NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — The countdown has begun for the Falcon 9 rocket.
Saturday evening it will lift off with a crew of four astronauts from the same pad that launched the Apollo missions in the late 60s and early 70s.
Twelve men made history by walking on the Moon then. Only four are still alive.
Brigadier General Charlie Duke is one of them. His mission was on Apollo 16.
When your travels have taken you to the Moon and back, literally, where do you travel for leisure? Well Apollo 16 astronaut Brigadier General Charlie Duke meets with friend Ken Stage in Sportsman's Paradise.
“He likes to fish. I like to fish in Barataria Bay and this Joe's Landing is really a place to push out from. So here we are,” Duke said.
And Duke never goes back home to Texas empty handed. With the help of Charter Captain Craig Degruise and of course mother nature, takes with him a catch that's out of this world. So before he went out to catch fish, we wanted to catch up with one of the only four moonwalkers left on planet Earth, of course while safely protecting the health of an American icon with proper PPE.
When reminded that he said he wants to go back up in space, he answered, “Well I would but NASA, you know, they're not, Elon Musk is not going to let me go and at 85, I don't expect a phone call from NASA saying, ‘Suit up,’” Duke laughed."
Watching the recent SpaceX mission brought back memories of his 1972 return to Earth.
“Sometimes you hit the water really, really hard and that's why I call it crash down. My head was out of position. I was looking out the window on Apollo 16 when we hit the water and my head went back like that and almost knocked me unconscious," he remembered.
Duke says the recent SpaceX public-private mission was impressive, and reminds us that back when he was flying, NASA wasn't building then either. It was all contracted out to private companies.
“I'm really excited about the future and I think Elon Musk will be taking tourists into space before too long and that's really, really going to stimulate the interest, I think, of the general public in space travel with the beauty they'll be seeing,” he predicted.
Last year, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, brought back memories. Duke was the CapCom, or capsule communicator, for that mission. He is the sigh-of-relief voice you hear from Mission Control talking to Neil Armstrong, who had only seconds of fuel left before the first lunar landing.
The exchange between Armstrong and Duke went like this:
“EAGLE: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!
HOUSTON: Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
“It was so dynamic and so tense because of the problems that developed when we continued that decent. And several times we almost called an abort, he recalls.
Duke was the backup lunar module pilot for the ill-fated Apollo 13. An oxygen tank explosion kept it from reaching the lunar surface. But before that drama played out on TV, there was another behind the scenes drama. He is the reason Ken Mattingly was pulled from the mission three days before launch.
“The prime crew was Lovell, Haise and Mattingly, but I caught the measles and exposed Mattingly to the measles, and they jerked him off and stuck in Jack Swigert, who I trained with," Duke said.
Mattingly later flew with Duke on Apollo 16. But Duke was again at the center of some drama the day before that launch too. He was in NASA quarantine. His identical twin brother was in town to watch the launch, staying at the Holiday Inn.
“He walks out of his room going towards the bar and there's this NASA executive sitting there. They called out to headquarters, NASA quarters. They said, ‘We saw Duke at the Holiday Inn. Well no sir you didn't. He's standing right here.’ And I said, ‘That's my twin brother you just met, so say hello to him. His name's Bill,’” Duke laughs.
And on the nearly 239,000 mile trip to the Moon, he turned on a country music cassette a DJ friend recorded for him. And there was a surprise.
“And the first one was, ‘Hey Charlie, this is Porter Wagner and Dolly Parton and we want to thank you for taking us to the Moon. And we got 30 minutes worth of songs and jokes for you.’ The whole show was just for us.”
He reminds us that our cell phones today have 800,000 times more memory than his Apollo spacecraft.
And as he autographs his landing spot on a moon globe for a baby boomer fan, Nancy, he reacts to The Pentagon recently releasing videos of UFOs that defy physics as we know it.
“I don't believe we're being visited by civilizations out there hundreds of thousands of light years away. I'm convinced that God has created life here on Earth. And if he created life out there on another planet, he hasn't told anybody about it,” he believes.
The SpaceX launch is targeted for 6:49 p.m. Saturday evening from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Crew Dragon is scheduled to dock at the International Space Station at 3:20 Sunday morning.
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