American astronaut and engineer who was the Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971. One of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon, he orbited it 74 times in the Command Module Endeavour.
During Apollo 15’s return flight to Earth, Worden performed an extravehicular activity (EVA) to retrieve film cassettes from the exterior of the spacecraft, the Apollo command and service module. It was the first “deep space” EVA in history, at great distance from any planetary body. As of 2020, it remains one of only three such EVAs that have taken place, all during the Apollo program’s J-missions.
He was elected by NASA in April 1966. He served as command module pilot on the fourth manned lunar landing mission. While his fellow Apollo 15 astronauts, David R. Scott and James B. Irwin, carried out their mission on the surface of the moon, Worden was in complete solitude, orbiting alone in space.
The son of Merrill Bangs and Helen Crowell Worden, he attended Jackson High School in Jackson, Michigan. After graduation, he attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Finishing in the upper ten percent of his class, he received his Bachelor of Science degrees in Astronautical-Aeronautical Engineering and Instrumentation Engineering in 1955. From 1957-1961, he served as a fighter pilot and armament officer at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
After his selection by NASA, Worden served on the support crew for Apollo 9 and the back-up crew of Apollo 12; Worden made only one space flight, which took place from 26 July to 7 August 1971. He was the recipient of the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1971. On 1 September 1975, he resigned from NASA and retired from the Air Force with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He then entered the private sector where he worked for several different corporations including Ames Research Center in California and B.F. Goodrich Company, Aerospace Division.
His experiences in space prompted him to write a book of poetry, Hello Earth: Greetings from Endeavor (1974) and a children’s book, I Want to Know About a Flight to the Moon (1974). He later wrote another book on the subject of home energy conservation.
Worden married three times. Both his first marriage to Pamela Ellen Vanderbeek and his second marriage to Sandra Lee Wilder ended in divorce. His third wife was Jill Lee Hotchkiss who died in 2014. He had four children. He had two daughters from his first marriage, Merrill Ellen (16 January 1958) and Alison Pamela (6 April 1960). He had a stepdaughter from his second relationship, Stephanie (1968) and a daughter from his third union, Tamara Lynn.
Worden died of a stroke on 18 March 2020 at age 88 at an assisted living center in Sugar Land, Texas.
Link to Wikipedia biography