We first heard Charles Duke’s voice the night the captain at our military hospital ward in Fort Dix let us stay up late.
Most of the men in our ward had just come back from being wounded in Vietnam. Some had wounds so serious they would not survive the summer. But all of us, wounded in body or spirit, could not go to sleep the night that man first walked on the moon.
Duke, who served as the capcom (the Mission Control person who communicates with the on-board astronauts) for the mission, served as our on-air tour guide as we huddled around the small black-and-white TV set the captain had rolled into the ward for us to watch.
Duke, in a deep Southern drawl, helped highlight the drama of what many consider the most significant moment in human history, when the Apollo 11 landing craft came dangerously close to running out of fuel.
We heard Duke’s now legendary words when the craft finally touched down on the moon’s surface.
“Roger Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
Perhaps just as significantly, Duke eventually would take a walk on the moon’s surface two years later, becoming one of only 12 people so far in human history who can make that claim.
On Nov. 29, Duke appeared at Bayonne High School, part of a lecture tour sponsored by Omega Watch Company – the company that made the watch he and other astronauts wore into space.
During an hour lecture and a short interview, Duke spoke about how he got to go to the moon and the importance of getting an education.
“When I was a kid, no one thought we could go to the moon,” he said. “If I had told my mother that, she would have put me in a psychiatric hospital.”
Even later, when the United States began its space program, Duke had his doubts, saying that the space program largely involved launching a rocket to have it crash. But by then, the United States was committed to getting into space, and Duke agreed to be part of that program.
Long road into space
Born in Charlotte, N.C., Duke was a top student, graduating valedictorian from high school. He was also an Eagle Scout. At one point, he decided he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and enlisted in the United States Navy. He received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Naval Sciences from the United States Naval Academy in 1957.
At some point, he realized that he wanted to fly an aircraft, and in 1958 graduated basic flying training with distinction and began serving three years as a fighter interceptor pilot out of an air base in Germany. He later obtained his Master’s in Aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A year later, he graduated Aerospace Research Pilot School – staying on to teach piloting until 1966, when he was one of 19 selected as the next generation of astronauts.
Duke became a key member of the team, serving on the support staff for Apollo 10, then as the capcom, who communicated with Apollo 11 astronauts through their historic flight and landing on the moon.
He was scheduled to take flight on the ill-fated Apollo 13, but caught the measles from a fellow astronaut, and thus missed one of the most disastrous flights in the Apollo program’s history when the mission had to turn back due to an explosion in the Lunar Lander.
Duke said the movie “Apollo 13” (starring Tom Hanks) was an accurate portrayal of the program and the events, except in one minor detail.
“The film showed the same people in Mission Control, when people actually changed with each shift,” he said.
The best 11 days he can remember
Duke took off for the moon on April 16, beginning an 11-day odyssey he still wishes he could repeat. He was part of the fifth manned lunar landing mission, and the next to the last before the budget conscious federal government killed the Apollo program.
While he had said he had confidence in the equipment to get him to the moon once he was in space, he did fear the program might end before he got his chance.
At particular moments leading up to and during the flight, he did have doubts, especially when waiting for take-off while sitting on top of a Saturn Rocket that’s 120-meters tall and weighs six and a half million pounds.
“I knew that was going to be some ride,” he said.
Unfortunately, because all the windows except for the one in the middle were covered over, he couldn’t see out the window. Not that there was much to see before launch except for the room outside the capsule they called “The White Room.”
A few minutes before take off, Ken Maddenly, another member of the crew, told him he could see the moon.
“They got us pointed in right direction,” Maddenly said at the time.
When the engines started, the rocket didn’t move right away.
“You just sit there and you can imagine those engines at the bottom shaking, and by the time it goes up to the 360-feet at the tip and it gets there, it’s shaking pretty good,” Duke said. “I didn’t remember anybody telling me it was supposed to shake and I was a little nervous.”
Duke described lift off as feeling like an elevator going up at first, but very slowly.
“As we burned out of fuel, of course, we accelerated,” he said. “The first stage, which was the big one, lasted for two minutes and 41 seconds and took us to an altitude of about 50 kilometers.”
“A few seconds later, they uncovered the windows and we could see out and look down at the crystal blue ocean of the Atlantic.
“We circled the earth for one and half revolutions, which took us two and half hours,” he said. “That took us over Australia and then we accelerated to 25,000 miles per hour and headed toward the moon.”
They kept busy on the three-day trip to the moon with various experiments, often floating in space along side their space suits – suits oddly made by the parent company of Maiden Form.
“We arrived at the moon on the third day of our mission,” he said.
The craft went into orbit on the dark side of the moon, a place that he called “very eerie.”
“We orbited the moon for a day while we got everything lined up right so we could go over our landing site,” he said.
On the fourth day of the mission, he and John Young boarded the Lunar Lander, got strapped in, and then heard the bad news from Maddenly, who said, “Something is wrong with the engine.”
This meant that after traveling 240,000 miles and hovering only eight miles above the surface of the moon, they might have to abort the landing. Six hours later, NASA resolved the problem and the lander set down on the moon’s surface.
Duke and Young spent the next three days on the moon.
Apollo 16 was the first scientific expedition to survey and sample materials and surface features in the Descartes regions of the lunar highlands. Duke said the region is right in the center of a full moon.
Duke said one of the mountains near to where they landed reminded him of a mountain where he grew up, so he named it after the mountain back home, Stone Mountain.
The two astronauts logged the most hours on the moon’s surface of all missions and brought back to earth the largest payload of moon materials.
Young drove the lunar buggy that allowed the astronauts to access larger areas of the surface, although the land was so rough, the buggy often drove on only two of four wheels. At one point, Duke took a motion picture of the buggy, the only moving picture taken on the surface of the moon to date.
On the return trip to earth, Duke had to walk in space to help retrieve mapping camera film. He floated in space that was 60,000 miles from the moon and 180,000 miles from Earth.
Because the sun is always present, he didn’t see stars. He saw the blue and white surface of earth, but not much detail.
“I had the feeling that everything we saw belonged to us,” he said. “I was in awe.”
Except what he heard on the radio in communicating, he heard mostly the sound of his own breathing in his suit.
When they reentered the atmosphere, Duke said perhaps the most satisfying moment was when the parachutes deployed and the craft splashed down safely.
Duke told students that they should set goals for themselves, but also get the kind of education that will prepare them for the unexpected.
“I never expected to become an astronaut, but when the opportunity came, I was prepared for it,” he said.