell you. They were stealing your... They were taking your coffee. Yeah, they were drinking my coffee and they were getting in my way all the time. So it was kind of nice to get rid of them for a while. And besides, I was trained as a single-seat fighter pilot, so it was kind of a neat thing for me. And in addition,

I had so much to do up there. All this remote sensing. I photographed about 25% of the moon's surface with those big cameras. And, yes, we had a bulky camera, which I had to climb over later on to get to the film canister. We had a little subsatellite that we put in lunar orbit. There were a lot of things in that scientific instrument module that, in terms of the science data that we brought back, was probably a million times more than you can get on the surface. So the scientists are still taking a look at all that. But there's another

aspect of being a command module pilot that people don't realize. I mean, you know, the media has really skewed, distorted the way we look at lunar landings, because the media is on the surface for the guys, and that's all you see. So you kind of forget about the guy that's in orbit and that's fine. It's just that that was a pretty doggone important position and it was the closest route to being a commander downstream.

Well, of course, they canceled 18, 19, and 20 so that opportunity didn't show up. But that's the path I was on. You see, the idea is that a lunar module pilot never gets to fly anything. You talk to any LMP and, yeah, well, he walked on the moon and that's all he's going to talk about because he never flew anything. And that's fine.

Command module pilot has to fly everybody out there, stay in orbit while they're on the surface, maintain that thing all the time, and bring everybody back home. And a commander's job is to fly the lunar module down to the surface and back up again. and bring everybody back home. And a commander's job is to fly the lunar module down to the surface and back up again. So in terms of the professional advancement and responsibility and status,

being a command module pilot was the second in command. That would put generally the command module pilot kind of in line for a commander's job. And that's what I was looking at. But you did your job so well while you were up there for several days on your own that you had time to just enjoy being up there as well. I did. And I think from what I read, it really changed your life. Well, there were a couple of aspects of that.

Yeah, it was fun. I thoroughly enjoyed being by myself. I'll be back with Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system.

It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Al Wharton has just written Falling to Earth, an Apollo 15 astronaut story. He made that trip to the moon in 1971. You'll find much more of our conversation at planetary.org. He made that trip to the moon 40 years ago. You'll find much more of our conversation at planetary.org. But Al did tell me more about what he did while Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were down on the surface.

One of the things was every time I came around the moon and looked at Earth and watched Earth rise, I watched that 75 times, and that's a pretty fantastic thing to view. I watched that 75 times, and that's a pretty fantastic thing to view. But from a kind of a personal standpoint, and I don't want to get into religion because it can kind of get mixed up with religion, but if you understand the trajectory of an orbit around the moon, you have to draw a picture, and there's a segment of that orbit around the moon where you're shadowed from the sun and you're shadowed from the earth at the same time. And that is complete, complete darkness, except for starlight. What I found when I got to that particular segment of the orbit was that I saw so many stars, I couldn't find my major

navigational stars. They were completely washed out it was absolutely unbelievable I could see the horizon of the moon by the light it cut off not by the light shining on it and I started thinking about you know we really don't know much about the universe I mean we were led to believe when we're sitting here on earth there are 37 bright stars are going to use for navigation stars but when you get out there there's so many other stars that they obliterate the 37 that you're supposed to use. You say, oh my gosh, this universe is – it's a different thing than I ever thought.

And I've got to stop thinking in terms of we're unique, that we're the only ones in the world, that we're here, we're the only intelligent species around. When you see the rest of the universe out there, you realize intuitively that there are other worlds and there are other species out there. Got to be. We got something like 200 to 400 billion stars in our own little galaxy, and we got another couple hundred billion galaxies out there. We're not just a coincidence. There are other solar systems, other planets, and I believe there's other intelligent beings out there.

We haven't made contact with them. We don't see them. We have this UFO theory conspiracy thing going on in the country, but I kind of overlooked that. I think that's kind of nonsense. But the idea that there are other intelligent species out there who may be a million times advanced, a million years advanced over us, giving them the ability to go anywhere in the universe they want, which we will have someday. But we're still in the infancy, and we've got to take our steps one at a time and sort of earn our spurs before we get out there too far. Amen to that.

