Walking on the moon
Walking on the moon
In July 1969, a tiny craft of lightweight steel, electric wires and electronic circuit boards approached the moon. Inside were three men, hearts pounding as they started on the complicated processes involved in descent and, hopefully, the first ever landing on the moon. Distracted for an instant from their perennial worries, strife and diversions, a world full of people watched in frozen suspension; billions of eyes and ears following every move of three lonely individuals. If it failed, the moon would become their grave, the world a witness to their deaths. If it succeeded, they would become the greatest navigators and explorers of all time, obliterating the proud records of the discoverers who came before.
The mission succeeded; the men took those first steps on the surface of an alien world and humanity watched, united in the joy and pride of this, its greatest achievement. But there was more to it than that, there always is. Ever since a group of gifted scientists embarked upon a sinister project for an even more sinister regime, producing the technology that would lead by way of Von Braun’s jet engines to Oppenheimer’s deadly toy, brilliant minds had given the rather more sinister imaginations of politicians the means to expand to previously unheard of dimensions. And so, science, technology and more specifically, the jet rocket, became the ultimate tool of the Cold War, the shadowy battle fought between Russia and America for the hearts and minds of the world. When the Soviets launched Gagarin into orbit with Sputnik, the Americans knew they had to get to the next finish line first, whatever the cost. The goal was the moon and the cost colossal, but in the America of the 1960s, people where patriotic, equated technology with a bright future and inclined to believe in their leaders.
Fast forward to 2005, and another President, this time not as universally popular as John F. Kennedy, has declared the intention to re-launch the lunar programme which has lain dormant ever since the last Apollo spaceship touched down on the dusty surface in 1972. “Americans go into space because it lifts the national spirit”, said President Bush. The Cold War is no longer, but there seem to be enough reasons to need to ‘lift the national spirit’, or distract our minds from the mess we’ve created on earth. Others, including the first man to set foot on the moon, speak of the need to break out of earth’s orbit again and visit the moon to address our ailing planet’s energy needs. They pin their hopes on the elusive isotope Helium 3, which in Neil Armstrong’s words could make oil redundant and become a non-pollutant and endlessly replaceable energy source. More of a petroleum man himself, the President must be driven by a different inspiration when he boldly claims that we will visit not just the moon but Mars within a generation.
Such determination stands in stark contrast to the years that have come between. After the initial euphoria, it all died down very quickly. When Eugene Cernan and his crew returned from the moon in 1972, having been the last people to stand on its surface, the Apollo Programme was wrapped up and space exploration lost steam, direction and cash. Except for the unmanned sojourn of Viking to Mars, and a similar Soviet endeavour on Venus, the astronauts and cosmonauts of the past 25 years have become glorified television repair men, installing and propping up the satellites that now circle our planet in increasing numbers. Yes, great scientific steps have been taken, but being better able to predict cyclones doesn’t stop them from happening—nor does it seem to help the victims of the rising tide of natural disasters. What has caused this apathy, this loss of faith in a dream driven by technology and exploration? Why has the promise gone out of space exploration and has it become so mundane, commercial and matter-of-fact?
It never happened
Because it was all a hoax in the first place’, say many. The Apollo Programme was born in the innocence and enthusiasm of the 1960s, but died away in the cynicism and scepticism of the early 1970s. Its story says as much about changes on earth as it does to chronicle the rise and fall of space exploration. No sooner had the masses stopped cheering about this amazing feat than the first voices were raised in doubt. Had we all been duped? Was the technology not really there to successfully send a manned mission to the moon? Claims that the whole thing was carefully set in scene and that the ‘moon landing’ and subsequent moon walks were filmed in a studio have given rise to one of the most expansive and persistent conspiracy theories of all time. Arguments about the lack of dust that would have been kicked up as the spacecraft’s engines produced reverse thrust, the fact that the American flag did not hang limp in an environment without atmosphere, reflections in the astronauts’ visors and anomalies about sunlight form the basis of an argument that has won over millions of disbelievers. Today, a significant proportion of people no longer believe we ever stood on the moon, and that the American government pulled off the hoax as a desperate bid in a costly propaganda war. With this level of cynicism and the dire straits we have created on earth, what hope is there of allocating the resources required to start the programme up again?
What did they see?
But maybe the earth is the clue to space exploration. At the rate we’re going, we may very well need to invest in a way of finding new worlds or ways of patching up our own, if we’re not to face a horrible fate within the coming decades or centuries. With a population growing at a rate of 120 million each year, our world will soon be too small and too exhausted to maintain us. Quite apart from whether you believe mankind ever made it to the moon or not, the real legacy about the Apollo Programme is not so much what it taught us about the moon, but how it showed our own world to be a small, beautiful and fragile planet quite unique within an overwhelmingly hostile universe. This seems also to have been the message that the astronauts, the moonwalkers, have tried—each in their own way—to communicate with us. The experience was so intense that these confident, intelligent, focused and highly disciplined men all returned strangely changed, unable to process what they had seen and never able to shake the revelation that had moved them to the core. Some turned to religion, some to science, others to drink, but the fact of the matter is that these 12 unique men, of whom nine survive today, have something to share with the rest of humanity that we seem unable as yet to grasp.
