NASA’s Al Worden is one of the Apollo programme astronauts who flew to the Moon but never landed on its surface. As the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 15, Mr Worden stayed in lunar orbit while David Scott and James Irwin explored the Moon below. The NASA astronaut served the same critical function pilot Michael Collins did during the first Moon landing in 1969.
Apollo 15 followed the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing after two years, in July 1971.
By this point, NASA’s Apollo astronauts have already performed six flybys and orbits of the Moon.
Mr Worden has, however, confessed the mission was not an entirely smooth ride.
During a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in May 2017, the astronaut revealed how a design feature of the Apollo Command Module “freaked” him out.
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Mr Worden said: “When I fired the engine to circularise, and I forget how many feet per second I had to add, instead of looking at the instrument panel I was suddenly looking out the left window.
“Because when I ignited the engine, that couch because of Newton went like this and now I’m looking out the side window.
“You talk about freaked out. I was really freaked because I could not reach a single control.
“So thank God the computer worked and it stopped at the right time and I was ok.
They can’t do anything to me now
Al Worden, Apollo 15 astronaut
“I never told anyone that, only 45 years later I dare and even try mention that. They can’t do anything to me now.”
According to Mr Worden, the three seats in the Apollo Command Module were mounted on swivelled shock absorbers.
When the astronaut fired the spacecraft’s engines to hit a stable orbit around the Moon, he was turned away from the Command Module’s console.
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He said: “I get them in the Lunar Module, off they go, they go down to land and I’m in the Command Module by myself.
“I’m approaching the apolune at 60 miles in the back where I’ve got to add some velocity to circularise the orbit.
“So I get to the backside of the Moon and I did not think about this but we have three couches in the spacecraft.
“One on the left and the one on the left has a pressure pad that sits against the left wall, and there’s a shock absorber on the right side of that couch.
“Then there’s a centre couch and on the other side of that centre couch, there is another shock absorber attached to the right couch, which has that right pressure pad.
“And so you adjust all that string of material all the way across there and you can kind of get the couches from bouncing back and forth because you put a little pressure on the pressure pads.
“Well, the centre couch was out. The shock absorber is on a swivel.”
After Mr Worden’s exciting mishap in the Command Module, his two colleagues landed on the Moon on July 30, 1971.
Apollo 15 spent more than 18 hours on the surface of the Moon and returned to Earth on August 7.
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