Apollo 15 astronaut circled moon
Alfred M. Worden, the command module pilot on Apollo 15 who holds a world record as the “most isolated human being” for orbiting the moon as his crewmates were on the surface, has died in the Houston area, his family said Wednesday.
Worden, 88, died at an assisted-living center in Sugar Land following treatment for an infection, according to news reports.
“NASA sends its condolences to the family and loved ones of Apollo astronaut Al Worden, an astronaut whose achievements in space and on Earth will not be forgotten,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.
Worden was born Feb. 7, 1932, in Jackson, Mich., and grew up on a small farm with six brothers and sisters. As he grew older and less fond of field work and milking cows, Worden left Michigan to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in military science.
He entered the U.S. Air Force “not because I wanted to fly, but because I thought the promotions would be quicker there,” Worden told an interviewer as part of a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
As it turned out, Worden was good at flying and enjoyed it. So after earning master’s degrees in astronautical/aeronautical engineering and instrumentation engineering from the University of Michigan in 1963, Worden attended the Empire Test Pilots’ School in Farnborough, England.
“If we had to test an airplane, we had to take up — I took up a yardstick and a tape measurer and a level,” he said in the oral history project, “and I would carry up what looked like a pair of pliers, but it was a hand-held force gauge. You could put this thing against the stick and you could actually read the pounds of pressure that you were putting on the stick as you were trying to do a stall or something. The point is, everything was done by hand. I thought that was very valuable training.”
It helped him become one of 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966.
“It’s kind of funny, because you start out being just a basic pilot, you do things to make your professional side better, you do better at flying, you kind of rise to the top of all that,”
Worden said, “then you go off to a test pilot school and you’re back to the bottom of the barrel again because everybody there is much more experienced and better than you are. You go through all that, you eventually come to the top of that. Then you get selected into the space program and you show up down here. And I will never forget walking down the hall, and everybody looking down their nose at me because we were the ‘greenies.’”
But Worden would work hard and get his flight into space with Apollo 15, launching on July 26, 1971, and returning Aug. 7, 1971. As the command module pilot, he orbited the moon while crewmates David R. Scott and James B. Irwin landed on the surface of the moon. And although other astronauts had orbited the moon while their crewmates were on its surface, Worden was a little farther away.
According to the Guinness World Records, he was 2,234.69 miles from the nearest living human.
“Most people think, ‘Oh, what a shame you didn’t get to walk on the moon.’ He was totally fine with that,” said Francis French, co-author of Worden’s autobiography “Falling to Earth,” published in 2011. “He felt he had the best seat on Apollo 15 because he got to orbit the moon alone for three days and study it from above.”
Apollo 15 was NASA’s first moon mission devoted mainly to science. And as Worden orbited, he operated a pair of cameras to take sophisticated photographs of the lunar terrain.
“There was an end purpose to going,” he said in the oral history. “It wasn’t just to go and come back. It was to go out there and really do something scientific that was worthwhile, and I think that’s what we did.”
He logged 295 hours and 11 minutes in space, including 38 minutes spent spacewalking outside of the command module. After the Apollo program was ended, Worden retired as an astronaut and moved to the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., where he worked as the senior aerospace scientist and then chief of the Systems
Study Division.
He retired from NASA in 1975. On Apollo 15, the astronauts had brought several hundred specially stamped, signed and canceled envelopes commemorating the flight and sought to sell them through a West German stamp dealer, the New York Times reported. Under the deal, a total of $21,000 was to be set aside for trust funds to benefit the astronauts’ children, but any proceeds the astronauts themselves would receive were to be deferred because they were still in the Apollo program.
The deal became public, NASA was embarrassed and the astronauts withdrew from it, with no funds going to them or their children. Worden would file a lawsuit and in July 1983 the federal government returned 359 stamped envelopes that NASA had seized from the astronauts, concluding that the space agency had either authorized their being brought aboard the Apollo 15 spacecraft or had known that they were taken on the flight, the Times reported.
Upon retiring, Worden remained devoted to education. As an astronaut he had appeared on the TV show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to inspire children, and after retiring, he raised scholarship money to help send students to college. Even at 88, he was full of passion and fresh ideas.
“I could not keep up with this guy, and I’m in my 40s,” French said. “He had so much energy and he had so many more years of things he wanted to do left.”
Worden is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Alison Penczak and Merrill Bohaning; a stepdaughter, Tamara Christians, from his marriage to Jill Lee Hotchkiss, who died in 2014; two brothers, two sisters and five grandchildren.
George W.S. Abbey, who worked with Worden during the Apollo program and would later become director of the Johnson Space Center, described Worden as dedicated to flying in space and to the mission.
“Losing Al Worden just brings a sobering thought that our Apollo astronauts are fading away,” Abbey said. “We’re losing a generation of leaders that got us to the moon. They really represent the only individuals who have left this Earth and gone to a destination beyond Earth’s orbit.”
He said returning to the moon is important to further humanity’s ability to operate in space and to pay homage to those of the Apollo era.