Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth Read online

  Silence.

  “Contact light.”

  “Shutdown.”

  “Descent engine command override. Engine arm, off, 413 is in.”

  A pause.

  Silence.

  More silence.

  “Houston, Tranquillity Base here … the Eagle has landed.”

  No one in the room seems to get it straightaway. The adults look at each other. Then cheering in the background somewhere and the drawl, like a sigh, the first hint of emotion from inside the box.

  “Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

  The room erupts. We erupt, too. My dad ruffles my hair and slaps David on the back. All the little kids run in.

  “Boys – they’re on the Moon!”

  Dad has tears in his eyes. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him with tears in his eyes, and it will only happen once more.

  None of us have any idea what has been going on behind the scenes during those final moments, although the evidence was there in the coded monotone exchanges if you knew how to read them.

  The crew NASA chose for this landmark mission consists of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, and they’re a peculiar trio. The flight plan called for Collins to orbit the Moon in exalted frustration, tending to the ship that would provide their ride home, the Command Module Columbia, while his colleagues dropped to the surface in the Eagle lander. He is a communicative character; enjoys fine wines and good books; paints and grows roses. But Armstrong is remote and self-reliant – Collins likes him, but can’t find a way through the defences – while the live-wire Aldrin just strikes him as dangerous.

  The buildup to the mission was insane. On one occasion the astronauts went on a geology trip to the mountains, but couldn’t hear a word their instructors were saying for the sound of media choppers jostling and whirring overhead like ravenous giant mosquitoes. No one knows for sure what’s up there, so the newspapers and TV current-affairs programmes have been full of catastrophic predictions. One academic has been assuring audiences that Moondust on the astronauts’ abominable-snowman suits will ignite the moment it comes into contact with oxygen back in Eagle’s cabin, if it doesn’t simply explode underfoot. Another warns that the surface may be composed entirely of dust, into which the craft will sink embarrassingly the moment it touches down, never to be seen again. Still more experts worry over the prospect of inadvertently bringing back an alien bacterium that will destroy all life on Earth, as in the sci-fi movies The Quatermass Experiment or The Andromeda Strain. Magazines contain drawings of what strange, subterranean creatures may lurk below the surface, hungry for roly-poly white snowmen from Earth.

  So it’s hardly surprising that there’s been tension in the cabin of the Columbia Command Module. In the early part of the flight, Aldrin kept describing these “flashes” he would see in the corner of his eyes as the Moon loomed before swallowing them into orbit, and Armstrong was irritated by this suggestion of something unknown and mysterious, just as he is when the other man drops to his knees and says Communion after touching down safely. In the lander, or Lunar Module – a bizarre and spindly construction which looks as though it was assembled from toothpicks and egg cartons by a class of five-year-olds, then roughly covered in foil by their moms – he has constantly felt “behind the airplane.” Not quite in control, and Armstrong doesn’t like that, either.

  But the real drama happened as they were coming down, nearing the surface. As David and I sped unsuspecting down the road; as Mum was pulling some beers from the fridge; as my father and Mr. Reuhl and Mr. Fish, who used to pay me a princely two dollars to mow his minuscule lawn and would have paid more if Dad hadn’t instructed him not to, were discussing the implications of all this and the probability that they would get to visit the Moon as tourists in their own lifetimes. Mike Collins had released the Eagle from Columbia’s grip just after 10 AM our time. They’d flown in formation for a short while so that the Command Module pilot could inspect the other craft from his porthole. Satisfied that it was in good repair, he masked his anxiety with a joke.

  “I think you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine, there, Eagle, despite the fact that you’re upside down.”

  In zero gravity there is no upside down. Armstrong played along. “Somebody’s upside down,” he said.

  Then a burst of thrusters took Columbia away until the Eagle was a little sparkly point of light, like a tiny diamond floating between Collins and the cratered surface. He had considered the chances of success and privately rated them at about 50 per cent, unaware that his commander had come up with the same odds. These were generous according to some of their colleagues’ calculations.

