Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  The Third Global Travel and Tourism Summit is falling on Vilamoura, one of those glaring grass-and-concrete Algarve resorts which might have been grown in a petri dish or dropped out of the sky like a meteorite, complete with its own milky population of British golfers and German yachtsmen. Identifiable only as a place with the technology to mass-produce sprinkler heads, it betrays no history or sense of time, offers no distinctive features, is in every respect the European equivalent of Reno. The Portugese prime minister will open proceedings with a dull and unnecessary sales pitch for his country, to be followed by Armstrong as the celebrity speaker. All aspects of tourism are under discussion, but the summit logo is Apollo 17’s Whole Earth photo and the theme is “The Next Giant Leap for Travel and Tourism.” It strikes me once more that those words tossed into the Moondust are as famous as anything Shakespeare wrote.

  Security for the gathering is tight and the accreditation process unusually strict, a fact which has caused a mixture of consternation and mirth in the media camp. This is for the simple reason that no one, not even the hoariest of hacks, had previously encountered anything like the Armstrong Clause, a stiffly worded paragraph beginning, “Mr. Armstrong values his privacy …” and climaxing with a command “not to report anything that is said by Neil Armstrong and not to publish any pictures of him.” But it didn’t end there, because once the Armstrong Clause had been signed by anyone capable of holding a pen, it had to be followed by a letter from their employers specifically underscoring the point and no one could recall a precedent for this: the starriest Hollywood star would never dream of making such a demand and unless you’re talking about Robert Mugabe or Stalin, no head of state or monarch would either. A desire not to be harried or pressed for autographs is one thing, but this is something other. What on Earth is he going to say? That my pal Bart Sibrel was right after all?

  The buildup is awesome. A slide show necessarily containing mostly pictures of Buzz on the Moon sets the scene, backed by Norman Greenbaum’s thundering 1970 hit “Spirit in the Sky,” and I’m thinking, Fantastic: no Strauss. Then the MC offers a rousing “I give you the man who has lived the future!” and the music changes – to, argh! Also Sprach Zarathustra – while a screen rises to reveal dry ice smoke and flashing Close Encounters of the Third Kind lights, and applause rips through the auditorium as Neil appears and 300 guests leap to a preemptive standing ovation while he saunters to the lectern. Wow. He looks around, waits, looks around some more, waits, blinks, clears his throat – shit, this cat is cool – then opens his mouth to speak and out comes … this squashed, hesitant, dry little voice … and the surprise and disappointment of the delegates is palpable. The details of what he says are classified, of course, but that’s okay, because he talks for an hour without saying a single thing that might be relevant to us here; without hinting that he’s ever explored anything beyond his hotel closet, let alone been to the Moon, and needless to say, this is not what an audience brave enough to negotiate the Armstrong Clause is expecting, with the continental Europeans seeming to find the spectacle particularly tedious. Why would he insist on reporting restrictions? You’ll find more controversy in my mother’s handbag than in this speech.

  Actually, I find the talk imaginative and interesting and admire its careful composition. A couple of weeks later, Armstrong will make me smile by confiding via e-mail that he was “very disappointed” with his performance, because a light on the lectern was broken, making it hard to see his notes. The delivery was thus “below my usual standards, though I’m told I ‘got away with it.’ ” Even so, I’ll marvel again six months later when someone sends me Accountancy Age magazine’s review of a business convention in Manchester, at which the ex-astronaut replaced Mikhail Gorbachev (urgent business in Kazakhstan) as the star speaker. The key part reads:

  “Having paid £250 [$475] a head for the pleasure [of hearing Armstrong speak], delegates at the North West Business Convention would not unreasonably have expected the great man to reminisce about his time on the Moon – ‘No, it wasn’t faked in a TV studio in Houston,’ etc. Instead, they were treated to a boring discourse on the history of manned flight. Given that big-name speakers command between £50,000 [$95,000] and £70,000 [$133,000] per engagement, he could have made a bit more effort.”

  Now, I’m inclined to grant Accountancy Age magazine a special kind of authority when it comes to boring things, and this is where Armstrong’s reading of the astro-celebrity issue gets thorny. Does he really imagine that people are paying for his charisma and wit and knowledge of astronomy and aviation – that he possesses these things in such abundance that any number of less famous astronomers or historians couldn’t do the job as well or better for a fraction of his fee? He is a clever, accomplished person, but he is famous as the First Man on the Moon and people come in the innocent hope of hearing about his experience. If he assumes that they’re happy just to bask in his presence, then he’s the one playing the celebrity game – not his audience. All the same, you have to feel for Neil. To him, the content of these speeches is the most fascinating and important stuff in the Universe, and no one wants to hear it. All they want to know is what it was like to stand on the Moon. No wonder playful Pete Conrad used to defuse the question by answering, “Super! Really enjoyed it!”

  In Armstrong’s further defence are grapevine suggestions that his new wife is trying to get him out of the house more, but there are still no ovations after the Vilamoura address. Over dinner in the evening, a French radio producer startles me by saying, “I found it boring … and it was strange to see him like that also,” to which I reply, “What – you mean … old?” and he nods grimly, reluctant to acknowledge this unsettling feeling, just as I’d been when faced with Ed Mitchell for the first time in Florida. By way of contrast, a young British print journalist enjoyed the content of the speech, but still finds peculiarity in the man’s apparent detachment from the process of delivering it. He cracks a joke about whether the speech really happened or not. Every time I step into my hotel’s lift thereafter, REM’s “Man on the Moon” seems to be playing, and for the first time I notice that the chorus runs, “If you believe they put a man on the Moon, then nothing is cool …” If I’m not mistaken, Michael Stipe is saying that he doesn’t believe in the landings, either. Being Neil Armstrong can’t be easy.

  And as for Dave Scott, well, where to start? David Randolf Scott, the lantern-jawed, six foot, brick-built Right Stuff general’s son with degrees from West Point, MIT and Marlboro Man, and awards coming out of his Leave It to Beaver ears, who welcomed geology and science and did everything right, always, so that even the guys who found him too straight-edged and square for their tastes, a bit of a keeno in fact, had to admit that astronauts didn’t get much better – the more so after he commanded the most enchanting, the most perfectly realized and scientifically rich mission of all, to one of the most beautiful places a human ever laid eyes on, on a ship called Endeavour, romantically spelled the British way after Captain Cook’s great vessel of discovery. Everything about the man and Apollo 15, the fourth mission to land, was etched in gold and writ large and those that followed couldn’t help but seem anticlimactic in a technical sense. Sure as his eyes were blue, Scott the champion swimmer, polo and handball player scaled the peaks of achievement, then scaled some more, until one day, with the summit in view, he glanced down and just … fell off. There’s only one word for this man’s career. Queer.

  The eldest of two boys (we might almost say obviously by this stage), Apollo 15’s commander was born in 1932, to a father who joined the Army Air Corps in order to win a Friday night bet that he could pass the medical. David watched him fly and knew from the age of three that this was what he wanted to do, sometimes sneaking into the old man’s room to try on his flying jacket and goggles, but Tom Scott – shades of the Aldrins here – was a hard taskmaster to his naturally reserved son and brooked no mediocrity. In the astronaut’s own words: “My father was a tough guy. He pushed me pretty hard.” Neve
rtheless, Scott Senior gave the boy his first flight at the age of twelve, after returning from three years stationed near Blackpool in the north of England during the war. Later, David won a swimming scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Michigan University, but soon left for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was indoctrinated into the ways of the Cold War (“I was pretty conservative in those days, and believed that we had to get rid of Communists wherever we found them”) and graduated fifth in a class of over 600. From there it was the familiar route of flight school, Europe, MIT for a graduate degree in aeronautics as a prelude to test-pilot training at Edwards Under Chuck Yeager, and NASA, where he flew Gemini 8 and Apollo 9 before finally riding away from the Earth on Apollo 15.

  No one could resist Hadley Rille, winding between the Seas of Serenity and Rains. It was an ancient canyon which looked like the imprint of a monster python and was flanked by the smooth slopes of mountains, the highest of which, Mount Hadley, rose almost three miles into the ink-black sky, with the rounded peaks of the lunar Apennines in the distance. When Scott’s partner, Jim Irwin, climbed down the ladder and settled his weight on the LM’s footpad for the first time, the pad tilted and threw him backward, leaving him hanging on with one hand, unbalanced, unexpectedly staring straight up at the luminous Earth. He felt ecstatic in that moment, and then again as he contemplated the surrounding peaks, which rose like gargantuan, half-finished pyramids and were coloured not the brown or grey of his imagination, but gold. At one point, as the pair of explorers climbed the spectral slope of Hadley Delta in the first of the remarkable Lunar Rover cars, Mission Control heard Scott exclaim, “Oh, look back there, Jim – look at that!” and he was gazing down into the canyon, which was strewn with house-size boulders that looked like grains of sand – so vast was everything about the scene laid out before him. Then he said to Houston: “Man, you oughtta have a great view on your TV … this is unreal … the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” A voice back home confirmed that the view they were receiving on the monitor was “absolutely unearthly.” Just eight months earlier, Irwin’s wife, Mary, had been on the verge of divorcing him because she didn’t like the celebrity and the absences that went with being on an Apollo crew, and now emotion welled inside him as he remembered that he’d almost resigned from the corps to save his marriage, but Scott had told him, “Everybody goes through it, it’ll change.” And it did. Mary Irwin and her daughter Jill both assure me that the Moon absolutely did change Jim’s life, that there’s been no exaggeration; that, as Jack Schmitt might put it with his trademark understatement, when you hear the voice of God over your shoulder it gets your attention.

  Later that night in a Houston restaurant, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey was reportedly heard lauding the thoroughness with which the two men had examined a particularly interesting boulder. “Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!” he concluded, which got fellow diners’ attention. Scott would leave behind a plaque containing the names of fourteen fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, which he’d commissioned specially from a New York sculptor, and while he did that, Command Module pilot Alfred Worden composed poetry as he glided above and took a series of startling photos of the Earth and lunar surface that would end up in art galleries. Of the Moon, he wrote:

  She is forever moving just out of reach and I sail on,

  Never touching, only watching and wanting to know.

  This was in July and August of 1971. On Earth, the New York Times was publishing “The Pentagon Papers,” which showed that Americans had been lied to by their presidents over Vietnam, while the voting age was falling from twenty-one to eighteen and hot pants were coming into fashion, and up in the stars, Apollo 15 proceeded like magic. Afterwards, Scott penned an article for National Geographic in which he said:

  “These mountains were never quickened by life, never assailed by wind or rain, they loom still and serene, a tableau forever. Their majesty overwhelms me.”

  What happened next looks more comic than scurrilous. Certainly, if it were a film, you’d want the Coen Brothers to direct rather than Oliver Stone, and yet it became the Astronaut Office’s own Watergate, its Stampgate. The official version of the story goes like this:

  All of the astronauts had something called a “personal preference kit,” in which they could carry a small number of souvenirs and mementos into space. NASA knew that many took specially minted medallions and pins, to be handed out to friends and family afterwards – at least this was the official understanding. It had been noted, however, that the number of keepsakes had been increasing over time, to the point at which they became a concern, because to crash under the weight of too many tie pins wouldn’t play well with Congress. There had been a mild controversy about the crew of Apollo 14 carrying some silver medallions which were to be melted down and mixed with others for sale to the general public. This plot was quietly squashed, but David Scott maintains that his crew heard nothing about it, because they were deep in training. Thus, when they were charged with carrying 250 commemorative “first day cover” envelopes on behalf of NASA and someone suggested they take a further 400 of their own, with a quarter reserved for a German stamp dealer who would in return establish three $6,000 college funds for the crew’s children, there seemed little harm in it. They were poorly paid and had no life insurance, and the scheme might have worked well if the dealer hadn’t released his flown envelopes sooner than agreed, priced at $1,500, and if word hadn’t filtered back to NASA.

