I could see the Moon’s curvature very plainly. You look at the Moon and there’s nothing there except craters and ancient lava flows and that kind of thing, and then you look at the Earth and it’s very dynamic, it’s got cloud cover and oceans and life. The difference between the two is pretty dramatic.

Jim Irwin was standing in the hatch at the time watching me and making sure that everything was OK. The Moon was behind him. In fact, there’s a painting at the Smithsonian that Pierre Mion did of my EVA, since I wasn’t allowed to take a camera out. It shows Jim Irwin standing in the hatch with the Moon behind him and as I was reflected in his visor.

Avi: Even if you had a camera would you have been able to capture the Earth and the Moon together?

Al: No, I couldn’t do that because they were too far apart for that but that really wasn’t the purpose. I wanted to take a camera out to photograph the outside of the Service Module and I found some things where photographs would have been helpful. There was some scorching from the reaction control system jets. The mapping camera had stuck out and wouldn’t retract. Pictures of all of that stuff would have been useful for the engineers back in Houston.

Avi: So is this what inspired you to write a book of poetry?

Al: You know what happened? When we got back from the flight we went into two weeks of debriefing. We were pretty exhausted from the flight and we spent all day long from early morning to the evening debriefing. When I’d get home I’d just be totally exhausted and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I’d sit in my living room with a pad of paper and a pencil and just start writing things and when I looked at it later it was just kind of like poetry so I rearranged it a little bit and the poetry came out. Poetry is kind of a shorthand for the feelings and the thought processes that you’re going through and that’s kind of what came out on the paper so that’s what ended up as the book of poetry.

Avi: It’s really a very personal piece of work. You talk there about “rebirth at thirty-nine”.

Al: Yes. That was on the EVA. I had the thought that it’s just like being born because you’re getting out of the spacecraft out into the world on your own. I was reborn at thirty-nine because that EVA did that for me. I had that feeling of rebirth going outside. A whole new perspective on everything.

Avi: One of your poems ends with “God made it all”.

Al: Well, that’s the kind of feeling you get. And that really doesn’t answer the question of what you think God is. But when you look at the universe out there and you see all those billions of stars and you see they’re all arranged in galaxies, and the galaxies break down into stars and some of those stars even further break down into planetary systems, you say to yourself— man, there is an organization to this universe that we just can’t comprehend.

There had to be something, somewhere, somehow that made this all happen. In my mind it just didn’t spring out of nothing. How better do you describe it? You have to say that there’s some other force, some other power, whether you call it God or whatever you want to name it. Something somewhere had to work to put all this together in the consistency of what we see of the universe.

Avi: That’s probably why many of the Apollo astronauts had a more religious or spiritual turn in their lives after they returned from the Moon?

Al: I suspect so. It’s interesting what happened to the guys once they made their flight. Some guys like Pete Conrad said “that’s just another flight”. Several of the guys when they came back became quite religious. I think being away from Earth that far and looking back at Earth had a big influence on them. Because we live in the only planet we know of that’s habitable and something had to make that happen.

Jim Irwin said he felt the presence of God on the Moon. Jim founded the High Flight foundation and he went all over the world giving testimony for Christian fellowship organizations after the flight. Other guys like Ed Mitchell got into psychic phenomena because of the flight. He was already interested in it but he focused his attention on it after the flight.

Avi: Who is Dee O’Hara?

Al: Dee O’Hara is one of God’s chosen people, let me tell you. I wrote a poem about her. She is my dear friend, has been for 45 years, and we e-mail back and forth all the time.

Dee was the NASA astronaut flight nurse throughout the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs. If you had something wrong with you, you went to her first. Because if you went to a flight surgeon, he always had the capability of grounding you as a pilot. She was very good to the guys. You could trust her and confide in her. She was so close to all the guys, she was like a third arm for all of us.

After my Moon flight I moved out to work at Ames Research Center in California. I found out that Dee was unhappy in Houston, so I arranged for her to come out for an interview, and she got a position there. They had a research program that was perfect for her. They were doing bed rest studies, the idea being that if you put somebody in a bed, and they have to lie horizontally for two weeks, the same kind of things happen to them that would happen in a space flight of the same duration, like loss of bone density and cardiovascular changes. They found some parallels between bed rest study and actual in-flight stuff. That was the beginning of a human physiology program, where we’re trying to figure out how to keep people healthy and alive in long-term space flight. It all started with those bed rest studies, and Dee was the one that took care of that.

