RS: If you had an opportunity to fly into space again,
what crew, mission and vehicle would you prefer?
WORDEN: “I would want a different spacecraft, I would
love to go to Mars. It’s a year and half trip. I would take
guys like Paul Weitz and Jim Irwin (if he was still alive). I’d
pick a crew like that - all of us old guys. I think the Mars
trip is the trip for old guys. We have better far vision, but
most importantly, we can sit still for days at a time! We’ve
got patience. If they provided me with a television set I’d
just sit there and watch it! I don’t get the heebie-jeebies
to move around and do things like a young guy would.
So, we’d be much more adaptable for going to Mars
than a young guy!”
RS: What if it was a one way trip?
WORDEN: “Who cares! I’m 82 years old! Who cares! I’m
going to go sometime anyway. Might as well go doing
something useful!”
RS: What is your favorite ... word?
WORDEN: “Honor.”
RS: Color?
WORDEN: “Blue.”
RS: Book?
WORDEN: “My own.”
RS: Movie?
WORDEN: “2001: A Space Odyssey. It really sparked my
curiosity. It really makes you think about what we are and
it was very inspirational to me - a real eye opener. They
had a lot of things right!”
RS: Animal?
WORDEN: “Dog.”
RS: Song?
WORDEN: “Anything that The Beatles wrote. I was there in
‘64 when they were just hitting it big!”
RS: What did you think of the movie Gravity?
WORDEN: “I thought it was crappy. The special effects
were amazing but the technical side of the movie was
absolutely horrible. They got NOTHING right! You do not
maneuver around in orbit from one space station to another using a fire extinguisher! That just cannot happen!
And the meteor shower - those clip the edge of the atmosphere and keep going, they do not enter Earth orbit!
They had everything wrong! And I did not like the role
Sandra Bullock played! All she did was cry and scream
the whole damned movie. The special effects were just
fabulous, though!”
RS: What was your spacewalk like?
WORDEN: “I was 50,000 miles this side of the Moon and
200,000 miles from Earth. We went to the moon, stayed in
20
20
Still frame from a video of Worden during his EVA to retrieve film from cameras in
the SIM bay of the Command Module. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
orbit, came back and did it on the way. The cool thing
about it was, I could see both Earth and the Moon at the
same time.”
RS: You orbited the Moon by yourself - what were you
thinking about while you were alone in the spacecraft?
WORDEN: “Orbiting the Moon by myself was absolutely
the best time of the flight. I got rid of two guys after being with them for about three and a half days; they were
getting on my nerves (laughter). I was trained to fly an
airplane by myself and I’ve always been a loner in an airplane. So, I was very happy being by myself. I got to the
back side of the Moon, away from Earth, I didn’t have to
talk to Houston, I was in my glory! “
RS: So, did you draw the short straw or the long straw
when it came to staying in the module or going down to
the Moon’s surface?
WORDEN: “Oh, I definitely got the long straw!
“What people remember as important is all due to the
media. They have romanticized the guys that walked
on the Moon. Do you know what they did down on the
Moon? What those guys’ primary job was? They picked
up rocks and dirt. Now myself, in lunar orbit, I did probably a thousand times more science than they did, because I had all these remote sensors and big cameras
and all kinds of things I was running the whole six days I
was there. Dave and Jim picked up 170 pounds of rocks,
huh? Big deal! (laughter)
“But I have to tell you that people focused on lunar
walkers as some mystical thing. Jim Irwin even tried to
put together an organization likening it to the last supper, where there were twelve astronauts that walked on
the Moon. And he didn’t include the Command Module
Pilots. But what’s curious about that is, 12 guys walked on
the Moon, but only six guys went around it. The media
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