Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  If one studied their preference in sports it was directly significant that they neither listed spectator sports nor played them now. There was a line in their biographical records for Recreations and Hobbies, and among the sports in which they participated, baseball was not listed, nor football, nor wrestling, nor hockey, nor boxing, and only one astronaut mentioned basketball, and that in the course of listing a number of other sports and pastimes.

  Their choices marked and tabulated, the order of preference in sports for astronauts was handball, swimming, fishing, hunting, golf, water skiing, sailing, and skiing. A few mentioned squash or gymnastics or jogging or tennis. A few did skin diving, or scuba, or surfing. One liked shooting, one did weight lifting, two bicycling. Of them all, Armstrong was the only one to list soaring, and it was the only sport he listed.

  Aquarius added the choices of another eighteen men. His selection was now derived from all the remaining astronauts but for the scientist-astronauts, a special group he decided, since some of them could not even fly a light plane at the time they were accepted. It did not seem to affect the findings. The younger eighteen astronauts liked handball and fishing and hunting and swimming and golf with about the same frequency as the older men. He thought if there was a perception to extract from these modest facts, it was that the astronauts seemed to like water and were drawn to the principle of striking a ball or hitting a target. In fact, twenty-one of the thirty-four astronauts liked all three. Since five of the astronauts did not list their sports, and one said he liked all sports, the adjusted count gave twenty-two out of twenty-eight or three out of four men who were happy to be in the water or aiming at a target. It is not so hard to comprehend their being attracted to handball, golf, and hunting. Astronauts were not going to put on boxing gloves or play tackle football any more rapidly than surgeons or musicians—they had no desire for personal injury. It would delay their careers. But coordination between hand and eye was crucial, the cool nerve of the hunter was crucial, and competition among all those keyed-up egos competing with their quick reflexes for the same few limited Apollo seats—well, handball was no surprise. But the water. Why should men who fly in air be drawn to water? Well, Aquarius could hardly adopt his name without passing one grudged respect to the astrologer. So he noted that nine of his astronauts were Pisces and five Scorpio. Even with one Cancer, signs of water prevailed. Fifteen astronauts out of thirty-four was almost twice the expected average.

  It was as if water was a clue to the difference between astronauts and other men, for it hinted at a readiness for displacement. We tend to forget that not many primitives love water. As recently as a hundred years ago, few men could swim. It is as if we turned to the water when technology began to capture the land, as if we explored our bodies in the sea about the time we learned to fly in the air. Should there be an oncoming self-destruction for the species, it is not unreasonable that unconscious warnings would exist—if a partial destruction, all the more urgent might seem the alarms. In a landscape of pollution and disease when the roots themselves are poisoned, the healthy man might begin to prosper on the very condition which once had been next to death itself—he could learn to live on the stimulations of the uprooted and the displaced. In morphological terms, it is as if the cancer becomes the continuation, as if life leaps a step and the anomaly acquires the art of reproduction. So why not turn to water? To live with style and pleasure in such displacement is to get ready for space stations, hydroponic food, and air which derives from a canister. An afternoon on the water may be a bridge to their ultimate mission.

  Too farfetched? Is it too extortionate finally to deprive an astronaut and his family of a Sunday on a powerboat or an afternoon of fishing? Is it finally necessary to explore into these recreations? There are hours when Aquarius, thinking of the astronauts he had met, would wince at his own ideas, for he knew the astronauts were likely to say they believed in death-to-party-poopers. To read the transcript of Apollo 10 near the moon was to hook up with room service on a three-day wowser.

  “Hello, Houston, this is Snoopy.”

  “We is going. We is down among them, Charlie.”

  “We are right there. We’re right over it.”

  “I just wish we could stay.”

  “I’m telling you, we are low, we’re close, babe!”

  “Oh, Charlie, we just saw an earthrise and it’s just got to be magnificent.”

  “We have been down among them, babe.”

  He had only to think of Jim McDivitt of Apollo 9, who had the genial and side-calculating air of an urbane and successful Irish executive who had risen in a predominantly Protestant corporation. What had his personality to suggest which had any relation to this calculus of the soul Aquarius would inflict on astronauts? And there was Gordon Cooper, who had taken the last Mercury flight through twenty-two orbits of the earth, a record at the time, and he had been sufficiently relaxed to sleep in the Mercury capsule while waiting for the launch. Cooper was blue-eyed with a sunburned nose and a red neck. He looked like a man who played on a semipro football team because he wasn’t big enough for the major leagues, and worked in a gas station the middle of the week. He had the look of a player who would saunter into the dressing room half an hour before the game with his helmet cocked on the back of his head. While playing, he would roll up his sleeves. After the game he might take a shower with an unlit cigar. What would he think of Aquarius’ theories of displacement?

  And Schirra would laugh. Schirra had the keen cut of nose and cut of upturned lip which had him always looking about a room for the next fly he could catch. He looked more like a ruddy young movie executive than an astronaut. He never failed to smile. He smiled the way other people shake hands, or a cop directed traffic.

  Or Jim Lovell, who would command Apollo 13. He was big for an astronaut. Stolid. Imperturbable. He was reminiscent of the kind of clubfighter who usually came out of Canada—durable would be his middle name. You could hit such a fighter all night, but he would win the fight. Not by knockout. Points. Lovell would listen solemnly to such theories.

  And Pete Conrad, quick as a little tiger, but sensitive about his looks for he had protruding eyes, a small hooked handle of a nose, and a big friendly space between his two front teeth. He had a reedy voice guaranteed to pierce all static. “That’s an interesting theory, Norm,” he would doubtless say, “now, let me tell you mine.”

  And Frank Borman, hard as hand-forged nails, Borman of Apollo 9, first to go behind the moon. He had read Genesis to America at Christmas while in lunar orbit. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Borman had read with all the sober respect and uneasy pronunciation you bring to a stock market report. Borman was the man who had come back from his trip and said, “We had a horseshoe up our ass.” Now he was adviser to Richard Nixon on NASA affairs. Borman had been indignant when a misconstrued medical remark had prevented the President from having dinner with the crew of Apollo 11 the night before the launch. “He can’t possibly see them now before the launch,” said Borman, rapping his hand against his drinking cup while talking in the sun. “If one of the astronauts was even to sneeze, they’d blame the President forever.” Borman had the look of a man derived from five generations of German farmers who had never failed to do a hard day’s work. Aquarius did not have to wonder how Borman would receive his theories.

  Face to face with these onslaughts of the matter-of-fact, the practical and the philosophically immune, still Aquarius would not relinquish that other intuition which insisted it was more than a life of high risk, great technique, and enormous demands of commonplace phlegm, more than a natural graduation from fighter pilot to test pilot to space, no, the logic of these matters did not add up, the logic crossed a gulch. The life made no sense unless they were men of enormous even unnatural ambition or men attuned to a mission they could barely confront in their dreams.

  III

  A man who becomes a good fighter pilot does not think anything can ground him. Fighters are lik
e downhill racers—their sanity is that they do not look to pick up a sane option. Their balance is at the edge of balance.

  Fighter pilots growing older sometimes become test pilots. The chances they used to take casually now collect around the act of flying the most dangerous aircraft to be found. But they have developed into engineers.

