Of necessity, fate and the vapour trail of the astronauts’ lives, rather than the chronology of their flights, will be leading me through Apollo. One thing I learned early on is that there is no agency or press office through which to trace them; that even NASA can’t tell you where they are, because most haven’t worked for NASA in three decades. Long retired from public life, they can be hard to find and difficult to contact, but I’m happy for the view of America from their waning slipstream, and symmetries are already emerging from the apparent randomness of my success in locating them.
Edgar Mitchell’s flight, Apollo 14, the fourth to attempt a landing, was like a new beginning for the programme. More people crammed into the Cape to watch it launch on January 31, 1971, than came for Apollo 11, because they knew that any serious problems, after the near-tragic failure of 13, would probably signal the end of an adventure which was already wreathed in doubt sown by severe budgetary cuts. In fact – and every Moonwalker has a story of fate’s decisive hand in their story – Mitchell was originally scheduled to fly 13, but a rogue infection in commander Alan Shepard’s ear caused the three-man crew to slip a place. Disappointed though they were at the time, this now looks like outrageous luck. Come to that, the flight-line presence of ego-rich Mercury 7 jock Shepard was outrageous to begin with: shortly after his Mercury flight, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s syndrome, a malfunction of the inner ear which brought vertigo and dizziness and caused him to be grounded for the next six years. A risky operation made him available once more at the advanced age of forty-seven, but one respected authority on Apollo will spit to me that sending the science- and geology-phobic Shepard to the Moon “was a complete waste of time – we might as well have sent that jerk to Dallas.” Every morning, his secretary hung a sign on the wall to indicate what sort of mood the man they called the “icy commander” was in on that particular day, and this was to the Astronaut Office what the shipping news is to mariners. Alan Bean of Apollo 12 describes him as like “a tiger shark swimming around a tank of fish.” In fact, if Ménière’s syndrome hadn’t intervened, he might well have captained Apollo 1 and so claimed commander Gus Grissom’s place in wherever it is that tiger shark throttle jockeys go when they fall in the line of duty. Remarkably, though, he was the only one to shed tears when he stepped onto the lunar surface, or at least the only one to admit it.
Mitchell was the anti-Shepard. Apollo 14 would be his first and only flight. He describes the Saturn V at launch as “coming alive with a kinetic violence unlike anything any of us had ever experienced.” Once up, space was “just as beautiful and strange as anything conjured by a child’s imagination…. There is a sense of unreality here, with the absence of gravity and the tapestry of blackness broken only by an overwhelming glitter of stars that surrounded our craft.” He echoes others in marvelling at how “the intricate beauty of Earth overwhelmed the senses,” and I find it impossible to read his descriptions of spaceflight without yearning to follow him there, a yearning I haven’t felt since I was a boy looking up at the sky.
The Apollo 14 launch went to plan, but trouble started as soon as they left Earth orbit, when the Command Module Kitty Hawk slipped the spent third stage of the Saturn and turned to pull the LM Antares after it, only to find that the docking mechanism wouldn’t work. A solution was improvised in time to save the mission, but four days later, with the two craft separated over the Moon and ninety minutes to the LM’s descent, Mission Control became aware that the guidance software was intermittently receiving false abort signals from somewhere. If this continued into the powered-descent phase, the computer, believing there to be an emergency, would automatically activate the ascent engine, separating the upper and lower halves of the LM and firing the crew back up into space. If Antares was near the surface, it could crash. Worse, the danger became apparent just as the LM was preparing to pass around to the far side of the Moon, meaning that there would be no radio contact for the next ninety minutes. Back in Houston, there was a thick manual containing procedures for every difficulty that had been imagined. This one hadn’t been.
