It must have been hard for Alan Shepard to wait almost ten years for another space flight and then have the responsibility of the rest of the Apollo program on his hands. It must have been equally as difficult for Deke to see Alan fly and not be up there himself.

Shepard’s responsibility to the Apollo program that was losing support after the Apollo 13 failure was best stated by Moon Shot:

“So Apollo 14, Shepard knew, had to be better than merely a successful mission. It had to be a superb effort to keep Apollo afloat.”

-Moon Shot by Shepard, Slayton, Benedict, and Barbee

I had been previously unaware of the problems that Apollo 14 faced. I did not know how much trouble they had docking Kitty Hawk, the command module, to Antares, the lunar module. They also had trouble with their abort program kicking in unasked for and their landing radar not registering for quite some time until they reset the circuit breaker. “The rule book said, ‘No radar, you don’t land. You abort.’” Still, by how the authors paint the picture, I am convinced that Alan Shepard had the gusto and would have landed that lunar module without the landing radar.