Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  As if guided by someone or something else, our attention turns to That’s How It Felt to Walk on the Moon. It’s a question which twelve men struggled to answer for varying portions of three decades, which Bean tried to answer with his brush.

  “It was an image NASA took of me. And I wanted it to have more emotion about it, so I didn’t paint it like those others. And I painted it gold – ’cos I felt like I had a glow up there, you know, really excited … I didn’t know how I felt! But you had the best day of your life. But I looked at it and I said, ‘I didn’t really feel the way that looks.’ So I said, ‘Maybe it’s more like a rainbow,’ and then it began to feel more like I felt. And those colours go well together, which is why it looks so good. And I wanted to keep it. I can’t remember what that sold for at the show, but I said to myself, ‘I can’t afford a painting that expensive.’ And later on when I could, I tried to buy it back, but I couldn’t.”

  They were asking more than you sold it for?

  “No, they wouldn’t sell it!”

  He explains that he’s borrowing it right now because he wants the painting of Conrad to be a companion piece to it. I tell him that I’d have trouble parting with something that I’d put so much of myself into.

  “You do,” he smiles, “but you’re either in business or you’re not.”

  On the way out, Bean invites me to a talk he’s giving for an education charity at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. He also lets me try on his space gloves, which are unexpectedly stiff and clumsy and as I’m tugging them off, I suddenly hear Naughty Jack’s voice in my ear, delivering the best speech from Terms of Endearment to Shirley MacLaine, who has just agreed to go on a date. He’s oozing:

  “Now, Aurora, since you’ve agreed, why don’t we just forget about the rest of it. I mean, I know how you feel, you know. There were countdowns when I had my doubts. But I said to myself, ‘You agreed to do it. You’re strapped in. You’re in the hands of something bigger and more powerful than yourself … so why don’t you just lay back and enjoy the ride …’”

  And I have to ask: Can this really have been based on Alan Bean, even in the wilder days of his youth?

  “Oh, nooo,” he assures me; “they just came round to get the feel of what an astronaut is really like.”

  So we’ll take that as a “yes,” especially once we know that Ron Howard and Bill Paxton also came over when they were making Apollo 13, and that at the film’s Hollywood premiere a stream of people came and told Bean how puzzled they’d been to find that Paxton’s portrayal of the Apollo 13 Lunar Module pilot, Fred Haise, reminded them so much of him. I watch it again and they’re absolutely right.

  The museum district comes on like a pleasant afterthought to the city, manicured green and – with no reason for anyone to go there other than culture – quiet. It’s nice, though, and the gathering at the Museum of Natural Sciences is an intimate thing, with cocktails preceding a “VIP dinner” attended by educators and Houston philanthropists, the theme being “Make Space for the World’s Kids.” I arrive late and sit at the back, watching chicken bones being cleared away until, lo and behold, those familiar ascending chords come spearing from the PA system. Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  Bean steps to the front of the circular room in brown trousers and a pale blue, long-sleeved cotton shirt with a NASA logo on the pocket, and a big smile on his face. “Hello, Earthlings,” he says into the microphone, which erupts into feedback. He steps back and someone fiddles with a knob. A slide show begins and Bean’s words start to tumble out as the images flash by. There’s one of the computer room at Mission Control, which contains all the computing power of several modern mobile phones (the onboard LM computer had a memory of 36k), and another of a strange harness designed to simulate the one-sixth gravity found on the Moon, which appears to be suspending Bean by his testicles. “We realized that not only did we not know how to git to the Moon, we didn’t know how to train to git to the Moon,” the former astronaut deadpans. “You’ll see that I’m not smiling here.” The audience dissolves into laughter. There’s a picture of a reluctant Bean being taught geology and another one with his crewmates Conrad and Dick Gordon, where he points out that he went all the way to the surface precisely because he was the least experienced of the three; because Gordon had been into space before and could be trusted to tend the Command Module alone; and I realize that I’ve never heard or seen any of the other LM pilots acknowledge this. It wasn’t a “single-shot thing,” he says as a slide of Aldrin on the Moon appears. They hadn’t assumed that the first attempt would be successful, had half expected that it might take two or three to get it right.

