In my world, however, it was David Bowie who most effectively tapped into what was happening. Thirty-four years after his career began in earnest with Space Oddity (a flop first time around in ’69), he passes up Gene Myers’s offer of a promo flight to Space Island, but on the subject of his early Seventies work, says:
“For me and several of my friends, the Seventies were the start of the twenty-first century. It was Kubrick’s doing, on the whole, with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange … There was a distinct feeling that nothing was true anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it seemed … everything was up for grabs.”
Thus, Ziggy Stardust was a parody of a rock star, herald of an era in which everything began to look like parody, and the satire I’d cherished in my MAD magazines seemed redundant. Kubrick had made A Clockwork Orange between 1969 and 1972, precisely as Neil and Buzz, and Pete and Al, and Alan and Ed, and Dave and Jim, and John and Charlie, and Gene and Jack were making their landings on the Moon. There’s a famous scene at the beginning, where Alex and his droogs confront a tramp under a dark railway arch. Reviewing it again, I remembered the old man complaining that “it’s a stinking world,” but not his reasoning:
“There’s men on the Moon. And men spinning around the Earth. And there’s not no attention paid to Earthly law and order no more.”
This seems to enrage Alex. He and his droogs kick the drunk senseless. Only now do I see how much their white uniforms look like space suits.
I’d always wondered whether my sense that everything changed with the end of Apollo was a figment of a child’s imagination. But no: the venerable historian Eric Hobsbawm is merely formalizing academic orthodoxy when, in his masterful Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, he divides the era extending from the onset of World War I to the fall of the Iron Curtain into three distinct periods. The second, which he calls “The Golden Age,” runs from the end of World War II, accelerating in the late Fifties, to – precisely – the end of 1972. The greatest period of economic expansion the world has ever seen. Like our fantasy of a space-faring future, the assumption of a world in which growth was inevitable proved sorely mistaken.
“Yet it was not until the great boom was over, in the disturbed seventies, waiting for the traumatic eighties,” says the historian, “that observers – mainly, to begin with, economists – began to realize that the world, particularly the world of developed capitalism, had passed through an altogether exceptional phase of its history; perhaps a unique one.”
When Gene Cernan left that last footprint in the Moondust on December 14, he was leaving behind everything we thought we knew about the context to our future lives. It’s easy to see why the generation which followed the Baby Boomers and includes some of their offspring had a propensity to be so much more cynical, or at least less idealistic, than their parents. The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland called us “Generation X,” supposedly the first to reach adulthood with broadly lower material expectations than their parents, and while this is a blunt and unwieldy label, it contains a core of truth. Social scientists have often identified Gen X with people born between 1961 and 1972 and if many of us grew up sneering at hippies, it was because we felt that the hippies let us down. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction: failed expectation.
So the 1960s may have been three years gone, but The Sixties died as Cernan clambered up the spaceship Challenger ’s ladder, ending an adventure which perfectly embodies the candescent era in which it took place – the upheaval, uncertainty, optimism, energy: the feeling that a world could be, was being, remade. This, I think, has something to do with the aura that still surrounds Apollo. It will be many months before I’m able to quiz Cernan on his bittersweet place in the Moonwalker canon, but when I do, the setting couldn’t be more fortuitous or bizarre.
Elements of the space age world that Cernan left behind linger on, of course. The day I drove to Los Alamos, there was a story in the local paper about forestry workers being banned from thinning ponderosa pine in some areas, because the trees are still radioactive from Cold War nuclear tests carried out up to 1961.
In a Santa Fe bar one night I met an English scientist who worked at the nuke-producing National Laboratory in Los Alamos. He told me that the facility there is run by the University of California, because it used to be secret and scientists didn’t want to work directly for the government, and that the place contains the highest proportion of PhD’s in the world, with average earnings four times those of Albuquerque. (I checked and it was true.) He said that his own work was on an energy conservation project, although I wondered whether this might be a front, and over a couple of beers we chattered about the town and the lab and The Bomb and the ever more threatening noises around Iraq at the end of 2002, then turned to space and a piece of insider information that I hadn’t previously heard: that Shuttle astronauts are given a 1 per cent chance of dying on a flight; that, statistically, this is given as their chance of failing to return. To this he added a further observation that the International Space Station, that hymn to narcotic space, was expected to require 150 flights before reaching completion in 2010. Then he frowned and took a slug of beer as the Appalachian blues singer we’d come to see wailed in the background.
“And that means that they expect to lose at least one of those,” he said.
On February 1, 2003, it happened. The shuttle Columbia broke up as it reentered Earth atmosphere, killing its seven crew and prompting a period of soul-searching in space circles. My Space Frontier Foundation pal Rick Tumlinson will suggest that the reaction to Columbia’s loss owed much to 9/11; that before, opprobrium would have rained down on NASA even as the debris was settling over Texas, but in this climate the astronauts were seen as martyrs and their deaths borne stoically as part of a bigger national picture. For the first time in a decade, questions were asked about America’s space programme and the people who ran it. The constant mantra has been Where are we going? And now, if rumour is to be believed, an answer that would have been unthinkable a year ago is waiting in the wings. The “space community” is beside itself with excitement. When Gene Cernan and I finally arranged to meet, we knew nothing of this and every time I think about it, I can’t help but laugh. Better yet, it’s only weeks since China put its first astronaut in space. It’s all coming together. If there’s a good day to be meeting the self-styled Last Man on the Moon, this is it.
