Stephen Baxter interviews Charlie Duke

Much of Stephen Baxter's fiction has been intimately connected with the history - both real and imagined - of the Apollo programme. In July 1999, 30 years after the first Moon landing, Stephen had the opportunity to meet one of the original participants of Apollo when he interviewed Charlie Duke, Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 16.

Lunch at the Westbury Hotel, Bond Street, London, 12/7/99. Duke is a dapper 63-year-old, brought here by the watchmakers Omega to promote their 30-year association with the American space program. What strikes me about Duke is his report of his childlike joy at his great adventure.

Baxter: When you were recruited in 1966 in a 19-strong cadre, what were your expectations? Storey Musgrave, who eventually flew on Shuttle, says he was recruited as part of the cadre that would lead the way to Mars.

Duke: My expectation was to fly Apollo. We had been selected for the Apollo programme. I was hoping that I would get a chance right after I got there so the expectations were real high. But right after we got there I realised there were a lot more astronauts than there were people going to get to go to the Moon. So you can imagine the competition was fierce. It wasn't cut-throat, it wasn't backstabbing competition, you didn't do anything unethical, but you knew you were in a competition to get one of these seats to the Moon. So my hope was to get to the Moon. Turned out I was fulfilled. Others didn't get to do that. But I think most of us who were picked were picked to go to the Moon, that was our expectation, that we were gonna have a chance to go to the Moon. And if they hadn't cancelled the last few missions, most of us, of our 19, would have done that.

Yes, they planned to go on to Apollo 20.

Which I thought that was a big mistake because we had the hardware paid for and all ready to go.

It's now lawn ornaments.

Not quite. Almost. The one at Houston's a lawn ornament.. The one at Kennedy, they've refurbished and put it in an Apollo-Saturn visitors' centre which is just fantastic. If you've not been you should go. It's just incredible. And then after Apollo I was hoping that certainly by now we'd go to the Moon again, or either after Shuttle, we'd go to the Moon or we'd go to Mars, but now it's all refocused to Earth orbit, the big Space Station, so I think it's gonna be quite a time before we get a chance go back. A lot of money.

Did you make the LM your speciality - was that your way of staking a seat?

No. You had a job that was assigned to you when we first got started. We all went into what was called a 4-month basic training - this is the way NASA worked, this is the acronyms, this is the beginning of the geology training, this is the spacecraft, these are the systems, basic just classroom work at understanding NASA with a few field trips on geology. Then after that we were assigned, strictly just assigned various areas of engineering responsibility, I would put it that way. Mine happened to be with Stu Roosa in propulsion systems. We monitored the Saturn V development from a crew standpoint. How's this thing going - can we fly it in orbit, we were thinking about in those days - emergency egress, how do we get out of this thing - turned out after the fire that was the big part of our job. But I had no say with that. I sort of thought, well I've been passed by, because here's Fred Haise working on the Lunar Module and he's going to know all about that and they're going to pick him first. And that's what they did. But I didn't get passed by completely. Fortunately not quite three years later in the spring of 1969 I got put on the support crew for Apollo 10. And my job was to help to develop the activation and checkout procedures for the Lunar Module in lunar orbit which also put me in Mission Control as capcom during that part of the mission. And so I got to know and understand the operation of the Lunar Module and plus with all of the mission control effort, the data priorities, what we called the big meetings, you started to get back into the operational side of things so that was a real advantage. Then Neil Armstrong invited me, right after Apollo 10, the crew said to me, 'You're the guy that knows more about the Lunar Module than anybody that's not on the crew, how about doing that for us?' and so that's what happened. Then right after that - I think that had a lot to do with a lot to do with why I got picked for Lunar Module pilot backup on Apollo 13, but I really don't know; it's to me a big mystery how they picked crews. The basic system was you backed one, skipped two, and fly the third. If you backed up on 10 you flew 13; if you backed up on 13 you flew 16. That was the normal procedure. Then it changed a little bit. Actually Jim Lovell, and Haise and Mattingley were supposed to fly Apollo 14. Alan Shepard was supposed to fly 13. But they wanted to give him a little bit more time in training after 10 years grounded and so they flipped. So we backed up 13. I was Fred Haise's backup. Jack Swigert was Mattingley's backup and John Young was Lovell's. The scheme was if something happened to the prime crew we'd change the whole crew. Unfortunately as it turned out I caught the measles and in exposed everybody. Somebody on the prime crew - Mattingley - could get the measles - but nobody else could, it was just the two of us, happened to be one guy from the prime crew, one guy from the backup, now what do you do, they just decided to swap out individuals. Which was to me an amazing demonstration of the quality and the thoroughness of the training that somebody could step in 4-5 days before lift-off and do the job. That's how standardised our training was.

