The implication for me was that if I wanted to sit down and speak with Neil Armstrong, the best bet would be to persuade him of my interest in the X-15’s landing gear. I’d done this kind of thing many times before. It’s understood in the modern media and the modern world that everyone has something to sell: you talk to them about whatever that is, then guide or drag them on to the things you really want to know. Except that Armstrong isn’t trying to sell anything. Even in Reno, I’d felt this – that his eyes are like windows on a lost age. What’s more, by a curious coincidence I stopped off on the way back from Portugal to see that other reticent but ubiquitous Neil, Neil Young, showcasing a new album at the Apollo Theatre (of all places) in London. Young’s late work has tended toward whimsy, but Greendale turned out to be an angry collection of songs about intrusion in the modern world, and a particular line about the right to “freedom of silence” had lodged in my mind. Doubly disquieting was my knowledge that the Moon has been a potent symbol for Young throughout a solo career which began the year of the first landing, figuring in no fewer than twenty-six of his songs. I spent a long time thinking about what to do.
The truth is that this coincided with some strange feelings I’d begun to have about Apollo anyway. From the start I’d been aware of a tension between the sepia attachments of my childhood and the curiosity I felt to see beyond them, to discover what would be left of the freaky adventure if I removed bright sun and thyme-scented hills and Credence on the radio from the picture, and let reason wash through it. The issue was simple: Without its cloak of childish wonder, was Apollo worth the costs? Was it good? Knowing what I know now, could I have voted for it? I let the question in and immediately knew I was in trouble.
If I close my eyes and think of the lunar programme, the first image I see is of the Saturn V rocket towering over the launchpad at night, illuminated by a battery of spotlights whose beams skitter and spear into the sky at wild angles, diamondlike and imperious. Yet, over time, the image has evolved in my mind and acquired new meaning, until each beam has seemed to represent another of Apollo’s contradictions – the first and most fundamental of which being that this cornerstone of the war against tyrannical Soviet communism was designed and built by a Nazi. Wondering whether I had too blunt a view of this, I e-mailed Dennis Piszkiewicz, whose biography of Wernher von Braun (The Man Who Sold the Moon) provides as detailed an account of his life as any has so far. I wanted to know how he’d felt about von Braun after spending so much time with him, whether he’d grown to empathize with the maverick rocket scientist by the end?
In reply, Piszkiewicz spoke of watching the German on the Disneyland TV series and being inspired and impressed by this prophet of modernity. He eventually learned about the V-2 and von Braun’s wartime past, but no one seemed worried about this, so he didn’t worry about it either. Then he addressed my question head-on.
“What do I think about von Braun now, after I have done all the research and written about him? My basic understanding of him did not change: he was a brilliant engineer, a visionary, and an American national hero. But I saw, in addition to all that, that he was an amoral opportunist and arguably a criminal because of his involvement in the use of slave labour. I might be inclined to ignore his flaws and failures, but it is hard to forgive a man who has participated in ruining and ending the lives of so many people. He became in my mind a far more interesting person, but he was far less admirable.
“My disappointment extends to those people and agencies of the Unitied States government who hid records of von Braun’s willing and extensive involvement in the crimes of the Nazis. His talent and creativity in no way justified absolving him of guilt.”
His absolution was, however, entirely consistent with American foreign policy throughout the Cold War, which often employed repressive regimes and despots in the interest of countering what was seen as a greater threat. Von Braun’s rise after World War II is not so surprising.