  The trio had committed no crime in law, but if there was one thing an astronaut feared more than the law it was Deke Slayton’s regulations, and these had been contravened. Now Deke hit the roof and an investigation revealed that a few other astronauts had made smaller-scale yet similar arrangements, some for charity (as per Jim Lovell), some for themselves, but it was the Hadley Rille boys who caught the attention of Congress and the press, so they took the flak and were slammed; were yanked from Apollo 17 backup duties, issued letters of reprimand by the Air Force and dragged before the Senate to apologize. Scott had been expected to make general and fly the shuttle, and none of that could happen now. The transgression was relatively innocent, yet it has come to define David Scott’s otherwise brilliant career, following him everywhere like a curse, inescapable and ever-present, the first thing the Apollo-literate think of when they hear his name and the first thing journalists and writers would ask about if he let them. That he doesn’t merely exacerbates the problem.

  In his memoirs, Slayton twists the knife. After labelling Scott “more openly political than most guys … a real Boy Scout, quite intolerant of what he saw as failings in other people …” Deke notes his partial rehabilitation at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, then describes a meeting at which the two men butted heads like goats, a situation in which there was only going to be one winner.

  “From that point on, Dave was on the downhill slide with NASA,” he contends. “He wound up leaving in 1977, getting involved with one questionable business deal after another. He seemed to have a weakness for anyone who would throw green at him.”

  After NASA, Scott founded a series of space engineering and consultancy firms, and in the 1990s acted as a technical consultant on the film Apollo 13 and TV series From the Earth to the Moon. Very little was seen or heard of him in public, however, until May 2000, when fifty-six-year-old Anna Ford announced her intention to marry the sixty-seven-year-old Scott. Three months later, long-lens photos of the couple on holiday in Majorca drove her to the Press Complaints Commission, but the relationship was said to have ended abruptly long before the PCC dismissed her complaint a year later. Even before that, the very day after Ford announced the engagement in fact, the Daily Mail ran a vicious article about Scott’s business dealings and ex-ploitation of his spaceman past. They dredged up the stamp scandal, then added an Arizona court judgement from 1992, in which he was convicted of defrauding nine investors in a partnership he organized (failing to note that the conviction was overtur
ned on appeal). They stirred in further allegations that he auctioned unverified Moondust from his space suit in 1995 – which the astronaut furiously denied – and had received money for endorsing a controversial telephone gambling enterprise which misleadingly claimed to benefit a space education and research fund. Finally, the Mail claimed that Scott, then commuting between California and London, had been dating Ford for a year, but had split from his childhood sweetheart wife of forty-one years only two and a half months previously. They found her moving out of the family home and reportedly upset, claiming her husband’s relationship and engagement had come as “a total shock.” It was as though the curse had followed Scott across the Atlantic.

  Who knows what truths or misapprehensions lie behind these reports? Probably no one other than Scott, but all this intrigue adds to the impression of an American hero’s precipitous, almost Miltonian fall from grace. Is that how the narrative reads to him? Paradise Lost? A life of two halves? Has he merely been unlucky, or is he the classic flawed hero? Whatever else he might be, Dave Scott is an enigma. And he’s here, quietly flown in to take part in a small panel discussion on the future of space tourism, a day after the man with whom he almost perished on Gemini 8 made headlines through his presence alone. Scott’s reclusiveness is different from Armstrong’s, though, because he hasn’t decided against profiting from his Apollo past. He has an arrangement with an auction house in California, where he conducts “closed signings,” from which the public is excluded, with each signature priced at between $165 and $400 a pop, depending upon what’s being signed. It’s hard to know what to make of this man. I haven’t even been able to uncover an address at which to contact him up to now. The few people who might be able to provide one say the same thing: “Oh, no, David never does anything like that.”