You've talked about the tension in Mission Control during Apollo 11. Is it true that as Armstrong came into land, you realised he had to be let alone to make his decisions and fly his ship over that unexpected boulder field?

Sort of. I look back now and up until that point I was basically non-stop talking, feeding them information. But then I realised that, with Deke Slayton's prompting, be quiet, let 'em land. But we really didn't know - you know he'd never reported why he levelled off at 400 feet. We could see it on the trajectory on our plot, but we had no TV, so we couldn't see the boulders, and the problem was, why is he flying this strange trajectory, we'd never seen it before in training, it was always basically a continuous descent to touchdown. [Our Cumberland sausage and mash arrive, with a glass of house Chardonnay. "Wow. Huge," says Duke.] So when he starts flying this, what's going through my mind is I don't understand what's happening. I mean he was flying across the lunar surface at about 400 feet, we're still 400 feet in the air and we're getting close to the sixty-second call to landing. And so finally we see him pitch back, slow down and then start down on descent. And that's when the fuel state started getting critical, because this overfly - and we'd probably misjudged the efficiency of the Lunar Module - it was just a combination of things - anyway we were running out of gas. And we'd never mentioned - 'Hey, Neil, what are you doing?' - I never radioed that at him, we just accepted what was going on, something was different. Finally they touched down. Then he reported as we were doing the debriefing, 'I know that looked funny because we had to override the guidance system that was taking us into a boulder field.' A lot of the problems that we discovered on Apollo 10 and Apollo 11, that we saw on Apollo 10, the first flight to the Moon with the Lunar Module, is the spacecraft wasn't exactly in the position we thought it was when we predicted ahead, like 2 orbits. That's because we didn't understand the mascons, the gravity anomalies on the Moon. And that's why the trajectory and their targeting took 'em into really an unfamiliar place on the Moon. I forget whether they were long or short. But we fixed it. Next mission Pete Conrad landed 300m from the Surveyor. I don't think they saw it on descent - I don't remember that - but certainly when they opened the door and got out, 'Oh, yeah, there it is, right over there'. [Charlie Duke's was the first human voice from Earth heard by the astronauts on the Moon.]

What a change from the early Mercury days, when the astronauts were treated as cargo.

Of course I never flew Mercury. But it had some manual control to it, but that was one of the big battles in the early days, how much control you gonna to give the crew over this thing, a big battle between operations, medical and astronauts.

Coming to your own mission: when you're in Earth orbit, and the Saturn third stage lights up, what do you see?

I don't remember that being a real memory-maker, it's not a predominant memory of the Earth shrinking. More on the other side, coming back from the Moon, I mean you could really see the Moon shrink as you started out. But the Earth, I think probably the feelings were just the incredible beauty, the breathtaking beauty of the view we had of Earth, and if there was one emotion that one had at that point, at least for me, it was anticipation: 'Hey, we're on our way. This is for real, I can't wait to get there, what's it going to be like when I finally touch down?' Like a kid on holiday, birthday and Christmas and everything else all rolled into one.

On the way back you participated in a spacewalk between Earth and Moon.

