Moondust (45 page)

This was in July and August of 1971. On Earth, the
New York Times
was publishing “The Pentagon Papers,” which showed that Americans had been lied to by their presidents over Vietnam, while the voting age was falling from twenty-one to eighteen
and hot pants were coming into fashion, and up in the stars,
Apollo 15
proceeded like magic. Afterwards, Scott penned an article for
National Geographic
in which he said:

“These mountains were never quickened by life, never assailed by wind or rain, they loom still and serene, a tableau forever. Their majesty overwhelms me.”

What happened next looks more comic than scurrilous. Certainly, if it were a film, you'd want the Coen Brothers to direct rather than Oliver Stone, and yet it became the Astronaut Office's own Watergate, its
Stampgate.
The official version of the story goes like this:

All of the astronauts had something called a “personal preference kit,” in which they could carry a small number of souvenirs and mementos into space. NASA knew that many took specially minted medallions and pins, to be handed out to friends and family afterwards – at least this was the official understanding. It had been noted, however, that the number of keepsakes had been increasing over time, to the point at which they became a concern, because to crash under the weight of too many tie pins wouldn't play well with Congress. There had been a mild controversy about the crew of
Apollo 14
carrying some silver medallions which were to be melted down and mixed with others for sale to the general public. This plot was quietly squashed, but David Scott maintains that his crew heard nothing about it, because they were deep in training. Thus, when they were charged with carrying 250 commemorative “first day cover” envelopes on behalf of NASA and someone suggested they take a further 400 of their own, with a quarter reserved for a German stamp dealer who would in return establish three $6,000 college funds for the crew's children, there seemed little harm in it. They were poorly paid and had no life insurance, and the scheme might have worked well if the dealer hadn't released his flown envelopes sooner than agreed, priced at $1,500, and if word hadn't filtered back to NASA.

The trio had committed no crime in law, but if there was one thing an astronaut feared more than the law it was Deke Slayton's regulations, and these had been contravened. Now Deke hit the roof and an investigation revealed that a few other astronauts
had made smaller-scale yet similar arrangements, some for charity (as per Jim Lovell), some for themselves, but it was the Hadley Rille boys who caught the attention of Congress and the press, so they took the flak and were slammed; were yanked from
Apollo 17
backup duties, issued letters of reprimand by the Air Force and dragged before the Senate to apologize. Scott had been expected to make general and fly the shuttle, and none of that could happen now. The transgression was relatively innocent, yet it has come to define David Scott's otherwise brilliant career, following him everywhere like a curse, inescapable and ever-present, the first thing the Apollo-literate think of when they hear his name and the first thing journalists and writers would ask about if he let them. That he doesn't merely exacerbates the problem.

In his memoirs, Slayton twists the knife. After labelling Scott “more openly political than most guys … a real Boy Scout, quite intolerant of what he saw as failings in other people …” Deke notes his partial rehabilitation at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, then describes a meeting at which the two men butted heads like goats, a situation in which there was only going to be one winner.

“From that point on, Dave was on the downhill slide with NASA,” he contends. “He wound up leaving in 1977, getting involved with one questionable business deal after another. He seemed to have a weakness for anyone who would throw green at him.”

After NASA, Scott founded a series of space engineering and consultancy firms, and in the 1990s acted as a technical consultant on the film
Apollo 13
and TV series
From the Earth to the Moon.
Very little was seen or heard of him in public, however, until May 2000, when fifty-six-year-old Anna Ford announced her intention to marry the sixty-seven-year-old Scott. Three months later, long-lens photos of the couple on holiday in Majorca drove her to the Press Complaints Commission, but the relationship was said to have ended abruptly long before the PCC dismissed her complaint a year later. Even before that, the very day after Ford announced the engagement in fact, the
Daily Mail
ran a vicious article about Scott's business dealings and ex-
ploitation of his spaceman past. They dredged up the stamp scandal, then added an Arizona court judgement from 1992, in which he was convicted of defrauding nine investors in a partnership he organized (failing to note that the conviction was overturned on appeal). They stirred in further allegations that he auctioned unverified Moondust from his space suit in 1995 – which the astronaut furiously denied – and had received money for endorsing a controversial telephone gambling enterprise which misleadingly claimed to benefit a space education and research fund. Finally, the
Mail
claimed that Scott, then commuting between California and London, had been dating Ford for a year, but had split from his childhood sweetheart wife of forty-one years only two and a half months previously. They found her moving out of the family home and reportedly upset, claiming her husband's relationship and engagement had come as “a total shock.” It was as though the curse had followed Scott across the Atlantic.

Who knows what truths or misapprehensions lie behind these reports? Probably no one other than Scott, but all this intrigue adds to the impression of an American hero's precipitous, almost Miltonian fall from grace. Is that how the narrative reads to him? Paradise Lost? A life of two halves? Has he merely been unlucky, or is he the classic flawed hero? Whatever else he might be, Dave Scott is an enigma. And he's here, quietly flown in to take part in a small panel discussion on the future of space tourism, a day after the man with whom he almost perished on
Gemini 8
made headlines through his presence alone. Scott's reclusiveness is different from Armstrong's, though, because he hasn't decided against profiting from his Apollo past. He has an arrangement with an auction house in California, where he conducts “closed signings,” from which the public is excluded, with each signature priced at between $165 and $400 a pop, depending upon what's being signed. It's hard to know what to make of this man. I haven't even been able to uncover an address at which to contact him up to now. The few people who might be able to provide one say the same thing: “Oh, no, David never does anything like that.”

The seminar room at the plush hotel playing host to the
Global Travel and Tourism Summit is airy and bright, semicircular and walled in glass, and carpeted in rich blue, and if you listen you can hear the sea sighing in the background. I'm not surprised that only a dozen or so delegates have turned up to hear space tourism being discussed, because this is a business conference and mass space tourism is still a pipe dream. Most delegates are either in the bar or on the beach, or chatting in the pleasant sun on the terrace, or attending more practical seminars, but here are Scott and other panelists, who include Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, sitting at a long table waiting to begin. The programme doesn't mention it, but Anderson was partly responsible for getting the second proper space tourist, the South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth, up to the International Space Station on a Russian rocket. The same programme makes me smile by listing the Moonwalker in our midst as “David Scott, Astronaut (first Moon landing),” but now, with his ruddy complexion and white hair, astonishingly trim in dapper black suit worn with tasteful op art tie, he reminds me of the actor Tommy Lee Jones in
Men in Black.
Introduced as a representative of the Vanguard Space Corporation, a “satellite recovery” operation, he opens with a joke about a Russian astronaut boasting to an American one that it doesn't matter about losing the race to the Moon, because they're going to the sun, and when the American responds, “But it'll be too hot – you'll burn up!” the Russian says, “Ah, well, we're going to go at night.” Everyone laughs, though I'm not sure that we're all laughing at the same thing, because since the loss of
Columbia,
the U.S. has been relying on those zany old Russians to get people and materials up to the space station.

Throughout, Scott seems the least passionate and most dismissive of the prospects for mass space tourism, to the extent that I begin to wonder why he came. Afterwards, as the panelists and audience linger momentarily before sweeping off to a lavish lunch, I approach with no idea of what to expect. He looks me in the eye and listens as I tell him about the places I've been and people I've met and the questions I've been trying to find answers for, chiefly
What was Apollo about?
and to my astonishment he appears to leap at the idea of speaking further,
sounding full of enthusiasm as he coos, “Sure, that sounds great – be happy to!” Still not quite able to believe this, I take his address and tell him that I'll write with a few more details when we get back to London and we can arrange to meet there. “Yeah, be happy to. That's a great story. A great story!” he repeats as a very attractive young woman in a white dress appears at his side and they disappear toward the terrace with the other panelists. Later, I unexpectedly bump into him, dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket at an end-of-summit beach party, with the same woman on his arm, looking more like the Doobie Brothers' keyboard player than an aged space cowboy. He's awkward in conversation, stilted, as though his face and his voice and his thoughts are operating at tangents, but we small talk about London and Portugal and California for a while and I leave him with the words, “See you in London, then,” to which he replies, “Yeah! sure!” – although when I replay the scene afterwards, I see a curious twist in his features and a beading of his eyes. Back in the U.K. I write to the Hammersmith address he gave me, but hear nothing back. So I write again. And again, delivering the letter by hand this time to make sure that the address is real, and it is, but there's still no reply. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

