by Andrew Smith
“Well, I really thought by now we’d have a base on the Moon. But all the big guys decided to quit. I think they were scared of it ’cos it’s pretty high risk and they didn’t think what they’d get from it would be worthwhile.”
Then he seems to relax as he turns to the Moon he experienced, which no one seems to give a damn about anymore. When I listen to the recording of our conversation afterwards, I think that when he talks about the Moon here, the tone of his voice sounds like that of someone who’s in love.
“I think the Moon’d really tell us a lot. I mean, I was up there and we flew around, and there’s a lot of interesting craters up there that are really strange-looking, and once you explore ’em, we’ll find out stuff. I mean, we had eighteen people up there for twelve days, so we don’t really know beans about the Moon.”
It’d be different if we did it again now?
“Oh, yeah, drilling and looking for water, and doing all the things you need to do at the South Pole … and picking up very old rocks. They say that there might be rocks from 120 kilometres down in the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which would tell you a lot about … I mean, it’s the biggest crater in the solar system – 2,500 kilometres across. So it would tell us a lot.”
Now seems the time to repeat my mantra about there being only nine Moonwalkers left, and one day there not being a single human being who’s seen us from that perspective. To my surprise, he breaks into a broad grin when he hears it.
“Yeah, I’m sure – there’s not gonna be too much longer before the rest of us kick the bucket!”
Well, that wasn’t quite what I meant, I start to assure him, before realizing that, actually, it was. I ask if he ever feels discouraged by the fight to move space back up the agenda, expecting a heroic dismissal of the idea, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he confesses:
“Yeah, I feel discouraged a lot of the time. You propose to do something and people tell you what an idiot you are. But, you know, making progress is never easy. You gotta keep at it if you want to really do it. And you got to take risks to make progress, so, you know” – and here he not only smiles, but jerks his head back almost playfully and exclaims – “to heck with ’em!”
We both laugh. These are the people who would send him to Mars. He always seemed to shun attention, status, celebrity, I note. Why?
“Oh, yeah. I’m not a celebrity. I’m definitely not a celebrity. When I go to the grocery store, I have to show my ID card and my driver’s licence to cash a cheque. My wife walks in the grocery store and everybody says ‘Hey, Susy’ and she can get anything she wants.”
Was that because he’d seen what happened to the others?
“No, I just never thought about it. Actually, working for NASA on technical things is really interesting.”
I wonder if there’s even a small part of him that would like to have been first and I believe him when he says no, because it would have meant having to play that game, and because then he wouldn’t have been able to fly the shuttle: the first men on the Moon were too politically precious to be risked on further spaceflight. Deciding to try flattery, I venture that to have found something to so absorb him over the course of a lifetime is a blessing, but he just says, simply and modestly:
“Well, I don’t know if it’s a blessing or not. I just think human space exploration is the most important programme going on in the United States right now. So every chance I get, I tell folks. But it, uh, doesn’t always come out that way.”
A sheepishness mingles with the smile and flash of teeth this time and only afterwards does it occur to me that he’s apologizing here for his ineloquence. He knows he’s not in his element right now, the way he is in a flying machine. I ask what he’s learned – recalling the way this one threw Dick Gordon – and he starts talking about asteroids. No, I say, I mean as a human being, one with such a vivid life: what are the things you know now that you wish you’d known at twenty, thirty, forty? … and there follows a meditation on the fact that the lift-to-drag ratio was 30 per cent lower than predicted on Gemini 3, leading to a splashdown sixty miles short of target. That’s one thing he’d like to have known about, he concludes. For a moment I feel quite sure that he’s toying with me.
Frustration is mounting. I’m not making him see what I want, which I suppose is for him to tell me something that’s true, that might fill in another piece of the jigsaw sky, help gather the hem of chaos into order. Then it strikes me: it’s just possible that when John Young looks at the world, order is what he sees first. Perhaps he pities the likes of me, who don’t, won’t, can’t: the ones who come in and overcomplicate things which have a natural elegance and beauty of their own. Perhaps once you’ve watched a whole planet sweeping imperiously through space, our human existential dramas look like nothing more than narcissism and vanity. And when I review our conversation, it strikes me powerfully that (a) I’ve met few people with less apparent vanity or narcissism than John Young, and (b) it’s hard to imagine any modern astronaut being so quirkily lacking in presentation skills as Young is and still finding a place in the programme, however brilliant they were. The truth is that he probably wouldn’t make it now and, frustrated as I’ve felt trying to communicate with him, this thought strikes me as ineffably sad, evidence of a world which is shrinking and homogenizing; where nothing is done for its own sake and nothing exists until it can be sold; where everything and everyone becomes a commodity with a brand identity and the maverick Young, product of a different age, doesn’t fit.
