Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  So, like all eight-year-olds, I recognize brutality to be the inevitable defining feature of my world. And outside of school, life is really okay. We spend our days catching snakes and lizards and frogs and, as if on a mission to prove that adults don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, black widow spiders, which we keep in jars as pets. Accordingly, the things I wouldn’t mind being when I grow up are: Evel Knievel, obviously; a zoologist specializing in creatures that terrify my mother; an astronaut and/or the lead guitarist in a band, even if Scott assures me that I have to be the bass player because I’m skinny and tall for my age.

  Of those four things, what I’d most like to be is an astronaut, but I’m not going to admit that, because all boys want to be astronauts at this time, really all boys and even some girls – like Erin Taylor, who I kind of like. And there’s nothing at all unrealistic about this, because one thing of which we’re all certain is that the future for astronauts is bright. Space sci-fi is everywhere, from Star Trek and Lost in Space to the Silver Surfer comics which taught me to read, to the era-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the inscrutable black slab that contains the key to the Universe is dug up on the Moon, by people living on a Moon base. We’re in one of those rare moments where imagination and expectation are converging and anything seems possible. In 1969, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that, by 2001, there will be bases on the Moon. There will be daily flights into the void, probably run by private companies, and mass space tourism. Communities will orbit the Earth and fan out through the solar system. Today proves that the technology to do these things is available. David is already talking about us saving up to buy a ticket for one of the first commercial space flights, which are on sale now. All we’ll have to do then is toss a coin or fight a duel to decide who gets to use it.

  With so many troubles on Earth, perhaps escaping to the heavens seems natural and logical. They’re making a movie called Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern, in which this actually happens as a way of preserving the forests and deserts, and something similar seems to be going on in Neil Young’s song “After the Goldrush,” where the human race is fleeing its devastated cradle in spaceships, “flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.” Everywhere we turn, there is talk of the Cold War, Vietnam, racial strife and looming environmental catastrophe. But all the bad things that are happening seem to have their corollary in good – none of them appear insurmountable – and we make no connection between those old-world horrors and the staggering ambition of the lunar programme. For all their ties to the military, the astronauts are pioneers, talismans, bringers of a bold new space-faring future …

  Sometimes it really does feel like the dawn of a new age.

  But the 1960s is the age of false dawns. Top of the charts is the bubblegum hippy anthem “Something in the Air” by Thunderclap Newman. Closing in fast, though, is Credence Clearwater Revival and “Bad Moon Rising.”

  The afternoon has passed in a blur. We watched some of the space coverage on TV. Joan Aldrin appeared with her three children outside her house in Nassau Bay. One of them was a boy named Andrew, who looked about my age, and an instant visual appraisal led me to believe that his mom cuts his hair, too. They had watched the landing at home with a group of family and friends and couldn’t understand the litany of technical data any more than we could. The difference was that Mrs. Aldrin had NASA pals on hand to explain what they meant. She heard them say that the fuel was almost gone and the astronauts hadn’t yet found a place to land, and her head spun. She stood in her crowded living room, holding on to a doorframe, eyes brimming with tears, waiting for the awful instant in which her husband’s voice would stop and be lost to her forever, while the whole world listened in. Then she heard him say, “Okay, engine stop.” She accepted a hug from someone and retired to her bedroom.

  It’s coming up to 7:30 PM and dusk is falling. I can hear crickets and birds in the back garden, and the burble of the creek. The Moon’s in the sky, a big silver full Moon, and I’ve been on the porch in my pyjamas, which have little blue spaceships on them, just drinking the sight in. They’re up there. Up there. There. We’ve been watching the screen for an hour, because Neil Armstrong was due out at 7:00 PM, after he told NASA that he couldn’t bear to hang around until midnight, much less sleep. The TV anchor and various experts have been assuring us that everything is fine, though. It takes a while to get those big Michelin Man suits on.

  Armstrong is late because stowing the dishes after dinner was never part of the practice routine and it’s taken longer than anyone expected. The first men on the Moon are being delayed by dirty dishes: there’s something wonderful about that. The Eagle is on a bright, rolling, crater-pocked plain. When they had a chance to take the scene in through the LM’s tiny, triangular portholes, Aldrin exulted at the unreal clarity in this atmosphereless environment, with features on the distant horizon appearing close by, contrasting beautifully against the boundless black backdrop of infinity. Armstrong wondered at the peculiar play of light and colour on the tan surface. He thought it looked more inviting than hostile. He knows this will be his home for only twenty-one hours.

  Now, what do you say as you become the first human being to set foot on the Moon? Neil Armstrong is an astronaut, not a poet, and certainly not a PR man. He wouldn’t have bothered about it much, but people have been writing to him with all kinds of suggestions – the Bible and Shakespeare being the most popular sources of inspiration – and everyone he meets seems to have an opinion. The pressure is on. It’s irritating, because, for him, the landing was the poetry and taking off again his next major work. Still, as he thinks about it, he considers the paradox that it is such a small step, and yet … the laconic career pilot comes up with one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language.

