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

  “And that was when he … you know – oh what’s his name, the one I mentioned a few minutes ago, uhm …”

  “You mean Alan Bean? John Young? Scott Carpenter …?”

  “That’s the one! Yes, he enjoyed his flight rather too much, I’m afraid.”

  At these points, he’ll smile and apologize, explaining that “it’s part of the aging process,” and I’ll be reminded of what a long time ago the 1960s were, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

  The aerospace beat was a backwater when Reg took over, but soon it was the centre of everything. Over a cafetiére of coffee in the bright, seaward Turnill garden, he reminds me of the panic that followed the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, which set the Space Race running. He describes his knockabout battles with the paranoid U.S. Air Force, whose Cape launchpads NASA had to borrow in the early days, and who used any excuse at all to arrest him and his gang of mischievous reporters. Even into the Sixties, there was an innocence, as everybody was improvising: poor NASA, having had the goal of flying to the Moon (and worse, getting back) dropped on them from the Olympian heights of the White House in 1961, had no idea how they were going to do it and the Air Force’s attempts to muscle in on the programme were “painfully” naked.

  Into this breach strode the fourth estate, swarming excitedly around the first astronauts, the silver-suited Mercury 7, who looked like and were treated like a rock group, even though this was fully three years before Beatlemania hit the U.S. in 1964, so there were no rock groups. The Seven were Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, who would be fêted as “the first American in space” when he rode his Freedom 7 rocketship into the sky on May 5, 1961. The truth is that no one had ever seen anything like the rocket stars of “the Original Seven,” except maybe in the days of the Wild West.

  They were all pilots, mostly drawn from the elite brotherhood of test pilots, even if NASA originally considered skydivers, deep-sea explorers and circus daredevils to be as suited to space flight as them. President Eisenhower eventually directed the organization to use the fliers, at least partly because they were already on the payroll and working for peanuts, but some refused to apply anyway on the grounds that the newly minted “astronauts” would be no more than computer-guided payload; others, like the legendary rocket plane pilot Chuck Yeager, couldn’t have, because these astronaut-passengers needed a degree. “Spam in a can” was the phrase used to describe the space pilots at Edwards Air Force base, high in the Mojave Desert of California.

  Two further groups of recruits followed the Seven, most of whom – though not all – were likewise recruited from the military. In September 1962, a group which became informally known as the “Next Nine” included such impressive and Luna-bound figures as Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, John Young and Neil Armstrong – who’d been trained by the military, but was by this time a crack civilian test pilot working for NASA. Then, a year later, a further batch of fourteen brought the Moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan and David Scott to the fold.

  After these, more arrived at regular intervals as the space effort intensified and some of the Mercury astronauts retired, and together they fed three different programmes – Mercury, Gemini and Apollo – with three distinct purposes. When the Space Race began, the Soviets were way ahead, so six Mercury flights were needed to prove that American rockets didn’t inevitably blow up and could lob single astronauts into low Earth orbit and bring them back in one piece. After that, between March 1965 and February 1967, a series of nine missions involving the two-crew Gemini ships were used to develop techniques that would be necessary to get to the Moon. Of particular importance and intricacy were the challenges of “rendezvous” and “docking”; the ability of two craft to find each other and conjoin in space. The Gemini spacecraft, while remaining in Earth orbit, also gave American spacemen their first chance to leave the capsule and float free. Then Apollo reached for the Moon.

  None of the seven Apollo missions which were intended to land went entirely to plan, but even if they had, the plan alone could make your head spin. As it sat on the drawing board in 1967, it looked like this:

  First, a huge, three-stage Saturn V rocket (“V” being the roman numeral for five) heaves the crew off the ground as they sit in a tiny capsule at its peak, facing up toward the sky. The first two stages fall away as their fuel runs out; the slender third provides a final push to a 116-mile-high orbit above Earth, from where a brief reignition of its single rocket engine breaks the planet’s bonds at a speed of 24,000 miles per hour and the long coast to the Moon is under way. Only here does the sweaty stuff start, though, because up to this point the two craft in which the Moon men are to travel have been concealed in or about the Saturn’s third stage, and the time has come to free them.

