It's vignettes like this that made Al Bean one of my faves:
Friday, November 21
Aboard Yankee Clipper, in lunar orbit
Bean was looking out the window. It was the first chance he’d had to relax and play tourist since arriving at the moon more than two days earlier. He thought about how strange it felt to orbit the moon. The strangest thing about it was the silence.
There wasn’t any engine noise, the way there always was in an airplane. And it felt odd to see the spacecraft fly in the same direction no matter how it was pointed. Orbiting the moon, Bean thought, was much more of a science fiction experience than walking on it had been.
Flying in space was better than Bean had ever imagined during those long years as a rookie. Yesterday, during the rendezvous, he’d been slaving away with the backup computer and the navigation charts while Conrad flew the lunar module. They had one more burn to do, and then they would have it made. And Conrad had said to him, “Why don’t you just quit after this midcourse, and relax and enjoy it? You can take a minute and fly this vehicle.”
Startled by Pete’s audacity, Bean wondered, wouldn’t it put them off course? No, Conrad assured him, whatever digressions they made would be easy to correct. Bean was reluctant—surely mission control would know. Conrad laughed, “Not on the back side of the moon, they won’t.”
Bean realized Conrad had planned this perfectly. And for a few minutes Bean had his hand at the crisp, responsive ascent stage. It was a moment that Bean would always remember as pure Pete Conrad, that in a small craft somewhere over the far side of the moon, he had taken the time to share with Bean a flying experience that even most astronauts would never know.
And then, Bean could see Yankee Clipper out ahead, growing slowly from a point of light into a gleaming spacecraft. He watched as the command module moved from sunlight into shadow and back again, thinking, That looks so neat. Dick Gordon did a perfect job on the docking—smooth as glass—and later, when he opened the tunnel to the LM, all he could see was two dim figures floating in a cloud of dust. He called down, “You guys ain’t gonna mess up my nice clean spacecraft!”
Before he would even let them into the command module, he made them take off their filthy suits. They passed them up through the tunnel and Gordon hurriedly zipped them into their stowage bags underneath the couches. Finally, when he and Conrad got up there, Gordon was happier than Bean had ever seen him. He was scurrying around, helping them stow their gear. He was offering them a drink of water.
And in that moment, Bean was filled with a love for his crewmates that he had never experienced. Years later, Bean would say, his most special memories of the flight would not be about the moon or the earth; they would be about Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon.
Now Bean looked out at the bright, bleak cinder passing beyond his window. It was so utterly inhospitable. Everything in the universe has some function, Bean thought, but what is the function of the moon? Is it to make the tides? The earth would probably get along fine without them.
Maybe it was as the geologists said: the moon is here to tell us the story that had been lost forever on our own planet. Maybe the moon would tell us where we came from. Bean didn’t know the answer. As Yankee Clipper circled, Bean looked, and now and then, he wondered. He found himself thinking about the six-year journey that had gotten him here.
He realized now, with his neck farther out than it had ever been, that life is too precious to spend it living by someone else’s rules, even the unwritten ones of the Astronaut Office. He would be a good astronaut, but he would do it his way. As the moon bore silent witness, he told himself, “When I get back home—if I get back home—I’m going to live my life the way I want to.”
I mean, really, what is there to do after walking on the moon? Is that all there is?
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