Selection In 1963, Worden put his name in for selection to
NASA Astronaut Group 3 but was told that though NASA was interested in him even without test pilot experience, he was ruled out by his pending orders to Farnborough, with which the agency could not interfere. Worden thought he would be beyond NASA's age limit for new astronauts when next free to consider such a career option, and so believed he would never be an astronaut. NASA's recruitment for its
fifth group of astronauts took place in 1965, at the same time the Air Force was seeking to recruit for its program, the
Manned Orbiting Laboratory, with qualified pilots in the Air Force free to apply for either or both. Believing, as proved correct, that the Air Force program would never get off the ground, Worden chose to apply only to NASA, which he did in September 1965. Worden wrote in his first book of memoirs that "professionally, I figured it couldn't get any better than that. Even being a test pilot couldn't compare with being an astronaut and making a spaceflight." Under the selection criteria, candidates had to be born on or after December 1, 1929, raising the age limit from 34 to 36. Worden, aged 34 when selected, was one of the 19 candidates chosen by NASA in April 1966, together with his ARPS classmates
Stuart Roosa and
Charles Duke; four others were previous graduates. Having been urged by NASA superiors to have plenty of astronauts available for the many hoped-for
Apollo and
Apollo Applications missions, Director of Flight Crew Operations
Deke Slayton, the astronauts' supervisor, hired all the Group5 candidates he considered qualified. Budget cuts and the diversion of funds to other programs meant there would be relatively few flights, and Worden perceived some resentment at the new intake from more senior astronauts as the competition for spots on Apollo missions intensified.
Early assignments On October 3, 1966,
Chief Astronaut Alan Shepard assigned Worden and four other Group5 selectees,
Ken Mattingly,
Jack Swigert,
Ronald Evans and
Vance Brand, to the astronaut team dealing with the BlockII
command module (CM), headed by
Pete Conrad. The BlockI command modules were intended only for Apollo's initial Earth-orbit flights, and in fact never flew in space on a crewed mission; the BlockII modules would go to lunar orbit. The following month, Worden was assigned as part of the support crew for the second crewed Apollo mission, along with
Fred Haise and
Edgar Mitchell. Apollo support crews were to do the things that the prime and backup crews did not have time for. Worden took the assignment as an indication that NASA management, including Slayton, was pleased with him. Worden was at
North American Aviation's plant in
Downey, California, where the BlockII command module was being built, on January 27, 1967, when he received an urgent phone call from Slayton, informing him that all three
Apollo 1 astronauts had been killed in a fire at the launch pad, where a test was under way. Worden informed the other astronauts on-site and they flew back to Houston. He was especially saddened by the fact that the three accomplished pilots who were to make up the first Apollo space crew died on the ground, rather than flying. During the complete safety review that followed, Worden spent much of his time in Downey working on the BlockII CM, seeking (with other CM specialists such as Swigert) to remove potential combustibles and other hazards. After the pause, he remained on the support crew for the second Apollo mission, which was to include testing of the CM and
Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit. This mission was initially designated
Apollo 8. There were delays in the development of the LM and in August 1968, NASA official
George Low proposed that if
Apollo 7 in October went well, Apollo8 should go to lunar orbit without a LM, so as not to hold up the program. The Earth-orbit test would become
Apollo 9. The crew who had been scheduled for Apollo8, led by
Jim McDivitt, became the Apollo9 crew, and Worden became part of that mission's support crew along with Mitchell and
Jack Lousma. Apollo9's CMP had been
David Scott, Apollo15 was originally scheduled to be an H mission, with a limited stay of 33 hours on the Moon and two moonwalks, but the cancellation of two Apollo missions in mid-1970 meant the flight would be a Jmission, with three moonwalks during its three-day stay, the first
Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), and in the service module (SM) a suite of scientific instruments to probe the Moon. It was Worden's job, as his crewmates walked on the Moon, to operate these devices. For the first time, observations from lunar orbit were made a formal mission objective, and, like the CMPs of
Apollo 13 and
Apollo 14, Worden worked with geologist
Farouk El-Baz during training, learning to interpret what he saw as he flew over the mountains and deserts of the western United States. Worden found El-Baz to be an enjoyable and inspiring teacher. He also accompanied his crewmates on geology training which took them to places where they walked over terrain resembling the Moon's, including sites in Hawaii, Mexico, and Iceland. He trained for the possibility he might have to return without Scott and Irwin or rescue them if the LM launched into the wrong orbit. When he was not busy with that or other training, Worden spent much of his time at North American Rockwell's facilities at Downey, supervising the construction and testing of Apollo15's command and service module (CSM). Before leaving on his mission, Worden appeared on the children's television show ''
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood''. He felt NASA needed to do more to engage children, members of a generation whose support would one day be necessary for the space program.
