What? I avoid looking at Claire, in case she’s waving a cue card instructing me to stand up and cheer. There follows all the cheesy motivational stuff, about telling young people not to be afraid to dream, or to try, “because if you don’t try, you’ll never know how good you could be,” or to make mistakes, “and I can look ’em in the eye and say, ‘I’m a good example, I went to the Moon before your mom and dad were born.’ ” Which is all true, but kind of … irritating. I heard Alan Bean say a lot of similar stuff, but it sounded modest and real coming from him, because he made his own decision to parachute into the unknown when he became a painter. That took some courage. What Cernan did was incredible, but the imaginative drive for it came from elsewhere. He lived the dream, but the dream wasn’t his and there’s something about his presumption of ownership, when contrasted with the humility of the others, that jars with me. I realize in a flash that this is what I feared they’d all be like. But they weren’t. They so weren’t.
We talk about the impact of World War II on children of his generation, which was similar to the impact of Apollo on mine.
“Aviation came into the world of young kids’ dreams at that point in time. Prior to that they wanted to drive locomotives and whatever else. That’s where aviation entered into the dreamer’s world.”
Clearly, they did a lot of dreaming in those days, what with no TV or video games. Cernan’s mobile rings elaborately and a long conversation about flights ensues.
“I do have an airplane, a commercial bird, leaving here at seven-forty in the morning. It gets into DCA and then … I have to be at NASA headquarters at one o’clock.”
When he comes back, I ask about the impending Bush announcement re the Moon and Mars and he is surprisingly measured in his response, though still with a Zelig-like tendency to place himself at the centre of events.
“I’ve been saying for twenty-plus years,” he says, “that we really haven’t had a space programme since we came back from the Moon. There have been a series of space events, but there was no agenda, they never led anywhere.”
Doesn’t it worry him that we’ve been here before with Reagan and Bush Senior?
“Okay. Let me tell you what’s different. They were both well-intended, and out of President Reagan came the space station, which has never been well-defined and never really had a purpose in life. And I think it’s gonna eventually go by the wayside. You can trace it back to Vice President Ted Agnew. After I came back from the Moon, he was very much in favour of putting a programme together to get to Mars. I said back in 1972, ‘Not only are we gonna go back to the Moon – you know I’m not gonna be the last human being to walk on the surface of the Moon forever – not only are we gonna go back to the Moon, we will be on the surface of Mars by the turn of the century.’ That gave me twenty-seven years to be proved wrong: well, my glass is half full, it’s not half empty. Okay. And what’s gonna happen tomorrow sort of proves it. But there was a big letdown back then. Then when President Bush [the Elder] said let’s go back into space, people started putting a price tag on it and saying it would cost jillions of dollars. And you’re gonna see the same thing this time around: ‘Well, we can’t afford it, we can’t afford it!’
“This president’s not asking for a balloon down-payment to go to Mars. He is putting Mars out there somewhere, a generation into the future, twenty to twenty-five years is what I’ve been hearing – is what I’ve been saying. We need to put the educational and industrial infrastructure together so that we can get there from here. One of the most significant spin-offs will be the enthusiasm and excitement that it’s going to put in the hearts and minds of young people. The technology we’re using is twenty-five years old. We’ve got to take the next step. I’ve been advocating that for twenty-five years. At least we’ll have a benchmark. Who knows, if we get to the Moon and find a way to mine helium-3, we might stay for another twenty-five years and not go further for fifty years. Mars is a challenging but reachable objective, so you build the infrastructure and work back from there.”
What actually happened with the first President Bush is that he announced his bold plan before asking NASA how much it would cost. When he asked them, they came back with a conservative estimate of $400–500 billion. End of story. Plan quietly shelved. Cernan talks about the educational value of going, the way it would inspire interest in science and engineering, like the first programme did for a whole generation. I mention the way that generation was let down afterwards, and wonder once more whether Apollo happened too soon.
“Yeah, maybe. It’s like a kid getting too much too early, as a country. We threw out a plum for these teenagers to go and reach for, and then they reeled in a lemon. That was your promise to the future. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t become doctors and journalists and teachers, but that was the promise to your generation. Then you reeled in a lemon and … ah … there we are.”
What about you? I ask. You reeled in a planet-sized lemon. Instead of being that mind-boggling future, you were presented with the midlife crisis to end all midlife crises. He softens a bit.
“Well, you know, I flew when I was thirty-two, thirty-five, thirty-eight, and I had no idea where I was gonna go or what I was gonna do. I looked at the space-shuttle programme, but by that time I was forty-three, I’d had twenty years in the Navy and the shuttle was still five or six years out there into the future. And even at the age of forty to forty-two, five years is a long time. I’d like to have flown the shuttle, ’cos it’s a great flying machine, but I’d been there and done that, and it doesn’t go anywhere. And let me tell you, when you’ve seen the Earth from the Moon, staying home isn’t good enough. So I had to decide whether to stick around or go out and find something new, and that’s what I chose.”
Which must have been hard.
“Yeah. Just ’cos you go to the Moon doesn’t mean you’re an expert at everything, obviously. And it’s harder to find something when you’re on the hot seat all the time, training for crews and backup crews. You almost take those things for granted, and then all of a sudden you get off and you look for the next mountain to climb. And you don’t find one with the challenge, with the risk, with the adventure and the reward. So you keep searching until … you know, I guess I’m the kind of personality that can’t just sit back and put up a sign saying, ‘I’ve been to the Moon – you all owe me somethin’. “I had to go and find something else. And I guess until I grew up and hit grandkids and one thing or another … I’m satisfied now, although I’m still probably this type whatever-it-is personality …”
And I find myself thinking, “But you never did find anything else,” and wondering what the difference was between those who were expanded by the journey and those left with ennui and frustration; between the trips that were good and the trips that were bad. I wonder what I would have found and whether it’s perhaps better not to know … whether quiet, Earthly contentment beats shooting for the Moon in the end, the way a pair of threes beats an ace in poker. It dawns on me that this question lies behind nearly all of the others I’ve been asking in regard to both the astronauts and the Apollo programme itself, and that it has a special resonance for me, because amused friends have begun to point out that when I’m finished with the Moon men, I’m going to be in a similar, if much less spectacular, position to the one they faced at the end of 1972. Where am I going to find something to absorb me the way they have? In this moment I feel a heightened empathy for Cernan, even if he maintains that he’s as passionate about space as he ever was.
You still feel passionate about it? I ask.
“Oh, yeah, that’s one reason why I’m tending to respond to requests like this. I’m finally seeing something come together that I’ve been trying to say for a long time. And that’s that we haven’t had an agenda. We’ve got a series of space events that we can’t define, that we can’t justify. And they’re going nowhere. We need something out there to entice our kids. Claire, how long have I been saying that?”
“Twenty y
ears.”
He continues as if he hasn’t heard.
“Twenty-five years. And finally we’ve got a president who’s saying the same thing I’m saying. So that’s what I’m passionate about, that’s what I’m excited about.”
After NASA, Cernan worked in oil, energy, marketing, and ran a small airline for a while. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to appreciate that none of those could rival the thrill of leading a species to its apparent destiny in space and in time they all palled. Like Buzz Aldrin, he wound up returning to the Moon in the sense that it’s his life again; it’s what he does and takes his identity from. It’s where he sees himself.
“Yeah, going to the Moon in front of the whole world is a tough one to top,” he confirms, leaving me to wonder whether he thinks his Moonwalker colleagues experienced the same sense of letdown that he did, reacting as he would have expected them to, or whether they surprised him.
“Some of them surprised me and some haven’t. Some have gone on and decided that they’ve done it, don’t want to be bothered, and live a cloistered life. Others are very ambitious and want to go out and do something and make something happen in business. And then others sort of, ah … I’ve gotta be careful with my words here … sort of prostituted to some degree their celebrity status. And I think there’s somewhere in between where you can make use of it.”
There’s little doubt in my mind as to whom he’s talking about here, although it seems to me that if anyone fits that third category, he does.
“You’ve got a lot of opportunities, but a lot of responsibilities go with it. Twelve of us travelled to the Moon. I don’t have to keep telling people about it, but some guys feel they do. So there’s that three categories of people.”
Does he get fed up with the obvious questions – what did it feel like to walk on the Moon etc.? He smiles.
“What’s it feel like? What’s it look like? Did you feel closer to God? Were you scared? How do you go to the bathroom in space? What’s one-sixth gravity like? I mean, you just can’t get it from looking at a picture. What’s it like? I can’t tell you what it’s like in a few words. What’s it like to look back at the Earth surrounded by the infinity of space and concepts we can’t even understand, like time. I can’t tell you it’s unbelievable, or it’s awesome, because that doesn’t answer your question. We gotta sit here and talk about it. That’s what enticed me to write a book … So do you get tired of hearing that question? Yes and no. You get tired of the fact that you can’t give that person the ten-second voice-bite that he wants in order to feel good about what you’ve said. You’ve gotta spend time, like I’m trying to do with you now, talking about being there at that moment in space and time and history. You feel inadequate that you can’t give people the answer they want.”
Suddenly I feel bad about my earlier impatience. When I told him what I was searching for, I never meant to suggest that I was expecting Kierkegaard in response, the grand answers from him alone, but that’s obviously what he heard. No wonder there was a look of panic in his eyes as he tried to figure where to start.
We talk about celebrity for a while and Cernan complains at the way its modern form fails to distinguish between “someone who’s cut somebody’s throat or drowned their pregnant wife,” or “a ballplayer who made sixty home runs, then got kicked outta the game because he’s a druggy,” or Britney Spears, who’s just got hitched for a day in Vegas (“she’s just a bad influence on my grandkids, as far as I’m concerned”), or him.
“But we didn’t put ourselves in front of the public, which is what celebrities tend to do. We just got thrust there.”
He talks about his “love affair” with the Saturn V.
“Standing up at night and the lights are on it and all this oxygen and hydrogen are boiling over the sides, it’s alive, it’s moving ’cos the wind makes it sway, and that’s going to take you a quarter of a million miles to another planet … and when you get in it, you’ve got control of it.”
Only later do I recall Buzz’s insistence that as an astronaut, one thing you didn’t have was control over the rocket.
We move on to the Carpenter family’s allegation of a coup in the Astronaut Office and Cernan holds the official line that Scott “screwed up.” He’s complimentary about Carpenter’s best pal John Glenn, though, who flew into space once more aboard the shuttle in 1998, at the age of seventy-seven. I ask whether he’d like to go for an encore and he says that he’d be happy to take the shuttle up for a quick spin, but not to spend two weeks sliding around in low Earth orbit on the space station.
“Would I like to go back to the Moon, though? Sure I would. Because I would like to go back to a place that I once lived, to see what it’s like, like going back to the old farmhouse that you grew up in when you were a kid, that you haven’t seen in thirty years. You know, What is it like today?”
He’ll repeat this thought for TV cameras tomorrow and Jay Leno will be making fun of him on The Tonight Show in the evening, pointing out that unless some alien civilization has sneaked up there and shifted stuff around like a frat house prank, it’s going to look the same. But when Cernan adds that “the place we lived was frozen in time before we got there and it’s been frozen in time since we left, with the flag and my spacecraft and the rover and my daughter’s initials in the dust, and our footsteps just eternally blazed in time,” I can see what he means. If it was a surreal adventure in the first place, how much more surreal it would be to go back and survey the scene again. That sensation has the potential to be felt by only nine people, but unless Bush the Younger has something very spectacular up his sleeve, it will never be felt by anyone.
“Yeah, I’d like to go back. As you get older, you get more historically minded. You go places where important things have happened and know that the only thing which separates this place from what happened then is something we know nothing about – time. How could you turn it down?”
We talk a bit about Mars and his inconvenient but valid contention that the chemical propulsion systems used today are inadequate to take us there, because “six or seven months’ travel time is unacceptable” but six to eight weeks would be okay. Right now, astronauts would have to stay there for eighteen months until the planets were correctly aligned for a return flight. In my mind, Mars moves further away as he says this.
“But you’ve got more technology under the dashboard of that rental car you’re driving than I had going to the Moon, which tells you what’s happened in those thirty or forty years. And there’s gonna need to be that same kind of technological evolution, that’s gonna be moved forward through necessity. Technology evolves through necessity, not by accident. Now we’re going to see another explosion of technology if the president’s policy goes through. I mean, when I was a kid, Dick Tracy used to talk through his watch and it was, like, ‘Gimme a break!’ Now we can talk through ’em and take pictures and find out where the nearest coffee shop is. I mean, this is wild technology we have today. Anything you can imagine, you can make happen. But we do need to advance our technology in several key areas even to get to the Moon.”
Yet the question remains: Why is any of this important?
“I don’t know, maybe just because it’s there,” he muses, echoing Sir Edmund Hillary’s possibly apocryphal response to the question of why people climb mountains. Taken at face value, this is obviously the most nonsensical reason a person could have for doing anything more complex than tying a shoelace, and I assume Hillary to have meant that mountains and Moons excite the imagination for reasons we don’t understand, which are irrational yet in some way quintessentially human. Viewed like this, Apollo was a decade-long spasm, the St. Vitus’ dance of the twentieth century; a compelling but hubristic and ultimately pointless exercise. Cernan knows there has to be more. He retrenches.
“But it seems to be a step we need to take in order to answer some of the questions human beings have always had. Who are we? What are we? What is the significance of time? It takes on a w
hole new perspective in space. It’s never going to be enough just to send a Mars Rover. Mankind has always followed.”
As I gather up my stuff, I’m astonished to realize that he got me, that I’m feeling inspired all over again by what Cernan and the others did, and the prospect of others following one day – though it will never be the same as the first time, because we know the dragons aren’t there. He seems relaxed now and we chat about the presidential speech on the Mars initiative, which I might be less suspicious of if it wasn’t coming at the start of an election year. The big aerospace states like Texas, California and Florida also happening to be big vote states. Whatever Bush says, Cernan is already anticipating a fight to get the new policy taken up.
“We’re going to listen to what the president says, and then the media’s going to inundate us, you know, with all these naysayers saying it can’t be done and it’s too expensive – you know, ‘I got my washing machine and my car and my telephone, why do I need any more technology? Why do I need to go to the Moon? What’s in it for me?’ I remember politicians in the Sixties saying that we should take all the Apollo money and go feed the poor. But that’s like eating the seed corn. You eat the seed corn and you got nothing to plant next year. There are shortsighted people and you’re gonna see a lot of them. A lot of them. I just hope the overwhelming excitement and a reasonable presentation of the cost will persuade people.”
I’ll watch on CNN the next day as G.W. stumbles through the speech in that distinctive way of his, as though he’s seeing every word on the Autocue for the first time in his life. He refers directly to Cernan at one point and the camera momentarily turns to the Moonwalker in a prearranged set piece, but his face is hard as granite. I wonder whether this is solemnity, or anger at the smoke-and-mirrors accountancy behind the bold-sounding but empty declarations being made. The plan is based on a consolidation of NASA’s resources and refocussing of its aims, common sense even before the Columbia disaster. In the short term, an extra $12 billion is promised toward replacing the shuttle with a more versatile craft, a real spaceship with a ten-year delivery date and goal of reaching the Moon in 2020, from which a base will be built to stretch for Mars. It’s enticing stuff, obviously, except that the details already look improbable. Lest we forget, the much simpler shuttle was massively delayed: it was intended to cut the cost of firing payload into space twentyfold, but ended up increasing it tenfold to around $10,000 per pound. Can this revolutionary replacement be designed and built in a decade? You wouldn’t bet on it even in Vegas.