Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  The justification for this enormous effort—initially budgeted at $4 billion, although by the time John Harper Wilson set foot on the Moon almost $9 billion had been spent—was that if the United States didn’t lay claim to the Moon, the Soviet Union soon would. This was a tenuous argument. The Soviet space program had been handicapped by a string of accidents, including the spectacular explosion of an unmanned Vostok spacecraft in 1957, and it was not until 1959 that the USSR managed to put its first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Yet the Pentagon managed to convince the White House and Congress that the Soviets were embarked upon a crash program to establish a military base on the Moon and were on the verge of catching up with the American space program. With Nixon and Senator Phyllis Schlafly (R-NY) leading the charge, Congress approved a ten-year program to put an American base on the Moon by 1970.

  Which is where John Harper Wilson enters the picture.

  Wilson had been under scrutiny by the Space Force as a possible commander for a lunar expedition since 1958, the year he first piloted an Atlas into orbit. The misfire of a starboard maneuvering rocket had sent the third stage into an end-over-end tumble which threatened to send the winged spacecraft into a lethal orbital decay. Wilson demonstrated extraordinary grace under pressure by firing other MRs in exactly the right order, thus pulling the ship out of its tumble and saving its cargo and the lives of its crew. This rescue made Wilson a hero, and the Space Force started to keep an eye on the young former test pilot from Concord, New Hampshire.

  Past and active Space Force personnel, who have asked to remain anonymous, remember Wilson as an easygoing, unpretentious family man when he was based at the Cape. Married to his college sweetheart and with a young son, John Wilson, Jr., he was a career officer, loyal to the Space Force even though he managed to take things with a few grains of salt. “Johnny was no hotshot, and this was when we had plenty of hotshot space cadets at the Cape,” recalls one former USSF officer. “He never pulled brass on anyone. You could get along with the guy. He knew he was good, but he used to joke about how when all this was over he would go manage a trailer park somewhere. Other guys kept saying how they were going to be the first man on the Moon.”

  On Saturday nights Johnny Wilson could be found in the officers’ club with his best friend, Captain Neil Holliday. Wilson and Holliday had met when they were jockeying jets at Edwards Air Force Base, and both had managed to be transferred to Cape Canaveral at the same time. In the club, Johnny and Neil would guzzle beer and watch Star Trek, laughing uproariously at the less-than-plausible adventures of space hero Captain Jim Kirk and his wisecracking science buddy Arnold Spock. Afterwards would come the all-night poker games, and more than a few times the MPs would have to drive Johnny and Neil back to their homes.

  Holliday was even less reverent towards the Space Force than Wilson was. Wilson, years later, recalls the practical jokes Holliday often played, like slipping lemonade into his weekly urine test or slipping a Playboy centerfold into another pilot’s map case, so that when the space cadet unrolled it during a mission briefing, out would fall Miss April.

  “Neil probably shot himself in the foot with some of those gags, and that’s probably why he never made Major,” says Wilson. “But underneath all the wiseguy stuff was a loyal USSF officer. He never made a spectacle of it, but he was really hard when it came to space.”

  Wilson and Holliday flew orbital missions through the early ’60s, and in 1963 both spent six months aboard the Wheel as senior officers. By this time, construction of the three moonships—passenger ships Eagle One and Eagle Two, and cargo ship Eagle Three—had commenced. Sometimes the two officers would take a space car from the Wheel out to the orbiting construction zone where the skeletons of the massive Luna One ships were slowly being assembled.

  “We kept saying to each other, ‘When we go to the Moon, when we walk on the Moon,’” Wilson recalls. “There was no if about it. There was no doubt in our minds that we were being groomed for Luna One, even if the Space Force hadn’t officially announced who the crew would be. There were other guys in the running, of course, like Pete Conrad and Al Shepard and Buzz Aldrin, and at one point the odds-on favorite was Neil Armstrong for the command spot. But I knew it was going to be my mission, and Holliday knew that he was going to be riding shotgun. I mean, who the hell else was there?”

