The man from the moon: Part one

The fact we’re talking at all is thanks to one Angus Fitton, an old friend and colleague who now looks after public affairs for Porsche in the US. It was Fitton who, while reading about Duke’s exploits in the Lunar Rover, realised that among Duke’s many unique distinctions is being a man who’d driven an electric car on the moon, but not on the earth. So he fixed that and if you go on YouTube and type in his name and ‘Porsche’ you can see the resulting film of Charlie driving and being astonished by a Taycan Turbo S.

On Wikipedia, Charlie Duke’s occupations are listed as: fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut. You could spend the rest of your days trying to imagine a cooler CV than that, and you would fail. Fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut. The young boy within me still goggles at that. But as we talk about his life up until the moment he got the gig that would change his life and become Apollo 16’s Lunar Module Commander, his responses are uniformly modest, his greatest concern appearing to be that I do not give him one mote more credit than he himself believes he deserves.

Charlie didn’t always want to fly. Indeed that seed was not even being sown until he was a teenager in the early 1950s and started to see contrails from early military jets in the sky and thought he’d like to make contrails too. And even when in 1957 the Sputnik 1 satellite became the first man-made thing to break free of our atmosphere and make it to space, he had no thoughts of becoming an astronaut, even though he’d flown an aircraft by himself for the first time that very day. ‘I’d just soloed actually – I was in flight school and it was the day after my [22nd] birthday. This thing went up on the fourth of October. I was really shocked. Back then our rockets would just go 5,4,3,2,1 blow up. I thought “golly, how do they do that?”.’

By then Charlie was in the Naval Academy  (‘that’s where I really fell in love with aeroplanes, not ships…’) and, perhaps not too surprisingly, graduated sufficiently well to be able to choose what to do next. Which was to put himself on the front line of the fast-freezing Cold War. Based at the Ramstein air base in West Germany he spent the next three years throwing his F-86 Sabre at anything that came across the East German Czechoslovak border. He flew largely in filthy weather, using radar intercepts against an unseen and deadly foe. ‘It was a fun job. I enjoyed it.’

So perhaps now we have some measure of the man.

On his return he attended MIT to study for a Masters in aeronautics and astronautics but still with no real thoughts of ‘going up’. He always thought that on leaving he’d end up ‘in some lab somewhere’. But MIT had been awarded the contract to develop the guidance and navigation systems for the still very much fledgling Apollo programme and Charlie was assigned to do a statistical study of the work being done.

‘And there I met some astronauts. They were very enthusiastic about their job and the programme. And so I asked how I could get that job? And they said, “first, you got to get your degree, then go and apply for test pilot school.” I knew I wanted to get back in the cockpit and fly, so I volunteered for Test Pilot School and was selected.’ In the summer of 1964, complete with his Masters in the bag and his bride on his arm, he and Dotty moved to Edwards Air Force Base as Charlie joined the most elite team doing the most dangerous job in the United States Air Force. His boss was one Colonel Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager, who I’m presuming needs no further introduction here.

‘He could be pretty firm, but I enjoyed working for him. He was a nice guy to work with and became a close friend. And as we got older we progressed up the ranks, we both ended up as Brigadier General. And he loved to hunt like I did. So we’d hunt together. We’d see each other a couple of times a year towards the end, and then he passed away.’

I find it interesting because Yeager’s reputation beyond being the bravest and best test pilot of them all, was that he was arrogant, self-opinionated and often rude. But I expect if you were one of his flock and actually understood what the work involved, you’d have seen a very different side of him.

And in his own, understated way, Duke is keen to set the record straight about being a test pilot too. ‘Test piloting is not throwing your scarf out of the window. It’s very precise. Plus or minus five knots, plus or minus twenty feet. Get your data point.’

Not that there wasn’t room for fun. He flew innumerable aircraft, one of which was the Lockheed F-104, known to all as the Starfighter. It looked like a missile with vestigial wings and to this day for me ties with the SR-71 Blackbird as the most exciting looking aircraft ever produced. And the most terrifying.

