Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  On the night before the launch of Apollo 11, in the heart of Brevard County, in that stretch which runs from Melbourne through Eau Gallie, and Cocoa, to Titusville, on the coastal strip from Patrick Air Force Base through Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral to the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station and above to the Space Center and Launch Pad 39, through all that several hundred square miles of town and water and flat swampy waste of wilderness, through cultivated tropical gardens, and back roads by rivers lined with palms, through all the evening din of crickets, cicadas, beetles, bees, mosquitoes, grasshoppers and wasps some portion of a million people began to foregather on all the beaches and available islands and causeways and bridges and promontories which would give clear view of the flight from six miles and ten miles and fifteen miles away. Tomorrow most of them would need field glasses to follow the flight up from the pad and out of sight over the sea down a chain of Caribbean isles, but they would have a view—they knew tonight that if the skies were clear they would have their view because they were encamped only where the line of sight was unimpeded to Launch Pad 39 on the horizon. There one could certainly see Apollo 11 on her Saturn V, see her for seven, nine, eleven miles away; she was lit up. A play of giant arc lights, as voluminous in candlepower as the lights for an old-fashioned Hollywood premiere, was directed on the spaceship from every side. On U.S. 1 in Titusville, eleven miles from Cape Kennedy across Merritt Island and the Banana and Indian rivers, all that clear shot across the evening waters, at an artillery range of twenty thousand yards, two hundred football fields away, by an encampment of tourists up from southern Florida, Everglades, Miami, and the Keys; in from Tampa, and Orlando; down from Daytona, St. Augustine, Gainesville, and Jacksonville; come from Fort Myers and Fort Lauderdale, from Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Lakeland, Ocala and Tallahassee, come from all the towns of Georgia and points farther north and west as well as every itinerant camper in the area from all of the ambulatory camping-out families of the fifty states, and tourists down on economy flights for a week in cheap hot summer Florida and now slung out in the back seats of rented cars, on U.S. 1 in Titusville, in an encampment of every variety of camper, was a view of the spaceship across flat land and waters, and she looked like a shrine with the lights upon her. In the distance she glowed for all the world like some white stone Madonna in the mountains, welcoming footsore travelers at dusk. Perhaps it was an unforeseen game of the lighting, but America had not had its movie premieres for nothing, nor its Rockettes in Radio City and fifty million squares tooling the tourist miles over the years to Big Town to buy a ticket to spectacle and back home again. If you were going to have a Hollywood premiere and arc lights, a million out to watch and a spaceship which looked across the evening flutter like the light on the Shrine of Our Lady outside any church in South Brooklyn or Bay Ridge, then by God you might just as well have this spectacle on the premiere trip to the moon. That deserved a searchlight or two! And the campers stared across the waters in their bivouac off Route 1 in Titusville, campers sat on the banks of the Indian River at twilight and waited for the tropical night to pass its hold on the hours.

  There were new industries in America these years. After five decades of suspense movies, and movies of the Wild West, after the adventures of several generations of men in two world wars and Korea and Vietnam, after sixteen years of Playboy and American iconization of the gravity-defying breast and the sun-ripened buttock, after ten years of the greatest professional football, after a hundred years and more of a tradition that the frontier was open and would never close, and after twenty more perplexing technological years when prosperity came to nearly every White pocket, and technology put out its plastic, its superhighways, its supermarkets, its appliances, its suburbs, its smog, and its intimation that the frontier was damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow, America had erupted from this pressure between its love of adventure and its fear that adventure was not completely shut down; America had spewed out on the road. The country had become a nation of campers, of cars toting trailers, of cars pulling tent-trailers, of truck-campers, top-of-car tent packs, Volkswagen buses converted to ambulatory bedrooms, jeeps with Chic Sale houses built on the back, Land-Rovers with bunks, Broncos with more bunks—any way a man could get out of the house with his buddies or his family or his grandmother, and take to the road and find some ten by twenty feet of parking grass not posted, not tenanted, and not too muddy, he would camp. All over America in the summer the night fields were now filled with Americans sleeping on air mattresses which reposed on plastic cloth floors of plastic cloth tents—what a sweet smell of Corporate Chemical, what a vat and void to mix with all the balmy fermy chlorophylls and pollens of nature! America the Sanitary, and America the Wild, went out to sleep in the woods, Sanitary-Lobe and Wild-Lobe nesting together neatly, schizophrenic twins in the skull case of the good family American.

  So they were out tonight, some portion of a million, all drawn on the lines of sight in Brevard County, and on every highway and causeway in the area the ground was covered with cars and campers, the shelter-roof extension of one family’s tent near to topping the picnic blanket spread out behind the tailgate of the next station wagon, and the open trunk lid of a twelve- or fifteen-year-old Dodge convertible (rusty, top all rent, peeling friction tape and dirty white adhesive tape chasing a flap of a patch) stood next to both, part of the family sleeping in the trunk, the others with their good dirty feet out the windows. It was hardly just middle-class America here tonight, rather every echo of hard trade-union beerbinge paunch-gut-and-muscle, and lean whippy redneck honky-tonk clans out to bird-watch in the morning with redeye in the shot glass. There were tourists and not inelegant campers which spoke of peanut butter and jelly, watercress, and cucumber—suburban campers—but there was also the raw gasoline of expectation in the air, and families of poor Okies. One felt the whole South stirring on this night. Quiet pious Baptists, out somewhere on their porches (kin to some of the redneck and Okie—Okie for Okeechobee!—and working class here) seemed to be waiting over an arc of a thousand miles, certainly all the way from Cape Kennedy across Florida along the Gulf of Mexico to Houston and the Manned Spacecraft Center and back again, all across that belt of Fundamentalist piety, hot dry tempers burning like closed-up balefire against the humidity of the swamps, religion and lust to work their combat in the tropical nights, yes all over the South they had to be praying, yes even more than everywhere for the safety of this shot, the astronauts part of that family of concern which White Southerners could share with each other out of the sweet deep wells of their Christian hearts, what was left of them. It was not hard to have a vision of mothers and grandmothers looking like spinsters, silver-rimmed glasses to shield your skin from their eyes of burning faith, predictable turkey wattles on the neck: they would be praying for America tonight—thoughts of America served to replace the tender sense of the Virgin in Protestant hearts. And out here on the campgrounds of Brevard County, out on all the scorched shoulders and oil-coated grass of the available highway, were men getting ready to drink with their wives, middle-aged, green-eyed Southern mill workers with sunburned freckled skin, reddish hair, hard mechanic’s muscles in their forearms, wife a trinity of worrying mother, fattening slattern, and give-me-a-drink-and-I’ll-holler-happy sort of bitch. Dutiful work, devotion to family and property, their sloven property! mingy propriety, real raucous bust-outs—that sort of South, married out of high school, oats half-sown like three quarters of all America over thirty, and their boys on the hunt through the encampment looking for opposite numbers, other boys or—Gods of fornication with them!—girls without bank locks on their bloomers. You can expect nothing less on a night so filled with heat, human meat, bubbles of fear, prayer soft as love, and tropical sex in every sauce. And that mill worker with red hair and gray-green eyes, red sunburn, red peeling skin on his knotty forearms—he could be an astronaut in another life. He looks like an older version of Neil Armstrong, maybe, he looks like some of them, like Gordon Cooper for sure, or D
eke Slayton, or Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7, yeah, the mill worker is tonight an American all drenched in pride and fear and sorrow—his wild rebel yell guaranteed to diminish each year, is riding the range with awe tonight. He has worked with machines all his life, he has tooled cars to the point where he has felt them respond to his care, he has known them and slept beside them as trustingly as if they were hunting dogs, he knows a thousand things about the collaboration between a man and a machine, and he knows what can go wrong. Machines—all the old machines he has known—are as unreasonable as people. And here, tomorrow, going up three men of whom he could have been one if he had a) not been a drunken fool half his life b) not married young c) had an education d) had twice as many guts and e) been full of real luck rather than cursed family luck, could have been going up with them in a machine with millions of parts, eighty percent electronics which he does not put his hand to, no grease, nut, wrench and arm in electronics. Yes, could have been going up in a machine no man could ever sleep next to, or trust, not a machine with millions of parts, and ten million fingers worked on them—how much evil, error and deception in millions of fingers?—he is thinking of his wife, why she alone when drunk and in full lunatic cohabitation with the all-out rays of the full moon was a hundred thousand fingers of evil herself! and his bowels come near to dropping out of him with awe at the daring of the act in the morning. He has spent his life with machines, they are all he has ever trusted with affectionate trust for he has had a nose for their treacheries (more than he can say for women), and now, twelve hours from now, in the full light of nine-thirty in the morning, that Apollo-Saturn is going to go up. He will see a world begin where machines are king and he does not know whether to cry from pride or the all-out ache that he does not really comprehend the new machinery.

