Al Worden

Alfred Merrill Worden was born on February 7, 1932, in Jackson, Michigan, and grew up on a family farm before charting a course into aviation. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and joined the U.S. Air Force, earning master's degrees in aerospace and instrumentation engineering and rising as a fighter and test pilot. Flying the F-86D Sabre and F-102 Delta Dagger, Worden trained at Britain's Empire Test Pilots' School and went on to instruct at the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School under Chuck Yeager. NASA selected him in its fifth astronaut group in 1966, and he was assigned as Command Module Pilot for Apollo 15, the mission that would give him one of the loneliest and most extraordinary vantage points in the history of exploration.

Apollo 15 launched on July 26, 1971, and while commander David Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin descended to the Hadley-Apennine site, Worden remained alone in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module Endeavour for roughly three days. Far from idle, he operated a bay of scientific instruments that mapped and photographed the Moon from above, and during his hours on the far side he was, by common reckoning, the most isolated human being who had ever lived, cut off even from radio contact with Earth. The mission's most singular moment came on the coast home: roughly 317,000 kilometers from Earth, Worden ventured outside to retrieve film cassettes from the service module's instrument bay, performing the first 'deep space' extravehicular activity in history. That roughly 40-minute spacewalk, conducted farther from Earth than any before or since, was the sole EVA of his single twelve-day, roughly 295-hour flight.

For his deep-space walk, Worden holds a place in the record books as the person to have performed a spacewalk at the greatest distance from Earth, a mark that still stands. After leaving NASA he pursued interests ranging from engineering and business to writing, publishing books and even children's poetry about spaceflight, and he became a familiar and generous ambassador at space and education events for decades. He devoted much of his later life to inspiring young people toward science and exploration, a fitting role for a man who had once flown alone around the Moon. Alfred Worden died on March 18, 2020, at the age of 88, remembered as the quietly reflective pilot who traveled to the edge of solitude and brought back the images that documented humanity's grandest expedition.