It’s Tuesday, January 13, 2004. We’d originally settled on Wednesday, but last week Cernan got a call from the White House asking him to be in D.C. for a speech President G. W. Bush is delivering at NASA headquarters on that day. The details of the speech have been widely leaked and these leaks suggest that the president will announce a return to the Moon, followed by a crewed mission to Mars. It seems almost unbelievable and is exciting stuff, though my first thought upon hearing the underground rumblings was that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. both trumpeted similar plans, which came to nought. And that 2004 is an election year, at the start of which the incumbent’s popularity ratings are poor.
Captain Cernan (always Captain Cernan) has been the hardest of the still-visible Moonwalkers to nail down. He’s a busy man with a punishing schedule, because this is what he does for a living; he’s a professional Moontalker. He is everywhere in the field of space – a signing here, an auction there, a speaking engagement or TV appearance somewhere else, stippled with promotional work for Omega watches – but he’s improbably hard to meet face to face. It’s been made clear that an audience with him is a rare and valuable commodity and my strong impression is that it’s been granted because he doesn’t want to be the odd man out rather than because he feels any curiosity or affinity with what I’m doing. Anyway, I know from the start that he’s not here to pass the time of day, because Cernan doesn’t mess about. It feels like getting an audience with the Pope. The Pope of the Moon.
The Captain is a first-generation American who’s lived the Dream in excelsis. The only son of Czech and Slovak immigrant
s who toiled hard to better themselves, he saw newsreel film of pilots landing on carriers during World War II and knew that this was for him. When he took to the skies, no one knew that there were going to be such things as astronauts in the twentieth century (one of the best sci-fi films of the Fifties, The Forbidden Planet, begins with the words “In the final decade of the twenty-first century, men and women had landed on the Moon …” – it had seemed that far away in 1956), but as soon as the word was coined, he wanted it for himself and got it. This explains both his passion for aviation and his profound patriotism. Guenter Wendt says: “He had a one-track mind. ‘I want to go to the Moon and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there,’” adding that “he had no problem with saying ‘thank you’ when he felt you had done something well.”
He manages his career with a finesse that his socially awkward old sparring partner Buzz Aldrin can only dream of, and we know that when Apollo was running, “Geno” was confident enough of Deke Slayton’s loyalty to reject a copilot’s seat on 16 in favour of commanding 17. If he hadn’t, Charlie Duke would never have flown, while Dick Gordon would have got his chance to land as commander of 17. In fact, both of these men might have had their way, because when Cernan crashed a helicopter after some ill-advised hot dogging on January 23, 1971, Deke protected him from what would have been a career-wrecking blunder for most. The way Cernan tells it, Slayton took him into his office, looked him straight in the eye and said, “So, exactly when did the engine quit on you?” Jim McDivitt, by then manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Programme Office, resigned over his subsequent assignment to Apollo 17. According to Chris Kraft, McDivitt raged:
“Cernan’s not worthy of this assignment, he doesn’t deserve it, he’s not a very good pilot, he’s liable to screw everything up, and I don’t want him to fly.”
Kraft goes on to note darkly that if Slayton had told him the truth about Cernan’s chopper accident, things “might have turned out differently,” intimating that he would have had the showboating astronaut yanked from duty. Cernan is impressively honest about the incident in his autobiography, just as he is about his strenuous efforts to have Edgar Mitchell bumped from Apollo 14, citing as justification Ed’s “goofy” attitude – by which he means the ESP stuff – and further suggesting that Deke Slayton was open to this idea. Fortunately, Mitchell’s commander, Alan Shepard, resisted Cernan and Slayton’s advances (asked why, he reportedly said, “Because I want to come back”), but Ed sounds a little hurt when questioned about the manoeuvring that seems to have gone on, commenting: “I doubt that the conversations took place quite as portrayed … [but] Gene and I have never been real buddies, so I would never be surprised at his stories and the spin he might give them. I think I was a bit too straitlaced and too intellectual.” He also notes drily that “NASA was not the proper milieu to pursue philosophy and art.” For reasons that are mysterious to me, the affection I felt for Ed Mitchell when we met has grown appreciably over the months (perhaps because I now have a clearer idea of what it took to be an outsider in the Astronaut Office) and I’m trying not to let this affect my attitude to Cernan.
Even so, a writer warns me that when you speak with him, “he has a kind of tape loop that he switches on.” Another Apollo astronaut dismisses him as “playing the rock star,” while yet another contends darkly that “Cernan’s a nice guy, but almost everything he says has been said already by somebody else” – the suggestion being that he has turned the experience into rhetoric and the rhetoric into cash and celebrity. When Rusty Schweickart saw him speak for the first time and gasped, “I didn’t know Gene had that in him,” he took his colleague’s apparent passion as an affirmation of his own profound feelings about floating in space, but there are other ways to read this. A second writer describes him as “frighteningly articulate” and warns me not to be late for our meeting.