Fred Rogers was planning to do shows on parents going away on trips, and felt Worden's appearance would mesh well with that. Worden appeared on the show before going to the Moon and answered several children's questions: he wrote down some others and took them with him on the spacecraft, promising to think about them on the trip, and after the mission, appeared again on the program to answer them. Apollo 15 took off on its lunar journey from KSC on July 26, 1971. Once
trans-lunar injection had been achieved, placing the spacecraft on a trajectory towards the Moon,
explosive cords separated the CSM,
Endeavour, from the booster as Worden operated the CSM's thrusters to push it away. Worden then maneuvered the CSM to dock with the LM,
Falcon, which was mounted on the end of the
S-IVB (the booster that had supplied the thrust for TLI), and the combined craft was then separated from the S-IVB by explosives.
Lunar orbit After the mission arrived in lunar orbit, Scott and Irwin entered
Falcon while Worden remained in
Endeavour. When the two craft failed to separate to allow
Falcon and its crew to prepare for the Moon landing, Worden went into the docking tunnel and reconnected a loose
umbilical, fixing the problem. Worden, in
Endeavour, was able to listen as Scott and Irwin descended toward and landed on the Moon, but was unable to spot
Falcon until a later orbit, though he passed over the targeted site at the moment of planned landing. He had executed a burn of the CSM's main engine, the
Service Propulsion System, to send
Endeavour from the lower orbit in which the two craft separated, to an orbit of by in preparation for his scientific work. {{quote box | width = 24em | align = right Worden began what amounted to a separate mission from his crewmates, with a separate
CAPCOM and mission controllers. His main tasks while alone in lunar orbit were photography, and operating the instruments in the SIM bay. Filling previously unused space in the service module, the SIM bay contained a
gamma-ray spectrometer, mounted on the end of a boom, an
X-ray spectrometer and a
laser altimeter, which failed part way through the mission. A stellar camera and a metric camera together comprised the mapping camera, which was complemented by a
panoramic camera, derived from the long-classified
Corona spy technology. Also present were an
alpha particle spectrometer, which could be used to detect evidence of
lunar volcanism, and a
mass spectrometer, also on a boom in the hope it would be unaffected by contamination from the ship. He supplemented the photographs with verbal descriptions; ''Endeavour's
inclined orbit caused it to pass over features never seen before in detail as Worden watched. Each time Endeavour's
orbit passed from the far side of the Moon to a view of the Earth and renewed communications with Mission Control, Worden greeted it with the words, "Hello, Earth. Greetings from Endeavour''", expressed in different languages. Worden and El-Baz had come up with the idea, and had collaborated on translations. Busy as he was, he still had time to savor the experience. Knowing he was unlikely to come back to the Moon, Worden was determined to absorb the entire experience. He did not need all the rest periods for sleep, and spent part of that time in contemplation of what was outside his craft, and what it all meant. Through
Endeavour's windows, he watched the Moon, the Earth, and the starshe could see many more stars, and more intensely, than Earthbound observers. He concluded it was naive to believe Earth had the only life in the universe, and he wondered if space exploration was part of humanity's survival instinct to avoid being trapped in a single solar system. Worden has been listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records as the "most isolated human being" during his time alone in
Endeavour. Orbiting the Moon alone, he was at his greatest distance from Scott and Irwin in
Falcon, away from any other human beings. He later stated he enjoyed his "three wonderful days in a spacecraft all by myself", and that he was used to being alone as a
fighter pilot.