That's right. I wasn't outside. My job was to be a lifeguard if you will, the only job I had to do was to monitor his [Mattingley's, the Command module Pilot's] actions, and I was sort of held the lifeline, his tether which controlled communications and oxygen and restraint. The concern was getting it wrapped around one of the reaction control modules about half way back on the Service Module, and these little jets were hundred pounders and if you got wrapped around it and sort of ripped one loose you lost control of the Command Module and so my job was just to make sure he didn't get all entangled back there. I was actually off the seat. We had removed the centre seat which was right in the hatch, we'd removed that and it would collapse and we stowed it up under the seats. So as you face the hatch, my seat was on the left, John was on the right, John stayed in his seat monitoring the control and the communications and operation of the spacecraft. So Mattingley's up front, I'm behind, and I'm tethered, with all of my stuff, but my tether's about a third of his length so I can't get back where he is. So he floats out, starts hand over hand back to the Service Module, and that's when I float out. And the way I anchored - we didn't have any footholds - and one of the couch's upper struts anchored to the aft bulkhead, and by turning my feet out, and wedging them within the hatch and the strut, that gave me enough anchor so I wouldn't just float out. And if I had to put some force on his tether I could do that, pull him back. And it worked real good. We were outside for a total probably of an hour and fifteen minutes. The Earth was off to the right, as I floated out, there down in this position [mimes] probably about a two o'clock low, real low. I could see it beyond the hatch, beyond the Service Module. And it was just a little thin sliver of blue and white. And then I spun around this way and up in this position [directly behind him] there was this enormous full Moon, and it was, I mean it was overwhelming, that kind of feeling. And you could see Descartes, you could see Tranquillity, all the major features and it just felt you could reach out and touch 'em. No sensation of motion at all. And everywhere else you looked was just black. The sun was up in here [he points before him, above his eye line] but it's so bright you don't look at it, you don't even attempt it. And everything else was just black. There was more of a feeling of being in the audience as you were floating, here was this big panorama in front of you, below - I was just sort of felt detached, I was just enjoying the view, as if I was enjoying the play, as if Ken was the actor doing his job.

You get to the Moon ...

We entered orbit, I think about 76 hours into the mission, and then we landed 104, 105. We orbited for a day, basically. The objective was to get the orbit centred over our landing site so that when the time came as the Moon slowly rotated we would be directly in plane. So we had to tweak the orbit a little bit. The first burn into orbit by the Command Module to put us in a 60-mile by 170-mile orbit, 170 on the front side and 60 on the back side. We were in darkness at that point. Then just seconds after the engine shut down - wham, sunlight. There's no glow begins, like on Earth - there's no atmosphere - so it's just wham, there's daylight. Real deep shadows, because the Sun was low at that point, you've just come out of night, and the shadows were real dark, real deep, and it looked rough. Your thought was, Man, I'm glad we don't have to land back here, there's no place to land down here. But we were all glued to the windows looking out. Then a couple of hours later we changed orbit down from 170 to 8 miles on the front side, and that was critical. A one second overburn would impact you on the Moon - you went from 8 miles to zero with about one-second overburn. Normally the autopilot controlled the engine but I had my stopwatch, so I was timing, my job was to time, and keep the oxidiser and fuel balanced in the Service Module engine, so that the thrust was basically constant. So the burn went off on schedule. The computers said we were okay, but to make sure we oriented, and we knew we were on target when we had acquisition of signal, we saw the Earth come up. If we were a few second off, we knew if we'd overburned, and we were going to impact, and we had enough bale-out manoeuvre, it was called, to boost us up. So we were in position to do that. Turned out we were okay. So then we got a rest period and the next day we got up, we suited up after eating a meal, John and I got in the Lunar Module and started activating, then we separated right on schedule. The computer had a antenna problem which it didn't work right; we ended up getting the computer loaded, a few other problems. And then about an hour before we were to land Ken Mattingley said 'There's something wrong with this engine'. He had to change his orbit again, and the engine control was all screwed up. So we delayed our burn and according to mission rules we were coming home. We had one single failure and - I mean that was a bitter pill to swallow when he said No sir, and it was awful. There you were 8 miles above the landing site and knowing you had to come home. So we sent the data down to Mission Control. Six hours later they said 'OK you guys, it looks like we got it figured out, you're go for landing, you got a go.' We landed. There was a brief explanation as best they could understand it, and Ken understood it better than I could, but it was relief. So he could burn, and the next rev around he made the burn and then we came around again and we landed.

When you do the burns in the shadow of the Moon, can you see the light of your burn?

I don't remember ever looking out. Except for that first one into orbit, and the one out of orbit, they're not very long. Just seconds. Generally the windows are not in position to see anything of the surface as you're burning. And if they are, your gaze is on the instruments because it's critical you do the right thing.

You've said the Lunar Module reminded you of the fighter planes you used to fly.