Avi: Can you tell us a bit about Farouk El-Baz?

Al: Farouk was the lunar geology instructor for all the Apollo missions. He’s a phenomenal guy and still a good friend. I just got an e-mail from him day before yesterday. He’s now a curator of space artifacts at Boston College. Farouk was the one who came up with the name for our spacecraft. We’d gone through lots and lots of names, and none of them were any good. Farouk came across a children’s book on exploration, and when he showed us the name “Endeavour”, we all said right away, “That’s what it’s got to be.” It was a no-brainer once we saw it, since “Endeavour” was the flagship of Captain Cook’s voyage of scientific exploration to the South Pacific in 1779.

Avi: How did Farouk teach you lunar orbital geology?

Al: Farouk would lay out a map of the Moon with our trajectory on it. And we would pick out all the features, the craters, the lava flows and meteor impacts along the trajectory. And we would go over them hour after hour until I could describe them from a map view so that when I flew over them for real, I could do an intelligent analysis of what was there.

Avi: Why did you contact Fred Rogers before your flight?

Al: I became aware that children under 16 were not allowed to come to the Cape to see a launch. It was only for adults. I didn’t think that was right, because I thought a launch and the whole space program was really more for kids than it was for adults. So I called Sesame Street but we couldn’t make it work.

Then I called Fred, and he was absolutely delighted. In one phone call, he had the whole thing arranged. I never knew him before, but I liked the way we talked on the phone. He came down the weekend before I went into quarantine, and we did a whole special show just on the pre-launch stuff. And then I did ten more shows with him back in Pittsburgh after I returned from the Moon.

Avi: Which is how the Pope recognized you on your visit to the Vatican!

Al: Yes, that was Pope Paul VI. He was a little short guy. I had to look down at him. He was a warm, friendly and a very nice man. I think he did see the show, because he looked at me and said, “I think I know you.” And I said, “The Pope knows me? I’m an Episcopalian. How could you know me?” He never did tell me. But I figured out later from something that some of the people around him had said, that he had, by chance, watched one of the Fred Rogers shows that I had done!

Avi: On the way back from the Moon, you had an interesting technique to navigate to Earth…

Al: I did all the navigation on the way back home, using a sextant. You get your correct attitude by doing star sightings, you get two stars, and you force them together, and then the computer calculates the angle. Anyway, then you have to do an Earth, horizon and star sighting to find your place in the Earth-Moon system, and the angle is critical to that. Well, the problem is that the atmosphere is 50 miles thick. So, if you just do a sighting on the whole atmosphere, you could be off by 50 miles, which could probably kill you when you come back.

So, what I had to do was find a color band in the horizon, in the atmosphere. See, the atmosphere is a rainbow, just like you see on a rainy day. And I found that the one I could pick quickly and easily was the blue band.

So, I used the blue band as the Earth’s horizon, and then I’d pick a star and calculate that angle and do three or four of those sightings. The computer, then, would calculate where I was in the Earth Moon system, how far away from Earth I was.

Avi: Did you ever get emotional when you looked through the sextant at the atmosphere?

Al: No Avi, I was too damn busy. There’s no place for emotion up there. You get that after you come back.

Avi: Do you still have the same intensity of feeling when you remember your Apollo experiences now?

Al: You remember what it was, but the sharp edges of the remembrances get filed off after a while. Not quite the same intensity. In fact I look at the Moon at night and I say — hmm, that’s kind of neat because I’ve seen it up close. I’ll tell you what it’s a little like. Through all the training and all the simulation you get so immersed in the project that you don’t really look at anything else for the time you’re in training. It’s just so all consuming. And when you come back you go through two weeks of debriefing and then you’re let out into the world.

It’s a little like going to a movie, and you get immersed in the movie and then when the movie’s over you walk out on the street, cars are going by, people are walking and talking and doing their thing. And you’re back in the real world again. And you say Gee, that was kind of an interesting little episode in my life, I watched that movie and got totally involved in it but here I am back in the real world. It’s kind of like that after you make a lunar flight.