Moondust (28 page)

“And I remember looking out the window and saying to Pete, ‘Wow, this is scary.' When I was in orbit around the Moon, I had a feeling I was in an animation. It was like orbiting a ball, because it's so much smaller than the Earth and you can see the curvature and it just seemed magical that we would keep going around this little ball in this little spaceship, without drifting off into space. But I remember looking out and there'd just be craters all over the place and I'd be scared and I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, I can't do my job scared,' so I'd look in and I'd pay attention to my computer screen, which looked just the same as in the simulator, and I calmed down. But I didn't want
to miss the trip, so I'd look out and get excited again, then look in … astronauts aren't fearless. Well, some are more fearless than I was, but it's a case of trying to find a way that you can manage your fear and still do the job at hand. And the thing to remember is that we couldn't do this when we began: we gradually learned to. I tell young people all the time, as part of their education, ‘You're not born brave: you gotta learn to be brave. You got to find a way.' ”

He addresses the post-Apollo hiatus in Deep Space voyaging, pointing out that it was 127 years between Columbus stumbling across America and the founding of Jamestown. He gives us a flash of the famous tabloid mock-up of a Nazi bomber on the Moon, using it to tell us that he doesn't think we've been visited by UFOs, then shows his painted version of Al Shepard hitting that golf shot on the lunar surface.

“If I was going again,” he maintains, “I'd take a football and I'd get Pete to go deep … we were so focussed on doing the science that we missed out on the humanity,” even though some people disapproved of that particular stunt. “One of the things I love about being an artist is that when you want to do something, you don't have to call a meeting. And also it doesn't have to make sense.”

We laugh at that. Can Apollo be said to have made sense? I'm still not sure.

Then there's the famous
Whole Earth
photo, which
Apollo 17
brought back after NASA had all but given up hope of getting one, and which is still the most reproduced image on Earth.

“And I'm not a religious person, but I do know what the Bible says, and I think the people that wrote the Bible, when they said ‘the Garden of Eden,' and they thought it was the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, 'cos that was all the writers of the document knew about, but I think, really, the whole Earth is the Garden of Eden. We've been given paradise to live in. I think about that every day. Now, think about this for a minute: we've been looking out of telescopes for three hundred years; we've been sending probes out into space, and we have never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out the front door. That's why, when I came back from the spaceflight, I was a
different person.”

During fifty-nine days of orbiting in Skylab, he looked down and saw rain over Houston, and wished he were there. What struck him when he came back from Deep Space was the movement and change all around us here, where in space you just have “a sunny day then a sunny night then a sunny day then a sunny night.” He remembers going to the shopping centre two or three times, after splashdown and just sitting there eating an ice-cream cone and watching the people go by, as thrilled and fascinated by this sight as by anything he'd seen on the surreal adventure. A photo of Bean, Conrad and Gordon in the Command Module on their way home reminds me of Kim Poor telling me, “I know other missions where the guys don't even talk to each other … but I was with those three at a signing three weeks before Pete died and they were just amazing … they were finishing each other's sentences, just
so
close,” and out of the blue, I find myself wondering whether the most powerful part of the journey for Bean might have been the relationship formed with these two other men? Gordon made some wisecrack about not messing up his tidy module when his friends returned to him safely from the surface, but once, in an unguarded moment, he did admit that what he felt was love flooding through him.

To Bean, the image also brings back the sudden understanding that they were invisible at that moment to even the most powerful telescope on Earth, which in turn showed “how inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of the Universe.” It dawned on him that with the right computer program, it would be possible to know precisely where everything else in the Universe will be ten, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand years from now.

“The one thing in the Universe that we can't predict,” he concludes – and we know what's coming, yet that doesn't diminish the thought – “the one thing that we don't know where it's going to be even ten years from now, is
us
. We may be small, but we've been given the most extraordinary gift in the Universe.”

