Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  MOONDUST

  ANDREW SMITH

  FOR LOTTE AND ISAAK,

  THE STARS IN MY SKY

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue: Then There Were Nine

  1. Dreaming of a Moonage

  2. The Hologram Man

  3. Then There’s Buzz Aldrin! (He Can Go to the Moon, But He Can’t Make Coffee)

  4. The Life of Neil

  5. Paint the Dust Red

  6. The Quiet Stuff

  7. Luna Meets Her Match

  8. Sons and Lunar Modules

  9. Flight

  Epilogue: Moondust

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  Further praise for Moondust

  Preface

  Not long ago, someone congratulated me on having had the foresight to write Moondust in time for the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing and the euphoria I knew would accompany it. Lost for a response, I thanked them, but felt a little spooked afterwards, as my mind retraced the maze of synchronicity and chance that led to the making of this book and ultimately directed its content. I realised that in the several years since its publication, perceptions of the Apollo programme have changed out of all recognition, and that this has had nothing to do with the book itself. And I set to wondering why.

  When I struck out to find the Moonwalkers in the summer of 2002, the thirtieth anniversary of that most singular and dreamlike of days had just passed with remarkably little fuss. There were a few official celebrations, but most of the accompanying newspaper articles and feelgood TV news items seemed unsure of how to present Apollo after thirty years of neglect. With a new millennium dawning, perhaps our first and only embrace of another world felt, if anything, more distant than it does now. Even the man who led that hazardous trip, Neil Armstrong, offered nothing that might clarify, angering townsfolk in his home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, by failing to turn up at a party thrown in his honour. Legend has it that he went flying at the local airfield instead.

  Thus, by 2002, it appeared to me that the most remarkable thing about these men was the extent to which they and their farout story had been forgotten ” not least, up to that point, by myself. After all, the Moonwalkers were holy ghosts of a future that had failed to happen. Why wouldn’t they be signing autographs for a tenner at Star Trek conventions? Or hidden away? Or in effect still up there?

  All of which may help to explain my surprise and delight at the excitement greeting this present anniversary; a simple expression of awe which would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. Nevertheless, while much that pertains to the story has changed in the four years since Moondust’s first publication, very much more has stayed the same. I hope you find the looking glass world of the Moonwalkers as intriguing as I did when I first stumbled into it.

  Prologue

  Then There Were Nine

  On the morning of July 9, 1999, I set out to meet Charlie and Dotty Duke in the bar of a London hotel. It was to be a brief encounter for a small magazine article of a type that I normally avoided, but even at a glance the Dukes were too intriguing to pass by.

  What I knew about them was that in April 1972, Charlie had become the tenth of only twelve human beings to gaze back at the Earth from the surface of the Moon. I knew that he’d stayed there for three euphoric days, then come home and imploded: that he’d lost his moorings and been unable to settle; had terrorized his children and tormented his wife, before eventually finding peace and resolution with her through faith in God. Now the pair ran a ministry out of New Braunfels, Texas. They were in town to talk about it.

  The longer I looked, the more fascinated I became with the strange and intense three and a half years in which the landings took place, during which the world seemed to shudder and change shape forever. By the end, a black Rolling Stones fan had been beaten to death at Altamont and the Beatles had split in acrimony, with JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King seeming like distant memories. Vietnam was effectively over and the counterculture which defined itself in opposition to the war was drifting off to nowhere like dust in a desert wind, while Watergate reared and racial conflict escalated and the pop music that swirled around my ten-year-old head seemed cooler and more cynical than it ever had before. As NASA flight director Chris Kraft would remark, “The best of times for America was also the worst of times.” Now recession was bearing down and a darker, harsher world was emerging.

  And although the space programme was begat by the Cold War, the lunar landings still looked like such a crazy Sixties thing, a last waltz with optimism in a decade which arguably ended on December 19, 1972, when the Apollo 17 astronauts sailed home knowing that the adventure was over and its promise had been a mirage. No Merry Prankster or acid-popping mystic ever did anything freakier than this, and yet the ambiguities of the enterprise seemed endless. What had humanity gained from President Kennedy’s capricious decision to launch his nation at the Moon, and the outrageous cash it required? The lunar programme cost twenty-four billion 1960s dollars: at its peak, NASA was swallowing 5 per cent of the U.S. federal budget. Was all that time, energy, money, life, wasted?

  Charlie Duke wasn’t the only one for whom the return to Earth was difficult. I traced the others and found that they’d reacted to their experience in wildly different ways. The First Man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, became a teacher and retreated from public view, “getting back to the fundamentals of the planet,” while his partner Buzz Aldrin spent years mired in alcoholism and depression, then threw himself into developing space ideas which all looked impossibly fanciful to me. The naturally rebellious Alan Bean of Apollo 12 quit space to become an artist, endlessly rendering scenes from the lunar quest in oils, and Edgar Mitchell experienced a “flash of understanding” in which he switched on to the Universe, sensing an intelligence which he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand. Even more dramatically, Jim Irwin purported to have heard God whispering to him at the feet of the majestic, gold-coloured Apennine Mountains, leaving NASA for the Church upon his return. Meanwhile, the fearsome Alan Shepard, the only one to admit crying on the surface, did the one thing no one thought he would do – could do: he mellowed.

  Among the rest, John Young became a fierce critic of NASA after the Challenger shuttle disaster and left the Astronaut Office in a fog of anger and grief, and Last Man on the Moon Gene Cernan admits to a nagging disappointment with everything that has followed his experience with Apollo 17 (“it’s tough to find an encore”). His flight companion, Jack Schmitt, became a U.S. senator, but found politicians myopic and frustrating after the creativity he’d grown used to. He wasn’t re-elected and I’d heard that he latterly worked as a “space consultant” in Albuquerque. All described an almost mystical sense of the unity of humankind as seen from afar. A lot happened up there. The post-flight divorce rate was, in more than one sense, astronomical.

  With hindsight, the astronauts’ reactions should have been predictable. Suddenly, the twelve had to find answers to a question that had never been asked in quite the same way before – namely, “Where do you go after you’ve been to the Moon?” In addition to their own hopes and expectations, they had the fantasies of faceless millions at their backs and millennia’s worth of lore. The Nepalese, for instance, believe that their dead reside on the Moon; when the Apollo 14 veteran Stu Roosa visited there, he grew increasingly flustered at being asked, “So did you see my grandmother?” The walkers will forever be caught between the gravitational pull of the Moon and Earth’s collective dreaming. Charlie Duke grew angry as he admitted getting lett
ers from conspiracy theorists who hold that the Moon landings were staged and call him a liar.

  I liked Duke. At the age of sixty-four he was still tall and handsome and spoke with a balmy drawl that seemed familiar, though it took a while for me to place it. I felt like a child lost in a favourite bedtime story as he described his flight and the striking luminescence of our world as it moves through the lonely black void of space. From the Moon, he said, the planet was like a jewel, so colourful and bright that you felt you could reach up and grab it, hold it in your hands and marvel at it like the precious thing it is. Then he described his horror at realizing that his life could only be one long, slow anticlimax from there. All that effort and creativity … what had it been for? The development of Teflon? A few photographs? By 1972, Americans didn’t give a damn about space. Then Duke spoke of his touching hope that one day “we’ll go back there” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that from where I was sitting, that didn’t look likely – at least not in his lifetime. Perhaps not even in mine.

  When our time was up, I thanked him for a conversation I’d greatly enjoyed and made to leave, but Charlie told me that he had a gap in his schedule, so we could talk a while longer if I wanted to. He then explained that he and Dotty had received some troubling news the night before, when word arrived that Pete Conrad, the wisecracking, larger-than-life commander of the Apollo 12 mission, the second one to land, had been injured in a motorbike accident near his home in California.

  Conrad was the one whose colourful swearing worried NASA suits, but who had kept cool when his Saturn rocket was hit by lightning – twice – on takeoff, sending cockpit alarms into a cacophonous frenzy and the ground into panic. When a journalist doubted his assertion that Armstrong’s “One small step …” speech was not scripted, Conrad secretly bet her $500 that he could say whatever he wanted when his turn came and nominated his words on the spot. “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a long one for me!” she duly heard the diminutive astronaut trill as he became the third person on the Moon on November 19, 1969. He was also the one who took a cassette player on the trip so that he and his crew could bounce around to “The Girl from Ipanema” and The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar,” and allowed copilot Al Bean to take the pirouetting gold Lunar Module, so spidery and fragile-looking, for a joyride round the back side of the Moon, where NASA couldn’t see what they were up to. When they went for their lunar stroll, Mission Control had to tell the two friends to stop yammering and exclaiming their delight to each other, as they couldn’t hear a word Dick Gordon was saying from the orbiting command craft.

  Then Dotty was called to the phone and came back with the shocking news that Conrad had died of his injuries, and I wasn’t surprised to see Charlie Duke’s eyes cloud over as he talked about his comrade. I later learned that the place where he fell was called Ojai, a Native American word for Moon, but it was the words Duke left me with that set my mind reeling that day. He said them quietly and evenly, as though uttering a psalm.

  “Now there’s only nine of us.”

  Only nine.

  On the way home my mind buzzed with the stories Duke had told, yet I also found myself overtaken by a sadness I hadn’t seen coming – not because only nine people remain who’ve seen us from the surface of the Moon, but because one day, possibly one day soon, there won’t be anyone who has. Nevertheless, I went home and carried on as before, expecting to think no more about the Apollo project, banishing it to the corner of my mind that it had occupied so obediently for three decades.

  But something unexpected happened: the spacemen wouldn’t go away. Three years later, I still found myself slipping outside to stare at the Moon in a way that I hadn’t since childhood, trying to imagine the tense drift toward it, the ecstatic return. I wondered whether the Moonwalkers had reconciled themselves to being Earthbound; whether they’d made peace with our world or continued to mourn their strangled hopes. I wanted to know what kind of people they’d become and what they’d learned; how they felt about the weird trip now and whether they thought it had changed them. Even more than this, I wondered why I suddenly cared when I hadn’t before. I began to ask myself what the whole thing had been about – what it had meant, if indeed it meant anything – and to develop an inchoate sense that the answers to these questions were important, even if I wasn’t yet sure why.

  And in the end I realized that there was only one way to try and answer them. I was going to have to find the nine Moonwalkers and see for myself where the odyssey had led, while I still could.

  1

  Dreaming of a Moonage

  When you’ve shared a moment with the whole world, it can be hard to know precisely where your memories end and everyone else’s begin.

  I see a blindingly bright California day. I am cruising on my bike, a metallic green Schwinn with swept-back handle-bars and a long chopper seat, which I’ve only just stopped parking in my bedroom at night so I can fall asleep looking at it. I want to be Evel Knievel and have spent the unending American school holiday building ramps with bricks and bits of wood lifted from local building sites. And no one can out-jump me, no one, especially not David, who rides by my side … mad, weird David, who’s twice everyone else’s size and has a penis like a man’s and spends all his time trying to make hang gliders out of 2×4’s and sheets of plastic. This morning, I found him begging my brother to jump off his garage harnessed to one of these contraptions and when I pointed out that if the thing plummeted like a stone without anyone attached to it, it would probably do the same with my brother aboard, he insisted that, if you looked – like really, really looked – you would find that it had moved forward from the vertical by at least eight inches. It had, in other words, flown. David’s parents sunbathe nude in his backyard sometimes. I can’t imagine mine doing that.

  No one’s in the backyard today. We’ve just come from his place and his mom and dad are hunched in armchairs, squinting at the TV. We’ve been riding around for hours, and it’s the same everywhere. Cars bake in drives. Dads are home. It’s as though the grown-up world is frozen and the Universe holding its breath while these spectral black-and-white images float across the screen, the same pictures in every single house, like the ghosts of ghosts of ghosts.

  They’re going to the Moon. My dad took me into the garden to look at it last night. I saw him frown as it reflected watery gold on his upturned face, as if someone had stepped over his grave or shone a bright light in his eyes. It was one thing to land a man on the Moon, quite another to bring him back afterwards. But to have stood there in the first place … the thought alone made you tingle. Perhaps coming back wouldn’t be such a big deal after that. No wonder David and I, and everyone we know, have spent this summer trying to reach the sky in one way or another.

  We’re in Orinda, California, a quiet suburb on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. It’s Sunday, July 20, 1969, and the good things in my life are as follows: my bike; the chattering creek that runs through a ravine at the end of the garden; the fact that my teacher next term is going to be Mrs. Lipkin, the foxy twenty-six-year-old hippy chick who’s already been married and divorced twice and plays Jefferson Airplane songs to her class on guitar. And there’s my friend Scott McGraw, who’s older than me, wears lank long hair and bell-bottom jeans, goes everywhere barefoot and is the first person to tell me that Santa Claus is a lie but if you think that’s bad, check out what “fuck” really means. Scott’s brother plays in a band called Love Is Satisfaction. Love Is Satisfaction: I love that.

  All the streets in our neighbourhood are named after characters from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” This is the kind of thing people do when they’re building from scratch, out of nothing, with no past to constrain them. My street’s called Van Ripper Lane and it slopes in a long arc from top to bottom. At the top end are the sun-soaked hills of Orinda Downs, where we pretend to ride motocross and find fossils and catch lizards in the rocky outcrops perfumed by wild thyme. When there’s a
breeze, ripples drift across the tall, golden grass and the hills seem to shimmer and I love to lie in it and let it tickle my face as I stare into the cloudless sky. Sometimes, if you stay there long enough, the smaller creatures forget that you’re not part of the hill and they’ll scuttle around you without fear. Then you do feel part of the hill and the infinitely receding worlds within it. Within a few years, this will be an estate, full of mock-Georgian houses and fences everywhere. The world is changing.

  We coast down the hill and into my drive. David throws his bike on the lawn. I park mine on its stand, issuing a warning to my brother and his tiny, blind-as-a-bat friend Ernie that if they knock it over, I will kill them. Without the wind in our faces, it’s hot outside, so we trot through the screen door and into the kitchen, from where a trail of sound and excited voices draws us toward the living room. It’s 1:15 PM. My parents’ friends the Reuhls and the sweet and elderly Fishes from across the road are leaning forward on couch and chairs, forward over the gold-and-orange shag carpet, clutching beers or cups of coffee tightly with varying mixtures of anxiety and disbelief on their faces. A familiar singsong southern drawl is floating from the TV, decorated with static and peculiar little squeaks and pings which sound like someone flicking the lip of a giant wineglass with their finger. We know this as the voice of Mission Control. His name is Charles Duke, but the astronauts just call him “Houston.” There are other voices, too, but they all sound distant and intermingled and it’s hard to get hold of what they’re saying. An air of expectancy hangs in the room.

  Now we hear:

  “Thirty seconds.”