Stuff we talk about on this show all the time. I got to let you go. There's this one other thing I'm going to ask, kind of on behalf of a buddy of yours, Tom Jones, fellow astronaut. Oh, yeah. He's been on the show a couple of times. One time, what we talked about in part was the smell of space, coming back in from EVA. But you in the book, just in passing, mentioned the smell of the moon, which you got to sample even though you hadn't been down there.

Oh, yeah. Well, the smell of space is different because you're in pure oxygen. It's a little different. What I got to smell when David and Jim came back in was the dust off their suits. And I wasn't quite sure what that was all about, but it smelled like gunpowder. There was a real gunpowder-y, like burnt gunpowder smell to it. Of course, that washes out fairly quickly when that dirt is exposed to humidity. But that's the way it smelled up there.

And we made sure that we cleaned up pretty well to make sure that not only did we not get a lot of dirt in the command module, but it kind of washed that smell out too. Still working with the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation? I do. I was the chairman for six years. We expanded a lot during that six years. We were very successful in raising money. Well, I was there.

Well, the foundation was formed in 1984 by the original seven Mercury guys. It was the Mercury Foundation originally. Yeah. To give out scholarships to the best and the brightest. And I took over six years ago. The endowment fund at the time was about a million seven or a million eight. Over that six-year time period, and I relinquished the chairmanship last May, we've got seven million in the endowment fund. So we raise a lot of money over the six years. We give out 25 scholarships, $10,000 each every year to the brightest and best students in the country because we want to make sure we fund those kids that can make a real difference,

and that's what we do. Good place to get to the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is at www.alwarden.com, where you can see a lot more photos of Al Worden's career, including the Apollo 15 mission, an incredibly successful mission of science to the moon all those years ago. But of course, what we really want to recommend, and I will personally recommend, is that you take a look at Falling to Earth, an Apollo 15 astronaut story. It's available from Smithsonian Books. I got the Kindle version. Love the photos. It all worked and made it convenient to carry around. But we got a bunch of the hard copies here that you're going to be signing in just a few minutes. Al, once again, a tremendous honor. And thank you. Thank you for all that you have done. As a matter of fact, Tom Jones endorsed the book. Oh, yeah. He's my buddy.

In fact, we saw him night before last. He was up in Pasadena with us. And you got some other great people in here who contributed. Oh, yeah. Well, Neil Armstrong, yeah. I mean, how much better can you get? Neil who? Yeah, who's that? Neil who? Yeah, right. Colonel Warden, thanks once again. Thanks, man. Al Warden has been our guest. He was the command module

pilot on the Apollo 15 mission. If you really want to read about the making of an astronaut, how a Michigan farm boy went up through the Air Force to becoming a test pilot, to becoming one of those very few people who have been to the moon, you want to read Falling to Earth. And if you want to know what's going on in the night sky, stick around. We're going to have What's Up with Bruce Betts in just a moment. It is indeed time for What's Up. Once again, I'm joined by the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, His Honor, Bruce Betts. Thank you. Thank you. You may be seated.

I have a gift for you. Yay! I picked it up at the Columbia Memorial Space Museum or Center in Downey where I talked to Al Ward. And what a fun guy, man. I would party with him. That really doesn't say much. You'd party with anyone, man. Yeah, that's probably true. But yes. But he'd be really fun. Now, they have a small gift shop there. And normally, I would never tell you what I've gotten you, but I think I will in this case.

I have bought you your own Saturn V. Oh, that's so cool. Gosh, where am I going to put it? Well, this one's only about two and a half inches, but I think you'll enjoy it. How appropriate, because I'll be talking about the Saturn V later in the show. Oh, and I didn't even know that. Whoa. This is the most serendipitous radio program there is.

Okay. There's a supernova. There's another supernova. I heard about this. Yeah. An M101, otherwise known as the pinwheel galaxy, off the Big Dipper's handle, but you can't just go out and stare at it with your eyes.

You will need a decent telescope. It is, let's see, last I checked, up to magnitude 13, and they think it may get to magnitude 11. Far below naked eye, but certainly something doable with amateur telescopes. I read something like, what, 21 million light years away. Good safe distance. That's about how far away I want to keep them. I didn't even hear it.

It was a muffled boom. Oh, wait, maybe I did hear it. Anyway, there's other stuff you can see easily with your naked eye, including you can check out Saturn still shortly after dusk. And, in fact, if you look on August 31st, you can see Saturn with the moon to its lower left, low in the west after sunset, and Mars also up in the wee hours of the morning over in the east looking dim and reddish. We go on to this week in space history. It was five years ago that SMART 1 was intentionally smashed into the moon, the European Space Agency lunar orbiter. It was 35 years ago that Viking 2 landed successfully on Mars.

And in 1979, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn. We move on to... Random Spice Lab. That's some cartoon character, right? I can't quite place it. Who is that? Does that mean something to you? I don't know, but I think it upset the dogs out in the hallway.

It did upset the dogs. I hear them scratching around. What's invaded the house? All right. Random Space Fact. This is something I picked up. I think you know I went to another meeting of Action Team 14 on Near Earth Objects of the Science and Technology Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the United Nations. Is this anything like the Justice League? But we're trying to save the world from neo-impact by going through excruciatingly painful bureaucratic detail to try to get international cooperation on neo-threats. But there I got this random space fact from NASA's neo-program head at headquarters, Lindley Johnson, mentioned it.

In the last 12 months, there have been 37 flybys of asteroids within one lunar distance from Earth. Wow, that seems like a lot. It does feel like a lot. Now, most of those, really, really small. So even down to meter size. So things that would burn up in the atmosphere, even if they did hit the Earth. But still, it reminds you that it is not entirely uncrowded in our neck of the woods out in space. Have you seen that great T-shirt?

I'm going to forget the artist's name. It's the T-shirt of the T-Rex saying, quick mammal, hide yourself. We'll fend off the asteroids. That was nice. It made me feel badly for the dinosaurs. Really? They weren't so bad? They were sweet guys.

Well, only for a minute, yeah. All right, we'll move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what is currently the fastest spacecraft leaving the solar system? How'd we do, Matt? We did well with this one. Our winner was Randy Bottom. Randy Bottom of Brighton, Ontario, Canada, who said that it is Voyager 1, 17.056 kilometers per second.

That translates to about 61,000 kilometers per hour, or 38,000 miles per hour. That's a pretty good clip, I would say, and it's not going to get caught. In fact, Ed Lupin, he wanted us to know, he had the answer right, but he said that no Pioneer anomaly is going to slow it down. No, particularly since it seems to be tied to the spacecraft itself. Now, it was a little tricky because New Horizons actually was the fastest spacecraft leaving the solar system for a few years, but now it has slowed down too much, being tugged on by the sun's gravity. Voyager 1 is back in the lead to stay in terms of all the spacecraft that are out there.

Now, the really good trick here, as a couple of people pointed out, among them Ilya Schwartz and Bjorn Getta, is that you did specify spacecraft leaving the solar system because there are others that are not leaving that are going even faster the fastest apparently helios 2 which rounded the sun get this at more than a quarter of a million kilometers per hour wow they get a ticket no but i just i mean you wonder why it didn't just get torn apart at those kinds of speeds. It does seem impressive, but as long as the whole spacecraft is going that fast, and since there's no stuff and there's very little stuff in space for it to be running into,

to be ripping it apart, it isn't too bad unless it gets too close. Yeah, I was just kidding. What do you got for next week? Sure you were. Hey, for next week, as promised, come back to the Saturn V. What mission was the first flight of the Saturn V rocket? The first flight of the Saturn V rocket. What mission? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. September 5th, that's Monday, September 5th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. I'll meet you a week after that. What do you say? And you'll tell us the answer.

I will indeed, as I'm sure many of our listeners will as well. All right, good. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about air filters. Thank you, and good night. Do you know that on Apollo 15, there was danger of both water and broken glass, to say nothing of all the other stuff that gets out floating around in spacecraft. So they needed really good air filters. Actually, what they had was a really good vacuum cleaner.

It's in the book. Wow, that's pretty cool. And you actually weren't making this up. I was not making this up. And he wasn't either. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, Clear Skies. Thank you.