Of a Fire on the Moon
At any rate, less than an hour later, the crew still not able to sleep, the spacecraft passed over into the sphere of influence of the moon, and all imperceptibly, light as the breath of a bird, an acceleration began. The gravity of the moon pulled upon the ship, and the force of lunar gravity, whatever was that force, drew upon the ship, pulled gently, perhaps as gently as that first almost inaudible ripple which pulls along a shore when the tide shifts and begins to go out. Baleful or benign, palpable or utterly without influence, the moon beckoned with the weight of its matter, the computers on earth changed over to the parameters of the moon, passed over into the divide of lunar sleep and began to live in her domain.
Enough of engineering! Enough of reading dials and setting knobs. Let us rather take a good look at the moon. She is now a presence outside the drawn shade of the capsule’s window, she is … she is not thirty-four thousand miles away and every instant nearer, and her pull upon the craft comes greater. Yes, let us look at the moon.
* * *
*No need to draw on the adventures of Apollo 13, nor the postponements of 14.
CHAPTER 4
The Near Side and the Far Side
On the fourth morning, a half hour after the usual routine of awakening on consumable updates, sleep reports, drift checks, REFSMMATs, fuel cell purges, PTC maneuvers, and radiator-flow checks, there was finally a conversation about their port of call. They had traveled through the night, their speed accelerating as they came nearer to the pull of their destination, and at 71 hours, 31 minutes out, a half hour less than three days from the time of lift-off, on seven-thirty of this fourth morning, they were now no more than 11,000 nautical miles away and traveling at a velocity of 4,141 feet per second.
ARMSTRONG: Houston, you read Apollo 11?
CAPCOM: Roger, 11. We’re reading you loud and clear now …
COLLINS: Roger. What sort of F-stop could you recommend for the solar corona? We’ve got the sun right behind the edge of the moon now.
When there was no answer, the spacecraft spoke again.
ALDRIN: It’s quite an eerie sight. There is a very marked three-dimensional aspect of the corona coming from behind the moon glares.
CAPCOM: Roger.
ALDRIN: And it looks as though—I guess what gives it that three-dimensional effect is the earthshine. I can see Tycho fairly clearly—at least if I’m right-side up—I believe it’s Tycho in moonshine, I mean in earthshine. And of course I can see the sky is lit all the way around the moon …
CAPCOM: Roger. If you’d like to take some pictures, we recommend you using magazine uniform which is loaded with high-speed black and white film. Interior lights off. We’re recommending an F-stop of 2.8 and we’d like to get a sequence of time exposures.
It’s quite an eerie sight. What an absence of technology in the remark! We need not even guess at what a panorama they had. Armstrong was later to report: “Of all the spectacular views … the most impressive to me was on the way toward the moon when we flew through its shadow.” The moon was three times nearer than it had been at the hour of sleep nine hours ago when the shades were drawn. Three times nearer, it was three times larger, and filled their circular window—the sun was behind and so throwing a halo several times the size of the satellite.
They had had glimpses of the moon before, of course, there had been occasions to study it all the way up, but the occasions were imperfect and full of glare. In the flaring lights of sun and black space, every reflection from the spacecraft dazzling in their eyes, as hard on visibility as driving into the sun, there were no stars to see (except with every difficulty we have noted) and the moon was often no more than an area of darkness in the brilliant haze.
But now the sun was back of the moon and the halo, like a nineteenth-century painting of heaven, was three-dimensional to their eyes, a borealis of golden light with shafts and vales and mansions of light and gardens of light back of the moon. And in the center of the celestial corona was the land of their visit, visible at last, the moon now as clear to the eye as earth on the night of the fullest moon, no, far more bright than that, brighter far, for the moon was now in earthshine. The light of the earth reflected on the blue-gray face of moon highlands and deserts and craters, the earth reflected back a light eighty times more intense than the brightest light of the full moon. It was like the light at early evening.…
ARMSTRONG: Houston, it’s been a real change for us. Now we are able to see stars again and recognize constellations for the first time on the trip. The sky is full of stars, just like the nights out on earth …
Yes, there was the moon before them, as visible finally as lands of the horizon in the endless twilight nights of a northern summer, the satellite of the earth, a body mysterious beyond measure, unique in the solar system, a moon whose properties and dimensions resisted all categories of classification between planet and satellite, that moon whose origins remained a mystery, whose lunar features were shaped—no one could prove quite how they had been shaped—the moon lay revealed beneath them in its multiplicity of design. Whether dead record of the forces at work in the heavens, or something else not altogether so dead, there beneath them turned some darkened world of blue and silver-gray with color of a subtlety in its corners, and craters luminous to the eye. It was an eerie sight, eerie as a presence, eerie as a strange and desert shore emerged across a dream of sky and glassed-up surface of waters. How to row? How to breathe? The blue and desert shore approached across the impalpable space, cathedrals of light bent around the rim of its edge.