I walk away feeling fascinated by Alan Bean and his charisma. I realize how few people I know who might be described
as
happy,
and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than that myself, and I'll still be considering this when I see a story in tomorrow morning's paper about how a new object has just appeared in Earth orbit, at about twice the distance of the Moon, and how astronomers at the University of Arizona have become convinced that it is the third stage of the Saturn rocket which hove
Apollo 12
into the sky. Third stages, remember, carried the Command and Lunar Modules into Earth orbit and then pushed them toward the Moon, and when they'd completed this task and been discarded, they were supposed to swing over to the sun, though some crashed into the lunar surface instead. By contrast, this one had seemed to have a mind of its own, loitering in Earth orbit, unable to tear itself away, until finally it did and went wandering for thirty years, only to return now, this week, to resume its silent vigil through the dark of space. I'll think of Alan Bean then, wondering how he'll feel when he opens his morning paper.

I find my car in the car park, climb in and put the key in the ignition. The radio comes on and I find myself laughing uncontrollably. Floating from the speakers is “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. My first thought is: “There's not a person I know who's going to believe this.” And I'm absolutely right.

Many months later, I call to see how Bean's getting on and he tells me that he's finally cracked the problem of adding colour to the Moon. He talks animatedly about the day it happened; how the reds and yellows and oranges suddenly gelled and he knew that he would now be able to make that other world look as beautiful on canvas as it seems to him when he thinks back to his time on the surface, on what he'll still describe as “the best day of my life.” As a result, he thinks his work might be about to enter a new phase, and with the sun shining in Houston and spaghetti in the cards for lunch, I can't help feeling that there's a lot to learn from Alan Bean.

As the family settles down to watch New Year's Eve on TV, the things I remember about the second half of 1969 are these: the first flight of Concorde; the Beatles in beards and Afghan coats on the roof of the Apple building in London, looking cold and sounding grey as the English sky; the murder of an actress named Sharon Tate by members of a hippy cult whose leader, Charles Manson, had eyes like pits – and then of a black Rolling Stones fan who was beaten to death by Hell's Angels security guards at their huge concert in Altamont, California, not far from where I live, filling my living room with articles about whether the Stones are Satanists.

The summer had seemed exciting and full of hope, a prelude to the new decade that would be coming along soon, bringing with it a new world of promise.
Apollo 11
was closely followed by the Woodstock Festival, which, even according to the super-square
Time
magazine, “unfolded without violence
in an Aquarian instant of communion and discovery.” For a few days, the newspapers were all full of hippies dancing naked in the mud and looking a little silly, but when the album came out and all my friends' older brothers and sisters bought it, we loved listening to Country Joe McDonald getting the crowd to shout “Fuck!” and singing a hilarious antiwar song called “The I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag” with a chorus that ended: “Well, there ain't no time to wonder why – whoopie! we're all gonna die.” Two things I've understood from 1969 are that satire is everything, and that people's genitals are hairier than at any other time in history.

Perhaps it's the drugs.

In the summer, everyone said the war was going to end, but it doesn't look that way anymore. In November, President Nixon, who'd promised to stop it (hadn't he?), came on TV and said that it was all North Vietnam's fault anyway and that he wouldn't countenance “the first defeat in our nation's history.” Like everyone else, I hardly noticed
Apollo 12
that same month, only sixteen weeks after the wonderment of
Apollo 11,
because a series of huge antiwar “mobilizations” were grabbing most of the headlines. In Washington, hundreds of thousands of Americans stood in the Mall singing “Give Peace a Chance”; then on the second day of the “Mobe,” news broke that in March 1968, some American troops under Lieutenant William Calley Jr. had massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Spiro Agnew, the vice president who radiates a weird, goofy anger and always sounds like he's trying to juice a lemon with his sphincter muscles when he speaks, accused the students of being irresponsible, drug-addled hippies – like my teachers – and a lot of grown-ups seemed to agree with him. Trade unions have supported the war: in some places, workers have been turning up to fight with student protesters.

Weirdest of all was the first “Draft,” where a huge fishbowl was filled with 366 blue capsules, which were drawn out one by one and if your birthday came out, you were sent to the war. Mum had the TV on that morning and I asked whether I was going to have to go when I was older, but she said no – if that happened, we'd move back to England. Other mothers say the same
thing and it's become a kind of game at school, boasting about whose parents will move furthest away in the event of their sons being drafted (not everyone plays, mind: John Schaeffer's dad, who makes his kids call him “Sir,” says that John'll just have to go and damn well fight). They still announce the number of American dead on the news each evening, but I've been hearing the numbers for so long that they don't mean much to me anymore. A poll on the news says that President Nixon's “approval rating” at the end of his first year is “eighty-one per cent, rising to eighty-six per cent in the South …” so I guess that means he's doing a good job.

What of this new dawn? Before 1970 is done, the Beatles have angrily split and Hendrix and Joplin will be dead, with the Doors' Jim Morrison to follow. Bill Anders's
Earthrise
picture has fronted environmentalists' first “Earth Day,” four students have been killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University and a house which blows up down the road from where I used to live in Greenwich Village turns out to have been a bomb factory for a shady group calling itself the Weathermen. The big movies are
Catch-22
and
M*A*S*H
and
Patton,
about the World War II general, which Nixon screens for himself in the White House whenever he feels in need of inspiration, clearly missing the archness in Francis Ford Coppola's script; and biggest of all, the weepy
Love Story,
which critics panned but fearful Middle America is eating up like Devil's Food Cake
lite
. There are signs that the economic Golden Age is losing its lustre, but they're subtle as yet. Public opinion is turning against the war, though – not because, to quote
Newsweek,
“the combat forces are now manned by bitter draftees [who] get killed at nearly double the rate of non-draftee enlisted men,” but because so many of them have been returning as drug addicts. Getting our boys killed in 'Nam is one thing: bringing them home as hippies quite another. Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, will one day admit that the new president could have halted the war in 1971 if not sooner, but chose to wait until the election year of 1972. By the war's end, the death toll will include 58,000 Americans, nearly a third of whom have gone down on his watch, with a quarter of a million wounded.

A new decade? No. From where I stand, nothing's changed. We're on the cusp of an era that will drift steadily beyond the reach of satire, but for now, it's business as usual. We're out of the 1960s, but the
Sixties
aren't done yet, and if Marvin Gaye doesn't know what's going on as he floats into my room on KFRC, that's because no one else seems to either.

In the days since I last saw Alan Bean, I've been surprised by a number of things. The first is that I drove away from him thinking not “I wish I could go to the Moon,” but rather: “I hope I can be like that when I'm seventy.” I'm beginning to see patterns again, like I did in the old apartment on West Fourth Street, and if it's becoming clearer to me that the astronauts' journey wasn't really about the Moon, it's also dawning that neither is mine.

Another surprise is how much I'm growing to like Houston, which, for all its rubble jungle of vacant lots and parades of traffic-choked, twelve-lane flyovers, is full of vitality, seems to be in a permanent state of invention, and I'm unexpectedly pleased to be staying for another week. And I'm staying because of the final surprise, which is that, in three days' time, the spectacularly retiring
Apollo 16
commander, John Young, has agreed to receive me at NASA's Johnson Space Center on the road to Galveston, where he still works, the last of the Moonwalkers to do so, a Space Age heirloom at the age of seventy-two. Before it was renamed, the Johnson Space Center was called the Manned Spacecraft Center and when astronauts referred to “Houston,” this is what they meant. So I'm meeting John Young at Mission Control.

It gets better, too. By priceless coincidence, the World Space Congress is also in town this week and I am registered as a delegate. The congress happens on this scale just once a decade and here Apollo's legacy will be laid out like a banquet in the big tin hangar of the George R. Brown Convention Center. In fact, as I take my seat for the inaugural ceremony, the eighty-five-year-old veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite is already hailing the presence of over one hundred Nobel Prize–winners this week. He talks up the forbidding programme of lectures, seminars and
events, then launches into a series of tales about his time reporting the space programme, the best of which concerns being in the studio when Armstrong and Scott started to tumble in
Gemini 8
and it looked like they were going to be lost, at which moment his team had “seized the air” and started to breathlessly report the episode – not a story Cronkite enjoyed reporting but his duty all the same – and the station switchboard had been instantly assailed by so much traffic that the phone company strained to handle it … calls sparked not by anxiety or alarm or concern for the astronauts, but because Cronkite had interrupted a broadcast of
Lost in Space. That's right,
Armstrong and Scott were cramping the style of my foily friend, Major Don West. This will be a theme I hear often this week: how the fickle public would rather be spoon-fed fantasy than pay for awkward and unpredictable reality. Then Cronkite introduces a celebratory collection of space clips from Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows and I seem to be the only one to find this riotously ironic.

Downstairs in the cavernous hall, the congress looks like two different conventions sharing the same space. There are dozens of small stalls concerned with satellites, or trumpeting technologies and programmes aiming to catch NASA's eye, because they're the only ones with money to spend. Then there's the monolithic NASA, which dominates and is here to persuade the public and media that it's exciting, necessary and value for money. This is a tough job, because no public in the world is more shrewdly skeptical of (real) space than the American public at the end of 2002. In Europe, India, China, Japan, it can still fire the imagination and inspire pride, but to most Americans it's history – expensive, tax-inflating history. Space people complain about this, even though the original push was presented to the people as a race which needed to be won, then was: and once a race is won, only a fanatic keeps running. This is in no way NASA's fault (remember Bob Gilruth's screams in the night?), but they've had to live with it ever since.

Which is not to say that NASA is blameless. Old-school engineers will tell you that the bureaucrats started to lose their nerve
and their way long before Apollo was over, while bureaucrats blame politicians, the public and the media for their lack of resolve, a little like Hitler and the people in the subway. Before I came here, I was pleased to track down the English engineer John Hodge, one of a visionary four-man team who designed Mission Control and went on to be the unflappable flight director on Armstrong and Scott's near-fatal
Gemini 8
mission (witnesses describe him pacing the floor in his tweed jacket, smoking a pipe as he issued instructions). Almost unknown in his country of birth, Hodge lives in Virginia now and his story is telling in a number of ways. To begin with, it's another little-known fact that he was part of a tranche of twenty-five crack British engineers who'd been recruited from the Canadian aircraft makers A. V. Roe when it suddenly went bust in 1959. They'd been working on a super-advanced jet fighter called the “Arrow,” and when NASA heard of the company's collapse, they hurried over the border with a chequebook and signed up the design team. It was a smart move: flight controller Chris Kraft enthuses that “In one bunch, we got engineers who would make major contributions to getting us into space.” Thus, when Hodge arrived two months after NASA's formation, 50 per cent of the engineers were Brits like him. Yet according to Hodge, there was more to this than met the eye.

“The interesting thing about it was that they couldn't get people in America,” he told me with a note of amusement in his voice. “People in the States thought it was just a fly-by-night thing that wasn't going to go anywhere. So when we came down here, we were about twenty per cent of the total organization! We were a big part of the programme at that time.”

He talked for a while about being part of the team that dreamt Mission Control into existence and how exciting those early years were. Then he spoke of how NASA ossified through the Sixties, as the bureaucracy became more top-heavy and entrenched and remote from the creative engineers. By the end of the decade, he was working on shuttle and space station designs, but the crafts which struggled through endless committee meetings and political compromises weren't what he'd imagined
or hoped for.

“No, the space station they built is not the space station I designed,” he mourned. “It's a very bad space station. And of course we need a new shuttle. That was not a good design either.”

Neither was money a key factor in this, in the engineer's opinion.

“No, I don't think it was about the budget, because we spent thirteen billion or something like that. It had to do with the attitude of the people in Houston. They really knew what they wanted and it wasn't the right thing. They're very precocious down there …”

So now I'm “down there,” looking directly at them; at the expansive stands displaying all sorts of speculative designs for sexy space planes and new propulsion systems that run on air itself, and socially conscious schemes for generating clean energy in space. The trouble is that everything's on paper, backed by an occasional scale model, and almost nothing looks likely to be realized anytime soon, save in response to some so far unseen threat or tragedy. No one in the hall knows that, fourteen weeks from now, in February 2003, the shuttle
Columbia
will provide just such a spur when it breaks up in the clear morning sky right above this place, as if on some mean cosmic cue. Like everyone else, my first thought then will be for the crew and their families, but my second involves remembering that
Columbia
had been the first shuttle to plummet back from space at twenty-five times the speed of sound in April 1981, and that the pilot who placed her triumphantly on a desert runway at Edwards that sunny day was the Apollo hero John Watts Young.