Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

  “You wish that you’d think of these things right away,” he concludes.

  You can’t think of everything right away.

  “Well, you could,” he smiles, “but it wouldn’t be art. That’s what I tell myself when the colours don’t come out right or something hasn’t worked like I thought it would: ‘That’s why they call it art!’”

  We discuss the problems of painting something that’s the same colour all over, surrounded by a uniformly dark sky. Other artists can put a tree or some grass in if they want an injection of colour, but Bean can’t.

  “There’s only a few colours you can use on the Moon and make it look real; you can use reds and oranges – which are becoming my favourite – and yellows. But you use almost anything else and it doesn’t look right. It took me years to understand this, but being an art lover, it can still be frustrating. I keep thinking, ‘Well, maybe there’s a way.’ And I spend hours trying.”

  Did he understand the extent of the risk he was taking when he quit NASA to become a painter? I ask. Hardly anyone makes a living at it.

  “Well, partly. But I had the advantage that I’ve always believed you should follow your dream. And I’ve always been like that. I knew that somehow I could work it out, you know? I didn’t know how long it would take, so I had the advantage of staying with NASA and trying to save my money. And I moved into a little apartment that was, like, 1,100 square feet, a little-bitty apartment, and I’m sure that, among astronauts, I had the littlest place. But I said, ‘Who knows how long I’ll be living on my savings here? I don’t know how this is going to go.’ And then when I got there, I discovered that I wasn’t as good as I thought.”

  He chuckles softly. Bean radiates a rare kind of peace, seems – there’s no other word for it – happy. I suspect that he would attribute this to the fact that he’s lived his “dream,” but my experience is that people who’ve lived dreams tend to be more discontented and unhappy. On the other hand, perhaps Bean just hides his shadows well. He seems to have such a positive outlook, I find myself saying aloud …

  “I do. That’s the thing I’m most proud of about myself, is that I’m productive and not thinking about the good old days and I’m not griping about stuff. I think one of the things I’ve learned in life is not to get trapped into needing too many things. I don’t … I’m not driven by a lot of things that some people are. My aim was not to get rich, although I’ve got lotsa stuff. Some of my friends have got airplanes or better cars. I’ve got a nine-year-old car out there. I mean, I’ve got the money, I could go buy a better car today out of my checking account, but I wouldn’t be any happier if I did. But I would be happier if I could paint a better painting tomorrow. And the stuff you like, if it breaks or someone takes it away, then it’s gone – it doesn’t matter. But if it takes you twice as long as you think it should to get to work every day, that does matter. I understand this for me: I’m not saying it’s true for everybody.”

  Ed Mitchell had a similar outlook. It’s unusual among people who’ve been high achievers.

  “Oh, I think it is. Of all the astronauts, I’m maybe the most that way. I feel good every day.”

  He must feel blue sometimes, I insist. What does he do then?

  “First of all, I feel like it’s me. If I feel like that here, I’ll quit doing it and go … the thing I like is eating, so that’s not good.” He laughs and pats his actually quite modest stomach. “But I’ll say, ‘I’m gonna have a big lunch today, I’ll have spaghetti at my favourite restaurant.’ ”

  Now I’m laughing. Spaghetti – still!

  “And I’ll have some garlic bread! I had that today. And I can’t do that every day, so I’ll be eatin’ leftovers tonight to make up for it. So I’ll do something like that. There’s not too many days like that, though. I mean I got as much ups and downs, as much good and bad that comes in, as anyone else.”

  He asks what I do, because “you seem real content.” I tell him that I’m not sure about that, that I get easily frustrated and even more easily bored and have a tendency to make things harder work than they really need to be. That said, I’ve gradually learned to trust these feelings, to see them as indications that something’s wrong and needs changing. Though, obviously, this is not always convenient.

  “I agree,” he enthuses. “Now, when I was an astronaut, I was the last one in my class to fly. And that was very frustrating to me and those were kind of unhappy periods, right when they’d announce the new crew and I wouldn’t be on it, even though my friends would be. And some of ’em, you know, I knew they were better astronauts than I was, could fly better and seemed to be smarter than I was … they would get selected for crews and I could kind of accept that. Then they’d begin to pick people where I knew I could fly better and knew I was smarter than them – ”

  Suddenly, there’s a commotion in the kitchen area and Bean dashes off to see that the Lhasas haven’t eaten the dog lady who’s come to feed them, then comes back and we go off on a tangent about my minidisc recorder (he’s never seen one) and a recent trip I made to Intel to hear about the new kinds of computer processors they’re working on, which might be like little organic puffballs, little brains that will store information three-dimensionally, and Bean is thrilled by this. Throughout our conversation, he asks a lot of questions and listens attentively to the answers. It would be hard to overstate how unusual this quality is among the alpha-male scions of the Space Age. All the same, when I remind him where we were, he picks up the thread in exactly the right place, with nary a pause for breath.

  “Yeah, well, I was disturbed about the fact that I wasn’t being selected. And I spent my time blaming my bosses, Al Shepard and Deke Slayton, for not recognizing how wonderful I was and giving me a flight, as opposed to those guys over there. And I put a lot of effort into that and it was nonproductive. And also, probably my attitude toward them when I was with them was not good.

