Mormon on the Moon: Don Lind's Cancelled Apollo Flight

Mormons in the sciences held a fascination for me while I was an active member of the church, and they still continue to interest me, though often for different reasons. Astronaut Don Lind is one of those interesting characters in Mormon scientific history. On course to join the elite few astronauts that have set foot on the moon, Lind always seemed to get the timing wrong. Just as he was preparing to make history both for NASA and his faith, Apollo 20 was canceled, sending him a course that bounced him between projects while other astronauts blasted off in his place.

But what would Apollo 20 — the mission that would have seen the first practicing Mormon set foot on another world — have looked like?

*

Born in Midvale, Utah to an active Mormon family, Don Lind’s aerospace career didn’t start until he had completed a two-year stint as a missionary. Returning home, and with the Korean War in full swing, Lind was called up by the draft board to serve in the infantry. With some expert maneuvering, he got himself exempted from the army and put into naval aviation flying jet planes off the USS Hancock. Naval aviation was a common starting place for the first generation of American astronauts. When the call went out for astronaut candidates, Lind applied. At the time, he was working on a physics degree at the University of Utah. 

NASA selected its astronauts in groups. Group 1 was the Mercury Seven. Lind applied to Group 3 but was turned down. Group 4 came around. Earlier astronauts were chosen for their flight experience, but Group 4 was selected based on academic experience and would become the first scientist-astronauts. Unfortunately for Lind, he was a few months too old to apply. Finally, with his application for Group 5, NASA took Lind in. Alongside him in Group 5 were some superstar astronauts: Charlie Duke, Bruce McCandless II, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert.

Chosen in 1966, Group 5 was training while the Apollo program was in full swing. The general architecture had been solidified by this point. A crew of three would lift off from Florida and boost into a moon-intersecting orbit. On the outbound coast, the crew in the Command and Service Module (CSM) would turn their ship around and extract the Lunar Module (LM) from the spent upper stage of their gigantic Saturn V rocket. Once in lunar orbit, the mission Commander (CDR) and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) would board the LM and descend to the moon’s surface while the Command Module Pilot (CMP) would stay with the CSM in orbit. After their lunar excursion, the crew in the LM would lift off the surface, rendezvous with and board the CSM, and then the three astronauts would ride the CSM back to Earth. Don Lind would be an LMP.

Don Lind, KSL TV

This mission architecture had a lot of moving parts, so NASA developed a staged testing plan where each mission was built on the previous one. They assigned each mission a letter designation from A to G. The A mission was an unmanned launch of the Saturn V and CSM, flown as Apollo 4 and 6. The G mission was the big one — the lunar landing, flown as Apollo 11. In between those, there were test flights of a crewed CSM in orbit, a circumlunar flight, and a lunar orbit dress rehearsal.

But the missions didn’t stop with the G mission, continuing to the H and J missions. The G mission, though epochal, was limited in its goals — they really only wanted to touch down. The H missions were precision landings. Apollo 12, for example, targeted a landing site within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe NASA had landed in 1967. The crews for these missions reflected the precision landing goal; they were all test pilots or naval aviators. One of them, Alan Shepard, was America’s first astronaut. 

That’s not to say that the scientific goals of the missions were secondary; the geologists still wanted lots of lunar samples. Landing itself was a scientific endeavor, with each LM incorporating little changes and upgrades from the last mission. However, the crew were not scientists, an issue that came to a head on Apollo 14. Alan Shepard was the commander, and before the flight, the geologists noted that he did not seem interested in training for collecting rock samples. Shepard was a test pilot by trade, and you can get the sense that the precision landing was what interested him the most. 

Shepard and LMP Mitchell landed near Cone Crater but never reached the rim during their EVAs. Lunar topography was notoriously tricky at ground level, and the exhaustion of operating space suits forced the crew to turn back before they got to their destination. They collected samples but did not properly mark and catalog them, leaving the Earthbound geologists unable to figure out where the samples had come from. Shepard did make sure to hit golf balls on the surface, which added only insult to the geologists’ injury: it seemed like Shepard was more interested in playing games than properly collecting rocks.

Apollo 14 was the last of the H missions. The next mission type — the J mission — would rectify the issues from Apollo 14. From the start, these missions were designed around scientific objectives. The LM was souped up to carry more weight and stay on the surface longer. Part of that extra weight was the iconic Lunar Rover, saving the astronauts from the backbreaking work of traveling around the lunar surface on foot. Now it was the scientist-astronauts’ time to shine. Lead scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt, himself a geology PhD, led the prep for these missions. NASA planned to fly six of these missions, Apollo 15 through 20. Schmitt would fly as LMP on Apollo 17 and then Lind’s time would come on Apollo 20. That is until the budget ax came swinging.

**

We do not know exactly who the crew would have been for the mission. Based on crew rotations the crew for Apollo 20 would likely have been:

• Commander Stuart Roosa, the CMP for Apollo 14

• Lunar Module Pilot Don Lind, first spaceflight

• Command Module Pilot Jack Lousma, first spaceflight

Apollo 20 would have had Lind take the lead on the scientific objectives. The Lunar Module would have been LM-14, one of the souped-up versions that came equipped with a Lunar Rover. The astronauts were assigned CSM-115A (the ship's numbers were assigned in ascending order, each spacecraft was custom-built) with Saturn V number SA-515, the seventeenth Saturn V contracted, and fifteenth in the main mission sequence. By this point, these ships would have presumably been the highest performing of all the flights, incorporating all the changes and lessons from the previous missions.