Yeah. The descent didn't feel that way - it was more of a heavy deal - because the descent engine gimballed so it basically controlled the trajectory by it moving which is slower. But the ascent engine was fixed and thrust to weight was a little bit higher, I think. So anyway you got a fixed engine to control the ascent, you had these little control jets firing to point you right, and when they fired you went 'boom', and it was fast like this back and forth, it was 'bang bang bang bang' [with his hand he mimes being thrown forward, swivelling sharply left and right, a flight path oscillating over the surface] and so it was like being a rough acrobatic pilot. Oh, great ride. In fact that was my comment 'What a ride, what a ride' as we got up and pitched over. The only thing that was a moment of concern -can't say fear but concern - was the Lunar Module goes straight up for eight hundred feet and then pitches over to accelerate into orbit. And when it pitched over the horizon disappears out the top of window. So now you're just looking down at the ground and it's a vertigo feeling of this [his hand plunges back into the surface]. So I got down real low and I could still see the horizon, we were still above the horizon, as I crouched down to look out the window. Of course the attitude indicator had us dead on and Mission Control said 'You're dead on', so quickly you overcome that vertigo feeling but as it started over like that, that rotation gave you the distinct impression you were going to go back into the ground.

On the surface ...

Until John got out and down. I was trapped behind the door until he got out.

I remember how enthusiastic you looked.

That enthusiasm never left us. John and I were really excited. We felt comfortable, right at home. He especially learned quickly how to manoeuvre the suit to his advantage. I had a little more trouble with balance than he did. I fell down more, some because of the experiments I was required to do, others just because of stumbling. It was like being in what I call a rigid balloon, you were sort of rattling around. You had good freedom this way [vertically] because of the one-sixth gravity but you couldn't bend at the waist like you could in training. In training the backpack helped, the weight and the gravity, helped you bend the suit. But up on the Moon in one-sixth gravity you didn't have that advantage. So the suit is still as rigid as it is on Earth so you couldn't bend it at the waist, nor could you do a deep knee-bend, you couldn't squat. So you had to learn how to manoeuvre it. You had good mobility in the arms. But it was work. The suit had a set to it like this [arms held out at 45 degrees from his side] and so to bend the arm you had to pull against the suit. So it was like a light workout in the gym. But eight hours, that got tiring. You ended real tired in here [the forearms] and the end of your fingers and your hands, just this kind of squeezing the glove for eight hours left you sort of crampy in the forearms.

Did it get more difficult as the days went by?

No, not really. You seemed to adjust. I don't remember being tired. I remember sleeping better the second and third night that we were there because you could tell, you'd worked hard. So I do remember being able to sleep better.

What was the smell of the suit like?

Just body odour really. When you were in it you didn't smell anything. The oxygen was odourless. You could hear the pumps running, you could hear the 'sss' of the oxygen flow, but mostly you were just listening to yourself breathe and talking. I don't remember any odour. But when we got out and the next day we got back in and you could smell the body odour. It got pretty ripe inside. After eleven days we came back and we could get out right away, there was no quarantine, and we got out. They picked us up by helicopter. Four hours later they had to retrieve the Command Module and it was sitting on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Well, I'd left my personal articles on board so I went back down and climbed in and I mean it almost knocked me down, it was so strong. Three guys, eleven days with no bath is pretty ripe. It was really strong. But when you're in it you get used to it.

The gloves had fingerpads. What could you feel?

Nothing. You didn't have any dexterity. You could feel a big button like that of course [on my tape recorder] and you had a camera trigger, you could change the film canisters on your Hasselblad, and you could do the experiments, but you couldn't thread a sewing needle. You didn't have that dexterity.

You couldn't feel the texture of the rock.

No, you couldn't feel any of that. You couldn't feel it on your feet either. It was Moon boots and then spacesuit boots, and then under that you had a set of socks. You could feel the pressure but you couldn't feel the feel. In some areas you sank in half an inch, some were deeper than that. I'd say the deepest was a couple of inches. At North Ray crater, our last objective on the third day, it was just like this tabletop [hammers the glass top with a spoon], there wasn't hardly any dust at all. But it was a fresh crater, relatively, and so the dust from the other craters that were being blasted out on the Moon hadn't time to mantle at all so it was pretty dust free on the edge of the crater. Down around in one of the corners that big rock we went to - House rock - it was dusty, and up on top of Stone Mountain, if you watch the videos of us walking back down I'm sort of skipping, and dust is flying everywhere. I drilled, out in front of the Lunar Module, we had an experiment called the drill. core which was 3 metres. I drilled in three metres, jacked it back out, took it apart and capped it off. When we got it back to the lunar lab, they sectioned it, and it was just basically dust all the way down. It varied, the farther away the meteorite impact the finer the dust so you'd go through a layer of fine then coarser, coarser, fine, fine, fine, coarse, coarse, coarse, but it was the ejecta from distant meteorites and the closer ones, the heavier, bigger particles.

