Our Countdown to Apollo at 50 celebration continues with this special evening.

Alfred Worden was the pilot of the command module Endeavour on the Apollo 15 mission (July 26–Aug. 7, 1971).

Worden graduated in 1955 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and he earned M.S. degrees in astronautical and aeronautical engineering and in instrumentation engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1963. He was a U.S. Air Force pilot and a commercial test pilot before joining the space program in 1966.

During the Apollo 15 mission, he orbited the Moon while commander David Scott and lunar module pilot James Irwin descended to the Moon’s surface. On the return trip, Worden took a space walk—at what was then the record distance from Earth for such activity, about 315,000 km (196,000 miles)—retrieving cassettes containing films of the Moon from the rear of a subsatellite that they had sent into orbit two days previously.

After serving at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., from 1972 to 1975, Worden resigned from the Air Force and the space program to enter private enterprises in Colorado and Florida. He wrote two books in 1974, a book of poetry, Hello Earth—Greetings from Endeavour and a children’s book, I Want to Know About a Flight to the Moon. He also wrote Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut’s Journey to the Moon in 2011.

Tickets are $20 or $15 for Museum Members

(Member tickets not available online, purchase at the door)