  “And I began to realize that if he [Deke Slayton] didn’t like me – professionally, as an astronaut, which is the way I interpreted it, since he didn’t give me flights – that it was up to me to find a way to make him think of me better than he was at that moment. And that clicked, almost like a binary, that it wasn’t his job, it was my job. Then I was standing around not knowing how to do that and realized that I had no skills to do it, because I’d never thought that way. I’d always been in little groups, like a squadron, where, if you could do it better, your boss saw it. The skipper knows who can land aboard ship. So I could do that, but I discovered at NASA that that wasn’t enough. My friends would know it, but the boss who was somewhat removed had no idea of this. So I had to learn how to do that, how to let him see me in an advantageous way, without bragging and stuff. Some people are really good at this. And I noticed that the guys whose fathers were generals and things, they knew how.”

  I haven’t heard him say this before. I assume that he’s referring to the likes of Buzz, Dave Scott, John Young.

  “Then you had to think of the ethics of it.”

  You mean in relation to negative campaigning, badmouthing competitors, I ask?

  A note of distaste enters his voice for the first time. He frowns and shakes his head.

  “Naw. I don’t do that. Never did that once and I’m proud of it. People did that to me, but I didn’t do it back. You have to find ways that fit your personality. It’s an advantage to be more ruthless than I am, no doubt about it. But I ain’t gonna do it.”

  “Surely success gained in such a way will be less satisfying in the long run?” I pipe, astounded by my own naïveté even as I speak.

  “Well, yeah, but I think you can be just as happy and even more successful if you’re able to cast aside the rules. I mean, I’m not gonna do it. But my feeling is from looking at it, that if you can be ruthless, lie, and all those other things – and be smart about it – that’s a big advantage, because then you can take shortcuts. It’s like football: if you didn’t have referees, and you could clip and push and grab
face-masks, well, you’re gonna win the game.”

  A question asked of ethics students is what do you say to the cheating, lying bastard who reclines on his deathbed insisting that he is happy, content and would do it all the same way again? The astute student soon learns that there is nothing to say to this person: placing matches between his toes and lighting them is about the best you’re gonna do, though Kant wouldn’t necessarily approve of this.

  “Well, I don’t think they think they’ve done it,” says Bean. “I think they think – as we all do – that they did what they needed to do. So that’s my take on it.”

  I’m keenly aware by now of how rare it is to hear astronauts talk like this. I wonder whether the feelings Bean has just expressed still colour his relations with his former colleagues?

  “I think, probably … it doesn’t with me. Ahm. I think that to get here you have to be very competitive, ’cos it is competition – the world is competition. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m an artist, by the way. I don’t want to do that. I don’t like to do that. I’d rather perform and see if it works out. If it doesn’t, I’ll try to perform better. That’s good. And other people perform better than me, so I’m not saying that I’m the best performer, I’m just saying that there’s a lot of ways to do this … but some people don’t ever get over it. Some of my astronaut friends have a different attitude. I feel friends to all of ’em, but I can see they don’t. I didn’t recognize this as a younger man, but I can see they’re just as competitive now as they were when we were really in competition.”

  He pauses for a moment, raising his eyes until they’re focussed somewhere just above my head. I get the feeling that he’s weighing whether to say something or not.

  “I went to an astronaut reunion here in Houston last week, and some of ’em would try to one-up you when they hadn’t seen you in three years. You know? That’s the way they are. They want to … they want to … give you a hassle. It’s just them. It’s just the way it is. And I feel bad for them, kinda. But they like it. On their deathbed, they’re going to feel that that’s the way the game is played. Everybody on their deathbed thinks they did the best they could. Adolf Hitler thought that he did the best he could. I’ve read that he said the German people let him down, they didn’t have the intensity and devotion that was required. And that allowed him to flood the subways when they were in there, to stop the Russians, and feel justified in doing it. But in my philosophy, which I’ve read a lot of, though I never took it, everybody feels they did the best they could under the circumstances. And so we have to be careful.”

  Bean doesn’t sound angry as he says this. He sounds like a man engaged in a conversation while trying to dig a thorn out of his foot.

  Then he returns to Wernher von Braun, extolling his ability to talk to anyone on their own level, in a way that they could connect with, without being condescending or patronizing.

  “I’d never seen anybody do it like that. And he did it effortlessly. He had this ability.”

  Which is rare in a person with great theoretical facility …

  “That’s because they always want to move on. I always felt that in meetings we’d be talking about stuff and he already knew the answer, but didn’t want to interrupt because he wanted to build a team. And as a result he had to sit in meetings that were boring even for me, not because I knew the answer, but because it took so long to get to the solution. And I think he often knew the solution before we started, but would patiently sit through the discussions because of the need to be there and provide leadership, so that in the long term, when he wasn’t there, they could still go out and do the things that needed to be done. Let’s assume that I had the IQ he did, which I don’t; I don’t think I could have been that patient.”

  Yet military historians have claimed that, had Hitler’s regime clung on for another six months, the godfather of Apollo and his V-2 rockets might have won him the war. I’m about to throw this spanner in the works when Bean does it for me.

  “Yes. And if you read his history, then you’re also left with the problem that he did a lot of bad things – but if he wanted to be in that society, and a leader, then he had to use slave labour, he had to accept that people were getting killed and starved and strangled with their belt because they took some leather to hold their pants up and they weren’t supposed to.”

  People say he didn’t know.

  “Of course he did. He was a genius. We knew, so I’m sure that he did. Now, here’s the question for philosophy: What does this all mean to a guy like von Braun? He must know the workers are not humanely treated. He can’t believe, I don’t think, that they’re subhuman. Hitler thinks that, but I imagine von Braun thinking, ‘They’re unfortunate humans, just like me.’ I don’t know that. But if it is the case, what does he do? He’s not going to stop it. What does it all mean? Thank God we’re not in that position, you and me, ’cos we could have been born in it, and we might not know what to do any more than von Braun did.”

  Which is something no one can deny until they’ve been in that position, but still …

  “So how does it all fit together? Say I was at Exxon, I would probably leave. I would try to tell the president what I thought and if he wasn’t interested, I think I personally wouldn’t stay. I wouldn’t blow the whistle and do all that other stuff, ’cos I wouldn’t want to spend my one life on Earth doing that – even though I might wish somebody would. I’ll tell my friends why and then I’ll go. That would be my approach. It’s probably not a good approach, because then it keeps going.”

  Afterwards, I wonder whether Bean actually meant Enron: in October 2002, there’s not much to choose between the two corporations in terms of popular image. I tell him about a dilemma I recently faced, in being forced to choose between one organization whose macro politics I dislike, but who treat actual people well, and another whose professed outlook I’m more comfortable with, but who treat their own people with contempt. He laughs delightedly.

  “Well, there you go! You see, it’s the real world you’re living in. It’s the dance that you’re learning to do as you go through it! Yeah. That’s interesting. It’s good. I just think we should all be moving toward positions where we can shine our light on things that are important to us. That’s what I feel like here. I don’t have a boss. I spoke to astronauts the other night and told ’em exactly how I felt about things – which is very positive, mostly – but I didn’t have to worry about how my boss would take it or any of that. I like that and that’s one of the reasons why I’m here. If my life gets screwed up sometimes, I know that I’ve screwed it up and I can undo it. Nobody is forcing me to screw up.”

  And as he speaks, the fact that Bean survived the Astronaut Corps and even learned to thrive in it strikes me as the most remarkable thing, a real cause for celebration. Then he’s talking about the Lhasa Apsos, which are said to have been traditional companions to the Dalai Lama and are good watchdogs, because they have keen ears and are terrified of everything, and he’s saying:

  “The thing I like about ’em is that their hair is not like dog hair. It reminds me of the hair on my children when they were little. And when they were little – do you have children? – you rub their heads and you’re kissing them and petting them and that’s something you can’t do when they grow up. You know I can’t go patting my daughter’s head – I’d like to, she’s thirty now, but I can’t do it. So I like that with the dogs, because it brings back good memories.

  “They smell good to me, too. They smell like a dog to everybody else, and they did to me at first. I think that’s what love is all about. They’re also good role models for growing old. We’ve had three grow old and die and they never complained about it. One had cancer and had to have one of her legs removed, but she came home and couldn’t do much for a while, but never complained and did the best she could. Another one went senile, couldn’t see much, remembered nothing and would bump into all the furniture, and I’d say to myself, ‘You got to get up courag
e to take her down to the vet and get her put to sleep.’ But I realized that she was happy doing that, that I was the one who had the problem – the dog didn’t. So I’ve learned a lot from these dogs about growing old. I mean, I’m seventy.”

  We talk for a while longer about his father and sister, and my father and brothers, and he asks about the pets I kept as a kid, and we discuss Vermeer and Wittgenstein and Britney Spears and Bianca Jagger and his daughter and the first marriage that ran out of steam soon after he returned from the Moon, and his second wife, who was supportive of his change of career (having little option but to be, I suspect), and what books I’m reading and what books he’s reading, and space suits and Houston, and he asks me again what he should do about the Pete painting, despite the fact that only in the spheres of navigation or timekeeping should any opinion of mine be taken less seriously than my opinion in regard to form and colour, and eventually I notice that it’s late. Hours have passed, and Bean doesn’t look like a man to be kept from his dinner for so long. I apologize for detaining him and start to gather up my belongings, being careful not to tread on any dogs. He says: “Don’t apologize. You didn’t keep me. I kept myself.” I ask if he’s thought about the day when all the Moonwalkers will be gone?

  “Oh, for sure. And it won’t be very long. There’s only nine of us left. And I knew that when I left NASA. I loved being an astronaut, but I said, you know, there are young men and women who can fly just as good as I can, or better, but there’s nobody who went to the Moon who can tell the stories about Pete and the others that I can, that’s interested in learning to do this sort of thing. When I think about my life, I’m always thinking, ‘I hope I live long enough to do all the stories I know.’ And I know I’m not gonna, ’cos I got a list over there and it keeps getting a little bit longer.”