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

  So I’m not expecting much of the bus tour, but as we sweep past the alien archaeology of the launch gantries, which look as though they’ve towered over this wasteland forever, there comes a kind of relief. A breeze blows in from the Atlantic and a wildness takes hold of the land, and now I can picture Shepard and Armstrong climbing steely-eyed into their ships. There’s no need for presentation here. Wherever you look, the squat shape of the Vehicle Assembly Building is somewhere in the corner of your vision, growing out of the marram grass, the highest point in the state of Florida and the largest human-made structure on Earth when it was built; the place where they put together the rockets, so big that they say it has its own weather system and could admit the United Nations building through any of its four doors. Then there’s the nightmarish crawler, like something from a Judge Dredd comic, which transports rockets from the Assembly Building to the gantries at half a mile an hour, running on tanklike tread plates that weigh one ton apiece. This is not like anything you’ve seen before. It’s unreal.

  And now the bus has stopped and you’re climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and – fuck, there’s the Saturn V.

  You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until you’ve stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but you can’t, so you give up. What you think is not “How could anyone make something this big?” because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. But to make something this big, and intend it to fly – the audacity of this conceit alone – and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on, bigger, and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough to bet a life on, three lives, every time … it’s just … the mind reels in the same way that a Victorian’s must have been carried away by one of that era’s gargantuan steelworks or power stations. Even at thirty-five years’ remove, it’s barely credible.

  What must it have been like to ride this thing? The geologist Jack Schmitt, the only civilian scientist who flew Apollo, spoke of the difference between sitting on top of one in simulations and during the real deal.

  “You start to hear sounds that you’ve never heard before,” he said, then shook his head. “Especially as you approach thirty seconds, this huge Saturn V starts to come alive, almost like an animal.”

  Bill Anders of Apollo 8, the first mission to circumnavigate the Moon, also resorted to anthropomorphic imagery, describing the ride as “like being heaved about; like being a rat in the jaws of a giant terrier.”

  And from the ground? A flash of brilliant light, followed by a squall of fire and the heart-stopping, agonizingly slow push to clear the launch tower. The final mission, Apollo 17, took off into the night and remade the entire sky as a dancing, fiery cathedral dome and the ocean as an orange-grey sea of flame. People describe a guttural quake that rolled toward you like thunder, with almost everyone who watched referring in one way or another to the intense physicality of the experience. The distinguished and then-Apollosceptic British journalist Hugo Young gasped that “in the bedlam of launch, there were, momentarily, no critics of the space programme.”

  I find myself avoiding the numbers, because they seem to flatten and insult Saturn, to tame it to the point where it no longer troubles the imagination. They say that it stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighed six million pounds at launch, that the first of the three stages had five rocket engines producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust each, but I don’t know what any of that means. Among the welter of facts and figures, only two strike me as particularly remarkable. The first is that this rocket was trusted to go to the Moon on only its third flight, where others faced exhaustive test programmes before anyone was allowed to climb aboard; the second that it contained close to six million parts, meaning that, even with NASA’s astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong on a good flight. Yet the Saturn V never failed, nor looked like failing when it mattered and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that something very like genius was at work here. What might not be guessed is that it was a Nazi genius. In the words of Chris Kraft, “Wernher von Braun built a masterpiece.”

  Wernher von Braun: his spirit haunts Apollo like a spectre. Reg Turnill’s eldest son was born prematurely when one of the first V-2 rocket-bombs von Braun designed during World War II fell on Sydenham in South London. It was years before Reg could bring himself to shake the German’s hand. To begin with, his thick accent and mouth full of metal teeth were “quite revolting for the viewer,” but one day Reg turned around and, lo, the engineer was speaking perfect English through a gallery of gleaming white teeth. Flight director Chris Kraft found his presence troubling at first, too, and claims to have contemplated punching him on their first meeting out of disgust at his background: NASA’s much-loved first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), Robert Gilruth, sought to assuage his deputy with the words “von Braun doesn’t care what flag he fights for.” But in the end, most NASA folk seem to have adored him. Astronauts have frequently referred to him as a genius, a visionary, someone they respected and loved to spend time with.

  The traditional view of von Braun has been of a modern-day Mephisto or Faust. He’d dreamed since boyhood of taking his species into space, and when the dream looked most likely to be realized by the Nazis, this son of an aristocrat signed up as an SS officer. Later, at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, explained that he and the Party had “exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task.” Perhaps we can understand this. And as the war was racing toward a conclusion, von Braun led 150 of his top engineers and their families on a hazardous dash across Germany so that they might surrender to the Americans rather than to the rapidly advancing Soviets. Whether he was acting out of compassion or because he knew the presence of his team would strengthen his bargaining position is impossible to know – although it’s worth noting that he left many behind. Either way, 118 of them joined von Braun behind barbed wire as “prisoners of peace,” until the Cold War was ratcheted up in Korea (1950–53), and the Germans were unpacked and moved to the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama, with Nazi pasts conveniently forgotten.

