Alfred Worden

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Worden was, for three days in 1971, the most isolated human being who had ever lived. While his crewmates David Scott and James Irwin walked on the Moon, Worden orbited above them alone in the command module Endeavour, at times 2,235 miles from any other person. No human before or since has been that far from their fellow humans. He later said he enjoyed those "three wonderful days in a spacecraft all by myself." Who was the man comfortable with that kind of solitude, and what brought him to the loneliest post in the history of space exploration? The answers reach back to a farm outside Jackson, Michigan, and a young man who knew with certainty he was going somewhere else.

• 2. From Farm to West Point

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  Alfred Merrill Worden was born on the 7th of February, 1932, in Jackson, Michigan, the second of six children. His family kept a farm outside the city, and the family also spent time at his maternal grandparents' farm near East Jordan. Worden attended multiple grade schools and graduated from Jackson High School, where he served as student council president and earned the rank of First Class Scout in the Boy Scouts.

  His family lacked the money for a four-year scholarship, so Worden secured one to the University of Michigan, though it covered only a single year. Eyeing the service academies as a path forward, he took the entrance examination and received offers from both West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He chose West Point, beginning studies there in July 1951. He later said plainly, "There was no way I was going to live the rest of my life on a farm. That kind of got me started down the path that led to NASA."

  Life at West Point suited him. Beyond his coursework, Worden ran cross country, practiced gymnastics, and served as a cheerleader. He finished 47th out of 470 in his class and received a Bachelor of Science degree in military science in 1955.

• 3. Learning to Fly

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  Worden graduated West Point in 1955 with no piloting experience at all. The United States Air Force Academy had not yet graduated its first class, so graduates from West Point and Annapolis could choose the Air Force, and several of Worden's instructors urged that route on him. He took their advice, thinking promotion would come faster, a belief he later acknowledged was mistaken.

  Primary flight training came at Moore Air Force Base in Texas, where Worden learned on Beechcraft T-34 trainers and found he loved flying. He advanced to Lockheed T-33 jet trainers at Laredo Air Force Base, then moved on to F-86D Sabres for Air Defense Command training at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. His first post-training posting was with the 95th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., where he flew F-86Ds and later F-102 Delta Daggers, also serving as the squadron's armament officer from March 1957 until May 1961.

  Wanting to deepen his engineering knowledge, Worden returned to the University of Michigan in 1961, earning Master of Science degrees in both aerospace engineering and instrumentation engineering in 1963. He applied for the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and was surprised to be turned away, only to learn his superiors had arranged something more unusual: training at Britain's Empire Test Pilots' School in Farnborough, England. He finished second in his class there. Back in the United States, he was ordered to serve as an instructor at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at the specific request of its commandant, Colonel Chuck Yeager, graduating from that program in September 1965.

• 4. The Road to Apollo 15

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  Worden had tried to join NASA as early as 1963, applying for Astronaut Group 3, but pending orders to Farnborough made him ineligible, and he assumed he had aged out of any future selection. He was wrong. In September 1965, Worden applied to NASA's fifth astronaut group, writing in his first memoir that "professionally, I figured it couldn't get any better than that. Even being a test pilot couldn't compare with being an astronaut and making a spaceflight." NASA raised its age limit from 34 to 36 for that selection, and Worden, aged 34 at the time, was among the 19 candidates chosen in April 1966, alongside his Aerospace Research Pilot School classmates Stuart Roosa and Charles Duke.

  On the 3rd of October, 1966, Chief Astronaut Alan Shepard assigned Worden and four other Group 5 astronauts to the Block II command module team. He was placed on the support crew for the mission that became Apollo 9, then named backup command module pilot for Apollo 12. That backup role, under the rotation system run by Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton, positioned Worden as the likely prime command module pilot for Apollo 15. Slayton, in his own memoirs, called Worden a "logical choice."

  Worden's bond with Apollo 12's prime command module pilot Dick Gordon became a close, lifelong friendship. They trained together for a year and a half, drilling navigational techniques that would let a command module pilot bring the craft home without Mission Control if communications failed. Worden remembered Gordon warmly: "We just went everywhere together. We worked really hard but it was also a lot of fun."

  Scott, Worden, and Irwin were publicly named as the Apollo 15 crew on the 26th of March, 1970. What had been planned as a modest H-mission with two moonwalks was upgraded after two other Apollo missions were cancelled, becoming a J-mission featuring three moonwalks, the first Lunar Roving Vehicle, and an elaborate suite of scientific instruments mounted in the service module. Worden spent much of his training at North American Rockwell's Downey facilities, supervising the construction and testing of Apollo 15's command and service module, and working with geologist Farouk El-Baz, whom he found an "enjoyable and inspiring teacher."

• 5. Alone Above the Moon

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  Apollo 15 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on the 26th of July, 1971. After the spacecraft reached lunar orbit, Scott and Irwin descended in the lunar module Falcon while Worden remained in Endeavour. When a loose umbilical prevented the two craft from separating, Worden crawled into the docking tunnel and fixed it himself. He then watched as his crewmates descended to the surface, unable to spot Falcon until a later orbit even as he passed over the targeted landing site.