What intrigues me in relation to Cernan is this: In a book from the 1980s called The Overview Effect, a Princeton social scientist named Frank White examines the impact upon the imagination of seeing the Earth from space. It’s an interesting if misty-eyed tract, but one thing which caught my eye was White’s acknowledgment of the natural, human pressure that astronauts must feel to give us what we want and expect; for their own experience to be corrupted over time by our innocent longings. So when Gene Cernan tells a rapt audience, “It is one of the deepest, most emotional experiences I have ever had,” or that he saw “too much logic, too much purpose” for there not to be a God, how do we know, how does he know anymore, whether these statements reflect what actually happened, or what we wish happened? Any writer or journalist understands this question: it doesn’t require dishonesty, at least not necessarily. For instance, a particularly evocative passage from Cernan’s book concerns a phone call the Apollo 17 crew received from Richard Nixon the night before liftoff, in which “our president rattled on for forty-five minutes about how he felt persecuted and pilloried by the very citizens he was trying to serve,” sounding like “a tired and lonely old man,” while Gene and Jack Schmitt and Ron Evans, listening on separate phones, “looked over at each other in bewildered surprise”: yet when I mentioned this to Schmitt, he just looked puzzled and said, “I remember that he called, but I don’t remember that. I think I would have, but I don’t.”
When you’ve shared a moment with the whole world, it can be hard to know precisely where your memories end and everyone else’s begin …
Questioned on this anomaly, Cernan declares himself “astounded” that Schmitt doesn’t remember the conversation as he does.
I’ve been instructed to make my way to a boxy concrete office belonging to a friend of the Captain in Gemini Street, off NASA Road 1, near the Johnson Space Center. Glossy colour photos of rockets hang from the white walls and I stand at reception while the owner of the office finishes his dealing with two older men in suits. I’ve given up trying to dress to expectation and am wearing a leather jacket, jeans and brown Italian shirt with a quiet flower pattern – nothing fancy or effete, but the three men look me up and down as though I’ve wigged in waving a joint and singing, “If you’re going to San Francisco.” I don’t need a ponytail to know that these guys would fail the ponytail test, so, looking around to make sure that no one’s preparing to throw tear gas at me, I tell them why I’m here and watch their jaws drop. I appear to have come down behind enemy lines. The owner directs me through a wide hall to a small end office where Gene Cernan reclines behind a wooden desk in a red-and-white-striped shirt, wiry and fit at age sixty-nine, bantering into a mobile phone about having had dinner with “The Pres” last Friday (“No – The Pres Senior”) and a book he’s reading about Japanese military culture and World War II. His pleasant assistant of twenty years’ standing, Claire, greets me effusively and offers a seat. She warns that we have limited time, because the Captain is getting ready to fly to Washington. He puts one hand over the mouthpiece and leans forward to extend the other – I’m momentarily thrown by how tiny it is – and tells me that he’ll be with me shortly. His voice has the same firm ring as Buzz Aldrin’s, like a part of him never left the ship, but without the other man’s disarming hesitancy.
He asks me to remind him why I’m here. He remembers that it was something he really wanted to do, but can’t remember why or what it is. I tell him and he looks a little alarmed; falters as he tries to work out where to set the tape loop running; asks if we’re “hot,” meaning is the minidisc recorder running, and launches into a spiel which sounds like it’s being read from Autocue, incorporating an extended advert for Bombardier, the Canadian aircraft firm with whom he has a business relationship (“the third largest aircraft manufacturing company in … the … world”). Then he runs through the official story of the space programme (“the president of the United States challenged 200 million people to do the impossible” etc.), including how “you have to understand that the Russians owned space at that point in time and America was feeling kinda flat and demoralized at the beginning of the Sixties,”
but won through, of course, and by the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if a marching band leapt out of the cupboard playing “God Bless America.” Obviously, Cernan has no way of appreciating that by now I know more about this guff than is healthy or quite tasteful, but when I try to find the gaps and gently interrupt so that we might move on to something useful, he just barrels over me. At this stage, I have the feeling of being performed at rather than spoken with. Still, I tell myself, it’s early days.
He talks about the centenary of the Wright Brothers’ maiden flight in 2003 and how the impact of Apollo must be traced back through that, handing me a short missive he wrote on the subject, followed by:
“The real legacy of the Wright Brothers is the inspiration and motivation that they instilled in the minds of young dreamers … Who would have thought a hundred years ago that that little fifty-two-minute-whatever trip across the sands of Kitty Hawk could have led to people dreaming about living on another planet? … and I stand here more than thirty years later, telling you, ‘I called that planet my home.’ I drove a car on it. It became my own private little Camelot, I worked, I did things, and I’m here to talk to you about it.”