Irwin, James Benson

(b. 17 March 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; d. 8 August 1991 in Glenwood Springs, Colorado), astronaut and the eighth man to walk on the moon.

Irwin was the elder of two sons born to James Benson, a plumber, and Elsie Strebel, a homemaker. His family moved to Florida, Oregon, and then to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Irwin attended East High School. Irwin later wrote that his first date in high school was with the daughter of Utah’s governor. In 1951 he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and won a commission in the Air Force but not the test pilot’s training that he hoped to get. In December 1952 he married Mary Etta Wehling, a young woman that he had met in Texas, but the marriage ended in divorce in the summer of 1954. He endured years of persistence at desk jobs while hoping for another chance at test pilot training. Also in the 1950s, he did graduate work at the University of Michigan in aeronautical and instrument engineering, for which he was awarded a master’s degree in 1957.

After a training flight to California, Irwin met Mary Ellen Monroe in San Jose, and the two were married on 4 September 1959. There was a religious difference, as Mary was a devoted Seventh Day Adventist and Irwin was a Baptist. He proposed that their children’s religious training be decided by gender: their sons would go to his church and their daughters would go to hers. Over the next decade the couple had five children.

After three years as a project officer in Ohio, Irwin transferred to test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California, graduating in 1961. Irwin admitted that as a test pilot, he was something of a show-off. Flying five feet above railroad tracks in the face of oncoming trains and buzzing fishing boats were among the stunts to which he admitted performing on training flights. In 1963 he attended special training courses in aerospace studies.

Irwin first applied to be an astronaut in 1963 but was rejected twice before he was accepted in 1966, just a month away from the age limit. Irwin wrote that the first rejection was due to the fact that he was recovering from a serious airplane accident that occurred during a training flight, which had left him with two broken legs and a serious concussion. The second time the agency was more interested in scientists than test pilots. Irwin was a member of the support crew for the Apollo 10 mission and was the backup lunar module pilot on Apollo 12, but his only completed mission was Apollo 15, which took him to the lunar surface on 30 July 1971.

On the Apollo 15 mission, Irwin and Colonel David R. Scott were the first astronauts to get a sound sleep on the moon because they could take off their space suits while inside the lunar module. Their sixty-six-hour, fifty-four-minute stay on the moon’s surface set a record. They were the first astronauts to use a battery-operated moon vehicle known as the Lunar Rover, which operated at a speed of six miles per hour and allowed them to venture as many as three miles from the lunar excursion module, and collect 175 pounds of rock samples, including a rock that many believe to be the most important sample from any of the Apollo missions. This crystalline sample, known as the Genesis Rock, tested at 4.15 billion years of age—just 100 million years newer than the estimated age of the solar system. It was believed to be part of the original lunar crust. The third member of the crew, Major Alfred M. Worden, piloted the Apollo command module in lunar orbit while the other two astronauts were on the surface.

While religion had been important to him as a young man, Irwin later wrote that he had fallen away from the church up until the time that he went to the moon. Once there, he experienced a religious feeling of omniscience. He wrote that he knew what orders would be coming from Houston seconds before they arrived.

After returning from the moon, it was discovered that the three Apollo 15 astronauts had made a deal with a German stamp dealer to carry stamps to the moon for resale when they returned to earth. The astronauts were reprimanded and the stamps were confiscated. A decade later a court victory forced the government to return the stamps to the three astronauts. Irwin apologized for poor judgment, and left NASA and the Air Force on 1 July 1972. At the time of his retirement, he had attained the rank of colonel. A speech to 50,000 Christians at the Houston Astrodome launched Irwin on a second career as an evangelist. Shortly afterward he established the High Flight Foundation, a nonprofit religious organization, with the Baptist minister William H. Rittenhouse. Irwin traveled the country speaking in churches and raising money for his organization. In 1973 he wrote a book with William A. Emerson, Jr., on his religious and astronautics experiences, To Rule the Night: The Discovery Voyage of Astronaut Jim Irwin, which was revised several times to cover his experiences after leaving the program.

In his postflight years, Irwin led six expeditions to Mount Ararat to find Noah’s ark. In 1982, he suffered a fall that nearly killed him. Despite a flurry of publicity in 1984, when the party found a “boat-shaped formation,” no hard evidence of the ark’s existence was found by Irwin. His quest was ended by Turkish bureaucrats who thought the expeditions might be a cover for espionage, and in 1985 Irwin wrote with Monte Unger More Than an Ark on Ararat.

A thin and earnest-looking man with dark hair, known to friends as Jim, Irwin wrote that he resembled the character Alfalfa from the Our Gang film comedies. He later remarked that at five feet, eight inches, he was the shortest of the three astronauts on Apollo 15.

During the grueling days on the moon, Irwin and Scott had both experienced irregular heart rhythms. The astronauts were unaware of this problem, although it was being monitored at mission control. Less than two years later, at the age of forty-three, Irwin suffered a serious heart attack while playing handball. He suffered a second major heart attack in 1986 while jogging. A third heart attack was the cause of death in 1991, making him the first of the twelve lunar landing astronauts to die. He died at Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Irwin’s autobiography, To Rule The Night (1973), is a good source of information. There is also extensive coverage of Irwin and the Apollo 15 mission in A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin (1994). An obituary is in the New York Times (11 Aug. 1991).

Terry L. Ballard