  And the wife sipping the booze, hot and much too funky is her flesh on this hot night, listening to transistor radio Red has bought her, is moony and full of tears at the heroism of male craziness tomorrow. She wishes—floodgates of middle-age sorrow—some crack of that holy lightning in her womb: too late now! and trying to love up a warmth for Red, married all these nineteen years, she rears up on the very pinpoint of spite. She has powers, her family has powers, there’s Indian blood in both her grandmas, and bruises, sorrows, slights, and nights of the loveliest now lost in the disappearing wahoo of studs she will never see again, our redneck Molly abloom in this encampment, she thinks on that pinpoint of spite of a curse she could put and will not on the launch tomorrow. For if Saturn were ever to burst and explode—she sees the flames across the sky: All witch and bitch on a holiday, such pictures encourage the lapping of gentle waters in her. Whereas putting wax on the tip of the needle, and capping the curse, leaves dull lead in her chest. Not to mention the future woman troubles of her gut. She stoppers the bottle and looks on a slant at Red—there’ll be an angle soon by which to pick a fight.

  And men and women, tired from work and travel, sat in their cars and sat outside their cars on aluminum pipe and plastic-webbing folding chairs, and fanned themselves, and looked across the miles at the shrine. Out a car window projected the sole of a dirty foot. The big toe pointed straight up to Heaven in parallel to Saturn V.

  III

  Aquarius passes these sights like a stranger. He feels in such surroundings a foreigner equally as much as he feels American. It is his country, but he merely traverses it. His feet do not take root.

  Studying the encampments on the roadside this plump and burgeoning night, he is thinking of the party he has attended at the Royal Oak Country Club in Titusville. A full occasion. Wernher von Braun has spoken there earlier. Wernher von Braun has in fact arrived and left by helicopter. Von Braun, the deus ex machina of the big boosters! He is of course a legend. If you ask the man on the street: Who is the head of NASA, he will probably not quite know what NASA is. If you ask: Well, who heads the Space Program, he is not likely to tell you James E. Webb was Administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, nor does he figure to know that in the summer of 1969 it is Dr. Thomas O. Paine who is ultimately responsible for all the NASA installations: Headquarters in Washington; Ames Research Center for space flight research at Moffet Field, California; Electronic Research Center at Cambridge; Flight Research Center at Edwards, California; Goddard Space Flight Center for unmanned satellites at Greenbelt, Maryland; Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena; Langley Research Center at Hampton, Virginia; Lewis Research Center at Cleveland; Nuclear Rocket Development Station at Jackass Flats, Nevada; KSC Western Test Range Operations Division at Lompoc, California; Wallops Station, Wallops Island, Virginia; NASA Pasadena Office; and of course the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston; the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Alabama; and Kennedy Space Center itself on Cape Kennedy and Merritt Island. No, he will not have heard of Dr. Paine, nor of Dr. George E. Mueller who heads the Manned Spacecraft Program, which is to say is in charge of everything to do with men in rockets as opposed to unmanned rockets, and so has authority over the directors of every space center and laboratory concerned with manned flight. Nor is anyone too likely to have heard of Dr. Gilruth, nor necessarily of Dr. Kurt H. Debus at Kennedy Space Center where he is Director and so in charge of every mammoth launching as well as planning, designing, developing and utilizing the launching facilities. No, they have heard only of Von Braun. Since his formal title is Center Director of George C. Marshall Space Center at Huntsville, Alabama, and he is therefore on an organizational level equal only to Debus and Gilruth, whereas Dr. Mueller and Dr. Paine are his most definite superiors in this heirarchy of NASA stations, divisions, laboratories, operations, facilities, centers and hegemonies, he can hardly by any organizational measure be the Boss, but to the public sense of these affairs, to the Press, and to a corps of space workers, he is the real engineer, the spiritual leader, the inventor, the force, the philosopher, the genius! of America’s Space Program. Such is his legend in the street. That is the positive side of his reputation; it is enormous; say, rather it is immense. Yet he has that variety of glamor usually described as fascinating, which is to say, the evocation of his name is attractive and repellent at once, because no one forgets for an instant that he worked on the V-2 rockets at the German Rocket Research Center at Peenemünde, second only to General Dornberger, and so was implicated on one occasion by giving an orientation lecture to the Leader himself, who stood and stared and did not say a word when rockets were later fired for him on test stands. It was expected that Hitler with his love of the cosmic, the primitive, the apocalyptic, and the more audible wars of Hell and Heaven would be enthusiastic about the extraordinary sound of rocket motors. The future of the rocket program at Peenemünde was indeed even dependent in 1939 upon just such hopes as Hitler’s ecstatic reaction. But the Fuehrer did not say a word until lunch, when he stated, “Es war doch gevaltig,” which may be translated as, “That was sensational.” (Göring, who visited a week later, was openly enchanted. Rocket propulsion for railroad and passenger cars, airplanes, airships! and ocean liners! was what he saw next.)

  Then in 1943, after an audience with Hitler, Von Braun was granted the very high honor of a titular professorship. That much was ineradicable from Von Braun’s record, but he had also had the opposite honor of being arrested and jailed for two weeks in an SS prison by Heinrich Himmler himself. One of the accusations: Von Braun was not really interested in rockets for war so much as for space exploration. It took General Dornberger’s intercession with Hitler to spring Von Braun from Stettin Prison. Without Von Braun, said Dornberger to Hitler, there would be no V-2. Then in 1945 Von Braun had managed with considerable skill to move about five thousand employees and their families, and some of their papers, documents and drawings, to the Harz Mountains in the south of Germany where they could be captured by Americans rather than Russians.

  Von Braun had not been out of higher headquarters since. While the U.S. Army test-fired V-2’s at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, he served as adviser. Five years later, stil
l working for the Army, he directed the development of the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. For NASA he had created the launch vehicle for the Apollo program, the famous, the monumental, the incomparable three-stage Saturn V, that launch vehicle we have already glimpsed at the VAB, a booster the size and weight of a full Navy destroyer, a rocket to deliver seven and a half million pounds of thrust at blast-off, Saturn V, 281 feet long, 33 feet wide, designed to put—we may be Germanic in metaphor here—designed to put its little brother, the 82-foot Apollo spacecraft implanted on top of it, into Trans-Lunar Injection, which is to say: on its way to the moon. In terms of size, the Apollo spacecraft was no more than a witch’s hat perched on Saturn V’s Instrument Unit of a head!

  Yet since this launch vehicle in all its three stages did not have fuel to burn for even eighteen minutes, all six million pounds of fuel consumed in bursts of two and a half minutes and six and a half minutes, then two minutes and six minutes, near to five million pounds of fuel being burned in the first 150 seconds, whereas, in contrast, the Command Module would be in flight for eight days; since Saturn V in relation to the complexity of the electronic vitals and conceptions on the Command Module was relatively simple in design, Saturn V hardly more by the severest measure than a mighty mortar of a firework to blast an electric brain into space, why then was Von Braun so worshiped, why, if the true technology, the vertiginous complexity of the engineering feat of putting a man on the moon and back belonged rather in sum of work and intimate invention to echelons of electronic engineers out at MSC, North American and Grumman and too many other places to name? Well, the brute but inescapable answer if one studies the morphology of rockets is that man worships his phallus in preference to a drop of his seed. Yeah and yea. Saturn V was guts and grease, plumbing and superpipes, Lucifer or the Archangel grinding the valves. Saturn V was a furnace, a chariot of fire. One could witness some incandescent entrance to the heavens. But Apollo 11 was Command Module and therefore not to be seen. It spoke out of a crackling of static, or rolled like a soup can, a commercial in a sea of television, a cootie in a zoo of oscillating dots.