Moondust (4 page)

With so many troubles on Earth, perhaps escaping to the heavens seems natural and logical. They're making a movie called
Silent Running,
starring Bruce Dern, in which this actually happens as a way of preserving the forests and deserts, and something similar seems to be going on in Neil Young's song “After the Goldrush,” where the human race is fleeing its devastated cradle in spaceships, “flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun.” Everywhere we turn, there is talk of the Cold War, Vietnam, racial strife and looming environmental catastrophe. But all the bad things that are happening seem to have their corollary in good – none of them appear insurmountable – and we make no connection between those old-world horrors and the staggering ambition of the lunar programme. For all their ties to the military, the astronauts are pioneers, talismans, bringers of a bold new space-faring future …

Sometimes it really does feel like the dawn of a new age.

But the 1960s is the age of false dawns. Top of the charts is the bubblegum hippy anthem “Something in the Air” by Thunderclap Newman. Closing in fast, though, is Credence Clearwater Revival and “Bad Moon Rising.”

The afternoon has passed in a blur. We watched some of the space coverage on TV. Joan Aldrin appeared with her three children outside her house in Nassau Bay. One of them was a boy named Andrew, who looked about my age, and an instant visual appraisal led me to believe that his mom cuts his hair, too. They had watched the landing at home with a group of family and friends and couldn't understand the litany of technical data any more than we could. The difference was that Mrs. Aldrin had NASA pals on hand to explain what they meant. She heard them
say that the fuel was almost gone and the astronauts hadn't yet found a place to land, and her head spun. She stood in her crowded living room, holding on to a doorframe, eyes brimming with tears, waiting for the awful instant in which her husband's voice would stop and be lost to her forever, while the whole world listened in. Then she heard him say, “Okay, engine stop.” She accepted a hug from someone and retired to her bedroom.

It's coming up to 7:30 PM and dusk is falling. I can hear crickets and birds in the back garden, and the burble of the creek. The Moon's in the sky, a big silver full Moon, and I've been on the porch in my pyjamas, which have little blue spaceships on them, just drinking the sight in. They're up there. Up there.
There.
We've been watching the screen for an hour, because Neil Armstrong was due out at 7:00 PM, after he told NASA that he couldn't bear to hang around until midnight, much less sleep. The TV anchor and various experts have been assuring us that everything is fine, though. It takes a while to get those big Michelin Man suits on.

Armstrong is late because stowing the dishes after dinner was never part of the practice routine and it's taken longer than anyone expected. The first men on the Moon are being delayed by dirty dishes: there's something wonderful about that. The
Eagle
is on a bright, rolling, crater-pocked plain. When they had a chance to take the scene in through the LM's tiny, triangular portholes, Aldrin exulted at the unreal clarity in this atmosphereless environment, with features on the distant horizon appearing close by, contrasting beautifully against the boundless black backdrop of infinity. Armstrong wondered at the peculiar play of light and colour on the tan surface. He thought it looked more inviting than hostile. He knows this will be his home for only twenty-one hours.

Now, what
do
you say as you become the first human being to set foot on the Moon? Neil Armstrong is an astronaut, not a poet, and certainly not a PR man. He wouldn't have bothered about it much, but people have been writing to him with all kinds of suggestions – the Bible and Shakespeare being the most popular sources of inspiration – and everyone he meets seems to have an opinion. The pressure is on. It's irritating, because, for
him, the landing was the poetry and taking off again his next major work. Still, as he thinks about it, he considers the paradox that it is such a small step, and yet … the laconic career pilot comes up with one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language.

The door won't budge and they don't want to force it, because you could poke a hole through
Eagle
at almost any point. The air pressure inside the cabin is holding it closed, so Armstrong peels a corner back gently and the last of the craft's oxygen screams into space as a rainbow of ice crystals. Aldrin holds the hatch open as the other man sinks to his knees and crawls through, until he is standing on
Eagle
's porch, surrounded only by Moon and space and the Earth which hangs above him.

