Hello Earth: Greetings From Endeavour

by Alfred Merrill Worden

Throughout history man has speculated about life on the moon, but not until now has he been able to travel to the moon and speculate about life on earth! What is it like to travel over a million miles in space, to view the entire earth as a small floating sphere in an immense universe? Alfred M. Worden was the pilot of Endeavour, the command-module for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. During the nearly 67 hours his fellow astronauts Scott and Irwin were on the moon, he was in complete solitude, floating in space. The overwhelming experience of being alone in the universe gave him a profound feeling of rejuvenation. That experience changed his life. Full of insight, these remarkable poems reveal the feeling man behind the astronaut image. Worden writes of rebirth at 39, of religious experience, the bitterness of public hero-worship, the loss of love, the incomparable joy of voyaging in space, and now the immensity of his solitude and distance from homemade global arguments and politics seem trivial. Indeed, Worden’s experience has changed his entire view of reality on earth, and he shares it beautifully in ‘Hello Earth; Greetings from Endeavour’.

Genres: Space

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Louise Pare-Lobinske · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a space program enthusiast and an amateur (although published) poet, this book was a natural.

At first, my judgement of Col. Worden's poetry skills was more or less, "anyone in my poetry group could write poetry of this quality." But the better stuff does eclipse us. (Hey, we're pretty good.) And in any event, Worden's perspective is what we're after here. And in that, he does not disappoint. It's wonderful to read poetry written by an astronaut.

The book does consist of a lot of NASA photographs, both of Worden and of various spacecraft, showing scenes from Apollo 15, the mission on which he served as command module pilot. In fact, without counting, I would say it's probably half photos and half poetry.

Who cares? It's astronaut poetry!

[Brian Laslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not often you get to read astronaut poetry, but Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden composed these shortly after his return to earth...I think it explains the Apollo program and space flight in a way that no narrative ever could.

[Jo Hoffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating this was hard. Should I judge this like a work of poetry from a poet or a report from an astronaut. Either way it fell short, but there is something important about describing space like this. I enjoyed the narrative rise and fall of the poems