Could you see the horizon curve?

A little bit. You had some sense of curvature especially when we were up on Stone Mountain and we looked back across the Cayley plain, that valley, and you could probably see the horizon was maybe fifteen miles away and you could get a little general sense. But it was more of this kind of horizon [mimes smooth waves, like sand dunes] and that sort of masked the general curvature if you will. But on orbit - gosh; it was a lot more pronounced that in Earth orbit. In Earth orbit you see a curvature but you don't see the whole of the circle. On the Moon you see a lot more curvature. On Earth you don't get that full circle until you get away from Earth. Only Apollo astronauts were the only ones to see that. The Shuttle doesn't get that view.

Was it difficult to judge distances?

It was. A real problem on the Moon was judging distances. It's like being in the high desert, western United States. You look at a mountain range, or you look at a series of rocks or features and they appear a lot closer than they are. And it's the same as on the Moon. Big objects far away look very similar to smaller objects close in. The reason is you have no objects to judge - there's no trees, no telephone poles, no people, no cars, all of these relative sizes that we know help us to judge distances. But up there you're looking at House Rock it's just a rock out there, and you don't know if it's House Rock or Table Rock, you know? A small object close in looks very similar to a big object far away. If you listen to that transcript, John tries to talk us out of going down there. 'It's a long way away.' I tried to talk him out of it. 'Oh come on, let's just go'. He was right.

What was the light like? Any colours?

No. Shades of grey, primarily. As you looked away from the Sun, down Sun, you were seeing the sunlit side of the rocks. The Sun was low on the horizon. And so it was a very light grey. The more you turned into the Sun the darker the grey became because you're now looking at the shadowed side of rocks in the soil. Even the fine grained soil ... If you've ever seen a freshly ploughed field, harrowed and very fine, and you know when it rains on it, it gives you that sort of pimply ripply look ... that's what I called it, I called it a freshly ploughed field. It was dry as toast but it still had that appearance. But as you looked into the Sun it got very dark grey. Some rocks - House Rock - was basically black in colour. We had another - it was beyond our objective, and our range, called South Ray Crater, which in the photographs it looked as white as that [a creamy china cup] and some of that rock was blasted out and landed in our landing area so we were able to collect some of that, and that was, apparently, it was a whitish colour. But that's basically it. This tie [a kaleidoscopic splash of colour] is a thin section of Moonrock that's been polarised and so the minerals in the rock look like this, which is like a terrestrial rock, but we couldn't see it, we didn't have a magnifying glass, we couldn't see any colour in the rocks.

You took the geology very seriously.

That was the whole purpose, picking up rocks, and so we wanted to do a good job. John and I had at least one field trip a month we scheduled for us in our final two years and that usually was 2-3 days a month when we were all out in the field simulating lunar geology techniques - you can't simulate lunar geology but you can simulate the techniques that you were gonna use. So we had an expert of the area selected and he planned traverses knowing unique features of this specific area, and it was designed to see if we could pick up the uniqueness of this are And usually we were pretty good.

On your mission you were expecting a volcanic are

That's right. But specifically our landing area had been selected by this committee based a lot on photogeology of the intersection between a very viscous volcanic rock and a less viscous rock that had flowed out across the valley. Turned out they were incorrect, it was more breccias, igneous rocks, fine-grained but yet igneous and we had very few volcanics. So when John and I start describing this they get a little suspicious at first but then they get excited because they realised what we were describing was unusual, and the lunar highlands did have a variety versus the Tranquillity Base rocks.

Was there any disappointment that your ostensible objective to find volcanic features wasn't achieved?

No. No, it was more exciting to find something new. Hey, look what we're finding: this great stuff.

Do you keep up with lunar science now?

Some. I don't go to those lunar-planetary conferences. Lately I've been more interested in what's happening with Mars stuff. I'm on the NASA advisory council and we get briefed on these unmanned active missions and we're going on every quarter, and so, what we learned on Pathfinder and what we're learning from Lunar Prospector. Now that stuff's interesting ... I really can't believe we're going to find water up there, and ice underneath the regolith, but according to this radar they're getting the data back from it has the reflectivity of ice. I mean it's dry where we were.

The theory is that the ice was delivered by comet impacts on the Moon.

I mean to me an impact like that is vaporisation of everything.

And the Moon was said to be formed in a giant impact.