  The door won’t budge and they don’t want to force it, because you could poke a hole through Eagle at almost any point. The air pressure inside the cabin is holding it closed, so Armstrong peels a corner back gently and the last of the craft’s oxygen screams into space as a rainbow of ice crystals. Aldrin holds the hatch open as the other man sinks to his knees and crawls through, until he is standing on Eagle’s porch, surrounded only by Moon and space and the Earth which hangs above him.

  He pulls a ring and a small TV camera lowers on a tray from the undercarriage and begins transmitting pictures home. A voice from Earth exclaims, “We’re getting pictures on the TV!” And so we are: grainy and unearthly. Upside down at first, then flipped over. Wow. Armstrong tests his weight in one-sixth gravity and launches himself onto the LM’s giant landing pad. He describes the surface as “very, very fine-grained as you get close to it … almost like a powder.” Then:

  “Okay, I’m going to step off the LM now.”

  There’s still time for the rapacious Moon-bugs to grab him, but they don’t. He tests the ground to make sure it will take his weight, then steps off the LM.

  “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind …”

  He bounces, paws at the dust once more with his boot and finally lets go of Eagle, to be free of the Earth and all its creations. He walks hesitantly, unsteadily at first, like a toddler searching for the secret of balance. He feels his way into the rolling gait that Moonwalking demands and takes some photos, until Mission Control reminds him about the “contingency” soil sample he’s supposed to get in case of an emergency takeoff. At that moment, Aldrin chips in, too, and the commander snaps, “Right,” as the press room back in Houston erupts with laughter – because it seems that nagging is nagging, even on the Moon. Fourteen minutes later, Aldrin joins him, cracking a joke about being careful not to lock the hatch on the way out – but all the same, he’s covered in goose bumps as he steps away from the Eagle. He likes the reduced gravity, is glad of its attention after the weightlessness of space, which feels lonesome to him, as though he’s nowhere. He looks up at the half-dark Earth and can make out the slowly rotating shapes of North Africa and the Middle Ea
st, then returns his eyes to the Moon and realizes that the soil next to his boots has lain untroubled by life since before those continents existed.

  I run out into the garden to bathe in the silky Moonlight and the blood seems to rush to my head. They’re standing there now. They’re walking on the Moon. I go back inside and President Nixon is on the phone to the astronauts.

  “Hello, Neil and Buzz, I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House …”

  Throughout the Moonwalk, Aldrin has been wrestling with a strange mixture of emotions, coalescing in an eerie sense that he is part of something that reaches way beyond himself. He’s here and there is Moon under his feet, but he feels strangely detached from the proceedings, as though he is simultaneously back home on the sofa, watching himself being watched. Inside Eagle, he felt alone with Neil, but now he imagines the presence of the whole of humanity. He wonders what to say in response to the president and decides that it might be best to say nothing at all.

  Nixon’s still going on.

  “… For one priceless moment, in the whole history of Man, all the people on this Earth are truly one. One in their pride in what you have done. And one in our prayers that you will return home safely to Earth.”

  Nixon does have speech writers.

  There is an awkward silence, such as might be encountered in conversation with an elderly uncle who can’t quite remember your name. Then Armstrong speaks.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. It’s a great honour and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations … men with a vision for the future …”

  It’s the 1960s: women still count as men. To some viewers, the astronaut’s halting voice sounds thick with emotion, although he will later insist that, with perhaps a thousand million people watching and listening, his thoughts are mostly concentrated on trying not to say anything stupid. He turns his attention back to inspecting and gathering samples of the Moon. It’s already proving a far more interesting place than he’d expected. Especially odd is the visible curvature toward the horizon on this relatively small sphere, which lends a kind of intimacy to the landscape. He and his partner struggle to plant an American flag in the lunar soil, and then have difficulty in persuading it to stand up. When the Eagle takes off, it blows over.

  They’re still out there when I lose my battle with tiredness and Dad carries me off to bed. It’s a hot night and I’d normally fidget and have trouble getting to sleep, but blanketed in the unreality of the last twelve hours, I’m out the moment my head hits the pillow. The next morning, I wake to sun struggling through my curtains and the world feels a little different. The future seems a little nearer. Nixon’s declared a holiday, so my brothers are on the lawn and I’m going to have breakfast before riding down the street to see David. On the Moon, though, Armstrong and Aldrin are about to enter the third act of their own drama.

