An exploding fuel cell took that opportunity away from him and he barely made it home alive. He was backup LM pilot again for Apollo 11, then got his chance to be the sixth man to walk on the Moon as LM pilot on Apollo 13. He joined Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 8 backup crew (Apollo 8 was supposed to be Apollo 9, the second test of a LM in Earth orbit, but schedule slippages in the LM left that crew without a LM to test for several months, so NASA moved it up in the flight sequence and sent its crew on the first flight around the Moon instead). That made him a natural choice to fly a Lunar Module (LM, pronounced “lem”) on an early Apollo flight. In 1966 he was selected as a NASA astronaut, and after initial training went to work shepherding the first lunar modules through their development and engineering tests, living for months in a trailer next to the Grumman test facility on Long Island. He rubbed shoulders with Chuck Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base when he went through test pilot school there. He graduated flight school too late for the war, and went on to a typical Cold War series of deployments in fighter and attack aircraft, then went to engineering school, and from there to NASA. ![]() He discovered his lifelong passion for flying on his first flight in a naval trainer. He joined the Navy during the Korean War, and thought his best route to becoming an officer was through the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. Like so many other astronauts of the Apollo era, Haise had a stereotypical middle-class boyhood, growing up in a small town in Mississippi, attending a local junior college. Fred Haise is one of the last to tell his story, and since he was the lunar module pilot on the ill-fated Apollo 13, it’s quite a tale. Of the 24 men who flew to the Moon in Project Apollo, almost all the still-surviving astronauts have published autobiographies. ![]() Title: Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey
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