Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History

by Ben Mezrich

  Thad felt a surge of adrenaline at the mere thought of the call, scheduled for eight A.M. He knew that if he was at home instead of in the museum basement, he really would have been burning off the soles of his shoes, circling the cordless phone on the desk in his living room. The day before, in preparation, he’d even pasted a pair of photos to the bare wall behind the desk. One showed a reasonably chiseled, crew-cutted man in his mid-thirties, smiling toward the camera, dressed in a conservative-looking suit and tie. The second photo was of a woman who appeared to be middle-aged; from the style of the picture and the discomfort in the woman’s pose, it was obvious that the shot had been culled from a college administration handbook.

  No doubt the photos were probably overkill, maybe even a little psychotic—but Thad wasn’t going to take any chances, because the call really was that important. Disembodied voices made him nervous, so if he had to do the interview by phone, he was going to see the people he was talking to, even if it was in two dimensions.

  Eight A.M.—crazy, that the call that could potentially change everything for him was now just a handful of hours away, because the truth was, he had spent the past two years preparing for this moment.

  But that knowledge didn’t make him any less anxious. It wasn’t just any interview—and the position at the Johnson Space Center Cooperative Program wasn’t just any job. It was the first step toward reaching his goal of becoming an astronaut. Since the sixties, the JSC co-op program had been supplying NASA with talent. It had grown into an incredibly competitive and prestigious feeder to the space game; on average, there were eight hundred applicants for every fifty spots in the program, and the majority of the applicants were engineering majors from the country’s top universities. Co-ops got to spend at least three “tours” at the space center in Houston, working on projects that were directly related to the space program. Most of the co-ops went on to work at the space center, and a handful of standouts had ended up successfully entering the astronaut training program. Aside from the air force, which Thad had already ruled out, the JSC co-op program was his best—and really, only—avenue to becoming an astronaut.

  No question, he had to ace the phone interview. And he had spent the past two years building himself into exactly the sort of person the JSC was looking for. Aside from a dizzying collection of physics, geology, and anthropology courses—he was majoring in all three disciplines—he’d filled his résumé with a wide array of outside accomplishments. He was the founder of the Utah Astronomical Society, and had personally built up the college’s observatory into one of the premier science clubs on campus. He was routinely doing volunteer dinosaur digs with the paleontology group, an offshoot of the geology department. He had gotten his pilot’s license and had become a certified expert in scuba diving. He’d taken Russian and Japanese. To top it all off, he’d recently completed a charity bike ride to raise money for cystic fibrosis; he and Sonya had biked all the way from the front door of the Salt Lake City hospital to San Francisco, bringing in just shy of $10,000 for the cause.

  He had done everything he could to make himself the perfect candidate. Along the way, he’d fought down the gnawing sense that no matter what he did, he’d always be starting a few steps back from the other kids applying for the program; most would probably be coming from more elite schools, paid for by loving parents. Most wouldn’t already be married at twenty-three. Hell, most wouldn’t be twenty-three; they’d be college age, from middle-class backgrounds. Thad was different. He’d always be an outsider.

  He’d have to work harder than everybody else to prove himself. Already, he’d shown them how persistent he could be.

  He thought back to the photos attached to the wall above the desk in his living room. Bob Musgrove was the co-op program manager, responsible for all new hires. The woman in the photo next to Musgrove’s was the man’s secretary, who Thad assumed might be part of the phone interview as well. Thad had spoken to her often, and had heard Musgrove’s voice on the man’s voice-mail greeting more times than he could remember. Thad had lost count after leaving his hundredth voice-mail message—to go along with the hundreds of e-mails, dozens of letters, and even a handful of faxes to the JSC co-op fax line. None of the voice mails or e-mails had gotten him a response, but he had kept going, placing a call nearly every day.

  And it had seemed to work out; four days ago, Thad had received a simple e-mail from Musgrove—as if Thad hadn’t been trying to contact the man for months—telling him when to call in for his initial phone interview. A message from the man’s secretary had confirmed the time and date, and now it was going to be up to Thad.

  One simple phone call.

  Thad took a deep breath—and the dust-filled, musty air of the museum basement brought him back into the moment. His heart still pounded, but thoughts of the phone call dissipated as he finally worked the stiffness out of his arms. Before heading back upstairs for the other two crates, he took a moment to peer over the top of the box he’d just settled onto the shelf. Sitting on top of the heavy pile of specimens was a jagged little piece of rock that had been given to the museum by an unnamed collector. Thad could barely make out the faint outline of some sort of fossil on the surface of the stone—maybe a prehistoric plant, maybe something better, like an insect or even a footprint. God only knew what it was—but that mystery made it even more amazing. It was a real piece of history, a step in evolution.

  Yes, it sure as hell put things in perspective. Thad had been preparing for the upcoming phone interview for two years—and if he did well, if he kept his cool and said the right things, maybe he really was going to be on his way to becoming an astronaut.

  That rock, on other hand, had survived two million years of erosion—to end up in a box in the dark basement of a museum.

  Thad took another breath—and came to a sudden decision.

  He glanced over his shoulder, making sure he was alone. Then he reached into the box, grabbed the fossil, and jammed it deep into his pocket.

  …

  Eight hours later, Thad’s mind whirled as he leaned back at the desk in his living room—a stunned expression spreading across his face. Bob Musgrove’s words still reverberated in his ears, as surprising now as they had seemed when they’d first echoed through the cordless phone now sitting dormant in front of him:

  “Well, Thad, I think you’ll be a great addition to the co-op program.”

  Just like that—after only the briefest of interviews. Musgrove hadn’t asked him about his scientific background, about how he was going to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t an engineer, about his moderately advanced age—all the man had wanted to talk about was the charity bike ride; how he and Sonya had raised money for cystic fibrosis while living out of a tent, collecting blisters on desolate roads crisscrossing the country. And then Musgrove had simply sprung it on him, out of nowhere.

  “Your résumé is stellar. Your grades really picked up once you started taking courses you enjoyed, and it’s obvious you know how to work hard. I’d already made the decision before I got you on the phone. You’re exactly the kind of person we look for.”

  Thad couldn’t believe it. All that anxiety, that built-up adrenaline—and now it was really going to happen.

  “There are two types of people who work at NASA,” Musgrove had finished cheerily. “People who are obsessed with space. And people who are about to become obsessed with space.”

  With that, the man had hung up, the phone going quiet in Thad’s hand.

  And that was it—Thad was on his way. He leaned back in his chair, grinning ear to ear. He was going to be a co-op at the Johnson Space Center.

  Houston, we have liftoff …

  4

  The twelve-year-old kids in the Star Trek uniforms should have given it away. That, or the fact that the line Thad was standing in ended in a turnstile manned by a guy in a bright orange space suit. But Thad’s anxiety level was so high, his mind whirling so fast, he didn’t realize anything was wrong until the k
ids in the uniforms had disappeared into the building in front of him, and he was standing right up against the turnstile, staring past the orange suit into an atrium that looked way more like Disney’s Epcot Center than a working government building. There was a mock-up of the Apollo lunar lander hanging from the ceiling, and something that resembled the interior of the space shuttle jutting right out of the far wall—as if the damn thing had crashed through from the other side, embedding itself for the amusement of the throngs of children scrambling over its fuselage. Stranger still, Thad noticed multiple vending machines hawking everything from colorful space ice cream to baseball hats with the NASA emblem emblazoned across the front. He’d either taken a wrong turn on his way out of the parking lot, or NASA wasn’t the buttoned-down institution he had imagined after all.

  He turned back toward the man in the orange space suit. On closer inspection, the guy couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old.

  “I think I might be in the wrong place.”

  “Depends where you’re trying to go,” the kid responded, barely looking at him. “You here for the zero-gravity show? Tickets are twenty bucks, but you have to get them at the ticket office.”

  Thad shook his head.

  “I’m not here for the zero-gravity show. I’m here for work. I mean, I’m supposed to start today. I’m in the co-op program.”

  The kid in the space suit yawned.

  “Uh, guy, this isn’t the Johnson Space Center. This is Space Center Houston. The JSC is next door. But you have to be authorized to get through security.”

  “Shit, thanks.”

  Thad quickly stepped out of line and rushed back out toward the parking lot. Christ, now he was going to be late—and on his first day. He pushed through the glass double doors and winced as the morning heat hit him full in the face; even though it was the first week of September, it still felt like an oven outside. The sky was blindingly bright and it had to be over ninety degrees. Thad pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket. The shirt was white, with short sleeves, and his pants were khaki and a little too long, hanging down over his black dress shoes. He knew the shoes were entirely wrong, but they were the only pair he owned that weren’t caked in dried mud from multiple dinosaur digs and geological fieldwork. Dress shoes would have to do.

  He quickly found his car—a 1996 bright green Toyota Tercel with Utah plates—and navigated his way around the tour buses that cluttered the vast parking lot. In retrospect, he should’ve known he was in the wrong place by virtue of how easy it had been to drive right up to the squat, rectangular building; after all, this was NASA, it should have been one of the most secure complexes in the country. But Thad was working on barely any sleep, having spent half the night driving the last leg of the fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Salt Lake City to Houston, and the other half moving into a shared apartment adjacent to the campus, which he had found on a NASA employee classified-ads list the week before.

  Less than ten minutes later, Thad found his way out of the tourist parking lot and onto an access road that led to the real JSC, which, as the kid in the space suit had correctly pointed out, was right next door. Thad knew for certain that he was on the right path when he caught sight of a mean-looking security gate barring the way ahead, attached to a rectangular kiosk with Plexiglas windows and floodlights hanging from each corner. Beyond the gate, Thad could make out a patchwork of asphalt lanes bisecting a pretty, rolling campus of green glades, low hedges, and boxlike buildings. He could also see objects in the distance that looked like oversized radar dishes and even a few buildings that reminded him of farm silos. Some of the buildings seemed modern, despite their 1950s-style exteriors, but a few of the complexes could easily have dated back to before the first moon landing.

  The three oversized men in the security kiosk certainly fit the mid-century ethos: square-jawed, crew-cut, in gray-on-gray uniforms bearing the NASA emblem on the lapel and shoulder. As Thad pulled up next to the kiosk, one of the three leaned outside, holding out a beefy hand that looked more like a paw.

  Thad rolled down his window and extended his driver’s license, as well as the printed co-op acceptance form he’d received from Bob Musgrove in the mail, just a few days earlier. The guard took both, checking them against a list taped to the inside of the kiosk door.

  “Welcome to NASA,” the man said, handing Thad back his license. “Speed limit inside the campus is five miles per hour. Any faster, and we’ll send a car after you. Oh, and since you don’t have your ID yet, you’ll have to park in the satellite lot. Once you’re through the gate, go about a hundred yards and take a right at the rocket.”

  Thad looked at him. The guard grinned back.

  “You’re a co-op, right? That means you’re supposed to be some sort of a genius. You’ll figure it out.”

  With that, the man retreated to the crisp air of his kiosk, shutting the door behind him. He hit a switch on the security console and the gate swung upward. Thad pressed lightly on the gas, inching the Toyota up to five miles per hour.

  The first stretch of road inside the JSC was fairly unremarkable, bordered on both sides by green grass, swampy-looking trenches, and some oversized hedges. But just as he made the first turn, Thad passed one of the high hedges and saw something through his windshield that nearly made him slam on the brakes. Stretched out along the entire right side of the road was a huge, cylindrical rocket. The thing was truly massive, over 360 feet from the rounded command module attached to the rocket’s tip to the huge, jutting nozzles of the first of five fuel capsules that made up its cylindrical body. Blindingly white in the Texan sun, the thing could not be described as anything but beautiful.

  Thad had read about the Saturn V rocket, but seeing it up close, just lying in a glade of grass at the opening of the JSC campus, was truly awe-inspiring. He remembered from his reading that this specific rocket had never been to space—it had been built for the two Apollo missions that were canceled at the end of the space race—but its sisters had carried every lunar orbiting and landing crew that had made the journey to the moon, and this beauty, though dormant and beginning to mold, had once been fully functional. In person, the scale of the thing brought home to Thad where he was: this wasn’t some museum or amusement park; this was a place where real men and women trained to go into space, carried by machines such as the Saturn V. Christ, what it must have been like, being strapped to a beast like that, hitting speeds that made your skin compress right up against the bone—it was hard to even imagine. That this thing was real, not some model or mock-up, made the moment even more thrilling.

  As Thad reached the end of the rocket, he saw a small group of people being led around the spacecraft thrusters by a young woman wearing a NASA uniform—some sort of tour, he assumed. The tourists all had badges on necklaces hanging around their necks. Thad also noticed that there were cameras along the road, a few trained toward the rocket and the tour group, but others aimed up and down where he was driving, covering what appeared to be every inch of the way in and out of the JSC. The cameras and the badges, like the rocket itself, again brought home the importance of where he was—that this was the first moment of an adventure that would surely change his life. He wondered how many people were watching his progress through the compound. Even from just inside the entrance, he could see that the place was huge. He knew there were over a hundred buildings on sixteen hundred acres—but those statistics didn’t capture the open feel of the compound, how truly immense the place was. And this was just one facility of NASA; all around Clear Lake, the part of Houston where the JSC resided, there were multiple complexes serving the astronauts and scientists as they trained for future missions. And now Thad was part of all this, and would be for the next few years. He would be making a name for himself, impressing the people that mattered—and ultimately, always aiming toward his real goal of becoming an astronaut. Of maybe one day being the man who took that first step on Mars.

  He was grinning hard as he finally pulled into
the satellite parking lot and found a spot at the end of a row of cars sparkling in the growing heat. As he stepped out onto the pavement, he reached again for his sunglasses. His adrenaline was spiking as he squinted through the haze, making out the closest building where he’d be able to ask directions to the co-op orientation. It would be a bit of a walk in this heat, but he didn’t care. He could already tell that he was going to love this place.

  A few days ago, he was studying while helping Sonya fold laundry in some Salt Lake City Laundromat.

  Now he was standing a hundred feet from a fucking rocket ship.

  He almost laughed out loud as he took his first few steps toward the interior of the JSC campus.

  5

  The air-conditioning was jacked up so high Thad could almost taste the Freon on his tongue. Even so, rivulets of sweat trickled down the skin of his back as he stood near the end of a long line of young, pretty people snaking through the cavernous lobby of the industrial-era building. The walk over to Building 2 of the Johnson Space Center had been blistering, but as tired and hot as Thad was, he still had rockets on his mind as he waited with the other co-ops to enter the Teague Auditorium for the orientation lecture.

  Locating Building 2 hadn’t been all that difficult, even without the aid of a map; the swarm of smiling, highly energetic kids gathered around the front entrance would have been hard for Thad to miss. Now that he was among them, he could tell that his new colleagues represented a world he’d never been a part of before. Because of Sonya, and later, at the U of U, Thad had broken out of his shy shell, but he could still count on one hand the number of people he truly called friends. Friday nights, at best, meant a small dinner party and maybe a movie. He and Sonya were a self-contained unit rather than part of some definable social scene.