Moondust (33 page)

“You know, it was a big moment,” he mused, “because most of your life passes into a kind of blur – there's like first grade, high school, NOW … but that was a big summer, when they landed on the Moon. I remember my brother and mother sitting on the porch, talking some stuff I couldn't really follow, but I'd watched a lot of
Dragnet
on TV and so I knew what LSD was,
and I remember my brother telling my mother while they were landing, ‘No, you don't understand, the reason I'm like I am is 'cos I'm taking LSD,' and her going shock-white. And I did, too – like, ‘Oh my God, my brother's doing that stuff they talk about on
Dragnet
!' But that was just the way that people lived.”

He had me in fits as he riffed on a line from one of his most beautiful tunes, “Do You Realize?” which simply asks, “Do you realize/we are floating in space?” but when I said that I found it soothing, he cried:

“No! I don't mean that line to relax you! We really are. We're on some fucking insignificant speck in an endless cold vast sea of nothing. I mean, it's just hanging … I don't even know why it works! It wouldn't surprise me
that
much if I woke up one morning and someone said to me, ‘Hey, you know how the world was turning? Well, it's stopped.' Why wouldn't it? I have dreams sometimes about shit like that, but it could be real. That part of outer space, I
love
that, the way it's full of mysteries. It seems to encapsulate the way that the more you understand, the less meaning things have. One of the things that happens as you get older is that you realize that things don't have to have any reason or meaning. The more knowledge and understanding you have, the more you see how random and meaningless everything is. People die and people are born and some wonderful people die when they're twenty and some horrible ones will live to 110 … no one is sorting this stuff out.”

Then Coyne drew a surprising conclusion, saying:

“But that's the way it should be. Goodness is not something that exists in the Universe and that's why, when it happens, when someone comes up to you and they love you and care for you, you can say, ‘Fuck! That's a big deal.' If it was the natural order to love and care, as the hippies would have you believe, then what would there be to celebrate?”

And I suspect that this is where those magic
Whole Earth
pictures, fed into the imagination of a seven-year-old, had led Coyne. I also suspect that, like me and most of our contemporaries, he owes more to the hippies than he cares to admit.

Afterwards, I began to wonder whether you needed to have
been there for any of this to make sense, whether you had to experience real fear that the lunar fantasy could drift into horror in order to feel any attachment to it? But then, working late two nights before I left the UK for Florida and Ed Mitchell's grown-up flower children, a tune came on the radio which set what appeared to be a recording of Ed White's ecstatic first American spacewalk to a lolloping techno backing. That stroll in space happened in 1965, as hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco; racial tensions prepared to erupt across LA;
Time
magazine declared “Swinging London” the locus of world hip and predicted that one million doses of acid would be taken in the next year. The tune turned out to be “Space Walk,” by a group called Lemon Jelly, and it went on to establish them as a major act in Europe.

I called to ask what had led Lemon Jelly to Ed White and the group's Fred Deakin told me that they'd found an old album called
Flight to the Moon,
which contained recordings from the space programme, and they'd been struck by how emotive they still were.

“‘One small step' leaves me cold,” he said, “because it was so obviously scripted. But the spacewalk … even after hearing it so many times, it's so vivid. Rather than being a technical achievement, it's a human thing and we've found that very few people can remain unmoved by it.”

And he's right. It is moving. The best bit – and this is one of my favourite bits of the whole space programme – is when Cap-Com Gus Grissom, the voice of Mission Control that day, orders White back into the craft and the spacewalker just can't bring himself to go. Broadcast live to radio at the time, the exchange captivated listeners. The third person involved is Commander Jim McDivitt, speaking from inside the spaceship. We come in at the end, which goes like this:

The saddest moment of his life! Who wouldn't feel for him? But he had to go back in, because NASA didn't yet know what floating in space would do to a human being. That he and Grissom had the breath snatched from their lungs in the
Apollo 1
fire only months later gives his words an added poignancy. He didn't have long to live, but he had
this,
and that it should become music is not so very surprising: Story Musgrave, the experienced shuttle astronaut who trained with the Apollo crews and developed a mystical bent afterwards, claims to have heard music up there. “It was a noble, magnificent music,” he told a space.com reporter in February 2000. “I was a little on the margin … I was walking the edge.” Three years after that, scientists in Cambridge claimed to have found the deepest note ever detected, a B-flat emanating from a black hole, fifty-seven octaves below the one in the middle of a piano. Is there a siren song calling us to space? My next couple of days will be spent with people who think there is. In the meantime I'm reminded of the welling in the eyes of visitors to the exquisite “Full Moon” exhibition of Apollo photography at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank of the Thames in 1999, for which artist-photographer-curator Michael Light had to develop a special ink to convey the intense black sheen that astronauts saw; and of a recent revelation by ITN that the first Moonwalk is still the most requested clip from its TV archive service, with JFK's assassination running a distant second. When the fashion giants Dolce e Gabbana declare “astronauts, sailors, ancient
Rome, the Sex Pistols” as the prime influences on their spring 2003 collection (illustrating their claim with a photo of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon), they're using Apollo in an entirely new way: as a symbol of decadence, transgression, impetuosity, hunger. All the elements of which are most assuredly there.

So it is that I walk into the busy lecture theatre in the main hall of the Space Congress just in time to hear Rick Tumlinson, now in a smart black suit and with freshly combed hair, cry: “Good afternoon and welcome to the revolution!” A few sentences later, I'm squealing with laughter as, through a semantic contortion of such daring that Dr. Johnson himself would have stood and cheered, he quotes a few obliquely instructive lines from Nirvana's “In Bloom” at the bemused throng. He talks for a while about the Earth being at the centre of an expanding bubble of life and the challenge of redefining the boundaries between public and private endeavour in this new realm. Then he slickly hands over to a panel of experts, the first of whom is Dennis Tito, the mathematician who traded NASA for Wall Street, then chose to spend some of the millions his skills there brought him on becoming the first space tourist. Against NASA's wishes, he went up with the Russians and stayed at the International Space Station for a fee that the papers reported as $20 million, but was in fact more like $12.5 million. Small and bald and sixty-two years old, he tells us that he got interested in space as a kid when Sputnik went up, joining the nationwide rush to engineering that followed. Then he talks about his trip.

“The experience I had was much, much better than I ever thought it might be,” he says, adding that the training was easier than expected. “The one thing I learned about flying in space was that anyone could do it.”

The problem, obviously, is the price.

“Costs have to come down. But I have to say that, at the current price, it's a bargain. It should cost $50 million, but doesn't because we have the remains of a command economy, meaning that the systems are already paid for. As they degrade and labour costs go up, the present opportunity will disappear.”

He advises those of us with twenty million to spend (the Russians have now set the price there, as people have got used to it) to go now. The other thing he says is how surprised he's been by the public's ignorance of the area.

“People, even my own age, come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you're that guy who went to the Moon!' They don't realize that nobody's been to the Moon for three decades. The level of understanding is terrible.”

That night, Rick and I meet for dinner at a lively Mexican restaurant in the Melrose district and the place is heaving and margaritas flowing by the time I arrive and am introduced to our fellow diners, who include Richard and Robert Godwin, proprietors of the space publishing outfit Apogee Books, and at the far end of the table, the aged and much admired Pad
Führer,
Guenter Wendt. Before long, I am trying on the black-faced Omega watch that Neil Armstrong gave the German prior to boarding
Apollo 11
and hearing about the transformation of the Apollo-struck Godwin brothers – who turn out to be from Liverpool – from publishers of rock music books to innovative chroniclers of the Space Age. Afterwards, I stand blinking in the car park as Wendt, who flew
Luftwaffe
night fighters during World War II, hears my accent properly for the first time and proceeds to regale me with a succession of wartime Britisher jokes, while I wonder whether someone's spiked my drink.

Rather than go straight home, Tumlinson and I decide to go see a band some friends of his play in, and over sangria margaritas squished out of Mister Softee ice cream machines – a bad idea on every level, when you think about it – he gives me his take on Wernher von Braun (“He was playing whatever card he could to get into space”); on Chinese lunar ambitions (“The first thing that'll happen is that America will try to sabotage it in any way possible … Rockets will blow up strangely, stuff won't work, shipments of technology will be stopped; that's just how they work”); on his overbearing Texan sergeant father and youthful disappointment at the sudden disappearance of the space programme. Afterwards, we climb to the top of a big hill to have a smoke and look out over Houston so that Rick can show me my route home. I ask him what he expects to get out of all
this? I can see that the heart's engaged, but is the head involved at all? Well, he says, no one's making rational business decisions to be involved in space at the moment. It's all about the dream he was given as a kid and you're either a believer or you're not. He has 1 per cent, 2 per cent, 3 per cent shares in a lot of companies, but they may end up as historical documents relating to visionary but failed companies; floggable on eBay as curios, but not worth anything more. Truth is, he's not quite sure how he's going to pay the rent next month. Then, as we gaze up at the progressively blurring stars, he says:

“There's a paradox, called Fermi's Paradox, which states that, if there is intelligent life out there, it should already be everywhere. Statistically, we should have been contacted. At the very least, we should be seeing clues all over the galaxy, just because of probability. But we're not. See, I think there might be a lot of ways that life can be killed off, levelled. There might be life everywhere, but on the other hand there might be very, very few – or even
no
– places where it made it past all the hurdles and got to the sentient stage. There's a million things that can wipe a planet out, or destroy its top level. If that's the case, the human species might be
it.
We might be alone. We might be the only planet with an evolved ecosystem and life. And if that's the case, not only does the cockroach you stepped on today have much more importance than you thought, because it's the only one
anywhere,
ever created, but so does this planet. And that puts us in a very different realm from the military-industrial approach to space. The stuff that's here might be unique, a kind of miracle, and too precious to confine to one planet, in case we take a hit or something happens …”

And it may be because my head's starting to spin by itself anyway, but I find this beguiling as we float under the stars: a beautiful synthesis of Zen Buddhism and
2001: A Space Odyssey.
If you could wedge Uma Thurman in there somewhere, you'd have a belief system that even I might sign up to. But I also think that here in Houston I've found something unanticipated but logical – the faintly glowing embers of a generation who grew up being promised the Moon and more, then had all that cool
expanse of sky whipped away and replaced with clammy earth. In this realm of inversions, the theoretical future thus has a curious identity with the past, and living in one is not so very different from living in the other. Hardly surprising that, much as I've enjoyed Houston, I wake up in the morning with one of the worst hangovers I can ever remember having. I'll drive away hoping that Rick makes it to the Moon one day.

Apollo was the Greek god of sun, music and poetry; the twin of Artemis, goddess of the Moon, from whom the Romans derived their own Moon goddess Diana. Indeed, one classicist goes beyond this to suggest that the Moon had a sophisticated, threefold identity for the Greeks and Romans: that she was respectively Selene/Luna when in the sky, Artemis/Diana on Earth, and Hecate in the underworld – sometimes also addressed as Trivia, keeper of the places where three things come together (which is why the great bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have been at a
crossroads
when he sold his soul to the devil). And it's Trivia I hear calling as I skim the featureless road from Houston to New Braunfels to see Charlie and Dotty Duke, knowing that it's really Dotty I want to speak to. People have different names for Trivia's haunts, like crossing places or passing places; those twilight regions of our lives where established rules disappear
and uncertainty holds sway and the ground seems apt to crumble beneath our feet, which contain adolescence and midlife crises and so many of the trials which define us as human. Most of the time we trust that these torments are leading us somewhere new, but very occasionally they don't. Sometimes they're simply
between.
States to be endured. Then all we can do is survive.

This is on my mind right now because it seems to me that Dotty spent six years, from 1966 to 1972, in one of these between places. Through these years she, like all of the Apollo women, lived with the spaceflights, with the danger and the sacrifice and none of the compensations. The astronauts got euphoria, fame and a place in history, whereas the best the women could expect was relief when their men made it home: they were involved, but not; they watched, but not the way we did. One of the astronauts told me that as far as he was concerned his wife was the brave one, because he couldn't get insurance – who on Earth would insure an astronaut? – meaning that she lived daily with the prospect of raising a bunch of kids alone, on no money, should her husband be carried off like Gus, Roger, Ed, Vladimir, Georgy, Vladislav, Viktor, Yuri … Worse, the wives had all seen the way Betty Grissom was left high and dry and isolated after Gus's death in the
Apollo 1
deflagration, how she'd become progressively more bitter at her treatment by the bureaucrats and ended up suing just to get NASA's attention. Martha Chaffee had been trying to reach Roger in the Astronaut Office at precisely the moment news of the fire arrived, while Pat White committed suicide in 1983, in the middle of trying to organize an Apollo wives' reunion. It would be a bad mistake to assume that the staggering number of postflight breakups were all, or even mostly, instigated by the men.

