Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

  Way back in LA, as I dragged myself shattered from Buzz’s place to my hotel, a soft-spoken man who looked like a kindly plainclothes detective from Hill Street Blues was waiting for me in the bar. His name was Gene Myers and he’d come to tell me about his company, Space Island, which hoped to construct a hotel in space from discarded space shuttle fuel tanks just as soon as they’d scraped together ten to fifteen billion dollars in investment. It sounded fantastical to me, but he said they could do it in five years and recited a list of possible uses for such a facility, which included science and tourism, and medical and artistic activities. He said you could leave Earth orbit and go to the Moon in three days if you wanted and that he’d like to run a competition to send up a songwriter, and when I ventured that the world might not thank him for the sort of tunes that came back – but that if they were going to do it, they might as well cut to the chase and send David Bowie – his eyes lit up. Perhaps when I got home, he enthused, I could get word to the pop star that, should he choose to accept it, there’s a free spaceflight waiting for him. I promised to let the former Mr. Stardust know.

  The thing about this is that Gene Myers is not alone. There are all sorts of organizations planning all kinds of more or less extravagant projects. Some are run by billionaires such as the hotelier Bob Bigelow, who’s spending five hundred million of his own dollars on manufacturing an inflatable space hotel in the desert outside Las Vegas, while others, like Armadillo Aerospace, run by the über-computer-game-designer John Carmack, coauthor of the mega-selling Quake and Doom series, are part of an expensive race to develop the first low-cost spaceships. The one problem they share in 2002 is NASA, and behind NASA the federal government and its tight regulations. And so it was that after meeting Myers, I turned left off Sunset, went up the hill past Mulholland Drive and down to Studio City, where just off Ventura Boulevard I found the offices of the Space Frontier Foundation and Rick Tumlinson.

  I took to Rick instantly. At a local bar, he told me about his English mother and Texan serviceman father and his speckled past as a video maker and twentysomething bong worshipper. Like Andy Chaikin, he was born in 1956, but looks much younger, like a character from National Lampoon’s Animal House, in fact (most specifically John Belushi). He wore a goatee and had just cut off his ponytail and we talked for a while about the Foundation’s aims, which boil down to wresting control of space from NASA’s bureaucratic paws so that the space frontier can be opened and the people might get up there themselves, as per Apollo’s promise, and at a certain point the penny dropped and I found myself exclaiming: “So wait – you’re a space activist!” to which he replied:

  “Oh, yeah. Hard-core! Space advocate and activist. The opening of something as big as the space frontier is not a thing that can be left to a few bureaucrats and corporations. It’s a much bigger change and challenge that’s facing us and a much bigger set of possibilities than should be guided by government agencies.”

  He talked about the “Lewis and Clark” model they see, where NASA, like the trailblazers of the western frontier, goes over the hill and tells us what’s there, leaving others to settle; and how, when he started, “there were no space groups of any size and credibility who actually disagreed with NASA.” When I got worried and wondered whether we really want WorldComs and Enrons chomping up the Moon in glorious privacy, he countered:

  “Yeah, but what we’ve had here, particularly in relation to the space station, is a combination of some of the worst aspects of both. You have giant corporations working with a very elite insider group that has a quasi-militaristic leaning. You have to bear in mind that, in the beginning at least, NASA was a partial fig leaf to cover the Cold War antagonisms of the Fifties and Sixties. There was all that ‘We came in peace for all mankind’ stuff, but they literally were part of the military-industrial complex – it was the same companies designing and making the military hardware and all that. If you were an antiwar hippy protester, they looked like the same group of people.”

  So I seemed to have happened upon a space Country Joe McDonald, who went on to tell me about the Foundation’s recent “Return to the Moon” conference and their sophisticated “jujitsu” lobbying model (an idea I first heard being used by environmental groups in Naomi Klein’s antiglobalization tract No Logo); about being part of MirCorp, the private, Amsterdam-based company partly run by people who’d marched against the war in their youth, which actually managed to lease the Mir space station from the Russian government for a brief period, only to be brutally “taken out” by the dark forces of the space establishment; about testifying before Congress and meeting high-level Russian officials in Moscow; about the various flashpoints within the organization, and all in a language that I understood.