The original theories, you know, the big mare basins were meteorite impact, and the explosion released all that pressure and it began, it bubbled out and covered the mare with basalt basically. The Russians even years ago had some data from an Earth-based telescope where they saw some flashes of light - recent volcanic activity - I don't believe anyone in the US has ever seen anything. There's certainly still Moonquakes going on ... evidence of a plastic interior but if there's liquid magma down there I don't know. Unfortunately our heat flow experiment, it failed, we would had a good idea from the heat flow experiment.

One of you tripped over a cable.

John did unfortunately. We told them about that, we said 'You guys, this is a bunch of spaghetti around this surface station, we can't see where we're walking, how about making those cables so they flatten out?' But they were so fresh. In training we didn't have any trouble because we'd been using these cables over and over again, you'd unroll 'em and they'd lie flat. But these ones that were actual flight hardware had basically never been unrolled, and you'd unroll 'em, and they were just spaghetti, all curled up. You look down and basically the neck ring sits right here [before his chin] and you look down you're looking at your RCU, your camera, and you can't see your feet. It's easy to get tangled up.

John Young said he had difficulty making the seals on his suit the third time.

The last EVA, we had a little problem. It was gritty. It felt like - when we got back in after EVA number 2, you clean up the suit, you swab down the rubber grommets and the rubber connections and all of the metal connections and the locks, but even with all of that it began to get ... You look at our suits and they were covered with Moon dust by the end of the second EV So all that dust we helped track back in and it was hard to keep 'em clean. It was hard to get a couple of the locks and the quick-disconnects to work. It smelled like gunpowder. That smell went away but after the first EVA we got these loose bags of rock and the dust we tracked in, we took our helmets off, and [sniff] the initial smell, was a smell like gunpowder a little bit. But then you lost it, it all sort of faded away. The dry regolith picked up the oils on your hand and it got more like a graphite feel than dryness.

Shiny on your fingers...

Yeah, and it looked a lot like pencil lead, almost.

You slept in hammocks.

We did. If this is the front of the spacecraft [mimes the following] my hammock was across-ship, this way left and right, and so the left side was John's and my side was on the right and I put my hammock up - so my feet were over where he would normally stand. And it was about six inches off the floor. His hammock went fore and aft, front to back, and I could reach up and hit him in the rear end, it was within reach, but it was about two, three feet above me, and it anchored on either side of the instrument panel and the back bulkhead so his head was toward the back, he slept with his head back, and we were up there in our hammocks. He generally took of his liquid cooled garment. I kept mine on because it was just another thing to take on and off, and we changed out our urine bags and all of that stuff that you had to change. But generally I left my LCG on. Changed it once because I think we were supposed to wear it no more than two times, and we had a spare, so I put on the spare. Something fresh. It got pretty ripe.

You slept well.

Uh-huh. First night I had to take a pill. Two reasons. I was anticipating a master alarm they'd told us about - we had a reaction control system that was over-pressurising due to a regulator problem - so I was concerned at that, they said 'You're going to get a master alarm four hours into your rest period', or whatever, and I was on the headset. Plus your mind was just racing - all the excitement, after the landing - so I ended up taking a sleeping pill about an hour or so after I went to bed. That was just enough to get me in idle, to slow down. And then the next night I was basically just exhausted and I went right to sleep. I don't remember - I'd have to check my log because I logged all of that stuff, but I don't remember taking any more pills.

You could darken the cabin.

We had some opaque curtains that we put up and they had a good Velcro seal around 'em. And then you just turned the lights out and it's black as pitch in there. The only other light source was through the telescope, but we could put an opaque cover over that, so we could block out that light, so it was like night-time. You could hear the pumps running and the hum of converters, and the electrical power stuff, and you could hear the PCS, the environmental control system humming. But that was more of a sleep noise if anything ... MMM. It wasn't like a banging or intermittent sort of ... I did jump out of the hammock when that alarm went off though; it was loud, because I had the headset on. I reset it and cycled, whatever I had to do, get the pressure back to normal - that's the last one we had.

Any problems with low gravity?