  “We were stunned, we were amazed when that happened,” he admits. “We came back and thought, ‘This is amazing that we did this’ – the same feeling that all the people on the planet had at that time.”

  Bean tells us that he called Neil Armstrong on the phone when he started to paint the Apollo 11 commander planting the first flag, and that Armstrong had declared this to be the scariest part of the mission, because lunar soil is like dust mixed with coral – sharp and hard because there’s no weather to erode and smooth it – and he couldn’t force the flagpole more than a couple of inches in. He became convinced that when he let go of the staff, it would fall and everybody around the world would see the American flag collapsing suggestively into the dirt. So he leaned it back and tried to balance it. He put a little soil around the base and the thing stood up, just, but he and Buzz made a point of steering clear of it thereafter. And I’m thinking: these people find fear in the strangest of places. This is followed by a photo taken through the LM’s window on the way down, and the observation that the Lunar Module pilot, which is what he was, should really have been called the Lunar Module engineer, because the commander, in this case Pete Conrad, was responsible for flying the ungainly contraption.

  “And I remember looking out the window and saying to Pete, ‘Wow, this is scary.’ When I was in orbit around the Moon, I had a feeling I was in an animation. It was like orbiting a ball, because it’s so much smaller than the Earth and you can see the curvature and it just seemed magical that we would keep going around this little ball in this little spaceship, without drifting off into space. But I remember looking out and there’d just be craters all over the place and I’d be scared and I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, I can’t do my job scared,’ so I’d look in and I’d pay attention to my computer screen, which looked just the same as in the simulator, and I calmed down. But I didn’t want to miss the trip, so I’d look out and get excited again, then look in … astronauts aren’t fearless. Well, some are more fearless than I was, but it’s a case of trying to find a way that you can manage your fear and still do the job at hand. And the thing to remember is that we couldn’t do this when we began: we gradually learned to. I tell young people all the time, as part of their education, ‘You’re not born brave: you gotta learn to be brave. You got to find a way.’ ”

  He addresses the post-Apollo hiatus in Deep Space voyaging, pointing out that it was 127 years between Columbus stumbling across America and the founding of Jamestown. He gives us a flash of the famous tabloid mock-up of a Nazi bomber on the Moon, using it to tell us that he doesn’t think we’ve been visited by UFOs, then shows his painted version of Al Shepard hitting that golf shot on the lunar surface.

  “If I was going again,” he maintains, “I’d take a football and I’d get Pete to go deep … we were so focussed on doing the science that we missed out on the humanity,” even though some people disapproved of that particular stunt. “One of the things I love about being an artist is that when you want to do something, you don’t have to call a meeting. And also it doesn’t have to make sense.”

  We laugh at that. Can Apollo be said to have made sense? I’m still not sure.

  Then there’s the famous Whole Earth photo, which Apollo 17 brought back after NASA had all but given up hope of getting one, and which is still the most reproduced image on Earth.
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  “And I’m not a religious person, but I do know what the Bible says, and I think the people that wrote the Bible, when they said ‘the Garden of Eden,’ and they thought it was the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, ’cos that was all the writers of the document knew about, but I think, really, the whole Earth is the Garden of Eden. We’ve been given paradise to live in. I think about that every day. Now, think about this for a minute: we’ve been looking out of telescopes for three hundred years; we’ve been sending probes out into space, and we have never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out the front door. That’s why, when I came back from the spaceflight, I was a different person.”

