Apollo 14: All or Nothing (Part 2)

L-R: CMP Stuart Roosa, CDR Alan Shepard,
LMP Edgar Mitchell 

What's happening: Alan Shepard has just recovered from Meniere's syndrome, and has been selected as prime commander of Apollo 14.

Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra had brought America back into space after the Apollo 1 fire, and now everyone's space hero, Alan Shepard, was taking America triumphantly back into space in the aftermath of Apollo 13.

Shepard picked two rookie astronauts for his crewmates. He selected Stuart Roosa as his Command Module Pilot, and Edgar Mitchell as his Lunar Module Pilot to land with him on the Moon. 

Neither Roosa or Mitchell had been on a crew before, and were very surprised when Shepard said, "If you two guys don't mind flying with an old guy like me, we're the crew of Apollo 13!" Of course that was before the flight switch. Stuart Roosa couldn't believe his ears. "You mean backup crew?" Roosa questioned. Shepard replied, "I never said anything about backup crew!"

Apollo 14's actual backup crew consisted of Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Joe Engle. What the backup crew did to the prime crew is best explained in Cernan's own book, The Last Man on the Moon, page 256:

"Every flight has a personalized crew patch, and Apollo 14 was no different, except for one thing--we were the first and only backup crew to have a mission patch, too! This loony idea was a "gotcha" on Al, for it depicted a gray-bearded Wile E. "Three Rookies" Coyote coming up from Earth only to find a "First Team"  Roadrunner already standing on the Moon, chirping his famous "Beep-beep!"

Every time we would give him a "beep-beep" jab, Shepard would shoot right back, "Beep beep..." This time...the coyote was going to win."

Let me add a little explanation to this. The Apollo 14 prime crew was nicknamed "Three Rookies" because Roosa and Mitchell had never been into space, and Shepard had only 16 minutes' experience. The backup team, with much more experience, was nicknamed "The First Team". 

But just creating the backup patch wasn't enough for Cernan's mischievous crew. Here's Gene Cernan again, telling more about the patch's adventures on page 269 of his book:

"All the way to the Moon and back, even on the lunar surface, whenever the crew opened a box, bag, or locker, out would float a First Team mission patch. Ron, Joe and I, as the backup crew, had final access to the spacecraft, and while we set the switches and checked the gauges, we also stuffed our Roadrunner patches into every nook and cranny, setting up a future mini-blizzard of "gotchas" for the Three Rookies. Perhaps the most repeated phrase on the private radio loop during the flight of Apollo 14  was Shepard's annoyance when still another patch would suddenly appear. "Tell Cernan," he growled, "Beep-beep." "

As Shepard suited up on January 31, 1971 for launch he was sure that NASA had fixed the problems that plagued Apollo 13. Now there were more, isolated oxygen tanks, and a spare battery that would last them the entire trip if need be. 

Launch of Apollo 14

At 4:03pm Shepard, Roosa, and Mitchell were thrust into the sky by their mammoth Saturn V booster. But once in orbit, and heading to the moon, they encountered a problem: the command module wouldn't latch with the lunar module. If they couldn't latch together, there would be no lunar mission. In the terms of the Apollo 14 crew, they would just do a blah, blah mission. With guidance from Mission Control Roosa tried again and again to dock, but with no joy. The spacecraft would join, but then rebound. Fuel was at a premium, and if Roosa didn't succeed, he wouldn't be able to dock, thus a blah, blah mission. 

Alan Shepard wasn't going to let Apollo down on his watch. Shepard looked over at his Command Module Pilot, and told him to juice it. If these two spacecraft didn't dock, the death knoll would ring not only for their mission, but quite possibly of the entire Apollo program. 

To be continued....

Part 3 of "Apollo 14: All or Nothing" will be posted on February 9, 2011.