Badges? We don' need no [more] steenkin badges!

I enjoy collecting access badges that were issued to people who worked in the early days of the US space program. These simple pieces of paper and plastic granted their bearers access to the inner workings of the launch vehicles, spacecraft, and even to the decisions that made the missions possible.

I began collecting access badges from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo several years ago. I hit a bonanza this year with the Lunar Legacies auction in March, when I was able to add several missions for which I previously had no access passes. I now have at least one access badge for every manned Gemini and Apollo mission, and for many of the unmanned ones as well. They include passes to the White Room, launch vehicle, Operations Support Room, Flight Readiness Reviews, Launch Readiness Reviews, booster tests, Engineering and Operations Building, Mission Control, and Firing Rooms, as well as press passes, parking passes, vehicle roll-outs, and launch viewing stand passes.

The photo to the left is a collage of all the passes currently in my collection. (Please click the image for a clearer view.) The next challenge is to figure out how best to display them!

I'm also researching the holders of the passes to learn more about them and their work. For example, I have several that were issued to G. Merritt Preston, who was the Branch Chief for all ground facilities at Kennedy Space Center during Gemini and Apollo.

Happy birthday, Jim Irwin

Happy birthday to Jim Irwin, one of the moonwalkers who I regrettably will never be able to meet.

Irwin's only mission was as the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 15, which landed near Hadley Rille in July 1971. Irwin and Dave Scott were the first mission to use the lunar rover and to take three moonwalks during their stay. The two astronauts exerted themselves so greatly in their final day on the Moon that they were both showing signs of irregular heartbeats after they rendezvoused with the Command Module. [Dave Scott told me at Spacefest that Mission Control was monitoring their hearts, but never actually told the astronauts that they were seeing the irregular heartbeats.] Irwin later suffered two heart attacks, the second of which proved fatal on August 8, 1991.

The photo above is from the pre-launch breakfast for the Apollo 15 crew and their backups. It shows Irwin and Vance Brand, who was the backup Command Module Pilot, obviously having an enjoyable time together.

Also shown is a photo of Irwin on the Moon. For autograph requests, he had copies of this photo printed with the pre-inscribed notation, "His love from the Moon." After leaving NASA in 1972, Irwin founded High Flight, a Christian ministry. Beginning in 1973, he led several expeditions to Mt. Ararat, Turkey, in search of the wreckage of Noah's Ark.

Happy birthday, Alan Bean!

Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot and Skylab 2/3 Commander Alan Bean turns 77 today. Al Bean is perhaps one of the friendliest astronauts you will ever hope to meet. He's a fabulous artist, too.

After getting into the astronaut corps, Bean looked to be on the track to go straight to the Apollo Applications Program (later called Skylab), bypassing the Moon missions. After astronaut C. C. Williams died in an air crash, Bean, his backup, moved into the rotation at the behest of Pete Conrad, who was Bean's instructor at the Naval Flight Test School. Conrad and Bean were perhaps the best matched pair of moonwalkers - at least they had the most fun!

I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Al Bean at Spacefest in February. I asked him if he had ever considered painting scenes from Skylab. His response was fascinating. First, he said, there was a purely technical reason. It normally takes him a month or two to get a scene just right when he paints an Apollo moonwalk picture. With Skylab, since there was so much complicated equipment to be considered, he said he could spend 6 to 8 months before getting the equipment and perspective right. The primary reason for not painting Skylab, though, was the historical significance. He said that in generations to come, the Apollo Moon landings will be all that is remembered about this time in space exploration - not Mercury, Gemini, and certainly not Skylab. Therefore, he said, it was more important for him to be capturing what it was like to be part of Man's first voyages to the Moon.

Happy birthday, Wally Schirra

Greetings from Pittsburgh, with a big "Happy Birthday" to Wally Schirra, who would have been 86 years young today.

Wally was the only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. He was a larger-than-life presence in the nascent space program. His sense of humor was legendary and infectious. He played practical jokes on anybody and everybody. And was he a Turtle? You bet your sweet ass he was!