But that’s not all. Jack Schmitt set off the next train of thought when he reminded me that “people like Neil Armstrong and the test pilots who flew the X-15 rocket plane were, in a sense, already astronauts.” And they were! Alan Shepard was not the first American in space, not by a long chalk – that was all PR spin. The domain of space was deemed to begin at fifty miles up back then, and Edwards pilots had been taking the X-15 up there long before Shepard squeezed into his Redstone rocket – a feat for which the Air Force bestowed astronaut’s wings. What’s more, the X-15 was reusable and required no expensive recovery operation. Even Deke Slayton admitted years later that developing space planes had struck him as “the most logical next step.” They might also have retained the support of women electors for longer, because aviation had many female pioneers. But in 1958, encouraged by space advocates like Lyndon Johnson and Wernher von Braun, a war mentality held sway, even as Boeing worked on the X-15’s successor, the X-20 orbital space plane, which would have 2.5 milion pounds of thrust as against the Mercury-Atlas’s 367,000. By 1962, half a dozen pilots had already been chosen to fly into orbit, and the pilots couldn’t believe it when this steady approach was sacrificed to the idea of farting a man into the sky, then scooping him up from the sea as he bobbed about like a helpless infant in his turkey-foil romper suit. Here’s the rub, though. The Titan rockets necessary to the X-20 were still three or four years away, while the Mercury Red-stones and Atlases were ready to go – and Kennedy, driven by his own sense of drama and the fear of Soviet progress further denting his image, had set a gratuitous end-of-Sixties deadline for getting to the Moon. There was no time to wait. Later, the space shuttle also elbowed out the X-planes for political reasons. Bill Anders, who was executive secretary for the Aeronautics and Space Council at the time, told me:
“I was involved in the decisions that were made around the shuttle, which was basically to keep the aerospace workers in California employed. Nixon didn’t give a rat’s ass about the space programme, he gave a damn about getting reelected, and the shuttle got more votes in California than a smaller ‘X’ version would have. I was right there, and that was asked: ‘Which one’ll employ the most people – the big one? Then let’s do the big one.’ It couldn’t have been more cynical.”
And Apollo’s ambiguity doesn’t even end there. Once the quick-and-dirty approach had been chosen, a method for getting to the Moon had to be devised. Von Braun’s first notion was to build a gargantuan “Nova” rocket, then point it in the right direction and go. When studies suggested that such a “direct ascent” vehicle would need to be the size of the Empire State Building, however, several alternatives were considered, the most bizarre of which involved sending some poor sap to the Moon and then leaving him there for a couple of years while engineers worked out a way to get him back. Alarming though this sounded, it would be cheap and fast and possibly the only way to beat the Soviets, and was still being advocated by Bell Aerospace engineers as late as June 1962. It also provided a blueprint for M*A*S*H director Robert Altman’s first film, Countdown, which starred Robert Duvall and James Caan and was seditious in its way, but never got close to the surreality of what we’d be watching on TV in real time a couple of years later, because sci-fi never did catch up with Apollo.
A more palatable option was to establish a base in Earth orbit, from which to assemble and launch smaller, simpler ships at Luna. This elegantly incremental scheme became known as Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) and eventually won von Braun’s support, meaning that an outsider engineer named John Houbolt who floated the idea of “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous” (LOR) was ridiculed and dismissed as a crank in the first instance. LOR was complex and would rely on a range of unproven techniques. It meant sending two ships into Earth orbit, piggybacking them to the Moon, separating in lunar orbit so that one might drop to the surface, blast back up, rendezvous and dock with the first craft, then come back together. An awkward and intimidating scheme, it’s easy to see why von Braun took so long to drop his initial hostility toward LOR. When his conversion came,
it wasn’t about elegance or practicality, though, it was about time. One of his lieutenants, Jesco von Puttkamer, notes:
“All we had was eight years, and LOR stood a better chance, in our estimate, of being achievable in that time. But EOR would probably have given us more continuity to the future.”
Earth Orbit Rendezvous would have taken longer, but would have bequeathed a waypoint in space, prepaid for and pointed out toward the stars. It could have been scaled up or down and adapted to a range of purposes with relatively little bother. It would have involved developing technologies and skills that would endure, so that when the political imperatives that drove Kennedy had gone and the lunar landings ceased, an orbital base camp would have been left behind. The Sixties-end deadline had necessitated a built-in obsolescence that was the quintessence of its time. It had also forced up the cost: during peak periods, the overtime bill for the programme came close to matching the regular payroll. Kennedy had turned to his advisers and wailed, “What can we beat the Russians at?” and if someone had cried, “Backgammon!” at that point, Apollo would never have happened. Equally, if Richard Nixon had found the paltry extra 118,001 votes he needed to win the November 1960 election, Apollo would never have happened in the way that it did. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that as early as late 1963, JFK was trying to wriggle out of the commitment he’d made, suggesting a joint programme with the Soviet Union that would bring down costs and allow a landing to be commuted to the Seventies. Part of his purpose in Dallas on the day of his murder was to bolster waning support for Apollo in the face of renewed congressional opposition.
Four days prior to Kennedy’s 1961 exhortation to Congress and ignorant of its content, NASA’s number two, Hugh Dryden, had been asked by a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee what practical use he saw for going to the Moon. “It certainly does not make any sense to me,” he replied. Through the Iron Curtain, the masterful chief designer Sergei Korolev had also envisaged a steady, incremental approach to space exploration that could have surfed the political tides, but Khrushchev, too, insisted on pushing his programme to destruction. So if the American lunar programme played a walk-on part in its president creator’s death, there’s no way to avoid the conclusion that it also did something far more ironic and contradictory: Jack’s Apollo programme killed “manned” Deep-Space exploration, stone dead, for at least the next four decades and probably many more.
How’s that for contradiction, for equivocation? And in this, Apollo also seems to me to be the most perfect imaginable expression, embodiment, symbol, of the twentieth century’s central contradiction: namely, that the more we put our faith in reason and its declared representatives, the more irrational our world became. Sane political leaders contemplated the mutual destruction of their societies; greater wealth led to greater dissatisfaction; faster communications which should have made life easier made it harder, because suddenly we expected everything to happen instantly; more efficient food production led to poorer health … the list could go on and on and on. Seen in this light, Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It’s a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies – the tragedies of Macbeth, Othello, Faust, Kennedy, Nixon, Aldrin … once again, you could list them forever: wanting something so badly that you end up destroying it. Hubris. Mary Shelley would have swooned. A century and a half after she wrote Frankenstein, which many consider the progenitor of modern science fiction, here was her monster made real.
And yet …
Through the years, the arguments used to defend Apollo changed – and have continued to change – with the political and economic tide. To begin with, there was national security, but Kennedy’s advisers knew perfectly well that putting people in space would do little to make America safer and going to the Moon would do nothing. As one of them explained, “The Earth would appear to be, after all, the best weapons carrier.” Afterwards, the justification switched to science, but the scientists, including such distinguished figures as Dr. James Van Allen, for whom the Van Allen radiation belt is named, had been saying all along that robots could do the job just as well in the short term, at a fraction of the risk and cost. Then there was the contention that Apollo stimulated the economy; that it begat new products, technological advances and medical techniques, but if that was the idea, $24 billion (equivalent to $100 billion today, remember) could certainly have been more efficiently spent. Imagine what a group of NASA scientists might have done for kidney dialysis or alternative energy production or clean transport systems if set the task. Even the notion that it was part of America’s national destiny as frontierspeople doesn’t hold, because it stopped. As Jim Oberg told me: “A lot of the guys at NASA thought that the goal was space exploration and colonization of the Universe, and they all had their hearts broken.”
After leaving office, Lyndon Johnson continued to paint the programme as a key pillar of his Great Society dream, as “the beginning of the revolution of the Sixties.” In his memoirs, he writes:
“Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched … If we could send a man to the Moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.”
Which is sweet, but no more convincing than the claim (false) that it was all worthwhile because we got Teflon – because, at the risk of sounding glib, it seems to me that the best way to demonstrate that we can put a poor kid through school is to put poor kids through school. How many teachers will $100 billion pay for? For the longest time, it seemed obvious to me that I was staring into the remains of the most immaculate folly ever conceived by a species for whom folly is a specialist subject.
But a change came one cool spring day as I stood contemplating a one-shot skinny white-chocolate cinnamon latte with extra foam in Starbucks, thinking that only Americans could turn coffee-making into a proxy branch of rocket science. I’d been trying to make sense of this enterprise which seemed to make no sense, which reason told me to dismiss, but which I couldn’t. The only thing clear to me was that Apollo was none of the things it was sold to the world as being.
Then I remembered something else that John Kennedy had said in his May 1961 appeal to Congress. His people had become convinced that the Cold War was going to be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did. In this respect, Apollo was a performance, pure and simple. JFK wanted something to capture the global imagination, and to excite his own people, and he found it. But he didn’t create the idea, the fantasy was already there, independent of the Cold War, and there’s no question that Kennedy knew he was tapping into something far deeper and more primal than an urge to humiliate the Soviet Union. All those space novels and sci-fi movies and articles in Colliers and Space Cadet magazines sat at the top of a pyramid of human dreaming that stretched back thousands of years. Apollo may have been driven by the Cold War, but it was an emanation of American popular culture at that moment in time. It occurred to me that, in the end, it was theatre – the most mind-blowing theatre ever created. In fact, at around $120 per American over the nine years of the Sixties in which it ran, or $13 a year, it was astonishingly cheap theatre. To be sure, the total bill for Apollo added up to $24 billion, but the U.S. was spending $30 billion on the Vietnam War annually at its peak. According to figures quoted by CNN, that conflict cost over $809 billion in today’s money. Next to ’Nam, $24 billion doesn’t look like much. By 1980, Americans spent more playing Space Invaders than they did on the space programme – a perfectly reasonable choice under the prevailing circumstances.
At this point, consideration of Apollo’s practical worth becomes redundant, because it was never about that. And here we come to the final contradiction: that this product of scientists and engineers and their lean rationality should, like a great work of art, have the special ability t
o transcend the logic at its core, and to take us with it. As the astronaut Joseph Allen said, “With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the Moon, no one suggested that we should do it to look at the Earth. But that may in fact be the most important reason.” The one that nobody foresaw: a unique opportunity to look at ourselves. How madly, perfectly human. For all Apollo’s technological wonder, it was as primitive as song. It meant nothing. And everything. I left Starbucks and went outside and stared at the unusually big, bright, opalescent Moon which hung above shoppers as they scurried between sales. I realized that I hadn’t looked at it, really looked at it, for a while. I tried to imagine floating through space towards it. Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes. The only thing I can’t see in all this is a rationale for going back. Unless we could find a way to take everyone.
Reviewing all these thoughts, I knew what to do about Armstrong, this intensely private man who’s worn his special place in our mythology of ourselves with such dignity, who’s had the decency not to crowd our imaginations or diminish our fantasies by fixing them with words he struggles to find. Who’s refused to auction himself to our idolatry or give in and tell us what we want to hear; who sees the worst of us, but still allows us to look at him and see the best of ourselves. So I told him what I wanted to know: the fourteen minutes he spent on the lunar surface on his own, utterly alone, staring out at a meticulously shifting Universe, full of unimaginable forces and giant, inscrutable, unstoppable bodies, but no mind like his … was the feeling like any he’d had before? Like sex? Like swimming in the sea at night? Going out without your parents on Halloween for the first time? Like he’d imagined all along, with no surprises? Did he feel alone, like a representative of the Earth, or closer to the stars? Did he leave us just for a moment and feel like Dave Bowman in 2001, or want to tell Houston to fuck off and shut up and let him just be there for a while? Did he feel adrift, or cosseted, or get the urge to do anything mad, like when you’re standing waiting for the subway and get a fleeting impulse to jump and test the truth of mortality? Did he feel nothing at all?