by Andrew Smith
“I felt that I had to tell them something, that I had to tell them how I was feeling,” he said, “ ’cos their guts must have been boiling inside … because when you lock those doors, there are only three outcomes that day: you’re either going to land on the Moon, you’re going to crash, or you’re going to abort the mission.”
Incredibly – uniquely in my experience of astronauts – Young is half an hour late, but I don’t much mind because the NASA public affairs officer has plonked me down in the tiny Lyndon Johnson Room, which is set up as a shrine to the late president and space advocate. On the way in I walked underneath one of the creepy “flying bedstead” LM trainers which nearly killed Armstrong, and past a huge mural in which I was surprised to see the loose cannon Young to the fore, but the presidential pens and desks and documents in here are far more mind-blowing than those. Take for example the framed NASA budget decrees from the 1960s. The one for 1967 is headed “Ninetieth Congress of the United States of America” and contains a list of figures that begins:
1. Apollo $2,521,500,000
2. Apollo applications $347,700,000
and carries on in a similar vein all the way down to twenty, at which point the “facilities costs” kick in. I’ve never seen anything like it. By the time it was finished, the total cost of the Apollo programme would be $24 billion and I’m trying to work out how much that would be in today’s money – about $100 billion, in fact – when I become aware of a gentle tapping of leather on linoleum and look up to see a slight man in a grey jacket and maroon turtleneck, with ash-flecked hair and bowed legs and unusually broad shoulders ambling down the corridor with his eyes trained on the floor as though he’s counting ants or trying to avoid the cracks. Kacy, my young host from public affairs, later tells me that he’d felt unable to leave a meeting he was in, but that when she’d gone to drag him out, his words had been, “Thanks for saving me from that stupid meeting.” She adds that this was the most she’d ever heard him say in one go. “It’s funny,” she muses, “because I see him just walking around the campus and every now and again I think, ‘God, that man has been to the Moon.’ ” Nothing in his bearing would suggest that if you didn’t know it. He could just as easily be a particularly fastidious janitor.
He looks a little like the Silent Running actor Bruce Dern in his younger days and the sharp cheekbones are still there, book-ending his arrowhead nose and darting eyes. His frame is small and wiry, with not an ounce of excess anything on (or in) it, and this distilled, rarefied leanness seems to hover in the air around him like a force field: throw anything nebulous or unnecessary into this field of exactitude and it simply drops to the floor at his feet, where it lies embarrassingly until you can find something else to send in. This becomes apparent, almost comically apparent, the moment I sit down at the rectangular conference table in the centre of the room and he sits down, too … so far so good … except that John Young doesn’t sit opposite me as people have been doing since tables and discussions were invented – rather, he places himself two chairs along, which wouldn’t seem so disquieting if he didn’t then proceed to stare fixedly at the wall behind me … just sit … and stare, staring even when he speaks, as though the wall has just voiced the question which I thought I’d asked, and before long this is starting to seem really, really odd. As the conversation progresses and he loosens up, he occasionally flicks his eyes in my direction, like a chameleon hunched on a branch (and, Christ, there is something reptilian about him!). Sometimes he offers an atom flash of smile, which I come to recognize as a sign that he’s made a joke.
Hmm. I’d assumed that the NASA geology instructor Lee Silver was being flip when he described Young as “the archetypical extraterrestrial.” But no.
So I tell myself, “All right, I’m experienced, I’ve been here before,” and in my mind I run through some difficult encounters from the past. What to do? That’s right: lob an easy one across the net to start with. And here it is. The Chinese have recently expressed an interest in going to the Moon. I wonder how he feels about this in relation to the future of space exploration? It turns out that he hadn’t heard these reports and there’s a brief pause while he considers a response. Finally he drawls:
“Good fer them. I’ll tell you, it’s a tough job and they’ll find out how tough it is when they start doin’ it.”
A flick of the eyes and flash of buttery teeth and I’m thinking: “That went well.” Great. But then I notice that John hasn’t stopped. Not at all. More is coming in an accelerating stream, like a geyser of words that’s been waiting to blow for eons and now here it is and here am I, an innocent and unprepared bystander, flapping around trying to catch the jetsam in a saucepan. This is how I hear what he says:
“I think human space exploration, particularly with respect to the Moon, is the key to the future of the human race, and I’ll tell you why … scientific evidence has shown us, just this last year, that in the last four major extinctions, they’ve got iridium layers or they have helium-three buckyballs – ”
Did he say buckyballs?