  The astronauts are to make the 240,000-mile journey to the Moon in a spaceship called the Command and Service Module (CSM). As its designation implies, this consists of two parts joined together: a Command Module, known to most of us as the “capsule” – the conical pod just thirteen feet in diameter in which the crew live and work and hope to splash down when the adventure is done; and a shiny, cylindrical Service Module, which attaches to the rear of the Command Module and contains the big stuff like the rocket engine and the fuel and oxygen tanks. During the early part of the flight, the CSM has been perched at the tip of the Saturn like a spearhead, while behind it, cocooned by four protective metal panels, lay the equally important Lunar Module, or LM, the ungainly craft in which two crew members will descend to the lunar surface. Now, at a distance of 6,000 miles from home, the CSM breaks free of its Saturn host, is gently guided forward by the Command Module pilot, then rotated 180 degrees on its axis to face the slumbering LM, whence the ship is nudged forward so that it might clasp, dock with, the LM and draw it from its berth. In this formation, nose to nose like two insects kissing, the ships drift through space for three days, before slowing dramatically to allow “capture” into lunar orbit. There, they manoeuvre into a special “descent orbit,” an ellipse with a high point of sixty-nine miles and a low of just nine, where the lucky, prechosen pair will crawl through a hatch from the CM to the LM and drop the short distance to history.

  The mere act of describing this outward journey is exhausting, and the return is no simpler. When the astronauts on the surface are ready to leave, the LM’s “ascent stage” – the cramped living quarters – will blast away from the spindly-legged “descent stage,” leaving that behind in the dust. Back in lunar orbit, they rendezvous with the CSM and climb aboard once more, to be reunited with the colleague they left behind, the one who didn’t drop sixty-nine miles into history, at which juncture they jettison the LM (an emotional moment for some who’ve lived in it) and set off for Earth. Three days later, they’re circling the home planet again; the CSM breaks into its two constituent parts, with the Service Module being ditched and the Command Module careening into the atmosphere at 24,000 miles an hour, splashing into the sea beneath a trio of gargantuan, red-and-white-striped parachutes, and the trip is over. Naturally enough, job titles derive from the participants’ relationship to this system, with the pair who reach the surface known as the Mission Commander and the Lunar Module pilot (even though the “LM pilot” is essentially a systems engineer, monitoring progress and feeding it to the LM’s real pilot – the Commander), while the Command Module pilot looks after the mother ship until such time as his crewmates return or are understood to be irretrievably lost. No one can deny the virtuosity of the technique, nor that there is an awful lot to go wrong with it.

  There were twelve crewed Apollo missions in all. The first, Apollo 1, ended before it had begun, when a fire in the capsule killed its crew – the Mercury 7 veteran Gus Grissom, first U.S. spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee – as they conducted tests in a bay on the ground, bringing despair and an eighteen-month hiatus to the programme while NASA’s management w
as overhauled. The next piloted mission was Apollo 7, which successfully launched into Earth orbit, followed by Apollo 8, which swung the first human beings around the Moon over Christmas 1968. Apollo 9 then tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, Apollo 10 did the same in lunar orbit, and finally Apollo 11 set down. Ten such landings were planned, but the last three (18, 19, 20) were cancelled as the programme’s budget was progressively slashed. Furthermore, Apollo 13 nearly ended in disaster when an explosion in an oxygen tank crippled the Command Module, forcing the landing to be abandoned and the LM to be used as a makeshift life raft to get the crew home. Thus, only six ships reached the surface, between July 1969 and December 1972, each with two astronauts aboard. Those astronauts were:

  APOLLO 11 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (CM pilot Michael Collins)

  APOLLO 12 Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (CM pilot Richard Gordon)

  APOLLO 14 Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell (CM pilot Stu Roosa)

  APOLLO 15 David Scott and James Irwin (CM pilot Al Worden)

  APOLLO 16 John Young and Charles Duke (CM pilot Ken Mattingly)

  APOLLO 17 Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt (CM pilot Ron Evans)

  Irwin, Shepard and Conrad are gone (heart attack, cancer, motorcycle accident), so nine of the Moon men remain.

  Reg runs me through his impressions of the early space programme; then we fall to talking about the landings and what a queer ship the Lunar Module was.

