Astronaut who did the first ‘deep-space’ walk but was censured for profiteering Al Worden

Out of radio contact as he orbited the far side of the Moon, Al Worden was 2000 miles away from his fellow crew members on the lunar surface and 250,000 miles distant from Earth. He was, he later reflected, ‘‘the most isolated human in existence’’.

Not that he minded the solitude, or felt too downcast that he was stuck in the command module while David Scott and Jim Irwin became the seventh and eighth people to walk on the Moon. A pilot who loved machinery, Worden, who has died aged 88, spent three days alone orbiting the Moon, operating an array of sensors and instruments and gathering data.

He took more than 1500 photos, sometimes working while using a cassette recorder to listen to Simon and

Garfunkel, the Beatles, and, inevitably, the Frank Sinatra standard, Fly Me to the Moon.

‘‘The Moon looked ancient, battered, pockmarked – and dead. I didn’t feel a sense of foreboding, but of lifelessness,’’ he wrote in his 2011 autobiography, Falling to Earth, cowritten with Francis French. Despite being as few as 11 miles from the Moon, Worden felt he developed a more profound understanding of our home planet, its blues, browns and greens shining vividly.

‘‘I could see that Earth was truly finite. That distant ball could only support so many people and contain so many resources. Once it is gone, it’s gone. If humans didn’t unite and organise their lives, I pondered, we’d be in trouble,’’ he wrote, adding that he ‘‘decided it was naive to believe we were the only life’’ in the universe.

He performed the first deep-space spacewalk, venturing outside the craft for 38 minutes to inspect its exterior and retrieve film cassettes from cameras. ‘‘This wasn’t deep, dark water, or night sky, or any other wide open space that I could comprehend. The blackness defied understanding, because it stretched away from me for billions of miles,’’ he wrote.

After the Apollo 15 crew landed in the north Pacific on August 7, 1971, concluding the 12-day mission, Worden struggled to return to normal life. One morning he stepped outside his front door to pick up the newspaper, saw the Moon and found it hard to comprehend that he had been there only a couple of days earlier. He tried to process the experience by writing poetry.

The astronauts dined with President Nixon at the White House and were feted on an international tour. At an event in Poland they discovered that the room had been bugged by the Communist regime and they were trailed by the secret police.

Worse was to follow.

To capitalise on a trend for stamped commemorative envelopes, Scott, Irwin and Worden took hundreds of them into space without authorisation from Nasa. Each was set to receive US$7000 (today about US$45,000) from a private arrangement. When it emerged that some of the covers were being sold for large sums by a German stamp dealer, the scheme became a national scandal.

The trio turned down the money, which they had planned to give to their children. It was common for astronauts to supplement their meagre salaries in various ways, not all of them irreproachable. However, faced with a public relations storm that made astronauts look like profiteers rather than heroes, the trio were reprimanded by Nasa for showing ‘‘poor judgment’’ and forced to explain themselves before a Senate committee in Washington. None flew in space again.

Alfred Merrill Worden was born in 1932 in Jackson, Michigan, one of six children. His father, Merrill, owned a repair shop, and his mother, Helen, had worked as a secretary. Young Al often worked 10-hour days on the family farm and drove to school from the age of 14.

He entered the gruelling US Military Academy in West Point, New York, in 1951. Once, after an officer spotted him holding hands with a girl, he was punished for violating a rule against public displays of affection by being forced to march in uniform nonstop for eight hours. Through a friend he met Pamela Vander Beek. They married in

1955 and divorced in 1969. He is survived by their two daughters, Merrill and Alison.

Worden joined the US Air Force and did graduate work at the University of Michigan. In 1964 he was sent to the Empire Test Pilots’ School, then in Farnborough, Hampshire, through a Royal Air Force exchange programme. He was popular with British colleagues, not least because he was able to buy discounted alcohol from the US Air Force shop, and partook in the local pilots’ custom of having a pint of beer with a lunch of Dover sole and brandy-soaked trifle before gulping down a strong cup of tea and heading for an afternoon flight.

He applied to become an astronaut and was selected by Nasa in 1966 after a barrage of mental and physical tests. There he was alarmed by what he saw as a culture among pilots that tolerated lax behaviour.

On one occasion, he recalled, an astronaut in the Gemini programme got drunk at a party and ‘‘decided he could fly without a spacecraft – and prepared to jump from the third-floor balcony of the Holiday Inn’’. The next day, sharing a T-38 supersonic jet with him, Worden suddenly felt a sharp jolt and the aircraft shuddered. His co-pilot had fallen asleep and his head had slumped on to the control stick.

To prepare for the lunar mission, Worden studied geology and was sent to ‘‘survival school’’ in the Panamanian jungle, where he was briefed in a classroom packed with writhing boa constrictors, one of which became lunch.

He left Nasa in 1975, worked in the private aircraft technology sector, ran a helicopter sightseeing company and was chairman of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which provides scholarships to Stem students, from

2006 to 2011.

A second marriage ended in divorce in

1980. Worden unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Florida in 1982, the year he married Jill Hotchkiss. She died in 2014. A stepdaughter, Tamara, survives him.

The stamp episode was a source of lifelong frustration for Worden, who regretted his misjudgment, was justifiably upset at the severity of the consequences and felt sorrowful that the incident tarnished an otherwise admirable mission and personal career. He reflected in Falling to Earth: ‘‘I made a decision that f...ed up my life completely, utterly, and irreversibly.’’ – The Times

‘‘I could see that Earth was truly finite. That distant ball could only support so many people and contain so many resources. Once it is gone, it’s gone.’’

Al Worden