Almost a year later, there's a chance to see Scott in a more sympathetic light. A memoir of the Space Race, which he's had ghostwritten in conjunction with the former Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, has just been published and of necessity it's drawn him out of his shell. He's not submitting to any media, knowing that the first question will concern either stamps or Anna Ford, but he is giving a few talks around the U.K. and one of them is at the Natural History Museum in Oxford. As a bonus, it's being chaired by the ever-smiling Colin Pillinger, God's gift to mad-professordom and leader of the team behind the Beagle Mars probe, that monument to British pluck and resolution in the face of insuperable odds, right down to the essential clinching detail that it didn't quite work.

The odd thing is that by this time, the pre-Apollo Scott looks even more complex to me, and for an unexpected reason. Race intersects this story at every turn, but is seldom mentioned
specifically in relation to the space programme, outside of noting that the first black astronaut candidate, Major Robert Lawrence, died when the plane he was flying spun out of control and crashed in 1967. However, the Kennedy administration had instructed the Air Force to find them a candidate long before that, believing that a black astronaut would help to draw African American kids into higher education, and the story of the one they turned up is like a cross between
Top Gun
and
In the Heat of the Night
. Ed Dwight is a successful sculptor in Denver now and I sit listening to him for several hours, and could sit for several more. He was relieved not to be selected for duty by NASA in the end, because he hadn't wanted to be an astronaut, but one of the things he will tell you is that when other pilots in the Air Force's astronaut training programme, which fed NASA, tried to freeze him out – less out of bigotry than resentment that he'd jumped the queue, he generously maintains – his classmate David Scott was the one who broke ranks and befriended him. Dwight confesses not to know whether the other man acted out of kindness or a sense of justice, or because he knew the White House was watching and it would be good for his career, but it helped to make the situation more bearable.

Scott's talk is in a museum lecture theatre. The audience is mixed, but contains a notably large portion of T-shirted men with longish hair and squarish glasses. They clap enthusiastically as Pillinger enters stage right, all beaming face and biker jacket and Einsteinian free-range hair, followed closely by a navy-suited Scott, who acknowledges the applause stiffly and sits down. Then he gets up and begins to talk about the book,
Two Sides of the Moon
.

I called the publisher and got hold of a copy before I came, so know what's in it: a juxtaposition of Scott and Leonov talking about their respective journeys through space and the Cold War, skillfully compiled by a journalist ghostwriter and especially interesting for Leonov's revelations about the secretive Soviet space effort. By his modest and likable account, Leonov would probably have been the first cosmonaut on the Moon if the Soviet programme had survived the Politburo's crippling ambitions
for it. Scott delivers little that is new about the U.S. side of the race and seldom gives up much emotion, but there are a few nice anecdotes, among them his description of Richard Nixon – who was so awkward with adults – delighting as he led the
Apollo 15
crew's children around the White House “like the Pied Piper,” showing off secret passageways and bestowing gifts; and of himself landing in the Bahamas after
Apollo 9,
to find his nine-year-old daughter Tracy clutching an essay she'd written for her English class while he'd been away, in which she imagined the family flying to the Moon one night, bouncing around happily with oxygen tanks on their backs. It ended: