Moondust (31 page)

I give up and return to nuts and bolts, and the irony is that only in this realm will Young start to betray any kind of animation or emotion, even if it is mostly still directed toward an inanimate object (the wall). Among the people who debate these things, there's a heated dispute about whether a giant new leap to Mars might be a better idea than going back to the
Moon, which we've already been to and abandoned. As we sit here, this debate seems as useful as discussing whether Martha Stewart or Skippy the kangaroo would make a better president of the United States. Would Young like to go to Mars, I ask? He smiles.

“Well, there's a lot of people'd like to send me to Mars and leave me there, but I think the Moon is the place right now.”

A flick of the eyes. Lightning smile. I know who he means: he means the NASA pencilnecks who are forever grinding their teeth at his implied accusations of timidity and lack of vision – sentiments which most space enthusiasts heartily agree with, but which are impolitic of him to express so openly. As associate director of the Johnson Space Center, Young has been supporting the dissident dream of a return to the Moon since the mid-Eighties. From the beginning, this involved sticking his neck out and annoying the brass, because in official circles the idea was considered preposterous, utopian – and of course it was. What everyone has realized in the intervening years is that, unless something extraordinary happens, taxpayers are not going to foot the bill again; that if it's ever to happen, it's going to have to pay its own way. Thus, Young is compelled to make a rational case for returning (mining, energy, protection from asteroids), but there's an ardour in his arguments that hints at something more than cold reason. One of his former colleagues commented that the 1960s was like “a decade from the twenty-first century transported to the twentieth,” and to me it seems that the further away Apollo gets, the stranger it looks. I wonder whether his regret that it stopped so abruptly has increased, or turned to resignation? A hint of something like feeling, of
wistfulness,
enters his voice as he says mildly:

“Well, I really thought by now we'd have a base on the Moon. But all the big guys decided to quit. I think they were scared of it 'cos it's pretty high risk and they didn't think what they'd get from it would be worthwhile.”

Then he seems to relax as he turns to the Moon he experienced, which no one seems to give a damn about anymore. When I listen to the recording of our conversation afterwards, I
think that when he talks about the Moon here, the tone of his voice sounds like that of someone who's
in love
.

“I think the Moon'd really tell us a lot. I mean, I was up there and we flew around, and there's a lot of interesting craters up there that are really strange-looking, and once you explore 'em, we'll find out stuff. I mean, we had eighteen people up there for twelve days, so we don't really know beans about the Moon.”

It'd be different if we did it again now?

“Oh, yeah, drilling and looking for water, and doing all the things you need to do at the South Pole … and picking up very old rocks. They say that there might be rocks from 120 kilometres down in the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which would tell you a lot about … I mean, it's the biggest crater in the solar system – 2,500 kilometres across. So it would tell us a lot.”

Now seems the time to repeat my mantra about there being only nine Moonwalkers left, and one day there not being a single human being who's seen us from that perspective. To my surprise, he breaks into a broad grin when he hears it.

“Yeah, I'm sure – there's not gonna be too much longer before the rest of us kick the bucket!”

Well, that wasn't quite what I meant,
I start to assure him, before realizing that, actually, it was. I ask if he ever feels discouraged by the fight to move space back up the agenda, expecting a heroic dismissal of the idea, but it doesn't come. Instead, he confesses:

“Yeah, I feel discouraged a lot of the time. You propose to do something and people tell you what an idiot you are. But, you know, making progress is never easy. You gotta keep at it if you want to really do it. And you got to take risks to make progress, so, you know” – and here he not only smiles, but jerks his head back almost playfully and exclaims –
“to heck with 'em!”

We both laugh. These are the people who would send him to Mars. He always seemed to shun attention, status, celebrity, I note. Why?

“Oh, yeah. I'm not a celebrity. I'm definitely not a celebrity. When I go to the grocery store, I have to show my ID card and my driver's licence to cash a cheque. My wife walks in the grocery
store and everybody says ‘Hey, Susy' and she can get anything she wants.”

Was that because he'd seen what happened to the others?

“No, I just never thought about it. Actually, working for NASA on technical things is really interesting.”

I wonder if there's even a small part of him that would like to have been first and I believe him when he says no, because it would have meant having to play that game, and because then he wouldn't have been able to fly the shuttle: the first men on the Moon were too politically precious to be risked on further spaceflight. Deciding to try flattery, I venture that to have found something to so absorb him over the course of a lifetime is a blessing, but he just says, simply and modestly:

“Well, I don't know if it's a blessing or not. I just think human space exploration is the most important programme going on in the United States right now. So every chance I get, I tell folks. But it, uh, doesn't always come out that way.”

A sheepishness mingles with the smile and flash of teeth this time and only afterwards does it occur to me that he's apologizing here for his ineloquence. He knows he's not in his element right now, the way he is in a flying machine. I ask what he's learned – recalling the way this one threw Dick Gordon – and he starts talking about asteroids. No, I say, I mean
as a human being,
one with such a vivid life: what are the things you know now that you wish you'd known at twenty, thirty, forty? … and there follows a meditation on the fact that the lift-to-drag ratio was 30 per cent lower than predicted on
Gemini 3,
leading to a splashdown sixty miles short of target. That's one thing he'd like to have known about, he concludes. For a moment I feel quite sure that he's toying with me.