  Wags began referring to Huntsville as “Hunsville” – they still do – but from this time on, there was no stopping von Braun and his team, which is widely regarded as one of the most talented groups of engineers ever assembled. In the Fifties he became a powerful advocate of space exploration, never shy of tweaking Americans’ fear of Soviet domination in this exotic new realm, even fronting a kids’ TV series on the subject for Walt Disney (notoriously no liberal himself). Apollo could not have happened without him and he is the only person of whom this might be said. His best biographer will point out to me that Stanley Kubrick used to get tetchy when people assumed the mad German adviser Peter Sellers played in his Cold War masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, to have been based on Henry Kissinger. The only German with the ear of a president when the film was being made in 1963 was von Braun.

  Even at this stage, though, as I crane my neck to gape at his work, I’m aware that history books have begun to be rewritten on the subject of von Braun. His V-2 rocket had been made with European slave labour in caves under the spectacular Harz Mountains of central Germany, but von Braun was always allowed to deny any involvement in, or even knowledge of, these crimes. Dr. Arthur Rudolph, who was in charge of production there and would later work under von Braun as manager of the Saturn V programme at Huntsville, was awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal in 1969, but later forced to flee the U.S. when a media emboldened by its reporting of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal began to question his past and the fact that workers who sabotaged the V-2s at his Mittelwerk fa
ctory were routinely hanged outside his office: estimates suggest that 60,000 inmates passed through Mittelwerk and its associated concentration camps, of whom 25,000 were worked or starved to death in the cold inhuman murk of the tunnels. Von Braun’s defence was always that he operated from the research station at Peenemünde and knew nothing of this, and was once arrested by an SS suspicious of his commitment to the cause – all of which now seems doubtful at best. I’ll come to see him as one of Apollo’s greatest mysteries, somehow representative of the ambiguity at its core: of the tension between this towering act of creativity and the avarice, fear and intolerance that enabled it; of the way all that is best in humanity appears to have been driven by everything that is worst.

  On the way out of the hangar, I walk past a corral of remote-controlled mini Mars Rover robot vehicles, where a recorded voice is pleading “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not drive the Rovers into each other!” Poor NASA: they give us these wonderful machines and our first impulse is still to see what they look like when they crash. Ballard would shake with joy. I get back on the bus, anoint my experience with some “memorabilia” from the shop, where the childrens’ T-shirts read “I need my space,” and head for Cocoa Beach.

  More bright light and desiccated sky, a smell of sea at the end of the pier where I sit with coffee and a book, rapt.

  It’s been a strange morning already. I found a voodoo charm on the beach but broke it; two small figures, a man and a woman tied together with string and placed in a salsa jar with some red fluid that might have been blood (or alternatively, I suppose, salsa), bobbing in perfect foaming surf in front of me. Slightly repelled, I lobbed it back and watched in horror as it shattered on the soft sand. I kneeled down to pick up the shards, wondering whether this portended bad luck, then had to remind myself that I don’t believe in that kind of thing.

  An elderly couple ambled by. They looked at the dolls for a long time. He was a sculptor and they lived here, they told me.

  “How good of you to stay and pick up the glass,” she said.

  She had a handsome tanned face with a calm smile and straight silver hair that swam in the breeze.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’d have done the same,” I smiled back.

  “Sure, but not everyone would these days.”

  These days. When did that phrase come to be an admonition? I’d never thought about it before. Was it so in 1969? 1961? The woman asked what brought me to Cocoa Beach and I told her I’d come to see an astronaut.

  “Well, there’s plentya them around here.” Her husband laughed as he took her hand, wished me luck and made to walk on by.

  Yes, I thought, but not like this one.

  Cocoa Beach, a few miles south of the Cape, is where the astronauts stayed and played while preparing to fly. They raced Corvettes down Main Street and partied around the pool at the plain-Jane Holiday Inn, where it seemingly rained only martinis and starstruck girls, referred to by one astronaut as “Cape cookies,” with all high jinks pardoned in advance by the court of fame (the harsher rules of celebrity having yet to be framed). In fact, most of the stories surrounding this place pertain to the Mercury 7 rather than the more cerebral young men who followed them and pushed humanity’s envelope to the Moon. Typical of that time are black-and-white photos of the Original Seven member Deke Slayton in a porkpie hat, sucking a cigar the size of a grenade launcher, Updike’s Rabbit to a tee, and another of him being flung fully clothed into the pool. Slayton had been raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin in a town with a population of 150, the eldest of four from his father’s second marriage. His early life was spartan: growing up in the 1930s, there was food but little money, so the family lived without electricity and had no radio and Slayton later recalled being taken to the movies just once, but not liking it and scarcely ever going back. It’s hardly surprising if the boy grew into a direct, capable, no-nonsense sort of man, ruggedly handsome with the sharpest crew cut in town and minimal tolerance for nicety or introspection.

  Deke Slayton didn’t fly to the Moon – his place in this story is more important than that, because before he could even hit the sky with the Mercury programme, NASA doctors diagnosed him with a minor heart condition and insisted that he be grounded. Some say he never forgave doctors and scientists for heaping their caution upon him, which he later associated with the way his hard-pressed mother used to tie him to a tree at the age of four to stop him from running into the road. Either way, in devastated rage he was removed from flight duty, then put in charge of the Astronaut Corps, making him the single most important figure in the other astronauts’ lives: the puppeteer; the man who assigned them to missions – or didn’t. Best pals with Al Shepard and the laconic Gus Grissom, and a straight-ahead fighter jock to the core, the word is that he didn’t like the comparatively bohemian Scott Carpenter, who would sit in the sand a stone’s throw from here, strumming folk songs on an acoustic guitar at a time when the roots clubs of Greenwich Village were teeming and the music was very, very hip. Many people think Slayton also underestimated the sensitive and artistic Alan Bean of Apollo 12 and was wary of conspicuous intellectuals like Bill Anders, Walter Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart – each of whom would fly but once and miss out on the landings. Known to most people simply as “Deke,” he died of cancer in June 1993, and is key to everything that follows.

  The end of the pier is a timber square gathered around the shaded sanctum of a bar. It’s 11 AM and I’m guiltily agreeable to sharing this space with seven or eight men in T-shirts and shorts, mostly pretty young or pretty old, who dangle fishing lines over the weathered railings, mouths of their beer bottles open to the sky as if in conversation with it. For the past hour, I’ve been sitting here reading a reprinted edition of Ether-Technology: A Rational Approach to Gravity Control, a cult text from the Seventies which claims to show that the kind of antigravity technology normally associated with UFOs is not only feasible, but already with us and being kept under wraps by the authorities. That the publishers may regard author Rho Sigma’s thesis with less than complete seriousness is indicated by a bold invitation to “Build Your Own Flying Saucer!” on the back cover. More important for me, though, is a modest line above the title on the front, which reads: “Foreword by astronaut Capt. Edgar D. Mitchell, Ph.D.” This is the same Edgar Mitchell who flew as Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14, becoming the sixth person to leave his bootprints on the Moon, then came back to embark on a far more curious journey. I’ve been scribbling furiously in the margins, noting key lines from this five-page foreword, and they’re not what you would expect from a man raised on the strict conventions of the military. Among the passages I’ve underlined in pencil are:

  the view from space has shown me – as no other event in my life has – how limited a view man has of his own life and that of the planet …

  no other animal commits the atrocities and stupidities men do …

  in our surfeit of knowledge and paucity of wisdom, we’ve come near the brink of global destruction …

  and at the same time other people were living in poverty, ill-health, near-slavery, starvation, fear and misery from prejudice or outright persecution, because as individuals and as a planet we have not had the will to change these conditions …

  the situation has become desperate, and I became acutely aware of that as I gazed at Earth from a quarter of a million miles away …

  Followed by the clinchers: “every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority” and “The solution is: a global change of consciousness.”

  The thing is this. Swaddled in the cosmos on the way back from the Moon, Edgar Mitchell had what he describes as an “epiphany,” in which he glimpsed an intelligence in the Universe and felt connected to it, like a lamp suddenly plugged in and switched on after an age hidden in darkness. In that moment, the void seemed to him alive and his description of it reminds me of the English poet-artist William Blake’s ecstatic vision of a Universe in which “every particle of dust br
eathes forth its joy.” And what he said to himself was, precisely: Wow.

  He was fascinated with it, with this feeling of transcendence, which he intuitively related to the euphoric states other civilizations have conjured with ritual, drugs, contemplation – gods – and when he got back, he left NASA and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), named for the Greek-derived word meaning “of, relating to or based on the intellect.” His aim was to reconcile science with religion – and the point at which they met, or at least the bridge between them, he postulated, consists in that greatest of all mysteries, consciousness itself. Thus, the key to the Universe is contained in our own minds, and vice versa, the result being that for thirty-two years now, the Moonwalker Dr. Mitchell, who has two bachelor of science degrees to add to his doctorate from MIT, has been searching for this key. People who pass through his gravity field frequently characterize IONS as a kind of New Age cult, with Mitchell the Space Age Colonel Kurtz, the hero who entered into the heart of a darkness even Conrad and Coppola couldn’t conceive, and never came back. It’s him that I’ve come to see and I have no idea what to expect. All I do know is that the Florida chapter of IONS is holding a conference 150 miles southwest of here, in the steaming Gulf resort of St. Petersburg, and I’m enrolled. Its theme is “Seeding Spirit in Action,” which might mean anything. Yesterday, I couldn’t help noticing that, unlike books by the other Moonwalkers, none of Ed Mitchell’s writings were available in the bookshop at the Kennedy Space Center.