The masters of the meteoric hypothesis had other difficult answers to give. Most craters were not a simple bowl, rather a bowl with an umbilical at its core—a separate mountain peak at the center of the bowl surrounded by a ring of plain. Even the smaller craters were rarely without a pit, a core, a vertical elevation at the center, or a root like the pintle on an old bottle. Such centers suggested a now extinct fountain of lava. So theories of impact were not comfortable, no more than the scientists who believed the craters of the moon were the product of volcanoes could explain with ease why even the largest volcanoes on earth were small in comparison to moon craters, and why the floor of a terrestrial volcano was elevated clear above the surrounding countryside, was often indeed a steep cone with no more than a modest vent for crater, and so most unlike the terrain of the moon. On the other hand the largest meteoric crater seen on earth was only two miles across. Models drawn from the earth simply did not suffice for either vulcanists or impact men. How to explain that the moon was either the subject of vast meteoric bombardments from ages past which the earth had somehow escaped, bombardments with an occasional perfection of aim equal to shooting pearls onto the circular points of a crown; or equally how to convince others that the moon was the product of its wanderings between the earth and Mars, child of regimens of boiling and cooling, geysers of water, mud and lava, a world of subterranean seas and trapped gases, a cauldron of upheavals and subsidences in some romantic, even catalytic relation to the earth, a theory therefore in furious conflict with the ideas of all meteoric theories, for the impact men were attached to the idea that the moon was ancient and unchanging, and the major bombardments had occurred eons ago, billions of years ago. It was the best explanation why such bombardments were not to be found on earth—the earth, equally pitted then, had had its face subsequently altered by geological upheavals went the hypothesis. It allowed one to induce that the impact men were classicists, positivists, traditionalists, upholders of the public common sense (since the moon by all common sense looked as if it had been bombarded). The vulcanists were romantics, Dionysiacs, existentialists, animists—at their most adventurous they would even search for some faint hope of life on the moon.
Neither could secure an explanation for the contradictory facts, and before the phenomenon of the rays, no meteorite man nor apostle of the geyser-volcano could offer an embattled theory. The rays had no explanation which could explain all the facts attached to them. The rays emanated from the craters, but before one could even speak of a stream of white powder flying out, it was necessary to note that the rays were sometimes tangential to the ring of the crater and sometimes radiated out from the center. Sometimes a crater had but a single ray which led to a particular place, often to another crater. Yet if the rays were some physical embodiment of an idea or a communication, they were yet singularly sensitive to obstacles—even a low ridge across their path could stop them short—yet in other places they would extend across a thousand-mile sea. They were even described like “snow thinly drifted by a strong wind across a black frozen lake.”
Imperfect, unhappy, unsatisfactory theories abounded within the two schools of theory. And other theories abounded, even the theory that the moon was a dead civilization, its endless rings the record of a last atomic war—it was said the earth would look like the moon after a nuclear holocaust had destroyed us.
Yet it was with the partial hope that their projected experiments on the moon and the rocks they brought back would begin to apply answers to these questions that the astronauts doubtless now reviewed for the thousandth time the order of their assignments on the moon ground and the probabilities of vulcanism, formation by meteor, or some other theory altogether. Revolving below them, coming each minute nearer was the dead beast of the moon ground, the mute mysteries locked in the formation of form itself. Would the moon yet answer the fundamental question of form—that all forms which looked alike were in some yet undiscovered logic thereby alike?—which is to say that if the skin of the moon was reminiscent of boiled milk and cancer cells and acne, so then—would a theory yet emerge which could revolve at some ease through the metaphors of the moon and find the link of metaphysical reason between cancer, acne, blisterings of paint and the wrinkled ridges of a boiled and skin-thick milk?
III
One can dismiss the enigma of form too quickly. Let us propose an artist who draws a face, and assume that the man in the portrait is bald, and the artist on a whim draws a wen on the back of the head, then the scar of an old boil. Finally he puts in a mean wrinkle high on the neck. Abruptly, a second face emerges on the back of the bald head. There with the wen and the old boil for eyes, the wrinkle has become a mouth. But the artist has lived with form for so long that he is far from surprised the back of this bald dome has revealed a face: he is already concerned with what that embryonic expression has to say—he would indeed go so far as to assume that the wen, the boil and the wrinkle are exactly where they are because the flesh has desired to become a draftsman, because the back of the head secretly wished to draw a particular face on its own skin, as though to say, “If I must suffer a boil, let it at least do some work for me, let it establish that I have not one head, but two; one biological, and one somewhat less tangible—perhaps a second spirit to be discerned only on the back of my skull.”
Painters are not invariably articulate. They can live quietly with such thoughts rather than look to express them. An argument ready to claim that the vulcanism of the skin is designed not only to draw attention to the imbalance of boils, eczema, and acne, but to the secret urges of the man to display a few items he cannot otherwise display—a hint of buried horrors if he is timid, or of humor if he is sufficiently pompous—is an argument beyond the average artist’s desire. For the discussion would have to confront the apostle of common sense, and the apostle, an impact man, would be quick to point out that the boil is where it is because of where the dirt was in the collar. Not every painter would have the wit to answer, “Dirty collars are many, boils are few,” or be ready to suggest that the site of the boil, while important, is not necessarily as significant as the visual statement offered by the form of the boil as the crater dried to a scar. There might lie the right to assume the flesh drew its own design.
The painter is probably suggesting that form is a language which seeks to express itself by every means. If man has his voice, nature has wind, it has thunder, the sound of running waters, it has its variety of cataracts and Krakatoas. If we agree that the urge to create a language is basic to man, so basic that one can begin to define his nature by saying he is an animal with the irrepressible desire to develop formal speech, why must it be altogether uncomfortable to assume other categories of nature would not attempt to shape forms that could delineate their inner meaning, why indeed is it not as natural for nature to shape itself as for man to speak? On that assumption could commence a metaphysics of form. If common sense would ask immediately why nature would not also wish to conceal itself, in fact elaborate a labyrinth of false and misleading form to protect itself, it can be agreed that not all form reveals, form may also be designed to betray meaning. Still there is an economy to nature one might as well assume, for that is easier to comprehend than lack of economy—a prevalence of wasteful and misleading communication might prove a luxury the cosmos could not necessarily afford.
So Aquarius, happy with this supervulcanism, would have the moon not only responsible for writing much of the record of its own history, but in fact could go so far as to search for evidence that the face of the moon might be a self-portrait which looked to delineate the meanings of its experience in that long marriage with the earth and its long uninsulated exposure to the solar system and the stars.
Well, Aquarius was in no Command Module preparing to go around the limb of the moon, burn his rocket motors and brake into orbit, no, Aquarius was installed in the act of writing about the efforts of other men, his attempts to decipher some first clues to the unvoiced messages of the moon obtained fro
m no more than photographs in color of craters, chains of craters, fields of craters and the moon soil given him through the courtesy of the Manned Spacecraft Center, photographic division of public relations, NASA, yet in the months he worked, the pictures were pored over by him as if he were a medieval alchemist rubbing at a magic stone whose unfelt vibration might yet speak a sweet song to his nerve. But he had all the failures of the occult in all the ages for model, and so he knew as he wrote that if the riddle of the ages was at the root of every form—a pure medievalist is Aquarius!—so, too, was every temptation of insanity. The profligacies of thought—total irresponsibility of connection, and complete loss of the ability to convince—sat in every widening ripple of contemplation over form. If he would travel into the inner space of his brain to uncover the mysteries of the moon, he could dignify that expedition only if he obeyed the irritatingly modest data of the given, the words, the humor, and resolute lack of poetic immortality in the astronauts’ communications with the earth, say, even more than that, would have to certify his respect for the particular endeavor of Apollo 11 by returning to the room where the Capcom speaks.
IV
If we would talk of mysteries, forms, projects, riddles and all of their roots, it is as well to recognize that the root of the Command Module as she approaches the moon is a room on the southeastern plains of Houston in a building called the Mission Control Center of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and this room, the Missions Operations Control Room, MOCR, a room perhaps thirty feet deep and sixty feet wide, is divided into a floor of desks and consoles and television monitors with a gallery of raised seats for dignitaries to observe at one end, and a set of projection screens and maps at the other, an air-conditioned windowless room lit by fluorescent light, with nothing but illumined graphs, quotations of number, and the intent locustlike feeding of flickering electronic dots on empty screens, the very gems of static, to come back to the visitor. Men in the uniform of NASA, white sleeveless shirts, dark ties, dark pants, sit before the consoles and confer, and on the illumined wall maps, a little figure of green light shaped like the silhouette of the Lem with the Command and Service Module attached, that flying-bug-with-a-bullet-up-its-bung goes crawling across the screen. The map up for display is the equator of the moon. In sixty minutes the bug will travel some ten feet across a lunar map. It is the most interesting sight in that intent space.
The spacecraft now is almost a quarter of a million miles away, but the MOCR is its neighbor. Closer than that, Apollo 11 and Mission Control in MOCR are as close as dialogues between conscious and unconscious mind. Here, like every other broad expanse of brain, ready to work on each problem the conscious mind can provide, are the collected resources, habits and themes for the flight. Outside the MOCR are Staff Support rooms, and on the first floor is the Data Processing Area—a large and open room which could be a diorama of a housing development of the future, its ceiling a mammoth artificial sky of square panels of fluorescent light, its boxlike machines equal to windowless buildings. It is the Real-Time Computer Complex, containing five IBM 360/75 computers plus facilities for flight dynamic analysis, telemetry, processing, acquisition predictions, flight controller display generation with call-up capability, etc., etc., a particularly interlocked nest of jargon to describe the total management of the mathematical and visual displays of the flight on the floor above.
There, back in the MOCR, is the Capcom, his formal title the Spacecraft Communicator, and he sits before a console in the second of four rows of desks and consoles which seat representatives in the Mission Control Team—the officers, directors, and engineers of each relevant department and function of the flight. Just behind the Capcom in the third row is the Flight Director, situated as near to the center of these sixteen responsibilities as the four rows permit—the critical decisions of the flight are to be made by the Flight Director. Almost within reach of his arms are the desks of the Mission Director, the Director of Flight Operations, the Assistant Flight Director, the Capcom, the Vehicle Systems Engineers, and the Experiments and Flight Planning Officer. Near the Capcom are the desks of the Surgeon, the Booster Systems and EVA Mobility Unit, the Retrofire Officer and the Flight Dynamics Officer. Further away from both Capcom and Flight Director are the Public Affairs Officer, the Department of Defense Officer, the Network Controller, and the Guidance Officer. These sixteen men with their links and taps and lead-ins and consoles and commo loops, their commands of data received and data processed by the computer complex below, their reference slides, their formats, combinations, pictorials, their alpha-numerics, analog plots, plotting data, their nerves and their experience, their knowledge of flight parameters, their red-lines and qualifications for GO or NO GO in each and every separate department are the base for one constant run of comments and queries and warnings and advertisements of future warnings about the functioning of the equipment, the condition of the flight and the oncoming tests and procedures of the flight plan, all funneled into the receiver and ear of the headset of the Flight Director who holds this web of sixteen rays of information in the bowl and dome of his skull and relays to the Capcom (not much more than the tap of an arm away) what piece of information might next be advanced up the quarter of a million miles to the minds and controls of the astronauts. And the Capcom in turn relays the requests, local data, appreciations and complaints of the astronauts. The Capcom, astronaut himself, is thus the advocate, mediator, lifeline, counselor, coxswain, gripe-box, court wit, and expediter for the styles and habits of the astronauts, their modes of procedure, the intimate who recognizes their separate voices and attempts in these static-filled limits to cater to the rhythm of their duties and their literal positions in the cramped quarters of the Command Module with which, as an astronaut himself, the Capcom is familiar.
On this hour, as the spacecraft came nearer to the advancing moon, now nine hundred miles from the outer edge, now six hundred miles from the limb, as the ship of space came closer and closer to disappearing around the back, so a tension began in Mission Control; the spacecraft would be out of radio contact on the far side. Radio waves were rarely modest in their properties, but they did not bend like waves of water around obstacles nor could they penetrate a sphere. On the far side, for a period of forty-seven minutes, there would be silence—it was called Loss of Signal. In that hour no ordinary anxiety would be felt. Once again the nightmare of technology was aroused. For if something happened to the astronauts on the far side—if the spaceship disappeared without a sound, then there would be no report to give on the source of the malfunction, no logic to the destruction, no pattern to the failure—only misery, the misery of exploring a thousand equally mysterious possibilities. Worse by far than failure was failure for undetermined reasons. So even the head of NASA himself, Dr. Thomas Paine, had asked the astronauts not to fire the Service Propulsion Motor and thereby brake their speed into the lower velocity of moon orbit if they thought anything was wrong; in such a case it would be better to coast out on the other side of the moon and swing back to earth. So concerned was he that the astronauts not take chances behind the moon that he promised them another flight soon if they were forced to return immediately.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: We are three minutes away from loss of signal. Apollo 11 is 425 nautical miles from the moon, velocity 7,368 feet per second, weight 96,012 pounds.
CAPCOM: Two minutes to LOS.
CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner and we’ll see you on the other side. Over.
ARMSTRONG: Roger. Everything looks okay up here.
CAPCOM: Roger, out.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: And we’ve had loss of signal as Apollo 11 goes behind the moon. We were showing a distance to the moon of 309 nautical miles at LOS, velocity 7,664 feet per second. Weight was 96,012 pounds. We’re 7 minutes 45 seconds away from the Lunar Orbit Insertion number 1 burn, which will take place behind the moon out of communications. Here in the Control Center two members of the backup
crew, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, have joined Bruce McCandless at the Capcom console. Fred Haise, the third member of the backup crew, has just come in, too, and Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, is at that console. The viewing room is filling up. Among those we noticed on the front row in the viewing room are astronauts Tom Stafford, John Glenn, Gene Cernan, Dave Scott, Al Worden, and Jack Swigert. With a good Lunar Orbit Insertion burn the Madrid station should acquire Apollo 11 at 76 hours 15 minutes 29 seconds.… This is Apollo Control at 75 hours, 49 minutes. Apollo 11 should have started this long burn, duration 6 minutes, 2 seconds, DELTA V 2917 feet per second. Given that burn we expect an orbit of 61 by 169.2 nautical miles. We’re 24 and one-half minutes away from acquisition of signal with a good burn. The clock has not yet started counting for the other acquisition time. We’ll take this lying down now and come back just prior to the acquisition in time for no burn. This is Mission Control, Houston.… We are past the burn acquisition now and we have received no signal.… It’s very quiet here in the Control Room. Most of the controllers seated at their consoles, a few standing up, but very quiet.… We are 4 minutes away now.… There are a few conversations taking place here in the Control Room, but not very many. Most of the people are waiting quietly, watching and listening. Not talking.… That noise is just bringing up the system. We have not acquired a signal. We’re a minute and one-half away from acquisition time.… 30 seconds.… Madrid AOS, Madrid AOS.… Telemetry indicates that the crew is working on the antenna angles to bring the high-gain antenna to bear.…