  “I never thought they could land that thing,” he says. “And even then, the prospect of one leg landing on a boulder or a slope seemed so very high.”

  He also admits that when he heard Aldrin tersely announcing the 1202 alarm during the Eagle’s final descent, his one and only thought was, “That’s it. They’re going to crash.” In fact, the more you talk to Reg Turnill, the more extraordinary the whole thing starts to seem. He remembers being detailed to show the interloping Norman Mailer around the launch site as the countdown for Apollo 11 proceeded (“You didn’t care much for him, did you, dear?” notes Reg’s wife, Maggie, as she sets a lunch of trout and new potatoes before us). He also describes 2001author Arthur C. Clarke stopping by his table as the rocket roared through the clouds to gasp that this was the first time he’d cried in twenty years and the first time he’d prayed in forty. Then the author declared, “This is the last day of the old world,” and Reg thought that was marvellous. He also believed it. As they watched, surrounded by people punching the air, clapping, applauding, bawling and shouting “Go! Go!” they all did. When missions 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled for lack of funds, Reg shared the astronauts’ distress as if he’d been due to ride with them himself.

  “They never really got away from the equatorial regions of the Moon,” he laments. “There was even talk of having astronauts descending into craters on ropes. These were going to be great missions of discovery.”

  I catch a cab back to the station thinking that this is the first time – it certainly won’t be the last – that I’ve heard Apollo spoken of as unfinished business. It may have been dead to me for many years, but for the people who were part of it, it remains vividly alive.

  Before the spacemen, Cape Canaveral – The Cape – was a sweltering nothing, paradise for malarial swarms of bugs and birds and alligators who’ll still slither into the backseat of your rental car if you ignore the warning signs about leaving doors open, but now it’s all flat, ruler-straight highways and boxy wooden houses and malls and motels and more highways. A permanent haze hangs over the area like an opaque shroud and seems to seep into the spaces between things: there are no natural vantage points and there is nothing to see – it’s a featureless, beautyless place, which is why the U.S. Air Force chose it as a launching ground for military rockets in the first place, and it wasn’t until air-conditioning and astronauts arrived that civilians came scuttling behind, chasing thrills and autographs and cut-price tans. These days, these days being July 2002, they call this place the Space Coast.

  On the flight from England, I was lost in a brilliant collection of J. G. Ballard short stories called Memories of the Space Age. Written between 1962 and 1988, most of them revolve around the Cape, and Cocoa Beach in particular, which is where the space programme’s human cargo lived in the run-up to missions. Ballard’s thrillingly jaundiced view of the Space Age is that it constituted a crime against evolution, a blind, hubristic leap into a realm where we do not belong, where all we can do is sow our disease and spread the human stain ever more thinly across the Universe. Accordingly, in his stories we find the Cape abandoned, laid waste by microbes from Mars as dead astronauts circle the earth in their capsule coffins, or serving as a beacon for falling space debris, roamed only by irradiated scavengers seeking icons in mangled bits of spaceship or spaceman bones. We find space explorers going insane midflight, haunting a whole world with their “nightmare ramblings.” In “A Question of Re-Entry,” Ballard’s protagonist hunts for a capsule lost in the Amazon forest, amid growing anxiety that “the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies … the missing capsule [was] itself a fragment of a huge disintegrating fantasy.”

  In “News from the Sun,” I find: “Certainly, the unhappy lives of the astronauts bore all the signs of a deepening sense of guilt. The relapse into alcoholism, silence, and pseudo-mysticism, and the mental breakdowns, suggested profound anxieties about the moral and biological rightness of space exploration.”

  All of which may look like no more than a clever inversion of the claim that the first “Whole Earth” photographs brought back by Apollo 17 changed our perception of ourselves for the better, but the author was right about one thing: that the Space Age would come to seem an historical anomaly, which didn’t lead where expected and significant numbers of people would come to doubt the very existence of. Meanwhile, his references to the fates of the astronauts … well, these aren’t complete fictions. Ballard knew where he was coming from. Like so much in this tale, what he says is not true, but it has truth.

