Moondust (5 page)

“I never thought they could land that thing,” he says. “And even then, the prospect of one leg landing on a boulder or a slope seemed so very high.”

He also admits that when he heard Aldrin tersely announcing the 1202 alarm during the
Eagle
's final descent, his one and only thought was, “That's it. They're going to crash.” In fact, the more you talk to Reg Turnill, the more extraordinary the whole thing starts to seem. He remembers being detailed to show the interloping Norman Mailer around the launch site as the countdown for
Apollo 11
proceeded (“You didn't care much for him, did you, dear?” notes Reg's wife, Maggie, as she sets a lunch of trout and new potatoes before us). He also describes
2001
author
Arthur C. Clarke stopping by his table as the rocket roared through the clouds to gasp that this was the first time he'd cried in twenty years and the first time he'd prayed in forty. Then the author declared, “This is the last day of the old world,” and Reg thought that was marvellous. He also believed it. As they watched, surrounded by people punching the air, clapping, applauding, bawling and shouting “Go! Go!” they all did. When missions
18, 19
and
20
were cancelled for lack of funds, Reg shared the astronauts' distress as if he'd been due to ride with them himself.

“They never really got away from the equatorial regions of the Moon,” he laments. “There was even talk of having astronauts descending into craters on ropes. These were going to be great missions of discovery.”

I catch a cab back to the station thinking that this is the first time – it certainly won't be the last – that I've heard Apollo spoken of as unfinished business. It may have been dead to me for many years, but for the people who were part of it, it remains vividly alive.

Before the spacemen, Cape Canaveral – The Cape – was a sweltering nothing, paradise for malarial swarms of bugs and birds and alligators who'll still slither into the backseat of your rental car if you ignore the warning signs about leaving doors open, but now it's all flat, ruler-straight highways and boxy wooden houses and malls and motels and more highways. A permanent haze hangs over the area like an opaque shroud and seems to seep into the spaces between things: there are no natural vantage points and there is nothing to see – it's a featureless, beautyless place, which is why the U.S. Air Force chose it as a launching ground for military rockets in the first place, and it wasn't until air-conditioning and astronauts arrived that civilians came scuttling behind, chasing thrills and autographs and cut-price tans. These days,
these days
being July 2002, they call this place the Space Coast.

On the flight from England, I was lost in a brilliant collection of J. G. Ballard short stories called
Memories of the Space Age.
Written between 1962 and 1988, most of them revolve around the Cape, and Cocoa Beach in particular, which is where the space programme's human cargo lived in the run-up to missions. Ballard's thrillingly jaundiced view of the Space Age is that it constituted a crime against evolution, a blind, hubristic leap into a realm where we do not belong, where all we can do is sow our disease and spread the human stain ever more thinly across the Universe. Accordingly, in his stories we find the Cape abandoned, laid waste by microbes from Mars as dead astronauts circle the earth in their capsule coffins, or serving as a beacon for falling space debris, roamed only by irradiated scavengers seeking icons in mangled bits of spaceship or spaceman bones. We find space explorers going insane midflight, haunting a whole world with their “nightmare ramblings.” In “A Question of Re-Entry,” Ballard's protagonist hunts for a capsule lost in the Amazon forest, amid growing anxiety that “the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies … the missing capsule [was] itself a fragment of a huge disintegrating fantasy.”

In “News from the Sun,” I find: “Certainly, the unhappy lives of the astronauts bore all the signs of a deepening sense of guilt. The relapse into alcoholism, silence, and pseudo-mysticism, and the mental breakdowns, suggested profound anxieties about the moral and biological rightness of space exploration.”

All of which may look like no more than a clever inversion of the claim that the first “Whole Earth” photographs brought back by
Apollo 17
changed our perception of ourselves for the better, but the author was right about one thing: that the Space Age would come to seem an historical anomaly, which didn't lead where expected and significant numbers of people would come to doubt the very existence of. Meanwhile, his references to the fates of the astronauts … well, these aren't complete fictions. Ballard knew where he was coming from. Like so much in this tale, what he says is not true, but it has truth.

Perhaps he was also whispering in my ear as I passed through the turnstiles at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's contribution to the rubric of Florida theme parks. Midday is approaching
and the ground is like a skillet. Everyone else is indoors, but I had to come here first, to the
Rocket Garden,
because this is the real thing; an outside park where the astonishing machines spacemen rode into the sky are on display. And they
are
astonishing, but not for the reasons you'd think, because the surprise is how terrifyingly small they are. I could grab a pipe on the side of the Atlas rocket which powered the last Mercury missions and shimmy up in seconds, while the Mercury Redstone that Alan Shepard flew is slender and frail-looking, topped by a little ribbed bird's beak of a capsule. Who would agree to crouch on top of what now clearly reveals itself as a
missile,
which might otherwise be used to smash a tank, and be shot into Ballard's “cyanide-blue” Florida sky? Assuming the thing didn't blow up first. The capsules weren't even going to have any port-holes to see out of until the astronauts/passengers/test subjects/Spam insisted. Only a Saturn IB, which launched
Apollo 7,
the nervy first crewed flight after the
Apollo 1
fire, looks as though it was made to carry people. Yet even that, slumped on its side, is less impressive than in the imagination. Still, the Saturn V, the vehicle which powered Apollo to the Moon, is yet to come. If you want to see that, you have to buy a ticket and be bussed to a special hangar.

Indoors I find a large collection of space art, including a painting by
Apollo 12
LM pilot Alan Bean; a shimmering Annie Leibovitz portrait of shuttle commander Eileen Collins, who became the first female shuttle commander in 1999; a haunting silver-black 1982 rendering of the shuttle
Challenger,
which exploded like a firework directly above this place four years later. The most familiar works are Andy Warhol's Day-Glo
Buzz Aldrin
and Rauschenberg's fast-paced
Hot Shot
montage, which is built around the powerfully phallic image of a Saturn V lifting off. As I look at these last two, I'm reminded of historian Eric Hobsbawm's dismissal of them, and Pop Art in general, with the words: “It is not surprising that in the 1950s, in the heartland of consumer democracy, the leading school of painters abdicated before image-makers so much more powerful than old-fashioned art.”

Which is absolutely right, but also misses the point. At the
emerging school's first big show in October 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Warhol, who grasped the trajectory of his society better than anyone, explained his work by saying, “I feel very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rocket ships and television.” More specifically, the critic James Rosenquist summed up what he saw as “post beat and not afraid of an atomic bomb,” while for the painter Robert Indiana it was “a re-enlistment of the world. It was shuck the bomb! It was the American dream – optimistic, generous and naïve.” It's easy to forget that in the beginning, Pop Art, like the space programme, defined itself explicitly in relation to the Cold War – about which there seemed a decisiveness, as if this was a bridge humanity had to cross to its future, grim or glorious as that might be. Thus, when Warhol set up his Factory in 1964, he decorated it top to bottom in silver, explaining that “silver was the future, it was spacey, the astronauts …” The impact of the spacemen when they first appeared is easy to underestimate.

Something here feels wrong, though. NASA was late catching on to the power of the image in an age where information was travelling further and faster all the time, and you can still feel this as you watch pasty-legged dads straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon dragging their kids – thought bubbles whining,
“What about Disneyland?”
– to an IMAX movie about the International Space Station. I sit through it myself and gradually become aware of a disturbance at the back of my mind, evolving into a strong sense of pathos. The movie was directed by Ron Howard and narrated by Tom Cruise and its remorseless tedium seems to say everything about the bind NASA finds itself in after three decades spent loitering in low Earth orbit. And in a flash I see the difference between the space shuttle's 200-mile-high beat and Apollo ploughing 240,000 miles to the Moon: before me now is a space that's been domesticated and rendered routine, while at a quarter of a million miles you've left the Earth and are on the outer edge of experience; are riding the skein between us and Deep Space, being dwarfed by infinity itself. Well over 400 people have now been into space, but only twenty-four have left Earth orbit and been out
there,
all with Apollo. But Apollo's dark allure seems distant here – I've felt none of it – and as I wrestle
the sterile wrapping off my cutlery in the cafeteria, I find myself grumbling that I bet Pete Conrad never used sterile cutlery: indeed, if I hear Strauss's
Also Sprach Zarathustra
– the theme from
2001
– one more time, I may very well attack someone with it. The cutlery seems emblematic of the whole Kennedy Space Center experience so far. Sterile.

So I'm not expecting much of the bus tour, but as we sweep past the alien archaeology of the launch gantries, which look as though they've towered over this wasteland forever, there comes a kind of relief. A breeze blows in from the Atlantic and a wildness takes hold of the land, and now I can picture Shepard and Armstrong climbing steely-eyed into their ships. There's no need for presentation here. Wherever you look, the squat shape of the Vehicle Assembly Building is somewhere in the corner of your vision, growing out of the marram grass, the highest point in the state of Florida and the largest human-made structure on Earth when it was built; the place where they put together the rockets, so big that they say it has its own weather system and could admit the United Nations building through any of its four doors. Then there's the nightmarish crawler, like something from a
Judge Dredd
comic, which transports rockets from the Assembly Building to the gantries at half a mile an hour, running on tanklike tread plates that weigh one ton apiece. This is
not
like anything you've seen before. It's unreal.

And now the bus has stopped and you're climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and –
fuck, there's the Saturn V.

You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until you've stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but you can't, so you give up. What you think is not “How could anyone make something this big?” because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. But to make something this big, and intend it to fly –
the audacity of this conceit alone
– and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on,
bigger,
and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough to
bet a life on, three lives,
every time
… it's just … the mind reels in the same way that a Victorian's must have been carried away by one of that era's gargantuan steelworks or power stations. Even at thirty-five years' remove, it's barely credible.

What must it have been like to ride this thing? The geologist Jack Schmitt, the only civilian scientist who flew Apollo, spoke of the difference between sitting on top of one in simulations and during the real deal.

“You start to hear sounds that you've never heard before,” he said, then shook his head. “Especially as you approach thirty seconds, this huge Saturn V starts to come alive, almost like an animal.”

Bill Anders of
Apollo 8,
the first mission to circumnavigate the Moon, also resorted to anthropomorphic imagery, describing the ride as “like being heaved about; like being a rat in the jaws of a giant terrier.”

And from the ground? A flash of brilliant light, followed by a squall of fire and the heart-stopping, agonizingly slow push to clear the launch tower. The final mission,
Apollo 17,
took off into the night and remade the entire sky as a dancing, fiery cathedral dome and the ocean as an orange-grey sea of flame. People describe a guttural quake that rolled toward you like thunder, with almost everyone who watched referring in one way or another to the intense physicality of the experience. The distinguished and then-Apollosceptic British journalist Hugo Young gasped that “in the bedlam of launch, there were, momentarily, no critics of the space programme.”

I find myself avoiding the numbers, because they seem to flatten and insult Saturn, to tame it to the point where it no longer troubles the imagination. They say that it stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighed six million pounds at launch, that the first of the three stages had five rocket engines producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust each, but I don't know what any of that means. Among the welter of facts and figures, only two strike me as particularly remarkable. The first is that this rocket was trusted to go to the Moon on only its third flight, where others faced exhaustive test programmes before anyone was allowed to climb aboard; the second that it contained
close to six million parts, meaning that, even with NASA's astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong
on a good flight.
Yet the Saturn V never failed, nor looked like failing when it mattered and it doesn't take a genius to understand that something very like genius was at work here. What might not be guessed is that it was a Nazi genius. In the words of Chris Kraft, “Wernher von Braun built a masterpiece.”