  Once they become astronauts, however, they hardly test anything. Where once they might have been testing planes every two or three days, now they do not have more than one rocket flight every two or three years. They still fly, they fly T-38 jet trainers for hundreds of hours a year, but they are not testing the T-38, they are merely flying in order not to lose their reflexes. And astronaut training is in simulators or classrooms. They are on call for public appearances. As test pilots they flew rocket planes at four thousand miles an hour and lived as they pleased, free to carry a drinking party to the dawn or to search for solitude; now that they were astronauts they were obliged to live in homes of a certain price in suburbs of an impeccable predictability in a world of public relations where they were rendered subservient to propriety by a force of mysterious propriety within NASA itself, a force which might just as well have seeped from every door of every office until anything spontaneous in a man was stuffed into the cellar of his brain. They worked long hours, perhaps an average of fifty hours a week, and hardly knew when they would have their first space flight, or once up, whether they would ever have a space flight again. They were the best pilots in their profession, but now they flew only for practice, and they could not know for certain whether they would ever be able to practice their new profession. (It is as if Truman Capote gave up literature because he wished to write opera and suddenly could not find out whether any of his music would ever be sung.) All the while the astronauts were obliged to live in intense competition with one another, yet had to exhibit every face of good spirit and teamwork to the world. Stories were common at the Manned Spacecraft Center of astronauts who had shared the same flight yet hardly spoke to each other in the months before, so intense was their mutual dislike. Still they kept their animosity private for fear they could lose their seat on the flight. Then all of them had had to swallow the wrath they might have felt for the contractors connected to the fire which killed Grissom, Chaffee and White. Say it worse. Eight of them altogether had already been killed. Besides the fire, four had gone in fatal crashes of the T-38, and one in an auto accident. (Astronauts were quietly famous for driving their cars a foot apart at a hundred miles an hour.) One could say that the demand for order, hard work and propriety in such competitive near-violent men had produced their deaths, as if the very tension of their existence as in a game of musical chairs had pushed the escape from death of one man over into a higher potentiality for accident of another. Being an astronaut was perhaps the most honored profession in the nation, but of a total of sixty-six astronauts accepted since the program began, eight were dead and eight had resigned. Since seventeen of the original sixty-six were scientist-astronauts, and only three of them had separated from NASA, it meant that thirteen of the forty-nine flying astronauts were no longer present. The resignation and mortality rates are not so close in other honored professions. Of course, most of the astronauts work for only thirteen thousand dollars a year in base pay. Not much for an honored profession. There are, of course, increments and insurance policies and collective benefits from the Life Magazine contract, but few earn more than twenty thousand dollars a year.

  So we are obliged to consider why a man would divorce himself from his true talent—which is to test a new jet or rocket plane—and live instead in propriety, order, competition, and tension for twenty thousand dollars a year, knowing he could make three to five times that much in private life, and not be afraid to utter a resounding opinion, get drunk in public, yell at his children before strangers, or be paralyzed by scandal or divorce. Can it be that any man who takes up such a life for thirteen thousand dollars base pay a year is either running for President, patriotic to the point of mania, or off on a mission whose root is the field of the magnet in the iron of the stars?

  Some may have been running for President. John Glenn had been campaigning for senator before his accident in the tub, Borman was now close to Nixon, Schirra was a television commentator (a holding position) and Collins was yet to enter the State Department. And there were bound to be others. If an astronaut had political ambitions he did not necessarily announce them.

  Then there were men for whom a celebrity as astronaut was preferable to the professional anonymity of the test pilot. And some were patriots. There is no need to diminish the power of this motive. Once, in a meeting of astronauts, NASA executives and scientist-astronauts, the NASA administrator, then James Webb, had told them there would be a hiatus in the Space Program during the early 1970’s due to budget-cutting. The scientist-astronauts were gloomy. Last to arrive in the program, unscheduled for flights, they saw a delay of a decade or more before they could even go up. Scientific examination of the moon and space by experts such as themselves would be again and again delayed. One of the scientist-astronauts said, “Mr. Webb, this hiatus you’ve been referring to—how would you say that the scientific community—”

  “To hell with the scientific community,” Frank Borman cut in. The astronauts laughed. The attitude was clear. They were not in astronautics to solve the mysteries of the moon, they were astronauts to save America.

  Nonetheless, if two-thirds of the astronauts were politicians and patriots, the remainder might still be priests of a religion not yet defined nor even discovered. One met future space men whose manner was friendly and whose talk was small, but it was possible they had a mission. Like Armstrong or Aldrin they were far from the talk at hand. If they followed the line of a conversation, they still seemed more in communion with some silence in the unheard echoes of space.

  The Director of Flight Crew Operations, the chief in effect of the astronauts, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, was a man with powerful big-knuckled hands and the rugged grin of a good mechanic. He had his own burden—he had never been up. One of the original seven astronauts, he had been scheduled for a Mercury flight, but a faint heart murmur had been detected. So he was grounded. Because he had not gone into space, he had not had the dubious opportunity of the others to come back down and tell about the experience to family and friends, go through debriefings and talk to the Press until half the life of the event was gone. He had had instead to listen to the accounts of others. So of all the astronauts his personal intensity was perhaps the greatest—indeed he was certainly the astronaut Aquarius would have supposed had been longest and farthest in space. Instead, he was the man who directed the Astronaut Office and was therefore responsible for picking the crews.

  Slayton always pointed out that no one could be certain when schedules might be changed for reasons beyond the control of the Astronaut Office. If he had selected Armstrong to be first on the moon, a small shift in events could have made it Stafford of Apollo 10 or Conrad of Apollo 12. Nonetheless, it turned out to be Armstrong, and so it is hardly unnatural to assume that he was the particular pilot Deke Slayton wished to see there.

  IV

  Naturally, there was more to selecting a crew than divining who might be the men most suited to fill the aesthetic outline of a mission. Seniority had to be taken into account and a matching of abilities. Even chance dictated how certain astronauts were teamed with others. Collins, for example, had been joined with Armstrong and Aldrin out of a process which was close to automatic. Originally with Borman and Lovell on the crew of Apollo 8, Collins had been obliged to give up the flight because of a bone spur in his spine which required a serious operation. By the time he was fit again, Anders had replaced him. Collins, however, was entitled by the logic of these affairs to get on the first crew available. That happened to be Apollo 11. Whether he was particularly suited to work with Armstrong and Aldrin was probably not considered too long; indeed Slayton may have estimated that Collins was likely to get along wit
h any crew. Besides, it is equally possible a man in Slayton’s position would look to eschew fine psychological match-ups. The logic of the missions demanded that the men, like the machines, be to a degree interchangeable.

  Still, if you have the power to choose astronauts for a mission, you are most likely to exercise such a function when the mission is as important as an initial landing on the moon. Let us make the assumption in the face of every published statement to the contrary, that Armstrong was Slayton’s carefully considered choice and then go in for the further presumption of trying to enter Slayton’s mind.

  What would one look for? Obviously any astronaut selected would have to be a superb pilot, better if possible than his peers. On the other hand, it would not hurt if he were a man who would appeal to large numbers of Americans. The size of NASA activities in the future was going to be determined in some degree by the response of Americans to the moon shot. While the flight of Apollo 11 would certainly excite America in the summer of ’69, how profoundly could the public be reached? Would it be deep enough to arouse desire for more space travel in the cold months of budget cuts in the years ahead? Or would it merely flip a thrill for one hot summer, after which the murderous laws of fashion would take over? To withstand that time when the moon shot could pass into discard, an astronaut able to capture the imagination of Americans was required. Slayton was in trouble already. He needed a man like Lindbergh.

  Then came other categories of selection. They were less definable. All astronauts were brave men and all astronauts lived with death: landing on the moon, however, might require a special sensibility. While a man could get killed undergoing a routine checkout on the pad, while a man was certainly in danger going out into space for a walk, where the crew of Apollo 8 had stepped right over to the unknown when they had gone behind the moon, still none of that was equal to landing on the moon! A man ready to do that would need not nerves of steel but some sense of intimacy with death, conceivably some sense of death as a pale ancestor one had met before and known for years, or, failing that, a sense of tradition so profound, a faith so great, that the moon could reside in some outlying yard of that faith. A more ordinary astronaut, no matter how brave, might be dislodged from normal command of his nerve by the psychical dimensions of the event.