  During fifty-nine days of orbiting in Skylab, he looked down and saw rain over Houston, and wished he were there. What struck him when he came back from Deep Space was the movement and change all around us here, where in space you just have “a sunny day then a sunny night then a sunny day then a sunny night.” He remembers going to the shopping centre two or three times, after splashdown and just sitting there eating an ice-cream cone and watching the people go by, as thrilled and fascinated by this sight as by anything he’d seen on the surreal adventure. A photo of Bean, Conrad and Gordon in the Command Module on their way home reminds me of Kim Poor telling me, “I know other missions where the guys don’t even talk to each other … but I was with those three at a signing three weeks before Pete died and they were just amazing … they were finishing each other’s sentences, just so close,” and out of the blue, I find myself wondering whether the most powerful part of the journey for Bean might have been the relationship formed with these two other men? Gordon made some wisecrack about not messing up his tidy module when his friends returned to him safely from the surface, but once, in an unguarded moment, he did admit that what he felt was love flooding through him.

  To Bean, the image also brings back the sudden understanding that they were invisible at that moment to even the most powerful telescope on Earth, which in turn showed “how inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of the Universe.” It dawned on him that with the right computer program, it would be possible to know precisely where everything else in the Universe will be ten, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand years from now.

  “The one thing in the Universe that we can’t predict,” he concludes – and we know what’s coming, yet that doesn’t diminish the thought – “the one thing that we don’t know where it’s going to be even ten years from now, is us. We may be small, but we’ve been given the most extraordinary gift in the Universe.”

  I walk away feeling fascinated by Alan Bean and his charisma. I realize how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I’ve spent being unnecessarily less than that myself, and I’ll still be considering this when I see a story in tomorrow morning’s paper about how a new object has just appeared in Earth orbit, at about twice the distance of the Moon, and how astronomers at the University of Arizona have become convinced that it is the third stage of the Saturn rocket which hove Apollo 12 into the sky. Third stages, remember, carried the Command and Lunar Modules into Earth orbit and then pushed them toward the Moon, and when they’d completed this task and been discarded, they were supposed to swing over to the sun, though some crashed into the lunar surface instead. By contrast, this one had seemed to have a mind of its own, loitering in Earth orbit, unable to tear itself away, until finally it did and went wandering for thirty years, only to return now, this week, to resume its silent vigil through the dark of space. I’ll think of Alan Bean then, wondering how he’ll feel when he opens his morning paper.

  I find my car in the car park, climb in and put the key in the ignition. The radio comes on and I find myself laughing uncontrollably. Floating from the speakers is “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. My first thought is: “There’s not a person I know who’s going to believe this.” And I’m absolutely right.

  Many months later, I call to see how Bean’s getting on and he tells me that he’s finally cracked the problem of adding colour to the Moon. He talks animatedly about the day it happened; how the reds and yellows and oranges suddenly gelled and he knew that he would now be able to make that other world look as beautiful on canvas as it seems to him when he thinks back to his time on the surface, on what he’ll still describe as “the best day of my life.” As a result, he thinks his work might be about to enter a new phase, and with the sun shining in Houston and spaghetti in the cards for lunch, I can’t help feeling that there’s a lot to learn from Alan Bean.

  6

  The Quiet Stuff

  As the family settles down to watch New Year’s Eve on TV, the things I remember about the second half of 1969 are these: the first flight of Concorde; the Beatles in beards and Afghan coats on the roof of the Apple building in London, looking cold and sounding grey as the English sky; the murder of an actress named Sharon Tate by members of a hippy cult whose leader, Charles Manson, had eyes like pits – and then of a black Rolling Stones fan who was beaten to death by Hell’s Angels security guards at their huge concert in Altamont, California, not far from where I live, filling my living room with articles about whether the Stones are Satanists.

  The summer had seemed exciting and full of hope, a prelude to the new decade that would be coming along soon, bringing with it a new world of promise. Apollo 11 was closely followed by the Woodstock Festival, which, even according to the super-square Time magazine, “unfolded without violence in an Aquarian instant of communion and discovery.” For a few days, the newspapers were all full of hippies dancing naked in the mud and looking a little silly, but when the album came out and all my friends’ older brothers and sisters bought it, we loved listening to Country Joe McDonald getting the crowd to shout “Fuck!” and singing a hilarious antiwar song called “The I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” with a chorus that ended: “Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why – whoopie! we’re all gonna die.” Two things I’ve understood from 1969 are that satire is everything, and that people’s genitals are hairier than at any other time in history.

  Perhaps it’s the drugs.

  In the summer, everyone said the war was going to end, but it doesn’t look that way anymore. In November, President Nixon, who’d promised to stop it (hadn’t he?), came on TV and said that it was all North Vietnam’s fault anyway and that he wouldn’t countenance “the first defeat in our nation’s history.” Like everyone else, I hardly noticed Apollo 12 that same month, only sixteen weeks after the wonderment of Apollo 11, because a series of huge antiwar “mobilizations” were grabbing most of the headlines. In Washington, hundreds of thousands of Americans stood in the Mall singing “Give Peace a Chance”; then on the second day of the “Mobe,” news broke that in March 1968, some American troops under Lieutenant William Calley Jr. had massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Spiro Agnew, the vice president who radiates a weird, goofy anger and always sounds like he’s trying to juice a lemon with his sphincter muscles when he speaks, accused the students of being irresponsible, drug-addled hippies – like my teachers – and a lot of grown-ups seemed to agree with him. Trade unions have supported the war: in some places, workers have been turning up to fight with student protesters.

  Weirdest of all was the first “Draft,” where a huge fishbowl was filled with 366 blue capsules, which were drawn out one by one and if your birthday came out, you were sent to the war. Mum had the TV on that morning and I asked whether I was going to have to go when I was older, but she said no – if that happened, we’d move back to England. Other mothers say the same thing and it’s become a kind of game at school, boasting about whose parents will move furthest away in the event of their sons being drafted (not everyone plays, mind: John Schaeffer’s dad, who makes his kids call him “Sir,” says that John’ll just have to go and damn well fight). They still announce the number of American dead on the news each evening, but I’ve been hearing the numbers for so long that they don’t mean much to me anymore. A poll on the news says that Pres
ident Nixon’s “approval rating” at the end of his first year is “eighty-one per cent, rising to eighty-six per cent in the South …” so I guess that means he’s doing a good job.

  What of this new dawn? Before 1970 is done, the Beatles have angrily split and Hendrix and Joplin will be dead, with the Doors’ Jim Morrison to follow. Bill Anders’s Earthrise picture has fronted environmentalists’ first “Earth Day,” four students have been killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University and a house which blows up down the road from where I used to live in Greenwich Village turns out to have been a bomb factory for a shady group calling itself the Weathermen. The big movies are Catch-22 and M*A*S*H and Patton, about the World War II general, which Nixon screens for himself in the White House whenever he feels in need of inspiration, clearly missing the archness in Francis Ford Coppola’s script; and biggest of all, the weepy Love Story, which critics panned but fearful Middle America is eating up like Devil’s Food Cake lite. There are signs that the economic Golden Age is losing its lustre, but they’re subtle as yet. Public opinion is turning against the war, though – not because, to quote Newsweek, “the combat forces are now manned by bitter draftees [who] get killed at nearly double the rate of non-draftee enlisted men,” but because so many of them have been returning as drug addicts. Getting our boys killed in ’Nam is one thing: bringing them home as hippies quite another. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, will one day admit that the new president could have halted the war in 1971 if not sooner, but chose to wait until the election year of 1972. By the war’s end, the death toll will include 58,000 Americans, nearly a third of whom have gone down on his watch, with a quarter of a million wounded.

  A new decade? No. From where I stand, nothing’s changed. We’re on the cusp of an era that will drift steadily beyond the reach of satire, but for now, it’s business as usual. We’re out of the 1960s, but the Sixties aren’t done yet, and if Marvin Gaye doesn’t know what’s going on as he floats into my room on KFRC, that’s because no one else seems to either.