Moondust (41 page)

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 immigrants 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.”

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!'