What a land was now there for study! If dead, the death was with dimension. It was a heavenly body which gave every evidence of having perished in some anguish of the cosmos, some agony of apocalypse—a face so cruelly pitted with an acne would have showed a man whose skin had died to keep his heart alive. What a burble of lavas and crusts, of boils on the pop and buds in frozen blight; what a scale of extinguishments; what a mystery of lines and rays and rills which ran from the coil of one burned-out crater to another; the moon was like a crazy old-fashioned computering machine with a tangle of wires all burned, a mute battleground of blows and hits and concussions and impacts from every flying or voyaging body or particle or radiation of the solar system and beyond. The moon spoke of holes and torture pots and scars and weals and welds of molten magma.
Punched-out, eviscerated, quartered, twisted, shucked, a land of deserts shaped in circles fifty and eighty miles across, a land of mountain rings higher some than the Himalayas, a land of empty windings and endless craters, craters within craters which resided within other craters which lived on the mountainous rim of very large craters, craters the size of an inch and craters to the depth of a mile, craters so vast Grand Canyon could have resided as a crater within the crater: There is a crater known as Newton and it is eighty-five miles wide and almost thirty thousand feet deep—the rim lifts up thirteen thousand feet above all surrounding mountains, and there are chains of mountains so high and vast they are called the Alps and the Apennines or the Caucasus and the Carpathians. There were also clefts, flattened rounds, ghost craters on the plain whose existence was distinguished only by a ring of lighter colorings as if the moon, every other death already available to her, was also a photographic plate of explosions, impacts and holocausts from other places. Scoops out of the lunar soil were to be seen, and pocks and cracks and scums of wrinklings on the plains, domes and bowls and hollow cones, blackheads and whiteheads, walled terraces and cataracts of random rock, hundred-mile spews of boulder, eggcups, table mountains and rims, mudholes, clamholes, spouts, gashes, splinterings of formation faults and extrusions, chains of craters, long mysterious slashes, long as endless roads from one vast crater to another, dark craters and bright craters, craters bright as phosphorescence in a moonlit sea, and long mysterious inexplicable networks of rays—there was no better word nor way to comprehend why lines flew out across the surface, thousands of lines from certain craters, lines straight, and lines which wobbled, lines which stoppe
d short and lines which seemed to skim from peak to peak like a pencil drawn across the grain of a rough plank, lines which continued as a hundred separate little flutterings, and thick lines, thick as brush strokes scumbled across the ridges of an old oil canvas, then lines which wove in and out of valleys—these lines, these rays, hundreds of miles long, even thousands of miles long, were without vertical dimension, they were not ridges or grooves, it was merely that they possessed some special property on the moon soil—they reflected light in a different way, as if they were a different kind of moon dirt and dust, an overlay or powder of some species of mind or order which had visited the moon after the early mind of the moon was gone, some species of hieroglyphic to record the history of relation between the moon and the earth, yes, studying the moon was enough to encourage curious thought, for the moon was a phenomenon, the moon was a voice which did not speak, a history whose record all revealed could still reveal no answers: Every property of the moon proved to confuse a previous assumption about its property. Yes, the moon was a centrifuge of the dream, accelerating every new idea to incandescent states. One takes a breath when one looks at the moon.
II
It was large for a moon; relatively, it was the largest moon of any planet—its mass was one-hundredth of the earth. Ganymede, the major moon of Jupiter, had a mass only one-twelve-thousandth of its planet, and Titan, the greatest of Saturn’s satellites, weighed in at the ratio of 1 to 4,700. Even Triton, heaviest of all moons, was only one-two-hundred-and-ninetieth of the mass of Neptune. For further comparison our moon had a diameter larger than a quarter of the earth’s whereas other moons in the solar system varied from one-ninth to one-thirtieth. So it was easy to think of moon and earth as a double planet. Indeed, there was no clear evidence the moon had been torn from the womb of the earth—it could as easily have begun as a separate body and wandered through space until that apocalyptic hour when it was captured.
The astronauts had lived with the moon: for years in increasing tempo they had studied lunar atlases, worked through geology, read the theories of the vulcanists and the impact men—in their privacy and their sleep they brooded upon it, we may assume, more perhaps than they knew, for the meanings of the moon were arrayed in all the caverns of sleep—was the moon a dead body or the dwarfed equal of earth? The nearer one came to a full contemplation of such mysteries, the greater was the temptation to think not at all. Perhaps in consequence, the astronauts were back immediately into talk of high-gain antennas and secondary loop checks, pericynthion burns and the morning news. Pravda had called Armstrong the “Czar of the Ship.” Capcom had added, “I think maybe they got the wrong mission,” and there would be jokes about this later in the day—Collins would remark that the Czar was brushing his teeth.
No, they would not dwell overlong on descriptions of the moon. It lived outside the hatch window, it filled almost all the view, its roughed-up hide paraded below—that skin of craters set upon craters which would inspire every simile from the pop-holes in pancakes cooking to barnacles upon a rock. One could say it looked like molten metal or blistered paint, one could speak of the erosions of bacteria culture in a Petri dish, or leukemia cells in an electron micrograph—one could also be looking at the heavens on a hazy night for the rays from the crater Tycho and the crater Copernicus spread out in such profusion that the moon also looked like a photograph taken across space of the streams of the Milky Way, even its dark maria—those dark seas of moon plain—Imbrium, and Tranquillitatis, Nectaris, Fecunditatus, Nubium, Humorum, Serenitatis, especially the vast dark plain of the Oceanus Procellarum looked like the dark and empty spaces of the sky where one saw no stars. And the multitude of craters were like a multitude of dots and rings of light, were like the overlapping luminescence of stars, as if the moon, properly read, could betray as much of the real character of the heavens as the lines on a man’s hand could enrich an eye which understood a world where histories might be written in the hieroglyphics of some universal form neatly concealed in the crack of the palm.
The moon traveled around the earth and both traveled around the sun; the moon moved therefore in a path, which if drawn, would have been not unreminiscent of the outline of an old gear with rounded teeth. The moon had a period of twenty-seven days seven hours forty-three minutes, and eleven-plus seconds—one could be tempted to predict that the interval of normal period of all the women in the world if taken for average would come to the same eleven-plus seconds, forty-three minutes, seven hours and twenty-seven days—there was a hieroglyphic from the deep!
There were others hidden no doubt on the far side of the moon. As she turned about the earth, the moon kept herself like a subject before the king—her face was always presented, her back always hidden—so from earth one saw only her face. The far side had remained a mystery until the first unmanned Soviet spaceships passed around the satellite and sent back photographs by television. Since then Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 had taken scores of pictures. Now, the far side of the moon was no longer a complete mystery. But it was different from the face seen on earth, it was powerfully different, and the astronauts would soon see the far side—they were indeed approaching toward rendezvous with the leading edge of the moon. Before too long, their trajectory, caught by the accelerating pull of the moon’s gravity, would begin to bend about the moon—at the appropriate moment they would be drawn into orbit around the back, they would see the far side, they would be the seventh, eighth and ninth men ever to see the far side of the moon, and then flying motors first, they would fire their main engine to brake their speed. When they came around the moon again they would not go whipping back to earth—rather they would be in lunar orbit, there to circle the moon ten times and more while preparing for the descent. So they would be in orbit about a moon which was in orbit about an earth, and if moon and earth were both in orbit about the sun, well the moon would soon have its satellite as well, a tiny satellite with three men.
Different, however, were the orbits. If the moon took twenty-seven days and some hours to go around the earth, that period was its lunar year just as it took the earth a year to go around the sun. Yet this lunar year of twenty-seven days plus seven hours was also the moon’s lunar day. Since the moon kept its face always to the earth, then as it went around the earth, the sun would shine on our visible side of the moon when the earth was between the sun and the moon, but then the sun would shine on the far side of the moon when the moon was between the earth and the sun. So daylight on any area of the moon lasted for fourteen days, a long fourteen days of sun beating on the desert and the craters and the plains of the dead seas, shining on the pinnacles and turrets of the mountains, and the temperature went up as the fourteen days went by, those fourteen earth days which were but one day of sunlight to the cloudless moon. Each terrestrial day here on earth was then by lunar measure of time no more than the rough equivalent of an hour, and the heat increased each lunar hour, each part of the fourteen continuous days of sunlight. At any given point on the moon, the temperature went up to as high as 243 degrees Fahrenheit when the sun was at zenith. Then the moon, always wheeling with her face to the earth, would pass that face out of the sun and into the dark of earthshine and the long fourteen-day night of the lunar night would begin and the temperature would drop. Down to 279 degrees Fahrenheit below zero it would drop in the depth of the long night, cold as the liquid oxygen in the tanks of Apollo-Saturn before lift-off, and the cold of that one night would last for the equivalent of two weeks of days and nights on earth. And there was no air and no wind.
Perhaps the moon had been once in rotation, and had had a day and a night not unlike the earth. But there were signs to indicate that the moon on approaching the gravitational grasp of the earth had had its cooling skin seized and twisted by the ferocious tides of the earth’s pull. Lines of mountain had been pulled up and the moon’s rotation had slowed. The moon staggered away into space, went out nearer to Mars, then caromed back and was captured again. One history of the moon conceived of it e
ntering relations with the earth three times in much such a way before its final capture; what spirit of earth and lunar forces must have been released, exchanged, and conceivably not lost forever? It was a theory among others, but it was not without relation to the difference between the near side of the moon and the far, and it offered an explanation for the moon’s craters, since the molten lavas and boiling waters of the young moon’s interior would have been profoundly disturbed in such a courtship of the spheres, and volcanic eruptions would have been the predominant order of events. That was one of the major theories, but in fact there were two fundamental and antagonistic hypotheses to account for the terrain of the moon: each was in difficulties before the critics of the other. There were men who believed the craters of the moon had come in their entirety, or almost entirely, from the impact of meteors in those remote ages when meteors abounded as planets formed. Such theorists were termed lunar impact men, and their thesis had to live with objections so thoroughgoing as the fact that craters sometimes presented themselves in a clean row like strings of artillery shells; worse! impact men were obliged to explain how craters could be spaced like pearls around the rim of a larger crater: how indeed could the meteors have landed in such order? But the largest of the objections was to be found in the size of the dead seas. The Oceanus Procellarum was better than a thousand miles across—a meteor comparable in size to a moon for our moon might have had to collide for such a scar to be left.