◆ SpookStack

The spritely crew of We Jus PETE CONRAD: ‘|| couldn't see our landing area at all from 100 feet on down. It was just one big gray blanket of dust’ We went whistling down to that moon right on the numbers. | usually get pretty excited, but | was a6 cool as I've ever heen Looking back on it | guess | did laugh and hum and hi-dee-dee a bit, but | wasn't aware of it at the time. Al Bean said he thought I'd lost my mind for a while there, but he knew | was just having a ball Every astronaut who makes a f ooks at it as the culmination of a long, long ef rt, but fly- ing Intrepid that day had a spec me: that funny-looking “bug,” the f meaning for true space vehicle, ts partly my baby. One of my first jobs when | came into the space program seven years ago was working on the displays and control sys tems for the LM. | was in on a lot of design de- cisions: to take out the original seats and fly it standing up: to build an overhead window to sight through at docking. to replace a circular hatch with a bigger, rectangular one. We never would have gotten out of that thing on the lunar surface, wearing the backpack, if we had had that original circular door Everything went so well before launch that | was beginning to get worried. 'm superstitious figured we needed a glitch somewhere just to rattle everybody's cage. Well. two days before the flight Al and | were polishing off a lunar land ing prac e in the simulator w hen Deke Slayton poked his head in the door with a lon face and told us about a hydrogen leak in the service mod- ule. Deke looked worried; Al dicr ay a thing. which means he was worried, | 1s the only guy with a smile on my face Here was our glitch, and | thought it sounded like someth ng Before lightning struck tt, the first manned rocket ever launched in the rain takes off from Cape Kennedy. Unusual effects are due to droplets on camera lens.