He pulls a ring and a small TV camera lowers on a tray from the undercarriage and begins transmitting pictures home. A voice from Earth exclaims, “We're getting pictures on the TV!” And so we are: grainy and unearthly. Upside down at first, then flipped over. Wow. Armstrong tests his weight in one-sixth gravity and launches himself onto the LM's giant landing pad. He describes the surface as “very, very fine-grained as you get close to it … almost like a powder.” Then:

“Okay, I'm going to step off the LM now.”

There's still time for the rapacious Moon-bugs to grab him, but they don't. He tests the ground to make sure it will take his weight, then steps off the LM.

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind …”

He bounces, paws at the dust once more with his boot and finally lets go of
Eagle,
to be free of the Earth and all its creations. He walks hesitantly, unsteadily at first, like a toddler searching for the secret of balance. He feels his way into the rolling gait that Moonwalking demands and takes some photos, until Mission Control reminds him about the “contingency” soil sample he's supposed to get in case of an emergency takeoff. At that moment, Aldrin chips in, too, and the commander snaps, “Right,” as the press room back in Houston erupts with laughter – because it seems that nagging is nagging, even on the Moon. Fourteen minutes later, Aldrin joins him, cracking a joke about being
careful not to lock the hatch on the way out – but all the same, he's covered in goose bumps as he steps away from the
Eagle.
He likes the reduced gravity, is glad of its attention after the weightlessness of space, which feels lonesome to him, as though he's nowhere. He looks up at the half-dark Earth and can make out the slowly rotating shapes of North Africa and the Middle East, then returns his eyes to the Moon and realizes that the soil next to his boots has lain untroubled by life since before those continents existed.

I run out into the garden to bathe in the silky Moonlight and the blood seems to rush to my head. They're standing there now. They're walking on the Moon. I go back inside and President Nixon is on the phone to the astronauts.

“Hello, Neil and Buzz, I'm talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House …”

Throughout the Moonwalk, Aldrin has been wrestling with a strange mixture of emotions, coalescing in an eerie sense that he is part of something that reaches way beyond himself. He's here and there is Moon under his feet, but he feels strangely detached from the proceedings, as though he is simultaneously back home on the sofa, watching himself being watched. Inside
Eagle,
he felt alone with Neil, but now he imagines the presence of the whole of humanity. He wonders what to say in response to the president and decides that it might be best to say nothing at all.

Nixon's still going on.

“… For one priceless moment, in the whole history of Man, all the people on this Earth are truly one. One in their pride in what you have done. And one in our prayers that you will return home safely to Earth.”

Nixon
does
have speech writers.

There is an awkward silence, such as might be encountered in conversation with an elderly uncle who can't quite remember your name. Then Armstrong speaks.

“Thank you, Mr. President. It's a great honour and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but
men of peace of all nations … men with a vision for the future …”

It's the 1960s: women still count as men. To some viewers, the astronaut's halting voice sounds thick with emotion, although he will later insist that, with perhaps a thousand million people watching and listening, his thoughts are mostly concentrated on trying not to say anything stupid. He turns his attention back to inspecting and gathering samples of the Moon. It's already proving a far more interesting place than he'd expected. Especially odd is the visible curvature toward the horizon on this relatively small sphere, which lends a kind of intimacy to the landscape. He and his partner struggle to plant an American flag in the lunar soil, and then have difficulty in persuading it to stand up. When the
Eagle
takes off, it blows over.

They're still out there when I lose my battle with tiredness and Dad carries me off to bed. It's a hot night and I'd normally fidget and have trouble getting to sleep, but blanketed in the unreality of the last twelve hours, I'm out the moment my head hits the pillow. The next morning, I wake to sun struggling through my curtains and the world feels a little different. The future seems a little nearer. Nixon's declared a holiday, so my brothers are on the lawn and I'm going to have breakfast before riding down the street to see David. On the Moon, though, Armstrong and Aldrin are about to enter the third act of their own drama.

If it works,
Eagle
's ascent engine will be an amazing thing. It generates a meagre 3,500 pounds of thrust, but that's enough to separate the ascent stage from the now redundant legs of the lander and shoot it back into orbit. The chemicals within it react on contact, thus obviating the need for a potentially troublesome ignition mechanism: in theory, once the valves are opened, the engine will fire and they'll be off. Armstrong had harboured doubts about the reliability of the valves, but the Apollo engineers had rejected his mechanical, rather than electrical, operating system. They have confidence in their design.