I got to meet Wally one time, at the National Air and Space Museum on November 3, 2006. Wally was there with Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan to talk about their missions together and what it was like to fly in the early days of the space program. By now, all of his jokes were old and familiar, but it was great to hear him talk about him. Jane had had a crush on him ever since her early childhood. When we met Wally after the talk and shook his hand, I told him that now that Jane had met him, I would never be man enough for her. Wally got a good laugh out of that. So that's my memory of Wally - him laughing at something I said! And I think that's how we all remember him - the man who could be incredibly serious in the spacecraft, but who loved to laugh whenever and wherever possible.

Living history

Hi from Cairo - I'm still on the road and waiting to get back home to take a breather. I'm finding out all kinds of interesting stuff about what the Internet does when you're abroad. I spent half an hour this evening trying to force the Blogger sign-in screen to appear in English instead of Arabic!

I received this wonderful photo this morning from Mark Usciak, the official Spacefest photographer. I'm just blown away to see myself and my lovely bride in the presence of so much history. Half of the men who walked on the Moon are in this photo with us!

Front row: Scott Carpenter, Gene Cernan, Ed Mitchell, Jane and me, Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke, and an unusually glum-looking Dick Gordon. Back row: Al Bean, Hank Hartsfield, Vance Brand, Jack Lousma, Dave Scott, Jim McDivitt, Rusty Schweickart, Mike Collins, Rick Searfoss, and Charlie Walker. Too bad Bruce McCandless was running late, or he would have been in this photo with us too. This still feels too strange to be real!

This week is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission, including the first flight of the Lunar Module. Mission Commander Jim McDivitt was making his second (and last) space flight; he would go on to become the Apollo Program Manager. Command Module Pilot Dave Scott was also on his second mission, and he would later command the Apollo 15 lunar landing mission. Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart was on his first and only flight. Rusty was one of the first astronauts to get space motion sickness, which hampered his functioning for several days and caused the delay of a planned EVA.

The rumor was that Rusty was grounded after the mission because of his space sickness. At the time, we knew very little about the syndrome, though, and it was later discovered that most astronauts get it to some degree or another. The Mercury and Gemini missions did not have the problem because the astronauts remained confined in their seats for most of the mission. It was only with the ability to move about the more spacious Apollo capsules that astronauts became succeptible to this form of motion sickness.

Back from Spacefest

Holy moley, I don't know where to start. I was at Spacefest 2009 in San Diego this past weekend. I will endeavor to provide some photos and commentary over the course of the coming week(s). Suffice it to say at the moment that at this conference, I met half of the men who have walked on the Moon - Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Charlie Duke, and Gene Cernan - in addition to about a dozen other Apollo-era and Space Shuttle astronauts. I spent waaaaaaaaaay more money than I intended to on autographs, but I now have some very cool Apollo-era artifacts that are signed by participants in every lunar landing.

This photo is Jane and me with the crew of Apollo 9, together again for the first time since 1972, in front of their Command Module, "Gumdrop." This was at a reception at the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

More later, I promise... for now, I'm getting ready to go off to Cairo on Thursday...

Prepping for a mission

Among the artifacts that I have most enjoyed collecting over the years are items that were used by astronauts or mission support teams in the endless planning and practicing that preceded missions.

This training manual belonged to Dave Scott, who later commanded the Apollo 15 mission to Hadley Rille. The manual predates the Apollo 15 training, however. It was issued to Scott in February 1970, before even the Apollo 13 mission. In fact, it was for an "H mission," using the same types of LMs as Apollos 11-14. In these missions, the LM's powered descent started from a 60-mile orbit, and there was no lunar rover. The "J missions," Apollos 15-17, had an extended duration LM, used the lunar rovers, and used the Command/Service Module to take the LM down to 50,000 feet before turning the LM loose to land on its own. Moving down to the lower altitude using the CSM gave the heavier J-mission LMs more fuel for the critical last minutes of landing.

Scott annotated this manual heavily. It's fascinating to see what he chose to concentrate on in learning the techniques for lunar descent. For example, Scott has underlined a section that says, "If the LR [landing radar] altitude data-good signal has not been received by a PGCNS [guidance system] indicated altitude of 10,000 feet, the crew will abort." This is precisely the scenario that was mentioned in my recent post about Apollo 14 [a year after this manual was written], where the lack of landing radar data almost caused the crew to abort the landing, until it was corrected at the last possible moment.