  With a separate mission controller and a dedicated CAPCOM of his own, Worden ran a parallel scientific program from lunar orbit. The service module's SIM bay, filling previously unused space, carried a gamma-ray spectrometer on a boom, an X-ray spectrometer, a laser altimeter (which failed partway through), a stellar camera, a metric camera, a panoramic camera derived from the Corona spy satellite program, an alpha particle spectrometer to look for evidence of lunar volcanism, and a mass spectrometer on a second boom. Endeavour's inclined orbit carried it over features that had never been seen in detail before. Each time the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon and re-established contact with Earth, Worden greeted Mission Control with the phrase "Hello, Earth. Greetings from Endeavour," spoken in a different language each orbit. He and El-Baz had devised the idea together and worked out the translations before launch.

  Worden later said he did not need all his rest periods for sleep and spent part of that time in quiet contemplation. Through Endeavour's windows he watched the Moon, Earth, and stars, observing far more stars, and more intensely, than any Earthbound observer. He concluded it was naive to believe Earth held the only life in the universe. The Guinness Book of World Records would eventually list him as the "most isolated human being." At his greatest distance from Scott and Irwin on the lunar surface, he was 2,235 miles from any other person.

  After Falcon lifted off from the Moon, Worden guided Endeavour through a first-orbit rendezvous, only the second time that had been accomplished (after Apollo 14). Endeavour completed 74 lunar orbits before the burn that set the crew on course for Earth. On the return journey, Worden ventured outside three times in a 38-minute spacewalk to retrieve film cassettes from the panoramic and mapping cameras on the spacecraft's exterior. It was the first deep-space EVA in history, and Worden remains the record-holder for the spacewalk performed farthest from Earth. Apollo 15 ended with a Pacific splashdown and recovery by USS Okinawa. Worden had logged 295 hours and 11 minutes in space.

• 6. The Postal Covers Affair

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  Before Apollo 15 departed, the crew made a private arrangement with an acquaintance named Horst Eiermann, acting on behalf of a West German stamp dealer named Hermann Sieger. The deal called for the crew to carry 100 postal covers to the Moon and back in exchange for approximately $7,000 to each astronaut. The crew added 100 more covers for each crew member, and Scott carried them aboard in his spacesuit pocket. After a total discrepancy of two unaccounted covers, 398 in all were flown. They spent three days on the lunar surface inside the lander. After the mission, 100 covers went to Eiermann in West Germany and the astronauts received their payments. The arrangement had never been approved by Slayton, as NASA rules required.

  Worden separately carried 144 covers into space at the request of F. Herrick Herrick, a retired movie director and stamp collector. Those covers had been approved by Slayton, who did not ask where Worden had obtained them. After the flight Worden sent 100 to Herrick, who sold some. The sales triggered an inquiry to NASA. Slayton warned Worden to stop further commercialization, and Worden wrote Herrick an angry letter warning that the sales were putting his career in jeopardy.

  The Sieger covers were put on sale to customers in late 1971 at about $1,500 each. The astronauts eventually returned their payments. In April 1972, Slayton learned the full extent of the unauthorized covers. Worden said what hurt most about that meeting was having disappointed Slayton, a man he greatly admired. The matter became public in June 1972, and on the 10th of July the three astronauts were formally reprimanded for poor judgment. A Senate committee hearing on the 3rd of August drew testimony from the astronauts, Slayton, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher, and Deputy Administrator George Low.

  In May 1972, Slayton had already called Worden while he was preparing for geological training and instructed him to clear out his office. Worden did not, instead finding an ally in Associate Administrator Dale D. Myers, who helped him secure a position at the Ames Research Center in California. He served there as a Senior Aerospace Scientist and later as chief of the Systems Study Division from 1973 to 1975, retiring from NASA and the Air Force with the rank of colonel in 1975. In his first memoir he wrote that he had made "a decision that fucked up my life completely, utterly, and irreversibly," though Thomas P. Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, wrote in an epilogue to that book that Worden's "efforts" should not "be degraded by the decades-old, short-lived publicity surrounding some postal covers carried on board."

• 7. Life After the Astronaut Corps

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  Worden founded Alfred M. Worden, Inc. after leaving NASA, then directed Energy Management Programs at the Northwood Institute in Midland, Michigan. In 1982, he ran for the United States House of Representatives in Florida's 12th congressional district, losing the Republican primary to state senator Tom Lewis. He called that campaign the high point of his life: "I thought that was a very important thing to do. I put everything into it and lost, but that is okay."

  A lawsuit Worden filed in 1983 against the federal government led to the return of 298 postal covers that NASA had transferred to the National Archives in August 1973; Worden had expected them to be returned after the investigation closed. The government, believing it could not win, handed the covers over, and Worden sold some to pay debts from his congressional run. He went on to hold executive positions at Jet Electronics and Technology, Inc. and B.F. Goodrich before retiring from business in 1996.

  In 1984, Worden began working with the Mercury Seven Foundation, which provided scholarships for science students. As the original Mercury astronauts aged, he took on growing responsibilities, and in 2005 he was elected to chair the board of directors of the organization, by then renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, serving until 2011. His 2011 autobiography, Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey to the Moon, reached the top twelve of the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. He also wrote a collection of poetry titled Hello Earth: Greetings from Endeavour in 1974, as well as a children's book that same year.

  In 2018, Worden joined the Back to Space organization as an Astronaut Consultant and served as a technical consultant on the film First Man, the biopic of Neil Armstrong. In 2019, the Astronaut Al Worden Endeavour Scholarship was established to send students and teachers to U.S. Space Camp in Alabama. Alfred Worden died on the 18th of March, 2020, at an assisted living center in Sugar Land, Texas. He was 88 years old. Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, a fellow West Point graduate, sent his farewell with the words, "'Line of Grey, Be Thou at Peace!'"