James Irwin

• 1. Introduction

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  James Benson Irwin told his mother, when he was about 12 years old, that he wanted to go to the Moon and might be the first person to do so. He was wrong about the first part. On the 30th of July 1971, Irwin became the eighth human being to walk on the lunar surface, a passenger and then a fellow explorer on a mission that would produce one of the most celebrated geological finds of the entire Apollo program. But what happened to Irwin after he came home is, in many ways, the stranger story. A man who by his own admission was not a committed Christian when he launched into space returned as a born-again believer who would spend the next two decades searching for Noah's Ark on a mountain in Turkey. He was also, quietly, the first of the twelve moonwalkers to die. The questions that follow are about how a test pilot who nearly lost a leg in a training crash became an astronaut, what he and his crewmates actually found on the Moon, and why coming back from it changed everything about the life he led afterward.

• 2. From Pittsburgh to the Moon

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  Irwin was born on the 17th of March 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of James William Irwin, a U.S. Army veteran of World War I, and Elsa Mathilda Irwin. His paternal grandparents had emigrated from Altmore Parish in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, Ireland, around 1859. By 1941, the family was living at 6006 Grand Boulevard in New Port Richey, Florida, where Irwin attended Pierce Elementary School. His aptitude was advanced enough that he was simultaneously enrolled in seventh grade classes at Gulf High School while still in sixth grade, a fact recorded in the 1942 Gulf High School yearbook. He graduated from East High School in Salt Lake City in 1947, then earned a Bachelor of Science in naval science from the United States Naval Academy in 1951. He followed that with two Master of Science degrees, in aeronautical engineering and instrumentation engineering, from the University of Michigan in 1957. His flight training took him from Hondo Air Base to Reese Air Force Base near Lubbock, Texas. He graduated from the Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School, Class 60C, in 1961, and from the Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1963. He also tested the Lockheed YF-12, the Mach 3 fighter-interceptor variant that preceded the SR-71 Blackbird. His first flight in that aircraft happened on the same day one of his five children was born. Before NASA ever called, Irwin had already accumulated more than 7,015 hours of flying time, of which 5,300 were in jet aircraft.

• 3. A Crash, a Leg, a Second Chance

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  In 1961, a student pilot Irwin was training crashed the aircraft during a training mission. Both men survived, but Irwin came out of it with compound fractures, amnesia, and a leg that was very nearly amputated. An Air Force orthopedic surgeon named John Forrest intervened and saved the limb. That Irwin was walking at all by the time NASA selected him, in April 1966, as one of nineteen new astronauts is partly a credit to Forrest's work. Before the Moon became a possibility, Irwin served as commander for LTA-8, an environmental qualification test of the Apollo Lunar Module in a vacuum chamber at the Houston Space Environment Simulation Laboratory. He was then placed on the astronaut support crew for Apollo 10, which was the first mission to carry the full Apollo stack to the Moon and served as the rehearsal for the first crewed landing. After that, he became backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 12, the second Moon landing. Each assignment moved him one step closer to a seat of his own, and NASA gave him one on Apollo 15.

• 4. Hadley, the Rover, and the Genesis Rock

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  Apollo 15 launched on the 26th of July 1971 and set down in the Moon's Hadley-Apennine region, an area chosen for its mountains and rilles. Irwin and Commander David R. Scott would spend just under three days on the surface, 66 hours and 54 minutes, significantly longer than earlier missions allowed. As a J-Mission, Apollo 15 was built around science, and Irwin and Scott underwent intensive geological training to meet its demands. Irwin was the first passenger on a Moon automobile, riding along as Scott drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which had been carried inside the lunar module Falcon's Descent Stage. Irwin's own time outside on the surface came to 18 hours and 35 minutes of extravehicular activity across three separate moonwalks. That geological training paid off when the pair found what became known as the Genesis Rock, considered one of the most important discoveries of the Apollo era. By the time they had completed the final moonwalk, rendezvoused with the command and service module Endeavour, and begun transferring rock samples, Irwin and Scott had gone 23 hours without sleep. It was in that window of exhaustion that something went wrong with Irwin's heart. Flight surgeons monitoring his vital signs from Earth detected irregular rhythms. His heart had developed bigeminy. Flight surgeon Charles Berry told Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at the time, that if Irwin had been on Earth, he would have been placed in an intensive care unit and treated for a heart attack. Berry's conclusion was that Irwin was, in effect, already in ideal conditions: 100% oxygen, continuous monitoring, and the reduced cardiac strain of zero gravity. Irwin rested during the return journey, and by splashdown his heart rhythm had returned to normal. The condition was never discussed during the mission debriefing sessions.

• 5. Stamps, Reprimands, and a Colonel's Exit

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  After Apollo 15 returned to Earth, an investigation revealed that the crew had carried 398 commemorative first day covers to the Moon without authorization. One hundred of those covers were sold to a German stamp dealer. The plan had been to use the proceeds to set up trust funds for the crew's children. NASA had overlooked similar arrangements on earlier flights, but this time the agency reprimanded all three astronauts, and none of them ever received any money from the sales. The covers still in the crew's possession were surrendered during subsequent investigations by NASA, the Attorney General, and Congress; they were returned to the astronauts in 1983. Slate magazine later opined that the return effectively exonerated them. Irwin had already announced his intention to retire from the Air Force and leave NASA before the reprimand came. He followed through, retiring as a colonel in 1972.

• 6. High Flight and Mount Ararat

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  Irwin founded the High Flight Foundation after leaving NASA, and spent roughly the next two decades describing himself as a "Goodwill Ambassador for the Prince of Peace." He stated that "Jesus walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon." His wife Mary Ellen corroborated his account that his Christian rebirth, which he said occurred while he was in space, transformed their marriage and their lives. He had by his own account been raised in a Christian household, stopped practicing the faith at age 10, and had not been a committed believer during his NASA years. Beginning in 1973, Irwin led multiple expeditions to Mount Ararat in Turkey, searching for physical remains of Noah's Ark. In 1982, one of those climbs ended with Irwin being injured during the descent and carried down the mountain on horseback. He recorded his view that the Genesis creation narrative was literal history in a book titled More Than Earthlings, published in 1983.

• 7. A Heart That Gave Out

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  Irwin suffered three major heart attacks after returning from space. The first came less than two years after Apollo 15, when he was 43 years old and playing handball. He underwent an emergency triple bypass operation. Two months after that surgery, he had another heart attack while skiing in Colorado. On the 6th of June 1986, he collapsed during a run and was found pulseless on a curb. NASA physicians doubted these events were caused by space travel. Pre-flight testing had already indicated a tendency toward cardiac arrhythmias during strenuous exercise, suggesting the vulnerability predated his mission. On the 8th of August 1991, twenty years and one day after his return from the Moon, Irwin suffered a final heart attack following a bicycle ride. Resuscitation attempts failed and he died that day. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the twelve men who walked on the Moon, Irwin was the first to die. A patch he had cut from a backpack left on the lunar surface during Apollo 15 was auctioned at Christie's in 2001 for $310,500, part of a consignment from his estate that brought in a combined $500,000.