Moondust
In search of the men who fell to earth
Andrew Smith was a young, excitable boy when the world slowed down to watch the crew of the Apollo 11 touch down on another world, over 300,000 kilometres away. With the perceptiveness of a child, he was deeply affected by the change in atmosphere he sensed. The period of the moon landing passed as if in a bubble, quite apart from what the ‘normal’ world that came before and followed. Life moves on, however, and he had all but forgotten about that summer in 1969 when it came flooding back during an interview 30 years later. Andrew, a seasoned journalist and writer, was interviewing astronaut and moon walker Charlie Duke for the Sunday Times. During the conversation, news came that fellow lunar explorer Pete Conrad had passed away, the poignancy of which became clear when Duke said: “Now there’s only nine of us.”
In the following months, the thought kept recurring to Andrew, who decided to interview the nine remaining moon walkers to record their impressions of a unique experience for posterity. The result is Moondust, In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth, a novel which explores the myths, conspiracy theories, personalities and legacy of the (in)famous Apollo Programme.
“Meeting Charlie Duke had a strong and unexpected impact on me. I hadn’t thought about Apollo much since I was a child, but the idea of these men who’d walked on the moon being gone for ever one day in the not too distant future really shook me. The fact that I had no explanation for this feeling is what drove me to go and find the moon walkers. The reaction of other people strengthened my feeling that this was a project worth pursuing. When I set out, I had no idea what I would find, either in terms of them or myself, but I feel that in talking to them I have been able to close the circle in some ways.”
Asked about the hoax stories, Andrew replies: “I love them and secretly wish I could believe them. One of their theorists, Bart Sibrel, became part of my own story at several junctions, thought most notably when Buzz Aldrin punched his lights out the day before I met the famous astronaut. I believe the actual evidence is very flimsy and is more a reflection of a generation’s cynicism and inclination to believe only in anti-belief. I think it stems from disillusionment with governments and politicians, as well as the fact that people struggle to believe that something with a computer less powerful than a mobile phone could take people to the moon and back. The thing is that every culture has its own moon mythology and I think this is ours today.”
“I think that after 1972, humanity’s priorities changed. The period from the end of World War II to the end of 1972 was an era of unparalleled economic growth for the developed world. America spent its wealth on Vietnam, space and rock and roll. Apollo made little political and economic sense, which, viewed with hindsight, is part of its beauty. There’s been no compelling reason to send people into deep space since. Most scientists think we should use robots, just as they did when JFK threw the Apollo project at NASA. In spite of President Bush’s comments, the only government I can see having sufficient motivation to go back to the moon is China, mainly for propaganda reasons. Even they will struggle to afford it, though, and America will struggle to get such a programme going because Americans won’t accept the risk and cost involved anymore. They were really flying by the seats of their pants in the 1960s. Having said that, I think the space enthusiasts are probably right that we will go back eventually, but the only way it’s ever going to be affordable and worthwhile is if it’s international.”
“The legacy of the Apollo programme is an unexpected one: not that we went to the moon, but that we left the earth for the first time and saw ourselves as small, isolated, possibly unique. I think this profoundly affected how we see ourselves as a species and it may be no coincidence that the environmental movement grew up shortly after the first beautiful ‘earthrise’ images came back. We’d never seen ourselves as a globe moving through space before. Those pictures had an enormous impact, and are still the most published photographs in the world 30 years later.”
“The greatest frustration surrounding the Apollo Programme is the inability even of the most articulate astronauts to express exactly what was they experienced. I think the experience was way too complicated to be explained. In a way, I’ve spent 320 pages trying to answer this question—which has been the bane of their lives—for them. Alan Bean, of Apollo 12, who became a painter after he left NASA, even made a painting called ‘That’s How It Felt to Walk on the Moon’, in an effort to describe his feelings. Neil Armstrong has refused ever to discuss the subject.”
I ask Andrew: with what we’re doing to the planet, maybe we do need to develop the means to find another place or way to live before the time runs out to do so. Could it be that space exploration is ultimately driven by our survival instinct and will represent the final stage of our evolution on earth? “People such as sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein and 60s counterculture guru Timothy Leary have thought so, but I’m with Apollo 14 moonwalker Edgar Mitchell on this one. Asked the same question, he told me: ‘That’s not the answer. We’ve got to solve the problems on this planet, then we’re more ready to go. We can take something good with us instead of our brand of insanity.’ Really, all space exploration really does is to highlight just how precious our planet and how fragile our position really is”.
Andrew Smith’s book, Moondust, In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, is published by Bloomsbury Publishing, www.bloomsbury.com