The target landing sight was still up for consideration before the flight was canceled. At first, Apollo 20 was set to land within Copernicus Crater. This massive crater is 93 km in diameter, big enough that the collision projected a mountain peak in the center and launched ejecta around the lunar landscape, punching a series of secondary carters in the regolith. The heat and power from the explosion pulverized the moon rocks into a cloud of fine dust and sprayed them in a shining ray pattern around the impact zone. Mission planners wanted to land a crew within the crater, close enough to the middle for the astronauts to sample rocks from the mountain peaks. But early in Apollo 20’s planning the landing zone was given to Fred Haise’s Apollo 19 crew. Had 19 flown, it would have been the most spectacular landing approach of the program, even beating Apollo 15’s descent between the mountains of Hadley Rille.

Copernicus Crater (in the background) photographed by Apollo 12.

After Apollo 19 got Copernicus Crater, mission planners gave Apollo 20 the Marius Hills. The geology of this region is notable for its winding hill systems. The Hills were formed early in the Moon’s geologic history by sinusoidal tubes of lava snaking their way under the surface. These hollow features sometimes collapse in on themselves, opening up skylights to the interior of the hills. The Marius Hills had been a target of interest since before the first lunar landings — NASA even planned to use jetpacks to explore the region until cooler heads prevailed and they stuck with the Lunar Rover.

Marius Hills photographed by Lunar Orbiter 2.

Marius Hills was the safer option for Apollo 20. If NASA relaxed its safety margins and really let it ride they could land at Tycho Crater. You can see this one with your naked eye in the lower right quadrant of the moon. Tycho, like Copernicus, is huge. The crater itself is 85 km across with rays that extend out 1500 km. These bright white rays make it easy to locate the crater. NASA already had experience landing at Tycho Crater with the Surveyor 7 probe. Science fiction fans will recognize the crater from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the monolith on the moon (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly - 1) was buried inside the crater.

Tycho Crater, center bottom, from Wikipedia.

Don Lind would have been the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 20, responsible for the onboard systems of the Lunar Module. Once in a selenocentric orbit, Roosa and Lind would have undocked from the Command Module and flown to the landing zone. During the landing, Lind would monitor the module’s systems as Roosa looked out the front windows and flew the landing. Although given the title of pilot, the LMP was more of a systems engineer. Lind planned to use his physics training to run experiments and set up equipment. After that, the crew would lift off, rendezvous with the Command Module and head back home. Had the mission flown, Lind would have had the honor of being the first and only practicing Mormon to set foot on the moon.

***

Apollo 20 was not to be — the missions after Apollo 11 were always on the chopping block. Armstrong’s landing was already the fulfillment of Kennedy’s vision and with the Soviets already beaten, political and public support for later missions was more difficult to obtain. 

Thus, United States policy was shifting away from the Apollo program. Even as the Apollo program was running, NASA was considering the next steps into the frontier. The Nixon administration tagged the Space Shuttle as the United States’s next launch system and every extra Apollo mission took time and resources away from the development of the ship. NASA administrator James Fletcher, himself a practicing Mormon, was eager to push the agency into a new era.

Internal NASA risk assessment was proving that the agency had been extremely lucky so far with its missions. Despite increased safety procedures after the Apollo 1 fire, the program had its fair share of near misses, the most well-known being Apollo 13’s. Apollo astronauts were working on borrowed time, each mission bringing the program closer to an inevitable loss of life during a mission. Landing on the moon is, after all, a dangerous business. Astronaut John Young learned that NASA's risk assessment put the chances of flying missions after Apollo 16 without a fatality as low as 20%. Young believed this low chance of success left NASA administrators eager to cancel Apollo 18-20. 

Externally, budgetary criticism dogged NASA, and the Apollo program went under the ax. Apollo 20 was the first mission to go, even as the Saturn V, CSM, and Lunar Module were under construction. Deke Slayton, head of Flight Crew Operations, realized there wouldn’t be a flight for Lind and transferred him over to the Apollo Applications (AAP), a program to develop new non-lunar missions using Apollo hardware. The transfer infuriated Lind. Not only would he not be flying to the moon, but he had been training as the Lunar Module Pilot, something AAP had no use for. Fostering acrimony towards NASA, Lind began complaining about everything related to the Apollo program, a move that quickly burned through his goodwill in the agency.

No amount of complaining can fight the budget ax, but it’s not like AAP was a boring program. NASA engineers proposed dozens of exciting projects, the stuff of wild imagination: a manned Venus flyby trip, massive crewed space telescopes, giant parabolic communication dishes, and a manned space station. Ultimately only two mission proposals were chosen: the space station and a joint docking flight with the Soviet Union. 

The space station, Skylab, was built from the upper stage of a Saturn rocket with the fuel tanks swapped out for crew living space. On May 14, 1973, it launched into orbit. A year earlier Apollo 17 had made the last lunar landing for NASA — Apollo 18 and 19 had been canceled not long after Apollo 20. Skylab marked the start of a new era and the end of manned lunar landings. 

CSM-115A’s current location, from Wikipedia.

Despite being part of the Skylab program, Lind still did not fly. He was scheduled to fly on Skylab 5, which got canceled. NASA wanted to use his Saturn V, SA-515, to launch a second Skylab station. That got canceled too. The rocket was broken up and the components were sent to museums. CSM-115A was mostly complete when the mission was canceled and now sits on top of the Saturn V display at the Johnson Space Center. Nobody knows where LM-14 ended up. Lind would not fly until 1985 on the Space Shuttle Challenger. Six months after his mission and safe return home, the orbiter exploded during liftoff. Lind died in 2022.

Lind’s story is ultimately one of being in the right place at the wrong time. Or maybe NASA was trying to cover up the existence of Moon Quakers.