Still, as with so much else on the mission, no one has ever done this before and until it has been done, the Moon still owns the
Eagle.
Up in
Columbia,
Mike Collins now confronts his worst fears. If the rocket fails to propel his comrades the full sixty-nine
miles to the intended rendezvous point, he can drop down as far as 50,000 feet to pick them up, but not much lower, because some of the lunar mountains reach nearly to that height. He writes down:

With two minutes to ignition, all Collins can do is wait and listen. With forty-five seconds left, he hears Armstrong remind his copilot of the routine.

“At five seconds I'm going to get ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you're going to hit PROCEED.”

“Right.”

“And
that's all.
”

Collins smiles at the knowing irony in Armstrong's words. Moments later, the commander presses a button and there is a heartbeat-sized pause, followed by a bang and smooth acceleration into the sky. On Earth, Joan Aldrin sinks to the floor, masking her face with her hands, and three days later her husband is bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, waiting to be winched onto the deck of the USS
Hornet.
There is the surreal sight of Nixon addressing them through the glass screen of their quarantine trailer, to be followed by three further weeks of strict isolation at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, during which time the men will have ample time to consider the significance of what they've done. Armstrong hopes that
Apollo 11
shows how seemingly impossible problems may be overcome if the will is there. Aldrin watches videotapes of what had been happening back on Earth, of the ecstatic newscasters and spectral pictures and people's houses full of guests in thrall to what they were witnessing, like mine. He begins to appreciate the depth of the emotions they've stirred and to sense a contradiction which will
haunt the rest of his life: that those most quiet and concentrated of moments on the Moon could trigger a kind of mania back on Earth. He turns to Armstrong and says: “Neil, we missed the whole thing.”

Sun sparkles on the English Channel.

It's the first day of spring, a perfect sunshiny day after another long, grey, funereal winter, and the Kentish countryside seems to have sighed and come alive. Outside in the street, people smile at the first touch of warmth and, just as assuredly as I find myself humming the first verse of “California Dreamin'” when the leaves start to fall in autumn, I'm tripping along to a silent chorus of “Here Comes the Sun” as I leave the shade of Folkestone station and angle into a tidy, daffodil-lined street.

We're six thousand miles and thirty-three years away from
Apollo 11
– half a lifetime – but time seems to stand still in this quiet south-coast town, making it a good place to chase down memory and hold it up to light, and on the train from London I've been thinking about my own. Did my father really have tears in his eyes? That's how I remember it, but then, the ghost craft I picture hovering above the Moon in a sheen of magic
dust … well, I can't have seen that. No one saw anything until Neil Armstrong pulled a cord which activated a camera on his way out of the Lunar Module. Then he jumped down to one of the lander's big round feet, described the lunar dirt and stepped gingerly to the surface. One of the great Internet rumours of our time is that his first words were not “One small step for man,” etc., but “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky,” in honour of a boyhood neighbour whose wife was heard announcing that he could expect to benefit from oral sex “the day that boy next door walks on the Moon.” He did get the words wrong, however, because he meant to say – and for years insisted that he did say – “One small step for
a
man …” Even his memory is not definitive, though in the freeze-frame world we're about to enter, that doesn't necessarily make it less true.

I'm here to see Reg Turnill, who was the BBC's aerospace correspondent for two decades from the late Fifties and is the only non-American to have been presented with NASA's Chroniclers Award for “contributions to public understanding of the space programme.” In those days the BBC still had a uniquely global reach and the NASA brass knew it. Reg had reserved seats at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was renamed Cape
Kennedy
after the president's death, and from these he watched much more than rockets blasting off, because his own world changed out of all recognition during those years, as TV usurped radio and the invention of videotape made footage-gathering cheap and fast; as the arrival of satellite transmission in 1968 allowed pictures to be shot across the globe instantaneously, shrinking the planet and helping to create the insatiable media we know today. A little-acknowledged fact is that, had the first Moon landing occurred in 1967 instead of 1969 (as JFK's people had hoped, so crowning his second term), it couldn't possibly have made the impact that it did.