  He said: “Before it became unpopular to be such, we called ourselves the Mujahideen. We were the guerrillas of space!”

  And: “When we created MirCorp, we went over, sat down with the Russians and said, ‘We’re not like those aerospace companies or NASA, who come over here and go, “We’re better than you are” – we represent a different part of American culture.’ And it’s true! The Russians have done amazing things in space, with no money and incredible common sense.”

  And: “I used to wave my ponytail around in front of the military guys, just because I knew that if there was a military guy who could deal with my ponytail … then I could work with him!”

  He said: “You have to be like water. Water is unstoppable, it finds the cracks.”

  And: “Some of us are more predisposed to wander further away from the ants’ nest than others … I say this because I’ve got an ant problem on my porch right now …”

  I sat there and hadn’t a clue whether a word was true, but it came at the end of a draining day and made me homesick for the more imprecise and elastic everyday world that I’d unwittingly left behind a couple of months previously, where reality doesn’t hide behind NASA-speak and there are worse sins than extravagance and incaution, and where a little iconoclasm never hurt anybody. So when I heard that Rick Tumlinson was going to be in Houston, I was pleased. When I heard that NASA had reluctantly agreed to give him a platform on the main floor of the World Space Congress, I was overjoyed. A window was opening onto something that I hadn’t even known to exist – the colourful realm of the “Space Movement,” for whom John Young, Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, and, above all, Pete Conrad are heroes of an entirely different order.

  This is a relatively recent phenomenon and chimes with something I noticed when tracing Luna’s passage through the pop cultural sky earlier – that by the 1990s, the lunar programme was reacquiring a romance and mystique that had been absent since the early 1970s. Was this because the Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986 restored the Moon’s hauteur, the sense of distance and unattainability that had once been attached to her? Or was the Moondust merely beginning to sparkle from a distance? Now there could be movies like Apollo 13 and the Australian homage The Dish, and songs like PJ Harvey’s “Yuri-G,” which was about a girl obsessed with the Moon, to which the chorus runs, “I wish I could be like Yuri-G” – not Alan B or Neil A, because Gagarin died the young, troubled martyr, as rock and roll as James Dean or Jim Morrison by now.

  I wondered whether some of this was nostalgia on the part of a generation who watched the adventure with innocent eyes and now found it bubbling to the front of their imaginations again? It struck me that Bowie included a tune called “Gemini Spacecraft” on his Heathen album of 2002 and that the sleeve to Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits CD depicts the group in Apollo space suits, reminding us that their portentous first four albums fell in those weird years from 1969 through 1972. It also struck me that in the year prior to this trip, characters as diverse as the Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the actor Vincent Gallo and musician Moby all told me, with no prompting, that the first thing they could recall wanting to be was an astronaut. They all remembered where they were when the first landing happened, but Wayne Coyne, singer with the Flaming Lips –
born in 1961, the same year as Apollo – had the best story.

  “You know, it was a big moment,” he mused, “because most of your life passes into a kind of blur – there’s like first grade, high school, NOW … but that was a big summer, when they landed on the Moon. I remember my brother and mother sitting on the porch, talking some stuff I couldn’t really follow, but I’d watched a lot of Dragnet on TV and so I knew what LSD was, and I remember my brother telling my mother while they were landing, ‘No, you don’t understand, the reason I’m like I am is ’cos I’m taking LSD,’ and her going shock-white. And I did, too – like, ‘Oh my God, my brother’s doing that stuff they talk about on Dragnet!’ But that was just the way that people lived.”

