And when he got back, did he feel longing? Relief? Irritation? Disappointment? The astronauts’ nurse, Dee O’Hara, spoke of a kind of rage the early astronauts felt at being back in the realm of gravity, how they were always looking up and bumping into Earth’s piteous furniture. Does Armstrong know what he thinks and feels about the adventure which asked for eight years of his life, then stole the rest? Does it make him want to scream? Cry? Smile? Laugh? Was it worth it? Does he wish he’d done something else instead, the way the iconic actor Paul Newman (on the screen as Butch Cassidy that year) wishes he’d become a marine biologist? Would he like to go again? Having had a privileged view of infinity, how does he feel about joining it when his time comes?
And I knew that Armstrong wouldn’t, couldn’t, answer these questions, but was struck by the pleasure I took in this knowledge, as in the realization that my “childish wonder,” far from being an impediment to understanding Apollo, had been the whole point of it; that perhaps it should be the point of more things, more often. Hours passed as I sat at the screen and it felt like a catharsis, the purging of a year spent finding different ways to ask the same question – because I could now see that in the end, everything boiled down to this: What was it like to stand on the Moon? I hit the send button and it was gone.
Epilogue
Moondust
Nearly three decades have passed since I last gazed down from the steep hill upon which my junior high school once sat. It’s a bright, cool January day and the sun is low; leafless trees cast long shadows across sidewalks and cars float slowly through the streets below. Again I wonder how it is that memories can seem so distant yet still feel like yesterday. I’ve returned to San Francisco many times over the years and in this moment am surprised that I’ve never made the short drive over the bay to revisit Orinda before now.
The Senate Watergate committee was in full swing and President Nixon on the ropes the week we started at the new school in August 1973, and everything in our lives seemed to change. The year before, we’d been running around calling the girls names, and they us, pretending we didn’t like each other when really we did, but at junior high we were suddenly going to parties with each other like bantam adults, invited in pairs, and at one I saw a couple disappearing into a bedroom, which shook me a little. The transformation had been so abrupt: how had we known to do this and who had decided that we would? In a new “health education” class, a studiously hip young teacher who let us sit on the desks as if we were at a be-in warned about VD and drugs, telling us that if you injected heroin three times you’d be an addict, and that at the huge California Jam festival, which Deep Purple headlines down the coast at the Ontario Speedway, “pushers” were sticking people with junk-filled needles at random in order to get them hooked. As with most things, I had no idea whether to believe her or not at the time, but later wasn’t surprised when both claims turned out to be untrue.
Watergate had hung over the country like a cloud of noxious gas and left a haze of heightened cynicism in its wake, which combined with the oil crisis and rising unemployment to make the world feel much less stable than it had. Awful though the Vietnam War was, it had provided a focus for dissent and its corollary, hope, in comparison with which the new problems seemed so formless and hard to grasp, so macro. The California sun still shone and we still had fun, but the stakes of our lives had been raised in ways that we couldn’t yet appreciate and that were already being reflected in the gritty realism favoured by a new wave of American film directors like Scorsese and Bogdanovich; in the pre-1963 nostalgia of George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Samaritans comforting people outside The Exorcist as the spiritual revolution turned in on itself. More seriously for me, my hero Evel Knievel became a laughingstock when he attempted to “jump” Snake River Canyon in a rocket, a stunt which made him look like a cheap circus daredevil and reeked of desperation. I’d thought the arcs he traced through the air on his bike were about flight, but this was just showbiz. He’d lost his way, too.
The hills are softer and rounder and more closely huddled than I remember, beautiful in a way that I couldn’t see as a child, and just in case anyone still doubts that the real victors of the Cold War were estate agents, the place is now called “Orinda Village.” Amazingly, my old playmate David from the day of the first landing is still here, newly divorced but little changed and living in the same street, and so is the old clapboard house where those ghosts of ghosts drifted across the screen that day. When the Golden Age was done, we had to move because Dad had left his job and couldn’t find another to satisfy him. We spent the summer building a retaining wall to stop the garden slipping into the creek that ran through the back, in which I spent hours catching frogs and newts while savings dwindled and Mum grew increasingly fraught, and when the work was done, we left for England in the summer of 1974, where a blistering heatwave was followed by three months of solid slate skies and rain. The foundations of the retaining wall are still there because Dad had designed it well – in the way of his generation, who’ve always seemed to me more rounded than my own. Two years older than Armstrong, he could build anything, but what he dreamt of being was a writer: all my life he was working on a book that, like Apollo, was never finished, and I wonder as I stand waiting for the dusk to come whether it’s coincidence that finishing this one has felt so strange? I mention this because there was a point towards the end of my travels when almost everything, not least the lunar programme itself, began to look like part of the peculiar dynamic between fathers and sons – from JFK and his tyrannical, supercompetitive father onward. In the end it has to be about more than that – and if I had to capture the spirit of the spooky adventure in a word … for astronauts, dreamers, doubters, conspiracy theorists … the word would be desire – but it’s part of the story all the same. It’ll take me months to realize this, but when I set out on my return journey to Apollo I was within weeks of the age that my father was when Apollo I set down in the lunar dust.
