Alfred Worden
Apollo 15 astronaut who flew the lunar lander Falcon and became the first man to walk in deep space
ALFRED WORDEN, who has died aged 88, was an American astronaut who had a key role in the Apollo 15 mission in July 1971 – the first major scientific expedition to the Moon – and became one of only 24 humans to travel there. He flew as Command Module Pilot, conducting extensive experiments in lunar orbit while his two colleagues, David Scott and James Irwin, achieved the fourth manned landing and drove the first electric car on the Moon.
Their lander, Falcon, touched down at Hadley Base below the towering Apennine Mountains – the first time a crew had ventured beyond easier flat terrain – while Worden surveyed their landing site and much of the lunar globe from above.
He was also the first astronaut whose career survived a divorce, a domestic crisis much feared by Nasa’s image-conscious public relations machine. It punctured the sanitised fiction presented in the pages of Life magazine that the astronauts were allamerican heroes with perfect families.
Although his role in the Apollo mother ship Endeavour (named after Captain Cook’s ship) may have seemed less glamorous than landing, it required much more technical flying skill, and the ability to manoeuvre a three-person craft back to Earth alone in the event that his colleagues met with an accident on the surface.
Worden always claimed, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that his role was more serious than that of his colleagues: “Do you know what those guys’ primary job was down on the Moon? They picked up rocks and dirt. Now, myself, in lunar orbit, I did probably a thousand times more science!”
The day after leaving the Moon, Worden made the first spacewalk in deep space, almost 200,000 miles from Earth, and set a Guinness record. He floated out of the hatch and was greeted with the extraordinary sight of the Earth and Moon as separate spheres hanging in the void, at opposite ends of his craft. He crawled down the sunblistered hull to retrieve the data canisters from his scientific instruments.
It was Worden’s only space flight; he and his crew mates were made scapegoats by Nasa over some souvenir postal covers they carried in their personal kit, a common practice that management had turned a blind eye to on previous occasions.
Alfred Merrill Worden, the first son and one of six children of Merrill and Helen Worden, was born in Jackson, Michigan, on February 7 1932. They were of Dutch farming stock, and he worked long hours on the family farm. As a teenager he ended up responsible for the farm, livestock and crops, also becoming an accomplished pianist.
Studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor convinced him that his future lay beyond farming, and he went on to West
Point. That led to the US Air Force, then a post as instructor of test pilots. He was selected as an astronaut by Nasa in 1966.
He married Pamela Vander Beek in 1955. They had two daughters, but after the first Moon landing the marriage was coming to an end. He moved across the street but remained a part of their life, and did not immediately remarry. The astronaut wives’ club, which first shunned him, relented.
Worden was selected to fly on Apollo
15 in late 1969 just after his divorce. In preparation, he had already served on the Apollo 9 support crew and as back-up Command Module Pilot for the second Moon landing mission, Apollo 12.
Worden’s second marriage, to Sandra Lee Wilder, a former bullfighter who fought under the name Dixie Lee, was shortlived. He married again in 1982, to Jill Lee Hotchkiss, and adopted her daughter. That same year he ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for Congress in Florida.
After retirement from Nasa in 1975, Worden worked on the boards of various aerospace companies, travelled widely to lecture, and was an adviser on films, including First Man, the biopic of Neil Armstrong. He chaired the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation until 2011, providing scholarships to science and engineering students.
His three days of solo travel in lunar orbit made a deep impression on Worden, stimulating a book of poetry entitled
Hello Earth. He followed that in 2011 with his bestselling memoir, Falling to Earth. Always known as Al, he was one of the most approachable of the astronauts, chatting readily over vodka on the rocks and a cigarette. He made many public appearances in the UK and Europe in his later years.
Worden’s wife Jill predeceased him. He is survived by his daughters.