No, the only problem with zero gravity that we had - I enjoyed it once I got used to it. First couple of hours I felt like I was going to get seasick but that went away. And then in lunar orbit the plan had been to land, to power down and go outside. So inside the spacesuit we had a gallon of liquid velcroed in sort of a hot water bottle arrangement and the valve came up inside the beck ring and it was over this side [the left side of his face] so to drink you'd reach over, grab hold and pull it to the right; that would open the valve and you'd take this liquid. And unfortunately, due to our long delay in landing, that proved to be a problem for me, because the liquid was floating in the bag and I had a leaky valve and every time I breathed it compressed the bag a little bit and out would pop a little drop of orange juice. It got to be a real messy sticky situation inside the helmet. It got on the visor, But before we landed I got permission to take off my helmet and I wiped it out and I remember I covered over that valve some way. But anyway I was able to clean up my visor so I could see clearly. A lot of that stuff ended up migrating up underneath my helmet and it was sticky, shampoo-like stuff but it was different then on, we decided not to use orange juice, we just used water in the bags. And once we got into gravity all that liquid hit the bottom and stay there.

You reached the greatest altitude of any lunar astronauts, didn't you?

Probably, yeah. I've heard conflicting stories and I gotta go check. But some of the data published today says that compared to Moon level, which is an imaginary datum around the Moon, we were 27,000 feet above that in the Highlands. Where Neil Armstrong landed versus where we landed my recollection was about 12,000 feet above where he landed. And basically the reference was the valley floor. And then we drove our car, if I remember it was 3 or 400 feet up the side of Stone Mountain to a place called Cinco Craters and that was one of our farthest geology stops - in fact the farthest on that second day. I think to the north was a little bit farther to North Ray Crater but we were basically in the centre of the valley and we had to go to the extreme. But to the north it was more of a gently rising - it was more of this [hand indicates an oscillating, shallow upward trend] and we never actually climbed what we called Smoky Mountain. But Stone Mountain we did go up and that was an experience. When we turned the car around and started back down I had to brace myself on the footboard. The car wasn't skidding but you felt like you were going to slide over the front, it was so steep. Going up, it felt the other way, like you were going out the back. But more dramatic is you were going down because you're looking - man this is steep.

What was the view like from that altitude?

Incredible. Probably the most vivid view of the lunar surface we had. You could see all the way across the Cayley Plain to Stone Mountain [probably means Smoky Mountain] to the north, North Ray Crater and South Ray Crater were very visible over to here out to the left, out to the west. Out to the horizon was just rolling terrain as far as you could see. Mostly light grey. You could see the Lunar Module sitting out the centre of the valley and our track leading up to us. It was very dramatic.

Where the craters lighter, darker than their surroundings?

It depended on the angle of the Sun. Early on the Sun angle was low, and one of our first objectives was called Plum Crater, and in the shadowed side it was very dark, but on the sunlit side of course it was bright. North Ray Crater was the same.

I've read of your dream of driving on the Moon ...

Yeah, that was a vivid dream. It happened on a geology trip in December of '71. I'd gotten the flu and I was 103 and 4 temperature, and I was .. anyway I had this dream. In my dream John and I were driving the Rover to the north, up to North Ray Crater, and as we came over one of the ridges there was a set of tracks out in front of us going east- west. And so we got excited, told Houston, and they said 'Well, follow the tracks.' You could tell by the tread marks that the vehicle was going to the east. So we turned right, to the east. And towards the eastern end of the valley we come upon this car, as we come over the ridge and there's this car which looked very similar to the Lunar Rover and there was two figures in it. So we radioed that we'd found this car, and we start top describe it, and they start to get excited, we're excited. So we turned the car, pointed and turned the TV on, and I ran over to the passenger side and I pulled up the visor and I was looking at myself. But it wasn't like a nightmare - it wasn't like you were dead - whoever it was looked like me but it wasn't me, I'm in this dream and I'm ok, and it wasn't like a premonition. I didn't wake up, it's just me. The other fellow looked like John. In reality if you would had ever discovered something like that you would have found some way to bring the body back. We'd have eliminated the rocks and brought these bodies back. But anyway we decided they weigh too much, we can't do that, so let's just take a little piece of this, a little piece of that, and so we got back, in the dream, we got all the way back to Earth and they analysed the data, and it was hundreds of thousand of years old, one of those science fiction things. And that was such a vivid dream that for a long time I didn't tell my wife about it, until actually I got back. But I remember when we got to lunar orbit and we could look down and first see our landing site, I looked down to see if I could see a set of tracks, going east to west ...

[After Apollo, Duke stayed three more years in NASA working on Space Shuttle designs. But he grew bored. 'The Shuttle was just a big space truck. It just wouldn't compare with flying to the Moon.' So he accepted an offer to go into business with a friend. 'I went from the Moon to money, if you will.']

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