  He had me in fits as he riffed on a line from one of his most beautiful tunes, “Do You Realize?” which simply asks, “Do you realize/we are floating in space?” but when I said that I found it soothing, he cried:

  “No! I don’t mean that line to relax you! We really are. We’re on some fucking insignificant speck in an endless cold vast sea of nothing. I mean, it’s just hanging … I don’t even know why it works! It wouldn’t surprise me that much if I woke up one morning and someone said to me, ‘Hey, you know how the world was turning? Well, it’s stopped.’ Why wouldn’t it? I have dreams sometimes about shit like that, but it could be real. That part of outer space, I love that, the way it’s full of mysteries. It seems to encapsulate the way that the more you understand, the less meaning things have. One of the things that happens as you get older is that you realize that things don’t have to have any reason or meaning. The more knowledge and understanding you have, the more you see how random and meaningless everything is. People die and people are born and some wonderful people die when they’re twenty and some horrible ones will live to 110 … no one is sorting this stuff out.”

  Then Coyne drew a surprising conclusion, saying:

  “But that’s the way it should be. Goodness is not something that exists in the Universe and that’s why, when it happens, when someone comes up to you and they love you and care for you, you can say, ‘Fuck! That’s a big deal.’ If it was the natural order to love and care, as the hippies would have you believe, then what would there be to celebrate?”

  And I suspect that this is where those magic Whole Earth pictures, fed into the imagination of a seven-year-old, had led Coyne. I also suspect that, like me and most of our contemporaries, he owes more to the hippies than he cares to admit.

  Afterwards, I began to wonder whether you needed to have been there for any of this to make sense, whether you had to experience real fear that the lunar fantasy could drift into horror in order to feel any attachment to it? But then, working late two nights before I left the UK for Florida and Ed Mitchell’s grown-up flower children, a tune came on the radio which set what appeared to be a recording of Ed White’s ecstatic first American spacewalk to a lolloping techno backing. That stroll in space happened in 1965, as hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco; racial tensions prepared to erupt across LA; Time magazine declared “Swinging London” the locus of world hip and predicted that one million doses of acid would be taken in the next year. The tune turned out to be “Space Walk,” by a group called Lemon Jelly, and it went on to establish them as a major act in Europe.

  I called to ask what had led Lemon Jelly to Ed White and the group’s Fred Deakin told me that they’d found an old album called Flight to the Moon, which contained recordings from the space programme, and they’d been struck by how emotive they still were.

  “‘One small step’ leaves me cold,” he said, “because it was so obviously scripted. But the spacewalk … even after hearing it so many times, it’s so vivid. Rather than being a technical achievement, it’s a human thing and we’ve found that very few people can remain unmoved by it.”

  And he’s right. It is moving. The best bit – and this is one of my favourite bits of the whole space programme – is when Cap-Com Gus Grissom, the voice of Mission Control that day, orders White back into the craft and the spacewalker just can’t bring himself to go. Broadcast live to radio at the time, the exchange captivated listeners. The third person involved is Commander Jim McDivitt, speaking from inside the spaceship. We come in at the end, which goes like this:

  GRISSOM: Gemini 4 – get back in!

  (White pretends he hasn’t heard. He’s looking at the Earth.)

  WHITE: What are we over now, Jim?

  MCDIVITT: I don’t know, we’re coming over the west now, and they want you to come back in.

  WHITE: Aw, Cape, let me just find a few pictures.

  MCDIVITT: No, back in. Come on.

  (Pause.)

  WHITE: Coming in. Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming …

  (A few more minutes of stalling by the reluctant spacewalker, who finally relents.)

  WHITE: This is the saddest moment of my life.

  MCDIVITT: Well, you’re going to find a sadder one when we have to come down from this whole thing.

  WHITE: I’m coming.

  (Not coming.)

  MCDIVITT: Okay … Come on now.

  The saddest moment of his life! Who wouldn’t feel for him? But he had to go back in, because NASA didn’t yet know what floating in space would do to a human being. That he and Grissom had the breath snatched from their lungs in the Apollo 1 fire only months later gives his words an added poignancy. He didn’t have long to live, but he had this, and that it should become music is not so very surprising: Story Musgrave, the experienced shuttle astronaut who trained with the Apollo crews and developed a mystical bent afterwards, claims to have heard music up there. “It was a noble, magnificent music,” he told a space.com reporter in February 2000. “I was a little on the margin … I was walking the edge.” Three years after that, scientists in Cambridge claimed to have found the deepest note ever detected, a B-flat emanating from a black hole, fifty-seven octaves below the one in the middle of a piano. Is there a siren song calling us to space? My next couple of days will be spent with people who think there is. In the meantime I’m reminded of the welling in the eyes of visitors to the exquisite “Full Moon” exhibition of Apollo photography at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank of the Thames in 1999, for which artist-photographer-curator Michael Light had to develop a special ink to convey the intense black sheen that astronauts saw; and of a recent revelation by ITN that the first Moonwalk is still the most requested clip from its TV archive service, with JFK’s assassination running a distant second. When the fashion giants Dolce e Gabbana declare “astronauts, sailors, ancient Rome, the Sex Pistols” as the prime influences on their spring 2003 collection (illustrating their claim with a photo of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon), they’re using Apollo in an entirely new way: as a symbol of decadence, transgression, impetuosity, hunger. All the elements of which are most assuredly there.

  So it is that I walk into the busy lecture theatre in the main hall of the Space Congress just in time to hear Rick Tumlinson, now in a smart black suit and with freshly combed hair, cry: “Good afternoon and welcome to the revolution!” A few sentences later, I’m squealing with laughter as, through a semantic contortion of such daring that Dr. Johnson himself would have stood and cheered, he quotes a few obliquely instructive lines from Nirvana’s “In Bloom” at the bemused throng. He talks for a while about the Earth being at the centre of an expanding bubble of life and the challenge of redefining the boundaries between public and private endeavour in this new realm. Then he slickly hands over to a panel of experts, the first of whom is Dennis Tito, the mathematician who traded NASA for Wall Street, then chose to spend some of the millions his skills there brought him on becoming the first space tourist. Against NASA’s wishes, he went up with the Russians and stayed at the International Space Station for a fee that the papers reported as $20 million, but was in fact more like $12.5 million. Small and bald and sixty-two years old, he tells us that he got interested in space as a kid when Sputnik went up, joining the nationwide
rush to engineering that followed. Then he talks about his trip.

  “The experience I had was much, much better than I ever thought it might be,” he says, adding that the training was easier than expected. “The one thing I learned about flying in space was that anyone could do it.”

  The problem, obviously, is the price.

  “Costs have to come down. But I have to say that, at the current price, it’s a bargain. It should cost $50 million, but doesn’t because we have the remains of a command economy, meaning that the systems are already paid for. As they degrade and labour costs go up, the present opportunity will disappear.”

  He advises those of us with twenty million to spend (the Russians have now set the price there, as people have got used to it) to go now. The other thing he says is how surprised he’s been by the public’s ignorance of the area.

  “People, even my own age, come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re that guy who went to the Moon!’ They don’t realize that nobody’s been to the Moon for three decades. The level of understanding is terrible.”

  That night, Rick and I meet for dinner at a lively Mexican restaurant in the Melrose district and the place is heaving and margaritas flowing by the time I arrive and am introduced to our fellow diners, who include Richard and Robert Godwin, proprietors of the space publishing outfit Apogee Books, and at the far end of the table, the aged and much admired Pad Führer, Guenter Wendt. Before long, I am trying on the black-faced Omega watch that Neil Armstrong gave the German prior to boarding Apollo 11 and hearing about the transformation of the Apollo-struck Godwin brothers – who turn out to be from Liverpool – from publishers of rock music books to innovative chroniclers of the Space Age. Afterwards, I stand blinking in the car park as Wendt, who flew Luftwaffe night fighters during World War II, hears my accent properly for the first time and proceeds to regale me with a succession of wartime Britisher jokes, while I wonder whether someone’s spiked my drink.