Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  We’ll also check out the tracking beacons in the Instrument Unit that travels as a guidance system for the Saturn V during the powered phase of flight. Now 59 minutes 48 seconds and counting.

  Yes, his brain was so chopped in fragments that he felt as if he had awakened with a hangover (which he had not quite) and had done nothing since but smoke and drink coffee, neither of which he had gone near, for he had not taken a cigarette in years and coffee was never his drink until night.

  The Test Supervisor, Bill Schick, has advised all hands here in the Control Center and spacecraft checkout people that in about thirty seconds that big swing-arm that has been attached to the spacecraft up to now will be moved back to a parked position some five feet away from the spacecraft. It’s coming up now in five seconds, the swing-arm will come back. Mark. The swing-arm now coming back from the spacecraft. Countdown proceeding satisfactorily …

  The voice was clear only if one forced oneself to listen to it. He tried to picture the scene in the Launch Control Center with hundreds of men scanning hundreds of consoles and computers, but there was not a real interest. He found himself going for a walk along the grass. Between the grandstand and the lagoon was a field about the size of a Little League baseball park and the photographers had all set themselves up at the edge of the water, their cameras with telephoto lenses set on tripods so that they looked from behind like a whole command of Army surveyors taking a lesson in their instrument. And the object on which they were focused, Apollo-Saturn, looked gray and indistinct across the air waves of heat shimmering off the lagoon.

  Astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the middle seat. He’s been working with the Spacecraft Test Conductor on setting up proper switch settings in preparation for pressurizing the reaction control system. There are these big thrusters on the side of the Service Module. There are actually sixteen of them in four quadrants around the Service Module. They are used for maneuvers in space.

  To the right of the photographers was a small grove of pure jungle. Recollections of his platoon on a jungle trail, hacking with machetes entered his head. A hash of recollections. He had thought he would be concentrating on the activities at the Launch Pad, the Control Center, in the Command Module, he had expected to be picturing the vitals of the rocket, and the entrance of the fuels into it, but he was merely out of sorts and with a headache, and waiting for the time to pass. He felt somehow deprived that he could feel so little. People had told him over and over that the sight of a large rocket going up was unforgettable and the sound would be remarkable, the ground would shake. It had begun to sound like an experience as mysterious and thoroughgoing as those first reverberations which had come to him in his early teens that there was a world of sexual intercourse out there, and it was unlike anything you and I had ever done. So, ridiculous as this, just as an adolescent would want his first real sexual hour to be at least approximately equal to his imagined pageant, so now Aquarius was cranky that nothing in his mood was remotely ready for the experience he had been promised. The damn astronauts weren’t even real to him. He had no sense at all of three psyches full of awareness on the edge of the horizon. Just that gray stick out there.

  Coming up shortly will be a key test here in the firing room as far as the launch vehicle people are concerned. It’s some final checks of the destruct system aboard the three stages of the Saturn V launch vehicle. In the event during powered flight that the vehicle strayed rather violently off course, the range safety officer could take action to destroy the vehicle which obviously would occur after the astronauts were separated by their escape tower from the faulty vehicle.

  He remembered the questions he had asked in the VAB. How would they destroy the rocket if something went wrong? Why a longitudinal set of explosives lined up, as if in the seam of a tin can, would burst the stages. The belly of the rocket would open like a Caesarian. A flood of burning fuel would burst into the sky.

  This is Apollo-Saturn Launch Control. We’ve passed the eleven-minute mark. Now T minus 10 minutes 54 seconds on our countdown for Apollo 11.

  He began to look for a place from which to watch. The grandstand had a roof which would obstruct the view once the rocket was high in the air. But, standing on the field, he felt a hint too low. Finally he took up a careful position a few steps from the ground in a wing of additional bleachers. He was still not properly ready for the spectacle. Yes, the future spoke of a human species which would live on diets and occasional feasts, and would travel to spectacles to feel extraordinary sensations. They might even look at photographs of starving Black faces in order to generate some of their deepest thoughts.

  But he knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.

  This is Apollo-Saturn Launch Control. We’ve passed the six-minute mark in our countdown for Apollo 11. Now 5 minutes 52 seconds and counting. Spacecraft Test Conductor Skip Chauvin now has completed the status check of his personnel in the control room. All report they are GO for the mission. Launch Operations Manager Paul Donnelly reports GO for launch. Launch Director Rocco Petrone gives a GO. We’re 5 minutes 20 seconds and counting. We took a good look at Eagle, and it looks good. The Spacecraft Test Conductor for the Lunar Module reported that Eagle was GO. The swing-arm now coming back to its fully retracted position as our countdown continues. T minus 4 minutes 50 seconds and counting. Skip Chauvin informing the astronauts that the swing-arm now coming back.

  Nobody was talking a great deal. If something went wrong, they would all be implicated. Who would know which evil had entered the ripe oven of space technology? Aquarius took note of himself. Yes, his throat was dry.

  We’re now passing the four-minute 30-second mark in the countdown—still GO at this time. Four minutes 15 seconds—the Test Supervisor now has informed Launch-Vehicle Test Conductor Norm Carlson you are GO for launch. We’re now hitting the four-minute mark. Four minutes and counting. We are GO for Apollo 11. We’ll go on an automatic sequence at 3 minutes and 7 seconds. Three minutes 45 seconds and counting. In the final abort checks between several key members of the crew here in the Control Center and the astronauts, Launch Operations Manager Paul Donnelly wished the crew on behalf of the launch team “Good luck and Godspeed.” Three minutes 25 seconds and counting. We’re still GO at this time. We’ll be coming up on the automatic sequence in about 10 or 15 seconds from this time. All still GO at this time. Neil Armstrong reported back when he received the good wishes, “Thank you very much. We know it will be a good flight.” Firing command coming in now. We are on the automatic sequence. We’re approaching the three-minute mark in the count. T minus 3 minutes and counting. T minus 3—we are GO with all elements of the mission at this time.

  He had his binoculars to his eyes. A tiny part of him was like a penitent who had prayed in the wilderness for sixteen days and was now expecting a sign. Would the sign reveal much or little?

  … all is still GO as we monitor our status for it. Two minutes 10 seconds and counting. The target for the Apollo 11 astronauts, the moon. At lift-off we’ll be at a distance of 218,096 miles away. Just passed the two-minute mark in the countdown. T minus 1 minute 54 seconds and counting. Our status board indicates that the oxidizer tanks in the second and third stages now have pressurized. We continue to build up pressure in all three stages here at the last minute to prepare for lift-off. T minus 1 minute 35 seconds on the Apollo mission, the flight that will land the first man on the moon. All indications coming in to the Control Center at this time indicate we are GO. One minute 25 seconds and counting. Our status board indicates the third stage completely pressurized. Eighty-second mark has now been passed. We’ll go on full internal power at the fifty-second mark in the countdown. Guidance system goes on internal at 17 seconds leading up to the ignition sequence at 8.9 seconds. We’re approaching the sixty-second mark on the Apollo 11 mission. T minus 60 seconds and counting. We have passed T minus 60. Fifty-five seconds and counting. Neil Armst
rong just reported back, “It’s been a real smooth countdown.” We have passed the fifty-second mark. Forty seconds away from the Apollo 11 lift-off. All the second-stage tanks now pressurized. Thirty-five seconds and counting. We are still GO with Apollo 11. Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts reported, “Feels good.” T minus 25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal, 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero, all engines running, LIFT-OFF. We have a lift-off, 32 minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11.

  But nobody watching the launch from the Press Site ever listened to the last few words. For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition, and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press Site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames.

  No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound.

  Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, “Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!” but not his voice, almost like the Italian girl saying “fenomenal,” and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears, hot in all the intimacy of a forming of heat, as if one’s ear were in the caldron of a vast burning of air, heavens of oxygen being born and consumed in this ascension of the rocket, and a poor moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God—the fire was white as a torch and long as the rocket itself, a tail of fire, a face, yes now the rocket looked like a thin and pointed witch’s hat, and the flames from its base were the blazing eyes of the witch. Forked like saw teeth was the base of the flame which quivered through the lens of the binoculars. Upwards. As the rocket keened over and went up and out to sea, one could no longer watch its stage, only the flame from its base. Now it seemed to rise like a ball of fire, like a new sun mounting the sky, a flame elevating itself.

  Many thousands of feet up it went through haze and the fire feathered the haze in a long trailing caress, intimate as the wake which follows the path of a fingerling in inches of water. Trailings of cloud parted like lips. Then a heavier cloud was punched through with sudden cruelty. Then two long spumes of wake, like two large fish following our first fish—one’s heart took little falls at the changes. “Ahhh,” the crowd went, “Ahhh,” as at the most beautiful of fireworks, for the sky was alive, one instant a pond and at the next a womb of new turns: “Ahhh,” went the crowd, “Ahhh!”

  Now, through the public address system, came the sound of Armstrong talking to Launch Control. He was quieter than anyone else. “Inboard cutoff” he said with calm in his voice.