  Wilson’s intuition proved correct. On February 19, 1966, he was summoned to the office of the Cape’s base commander, USSF General Jeffrey Marco, where Wilson was informed that he would lead Luna One to the Moon. The target date for the landing would be July 4, 1969; his second-in-command would be Eagle One’s pilot, Neil Holliday.

  Yet by 1966, America was having second thoughts about its destiny in space. President Nixon, in his second term in office, had further escalated the war in Viet Nam, and many thousands of young men had been killed in what was increasingly being perceived as a war without an objective. As draft-dodging increased and college activists began publicly burning their draft cards, disenchantment towards the military spread to the space program.

  Norman Mailer published a blistering attack on the program, Why Are We Going to the Moon? which prompted Democratic senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Walter Mondale of Minnesota to revive the Kennedy-Johnson Space Act. Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy made the military space program a central issue in his criticism of the Nixon White House. Radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin led two hundred students in a sit-in in front of the gates of the Cape, and actress-activist Jane Fonda confronted Buzz Aldrin in an angry chance encounter at LaGuardia Airport in New York. Star Trek was cancelled following a fast plummet to the bottom of the Neilsen ratings.

  The shift in the country’s attitude toward space was not unnoticed by Major Wilson. “I was confused,” Wilson remembers. “One day I was a national hero who couldn’t go to the movies without being hounded for autographs. The next day I was being stopped on the street by the same kids who once idolized me and who were now asking why I wanted to blow up the world.

  “I didn’t want to blow up the world,” he continues. “But it started to make me wonder what the Space Force wanted to do, because I knew a top secret objective of the Force was to place nuclear missiles on the Moon Base once it was established. I had never really thought about that before, but now … well, I started to think about it a little bit.”

  Another former Space Force officer stationed at the Cape at the time says that Wilson’s attitude began to change. “He became more serious, less happy-go-lucky about things,” he recalls. “We all but stopped seeing him in the officers’ club, for one thing. We thought it was, y’know, nerves, being under pressure about Luna One. It never occurred to us that he was having doubts about the program as a whole.”

  The real turning point for Wilson, however, didn’t come until Christmas Eve, 1968. As was traditional with the Wilson family, John Jr. received one of his presents that night; this year he was given his first railroad set. Leanne Wilson remembers how the miniature tracks wound around the Christmas tree and under chairs and the coffee table, and how their five-year-old son couldn’t be pried away from his tiny passenger train even to watch the TV as the spaceship Columbus made the first manned flyby of the Moon.

  The Columbus mission was technically little more than a dry run for Luna One, scheduled for seven months later, but the Space Force needed something to impress the public in this new era of doubt about the space program. Thus a TV camera was mounted on the outside of the ship’s superstructure. On Christmas Eve, at 8:35 pm EST, an audience of thirty million Americans watched on TV as the camera caught the unforgettable sight of Earth rising above the limb of the Moon.

  This was soundtracked by a tape of the “Air Force Flight Song,” but as John Wilson watched the earthrise on TV, he had a more profound thought. He recalled the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. After turning down the volume on his set, he quoted them from memory to his wife and son: “In the beginning God created the heave
ns and the Earth. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light …”

  “This was a moment of epiphany for me,” Wilson says years later. “I suddenly realized, that from the Moon, you see the whole planet, not just the United States of America. For the first time in my life I really saw that the USA was not the center of the universe, that my country, much as I loved her, was not the biggest thing on the planet. So why should America take sole claim to the Moon?”

  Wilson leaned back in his chair, staring at the bit of moonrock in his hands. “It was a simple notion, really, but it was something that had never occurred to me before. And it kinda shook me up, because here I was, the man who in seven months was supposed to claim the Moon as territory of the United States. But how could I do this, knowing and believing as I now did?”

  Later that evening, still trying to cope with his uneasiness, Wilson slipped out to the officers’ club. The club was nearly empty that night—most of the base personnel were either on duty or enjoying Christmas Eve with their families at home-but he found at the bar his old friend, Neil Holliday. The two men grabbed a bottle of Scotch and hunkered down at a corner table to share some Christmas spirit, but what happened would further change Wilson’s life.

  Johnny Wilson had been careful not to express his recent misgivings about Luna One, knowing that such musings would find their way to Space Force security officers, but that night his brain was on fire and, soon, his caution was numbed by the Scotch. Before they had worked their way to the bottom of the bottle, Wilson had slurred his revelation to Holliday, who sat silently on the other side of the table, listening and occasionally pouring his friend another shot.

  “I got drunk,” Wilson says. “I got plastered, and I opened my heart to my best friend in the world. Now, people can do that all the time, but not necessarily in the Space Force. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I let it all hang out.”

  He paused, and shook his head. “And what do you know? The son of a bitch stabbed me in the back. Neil Holliday went straight to the brass with everything I had said.”

  Indeed. The day before Christmas, Capt. Neil Holliday went to the base hospital where he conferred privately with staff psychiatrists on the Moon operation, telling them about Major Wilson’s revelations. Concerned, the psychiatrists immediately summoned members of the Space Force upper echelon and the intelligence staff. In an off-record, closed-door meeting at the hospital, Holliday blew the whistle on Wilson. Sources say that Holliday claimed Wilson was “losing his edge,” that Wilson had told Holliday that he had received a message from God, that the Almighty didn’t want the Space Force on the Moon, that the United States didn’t have any right to claim the Moon for itself.

  The sources say this put the Space Force general staff into a quandary. Luna One was only a few months away, and the crew was in the midst of intensive training. There was simply no way that Wilson, who had been preparing for the mission for the last two years, could now be yanked from the command seat and replaced. Nor could the flight be postponed; everyone was frightened that the Russians were preparing their own lunar mission, and the common perception was that the US was locked into a race against time to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Yet at the same time, they didn’t want an unstable man to lead nineteen men and three ships to the Sea of Tranquility. Especially if that man thought he was under orders from God to keep the US from claiming the Moon, as Holliday had led them to believe.

  But the staff psychiatrists didn’t see it that way. “They pointed out that the major had been ripped when he had said these things to Holliday,” one source recalls. “They asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether Wilson wasn’t entitled to get blitzed and make some strange comments, considering the enormous pressure he was under. The shrinks weren’t worried. ‘Just keep an eye on him and keep your options open,’ that was their advice, and the brass accepted it.”

  So the men at the meeting made an on-the-spot decision: Wilson would remain in command of Luna One, but Holliday was to closely monitor the major’s mental condition. “The word was if Wilson looked like he was going to crack, they were going to yank him from the top gun slot at once, even if he was standing on the Moon when it happened,” the source says.

  And why did Holliday snitch on Wilson? Wilson believes that his friend was merely looking out for the best interests of the mission. But the source, who was at the meeting, remembers that Holliday appeared very satisfied when he was told that, if Wilson were taken off Luna One, Holliday himself would have the command. “There’s no question in my mind that Neil Holliday wanted to be the first man to walk on the Moon,” he says.

  It’s now midafternoon and the conversation has moved into John Wilson’s office in the cabin’s guest room. Leanne Wilson brought a teakwood tray laden with Syrian bread, English chutney and hot coffee into the office, then retired to the living room to write a letter to John Jr., now a graduate student in physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Through the window a neighbor’s cat can be seen, stalking mice and spiders in the backyard.

  “Of course I knew I was being watched,” John Wilson says as he spread chutney onto a slice of bread with a butter knife. “I figured out, from the way he was acting, the questions he was asking—have I been going to church, that sort of thing—that Neil was spying on me and regularly reporting to the shrinks and the top brass. So I kept my mouth closed, acted like nothing was different from before.”

  He smiles. “But, yes, I was making my own plans for the mission. But I said nothing to anyone, not even Leanne, and I wrote nothing in my journal. This was strictly between me and my conscience.”

  Sources say Holliday’s reports to the Space Force high command revealed nothing unusual in Wilson’s behavior prior to the mission; he wasn’t talking about Genesis or mankind’s right to claim the Moon, he hadn’t been reading the Mailer book, he hadn’t voted for Bobby Kennedy in the last election. The Luna One training team reported that Wilson’s test scores had remained high and that his performance during flight simulations was superior. There was no hint that he was going to crash Eagle One into the Moon or attempt to blow out the pressure in the crew compartment.

  After awhile, Wilson’s Christmas Eve ramblings were written off by most of the brass as whiskey talk.

  By now, the Space Force had other problems. Bobby Kennedy had promised a civilian space program during his presidential campaign. Now, having defeated Ronald Reagan in November, the new liberal president was apparently intent on making good his promise. The Proxmire-Mondale bill to form NASA was gathering momentum on the Hill, and if Congress passed the bill there was little doubt that Kennedy would sign it into law. Thus, the Space Force would be dismantled and NASA would take over the space program as a civilian activity. Luna One was to continue as planned even if the Space Act were signed by the end of July—by now the landing had been pushed back two weeks due to a ruptured seal on a fuel tank on Eagle Three—but it would be the last hurrah for the all-military space effort.

  In an effort to head off political disaster, the Pentagon was trying to recast Luna One as a peaceful venture. It downplayed the military significance of the lunar base and attempted to portray the mission as being in the spirit of human exploration. The hope was that this last-minute PR effort would make the Space Act seem unnecessary and turn around the votes on Capitol Hill.

  Yet while the Secretary of the Air Force was in front of Congressional committees claiming that the USSF would be renamed the “United States Peace Force,” the talk on the Cape was of bitter resentment against the Commander-in-Chief. “Everyone knew that the civilians would blow it if they were given charge of the space program,” Wilson says. “The Space Force was determined to keep control of the program, and the logic was that, if Luna One claims ownership of the Moon for the US, the public would force Congress to vote down the Space Act.

 
; “I didn’t like that idea,” he continues. “More than ever, I didn’t want the US to outright own the Moon … because it wouldn’t be the people of the United States, but the Pentagon having sole right to the Moon. That was scary. Really, very scary.”

  Two weeks before the beginning of the mission, the day before the expedition members were launched to the Wheel for final preparations for Luna One, John Harper Wilson was given the text of the first words he would say upon setting foot on the Moon. The text, which had been carefully written by the Space Force, was classified Top Secret.

  It read: “I, John Harper Wilson, do claim the Moon as sovereign territory of the United States of America. That’s one small step for an American, one giant leap for America.”

  Wilson dutifully memorized the speech in case anyone asked for a rehearsal. Someone did. A few days before the launch of the three Luna One ships from Earth orbit, while relaxing in the space station’s rec room, Neil Holliday innocuously asked Wilson what he would say when he stepped onto the Moon. Since Holliday was cleared for Top Secret, Wilson repeated the words for his friend.

  “He just nodded and looked away,” Wilson says, “but I don’t think he was just wasting his time with that question.”

  On July 20, under the harsh glare of the early lunar afternoon, Eagle One descended like a steel monolith riding a blowtorch to the surface of the Moon. Its touchdown in the Sea of Tranquility was followed shortly by the arrival of Eagle Two and Eagle Three, the engines of each blackening the grey lunar dust beneath their landing struts. Several hours later, as planned, Major John Harper Wilson undogged the airlock hatch and began his long solo climb down the ladder to the Moon’s surface.

  “I wasn’t thinking of history or how I would figure in it, or even about where I was,” Wilson recalls. “I was thinking about my career while I was climbing down. ‘They’re going to court-martial me after I do this,’ that was my main thought. I guess I wasn’t sure that what I was going to do was right.”