Frustration is mounting. I'm not making him see what I want, which I suppose is for him to tell me something that's true, that might fill in another piece of the jigsaw sky, help gather the hem of chaos into order. Then it strikes me: it's just possible that when John Young looks at the world, order is what he sees first. Perhaps he pities the likes of me, who don't, won't, can't: the ones who come in and overcomplicate things which have a natural elegance and beauty of their own. Perhaps once you've
watched a whole planet sweeping imperiously through space, our human existential dramas look like nothing more than narcissism and vanity. And when I review our conversation, it strikes me powerfully that (a) I've met few people with less apparent vanity or narcissism than John Young, and (b) it's hard to imagine any modern astronaut being so quirkily lacking in presentation skills as Young is and still finding a place in the programme, however brilliant they were. The truth is that he probably wouldn't make it now and, frustrated as I've felt trying to communicate with him, this thought strikes me as ineffably sad, evidence of a world which is shrinking and homogenizing; where nothing is done for its own sake and nothing exists until it can be sold; where everything and everyone becomes a commodity with a brand identity and the maverick Young, product of a different age, doesn't fit.

I try to address the politics of this situation directly with him and get nowhere, which is amusing in itself when you think about it. He tells me that he's always just thought there were more interesting things to consider than himself and if I, child of the hang-it-out-there Sixties, don't necessarily agree with him, I've grown to respect the sentiment. I try macro politics, too, wondering whether he thinks Ronald Reagan's aggressive “Star Wars” proposals of the 1980s damaged the image of space, but this only brings a frown such as you might see on the face of a friend you've just shot in the arse with a dart gun, followed by a shocked-sounding “I have no idea.”

I ask whether he would have done anything differently in his life?

“No, I can't think of anything. But you never know. Everybody makes mistakes. You just try to keep on going.”

Sigh. Has he ever felt content?

“I don't know. I don't know. Contentment is just sorta like … I think just being here is … well, I think there's so many problems to work on and be thinking about making improvements and making progress. I think scientific and technical progress is very important for human beings.”

I try to recall the last time I heard the word “progress” used in this way. After 1972 or so, no one trusted it – or maybe it was
just the people who'd been using it most that we no longer trusted. The Bomb had been progress, as had Thalidomide and DDT and the chemicals shovelled into our Sixties baby food so that it could sit on supermarket shelves until the asteroids come, even though they made some of us sick. There were good things, too, but no longer anything self-evidently
right
about progress. It's a lost faith, which Apollo grew out of, but also helped to destroy by revealing the Earth as fragile and rare.

I want to know whether the surreal adventure ever feels surreal to him, but again Young hears the question literally and again I wonder whether this is deliberate as he assures me:

“No, no, it was real. I saw a TV programme that said we didn't do it, though.”

I tell him about Buzz and Bart Sibrel in LA and the eyes flicker with amusement.

“Oh, yeah. I saw him out in Las Vegas. He tried to get me to do that as well.”

And Ed!

“Yeah, he got Ed and he got Bill Anders. Jeez, he's been around!”

Now he laughs, clearly not angered or offended the way Charlie Duke and Buzz Aldrin were. However laconic Young is, there's no self-importance about him. I ask what happened with Sibrel and him?

“Oh, he wanted me to swear on the Bible that I'd been to the Moon. I told him I didn't swear on the Bible. He said he wanted to talk about
Apollo 16,
but he didn't.”

He cracks up properly, a full, joyful laugh, and I resolve to redouble my efforts to find this man, who turns out to have made a film called
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon,
based on “previously unseen downlink footage” of the
Apollo 11
crew horsing around in low Earth orbit while they were supposed to be on their way to the Moon.

I ask John whether he still sees Charlie Duke much and he says about once a year, when Duke comes in for his medical and he and Dotty stay over. They live a few hours away in New Braunfels. “It's always good to see 'em,” he says casually, and I find myself wondering what on Earth they talk about.

I ask about the postmission personal crises and he launches into a treatise on adrenaline depletion. So, giving up on the search for anything the rest of us might identify with, I ask him whether he still flies and he says, “Oh, yes,” leaving the way open for me to run Arlo Guthrie–like through the tale of my brief jet-fighter flying career – puking, passing out, four-part harmony and all. His face lights up, just as Dick Gordon's did, and he looks directly at me for the first time in an hour.

“Yeah, well, 6 Gs without a G suit – unless you're experienced or very tough – is pretty … actually, we rode the centrifuge in Apollo and went up to 15 Gs, but that's through your chest, it's not your sit-down Gs …”

Young has been with his second wife, Susy, since their marriage in 1972 and she's always the first thing he mentions when he talks about his post-Apollo life and career. Naturally, we don't get far on the subject of his relationships, though he laughs self-deprecatingly when I ask if he's difficult to live with, confirming that he thinks he probably is. When I inquire after his children and how they experienced his career, though, he surprises me for the first time as he begins, “Well, I think they appreciate the work, but I'm sure I probably …” and then allows his voice to trail away into a mumble.

Sorry?

“I said I probably neglected 'em way too much. You know, 'cos you have to work twenty-four hours a day when you're working on a mission. Especially those lunar missions. That's when they were affected by it most. You didn't have much choice. They'd send you places and you'd have to be there for so long.”

His voice is very quiet now.

“There wasn't anything you could do about it … ”

We've been talking for much longer than we'd agreed to in the first place and I'm exhausted from the effort of the conversation. I thank John for his time and suggest that perhaps I could call him at a later date if any more questions arise and the really peculiar thing is that I'm sure a trace of disappointment flashes across his face. People who know Young will try to convince me that I've experienced him at his most loquacious today. Either
way, for the first time he offers something spontaneously. Mild rhythm enters his voice.

“Actually, I got to go to a meeting right now where we're talkin' about gettin' back to the Moon.”

I'm stunned. “Really?” I say. “Seriously?”

“Well, I hope it's serious. We been talkin' about it off and on for the last ten, fifteen years.”

But as a political reality? How has that happened?

“Human beings have changed. People that run the space programme have changed.”

That's right, I remember. There've been changes at the top of NASA. So you could be talking realistically about going back?