  If it works, Eagle’s ascent engine will be an amazing thing. It generates a meagre 3,500 pounds of thrust, but that’s enough to separate the ascent stage from the now redundant legs of the lander and shoot it back into orbit. The chemicals within it react on contact, thus obviating the need for a potentially troublesome ignition mechanism: in theory, once the valves are opened, the engine will fire and they’ll be off. Armstrong had harboured doubts about the reliability of the valves, but the Apollo engineers had rejected his mechanical, rather than electrical, operating system. They have confidence in their design.

  Still, as with so much else on the mission, no one has ever done this before and until it has been done, the Moon still owns the Eagle. Up in Columbia, Mike Collins now confronts his worst fears. If the rocket fails to propel his comrades the full sixty-nine miles to the intended rendezvous point, he can drop down as far as 50,000 feet to pick them up, but not much lower, because some of the lunar mountains reach nearly to that height. He writes down:

  My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter. If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it. Almost better not to have the option I enjoy …

  With two minutes to ignition, all Collins can do is wait and listen. With forty-five seconds left, he hears Armstrong remind his copilot of the routine.

  “At five seconds I’m going to get ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’re going to hit PROCEED.”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s all.”

  Collins smiles at the knowing irony in Armstrong’s words. Moments later, the commander presses a button and there is a heartbeat-sized pause, followed by a bang and smooth acceleration into the sky. On Earth, Joan Aldrin sinks to the floor, masking her face with her hands, and three days later her husband is bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, waiting to be winched onto the deck of the USS Hornet. There is the surreal sight of Nixon addressing them through the glass screen of their quarantine trailer, to be followed by three further weeks of strict isolation at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, during which time the men will have ample time to consider the significance of what they’ve done. Armstrong hopes that Apollo 11 shows how seemingly impossible problems may be overcome if the will is there. Aldrin watches videotapes of what had been happening back on Earth, of the ecstatic newscasters and spectral pictures and people’s houses full of guests in thrall to what they were witnessing, like mine. He begins to appreciate the depth of the emotions they’ve stirred and to sense a contradiction which will haunt the rest of his life: that those most quiet and concentrated of moments on the Moon could trigger a kind of mania back on Earth. He turns to Armstrong and says: “Neil, we missed the whole thing.”

  2

  The Hologram Man

  Sun sparkles on the English Channel.

  It’s the first day of spring, a perfect sunshiny day after another long, grey, funereal winter, and the Kentish countryside seems to have sighed and come alive. Outside in the street, people smile at the first touch of warmth and, just as assuredly as I find myself humming the first verse of “California Dreamin’” when the leaves start to fall in autumn, I’m tripping along to a silent chorus of “Here Comes the Sun” as I leave the shade of Folkestone station and angle into a tidy, daffodil-lined street.

  We’re six thousand miles and thirty-three years away from Apollo 11 – half a lifetime – but time seems to stand still in this quiet south-coast town, making it a good place to chase down memory and hold it up to light, and on the train from London I’ve been thinking about my own. Did my father really have tears in his eyes? That’s how I remember it, but then, the ghost craft I picture hovering above the Moon in a sheen of magic dust … well, I can’t have seen that. No one saw anything until Neil Armstrong pulled a cord which activated a camera on his way out of the Lunar Module. Then he jumped down to one of the lander’s big round feet, described the lunar dirt and stepped gingerly to the surface. One of the great Internet rumours of our time is that his first words were not “One small step for man,” etc., but “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky,” in honour of a boyhood neighbour whose wife was heard announcing that he could expect to benefit from oral sex “the day that boy next door walks on the Moon.” He did get the words wrong, however, because he meant to say – and for years insisted that he did say – “One small step for a man …” Even his memory is not definitive, though in the freeze-frame world we’re about to enter, that doesn’t necessarily make it less true.

  I’m here to see Reg Turnill, who was the BBC’s aerospace correspondent for two decades from the late Fifties and is the only non-American to have been presented with NASA’s Chroniclers Award for “contributions to public understanding of the space programme.” In those days the BBC still had a uniquely global reach and the NASA brass knew it. Reg h
ad reserved seats at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was renamed Cape Kennedy after the president’s death, and from these he watched much more than rockets blasting off, because his own world changed out of all recognition during those years, as TV usurped radio and the invention of videotape made footage-gathering cheap and fast; as the arrival of satellite transmission in 1968 allowed pictures to be shot across the globe instantaneously, shrinking the planet and helping to create the insatiable media we know today. A little-acknowledged fact is that, had the first Moon landing occurred in 1967 instead of 1969 (as JFK’s people had hoped, so crowning his second term), it couldn’t possibly have made the impact that it did.

  Reg is older than the astronauts, eighty-seven, ruddy-faced and wiry, with one of those distinctive old man’s voices that waver as though reversing back through teenage. His mind is sharp, but sometimes names slip away and I have to supply a list of options. He’ll say: