Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  It was American capitalism most undeniably in the saddle, not that capitalism which had come out of the hard Scotch-Irish fiber, the very wings of the Wasp, not that capitalism in which greed and piety had done their wild Celtic jig, some blessing or curse from the Druids still stinging the toes, not that good old Midwestern Scotch-Irish, German, Swedish, English, Welsh (and who knows what other good cold bloods?) which had gone into the making of that old-fashioned profit and propriety, that greed and service, itch for exploitation and nose for growth, that quickness to cheat and that sense of solid procedure, gambling man’s love of destiny and workman’s love of tools, pillar of moral rectitude, friend of high hypocrisy—no, not that particular capitalism which had come round the bend into the Twentieth Century full of its wild dreams and orderly homes, that turn-of-the-century American capitalism, the only prosperous middle-class power ever built on a series of outrageous gambles, no, that capitalism had passed over to its son, corporate capitalism, and corporate capitalism was the marriage of huge profit with huge service, of teamwork—the methods of the hospital mixed with the methods of the football team—and of detestation of contradiction. Where the old capitalist had a rock glint, “I’m a crazy old bastard,” he would confide to any reporter, thinking of his ability to water the stock of widows and head the drive to distribute Christmas packages to the poor, proud of every paradox in him, as if in the boil of his contradictions were the soups and nutrients of his strength, so his son was a dull-eyed presence, a servant of reason—contradictions as odious to him as words of filth before a table of the immaculate. Therefore, the son was never about to work alone. There is no contradiction in a committee, not at least after it has delivered its collective measure of finding. Like the father, the corporate son sought to make profit for the corporation, but neither he nor the corporation did it for profit, they did it for reason, did it to remove contradiction from the earth, remove problem and heartache from human interface; subtract germs, viruses, pests and bugs from the bounty of nature; subdue contradictory ideologies in foreign affairs; extirpate irrationality from conduct and inefficiencies from machines; and sometimes Aquarius would even suspect they wished to remove human activity from divine punishment. For the more quickly that technology demands new certitudes from physics, and receives mysteries instead (being obliged thereby to call a halt or advance blindly on the engineering side of the interface), the more does technology secretly suspect that God is irrational in His judgment, and best kicked upstairs where He will not interfere with human disposal of life after death. Such at least is Aquarius’ view of the American corporation. He thinks it is not sublimely suited to deal with heartache on the male or female side of the interface—in fact he sometimes thinks the reason the American family is in so much danger is because life in ranch houses is so deadly. He knows every bug the corporation slays by reason creates two by the stimulations of mutation, he knows the bounty of nature is gagged, in fact plastic wastes are stuffed into every one of her mouths; he knows Communism thrives on the opposition of the American corporation, and degenerates into civil war when left alone; he suspects rational solutions to poverty will end in delinquency, and finally he knows that the corporate son of the old capitalist does not often get the inefficiencies out of his machines, for he is more interested in communicating his love of reason than in applying it. So he designs new machines before the old are tested and vitiates the intestinal fortitude of the old mechanical insides by using inferior materials which break down too early. The money which used to be spent for good materials is now spent for advertising the product. He speaks of a society of reason and tells lies every time he opens his mouth. The more simple and ubiquitous is his commodity, the greater are his lies. No surprise then if the lunar air of engineers at NASA was reminiscent of the hearty hollow manner of many executives in many corporations, that look which suggests one is trapped on the inside of a drum. Every corporation executive told lies because it was in the nature of his work to be expected to make positive statements, but he was obliged to make them about matters which were larger than a man could comprehend. How indeed could one know what the result would be of five million people all brushing their gums with your toothpaste each morning, and who knew if your toothpaste was better, and if not, why bother? Why consume one’s life in this nasty nugatory activity of pushing at products, and indeed what did it matter if one toothpaste was better than another—let each consumer find his own. So a quiet sense of woe lay over all the antiseptic aisles of all the corporations, mixed in with the office jokes and the good Wasp regard for positive living and healthy cheer, a subtle woe fine in its strain for most, but intense in its concoction when rendered, if any corporation executive cared to render such a bitter drop, for it was a death-heavy guilty stone-heavy woe that man exhausted his working hours on earth in corporate activities so ridiculously petty that the only answer could be that he did not dare to push further and faster into real ideas of nature, manufacture, joy, dread, death, and human drama because his own ideas had gone dead before his sense of shock at the taboos he had smashed in the century.

  Consider that sense of life programmed and wasted, of reason so overapplied to life that all contradictions having been killed, the light of reason had finally left the eye, yes that was also in the bands of force and process and network which flowed across the country and came to focus in the bank of instruments eighteen inches over each astronaut’s head as he lay in his plastic suit on a plastic couch—lay indeed in a Teflon coated Beta-cloth (laid on Kapton, laid on next to Mylar, next to Dacron, next to neoprene-coated nylon) space suit on his Armalon couch—plastic, that triumph of reason over nature!—and the astronauts, whether feeling a focus of such forces or oblivious to them, were nonetheless a true focus of concentration for every corporation executive in the country, even for the man who sold the toothpaste, since aerospace was not all that was in this capsule, the food and drug industries were here as well in their special medicines, extraordinary toilet papers, and exceptionally processed foods, so too the construction industries, the gas and fuel industries, metal industries, forget the corporation, occupation, or industry which did not have its relation to one of the factories responsible for one of the buttons in the six-hundred-and-fifty-odd buttons, switches, dials and controls which fanned over the heads of these generals of the church of corporate endeavor. The corporation had replaced the old existential gambles of the small-town capitalist and the lonely tycoon with the security of the organization. The corporation substituted cooperation for competition, and reason for struggle, but because its activities were usually at once immense and petty, like the manufacture of toothpaste, immense and noxious, like the production of cigarettes or poisons for war, or immense and depressing, like the shoddy production of slovenly functioning automobiles, or even immense and scandalizing, like the ways in which aviation contracts were garnered, the corporation not only gave security but engendered loneliness and woe, that same heart-heavy death-heavy stone-guilty woe. Small wonder there was a communion of feeling around the nation for these generals of the forces of a new church which offered a new communion in replacement for the loneliness of meaningless effort: here at last was American capitalism attached to a corporate activity which was momentous, dangerous, awesome, and a palliative to dread, for if the venture succeeded, could the heavens despise the nation? Supported by the memory of tragedy, the three burned and asphyxiated corpses in the hideously charred cockpit, that very recollected sense of pain gave sentiments of nobility to corporation executives looking to find a line of connection between their work and the vault of this endeavor.

  It was not that NASA had done a perfect job, in fact there were critics enough to accuse it of timidity on one hand and rash acceleration on the other, scientific critics to decry the lack of real scientific investigation on this trip, critics who called for unmanned flight, critics who cried for an end to explorations in space altogether until our problems on earth had been properly solved, and no one could d
eny that NASA, once recovered from the twenty-month paralysis which followed the death of Grissom, Chaffee and White, had accelerated its flight schedules at so inhuman a pace the suspicion had to arise that they seemed to think if they did not make the moon in ’69, fulfill the dead and martyred President’s directive to land a man and return him safely by the end of the decade, that indeed there would be no landing at all, and the end of all space effort. If NASA did not believe in a psychology of machines, it certainly seemed to subscribe to a psychology of events, for from October 11, when Apollo 7 with Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham went up, until nine months and a few days later, to this day of July 16, four flights in all had been made, Apollo 7, 8, 9 and 10, flights on sixty-day centers, flights rotated so quickly that the lessons of the last flight could hardly be catalogued, let alone absorbed and employed before the next flight was ready, and indeed some very large chances had been taken. Before Apollo 7 all sorts of flaws had been found in Apollos 4, 5, and 6, all unmanned. Apollo 4 spilled fuel during the flight, and a computer station suddenly shut down. On Apollo 5, the Lem, being tested for the first time, was able to fire its engine at only ten percent of maximum thrust, and that for only four seconds instead of thirty-eight (it was not to be tested again until McDivitt and Schweickart took the large risk of flying it in Apollo 9) yes, Apollo 5 had been so unsatisfactory a flight that even the windows of the Lem had broken while readying for the launch, and that for no reason engineers could discover. And Apollo 6 had been a near disaster. Two of the five second-stage engines had cut out prematurely. The third-stage engine failed to re-ignite when it should. As a result, the spacecraft went into the wrong orbit. On Apollo 7, to repeat, there had been fifty mishaps, everything from malfunction of the navigational guidance and control equipment, to circuit failures in flight, plus sticky control handles, mysterious surges of the capsule, a nine-minute communications blackout on the seventh day of the mission, three days of medical monitoring lost. Perfectionists could have spent six months recovering from those fifty mishaps, but this was October 1968, this was the year in which the war in Vietnam became a debauch, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been killed, and Lyndon Johnson abdicated, this was the year in which the colleges showed open signs of revolution and corporation executives for munition firms were barred from campuses, it was a year in which industry was still recovering from the shock that General Motors had put private detectives on Ralph Nader. (Didn’t General Motors understand how modest and uneventful were the private lives of savage writers?) So NASA had barreled ahead, NASA had pushed for results as if the very nerve of endeavor in the nation depended on their effort, depended on doing it before ’69 was out (what a joke for the sophistications of Jack Kennedy that men would first kiss the moon in ’69). Ignoring the dubious performance of Apollo 7, they rushed Apollo 8 into readiness in the next sixty days. That was the first flight of men ever to go up in Saturn V, but the trip went all the way to the moon, passed around it ten times in orbit, some orbits so low as seventy miles away, while Frank Borman read the opening words of Genesis on color television to a Christmas Eve audience and brought his crew back before the year was out. After that, it seemed as if NASA could not make a mistake. Gone was the bad publicity of the days when Gemini flights were regarded as stunts, gone were the horrors of the investigation of the fire. The sense of waiting for a blowup had abated. A new sense seemed to have arisen that this congeries of corporations must work in ways they had not worked before, cooperate as they had not yet learned, tell the truth across the board in fast-working practice—it was no longer corporate procedure but mission procedure. The hundreds of thousands of workers in NASA and the corporations who worked for NASA now had a holy task, they had the most serious and honorable work of anyone hired by any corporation in the nation and so, like that Russian people which learned how to wage war and discover efficiency in their factories only when the country was in danger of whole occupation by the Nazis, so did American capitalism finally put together a cooperative effort against all the glut, waste, scandal, corruption, inefficiency, dishonesty, woe, dread, oversecurity and simple sense of boredom which hounded the lives of its corporate workers, and prove finally to react as if the country were being occupied. And indeed it was. For years, the forces of irrationality had been mounting into a protective war against the ravages of corporate rationality run amuck. Now corporate rationality to save itself would commit the grand, stupendous, and irrational act (since no rational reasons of health, security, wisdom, prudence or profit could be given) of sending a ship with three men to the moon. What a mighty congregating, what a streaming of workers and techniques toward the base of the rocket, what a gathering of the hours as the countdown proceeded, what a last week of huge effort to lift Apollo 11 from the ground.

  VII

  Not all the men who worked for NASA were hearty and hollow or had a lunar air. Of the five thousand who worked on the launch, perhaps half were present at one time or another on Pad A at Launch Complex 39, and they were “so highly motivated,” said the Launch Operations Manager, Paul Donnelly, at a press conference, “that even a loser comes in to do a good day’s work.” Donnelly was a middle-aged leprechaun of a man with boiling green eyes, pepper-and-salt blond hair, a snubbed Irish nose, a green jacket, a white shirt, a greenspeckled tie. When asked if he was tense about the launch, he snapped, “Suppose you have to have a brain operation? Would you want the surgeon to be tense?” He was firm in his answers, tough as a bowstring ready to send its arrow. “We lift off if the ceiling is anywhere over five hundred feet,” he said in reply to one query. “Maximum allowable wind is twenty-eight to thirty knots,” he gave back for another. He had diagrams, he showed details of the countdown, he had been a semipro baseball player in his youth.

  That was one kind of man around launch operations. The Director, Rocco Petrone, already quoted, was another, and he was a big massive ex-football player at West Point with thighs for forearms and eyes which suggested the compressed power of oil about to come in at the bottom of a well, his mind—by reputation—a store of endless detail. Many men who looked like him were attached to the work of the launch. It was heavy work. Over six million pounds were going to go up in the air, and go up by the force of a fire which consumed its fuel so fast—over half a million gallons to be burned in two and a half minutes—that one might as well think of it as a controlled explosion. Where everything at MSC in Houston was drawn, wired, small, neat or locked up, the buildings without character, the technicians lunar—the structures here at Kennedy, the VAB, the Mobile Launcher, the Transporter and the Mobile Service Structure were in contrast gigantic powers gathered for a climax so rapid that months of work would have their fruition in two visible minutes across the sky, and indeed the power of commanding the flight would soon pass from the Control Center at Kennedy to Mission Control at Houston, where it would remain for the next eight days. So it was no accident that men who were strong and definite, men agile as baseball players or as isometrically bottled as guards or fullbacks should be attracted to launch operations. Indeed many of them had the kind of sullen collected hurricane violence you find in the Mexicans and Indians who work in Texas oil fields; a few of them dressed with the sportiness of Las Vegas spenders; if whisky and jazz was to be located anywhere in the ranks of NASA-men, it was in these technicians and workers whose problems revolved around pumping the million gallons of fuel into the bellies of the stages of Saturn V. If their eyes seemed tuned to the depths of fuels ready to roar into hundred-footed flames, if preparations for the launch left worry on their heavy faces, it was not because they had the kind of dread which comes from smashing taboos. No, Cocoa Beach had been wild and raucous in its time, and you could still hear such jokes in the strip bars as: “I want to commiserate with all you folks from Georgia because Governor Maddox just had a rectum transplant” … gulp … “and the rectum rejected him!” No, if there was dread here, it was the kind professional athletes have: will we win the game? They know they cannot
even think of not winning, for luck comes in strings. If they lose, worse retribution will follow. So they concentrate upon Wernher von Braun’s mighty Saturn V, and like good athletes take the effort of raising the rocket into their dreams, even in sleep they go over the function of each pipe and valve.