Worden suits up in preparation for a pressure chamber test on April 5, 1971 as part of his training for the Apollo 15 mission. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
“When I graduated from West Point in 1955, I elected
to go in the Air Force - flying was a very exciting thing
- even though I had no experience at all. When I went
into flight training, I found that I had kind of a knack
for it. When I graduated from pilot training, I went into
Air Defense Command. When I was in that squadron
in Washington, I got involved with the maintenance in
the hangar and eventually took it over for the squadron commander. Air Defense Command wanted me to
come up and walk around to all the squadrons in the
country and teach them how to do that (maintenance
in the hangar), too. I decided that if I’m going to do staff
work like that, my best bet was to try to get back to college. If I was going to sit at a desk, I was going to do it for
something that was good for me.
“So I got orders to go back to the University of Michigan. I spent two and half years there getting three
master’s degrees, and when I graduated from there, I
applied for and got selected for test pilot school. I went
to England to Empire Test Pilot School and graduated
from there in 1964. The U.S. Test Pilot School was visiting
just before I graduated, and they told me they needed
me back at Edward’s Air Force Base, so they got my orders changed to go there.
“I had been at Edward’s for a year when I saw that
NASA had a request for applicants.
“At that point, I had all the squares filled. I had everything they needed, which was a little bit unusual back in
those days. So I applied and got into the program. You
had to have a certain amount of flying, you had to be
academically qualified, you had to have very, very good
efficiency reports leading up to that point. You had to be
under 6’ tall, under 35 years of age, pass a physical, all
those things - and I could do all of them.
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