by Andrew Smith
Johnson’s War was now costing $30 billion a year and the humiliating success of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive suggested for the first time that American technology was not the answer to everything. A bitter presidential race was intensified by the brutality shown young antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention, which looked to TV viewers like Saigon on a bad day. The only victors in Chicago were the Yippies, whose brilliantly absurd threat to dump a ton of LSD into the Chicago water system and keep the whole population high for a week had made the overreacting authorities look ridiculous (where would anyone get a ton of LSD from?). Across the Atlantic, the BBC banned “A Day in the Life” from the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album for the line “I’d love to turn you on” and the coming vice president Spiro Agnew demanded the same treatment for “A Little Help from My Friends,” because it spoke of “getting high.” Even without the heightened racial unrest following a Supreme Court order that school segregation in the South must end, the country looked to be splitting into two warring factions. When Richard Nixon finally took office in January 1969, the outgoing deputy attorney general, Warren Christopher, handed over a big package of martial law declaration orders, which he suggested be kept “on hand all the time,” ready to be signed by the president on a city by city basis. One member of the public commented in a letter that the first journey of humans into Deep Space, as Anders, Lovell and Borman circumnavigated the Moon aboard Apollo 8 at Christmas, had “saved” 1968.
By comparison, the summer of 1969 had looked much better. Abroad, British troops went into Northern Ireland, Yasir Arafat became leader of the PLO and India and Pakistan were squaring up over Kashmir again, but Apollo 11 and Woodstock struck an optimistic note at home. The most telling vignette from Michael Wadleigh’s entertaining film of the latter was his interview with the Portosan toilet man, who, on being asked how he felt about cleaning up hippy shit, grins, “Glad to do it for these kids. My son’s here. And I got another in Vietnam, too.” Nixon had entered office making all the right noises about peace and the environment, had withdrawn tens of thousands of troops from Vietnam and brought U.S. casualties down dramatically. Racial incidents in the cities were also reported to be running at a third of the rate of the year before and the economy still appeared robust. That summer, the United States was beginning to look like one nation again, illusory though this impression proved to be.
Nixon was also the first president to attend a space launch and he seems to have been genuinely excited by Apollo 12 and its prospect of a second American landing on the Moon. We’ll never know if that’s why the decision was made to launch Bean and Conrad and Gordon into a storm, but it led to one of the most hair-raising incidents of the whole Apollo programme when, after a textbook takeoff and rise into the grey sky, Conrad saw a flash in the corner of his eye and felt his ship shiver, then heard static fill his headset, followed by the angry bark of the master alarm. On the control panel, almost every light connected to the electrical system was ablaze and in months of rehearsing crises in the simulator, neither he nor his crewmates nor anyone on the ground had seen so many warning lights lit at once. The “8-ball” altitude indicator through which the Saturn’s orientation could be gauged was spinning crazily.
“Okay, we just lost the platform, gang,” he told Houston. “I don’t know what happened here – we had everything in the world drop out.”
They could be headed in any direction now: Bean briefly wondered whether the computer had detected a problem somewhere and ejected them to theoretical safety, but quickly dismissed that idea, because the violence of such an event would have felt like hitting a brick wall. And the first stage of the rocket still seemed to be drawing electrical power – though at less than optimal voltage.
The young flight director, Gerry Griffin, was conducting his first mission and couldn’t believe the list of apparent problems Conrad now read out to him. It already seemed obvious that he was going to have to abort the flight, but before making such a drastic announcement, he called John Aaron, the twenty-four-year-old in charge of the electrical system.
“What do you see?” he asked evenly.
The trouble was that Aaron could see nothing that made any sense on his console, which was supposed to contain information about the performance of the spacecraft – there were only random patterns of numbers, as if the screen had been possessed by an alien intelligence. And yet, as he looked at it, he realized that he’d seen something similar in a simulation the year before and that the telemetry had been recovered using an obscure switch labelled Signal Condition Equipment. He announced, “Flight, try S-C-E to Aux,” and although neither flight director Griffin, nor capcom Jerry Carr as he relayed the advice, nor commander Conrad as he received it knew what this meant, Alan Bean did. He flicked the switch and the data returned. Conrad glanced up and saw sunlight, indicating that they’d risen above the clouds, that the problem with the electrical system hadn’t affected the rocket engines or guidance system – though this still left the possibility that he would wind up in orbit with a dead command module and little hope of returning to Earth. He waited until the Saturn’s first stage had spent its fuel and dropped away, then instructed Bean to reset the fuel cells and watched as the command module came back on line, reanimated.
Now, with the emergency having passed, Conrad could say it: “I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.” As indeed they had been – twice, thirty seconds after liftoff and then again at fifty-two, causing the command module to shut down as defence against the huge electrical surge, then knocking out the navigation platform for good measure. Only when ground-based footage of Apollo 12’s launch was examined would the truth be known for sure, but in the meantime, Conrad, Gordon and Bean continued into space like a trio of lucky urchins, with Conrad laughing, “Was that ever a sim they gave us!” and the others chuckling along. All the same, Bean was once again lost in admiration for his commander’s ability to calmly and instinctively make the right call, for that way he had of making things look easy, which fascinated Bean the trier, the space rookie who, during the training period, had developed a fear that he had a finite mental space to work with and that if he allowed useless information to come in one ear, something important might fly out the other. Duly intimidated, he found himself going to parties and saying to himself, “I’ll concentrate enough to be friendly, but don’t learn anybody’s name; don’t remember their face.” On the way home, he’d congratulate himself with “Great, I don’t remember a thing about that!”
Unsurprisingly, Bean gives us more detail about the feeling of a lunar landing than Armstrong or any of the others do. He jumped when he first heard the loud bang of the LM’s reaction-control thrusters, which were only a couple of feet away through the skin of the craft and were being much more active than in simulation. He and Conrad were aiming for a specific series of craters called the Snowman, near which they would expect to find the Surveyor 3 probe that NASA had sent up a few years before: one of Bean’s tasks was to recover the probe’s camera. He recalls glancing out of the window at 900 feet and seeing the Ocean of Storms racing toward Intrepid at 100 feet per second, and feeling scared; then another shiver of fear when Conrad, realizing that his intended landing site was too rough, took over from the computer and started swinging and jerking the craft around, searching for a better place. Fuel was down to 10 per cent as they dropped into a dust cloud that was like a boiling sea, much worse than Armstrong and Aldrin’s. It gave Conrad the illusion of drifting backward, but he resisted the temptation to
nudge forward, taking his bearing from the tops of boulders. They made it down and when the dust cleared, there was Surveyor 3, winking silver on the other side of the nearest crater.
Bean confesses regret that he never stole a chance to just be there for a few minutes, to register the feelings, but time was tight and there was work to be done.
“Neil Armstrong’s first thoughts might have been ‘This is one small step for a man …’” he says, “
but I remember vividly that after climbing down the ladder and stepping on the lunar surface my first thought was ‘We’re twenty minutes behind now and we’ve got to catch up.’ ”
All the same, the surface suggested to him “sculptures in a garden of stone.” He fought to keep his attention focussed on his cruelly relentless schedule of tasks as he watched the Earth wax and wane in the sky “like a blue-and-white eye opening and closing.” Every now and again, he’d grab hold of something solid and look up, muttering to himself, “This is the Moon, that’s the Earth: I’m really here, I’m really here.” Years later, the whole thing would seem “unreal and perhaps a little like a dream,” and I’ve wondered whether this is why he’s trying to capture it in paintings, to tie it down and make it into something he can more easily embrace – something solid and comprehensible, identifiable, real-seeming. There isn’t even any TV footage to confirm that it happened, because Bean broke the camera by inadvertently pointing the lens at the sun: all we got of Apollo 12 was excited cries and the sound of Conrad cavorting. They discovered green rocks and tan dust and Bean became the first person to eat spaghetti on the Moon (“spaghetti is all he eats on a trip,” marvelled Michael Collins), and the Surveyor camera led to one of the most unsung yet mind-blowing revelations of the whole programme. When the thing was being assembled, one of the workers must have sneezed into it, leaving traces of streptococcus bacteria, which were found to have survived their stay on the Moon. This opened the theoretical possibility that life could have originated elsewhere in the Universe, then ridden to Earth on a lump of rock. The “Panspermia” hypothesis was viable. We Earthlings might not be Earthlings at all.
After Apollo, with crewed forays into Deep Space gone for good, Bean went on to Skylab, a primitive space station, commanding the second mission and setting a record by staying fifty-nine days in space. He’d been a gymnast in college and now went outside the craft and held a handstand through a whole ninety-minute Earth orbit. Then he trained other astronauts and geared up for shuttle duty, but never flew. When he left NASA, he was one of the most experienced active astronauts in the world, but by then he’d decided that space wasn’t enough. He’d taken night classes in painting when he was a test pilot at Pax River and had kept it up when he could. When no missions were in sight after the Cold War–busting Apollo-Soyuz Test Project of 1975, he resumed classes at the Houston Museum of Fine Art. He remembered a promise he’d made to himself on the way back from the Moon – his equivalent of Ed Mitchell’s epiphany – in which he said, “If I get home, I’m going to live my life the way I want to.” In 1981, at the age of forty-nine and with the first shuttle flights in view, he announced to colleagues that he was leaving to become a painter. It was a different kind of fear he faced now. For all the uncertainty on the way to the Moon, he had a team behind him then. Now he was on his own.
He loves talking about painting, losing himself in the work as he shows you around it. He speaks of colour the way a fencer might discuss a particularly slippery opponent, describing his ongoing battle with the lunar surface, starting with greys and tans, moving through blues and greens on to reds, oranges and yellows as he gradually negotiated the transition from literal to emotional verity. Even so, most of the paintings tell some kind of story, relate to a particular episode from the landing sagas, which he’s always calling the others to discuss in order to get the details right. In a corner of the room are some scale models he commissioned to help with form and proportion, because even though his paintings have grown further and further from literal portrayals of what happened, he wants them to be formally accurate.