Endeavour completed 74 lunar orbits prior to
trans-Earth injection (TEI), the burn to take the astronauts home. On the way back to Earth, Worden did a spacewalk to retrieve film from the spacecraft's cameras. and reported his personal observations of the general condition of equipment housed there. The astronauts stated their intent had been to set up trust funds for their children, and that they intended that the covers not be sold or otherwise publicized until the
Apollo program was over and they had left NASA and the Air Force. Astronauts were forbidden by standards of conduct issued in 1967 from using their position for financial gain for themselves or other people. In addition to the 398 carried by Scott, Worden took 144 covers into space, at the instigation of
F. Herrick Herrick, a retired movie director and a stamp collector. These had, as required, been approved by Slayton, who did not ask where Worden had gotten them. After the flight Worden sent 100 of them to Herrick, who sold some. These sales prompted an inquiry to NASA, alerting Slayton, who warned Worden to avoid further commercialization. Worden wrote an angry letter to Herrick, stating that the sales were putting his career at risk. The 100 covers Scott sent to West Germany were put on sale to Sieger's customers in late 1971 at a price of about $1,500 each. After receiving the agreed payments, the astronauts returned them, and in the end, took no compensation. Slayton heard about the Sieger covers, and he spoke with Worden and Irwin; both referred him to Scott. Slayton, knowing Worden was a stamp collector, became suspicious that he had arranged both deals, and this led to repeated phone calls asking for details. In April 1972, Slayton met with Scott and Worden and learned from them that unauthorized covers had been flown. Worden remembered what hurt the most about that meeting was having disappointed Slayton, a man he greatly admired. The Apollo 15 crew had been recycled as the backup crew for
Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission, as using fully-trained astronauts was easier than training a fresh backup crew who would have no prospect of being the prime crew on a later lunar Apollo mission. But in May 1972, as Worden remembered, Slayton called him while Worden was preparing for geological training, instructing him to clear out his office and go back to the Air Force. Slayton had prevailed on Irwin to retire, letting NASA assign a new backup crew. Worden did not clear out his office but began looking into ways of staying at NASA, even if outside the Astronaut Corps. Slayton said at the time that he had to reduce the number of astronauts, that Irwin and Mitchell were eligible for retirement from the military, and the astronaut he could most easily do without after that was Worden; the postal covers incident had played a part in that determination. The matter became public in June 1972 and the three astronauts were reprimanded for poor judgment on July 10. Concerned about commercialization of Apollo15, the
Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences set a hearing for August 3, 1972; among those who testified were the astronauts, Slayton, NASA Administrator
James C. Fletcher and Deputy Administrator
George Low. Slayton wrote of the astronauts' testimony, "they came clean and took their lumps but I was still pretty pissed off about it." This still left Worden trying to find a job at NASA; he testified before the committee that he had been told he could stay if he came to an agreement with whoever he was to work for. He found an ally in Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight
Dale D. Myers, who helped Worden get a position at the
Ames Research Center in California. According to Low, NASA was aware that the reprimands made the astronauts essentially unpromotable in the Air Force, which would not have jobs for them worth their abilities, and it was decided that though the crew was removed from flight status, they would be given positions elsewhere in NASA. At Ames, Worden served as a Senior Aerospace Scientist, and from 1973 to 1975, chief of the Systems Study Division. He retired from NASA and the Air Force, with the rank of colonel, in 1975. In his first book of memoirs, Worden took responsibility for making "a decision that fucked up my life completely, utterly, and irreversibly", but felt Scott did not take enough of the blame on himself. In a second book, published posthumously in 2021, Worden expressed his belief that Slayton would not have fired him from the Astronaut Corps if given the chance, but that Slayton's superior,
Christopher C. Kraft, wanted him fired.
Apollo 10 commander
Thomas P. Stafford wrote an epilogue to Worden's first book and stated, "Al should not have his efforts degraded by the decades-old, short-lived publicity surrounding some postal covers carried on board." Worden later stated, "We probably didn't do the smartest thing in the world, but we didn't do anything that was illegal. We didn't do anything that anybody else hadn't done, but the consequences were rather severe to us." == Post-NASA activities ==