Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart
The retired NASA astronaut tells All About Space how a jammed camera during a spacewalk changed his life
If NASA had stuck with its original rosters, the crew of Apollo 9 should have flown on Apollo 8, circling the Moon during Christmas 1968. How did you take the news that you weren’t going to fly to the Moon after so much hard training?
Those were very complicated times, and the mission shifted all over. We were actually the backup crew for the first Apollo missions, including Apollo 7, but we were also going to pick up the Lunar Module and be the first to fly it. Then we were shifted off the backup crew and Wally Schirra’s team took our places for the first Apollo mission, with Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White the appointed first-choice crew. We moved into a totally different mission, but we were going to fly the Lunar Module. Then that didn’t work and Frank Borman proposed moving his flight.
Did you ever have the feeling of having lost the chance of going to the Moon?
Not then, but after we flew on Apollo 9 and tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, the next rotation would have been to go from Apollo 9 to being backup for Apollo 12 and then a member of the prime crew on Apollo 15, which Dave Scott did. But things changed because I had gotten sick on Apollo 9.
I had motion sickness, and as the first person not to get sick, but the first person to acknowledge it – that’s an important difference – there was a big question as to whether people getting sick might actually make going to the Moon unsafe and dangerous for people. We had to learn something about that, and I volunteered to be the guinea pig to test motion sickness so that we came to understand what was going on there and how we could overcome it and so on… so that took me out of the normal rotation. That’s the way that happened.
You lifted off as the pilot of the Lunar Module with the first complete Apollo spacecraft on 3 March 1969. What moments or lessons would you point out from that experience?