‘They were fun!’ says Duke. ‘The flights that were the most fun in the 104 were zoom manoeuvres. We’d fly at 35,000 feet with full afterburner and no drop tanks. It would accelerate to almost Mach 2, then you pulled up to 45 degrees and just let it go. You could get it up to 100,000 feet. You had to be careful with the rudder and ailerons at that altitude because the gyroscopic effect of the engine rotating wanted to pull the nose off. But you’d come over the top and back down, the runway was off to the left of the lake bed and you’d simulate a flame out landing. Generally the engine would restart about 25,000 feet; you rarely had to land it dead stick…’ As in without an engine. It really doesn’t bear thinking about.

His transition from there to the Apollo space programme came from nothing more exotic than a newspaper advertisement in the Los Angeles Times spotted in 1965: NASA was looking for what by then would be its fifth intake of astronauts (after those that crewed the original Mercury and at the time ongoing Gemini programmes). Charlie had graduated second in a class of 12 that included future Apollo astronauts Stuart Roosa and Al Worden, and taken a job with Yeager but applied nonetheless. Out of many thousands of entries, NASA whittled the list down to 44 ‘finalists’ of whom 19 were chosen to join the space programme on April 4th 1966, Charlie Duke among them.

Even once he’d been selected, ‘it was never a given you were gonna fly in space. You were selected as an astronaut, but had no guarantee that you’re going to ever get a space flight. Two of the guys in our group of 19 waited. Their first flight was 1985. So they waited basically 19 years till they got their flight. And it was in a space shuttle.’

With even the first Apollo mission still some months from lift off, Duke and Roosa were assigned to work on the lunar module propulsion system and also monitor the progress of the Saturn V launch vehicle designed to take the astronauts from earth to space, a rocket so powerful its acceleration had to be capped at 4g for the sake of the astronauts sitting on top of it.

There he attended monthly meetings held by Wernher von Braun, the man who was instrumental in designing and engineering the V2 rocket for the Nazi regime, the world’s first viable long range ballistic missile of which over 3000 were launched in the latter months of the war, primarily against targets in the UK, Belgium and France. If there was ever any ill-feeling towards von Braun as a result of this work, Duke harbours none today.

‘He enjoyed having us there and he was proud of the work, especially the Saturn V which was the most amazing rocket. It never had a failure. I found him very congenial and enjoyed going to his meetings; we’d have lunch together occasionally while we were up there, and I found him very knowledgeable, competent, yet humble and friendly.’

The first mission to which Duke was assigned was as support crew for Apollo 10, the full dress rehearsal for the moon landing, in which three astronauts would travel to the moon, go into lunar orbit and do everything save set down on its surface. Each mission had three crews: the main crew, a back up and the support.

‘We were the third level. We never had a chance to fly. You’re the gopher really, check on this change, sit in that briefing. It was an interesting job, but I don’t remember having a spacesuit fitted for me back then.’

Instead when Apollo 10 started its mission, he found himself in the role of CAPCOM, the link between the astronauts and mission control and in all normal circumstances the only person allowed to communicate with the crew. He did the job well and that, combined with his knowledge of the lunar module, meant he was invited to perform the same role for Apollo 11, the actual moon landing. This was not normal practice as the job was usually rotated around the prospective astronauts, and it was only when Neil Armstrong and the legendary Gene Krantz (as played by Ed Harris in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film) insisted that Charlie was brought back for what would be the most important space flight there’d ever be.

So I reminded him of his words after the Eagle had touched down, the first ever spoken to a man on the moon.

‘It was more tension than nerves if you can separate the two,’ he said, describing Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s final descent to the lunar surface. ‘We were having all these problems. It started out as a communications problem, then we had a computer problem, then we had a trajectory problem which led to a fuel problem, because Neil couldn’t land where we had targeted him to. So he had to level off and fly horizontally across the moon for a while. And that used up basically all our reserve fuel.