  Perhaps he was also whispering in my ear as I passed through the turnstiles at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s contribution to the rubric of Florida theme parks. Midday is approaching and the ground is like a skillet. Everyone else is indoors, but I had to come here first, to the Rocket Garden, because this is the real thing; an outside park where the astonishing machines spacemen rode into the sky are on display. And they are astonishing, but not for the reasons you’d think, because the surprise is how terrifyingly small they are. I could grab a pipe on the side of the Atlas rocket which powered the last Mercury missions and shimmy up in seconds, while the Mercury Redstone that Alan Shepard flew is slender and frail-looking, topped by a little ribbed bird’s beak of a capsule. Who would agree to crouch on top of what now clearly reveals itself as a missile, which might otherwise be used to smash a tank, and be shot into Ballard’s “cyanide-blue” Florida sky? Assuming the thing didn’t blow up first. The capsules weren’t even going to have any port-holes to see out of until the astronauts/passengers/test subjects/Spam insisted. Only a Saturn IB, which launched Apollo 7, the nervy first crewed flight after the Apollo 1 fire, looks as though it was made to carry people. Yet even that, slumped on its side, is less impressive than in the imagination. Still, the Saturn V, the vehicle which powered Apollo to the Moon, is yet to come. If you want to see that, you have to buy a ticket and be bussed to a special hangar.

  Indoors I find a large collection of space art, including a painting by Apollo 12 LM pilot Alan Bean; a shimmering Annie Leibovitz portrait of shuttle commander Eileen Collins, who became the first female shuttle commander in 1999; a haunting silver-black 1982 rendering of the shuttle Challenger, which exploded like a firework directly above this place four years later. The most familiar works are Andy Warhol’s Day-Glo Buzz Aldrin and Rauschenberg’s fast-paced Hot Shot montage, which is built around the powerfully phallic image of a Saturn V lifting off. As I look at these last two, I’m reminded of histor
ian Eric Hobsbawm’s dismissal of them, and Pop Art in general, with the words: “It is not surprising that in the 1950s, in the heartland of consumer democracy, the leading school of painters abdicated before image-makers so much more powerful than old-fashioned art.”

  Which is absolutely right, but also misses the point. At the emerging school’s first big show in October 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Warhol, who grasped the trajectory of his society better than anyone, explained his work by saying, “I feel very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rocket ships and television.” More specifically, the critic James Rosenquist summed up what he saw as “post beat and not afraid of an atomic bomb,” while for the painter Robert Indiana it was “a re-enlistment of the world. It was shuck the bomb! It was the American dream – optimistic, generous and naïve.” It’s easy to forget that in the beginning, Pop Art, like the space programme, defined itself explicitly in relation to the Cold War – about which there seemed a decisiveness, as if this was a bridge humanity had to cross to its future, grim or glorious as that might be. Thus, when Warhol set up his Factory in 1964, he decorated it top to bottom in silver, explaining that “silver was the future, it was spacey, the astronauts …” The impact of the spacemen when they first appeared is easy to underestimate.

  Something here feels wrong, though. NASA was late catching on to the power of the image in an age where information was travelling further and faster all the time, and you can still feel this as you watch pasty-legged dads straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon dragging their kids – thought bubbles whining, “What about Disneyland?” – to an IMAX movie about the International Space Station. I sit through it myself and gradually become aware of a disturbance at the back of my mind, evolving into a strong sense of pathos. The movie was directed by Ron Howard and narrated by Tom Cruise and its remorseless tedium seems to say everything about the bind NASA finds itself in after three decades spent loitering in low Earth orbit. And in a flash I see the difference between the space shuttle’s 200-mile-high beat and Apollo ploughing 240,000 miles to the Moon: before me now is a space that’s been domesticated and rendered routine, while at a quarter of a million miles you’ve left the Earth and are on the outer edge of experience; are riding the skein between us and Deep Space, being dwarfed by infinity itself. Well over 400 people have now been into space, but only twenty-four have left Earth orbit and been out there, all with Apollo. But Apollo’s dark allure seems distant here – I’ve felt none of it – and as I wrestle the sterile wrapping off my cutlery in the cafeteria, I find myself grumbling that I bet Pete Conrad never used sterile cutlery: indeed, if I hear Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – the theme from 2001– one more time, I may very well attack someone with it. The cutlery seems emblematic of the whole Kennedy Space Center experience so far. Sterile.