Genevieve and I had the great honor of sitting up front with Rusty Schweickart (the first Apollo Lunar Module Pilot) and his delightful family. When I showed him my vintage Lunar Module cufflinks, he lit up and showed me that he was wearing Command Module cufflinks, and exclaimed “Dock, Dock”… and so we executed a inter-cuff rendezvous!
Rusty thanked McDivitt on stage, for the first time, for authorizing his EVA. This was a judgement call because Rusty threw up on the mission, and were that to reoccur during the EVA, it could be life threatening. We also learned that Borman threw up on Apollo 8, but the Apollo 8 crew hid that from NASA at the time, and so Rusty’s illness on Apollo 9 was seen as an anomaly, dashing his hopes to land on the moon on a subsequent mission (as David Scott, center here, did on Apollo 15).
“We worked together more than any other astronaut team. We were the backup crew for Apollo 1, and then flew together for Apollo 9. We get along pretty good, except for Rusty being a liberal.” — Commander Jim McDivitt
“The PLSS backpack check went perfectly. The next use was by Neil Armstrong on the moon. If anything on the Apollo 9 mission had failed, we would not have hit Kennedy’s deadline for landing on the moon.” — David Scott
“We also tested the lifeboat mode of the Lunar Module, used during the Apollo 13 rescue.” — Rusty
“The Lunar Module is my favorite spacecraft” — Gene Kranz
“There were no tracking satellites yet, so we had to continually reestablish ground contact as we orbited, and so we did not get much sleep” —Jim McDivitt
Update: I found video clips of their Apollo 9 memories and perspectives on the future.
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