‘So now we’re minimum fuel. You can imagine the tension. And it was, “are we gonna make it, are we gonna make it, are we gonna make it?” At least that’s what I’m thinking in my mind. I looked at the fuel levels on my monitor, descent, the height and I knew it was going to be really, really close. So we had two calls when the fuel got to a certain percentage. The first called “60 seconds”,  then after that, the countdown called “30 seconds.” The next call after was going to be “abort”.

‘But we landed with about 17 seconds left. And I’m convinced that if we’d called an abort, Armstrong was not going to abort 20 feet off the moon. He had the final say. If he’d been 3000 feet up you don’t have a chance, so you abort. But 20 to 30 feet off the moon? “Hey, I got a chance to do this. And we got four per cent fuel remaining. And let’s just have a go.” So anyway, we didn’t have to get to that dilemma. We landed with 17 seconds to the abort call…’

Charlie next found himself on the back up crew for Apollo 13. If for any reason the main crew couldn’t go, they would. And those who remember the film will recall that Ken Mattingly was indeed unable to go because he’d been exposed to someone who had German Measles and, as he’d not had it as a child, he was taken off the team and replaced by Jack Swigert.

What you may not know is that the man with the Measles was Charlie Duke, who then played a critical role in bringing Swigert, Fred Haise and Jim Lovell back home. Sadly Charlie’s role in saving the crew was completely airbrushed out of the film, with Mattingly credited as the man who laboured day and night in the simulator to find a solution that might return the boys and their crippled spacecraft to earth. Which, in real life, he absolutely did. But he was not alone.

‘It was like 10 o’clock at night and [fellow back up astronaut] John Young called saying “hey, they got a problem. We gotta go.” So John and I showed up at Mission Control with Mattingly and if I remember right, we were there for the next 35 hours. John and I were in the lunar module simulator, figuring out how to get them back on a free return trajectory, and how to power up the lunar module in what sequence. And Mattingly was in the other simulator, figuring out in what order to power down the command module. It was never made to be powered down in flight, so that was some big decision.’

I then asked one of those questions that seems disloyal just forming in your mouth. But after all the tales, books and feature films, I just wanted to know, first hand from someone who was there in Mission Control at the time: just how bad it was? So I asked:

‘Was there ever a time when you thought they might not be coming back?’

‘There was, yes, I think for the first 20 hours after the accident, until we whipped around the moon and began to get smarter about how to manage the systems, the electrical power, the oxygen, the water, the consumables we had on board. The battery power was not infinite, so we had to manage it and turn off everything.’

But the problem of having three people in a lunar module built for two, in particular filtering the carbon dioxide they were exhaling, remained.

‘They captured it pretty well in the movie, how we use the command module filter to filter the carbon dioxide out of the lunar module. But the Lunar Module [attachment] was round and the command module’s was square. But the Mission Control guys built up a contraption, and it was at about that time my attitude changed from we’re not gonna make it because we’re using up all this stuff. We got smarter and smarter and smarter. And so now it looks like instead of running out 10 hours before re-entry it’s 10 hours after. So we began to relax. And after that my attitude was that if Mission Control doesn’t make a mistake and the crew doesn’t make a mistake, we got enough stuff, we’re gonna make it. So I was pretty comfortable over the last 30 hours I guess.’

Apollo 13 splashed down safely on April 17th 1970, two years minus one day before Charlie’s date with celestial destiny. But he very, very nearly didn’t make it into space at all. Three months before Apollo 16 was due to blast off, Charlie was in hospital with double pneumonia and facing two problems: recovering his health in time, and completing the training required prior to launch.

In part two, he’ll tell us what happened next, about his journey to the moon, what it felt like when he got there and roaming around the lunar surface in a car like no other on Earth. Literally.

Read part two