I spent a while at the old house, as the woman who lives there now explained that her kids never played in the creek because she thought it might be dangerous. These days it’s hidden behind a fence and as I look around I seem to see fences everywhere: I thought my visit would feel like a homecoming, but in the event it feels more like a catharsis.
The question I started out with remains. Why had I wanted to come back to the time and place of Apollo? Why had Pete Conrad’s death and Charlie Duke’s “only nine” affected me the way they did, impelling me to go and find them, fueled by anxiety that these people whom I’d barely thought about in the intervening years would soon be gone? For eighteen months this has vexed me, but suddenly the answer seems obvious: that the astronauts represent a time when the world seemed to reflect my own innocence. Bad things happened, all the time, in spades, but for a brief period people tried to convince themselves that these horrors stood against the natural order and run of humanity, as opposed to constituting its most perfect expression – that progress in the broadest sense could win the day, was liberating and inevitable. For me, the custodians of this radical and optimistic notion were the lunar astronauts and the flower children, both of whom promised bright futures that were later discredited and abandoned; that disappointed, yet retained a latent, almost involuntary, hold on the imagination. Little wonder that we as a culture return to them constantly, can’t leave them alone. Like the curious decade that spawned them, they carry the fascination of the unresolved.
Little wonder that at about the astronauts’ Moon age, the age they were when they flew, I’d wanted to find out what they and their era were worth, what they’d left us with – if anything. And in Apollo’s case, it’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did, via Neil Armstrong’s upstretched thumb, was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small. It’s no coincidence that when I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind’s eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Ala
n Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact that they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he. Then, no matter what else I might be feeling, I also feel lucky, because in a cosmos of infinite scattered moments, each one I can lay claim to and use well seems precious. For me, this is the surprise collective lesson of the Moon men. No one was changed, but everyone was galvanized. Whatever they took with them, they brought back tenfold, like coals crushed to diamond. Through Apollo, the Moon did what it has always done: it shone fresh light on what was already there.
* * *
And still one surprise remains.
Against form and expectation, Armstrong got in touch, saying that he would be willing to try to answer my questions, making me laugh by adding that he would be more inclined to address matters of “fact” than “questions of opinion” – a much clearer distinction for him than it is for me, I suspect. In the months that followed, he proved unfailingly courteous if typically cautious in his responses, yet the truth is that the technical details of Apollo have been so extensively catalogued that few original “facts” remain for even him to disclose.
There was one particular exchange that I cherish, though. It followed my observation that in 1999 the reprinted edition of a book called Chariots for Apollo by Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff had revealed how close Armstrong’s Eagle may have come to an unhappy end in the moments after landing, when a slug of frozen fuel became trapped in a pipe, causing a buildup of temperature and pressure that threatened to set the ship off like a hand grenade. Their story has engineers at Grumman headquarters scrambling for blueprints and ideas, guessing that they had five minutes, maybe ten if they were lucky, to sort the problem out. Someone suggested they “burp” the engine, but that carried a risk of tipping the module over, and studying the options, the engineering manager said, simply, “Get them out of there.” Yet just as concern was turning to panic on the ground, telemetry indicated that the fuel plug was shifting on its own. By this account, very few people have known how close Eagle came to recasting Tranquillity as a graveyard even before the One Small Step could be taken. How different America and the Sixties might look to us now if it had.
I’d mentioned to Armstrong that I’ve never seen this story anywhere else and had asked whether it was true as reported. He replied that although he considered the book in question “a case study in creative writing” (heinous crime!), the blockage was real and “we did have some discussion with Mission Control … [but] we were not unduly concerned about it.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the authors were exaggerating, because Houston may have kept the seriousness of the situation from the crew, and in any case we have Michael Collins’s word that “Neil never admits surprise.”
Of more interest to me, though, was the First Man’s response to a supplementary question about “the strange, electronicsounding music” that Collins reported him taking to Luna, to which he offered a piece of trivial information that gives me as much pleasure as anything I discovered in the course of my research. He told me that he took Dvořák’s New World Symphony, but that the electronic sound I referred to was the theremin music of Dr. Samuel Hoffman, specifically an album called Music Out of the Moon, which he’d committed to tape from his own collection. The theremin was an early form of synthesizer, played by moving one’s hands through two invisible radiostatic fields to produce a kind of unearthly quaver, eerie, like the pleadings of an alien choir. Now mostly associated with Fifties sci-fi movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” along with a few moody modern groups like Portishead, Armstrong’s decision to make it part of his own sound track struck me as at once deeply, deeply eccentric and absolutely perfect, and ever since, when I’ve thought of Apollo, I’ve thought not of the first step or the raging Saturn, but of him and his little band drifting out there towards the secret Moon, spinning slowly to distribute the heat and spilling spooky theremin music out at the stars, who think it’s just as weird as I do – and it occurs to me that in the final analysis this might be as good a way as any to remember Apollo, as a kind of collective dream, a tale from a comic book come to life. I’ll drive away from Orinda thinking that it might be a while before we see anything like it again, but finding a rare peace in this knowledge. It’s time to go home.
Afterword
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 – 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 – however briefly – have.
‘Oh, they’ve mellowed,’ she chuckled. ‘Back 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 – 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 ‘Punky’ 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 ‘about’, and while my stock response in the case of Moondust is that ‘it’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.
Acknowledgements
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.