Gazing at the work on the wall, I comment on the fact that most things one has a romantic attachment to start to pall eventually, but that he seems happy to live in the experience forever. Does he never get bored with it? Or feel sated by it?
“No,” he says. “And I think one of the gifts that a person gets … you know, they claim what a great gift is talent, but I’m not sure that talent is a nice gift. I’m not sure the biggest gift isn’t that somehow you care about these things so much, for some reason not known, that you’re willing to devote the time it takes to learn to do it. And then when you do know how to do it, you want to do it better and you like to do it. ’Cos you could quit liking it halfway through. So I think that when people say to me ‘Gee, you’re lucky, you’ve got a lot of talents – you can fly airplanes and spaceships and do this – ’ ”
He waves dismissively at the canvases around him and laughs.
“I just think, ‘You know, none of it ever came easy.’ I was never the best guy in class. I was never the best pilot. I was always trying to be the best pilot, but I was never the best. I was never the best artist in any class I’ve been in. If I went to a class now, maybe I would be, but it wasn’t that way then. I just always cared enough that while they slept, I was toiling away, doing those things right over there, and liking doing it – it wasn’t like drudgery.”
I ask whether he gets the urge to paint other stuff occasionally – a loaded question – and he takes me into a small adjoining room which contains a couple of long, cream sofas and on the wall, a vast painting of a lily pond, which I recognize immediately as the one Monet spent the last years of his life contemplating, or one very much like it. Bean went on a pilgrimage to Giverny in France to see it and when he came back, he did this. I remind him about his fantasy of going back to the Moon and stealing a few minutes to himself, just to take it all in and screw NASA and their ledger of tasks. Could his paintings be an unconscious expression of this desire or frustration or grief, or whatever it is – an attempt to claim that space for himself retroactively? He thinks for a moment.
“Well, maybe I am. My primary goal is to preserve this great adventure, in this way that no one’s doing. But I am looking for that, to preserve that feeling, too, if I could find it. And it’s thirty years ago, so at the same time I have to be careful not to stray too far from it. So I’m always talking to other astronauts and looking at the pictures and all that, trying to make sure that I don’t turn it from what it was into what I wish it was.”
We go back to the studio and stand in front of the troublesome Conrad for a while as Bean remembers him with a fondness it’s hard to remain untouched by. At Conrad’s funeral in 1999, Armstrong, not a man given to hyperbole, referred to him as “the best man I’ve ever known,” and everyone seems to agree on that. He’d failed to make the Mercury 7 only because of his irreverent attitude to the tests and my favourite story is that when a psychiatrist held up a blank piece of paper and asked him to describe what he saw, he replied, “But it’s upside down.” He is thought to have been Tom Wolfe’s main source for The Right Stuff and was the kind of man other men either wanted to follow or be – more like Ken Kesey or Tim Leary than other astronauts.
I can see the problem with the picture, too, because depicting a man clicking his heels in a space suit is difficult without making him also look like he’s toppling over. Bean asks me for my opinion on it, which he would certainly never do if he’d seen the paint scheme in my study, and we fall to talking about the trip back, as he describes the intense sensation of slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,000 miles per hour – the point at which they understood how fast 24,000 miles per hour really is … twelve times faster than a high-speed rifle bullet … and they hit six and a half Gs. A fraction of a degree off course and they would have skipped off the atmosphere and joined Major Tom, tumbling away forever, watching the Earth get smaller and then disappear entirely as they sped into the blackest black of an absolute void, blacker than any dye or pigment or mere absence of light could ever approach on Earth. We tend to discuss space as though it’s something. Actually, space is nothing. Such a strange idea. Bean talks about the lessons Conrad taught him and the home truths he cared enough to tell when the younger man’s troubles with Slayton and Shepard were at their peak and he was feeling persecuted or ignored. When I express sorrow at having been denied the chance of meeting Conrad,
he sighs and simply says:
“Yes, he’d have been one you’d have remembered. They come along every once in a while.”
Bean smiles as he shows me the Moon tools he uses to give the pictures some of their texture; the boots he stomps across them and the geology hammer “which really belongs to the American people, but I’m using it right now.” He’d been searching for more beautiful – and there, he says it! – more feminine colours in the face of “this rugged Moon,” when the tools came to him as a way of resolving the conflict.
“Why was I using these tools?” he asks, holding up a paintbrush, “when I’ve got tools of my own!”
He’d also dreamt of scattering Moondust on the works, but didn’t think he had any. Then one day he looked up and saw his old mission patches, which were filthy with it.
“So I said, ‘I could cut those up.’ Then I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to do that, those mean a lot to me.’ It took me three or four days of thinking about it to decide that, well, I really was devoting the rest of my life to doing this, so that was a good place to put them. Rather than just leave ’em for somebody to sell one day and somebody else buy ’em and put ’em on their wall … it’d be better for me to put them in these paintings.”
It had sounded like a gimmick in the catalogue, but it doesn’t when he talks about it. He shows me some of the tricks he’s discovered for improving the texture of the work.