by Robert Stone
But in the NASA offices, Paine remained undaunted. He asked the space agency’s most persuasive spokesperson, Wernher von Braun, to leave his managerial position at the Marshall Space Flight Center and come to Washington to serve as NASA’s deputy associate administrator for planning. After more than two decades in Alabama, von Braun decided to move his family to Alexandria, Virginia. However, not long after his arrival, he sensed a changed mood in the country and even wondered whether the lavish Apollo budget hadn’t spoiled many of his colleagues. Reflecting on the current moment and his new assignment, von Braun confessed, “Too many people in NASA…are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet, like President Kennedy.”
In an effort to better determine NASA’s post-Apollo future, von Braun and Paine decided to hold a three-day off-site retreat where they would look ahead to the year 2000 and beyond. They chose as their venue a modest building on Wallops Island, one of the barrier islands on the Virginia coast, where NASA maintained a small but active research station and rocket-launching facility.
Prior to the gathering, Paine charged the twenty-five attendees to call upon their “swashbuckling buccaneering courage” and imagine the possibilities thirty years hence and all that NASA could accomplish by 2000. He cautioned his space-age band of brothers to “be careful of ideology, amateur social science, and economics,” and open themselves to “a completely uninhibited flow of new ideas.”
Von Braun asked his old friend Arthur C. Clarke to deliver the Wallops Island conference keynote address. The select group of attendees—not surprisingly, all men—included the directors of most of the NASA centers as well as another VIP, the most celebrated space traveler in the world, Neil Armstrong. It was the first time Clarke and Armstrong met each other, a moment that Clarke made certain was captured in a snapshot taken outside of the Wallops Station building.
The free-ranging discussions at the Wallops Island conference were more like something that might be overheard at a science-fiction convention than at a government-agency long-range-planning session. Moon colonies, giant space stations, and human settlements on Mars were projected by the year 2000. Also discussed were new types of nuclear-powered rocket engines that would facilitate human travel outside the solar system and the future of human evolution on other planets. When imagining life closer to home, attendees debated the feasibility of an intercontinental space plane, ways to free humanity from a dependence on agricultural-based food, and a combined global supercomputer and telecommunications network. The Wallops Station conference turned out to be the last hurrah of the grand visions seen in Collier’s, at the New York World’s Fair, and in the movie theaters where 2001: A Space Odyssey was still playing more than two years after its world premiere.
Paine enthusiastically submitted his Wallops Island report to the White House, hoping that these daring ideas would find supporters in the administration and lead to future discussion. But Paine had also seen the writing on the wall. The Wallops Island report was his parting shot.
Within six weeks of submitting his conference summary, Paine tendered his resignation and returned to work at his former employer, General Electric. But before he left his NASA office, Paine steered future development a bit closer by canceling two Apollo lunar missions—Apollo 18 and 19—thus saving 40 million dollars from the NASA budget and allowing the design and development for a space shuttle to move forward. (Apollo 20 had already been canceled the previous January to allocate its Saturn V to the Skylab space station program slated for 1973.) Paine’s decision was not popular. After the billions spent on Apollo, one astronomer expressed in frustration: “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce and then not using it because you claim you can’t afford the gas.”
In Houston, news of the two latest Apollo cancelations did not go over well. Astronaut Tom Stafford, in a rare break with decorum, spoke frankly to NBC News. He speculated that some astronauts might quit, saying the decision suggested the United States could become a second-rate power. But in the new age of limits, this was necessary triage. Not only had Paine kept the development of a future space shuttle alive, but the cuts to Apollo enabled the channeling of resources toward less costly yet hugely ambitious robotic missions to the outer planets.
For those hoping to spend New Year’s Day 2000 at a hotel on the Moon, the dream ended in 1970. The following year, Pan Am quietly terminated its First Moon Flights Club promotion.
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NINE YEARS LATER, the framed photograph of Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong taken at Wallops Station hung in a place of honor in the author’s study at his home in Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India that had removed all reference to its former British colonial name, Ceylon, in 1972. In the years since Armstrong and Clarke met, much had occurred, yet little followed the optimistic outline Clarke, von Braun, and Paine had envisioned at the June 1970 conference.
Not far away from the Wallops Island photograph on Clarke’s wall of memories was a black-and-white image of him standing with von Braun. In 1972, in his new advocacy position in Washington, von Braun had helped NASA obtain presidential and congressional approval for the space shuttle, which had been scheduled to launch its first crew before the end of that decade. Von Braun had often spoken of hoping to be among its first passengers, though most of its crew members would come from a new class of thirty-five shuttle astronauts enlisted in 1978. Among them were the first women and people of color in NASA’s history.
But by 1979 the first shuttle launch had been delayed into the early 1980s. Von Braun would never see it fly, much less ride on it. He died in 1977 at age sixty-five, shortly after leaving NASA. During his last years he served as vice president for engineering and development at Fairchild Industries, an aerospace firm. This had been the first private-sector job in von Braun’s career. No longer would he answer to dictators, generals, and government bureaucrats. But within months of joining Fairchild, he was diagnosed with cancer and would die four years later.
Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong meet at the NASA long-term planning session held at Wallops Island, Virginia, in June 1970. Although he had stepped on the Moon less than a year earlier, Armstrong attended the Wallops Island conference in a new role as a NASA bureaucrat, the deputy associate administrator for aeronautics. He held his administrative position for only a year, resigning to teach at the University of Cincinnati.
His death spared him further questions about his wartime past, many details of which were about to come to public attention for the first time. An investigative unit within the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, called the Office of Special Investigations, had been created to delve into the histories of former Nazis who had entered the United States under fraudulent circumstances. Soon there would be renewed interest in the Operation Paperclip Germans. In 1973, Arthur Rudolph, a key member of von Braun’s Saturn V team, who had overseen the production of the V-2 at the Dora-Mittelbau slave-labor factory, was forced to renounce his American citizenship and return to live in Germany.
The past had been shadowing von Braun during his final years. He had been called to testify as a witness at a German war crimes trial shortly before the Apollo 11 landing. When he met with journalists and news cameras on the day of his testimony, von Braun declared that his conscience was clear and he had nothing to hide. Not long after, he appeared on TV as a guest on the late-night Dick Cavett Show to speak about NASA’s future in space. But Cavett changed the discussion to ask a few pointed questions about his experience during the Third Reich, something that had never been raised during a television interview in the past two decades.
In the course of his short time at Fairchild, von Braun reconnected with his old friend Arthur Clarke, living in Sri Lanka’s commercial capital of Colombo. Von Braun’s initiative, in fact, eventually transformed Clarke’s home in the elite palm-shaded Cinn
amon Gardens neighborhood. When Fairchild’s experimental ATS-6 satellite was positioned in a geosynchronous orbit over the Indian subcontinent in 1975, von Braun immediately thought of Clarke. ATS-6 was to be used in an international experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of beaming educational television programming to rural villages that couldn’t otherwise receive signals. The Indian government would give a number of remote villages their own satellite ground stations, a receiver, and a television monitor from which the local community could gather to watch the broadcasts.
Von Braun suggested that one of the receiving stations be given to the man who had first proposed the geosynchronous-communications-satellite idea back in 1945. Not long after, a crew of six engineers from the Indian government arrived at Clarke’s home, where they installed a sixteen-foot dish antenna on his second-floor patio-deck, transforming it into the only privately owned satellite-receiving station in the world. At the time Clarke also had the only working television set in the entire country; national TV broadcasting didn’t come to Sri Lanka until 1979.
After nearly a quarter century as a frequent visitor to the United States, Clarke had chosen to reduce his busy travel schedule. Now, financially secure for the first time in his life due to his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, the world came to him—both via satellite and whenever astronauts, authors, royalty, journalists, and other celebrities were passing through Colombo and wanted to say hello.
Over the years, Clarke had explained to journalists that he’d moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 for the skin diving. But as his friend the science writer Jeremy Bernstein later recounted, there were additional personal motivations behind his choice to relocate there. His decision came only a few years after the suicide of British mathematician Alan Turing, who had been convicted of gross indecency and given a choice between prison and chemical castration treatment as a supposed cure for homosexuality, then criminally outlawed in England. Clarke had been briefly married to an American woman in 1953, a decision he regretted soon after. Properly British and discreet, Clarke usually deflected inquiries about his personal life, occasionally making public comments that led listeners to infer he was heterosexual. But as he grew older he became less guarded. Reflecting on Turing’s decision to commit suicide in 1954, Clarke confided to Bernstein “that if he’d had the chance he would have urged Turing to immigrate to the island.”
Embedded in the tropical garden at the rear of Clarke’s house was a small marker noting the grave of his beloved German shepherd, with a name and ancestry that commemorated the early space age:
SPUTNIK
1966–1978
SON OF LAIKA:
GENTLE, LOVING, FRIEND
Whenever he was showing off his house and garden and the satellite receiving station, Clarke told his guests that within a few years they would have access to a far more varied selection of television broadcasts from around the globe than he could currently access with his satellite dish. He explained that the world was still in a semaphore and smoke-signal era of communications when compared with what was to come. Soon telephones, radios, newspapers, and televisions would be combined into a single portable device with a high-definition screen and a keyboard, allowing for two-way communication with anyone on the planet. Such a device, which could be as small as a wristwatch, would allow anyone anywhere to access the world’s great libraries. The integrated circuit that was used on the Apollo guidance computer a decade earlier had since been superseded by faster and vastly more sophisticated chips. In the United States the first personal computers were being sold to hobbyists, and Clarke was hoping to get one soon.
Though ever the optimist, Clarke was bothered by the recent resurgence of interest in paranormal phenomena and pseudoscientific fads in the United States and elsewhere. Books and television specials “investigating” ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and psychokinesis had become the rage. For decades Clarke had enjoyed listening to such theories and had maintained an open mind, but he now feared cranks were littering the fringes of science.
Perhaps the strangest and most baffling of the new fringe ideas in the mid-1970s was promoted in a self-published book arguing that the Apollo moon landings were all an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the American government. Bill Kaysing’s We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle had been written in the wake of the release of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and other disturbing government revelations. Motivated by anger about the Pentagon’s deception in Vietnam, Kaysing decided to write something “outrageous,” hoping that it might prompt Americans to no longer blindly accept as truth the official word out of Washington, D.C. Ironically, this was one rumor the Soviet Union hadn’t tried to cultivate as part of their disinformation campaign against the United States.
At the time of the moon landing, few voiced rumors of it being a hoax, although as early as 1968 just such a secret government conspiracy had served as part of the plot of a darkly satiric BBC television drama, The News-Benders. Author Norman Mailer may have sensed the growing paranoia when he joked a year after Apollo 11, “In another couple of years there will be people arguing in bars about whether anyone even went to the Moon.” He was quick to dismiss any such “mass hoodwinking” because, he argued, to pull it off would entail an effort and genius greater than the feat of launching the Saturn V and landing on the Moon. But as memories faded and disillusionment about established institutions became more widespread, this infectious idea slowly gained adherents.
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BY LATE 1979, America hadn’t launched a single crewed space mission in four years. During the same time period, the Soviet Union launched fourteen flights carrying cosmonauts into earth orbit, many taking crews to their Salyut space stations. America’s robotic planetary probes had taken over as the new stars of NASA. A pair of Viking landers transmitted the first color images from the surface of Mars in 1976, and three years later Voyager 1 began sending detailed images of Jupiter and its moons. It was followed by Voyager 2, which, like the first Voyager, traveled to Saturn, then, for the first time, headed out toward Uranus and Neptune. The Voyager program had originally been proposed in 1969 as a “Grand Tour” and would have included a visit to Pluto as well. But Congress’s efforts to constrain the space agency’s budget and NASA’s desire to divert funding to the shuttle had reduced the Voyager missions’ agenda.
Culturally, astronauts no longer held the iconic position that they had a few years earlier. Life magazine, which had published the astronauts’ exclusive personal stories since 1959, ceased publication the same month as the final Apollo moon voyage, in late 1972. That same year a report revealed that NASA had disciplined the Apollo 15 crew members for smuggling a packet of unauthorized collectible autographed postal covers onto their flight, with the implied suggestion that they had an unethical plan to enrich themselves. Appearing not long after the release of the Pentagon Papers and other journalistic exposés, the Apollo 15 postal-cover scandal fostered the cynical assumption that everyone holding a position of privilege and power covertly cheated to get ahead—even America’s most celebrated heroes. (In fact, the situation with the Apollo 15 crew was not entirely unique.) Indeed, the next year the first book was published that dissected and debunked the carefully crafted images of the astronauts long promoted by NASA’s public-affairs office and sustained by an adoring media.
By the end of the decade, the Apollo astronauts who had left NASA were appearing frequently in consumer advertising. Buzz Aldrin endorsed Volkswagen and its new computer diagnostics system. Frank Borman, now chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Eastern Airlines, became the public face of the company. Neil Armstrong, who had maintained a more private profile than most of his colleagues, surprised many by starring in an ad campaign for Chrysler at a time when the carmaker was experiencing serious financial trouble due to the energy crisis. Wanting there to be no lingering doubt about the i
dentity of Chrysler’s spokesperson, the advertising agency not only had Armstrong introduce himself on camera, but they also made sure his name was superimposed in large type below his face. The fading fame of the Apollo moonwalkers even prompted a successful television commercial with a balding man dressed in a checkered sports jacket, asking the camera, “Do you know me? I’m one of the astronauts that walked on the Moon. When I walk in here to rent a car, they don’t always recognize me. That’s why I carry an American Express card.” Only later was the name of the third man to walk on the Moon, Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad, revealed in a final close-up of his credit card.
More and more of the Apollo-era astronauts were joining the private sector, as the new class of shuttle astronauts was altering the popular conception of NASA’s space voyagers. In public statements the generation of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, with years of test-pilot and combat-flying experience, acknowledged the transition as an inevitable sign of progress. John Young, who had previously entered space on four different missions, would be the only Gemini astronaut to fly the new space shuttle. But among themselves, the earlier generation regarded the new group of mission and payload specialists—astronauts assigned to oversee medical and engineering experiments or serve as civilian technical experts—as something different. One went so far as to refer to the new generation as “second-class astronauts.”
However, before the first shuttle left the launchpad, something appeared that strongly reinforced the popular image of the astronauts from the dawning years of the American space program. It came first, in 1979, as an acclaimed book and later as a popular Hollywood movie. Together, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Philip Kaufman’s screen adaptation became the dominant narrative of the early space age for generations of Americans.