At Mission Control and MIT in Boston, desperate computer experts supposed that a quick-and-dirty response would be to write the abort switch out of the software, and a lank-haired young programmer named Don Eyles, who looked like a Pink Floyd sound engineer, set about doing just that. When it came time to power up Antares’s descent engine, Shepard and Mitchell held their breaths, but the fix worked; there was no bang and rush and wrenching of gut at the realization that the landing was off. They understood this to mean that, should an abort actually be required as they neared the surface, a lengthy and potentially fatal series of commands would have to be issued manually to the guidance computer. This risk was worth taking.
Unfortunately, no one foresaw that it would also prevent the LM’s landing radar from locking on to the echoes it bounced off the lunar surface. As Edgar Mitchell scanned his instrument panel with increasing despair, caution lights warned that the radar had gone for a walk. He knew that if there was no radar at known mountaintop level, the mission rules called for them to abort the landing. They were halfway there already and sinking fast and if the radar wasn’t working now, there was no very good reason to think that it would be anytime soon. They had thirty seconds. Mitchell found himself muttering, “C’mon, radar – c’-mon!” then trying to calm himself, as other LM pilots did, by saying, “It’s just like a simulation.”
In these moments, Deke Slayton noticed a different tone in his friend Shepard’s voice as it crackled into the control room, and he thought: “Jesus, he doesn’t care. He’s going to land anyway.” Commander Shepard later claimed that he had run this notion past Mitchell, who replied, “Okay, Al. As long as we both know the risks,” adding doubtfully, “Promises to be interesting” (oddly enough, the LM pilot has no recollection of this exchange). Yet the charm of Apollo is that while a babyish room-sized computer ostensibly ran the show, the technology still had a physical presence, leaving open the ancient “just give it a whack” route to deliverance. Thus, when the abort switch was playing up, the engineers’ first instruction was for Mitchell to tap it with a screwdriver, and when Buzz Aldrin accidentally snapped a key used to arm the Apollo 11 ascent engine, so apparently condemning himself and Neil Armstrong to a whimsical death 240,000 miles from home, the day was saved by jamming a pen into the lock (Aldrin still has the pen). And now, after much scratching of heads, the brains at Mission Control suggested that Mitchell “recycle” a circuit breaker, which is to say, pull a knob out and push it back in again. With time rapidly running out, Ed did, there was an interminable pause … and data started appearing. The radar was on. Human beings number five and six landed safely among the hills, valleys and craters of the rugged Fra Mauro region. Legend has Mitchell asking his commander afterwards, “just between you and me,” whether they really would have risked landing without radar, only to be told with a wink, “You’ll never know, Ed. You’ll never know.”
* * *
Following a first, acclimatizing stint on the surface, Mitchell and Shepard climbed back into the LM and tried to get some rest in advance of their arduous main task – the ascent of Cone Crater. As with other crews, any sleep was hard won and shallow when it came; uncomfortable in spacesuits on hammocks, with life-support machinery whirring, pulsing, ticking in the background and the occasional micrometeorite clattering into the ship’s thin skin. At one point during their “night,” an unfamiliar bang emanated from somewhere and they woke with a jolt and a fear that the craft, which had come down with one foot in a small crater and so tilted disconcertingly, was about to topple over. Mitchell had only been half gone anyway, in a private realm of “edgy half-dreams,” because his mind was still outside, revelling in the eerie drama of the landscape he’d stepped into – a stark and sun-soaked land where the lack of atmosphere caused shadows to be sharper and more clearly defined than on Earth, almost as if they were produced by backlighting or had a solid, three-dimensional prese
nce of their own. And the stillness, the silence, was like nothing that could ever be experienced on a living planet such as his own. He loved being there.