Intuition says that it can't have been easy for the kids, either. They had their mothers' fear, the media frenzy, their fathers' absence or preoccupation to deal with. It won't surprise anyone that the son of acerbic flight director Chris Kraft dropped out and became a hippy. On the other hand, children are flexible, and they must have felt as though they were at the epicentre of the Universe for a few years. Then and now I've wondered how
it felt to have that and to lose it. In Houston, I was lucky enough to track down someone who knew better than most.

I had to call Andrew Aldrin repeatedly on his mobile phone before he answered and agreed to meet over a coffee, but when we did, I liked him. He was bright, affable and interesting, if a little guarded at first. Of all the NASA brats, he was the one I related to most readily: we shared a name and looked remarkably alike as kids. I could sense the same battles with his mum over hair length down the years, and could see from news photos that he eventually won them, whereas some Apollo kids had to wear crew cuts even when it meant squaredom and social death at school. I also know that he and his elder brother and sister were a source of tension between their parents. When Joan Aldrin presented her husband with the demand that he stay at home or move out after their post–
Apollo 11
PR tour, the spark for the row had been an important football game of Andrew's, which the couple had been forced to miss. The funny thing is I recall Buzz's sad expression as he rued his own father's absence on such occasions. Buzz also remembered his unease at watching Andrew sign autographs on their front lawn at the age of eleven. Dotty Duke will tell me that her own two boys were petrified by the reporters on the lawn.

Andrew was at the Space Congress because he recently took a job in business development at Boeing. He got there by an unconventional route, though, and doesn't look or talk like either an engineer or a career businessman. He inherited his parents' good looks and is at times strikingly like his father, with short but stylishly cut hair, wire-rimmed specs and a casual confidence about him, and I noticed that his conversation was sprinkled with one of the year's Sixties-resuscitated buzzwords – “
cool.
” I began by asking whether he'd been aware of the unusualness of his surroundings as a kid and he told me that, no, he hadn't. In Houston, the Aldrins lived in a cul-de-sac, right next to Alan Bean and Charlie Bassett. Within his own stone's throw were four astronaut homes. It was all right that his dad was a spaceman, but much cooler that he could pole-vault. Only when the family moved to California did he realize that people looked at him differently. Jill Irwin, daughter of
Apollo 15
LM pilot Jim,
will tell me that moving away to Colourado after Apollo was a turning point for her, too, because for the first time kids she hardly knew at school would come up and snarl, “Hey, gimme five dollars, 'cos you're all rich.” Which was the more galling for being so profoundly untrue.

I asked Aldrin whether this proxy celebrity ever felt like a burden to him and his eyes drifted skyward as he weighed an answer. Eventually, he said:

“Well, sometimes, I'm sure. You know. It can be a burden in the sense that I would always get a little bit more attention, for better or for worse. It can be a burden in the sense that people tended to assume that maybe I got favoured treatment – and then, no doubt I did on occasion, but then on another occasion I got unfavourable treatment for exactly the same reason. So, no. It cuts both ways.”

I noted that the media didn't seem to scare him the way it did others and he threw back his head and laughed.

“Well, bear in mind I'm, like, eleven years old when my dad flew to the Moon. And not shy. So you've got a bunch of guys hanging out in front of the house, whose job it is to find somebody in the family to take a picture of. And they have …
doughnuts
!”

That's how they did it?

“Yep. So for me, it was great fun. My mother was terrorized by the whole thing, though. Probably even more so with me out there running around and playing football with the reporters. You know: ‘Oh my God, what's he going to say?' I don't think either my mother or my father was really prepared for what happened. In fact, they were
exquisitely
underprepared.”

It seemed that the LM ascent engine was the chief focus of anxiety for him, because Andy understood that if it didn't start, his dad wasn't coming back. He remembers lying awake at night worrying about that. In fact, there's a famous photo of his mother crumpling with relief when the engine did work and
Eagle
leapt back into space. Andrew feels more fear now, in retrospect. His biggest worry at the time was that Dad would fall over and embarrass him.

“The danger was something I thought about then,” he ex-
plained, “but now that I understand more about what really goes into developing space vehicles and what really did
not
go into sending us to the Moon, the risks that we were taking … I'm …
appalled.
No, not appalled, that's not the right word … in retrospect, it's very frightening. And the flip side of that is that if you talk to the old engineers, they're just like, ‘Jeez, we're not willing to take those risks anymore.' Well, we're not. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing – I don't know. We need to be risk-averse right now. Any kind of an accident would just be catastrophic to the programme.”

Asked whether either of his siblings went into aerospace, Aldrin offered a wry smile and “No, I'm the mutant.” His dad's absence bothered him, but his elders were better able to appreciate the significance of what was happening and so might have been more deeply affected by it. Buzz and Joan were obliged to attend therapy sessions with their eldest son, Mike, soon after the Moon trip, but who knows whether that had anything to do with the extra pressure of Apollo? Adolescence is a pig we all have to ride. The thing is, the family has never sat down and discussed those years,
ever.

“It just happened. It's just
there.
”

Then Andy described how he became fascinated with the Soviet Union as an undergraduate and went on to become a specialist in Russian and East European studies at a couple of research institutes. Part of what gripped him about the subject was the question of how “this country that was so dark and murky and seemingly underdeveloped was capable of competing with the United States on that level.” He did that for a long time, then “just by happenstance” fell into a job in aerospace. I asked whether he's ever felt in his father's shadow – you know, in that primal, Oedipal sense, but the question found no purchase with him and when I think about it, I can see why. Andrew Aldrin had no faux-Olympian patriarch to measure himself against, the way Buzz and so many of the rest of us did: he couldn't avoid seeing his father as a flawed human being like himself, rather than a saint or superman. Perhaps by accident Buzz Aldrin became the best kind of father. This half-formed thought drew a rueful chuckle.

“Right! I certainly get to see my father as a human, probably more so than anyone else, and learn from his successes as well as from his failures. And that's … that's the way it oughtta be. I love hanging out with my dad, he's a really cool guy.”

He said that he'd lost touch with most of the other Apollo kids when he moved to California and that his favourite astronauts were Gordon Cooper of the Mercury 7 (“ 'cos he raced boats!”), plus Bill Anders and Michael Collins for their humour and humility. I asked whether his view of them has changed since he was a child and he told me:

“Oh, absolutely. I notice the differences in how their lives have gone since the missions. People have gone to industry. People have become very important. People have become very
self
-important and people have become reclusive. It's interesting. Fascinating.”

Fascinating, I thought, the way one experience can produce such a spectrum of consequence, like light refracting through a prism.

I was glad to have caught up with Andy Aldrin. We said our farewells and I left for New Braunfels.

The hotel was quaint, full of comically decrepit Victorian furniture and groaning lifts, but the morning was bright and the sidewalk rustled leaf gold, and it felt good to be here, like I'd come full circle, back to the source, the place where it all started for me – Charlie and Dotty.

New Braunfels is a pretty town, divided into an “old” half of cafés and craft shops and a generic new one of malls and fastfood franchises, fringed by housing developments and dozens of concrete churches with crossword-clue names. Charlie gave me very detailed directions to his house, but I got lost anyway and had to ask for guidance at one of these churches, where a young woman knew there was a famous astronaut living in town somewhere, but couldn't recall his name. I joked that she'd probably recognize his voice at least, because he played “Houston” when the
First Man on the Moon Show
ran all those years ago: John Updike described him as having “that Texan authority
… as if words were invented by them, they speak so lovingly,” even though Duke was from South Carolina. Chris Kraft recalls watching him gulp two deep breaths of air before saying, “
Eagle,
Houston, we read you now. You're go for PDI,” which meant they could begin their descent and try to land. The woman looked at me blankly, perhaps thinking, “My dad says it was a fake anyway.”

The Dukes live on a nice estate on the outskirts of town, looking out over Landa Park. The Stars and Stripes is everywhere and “God Bless America” signs skewer flawless lawns, but their garden is secluded and uncluttered. A black mailbox at the end of a long drive croons: “Duke.” A basketball net is folded down. The rear of an SUV peeks from a garage and the house seems to float on wood decking. I park and climb out of the car, but before I can ring the bell, Charlie's opened the door and is shaking hands and beaming welcome. Guenter Wendt said, “You'll be hard put to find someone who doesn't like him,” and unlike some of the others, you don't ever wonder how he expects to be addressed, because there's something so essentially
Charlie
about him. Again I'm struck by the contrast between this tanned and smiling host and the sunken, grey man I met that curious day in London, the day Pete Conrad died; and also between this and the mean-minded tyrant Duke describes himself as having been when he returned from the Moon. He makes it sound as though he left a part of himself up there, or brought back some insidious malaise. Then Dotty appears with her beatific air and the offer of coffee.