Reg is older than the astronauts, eighty-seven, ruddy-faced and wiry, with one of those distinctive old man's voices that waver as though reversing back through teenage. His mind is sharp, but sometimes names slip away and I have to supply a list of options. He'll say:

“And that was when he … you know – oh what's his name, the one I mentioned a few minutes ago, uhm …”

“You mean Alan Bean? John Young? Scott Carpenter …?”

“That's the one! Yes, he enjoyed his flight rather too much, I'm afraid.”

At these points, he'll smile and apologize, explaining that “it's part of the aging process,” and I'll be reminded of what a long time ago the 1960s were, even if it doesn't always seem that way.

The aerospace beat was a backwater when Reg took over, but soon it was the centre of everything. Over a cafetiére of coffee in the bright, seaward Turnill garden, he reminds me of the panic that followed the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, which set the Space Race running. He describes his knockabout battles with the paranoid U.S. Air Force, whose Cape launchpads NASA had to borrow in the early days, and who used any excuse at all to arrest him and his gang of mischievous reporters. Even into the Sixties, there was an innocence, as everybody was improvising: poor NASA, having had the goal of flying to the Moon (and worse,
getting back
) dropped on them from the Olympian heights of the White House in 1961, had no idea how they were going to do it and the Air Force's attempts to muscle in on the programme were “painfully” naked.

Into this breach strode the fourth estate, swarming excitedly around the first astronauts, the silver-suited Mercury 7, who looked like and were treated like a rock group, even though this was fully three years before Beatlemania hit the U.S. in 1964, so there were no rock groups. The Seven were Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, who would be fêted as “the first American in space” when he rode his
Freedom 7
rocketship into the sky on May 5, 1961. The truth is that no one had ever seen anything like the rocket stars of “the Original Seven,” except maybe in the days of the Wild West.

They were all pilots, mostly drawn from the elite brotherhood of test pilots, even if NASA originally considered skydivers, deep-sea explorers and circus daredevils to be as suited to space
flight as them. President Eisenhower eventually directed the organization to use the fliers, at least partly because they were already on the payroll and working for peanuts, but some refused to apply anyway on the grounds that the newly minted “astronauts” would be no more than computer-guided payload; others, like the legendary rocket plane pilot Chuck Yeager, couldn't have, because these astronaut-passengers needed a degree. “Spam in a can” was the phrase used to describe the space pilots at Edwards Air Force base, high in the Mojave Desert of California.

Two further groups of recruits followed the Seven, most of whom – though not all – were likewise recruited from the military. In September 1962, a group which became informally known as the “Next Nine” included such impressive and Luna-bound figures as Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, John Young and Neil Armstrong – who'd been trained by the military, but was by this time a crack civilian test pilot working for NASA. Then, a year later, a further batch of fourteen brought the Moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan and David Scott to the fold.

After these, more arrived at regular intervals as the space effort intensified and some of the Mercury astronauts retired, and together they fed three different programmes – Mercury, Gemini and Apollo – with three distinct purposes. When the Space Race began, the Soviets were way ahead, so six Mercury flights were needed to prove that American rockets didn't
inevitably
blow up and could lob single astronauts into low Earth orbit and bring them back in one piece. After that, between March 1965 and February 1967, a series of nine missions involving the two-crew Gemini ships were used to develop techniques that would be necessary to get to the Moon. Of particular importance and intricacy were the challenges of “rendezvous” and “docking”; the ability of two craft to find each other and conjoin in space. The Gemini spacecraft, while remaining in Earth orbit, also gave American spacemen their first chance to leave the capsule and float free. Then Apollo reached for the Moon.

None of the seven Apollo missions which were intended to
land went entirely to plan, but even if they had, the plan alone could make your head spin. As it sat on the drawing board in 1967, it looked like this:

First, a huge, three-stage Saturn V rocket (“V” being the roman numeral for
five
) heaves the crew off the ground as they sit in a tiny capsule at its peak, facing up toward the sky. The first two stages fall away as their fuel runs out; the slender third provides a final push to a 116-mile-high orbit above Earth, from where a brief reignition of its single rocket engine breaks the planet's bonds at a speed of 24,000 miles per hour and the long coast to the Moon is under way. Only here does the sweaty stuff start, though, because up to this point the two craft in which the Moon men are to travel have been concealed in or about the Saturn's third stage, and the time has come to free them.

The astronauts are to make the 240,000-mile journey to the Moon in a spaceship called the Command and Service Module (CSM). As its designation implies, this consists of two parts joined together: a Command Module, known to most of us as the “capsule” – the conical pod just thirteen feet in diameter in which the crew live and work and hope to splash down when the adventure is done; and a shiny, cylindrical Service Module, which attaches to the rear of the Command Module and contains the big stuff like the rocket engine and the fuel and oxygen tanks. During the early part of the flight, the CSM has been perched at the tip of the Saturn like a spearhead, while behind it, cocooned by four protective metal panels, lay the equally important Lunar Module, or LM, the ungainly craft in which two crew members will descend to the lunar surface. Now, at a distance of 6,000 miles from home, the CSM breaks free of its Saturn host, is gently guided forward by the Command Module pilot, then rotated 180 degrees on its axis to face the slumbering LM, whence the ship is nudged forward so that it might clasp,
dock with,
the LM and draw it from its berth. In this formation, nose to nose like two insects kissing, the ships drift through space for three days, before slowing dramatically to allow “capture” into lunar orbit. There, they manoeuvre into a special “descent orbit,” an ellipse with a high point of sixty-nine miles and a low of just nine, where the lucky, prechosen pair will crawl
through a hatch from the CM to the LM and drop the short distance to history.

The mere act of describing this outward journey is exhausting, and the return is no simpler. When the astronauts on the surface are ready to leave, the LM's “ascent stage” – the cramped living quarters – will blast away from the spindly-legged “descent stage,” leaving that behind in the dust. Back in lunar orbit, they rendezvous with the CSM and climb aboard once more, to be reunited with the colleague they left behind, the one who
didn't
drop sixty-nine miles into history, at which juncture they jettison the LM (an emotional moment for some who've lived in it) and set off for Earth. Three days later, they're circling the home planet again; the CSM breaks into its two constituent parts, with the Service Module being ditched and the Command Module careening into the atmosphere at 24,000 miles an hour, splashing into the sea beneath a trio of gargantuan, red-and-white-striped parachutes, and the trip is over. Naturally enough, job titles derive from the participants' relationship to this system, with the pair who reach the surface known as the Mission Commander and the Lunar Module pilot (even though the “LM pilot” is essentially a systems engineer, monitoring progress and feeding it to the LM's real pilot – the Commander), while the Command Module pilot looks after the mother ship until such time as his crewmates return or are understood to be irretrievably lost. No one can deny the virtuosity of the technique, nor that there is an awful lot to go wrong with it.

There were twelve crewed Apollo missions in all. The first,
Apollo 1,
ended before it had begun, when a fire in the capsule killed its crew – the Mercury 7 veteran Gus Grissom, first U.S. spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee – as they conducted tests in a bay on the ground, bringing despair and an eighteen-month hiatus to the programme while NASA's management was overhauled. The next piloted mission was
Apollo 7,
which successfully launched into Earth orbit, followed by
Apollo 8,
which swung the first human beings around the Moon over Christmas 1968.
Apollo 9
then tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit,
Apollo 10
did the same in lunar orbit, and finally
Apollo 11
set down. Ten such landings were planned, but the
last three (
18, 19, 20
) were cancelled as the programme's budget was progressively slashed. Furthermore,
Apollo 13
nearly ended in disaster when an explosion in an oxygen tank crippled the Command Module, forcing the landing to be abandoned and the LM to be used as a makeshift life raft to get the crew home. Thus, only six ships reached the surface, between July 1969 and December 1972, each with two astronauts aboard. Those astronauts were:

Irwin, Shepard and Conrad are gone (heart attack, cancer, motorcycle accident), so nine of the Moon men remain.

Reg runs me through his impressions of the early space programme; then we fall to talking about the landings and what a queer ship the Lunar Module was.