  With ten minutes remaining to touchdown, Eagle was 50,000 feet above the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin stood side by side, spacesuited, anchored to the floor by harnesses. Everything had gone according to plan so far and preparations were on schedule. They had pressurized Eagle’s fuel tanks, primed the computer and checked their trajectory by training their navigation telescope on the sun. They activated the camera and armed the descent engine. Then Aldrin pressed the ignition button and the rocket engine came to life. Thirty seconds later, the cabin shuddered as they roared to full thrust.

  And now there was a problem.

  Eagle was facing the Moon, and Armstrong noticed that the landmarks he navigated by were coming up two seconds ahead of expectation: they were set to overshoot the landing area, but the computer hadn’t picked up the error. At 46,000 feet, he flipped the craft over, so that the landing radar faced down and he and Aldrin found themselves looking up at the shimmering, miragelike Earth. The ride was noticeably jerkier than in simulation as Aldrin compared data from the radar and computer and found a discrepancy of several thousand feet. Knowing the radar to be more reliable, he decided to instruct the computer to accept its information and act on it, but as he hit the necessary buttons, the piercing buzz of the Master Alarm filled Eagle’s cabin. They looked down and saw the “PROG” light glowing sulphuric amber on the computer display.

  “Program alarm,” said Armstrong.

  His voice stayed even, but the words were clipped, urgent. Aldrin instructed the computer to supply the alarm code and “1202” flashed onto the screen. He didn’t know what this meant, but suspected that it was something to do with the computer being overloaded. This had failed to happen in any of the simulation he’d been a part of. Now wasn’t the time for it.

  The focus turned to Earth and the thirty-five-year-old flight director, Gene Kranz. He knew the alarm was serious, because he’d seen something like it back in the first week of July and he’d aborted the virtual mission as a result. The truth was that he and his staff had been having problems for the last hour, with communications cutting out – sending Mission Control screens blank and filling headsets with static – then resuming for barely long enough to justify continuing the descent. There was a 2.6-second delay in communications with the Moon and so no time for elaboration. In simulations, controllers had discovered a dead-man’s box which was defined by this delay, in which the LM would always hit the surface before they could react to a problem and order an abort, and about which nothing could be done. Now the exchanges were breathless and suspended, like the Eagle itself.

  Kranz quickly consulted the people around him, listening for signs of strain in their voices, then turned to the young MIT computer boffin Steve Bales.

  But the Lunar Module computer was too complicated for one person alone to understand. Bale knew that it wanted to abort the mission. What he didn’t know was why. So he, in turn, relayed the problem to his team of backroom experts, who guessed that the computer, finding itself with too many tasks to perform – again, no one knew why – was automatically returning to the start of its computation cycle, to begin again. In the background, Armstrong could be heard requesting tersely: “Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.” Aborting a landing at this
stage was neither easy, nor certain of success, and once you’d done it, there was no room for further failure. They decided to carry on. So long as the alarm was intermittent, they could continue their descent safely. If it became continuous, however, the computer could stop working altogether and they were lost.

  Standing at the flight controls of the plummeting lander, Armstrong heard Duke’s voice.

  “You are go for landing.”

  The trouble was that he and Aldrin had been distracted by the alarms and the mental preparations for an abort. By the time the computer had been pacified and attention returned to the task of getting Eagle down, the Moon was only 1,000 feet below and they were racing past the inviting plain on which their hopes had been pinned. In the huge, glowing control room, seventy people who’d spent months and years training for this moment caught their breaths in unison, like a theatre audience, when the landing radars abruptly corrected themselves and the little toy Space Invaders graphic in front of them jumped to four miles off-range: at six, mission rules called for a mandatory abort. Armstrong looked ahead and was not thrilled by what he saw: a field of huddled boulders, gathered like the remains of an ancient cemetery around the dark lip of a crater, into which the computer was blindly flying them. He made some quick calculations as to whether he could bring the craft down in front of the boulder field, knowing that they were probably composed of lunar bedrock and the geologists would be ecstatic, but realized that they were still going too fast. He pressed some buttons and took control of the craft, pitching it forward until it was almost upright. Now the rocket was slowing their rate of descent, without diminishing forward speed. He would try to set down in the first clear space he saw.

  No one except Armstrong knew about the crater or the boulders. Aldrin had his eyes fixed on the instrument panel and was issuing a steady stream of data, which is what Mission Control and the rest of us were hearing.

  “Three hundred and fifty feet … down at four … three hundred thirty, six and a half down …”

  Aldrin’s remote mantra was reassuring, but masked the fact that, with his partner too absorbed in finding a way to bring Eagle down before her fuel ran out to tell anyone what was happening, even Mission Control was in the dark. All they knew was that the plan had been ditched and Armstrong was now on his own, a quarter of a million miles from home. There was nothing they could do to help. Duke whispered to Kranz, “I think we’d better be quiet.”

  Three hundred and fifty feet up, Eagle skimmed over the boulders. Armstrong pitched her back to a rearward angle in order to avoid picking up too much speed. He banked left to skirt another field of rocks as the Moon seemed to rear up at him and telemetry showed his heart rate surge.

  “How’s the fuel?” he asked Aldrin. An unnatural calm in his voice masked the fact that his pulse was now racing at over 150 beats per minute.

  “Eight per cent,” came the reply. Less than in the simulations.

  At 250 feet, Aldrin stole his first glance out of the window, then quickly returned to his instruments. Armstrong was still searching for a landing site: he chose one, then discovered it to be flanked by another crater. There was now ninety seconds’ worth of fuel left, but twenty of those had to be saved for an abort: if they got to that stage and still hadn’t landed, the computer would automatically try to shoot them back into space and putative safety, no matter how close they were to the surface. Back in the control room, an automatic sequencer had begun counting down to such an eventuality, and everyone knew it. Armstrong edged forward and saw a clearing of about 200 square feet, bounded by craters on one side and more boulders on the other. The Moon was 100 feet beneath them. This had to be the place.

  Eagle needed to be brought down in a straight vertical line. Any horizontal movement at the point of impact could snap off one of her matchstick legs. Yet, as he listened to Aldrin reciting his litany of figures – “sixty feet … down two and a half … two forward … two forward …” – Armstrong suddenly found his view stolen by an eruption of dust and rock that arced away in dense sheets, obscuring the landing area completely. Momentarily unsettled, he was training his eyes on some distant rocks in order to maintain his bearing when he heard Charlie Duke’s voice in his ear, warning “sixty seconds.” No one in Mission Control knew about the crater, the boulders, the dust. All they knew was that in every successful simulation Armstrong had landed by now. The years of preparation, the billions of dollars, the lives that had been sacrificed on the way – most notably the crew of Apollo 1 thirty months previously – all that energy and ingenuity and life was now compacted into the next sixty seconds and the judgement of one man. The room was held in an agonized silence.

  At thirty feet, Armstrong found Eagle to be drifting backward. He didn’t know why, but knew that landing while he couldn’t see where he was going would be extremely dangerous. He wrestled with the controls, eventually halting the backward movement, but picking up a horizontal drift in the process. He felt frustrated that he wasn’t flying well enough, and would have given anything to buy more time, but there was none to buy. They were now hanging twenty feet above the surface of the Moon and had entered the “dead-man’s curve” – the point at which bailing out becomes impossible and if the manoeuvre doesn’t work, you crash.

  From the earth: “Thirty seconds.”

  Aldrin: “Contact light.”

  Through the storm of dust, whiskery probes attached to the LM’s feet had made contact with something. The pilot had been instructed to cut Eagle’s descent engine at this height, because engineers calculated that it could be blown up by the back pressure from its own exhaust if he didn’t. But Armstrong didn’t do it. In his fight to keep the thing steady, he failed to hear Aldrin’s call.

  Fortunately, the engineers were wrong about the back pressure. Still firing, Eagle settled into the dust so easily that neither man felt the impact. Armstrong’s hand flew to the Engine Stop button and he announced, “Shutdown.” There was a whirr of action as he hit more switches and buttons and Aldrin ran through the post-landing checklist. Then there was a moment of stillness. The two men turned to face each other, grinning through their helmet visors, and clasped hands. After what seemed like an age, Armstrong advised a waiting world that the Eagle had landed. The announcement that his words were coming from “Tranquillity Base” momentarily threw Charlie Duke, who became tongue-tied and began “Roger, Twan– ” before gathering himself and offering a correction.

