Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  Finally, there had to be motivation beyond measure, some need to succeed which would keep a man pointed to his target, locked into his target, ready to dare the very explosion of his flesh before he would give up his destination. It would have to be a motivation powerful enough to take him through training, public exposure, inhuman tension, and the dread weight of being responsible for NASA’s effort over ten years.

  Slayton picked Armstrong. He had been one of the best test pilots in America, yet unlike many of the other astronauts, his personality did not suggest that there was a hive of possible occupations he had left behind. He would not have been a politician, a professional athlete, an Air Force general, a top corporation executive—no, something in his personality and in his history would insist that he seemed born to be a pilot. He had learned to fly before he could drive a car; he had paid for his lessons, nine dollars each, out of the forty cents an hour he earned from deliveries around a pharmacy. He had built model airplanes, read every issue of Air Trails, and had excelled at not too much else. He had not been an athlete in high school, nor the center of any high-riding social life—if he played baritone horn in a jazz band, he was still not winning dance contests, and if he went to college it was by the thrifty route of Navy scholarship to study aeronautical engineering, then on to Pensacola for flight training. Yet at twenty-one, he was flying Panther jets in the Korean War, had seventy-eight combat missions and three Air Medals, and had almost been lost twice. Once he flew a crippled plane back to the carrier Essex, another time he brought a plane with one wing half-lost back far enough from enemy lines to parachute to safety. As there are bullfighters who will go back and fight bulls so soon as they recuperate from their last wounds, so Armstrong was always back in a plane, no matter how many experiences he had had which would have encouraged a man to quit. It is worth repeating that he was the only astronaut who did soaring in his spare time. It was apparent that his life was founded upon the act of being aloft.

  Of course Armstrong’s qualifications as a matinee idol were not monumental. If he had a face as American as any astronaut in Houston, and a small-town background to match, if he would appeal to all of the silent majority in every town in the Midwest and South, he was still too perfect, too polite, too reserved, finally too pinched in manner to interest that part of America not partisan to space and inclined to give priority to the accelerating needs of the cities. Of course, none of the available astronauts were likely to satisfy. NASA had picked them in the first place for more functional qualities than the ability to arouse a continuing fascination in the public. Armstrong at least would not offend too many sensibilities for he would obviously respect the indefinable chastity of the moon ground; there were all too many astronauts who thought chastity was something which came with a belt. On the other hand, Armstrong had too many qualifications in the next regard. Over the years, he had had not only an intimate acquaintance with the nearness of death, but been in the literal presence of it. List not only the crashes and near-crashes in planes, there was also the death of his young daughter from a brain tumor, the near loss of his family when their house caught fire one night and burned to the ground. This was Jan Armstrong’s account:

  Neil told me to call the fire department. I couldn’t get the operator on the telephone at 3 a.m.… I tried dialing 116, because I had had a first aid course in California. Then I realized that number was local only for the Los Angeles area. So I put the phone down, and Neil had gone in for Marky. I ran to the back of the house, and I was banging on the fence calling for Pat and Ed White … It was a six-foot fence. The Whites’ air conditioning wasn’t working … and they heard me calling. Ed came bolting over the fence. I don’t know how he did it, but he took one leap and he was over. He got the hoses out immediately, and by this time I had run around to the front of the house for Neil to hand Marky out the window. But no: Neil didn’t do that. They were little windows, and Neil would have had to break one of them. He brought Mark back down the hall, back to our bedroom and out. He was standing there calling for somebody to come and get Mark because he was—what, ten months old?—and he couldn’t put him down because he was afraid Mark would crawl into the swimming pool and drown. By this time I could hear the fire engines on the way—Pat White had turned in the alarm. This whole wall was red, and the glass was cracking in the windows. I can remember Ed White calling me. He was saying: “Here you hold the hose; I’ll get Mark.” Neil had gone in for Ricky, who was just awakening at the time. And I was standing with the hose, the concrete was burning my feet, and we had to keep watering the concrete so we could stand there.

  Guess at the subsequent shock when Ed White was burned to death in the fire with Grissom and Chaffee.

  Armstrong must have been a man for whom dread was as near as breath. Search for evidence in the very lack of emotion with which Armstrong relates what was probably the most unnerving malfunction of a spaceship up to that date. In his Gemini 8 flight with David Scott, the mission had called for rendezvous, then docking with an unmanned Agena capsule previously fired into orbit. The rendezvous proved successful, so did the docking at first. But in a short period both vehicles began to spin, first slowly, then rapidly. Attempts to reduce the movement failed to work. Here is Armstrong’s account:

  We felt something that Dave was to describe later as “constructive alarm.” We were aware of a serious emergency. A test pilot’s job is identifying problems and getting the answers. We never once doubted we would find an answer—but we had to find it fast.

  Although we had no way of knowing for sure, we were concerned that the stresses might be getting dangerously high—that the two spacecraft might break apart. We discussed undocking, but we had to be sure that the tumbling rate at the instant of separation would be low enough to keep us from colliding moments later.

  As we unlatched, we still hoped to rejoin the Agena. At this point we figured that the trouble was in the Agena, but it wasn’t. After separation, the Gemini spacecraft stopped responding to the controls and rotated more rapidly than ever—the sun flashed through the window about once a second. The sensations were much like those you would feel during an aircraft spin. Neither Dave nor I felt the approach of loss of consciousness, but if the rates continued to increase we knew that an intolerable level would be reached. The only way to stabilize the spacecraft would be to shut down the regular control system and turn on the thrusters in the reentry control system.

  I made that decision reluctantly—reluctantly, because once the decision was made, the mission had to be terminated. That excluded Dave Scott’s EVA, the two-hour walk in space scheduled for later in the flight—and that hurt.

  After a check of all the electrical circuits, we finally pinpointed the problem: The Number 8 thruster had been firing on its own.

  What a horror; what a paltry air of description! Two men in a cramped capsule revolving around once each second, the sun flashing with the delirium of a shield in combat, the dials turning with the revolving eye. How difficult to avoid the conviction that one’s existence was finally spinning into a vortex. Unspoken by any astronaut had been a covert wonder about the benign receptions of space. Was there no curse in space, no buried storms in the oceans of space? At that moment, Armstrong and Scott must have felt as if they had blundered past the last taboo into the whirlpool of all fury.

  By pressing the abort button, Armstrong saved them. Reentry control began a set of operations programmed for landing. That stabilized the craft. Afterward, Armstrong was considered to have made a brilliant move, for a thruster had been stuck in firing position and there had been no other way to turn it off.

  We cannot speculate on the dreams which followed, but the wipe-out of all feeling from his description can hardly drive us away from the point that a man who has been through such an experience will not soon cease living with it in his sleep. Worse. Engineers were never able to explain the malfunction of the thruster. The psychology of machines is trial enough, but nothing next to the suspicion that one mi
ght have an unnatural influence on insensate instruments. What a suspicion for a man to hold of himself. Afterward, it would not be so automatic to remain an astronaut: one might need some of the monomania of Captain Ahab. There is never a hint Armstrong ever thought of trying another profession. If Slayton was looking for a commander with motivation, Armstrong had been offering his credentials. There is either something close to schizophrenia in his lack of reaction to the dangers about him, or we must go right past the competence of any psychologist to use the word for a man like Armstrong and recognize that some of the brave have a lover’s sense of death as a partner whose nearness is comfortable, as if on those occasions a quiet voice declares, “You, sir, have nothing to fear if your ship passes over the bar,” no, Armstrong must have been brave about flying and wise about the nearness of dying ever since he had learned to solo on his sixteenth birthday, for he was not much older when he saw one of his friends crash a plane into a power line and be killed. No wonder Armstrong’s nerves were occasionally thus taut that a Houston journalist who inadvertently broke the news to an astronaut’s wife about her husband’s death was never to have any luck with Armstrong. “Keep that man away,” was the comment. “He’s a ghoul.”

  One wonders at last at the selection. The Director of Flight Crew Operations is obviously a man with his own nerve. For what avalanche of criticism would come on Slayton if the end of Apollo 11 was tragic. What a hint of the curse of the ages would feature writers find in details about Armstrong. Why, he had even crashed the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle—a species of steam calliope and helicopter on stilts which gave a simulation of what it might be like to land with one-sixth of gravity on the moon—yes, the LLRV had gone out of control on Armstrong, and he had been forced to use his ejection seat and be landed by parachute. He was the only astronaut who had crashed in the LLRV. Still, Slayton picked him. Living in the privation of sending other men on a job he wished to do himself, Slayton’s sense of the abilities of particular astronauts to perform particular expeditions into the extraordinary must have taken on levels of acuteness one does not easily conceive. Almost any man other than Slayton was bound to classify Armstrong as accident-prone and a bad risk. Slayton, however, may have been working on the thesis that only a man who had been in and out of death as many times as Armstrong could be entrusted to pass through the unpredictable minutes of a descent to the moon, down to that untenanted and eventless ground, that dead body whose light, when full, inhabited the switches of human sanity on the living earth, yes, perhaps only a man familiar with that twilight of the sleeping sky which may be known in the soul when death lays near and the psyche begins to hover, only a man who has become familiar with how soon the psyche will lift and begin to depart, yes, only a man who has lived with death since a boy with a recurrent dream (“I could, by holding my breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much happened; I neither flew nor fell in those dreams. I just hovered.”), only such a man, hovering for all one knew next to dying without a struggle in his sleep on many a long night of his childhood, could be the man to enter the sanctums and veils of the moon. For he had inhabited them since he was a child. He was familiar with the awe of his task. He could be capable of calm where other brave men, feeling the terror of emotions never felt before, could spin into a vertigo of the will at that dread which comes not from dying but from stepping into death and feeling no immediate urge to retreat.

  The inquiry has obviously pushed too far. It is not likely Armstrong went about talking of an old recurring dream to Slayton, but then it was hardly necessary. Slayton was a man who took off on hunting trips when he could—his decision would come from the presence of qualities he would not even bother to name. So Aquarius would report, and he had no more for evidence than a night at dinner with the Director of Flight Crew Operations and his wife, and it was a night in which Slayton with long practice had not made a single remark which could be quoted in the morning. Yet, in the resonance of his silences, the weight of his smile, in the sense of his gravity, yes, even in his maintenance of a pause at the depth of man’s adventure to the moon, was all that fiction of unspoken evidence upon which novelists throw themselves and journalists snarl. After this dinner, Aquarius was always certain Slayton had picked Armstrong with care, picked him out of some equivalent of the reasons Aquarius would give, yet they never mentioned his name once, nor the name of Aldrin either, and Aquarius was equally certain Slayton had picked Aldrin with much the same measure of care.

  V

  “Neil and I are both fairly reticent people and we don’t go in for free exchanges of sentiment,” Aldrin was to say. “Even during long training we didn’t have many free exchanges.”

  One may be certain of that. They were a curious mating of opposites, a team picked most probably for their complementary abilities and aptitudes. Temperamentally they suggested the equivalent of one of those dour Vermont marriages where the bride dies after sixty years and the husband sits rocking on the farmhouse porch. “Guess you feel pretty bad, Zeb, that Abigail is gone.” The chair keeps rocking, there is a long puff on the pipe. “Nope,” says Zeb, “never did get to like her much.”

  It was not a case of Armstrong and Aldrin disliking each other. How would one ever know? It is almost as if the question never occurred to them. They had each, after all, been married for years and their wives did not pretend to know them easily. They were men who liked to be alone in their thoughts so much that once teamed up with each other, there may have been no need to speak for more than functional purposes. It is possible they never had to decide whether they liked one another or not. Those who wish to live within their own minds ask for nothing more perfect than a companion whose presence is not felt.

  Yet how remarkable if their personalities did not impinge upon one another, for they were profoundly different men. Armstrong, as we have seen, was a virtuoso of a flyer; Aldrin was a powerful personification of organized human intelligence. Of course, he could fly a plane well, just as he could give a superior performance at any number of activities from pole vaulting to celestial mechanics, but in relation to other astronauts, he was not among the most accomplished of aviators, he had not in fact even been a test pilot. Yet of all these men he was the one whose command of mathematics and complex statistical operations was so tuned to the logic of information systems that he was doubtless the nearest human equivalent to a computer at NASA, and had a Doctor of Science degree in Astronautics from MIT, the only one in the first three groups of astronauts to have earned his doctorate. Back in April 1966, the Director of Flight Operations, Chris Kraft, had spoken of Aldrin in these encomiums:

  In the early stages of the development of the Gemini rendezvous mission plan, Major Aldrin almost single-handedly conceived and pressed through certain basic concepts … without which the probability of mission success would unquestionably have been considerably reduced.

  A well-known geologist spoke of Aldrin as “the best scientific mind we have sent into space.” Ted Guillory, an engineer engaged in designing the detailed trajectories and orbits of a flight plan, said, “He carried a slide rule for his Gemini flight on the rendezvous, and I sometimes think he could correct a computer. I can remember hearing him say things like, ‘If the computer says I’m twenty feet out of plane, I’ll believe ten of that, but not all twenty.’ He’s one of the few people who can figure out all those rendezvous things in his head.” The accolade from his wife was one straight statement, “If Buzz were a trash man and collected trash, he would be the best trash collector in the United States.” And Aldrin speaking of himself remarked, “At West Point the name of the game is, ‘Do what people tell you to do, keep your nose clean, and work out your academic progress.’ I fitted into that pretty well. I’m a sort of mechanical man,” and then added, “or I was.” We can return to his exception later. It is enough for now to say that if his personality suggests the loneliness of the computer in a man of enormous will, he is yet a complex figure. It is not easy to recognize, however, for he is so promin
ently a man who has become the instrument of his own will. All his biographical details emphasize loneliness, self-sufficiency, eccentricity. He was the son of a strong father, a man who had been an intimate of Lindbergh and Robert Goddard, a species of minor-league Rickenbacker; for his aid in handling Italo Balbo’s flight from Italy to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, Aldrin Sr. was made Commendatore in Mussolini’s Air Force. We can picture a father full of force and full of guidance, but usually away on business trips to tend his interests in commercial aviation, so that his only son grew up among maids and sisters, a boy prodigy in his powers of digestion, for the son could consume cans of tuna fish, packages of Jell-O powder dry, and sandwiches of peanut butter and sliced banana sprinkled with powdered chocolate, a mystery until one assumes he was already processing carloads of hitherto undigested information on the parameters of elemental nutrients in abdominal rendezvous. His activities in school offer similar sidelights on his will. Barely able to read one year, he could dominate a class the next. Yet once interested in football, his marks deteriorated. Warned he would not be accepted at West Point or Annapolis if they did not improve, he gave up sports for a year and moved from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s. Halfback and quarterback originally, he also moved to center. At West Point he was first in his class at the end of plebe year but on advice from his father, “in my experience number-one graduates become more or less freaks,” he determined to slow down. He succeeded. He graduated third. The irony is unavoidably present—change for Aldrin was never grace but challenge. If challenge is usually the imperative to do more in an unfamiliar situation, it is also—given the momentum of much human mass applied to a problem—a challenge to reduce such momentum once it is begun. It is apparent in everything he comments upon. For example: