Moondust (49 page)
I saw Charlie Duke a few months ago.
He was on a treadmill in the gym of a hotel at which we were both staying, and I walked past his whirring machine three or four times without satisfying myself that it was really him. Charlie had been one of the youngest of the Moonwalkers, but I knew that even he would be at least 74 now, and the tanned jogger before me looked fifteen years shy of that. Only when we met over dinner that night did I laugh at myself and accept the truth that all those Albuquerque needles and tubes weren't for nothing. NASA chose their Moon men well.
Looking back, my concern over the longevity of the Nine looks a little amusing; a young man's sublimation of his own dawning sense of mortality. To be sure, they're older now, but as I write they're all still active and very much here â doubly good news, because this most exclusive of clubs looks unlikely to expand in the near future. For all Dubya's TV rapture and Gene Cernan's faith back in 2004, my instinct had been right: the now ex-President had committed little that was new to the cause, and whatever private enthusiasm his successor might have felt for the plan surely evaporated with the credit crisis. In its way, Barack Obama's election in November 2008 seemed as momentous as that first landing back in '69. Born the year JFK launched Apollo, Obama's eyes light up when he recalls the sense that first landing gave him that anything was possible and perhaps, in some small way, these two landmark events are even linked. For the time-being, though, he and the world will have other priorities. No one's going back just yet.
In a phone conversation not long ago, the still razor-sharp Rene Carpenter suggested that, while the near-term prospects for further crewed deep space exploration haven't changed in the past few years, the men lucky enough to live that singular dream â however briefly â have.
âOh, they've mellowed,' she chuckled. âBack then, they would have cut each other's throats to get a flight, but now they're a band of brothers. It's kinda cute.'
And what are they up to, this novel band of brothers? Pretty much what they were before, as far as I can tell. I've stayed in touch with Alan Bean, and when the author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce called to ask advice on which real-life Moonwalker to put in his next book, a children's space odyssey called
Cosmic
, I had no hesitation in recommending the painterspaceman whose work, incidentally, is now even further outside my price range than it was when I first saw it. Every now and again I get word of another hard-won victory over the lunar palette, or a collection of funny NFL clips on YouTube. It came as no surprise that Frank enjoyed him just as much as I did.
Elsewhere, Ed Mitchell, having shrugged off cancer, recently made the news at home and in Europe by offering his thoughts on UFOs to a radio station, and is still to be found addressing academic symposia on that subject and on crop circles, while Buzz Aldrin travels all over the world â at a conference here, a cruise there, a product launch somewhere else. In space circles, he and Armstrong have now ascended to the ranks of single-name celebrities, like Angelina and Brad or Ant and Dec, and one can only guess at how the First Man feels about this. When I visited Wapakoneta recently, members of the Armstrong Day organising committee revealed that their sole famous son had missed last year's celebration, as per tradition, and that no one would be holding their breath this time either. On the other hand, I did meet a former classmate named Doris (or âPunky' to friends) who described Neil's presence at a high school reunion only months before, through which he'd been warm and engaging. If Armstrong didn't already exist, someone could make good money inventing him.
An author is often asked what his or her work is âabout', and while my stock response in the case of
Moondust
is that âit's about the guys who walked on the Moon,' my real view changes constantly and most readers recognise that this explanation is only a starting point. It pleases me that through all the letters and conversations I've had on the subject, only one other person has interpreted the book in precisely the same way as me, and also that so many plays and theatre productions, radio programmes and films, songs and albums have used it as a starting point for their own explorations. In truth, the two years I spent moving between the Moonwalkers still seem uncanny, as though my journey had already existed, shared in the minds of anyone who had ever pondered the subject for more than a heartbeat.
Huge thanks to everyone at Bloomsbury, who made coming to them feel so much like coming home, and whose enthusiasm and encouragement have been such a joy to work with. I couldn't have landed in a better place. Thanks also to my U.S. editor Courtney Hodell, and to Simon Trewin and Sarah Ballard at PFD.
Equally, thanks to everyone who gave their time and thoughts in the course of making this book, both those who appear on the page and the many, many who don't but made telling contributions nonetheless. A general debt is also owed to all the writers and journalists who've passed this way before, because few events have been so widely or well documented as the Apollo Moon landings. In particular, I would like to thank Andy Chaikin, Al Reinert and Robert Godwin, who lent their support for no better reason than that they liked the sound of what I was doing. Their spirit of inquisitiveness and generosity made me feel proud to count myself a writer, and continues to do so.
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