  Tranquillity. They were on the Sea of Tranquillity. With ten seconds’ worth of fuel to spare, they were down.

  Those last ten minutes contained 600 of the most vivid seconds a human being ever lived and we knew nothing of them. Countless things went not exactly wrong, but different from plan and expectation, below optimum in NASA’s arid tongue, and for decades to come Steve Bales will find it hard to listen to tapes of the landing without feelings of discomfort and foreboding, even knowing that it turned out all right. Now Armstrong and Aldrin have to prepare the craft to take off again in a hurry, in case of trouble. After that, they are under orders to get some sleep, but Armstrong won’t sleep, because he’s trying to work out what to say when he becomes the first human to set foot on another world. No one seems to have noticed that this is also the first properly global media event: in a future the astronauts can’t yet see, politicians will have marketeers and spin doctors to help with this sort of thing. In July 1969, however, he’s on his own. It’s 3:17 PM Houston time, 1:17 PM in Orinda, California. The walk is set for ten hours from now. What are we going to do until then?

  What’s it like to be alive in 1969?

  Bobby Kennedy has just been assassinated and so has Martin Luther King. It’s a strange word, assassinate, which to my eight-year-old ears sounds sort of clandestine and exotic, not like the blunt and scary killed or murdered. The Kennedy shooting happened a year ago, but I recall it very clearly, because we were driving to Disneyland the next morning and I woke to Dad telling me that we might have to call the trip off beca
use people might not want to skip around having fun at such a terrible time. But in the end they did, so we went. I don’t know why they shot him, or his brother. No one seems to know.

  I understand more about King than Kennedy. On the windowsill of our classroom last term, there were piles of biographies of famous Americans and I devoured them, but the one I liked best was about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who risked all kinds of harm to help lead other escaped slaves to freedom in the north on the “Underground Railroad.” The local education authority had cooked up a scheme to mix kids from our mostly white suburbs with black ones from Oakland and take them on field trips. I’d made some good friends at places like the University of California science lab, where you could watch massive, tape-spooling computers do amazing things like make a dot travel from one side of a screen to the other, or count until they reached infinity or you got bored and pressed a red button – whichever came first – at which point they would start over again. The thing I remember most clearly about those outings, though, is Andy Leeman, who was sitting next to me the day they announced it, turning and scowling, “I wonder what it’s like to sit next to a nigger.” Every day on the news, there seem to be pictures of black people being hit with truncheons or pinned to walls by the jets of fire hoses. It’s frightening.

  In fact, the news always seems bad. Mum watches TV on a weekday morning when they hold the Vietnam draft, live, like a lottery. If your number comes up, she says, you’ve lost and have to go fight. At summer school this year, they showed us a film called The Lottery, in which the population of a small town gathers for an annual festival of some kind, where everyone – men, women and children – has to take a little folded-up piece of paper from a box and open it up. They’re all laughing and joking with each other until one woman, whom we’ve watched shepherding her children to the gathering, opens her paper to find a black spot on it, at which point everyone stones her to death.

  Afterwards, we had a discussion and I wondered whether the film was about bullying. There’s a girl in my class named Kelly, whom all the locally raised kids pick on viciously for reasons that I haven’t yet understood. Soon after we arrived from New York, I felt sorry for her and sat next to her on the school bus one day, but everyone else teased me so much that I stayed away from her after that. She seems to smile a lot, but not a happy smile. And last week, in her summer-school science class, Mrs. Lipkin came in to find that someone had drawn a swastika on the blackboard. She dropped her Coke bottle and threw both hands over her mouth and ran back out. Later she came in and explained why. She was Jewish. I’d been gazing at the symbol before she came in, thinking that it was an interesting shape. I had no idea what it meant. I loved Mrs. Lipkin, who would give me my first Beatles album at the end of the school year, and was upset that she was upset, and then a few days later Scott and I found a gopher snake that someone had strung up by the neck and used for target practice with an air rifle. There’s a lot of peace and love in the air according to the songs they play on KFRC, but not necessarily in the air around me.