  Far in the distance, almost out of sight, like an all-but-transparent fish suddenly breaking into head and tail, the first stage at the rear of the rocket fell off from the rest, fell off and was now like a man, like a sky diver suddenly small. A new burst of motors started up, some far-off glimpse of newborn fires which looked pale as streams of water, pale were the flames in the far distance. Then the abandoned empty stage of the booster began to fall away, a relay runner, baton just passed, who slips back, slips back. Then it began to tumble, but with the slow tender dignity of a thin slice of soap slicing and wavering, dipping and gliding on its way to the floor of the tub. Then mighty Saturn of the first stage, empty, fuel-voided, burned out, gave a puff, a whiff and was lost to sight behind a cloud. And the rocket with Apollo 11 and the last two stages of Saturn V was finally out of sight and on its way to an orbit about the earth. Like the others he stayed and listened to the voices of the astronauts and the Capcom through the P.A. system.

  PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER: At 3 minutes, downrange 70 miles, 43 miles high, velocity 9,300 feet per second.

  ARMSTRONG: We’ve got skirts up.

  CAPSULE COMMUNICATOR: Roger, we confirm, Skirts up.

  ARMSTRONG: Tower is gone.

  CAPCOM: Roger, tower.

  PAO: Neil Armstrong confirming separation and the launch escape tower separation.

  ARMSTRONG: Houston be advised the visual is GO today.

  On the way back to Cocoa Beach there was a monumental traffic jam, and Aquarius had time to look at objects by the road. There was a parked trailer with a twelve-foot inflated rubber rocket—it looked like a condom with a painted tip. Down its length ran a legend.

  GOOD

  LUCK

  A

  P

  O

  L

  L

  O

  11

  Montg.

  Ala.

  The radio was playing in the car. Fred Something-or-other from the Titusville Chamber of Commerce was talking fast. “And when the folks who were visiting this launch here go home, I want them to tell everybody how beautiful it was from Titusville.”

  “Folks,” said an announcer, “get in on the Apollo 11 Blast-off Sale.” The radio had lost no time.

  America—his country. An empty country filled with wonders.

  Aquarius did not know how he felt. He was happy all afternoon and went surfboarding for the first time, not even displeased that it was harder than he thought to stand up.

  In the evening he left Cocoa Beach to fly back to Houston where he would cover the trip to the moon and back. On the flight, everybody was drunk, and the hostesses were flip and hippy and could have been drinking themselves. The Southern businessmen were beaming.

  In the late edition he brought with him, Aquarius read that the Reverend Abernathy together with a few poor families had watched the launching from the VIP area, after making a request of Dr. Thomas O. Paine, Administrator of NASA, for special badges. “If it were possible for us not to push the button tomorrow and solve the problems with which you are concerned, we would not push the button,” Dr. Paine said.

  Answered the Reverend Abernathy after the launch, “This is really holy ground. And it will be more holy once we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide for those who do not have houses.”


  Aquarius thought more than once of how powerful the vision of Apollo-Saturn must have been for the leader of the Poor People’s Crusade. Doubtless he too had discovered that his feet were forced to shake. However, Aquarius was not yet ready to call this hallowed ground. For all he knew, Apollo-Saturn was still a child of the Devil. Yet if it was, then all philosophers flaming in orbit, the Devil was beautiful indeed. Or rather, was the Devil so beautiful because all of them, Johnsons, Goldwaters, Paines, Abernathys, press grubs and grubby Aquarius, were nothing but devils themselves. For the notion that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God was either the heart of the vision, or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent. A ship of flames was on its way to the moon.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Greatest Week

  If lift-off had just provided him with sensations not unlike the very mania of apocalypse, the ensuing flat heat of Houston on his return, the oppression of Nassau Bay off NASA Highway 1 this night in July came into his lungs with the smell of a burnt-out tire. He plummeted into a profound depression. Everything was wrong. Having sneered at the red velvet king-sized bed in the snappy motel off the highway, he now discovered that he was not to have it again. In the avalanche of reporters and corporation representatives who descended on the Texas plain near Manned Spacecraft Center to be near the collective brain which would pilot the flight, he, miserable sophisticate from the East, had somehow suffered a missed accommodation—as agreeable under the circumstances as a slipped disc—and was forced to camp out in the boondocks: in this case, a buried little basement apartment, one-room-with-kitchenette, furnished in convalescent spaced-out colors of dead gray, dull brown, dishwater white, and bargain-furniture green. You may be certain he missed the motel! The apartment had dingy Venetian blinds, plastic of course. Each time he tilted the slats to a new angle of admission of light, the blinds gave an oooong of sound which went without pause into the Graves Registration Department of his depressed psyche. Still he kept working the slats. At least it gave him power over some dimension of his environment.