by Tom Neven

Ever wonder what it’s like to ride a rocket to the moon? Charlie Duke knows.

But Charlie didn’t always want to be an astronaut. He had no interest in flying until he attended the U.S. Naval Academy. That’s when he developed a love for airplanes and transferred to the U.S. Air Force, where he later became a test pilot.

In the mid-1960s, he was picked to be an astronaut out of thousands who applied. He then was chosen for the Apollo 16 moon mission in 1972. As he was strapped into his seat with fellow astronauts John Young and Ken Mattingly perched atop a mighty Saturn V rocket, he was not afraid. His only thoughts were, Let’s go, let’s go.

Mission Control got to T-minus-8 in the countdown and the engines were lit.

"Liftoff had quite a bit more vibration than I expected," he says.

The rocket engines burned 4,500 gallons of fuel per second. Instrument panels vibrated and the entire rocket shook violently from side to side as it strained against the retaining bolts on the launch tower. At T-minus-0, the bolts blew apart and Apollo 16 was on its way.

"They said ‘Liftoff,’ and I could feel it moving very slowly," Charlie says. Pretty soon the astronauts experienced about 4 1/2 G’s—four and a half times the force of gravity on their bodies. (To compare, the fastest roller coasters in the world put only about 1 1/2 G’s on a body.)

"There was a muffled roar," Charlie remembers. "My first thought was, This thing is going to shake to pieces. But John calmly said, ‘We’re a go,’ and Mission Control was saying, ‘You’re a go.’ For the first stage it just shook like crazy, but after that shut down and separated, it was smooth as it could be."

Skyrocket in Flight

About 15 seconds into the flight, when he was nearly 50 miles above the Earth, Charlie looked out the docking window above his space helmet.

"Our heads faced the Atlantic, so that put the ocean at the top of the window. It was deep, crystal blue, and it faded into a lighter blue of the atmosphere, which faded into the white of the upper atmosphere, which faded into the blackness of space.

"Thirty minutes later we were in nighttime over Africa. I remember vividly a huge line of thunderstorms over the equatorial part of Africa. The lightening display was just incredible from above."

Touchdown

The landing on the moon was delayed for technical reasons, so once the astronauts had touched down, Mission Control ordered them to wait about 12 hours and to sleep before leaving the lunar module for the surface. Needless to say, sleep was nearly impossible. They were on the moon’s rough Descartes Highlands. If you look at the man in the moon, that’s about where his left cheek is.

When the time came to climb down the ladder, Charlie says, "I was sort of kicking John out the door with excitement. It was exciting to be on the moon and in one-sixth gravity. The moon was spectacularly beautiful—lifeless, an absolute desert of dust and rocks."

He and John spent just over 71 hours on the moon, exploring with the lunar rover, gathering moon rocks and conducting experiments.

Charlie did encounter one difficult situation during his time on the moon, one of his own making. "Like every flight, we saved the final few minutes for ‘innovative activity,’ " Charlie says. For example, Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 hit a golf ball, and David Scott on Apollo 15 used a hammer and feather to prove Galileo right—that gravity exerts an equal force on all objects, no matter how heavy or light. (Galileo’s experiment didn’t work on Earth because of air resistance against the feather.)

Because 1972 was an Olympic year, Charlie decided to try the long jump in one-sixth gravity. The jumping part went well, but he didn’t land correctly and toppled over backward in his space suit, right in front of the TV camera on the lunar rover.

"Fortunately, as I was going down I was able to roll right and break the real impact," he says. "But the fear was real. This is crazy, I thought. I’m in trouble."

He was afraid he’d damaged his suit or backpack. "John came over and helped me up. I got real quiet. I could hear the pumps running in the backpack. The pressure gauge read normal. Mission Control was very upset, and John was upset but, hey, I’d entered the moon Olympics."

If Charlie could cite only one lesson from his moon walk, he would choose Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

"It’s so vivid to me now," Charlie says, "that picture of the Earth and the moon and the orderliness of the universe and God’s handiwork in creation."

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