“ – or they have big holes in the ground; and they show that the last four major extinctions were caused by impacts and we also have super volcanoes around the planet Earth – you know there’s a lot of volcanic activity all over the solar system, there’s hundreds of volcanoes on Venus and some on Mars and the Moon has a bunch – there’s no active volcanism on the Moon right now, but it had a lot of old volcanism on it and right in the United States there’s three potential super volcanoes; Long Valley Caldera and the big crater there, that Los Alamos sits on top of, and Yellowstone … theoretically Yellowstone goes off every 600,000 years, and it was 640,000 years ago that it last went off, and when it did that, it put two and a half metres of ash in Nebraska, 1,200 kilometres away, so if you get a super volcano it causes the same thing that impacts cause … nuclear winters, wiping out life – ”
And from here I pretty much lose it, just registering odd phrases.
“ – and the last one, Toba in Sumatra, put 2,800 cubic kilometres of ash in the stratosphere and wiped out – ”
“ – I mean, that’s why we all have the same DNA pretty much, because Earth’s population went down to several thousand people and that’s not me talking, this is scientific evidence – ”
“ – the statistics right now for impacts are 1 in 5,000 chances that in the next hundred years we’ll get an impact that’ll wipe out civilization – ”
“ – the chances of a super volcano occurring, which are independent events, are 1 in 500 in the next hundred years, so if you take those two together, the chances of a civilization-ending event occurring in the next hundred years is 1 in 455.”
And as abruptly as Young started, he stops. He’s done. I realize that I’ve been holding my breath for some time: we both exhale and sit in silence for a moment, like a pair of strangers who’ve just had reckless sex and now don’t know what to say to each other. Later research reveals “buckyballs” to be a recently discovered form of molecule, named after the brilliant thinker/ inventor/engineer/cosmologist Buckminster Fuller. And if I can’t quite remember what the question was by this point, I have managed to grasp that I’m being asked to contemplate the near-certain extinction of my species through something other than boredom or stupidity, possibly in my own lifetime, or even next Tuesday.
And now my mind reels back to the previous evening and a fund-raising dinner for Buzz Aldrin’s National Space Society. The event felt a little as though it had been directed by David Lynch: there were blue velvet drapes and women singing dolorous synth music, and pop-eyed space-nut journalists and a Russian speaker who looked like Leonid Brezhnev and lectured us on why women aren’t fit for space travel – which didn’t impress the watching Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols or the statuesque African American shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison one bit. It was nice to see Buzz again and even more thrilling to meet Nichols, aka the glamorous Lieutenant Ohura, whose clinch with Captain Kirk led to the first inter
racial kiss on American television, but what I recall most clearly at this moment is chatting to the author Andy Chaikin, whose book A Man on the Moon provides as enthralling an account of the lunar landings as I can imagine, and happening to mention that I planned to sit down with John Young the following morning – only to see an amused grin spread out over his face. When I’d asked what was so funny, the grin had simply broadened and the eyes lit up a little as he chuckled, “Oh, you’ll see.”
And I guess I do see. This is going to be different. A 1 in 455 chance of humanity failing to see out the next century, was that?
“Yeah, it’s a very high risk,” Young warns the wall direfully. “It’s telling you that you’re about ten times more likely to get killed in a civilization-ending event than you are of getting killed on a commercial airline flight.”
He breathes more deeply than usual, which I think might signify great amusement.
“So it’s high risk, but the Moon can save us, literally and figuratively, ’cos if we can learn to live and work on the Moon, the same technology that’ll allow you to do that will allow you to survive on Earth when bad things happen.”
But doesn’t that just mean that a few politicians and rich businesspeople get to survive while the rest of us perish? I’ve always felt that I’d rather take them with us, to be honest.
“Not necessarily …” he says, and proceeds to make a case for setting up a base on the Moon, from where you could ship guilt-and-pollution-free solar electricity back to Earth. He favours the South Pole–Aitken Basin, because there may be water there, which would make living viable and moving into Deep Space twenty times easier, and there’s a crater that enjoys near-perpetual sunlight. Energy could be beamed back or shipped back.
“Human activity in the next centuries is going to be horrendous,” he concludes in the same toneless drawl. “Some people are starting to get very concerned about the increase in the number of people on Earth that are gonna be using larger amounts of fossil fuels. If the Chinese get to the stage where they want a car in every garage, boy it’s gonna be a big deal.”
Obviously, he’s right. This is an appalling thought. He goes on to describe some of the good works NASA is involved in, like developing special methods of recycling water for the poor people who live along the Rio Grande and developing super-high-yield crops that may be grown in artificial environments. And it’s all very interesting, but I have to admit that by now I’m feeling more than a little unnerved by this talking-to-the-wall thing. He speaks in long, uninterruptible strings of sentences, which proceed in a monotone and end as abruptly as they start. I briefly wonder whether I’m doing something wrong; whether I’ve offended him; whether he doesn’t like my suit. But I don’t think it’s any of those things. No discernible arrogance or judgement comes from him, just a sense that he’s having to drag every word out of himself. There are times when I could swear that I’m talking to Peter Sellers playing Chauncey Gardiner, the autistic gardener whose innocent homilies propel him to the White House in the film of Jerzy Kosinski’s book Being There. Then I remember Deke Slayton characterizing him as “one of the unsung heroes of the astronaut programme, before going on to suggest that “the only thing that held him back was that he was not comfortable with public speaking; he tended to freeze up and give one-word answers … I don’t know that he ever got over it …”
All of which makes it even harder to explain what happened to John Young the moment he set foot on the Moon.
Of the six completed missions, Apollo 16 probably came closest to losing out on landing at the last moment. Morale at NASA and among the contractors to the programme was low by April 1972, with jobs going and talented people leaving amid accompanying fears of shoddy workmanship. There were problems all the way to the Moon, a minor one being the constant interruption of communications by a Spanish man wooing his girlfriend over the phone. Then a problem with control of the Command and Service Module engine prompted Mission Control to actually announce, “Anticipate a wave-off for this one,” and start to make plans for converting the LM into a makeshift lifeboat, as per Apollo 13. Amazingly, after a six-hour delay the problem was solved and the Lunar Module Orion set down in the mountainous Descartes region, which the geologists hoped would provide crucial clues as to the extent of Luna’s past geologic life, in the form of volcanic rocks. Young’s pulse rate at landing was an outrageously low 90 bpm and, exhausted from a hundred hours of troubleshooting, he and his copilot actually managed to sleep before their EVA. Then the fun began.
Duke’s first words upon touching down had been, “Wow! Wild, man, look at that!” closely followed by, “Boy! I nearly had apoplexy, that programme alarm …” – which set the tone for what followed. In his BBC dispatch, Reg Turnill described them as “fairly tumbling out onto the Moon.” Young’s first utterance, after being shooed out of Orion by an excitable Duke (“Hey, John, hurry up!”), was: “There you are, our mysterious and unknown Descartes highland plains … Apollo 16 is gonna change your image,” while his partner followed with, “Good Lord! Look at that hole we almost landed in!” The hole turned out to be a twenty-five-foot deep crater, gaping next to one of the lander’s legs. So this was not going to be Son of Buzz and Neil, in which no one was allowed to admit surprise – in fact Andy Chaikin laughingly refers to what followed as the “John and Charlie Show,” though when I listen, what I hear is Deputy Dawg and Droopy. Chaikin will have me in stitches when he acts out one of his favourite exchanges, where the pair are collecting rocks and Duke remembers an earlier plan to bring a carrier bag to put them in, saying, “Knew ah shoulda bought that bag at the supermarket, John” – to which, after a suitably reflective pause, he received the reply: “Charlie, ah think they give you ’em free at the supermarket.”