The pinpoint landing of Apollo 12 had emboldened mission planners to shoot for highland sites with 13 and 14, in search of broader insight into the Moon’s origin. Prior to the first landing, scientists had divided into two camps on this issue, defending their respective positions with evangelical passion: there were the “cold mooners,” who believed our moon to have formed out of wandering debris which had gathered into a sphere over billions of years and gradually been wooed to the Earth, and the “hot mooners,” who saw evidence of volcanic activity in all her features and believed she had once been geologically “alive.” Apollo 11 had settled this argument, because the rocks Armstrong and Aldrin had collected on the Sea of Tranquillity included a grey slab of volcanic basalt, meaning that the “sea” was in fact a sea of congealed lava. The Moon had been alive. Nonetheless, while there were many similarities with Earthly basalt, there were enough significant differences to pose problems for hot-moon adherents to the hip “fission” theory, who believed that Earth’s companion had been torn from her own infant belly by a massive collision, possibly with another planet. There was still a lot to learn and scientists hoped that rocks from the rim of Cone Crater, which would have been ejected from deep beneath the surface by the immense force of the impact which had created it, would help.
The outer slopes of the crater rose rough, pocked and high before the LM, wearing the scars of eons of assault from space. Ed Mitchell was looking forward to standing at its peak and gazing down into it: it was as wide as four football fields laid end to end and as deep as two and a half, and to reach it he and Shepard would travel far further from their LM haven than anyone had before. To help them carry their tools, they had a small cart, which they would pull, and a photomap for navigation, but from the beginning Mitchell realized that navigation was going to be much harder than expected, because against the oil-slick sky and flaring sun, he saw only a desert swell of dunelike hillocks; a furtive landscape strewn with depressions and craters which revealed themselves only when you were almost on top of them, like a collection of mischievous kids playing hide-and-seek. Again the lack of atmosphere and curvature of the land played tricks, made everything look closer than it was – confusing, disorienting. He was trapped in a dusty hall of mirrors a quarter million miles from home. With difficulty, he and Shepard found their first geologic sampling stop, then their second, and finally began their climb.
The ground on the slopes was solid, but its undulation and the litter of rocks was greater than had been expected on the basis of the first two missions, and every time the cart’s wheels hit one, it reared up in slow motion, threatening to overturn and launch its cargo into the void. In the end the men decided to carry it and quickly grew exhausted from the effort, but trudged on in their restrictive suits anyway, turning only once to savour a view of the crater’s smooth outer slope, now zagged with silvery cart tracks leading all the way back to the LM, which glinted like a toy. By Mitchell’s reading of the map, they were almost at the top, but the scene wasn’t as his training had led him to expect: there were no large boulders skirting the rim – the deepest of the ejecta and the greatest prize for geologists – and moments later the reason for this became clear. What they’d imagined to be the rim was merely another rise. The side of Cone Crater still stretched dauntingly up and out before them. Shepard breathed: “We haven’t reached the rim yet,” while his partner radioed Mission Control with the words “Our positions are all in doubt.” Shepard’s pulse had reached a worrying 150 bpm.
On the ground, discussions were taking place between doctors and scientists as to how important it was to reach the top. Shepard, who weeks earlier had dismissed a geologist’s attempts to provide extra tuition in the difficult business of lunar navigation, had spotted some boulders which looked to him like deep ejecta and he wanted to sample them, then turn back, but Mitchell was distraught at this suggestion.
“Oh, let’s give it a whirl!” he said. “We can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater. We’ve lost everything if we don’t get there.”
No one had ever stood at the edge of such a crater before and Mitchell was desperate to do so. When Houston capcom (capsule communicator) Fred Haise suggested they were near enough, Ed muttered, “Think you’re finks” – until Haise offered a lifeline, announcing that the walk was to be extended by half an hour and that if they wanted to spend the extra time hunting for the rim, they could. The decision was theirs. Deke Slayton suggested they help themselves by ditching the tool cart, but Ed bravely claimed that it wasn’t slowing them down, because he knew they’d need the tools when they arrived.
“It’s just a question of time,” he said. “We’ll get there.”
Dragging the cart, Shepard led the way, but they didn’t seem to be getting any nearer: it was only when the commander gave their position as “the middle of the boulder field on the west rim,” that Mitchell realized he was being taken in the wrong direction. Shepard thought they were west of the crater, but Mitchell felt sure they were to the south. He consulted the map, could now see where they were. Panting heavily, he told Shepard that if they headed north, they’d get there.
So Mitchell pulled. The ground flattened out, which meant the rim had to be close, but they still couldn’t see it. It was as though the Moon was playing games with them and in desperation Ed rescanned the map. There was a big boulder which ought to be in view now, but was nowhere to be seen. He knew they were nearly there, yet the time had just run out. Fred Haise said:
“Okay, Ed and Al.”
Like Mom calling them home for dinner. Their time was up. So they sampled some interesting-looking grey-and-white-streaked rocks and headed for base and the safety of the LM, where the keen golfer Al Shepard pulled the stunt for which his mission is still best remembered, attaching a golf club head to one of the geology tools and sending a couple of secretly stowed balls arcing into the distance – an idea he got from watching Bob Hope mince about the space centre with a club clenched in his fist like a baby rattle. After another fitful nap, the pair of Moonwalkers blasted back into the sky and Edgar Mitchell felt a real, physical yearning, a “strange nostalgia” for the world he’d just left and knew he would never see at close quarters again. Back home, scientists would establish that he and Shepard had drawn within twenty yards of Cone Crater’s edge … it had been right under their noses, but evaded them anyway.
After the return, Mitchell stuck around for another year, then left NASA to form his IONS research institute. He had found the Moon a welcoming place and had no trouble integrating it into the human story, or his own. To him, “the stillness seemed to convey that the landscape itself had been patiently awaiting our arrival for millions of years.” There’s a mystic edge to this observation, yet for the thirty-three hours that he spent on the surface, during which he and Shepard collected ninety-four pounds of rock, he felt constant frustration at being too busy to stop and simply look around, take in the feeling of being there. He also felt a powerful angst at leaving, knowing as he did that he would never return, and, once back, became worried by his irritation with the question “What did it feel like to walk on the Moon?” Unlike most of his colleagues, he decided that the problem was not with the questioners, but with himself and the anguish he felt at being unable to recall the feeling of being there. Eventually, he got two friends to regress him under hypnosis, after which he felt sure that something significant had happened to him on the flight – that the epiphany provided no less than a window on the Universe; a clue as to its structure and our connection to it. He realized that the tightly focussed training regime of the fighter pilot and astronaut is at odds with that required of a modern-day shaman, which was how he was beginning to see himself.
Mitchell originally conceived the Institute of Noetic Sciences as “more a state of mind than a place” and began by running it with his new girlfriend, A
nita Rettig, whom he married in 1974, adopting her two children into the bargain – for his first marriage to Louise Randall became one of many to collapse soon after a Moonwalker’s return to Earth. Mitchell is hard on himself about this, blaming the anxiety and absence enforced by his career, multiplied by his own self-absorption, for a failure to understand his wife’s unhappiness. While his dream had been drifting into view, he confesses, “there were never any guarantees, and for a mother and her children, the lifestyle meant friends and playmates left behind” as the family was dragged from base to base. At any rate, the crises came fast. In the beginning, influential people wanted to meet and be associated with an Apollo astronaut, but the Moondust gradually fell away and the businessman who had agreed to back IONS withdrew, leaving the dream in ruins. Nevertheless, money did arrive in fits and starts: on one occasion, according to Mitchell, a hippy girl in a VW camper van arrived with $25,000, dropped it off and puttered into the sunset without even leaving a name. Soon they were able to initiate research into paranormal phenomena like extrasensory perception (ESP), and the health benefits of acupuncture and meditation, which was still considered pretty “farout” stuff in the 1970s. At the same time, Mitchell was forced to engage in another struggle, fighting a drift toward both mysticism and his own deification within the organization. He even felt compelled to shave off the beard he’d grown at one stage, in order that he might look less biblical.