I try to address the politics of this situation directly with him and get nowhere, which is amusing in itself when you think about it. He tells me that he’s always just thought there were more interesting things to consider than himself and if I, child of the hang-it-out-there Sixties, don’t necessarily agree with him, I’ve grown to respect the sentiment. I try macro politics, too, wondering whether he thinks Ronald Reagan’s aggressive “Star Wars” proposals of the 1980s damaged the image of space, but this only brings a frown such as you might see on the face of a friend you’ve just shot in the arse with a dart gun, followed by a shocked-sounding “I have no idea.”
I ask whether he would have done anything differently in his life?
“No, I can’t think of anything. But you never know. Everybody makes mistakes. You just try to keep on going.”
Sigh. Has he ever felt content?
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Contentment is just sorta like … I think just being here is … well, I think there’s so many problems to work on and be thinking about making improvements and making progress. I think scientific and technical progress is very important for human beings.”
I try to recall the last time I heard the word “progress” used in this way. After 1972 or so, no one trusted it – or maybe it was just the people who’d been using it most that we no longer trusted. The Bomb had been progress, as had Thalidomide and DDT and the chemicals shovelled into our Sixties baby food so that it could sit on supermarket shelves until the asteroids come, even though they made some of us sick. There were good things, too, but no longer anything self-evidently right about progress. It’s a lost faith, which Apollo grew out of, but also helped to destroy by revealing the Earth as fragile and rare.
I want to know whether the surreal adventure ever feels surreal to him, but again Young hears the question literally and again I wonder whether this is deliberate as he assures me:
“No, no, it was real. I saw a TV programme that said we didn’t do it, though.”
I tell him about Buzz and Bart Sibrel in LA and the eyes flicker with amusement.
“Oh, yeah. I saw him out in Las Vegas. He tried to get me to do that as well.”
And Ed!
“Yeah, he got Ed and he got Bill Anders. Jeez, he’s been around!”
Now he laughs, clearly not angered or offended the way Charlie Duke and Buzz Aldrin were. However laconic Young is, there’s no self-importance about him. I ask what happened with Sibrel and him?
“Oh,
he wanted me to swear on the Bible that I’d been to the Moon. I told him I didn’t swear on the Bible. He said he wanted to talk about Apollo 16, but he didn’t.”
He cracks up properly, a full, joyful laugh, and I resolve to redouble my efforts to find this man, who turns out to have made a film called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, based on “previously unseen downlink footage” of the Apollo 11 crew horsing around in low Earth orbit while they were supposed to be on their way to the Moon.
I ask John whether he still sees Charlie Duke much and he says about once a year, when Duke comes in for his medical and he and Dotty stay over. They live a few hours away in New Braunfels. “It’s always good to see ’em,” he says casually, and I find myself wondering what on Earth they talk about.
I ask about the postmission personal crises and he launches into a treatise on adrenaline depletion. So, giving up on the search for anything the rest of us might identify with, I ask him whether he still flies and he says, “Oh, yes,” leaving the way open for me to run Arlo Guthrie–like through the tale of my brief jet-fighter flying career – puking, passing out, four-part harmony and all. His face lights up, just as Dick Gordon’s did, and he looks directly at me for the first time in an hour.
“Yeah, well, 6 Gs without a G suit – unless you’re experienced or very tough – is pretty … actually, we rode the centrifuge in Apollo and went up to 15 Gs, but that’s through your chest, it’s not your sit-down Gs …”
Young has been with his second wife, Susy, since their marriage in 1972 and she’s always the first thing he mentions when he talks about his post-Apollo life and career. Naturally, we don’t get far on the subject of his relationships, though he laughs self-deprecatingly when I ask if he’s difficult to live with, confirming that he thinks he probably is. When I inquire after his children and how they experienced his career, though, he surprises me for the first time as he begins, “Well, I think they appreciate the work, but I’m sure I probably …” and then allows his voice to trail away into a mumble.
Sorry?
“I said I probably neglected ’em way too much. You know, ’cos you have to work twenty-four hours a day when you’re working on a mission. Especially those lunar missions. That’s when they were affected by it most. You didn’t have much choice. They’d send you places and you’d have to be there for so long.”
His voice is very quiet now.
“There wasn’t anything you could do about it … ”
We’ve been talking for much longer than we’d agreed to in the first place and I’m exhausted from the effort of the conversation. I thank John for his time and suggest that perhaps I could call him at a later date if any more questions arise and the really peculiar thing is that I’m sure a trace of disappointment flashes across his face. People who know Young will try to convince me that I’ve experienced him at his most loquacious today. Either way, for the first time he offers something spontaneously. Mild rhythm enters his voice.
“Actually, I got to go to a meeting right now where we’re talkin’ about gettin’ back to the Moon.”
I’m stunned. “Really?” I say. “Seriously?”
“Well, I hope it’s serious. We been talkin’ about it off and on for the last ten, fifteen years.”
But as a political reality? How has that happened?
“Human beings have changed. People that run the space programme have changed.”
That’s right, I remember. There’ve been changes at the top of NASA. So you could be talking realistically about going back?
“Well, yeah. The technologies are easy to develop, but they’re pretty expensive. But still the benefits would be remarkable. They could probably revolutionize the way we live on this planet.”
He rails briefly against “bureaucratic inertia,” confessing that “We’re looking at 251 improvements to the space shuttle, but it’s slow work … in the old days, we discussed stuff at meetings, then went away and did it – now we have meetings to arrange more meetings …” I tell him that a senior executive from a NASA contractor admitted to me privately that the risks taken with Apollo would be unthinkable today, and when he speaks, to ask who said that, there’s an edge to his voice, the spark of anger that I couldn’t find earlier. Fearing that I’ve got someone into trouble, I hurry to a question. Would it be safer today?
“Well, hopefully.” His voice is calm again. “But you either accept a degree of risk or you don’t do anything. We reckoned to have about a one in two chance of getting back from the Moon at first, but by the time I flew, it was about five to one. I think it’s always gonna be high risk. Be worth it, though.”
We stand up. I thank him again. He says: “Thank you, sir. And good luck with yer book,” then turns and adds, “It’s hard,” but before I can ask whether he means writing a book or going to the Moon, he’s rolling slowly back down the corridor. In my imagination, he’s looking for his horse. The perplexing thing is that when I see him the next morning, at a ceremony to mark his induction into an “Astronaut Hall of Fame” (which really is a hallway at the conference centre with a few pictures in it), he greets me like an old comrade, is friendly and warm and happy to stand around chatting with no minidisc to mock him, until he is called to face a scrum of photographers and reporters. Then he nods bashfully, blinks away the camera flash, says hardly anything at all. And I think that maybe the Apollo-nut fascination with him stems from the fact that neither they, nor I, nor anyone else, has ever really known what he felt about anything – save for three days out of his life which he spent on the Moon, during which no one could have been in any doubt about what he was feeling, because he was just so full of joy. And for all the difficulty of sitting (not-quite) opposite John Young, some of that joy must have rubbed off on me, because whenever I think about this eccentric, elemental man hereafter, I can’t stop myself from smiling.
Only much later do I notice that John Young is the first of the six mission commanders I’ve spoken to at any length and it will be longer still before I understand the significance of this. In the meantime, there are several things to think about as I join the traffic vomiting into Houston from the I-45.
I’d started out wondering where you go after you’ve been to the Moon, but from what I’ve seen so far, the answer is that you don’t: I’ve met five Moonwalkers now and each seems in a different way to remain in its spell. There’s Ed Mitchell, still roaming the benign and beautiful Universe he touched, and Buzz and John Young with their compulsive dreaming of a return; a similar inability to let go. There’s Alan Bean with his equally compulsive efforts to capture what he saw and felt, make it somehow solid and communicable; and Neil Armstrong, who wants to live quietly with whatever it was he experienced or didn’t experience, but can’t because we won’t let him; who’s spent thirty-five years running from us and it and will probably spend the rest of his life doing the same.
I’m also seeing that there is a more practical side to my own interest in these men, because they seem to symbolize, even embody, a question that I and most people I know find themselves asking at regular intervals. Do I stick with life as I know it, be happy and content with the considerable challenge of appreciating and improving that, or shoot for the Moon and risk being dissatisfied, finding that it wasn’t what I expected, or that nothing else can ever match it afterwards (as per Michael Collins’s “earthly ennui”)? Indeed, it’s possible to see the whole of Apollo, not as a metaphor for this condition, but as a solid expression of it at the most fundamental level, which the Moonwalkers lived and had to try to make sense of afterwards, fermented into that eternally nagging question which Ed Mitchell first raised: “Who am I and why am I here?” At this halfway stage, I’m not ready to draw any conclusions on that yet, any more than I am about whether going actually changed anyone or whether the adventure was worth the cost, or even what that cost was. But I feel sure that answers are here, buried in these nine men, who’ve been far more exotic and in their different ways impressive than I’d imagine
d they would be. As to what it was like to stand on the Moon, I’m beginning to think that the sensation was either too complex or too primitive to describe, or that the weight of expectation, of that “Earth’s collective dreaming,” paralyses those who could. My initial instinct that the most powerful part of the experience was about returning to Earth – and that we’re as much a part of the dynamic behind this paradox as the spacemen are – seems to have been right, though. That no one can easily say what it was like to stand on the surface simply makes the question all the more interesting.
After young, I thought my job here in Houston was done, but some inner voice persuaded me to stay and by the end of a lunatic week I’ll be very glad I did. I wanted to know more about the ways in which perceptions of Apollo have changed, and in which it’s been internalized by the culture. I wasn’t expecting anything tangible by way of evidence, but here in Houston, I’ve found some; a group of people who prove as unexpected and compelling to me as the astronauts themselves. Apollo’s children.