Over three Earth days and nights in the Moon’s central highlands they did their science and geology work, diligently collecting 200 pounds of rock, after which despairing medical staff watched Young take the Lunar Rover car on a “Lunar Grand Prix,” followed by an impromptu session of “Lunar Olympics” (how had the others resisted this?), during which Charlie fell down and winded himself. In fact, TV viewers saw Charlie hit the dust at least six times, then finally disappear into Orion covered head to toe in it, because he’d found that the best way to regain his footing was to roll into a small crater. As Young waited to climb aboard the LM, he enthused to Mission Control: “Man, you don’t know how much fun this has been.” A chuckling voice said, simply, “We concur, John.” Later, with the “talk” button on his microphone unknowingly stuck in the on position, he could be heard groaning: “I got the farts agin. I got ’em agin, Charlie.” The Washington Post wasn’t being rude when it headed a column “Two Klutzes on the Moon.” Young and Duke worked harder than anyone else to get there and once they did, their joy was tangible. Certainly, a change seemed to come over Young. He was like a different person.
So here’s the mystery of John Young. His Gemini 10 partner, Michael Collins, pegs him as “the most uncommunicative” of the astronauts he flew with, saying, “I don’t have any idea what flying in space has meant, or will mean, to him” (and lest we forget, Collins flew with Neil Armstrong). At the same time, Apollo 16 Command Module pilot Ken Mattingly described him as one of the best-read people he’d ever met, while the geologists will tell you that he delighted in their tutelage, where most of the fighter jocks thought it was for girls, and that he was similarly transported by astronomy. Indeed, when one of the science experiments went wrong on the lunar surface after he accidentally pulled a wire loose, he appeared genuinely, touchingly upset.
In the face of all this, it seems reasonable to conclude that Young does have an inner life even if he pretends that he doesn’t, leaving me with an embarrassingly strong compulsion to find it. The next hour is thus spent trying every way I can think of to encourage a response that goes beyond the literal, superficial or blandly factual. I ask when he experienced the most fear, how he felt when he thought the landing was off, about his re
action to being there and of coming back and whether he felt any comedown afterwards, and why he thinks some of his colleagues left the path. I wonder whom he was closest to in the Astronaut Office and which side he stood on in relation to the various schisms that developed, and whether he thinks he changed. After a while I give up trying to engage him and resort to deliberate provocation in the hope of producing a spark. I note that I’d heard he was angry about his divorce from his first wife of sixteen years, the first preflight divorce, being featured so prominently in Tom Hanks’s From the Earth to the Moon series; I suggest that Apollo was clearly not worth the money it cost or havoc it wreaked on the participants’ personal lives and that the danger of an asteroid hit has been exaggerated by vested interests within the space community (as some astronomers have claimed) and wonder whether staying with NASA had represented the easy and least challenging option for him. Yet all of these lines and others are met only with humility and good grace. And remarkably few words.
I give up and return to nuts and bolts, and the irony is that only in this realm will Young start to betray any kind of animation or emotion, even if it is mostly still directed toward an inanimate object (the wall). Among the people who debate these things, there’s a heated dispute about whether a giant new leap to Mars might be a better idea than going back to the Moon, which we’ve already been to and abandoned. As we sit here, this debate seems as useful as discussing whether Martha Stewart or Skippy the kangaroo would make a better president of the United States. Would Young like to go to Mars, I ask? He smiles.
“Well, there’s a lot of people’d like to send me to Mars and leave me there, but I think the Moon is the place right now.”
A flick of the eyes. Lightning smile. I know who he means: he means the NASA pencilnecks who are forever grinding their teeth at his implied accusations of timidity and lack of vision – sentiments which most space enthusiasts heartily agree with, but which are impolitic of him to express so openly. As associate director of the Johnson Space Center, Young has been supporting the dissident dream of a return to the Moon since the mid-Eighties. From the beginning, this involved sticking his neck out and annoying the brass, because in official circles the idea was considered preposterous, utopian – and of course it was. What everyone has realized in the intervening years is that, unless something extraordinary happens, taxpayers are not going to foot the bill again; that if it’s ever to happen, it’s going to have to pay its own way. Thus, Young is compelled to make a rational case for returning (mining, energy, protection from asteroids), but there’s an ardour in his arguments that hints at something more than cold reason. One of his former colleagues commented that the 1960s was like “a decade from the twenty-first century transported to the twentieth,” and to me it seems that the further away Apollo gets, the stranger it looks. I wonder whether his regret that it stopped so abruptly has increased, or turned to resignation? A hint of something like feeling, of wistfulness, enters his voice as he says mildly: