06/12/2026
Idea Of Going To Moon Boggles Haise A Little
By Paul Recer
AP Aerospace Writer
SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) — Fred W. Haise Jr., a trained three years for space, but the idea of soon setting foot on the moon still boggles his mind a bit.
“I’m not sure it’s really hit me yet,” says the 36-year-old civilian astronaut. “On a few occasions I’ve awakened with a little sense of butterflies from maybe a realization that it’s really coming true.”
On his first flight into space, Haise will spend up to 10 hours exploring the rugged highlands of the moon. He is the lunar module pilot of Apollo 13. He and astronaut James A. Lovell Jr. will make man’s riskiest landing yet on the moon while the third Apollo 13 crewman, Thomas K. Mattingly II, orbits overhead.
Haise is a Biloxi, Miss., native who as a youth had no intention of becoming a pilot. Haise wanted to be a journalist.
He wrote sports stories for his home town newspaper while a high school pupil and then went to college determined to become a reporter.
At Perrinston Junior College in Mississippi, Haise wrote for the school paper and took journalism courses. But then he graduated at 18½ and realized he was eligible for the military draft.
Instead of waiting to be taken, he joined the Naval Air Cadet program “because it was the only program I could go into at age and get a commission and become an officer.”
“It began to worry me near the end of three or four months of preflight training when all at once I realized that I was actually going to have to fly an airplane as part of that goal of getting a commission,” Haise said. “I’d never flown before in my life. I’d had no inclination toward flying prior to that time.”
But Haise found that flying gave him “a lot of enjoyment and self-satisfaction.”
When Haise received his wings, he took his commission in the Marine Corps instead of the Navy and spent 2½ years as a fighter pilot at Cherry Point, N.C.
The Marine Corps gave him his discharge in 1956 and Haise, by now thoroughly hooked on aviation, decided to go back to school and earn a degree in aeronautical engineering.
He entered the University of Oklahoma and joined the Oklahoma Air National Guard so he could fly on weekends.
In 1959, Haise graduated with honors and immediately accepted a job with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a research pilot.
Haise moved to Cleveland to work at the Lewis Research Center and transferred to the Ohio Air National Guard.
When the Berlin crisis arose in 1961, his National Guard unit was activated and Haise spent 10 months in the Air Force as a tactical fighter pilot.
After his second discharge from military service, NASA transferred him to the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.
Haise graduated as the outstanding student in his class and within months was transferred again, this time into the astronaut corps.
He was one of 19 pilots selected as astronauts in 1966.
Another was Mattingly. Haise is married to the former Mary Grant, a Biloxi girl he started dating when he was in high school. They married in 1954.
His wife is expecting their fourth child in June, only a few weeks after the post-Apollo 13 quarantine is scheduled to end on May 8.
The astronaut’s mother, a widow who still lives in Biloxi, said the family is as excited about the new baby as they are Haise’s moon flight.
“We all want a girl,” she said.
The Haises’ three other children are Mary, 14; Frederick, 11; and Stephen, 8.
Stephen, says the astronaut, is stunned by the idea of his father going to the moon, but Haise thinks it’s “just a function of his age.”
“It’s like back when I was a kid at that age, the serials on Saturday morning at the theaters were the big thing,” says Haise. “I was wanting to be a cowboy or a Buck Rogers or whatever was on during that time.”
Haise and Mattingly have often friends since well before they were astronauts. They were pleased to be named to the astronaut group that roomed together for six weeks before Haise brought his family to Houston.
Occasionally, says Haise, he and Mattingly gang up on Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander, who the rookie spacemen call “the old man.”
“We two rookies sort of take every opportunity there is to show up the space veteran,” Haise says.
