Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

  Rather than go straight home, Tumlinson and I decide to go see a band some friends of his play in, and over sangria margaritas squished out of Mister Softee ice cream machines – a bad idea on every level, when you think about it – he gives me his take on Wernher von Braun (“He was playing whatever card he could to get into space”); on Chinese lunar ambitions (“The first thing that’ll happen is that America will try to sabotage it in any way possible … Rockets will blow up strangely, stuff won’t work, shipments of technology will be stopped; that’s just how they work”); on his overbearing Texan sergeant father and youthful disappointment at the sudden disappearance of the space programme. Afterwards, we climb to the top of a big hill to have a smoke and look out over Houston so that Rick can show me my route home. I ask him what he expects to get out of all this? I can see that the heart’s engaged, but is the head involved at all? Well, he says, no one’s making rational business decisions to be involved in space at the moment. It’s all about the dream he was given as a kid and you’re either a believer or you’re not. He has 1 per cent, 2 per cent, 3 per cent shares in a lot of companies, but they may end up as historical documents relating to visionary but failed companies; floggable on eBay as curios, but not worth anything more. Truth is, he’s not quite sure how he’s going to pay the rent next month. Then, as we gaze up at the progressively blurring stars, he says:

  “There’s a paradox, called Fermi’s Paradox, which states that, if there is intelligent life out there, it should already be everywhere. Statistically, we should have been contacted. At the very least, we should be seeing clues all over the galaxy, just because of probability. But we’re not. See, I think there might be a lot of ways that life can be killed off, levelled. There might be life everywhere, but on the other hand there might be very, very few – or even no – places where it made it past all the hurdles and got to the sentient stage. There’s a million things that can wipe a planet out, or destroy its top level. If that’s the case, the human species might be it. We might be alone. We might be the only planet with an evolved ecosystem and life. And if that’s the case, not only does the cockroach you stepped on today have much more importance than you thought, because it’s the only one anywhere, ever created, but so does this planet. And that puts us in a very different realm from the military-industrial approach to space. The stuff that’s here might be unique, a kind of miracle, and too precious to confine to one planet, in case we take a hit or something happens …”

  And it may be because my head’s starting to spin by itself anyway, but I find this beguiling as we float under the stars: a beautiful synthesis of Zen Buddhism and 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you could wedge Uma Thurman in there somewhere, you’d have a belief system that even I might sign up to. But I also think that here in Houston I’ve found something unanticipated but logical – the faintly glowing embers of a generation who grew up being promised the Moon and more, then had all that cool expanse of sky whipped away and replaced with clammy earth. In this realm of inversions, the theoretical future thus has a curious identity with the past, and living in one is not so very different from living in the other. Hardly surprising that, much as I’ve enjoyed Houston, I wake up in the morning with one of the worst hangovers I can ever remember having. I’ll drive away hoping that Rick makes it to the Moon one day.

  7

  Luna Meets Her Match

  Apollo was the Greek god of sun, music and poetry; the twin of Artemis, goddess of the Moon, from whom the Romans derived their own Moon goddess Diana. Indeed, one classicist goes beyond this to suggest that the Moon had a sophisticated, threefold identity for the Greeks and Romans: that she was respectively Selene/Luna when in the sky, Artemis/Diana on Earth, and Hecate in the underworld – sometimes also addressed as Trivia, keeper of the places where three things come together (which is why the great bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have been at a crossroads when he sold his soul to the devil). And it’s Trivia I hear calling as I skim the featureless road from Houston to New Braunfels to see Charlie and Dotty Duke, knowing that it’s really Dotty I want to speak to. People have different names for Trivia’s haunts, like crossing places or passing places; those twilight regions of our lives where established rules disappear and uncertainty holds sway and the ground seems apt to crumble beneath our feet, which contain adolescence and midlife crises and so many of the trials which define us as human. Most of the time we trust that these torments are leading us somewhere new, but very occasionally they don’t. Sometimes they’re simply between. States to be endured. Then all we can do is survive.

  This is on my mind right now because it seems to me that Dotty spent six years, from 1966 to 1972, in one of these between places. Through these years she, like all of the Apollo women, lived with the spaceflights, with the danger and the sacrifice and none of the compensations. The astronauts got euphoria, fame and a place in history, whereas the best the women could expect was relief when their men made it home: they were involved, but not; they watched, but not the way we did. One of the astronauts told me that as far as he was concerned his wife was the brave one, because he couldn’t get insurance – who on Earth would insure an astronaut? – meaning that she lived daily with the prospect of raising a bunch of kids alone, on no money, should her husband be carried off like Gus, Roger, Ed, Vladimir, Georgy, Vladislav, Viktor, Yuri … Worse, the wives had all seen the way Betty Grissom was left high and dry and isolated after Gus’s death in the Apollo 1 deflagration, how she’d become progressively more bitter at her treatment by the bureaucrats and ended up suing just to get NASA’s attention. Martha Chaffee had been trying to reach Roger in the Astronaut Office at precisely the moment news of the fire arrived, while Pat White committed suicide in 1983, in the middle of trying to organize an Apollo wives’ reunion. It would be a bad mistake to assume that the staggering number of postflight breakups were all, or even mostly, instigated by the men.

  Intuition says that it can’t have been easy for the kids, either. They had their mothers’ fear, the media frenzy, their fathers’ absence or preoccupation to deal with. It won’t surprise anyone that the son of acerbic flight director Chris Kraft dropped out and became a hippy. On the other hand, children are flexible, and they must have felt as though they were at the epicentre of the Universe for a few years. Then and now I’ve wondered how it felt to have that and to lose it. In Houston, I was lucky enough to track down someone who knew better than most.

  I had to call Andrew Aldrin repeatedly on his mobile phone before he answered and agreed to meet over a coffee, but when we did, I liked him. He was bright, affable and interesting, if a little guarded at first. Of all the NASA brats, he was the one I related to most readily: we shared a name and looked remarkably alike as kids. I could sense the same battles with his mum over hair length down the years, and could see from news photos that he eventually won them, whereas some Apollo kids had to wear crew cuts even when it meant squaredom and social death at school. I also know that he and his elder brother and sister were a source of tension between their parents. When Joan Aldrin presented her husband with the demand that he stay at home or move out after their post–Apollo 11 PR tour, the spark for the row had been an important football game of Andrew’s, which the couple had been forced to miss. The funny thing is I recall Buzz’s sad expression as he rued his own father’s absence on such occasions. Buzz also remembered his unease at watching Andrew sign autographs on their front lawn at the age of eleven. Dotty Duke will tell me that her own two boys were petrified by the reporters on the lawn.

  Andrew was at the Space Congress because he recently took a job in business development at Boeing. He got there by an unconventional route, though, and doesn’t look or talk like either an engineer or a career businessman. He inherited his parents’ good looks and is at times strikingly like his father, with short but stylishly cut hair, wire-rimmed specs and a casual confidence about him, and I noticed that his conversation was sprinkled with one of the year’s Sixties-resuscitated buzzwords – “
cool.” I began by asking whether he’d been aware of the unusualness of his surroundings as a kid and he told me that, no, he hadn’t. In Houston, the Aldrins lived in a cul-de-sac, right next to Alan Bean and Charlie Bassett. Within his own stone’s throw were four astronaut homes. It was all right that his dad was a spaceman, but much cooler that he could pole-vault. Only when the family moved to California did he realize that people looked at him differently. Jill Irwin, daughter of Apollo 15 LM pilot Jim, will tell me that moving away to Colourado after Apollo was a turning point for her, too, because for the first time kids she hardly knew at school would come up and snarl, “Hey, gimme five dollars, ’cos you’re all rich.” Which was the more galling for being so profoundly untrue.

  I asked Aldrin whether this proxy celebrity ever felt like a burden to him and his eyes drifted skyward as he weighed an answer. Eventually, he said:

  “Well, sometimes, I’m sure. You know. It can be a burden in the sense that I would always get a little bit more attention, for better or for worse. It can be a burden in the sense that people tended to assume that maybe I got favoured treatment – and then, no doubt I did on occasion, but then on another occasion I got unfavourable treatment for exactly the same reason. So, no. It cuts both ways.”

  I noted that the media didn’t seem to scare him the way it did others and he threw back his head and laughed.

  “Well, bear in mind I’m, like, eleven years old when my dad flew to the Moon. And not shy. So you’ve got a bunch of guys hanging out in front of the house, whose job it is to find somebody in the family to take a picture of. And they have … doughnuts!”

  That’s how they did it?

  “Yep. So for me, it was great fun. My mother was terrorized by the whole thing, though. Probably even more so with me out there running around and playing football with the reporters. You know: ‘Oh my God, what’s he going to say?’ I don’t think either my mother or my father was really prepared for what happened. In fact, they were exquisitely underprepared.”

  It seemed that the LM ascent engine was the chief focus of anxiety for him, because Andy understood that if it didn’t start, his dad wasn’t coming back. He remembers lying awake at night worrying about that. In fact, there’s a famous photo of his mother crumpling with relief when the engine did work and Eagle leapt back into space. Andrew feels more fear now, in retrospect. His biggest worry at the time was that Dad would fall over and embarrass him.

  “The danger was something I thought about then,” he ex-plained, “but now that I understand more about what really goes into developing space vehicles and what really did not go into sending us to the Moon, the risks that we were taking … I’m … appalled. No, not appalled, that’s not the right word … in retrospect, it’s very frightening. And the flip side of that is that if you talk to the old engineers, they’re just like, ‘Jeez, we’re not willing to take those risks anymore.’ Well, we’re not. And maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing – I don’t know. We need to be risk-averse right now. Any kind of an accident would just be catastrophic to the programme.”

  Asked whether either of his siblings went into aerospace, Aldrin offered a wry smile and “No, I’m the mutant.” His dad’s absence bothered him, but his elders were better able to appreciate the significance of what was happening and so might have been more deeply affected by it. Buzz and Joan were obliged to attend therapy sessions with their eldest son, Mike, soon after the Moon trip, but who knows whether that had anything to do with the extra pressure of Apollo? Adolescence is a pig we all have to ride. The thing is, the family has never sat down and discussed those years, ever.

  “It just happened. It’s just there.”

  Then Andy described how he became fascinated with the Soviet Union as an undergraduate and went on to become a specialist in Russian and East European studies at a couple of research institutes. Part of what gripped him about the subject was the question of how “this country that was so dark and murky and seemingly underdeveloped was capable of competing with the United States on that level.” He did that for a long time, then “just by happenstance” fell into a job in aerospace. I asked whether he’s ever felt in his father’s shadow – you know, in that primal, Oedipal sense, but the question found no purchase with him and when I think about it, I can see why. Andrew Aldrin had no faux-Olympian patriarch to measure himself against, the way Buzz and so many of the rest of us did: he couldn’t avoid seeing his father as a flawed human being like himself, rather than a saint or superman. Perhaps by accident Buzz Aldrin became the best kind of father. This half-formed thought drew a rueful chuckle.

  “Right! I certainly get to see my father as a human, probably more so than anyone else, and learn from his successes as well as from his failures. And that’s … that’s the way it oughtta be. I love hanging out with my dad, he’s a really cool guy.”

  He said that he’d lost touch with most of the other Apollo kids when he moved to California and that his favourite astronauts were Gordon Cooper of the Mercury 7 (“ ’cos he raced boats!”), plus Bill Anders and Michael Collins for their humour and humility. I asked whether his view of them has changed since he was a child and he told me:

  “Oh, absolutely. I notice the differences in how their lives have gone since the missions. People have gone to industry. People have become very important. People have become very self-important and people have become reclusive. It’s interesting. Fascinating.”

  Fascinating, I thought, the way one experience can produce such a spectrum of consequence, like light refracting through a prism.

  I was glad to have caught up with Andy Aldrin. We said our farewells and I left for New Braunfels.

  The hotel was quaint, full of comically decrepit Victorian furniture and groaning lifts, but the morning was bright and the sidewalk rustled leaf gold, and it felt good to be here, like I’d come full circle, back to the source, the place where it all started for me – Charlie and Dotty.

  New Braunfels is a pretty town, divided into an “old” half of cafés and craft shops and a generic new one of malls and fastfood franchises, fringed by housing developments and dozens of concrete churches with crossword-clue names. Charlie gave me very detailed directions to his house, but I got lost anyway and had to ask for guidance at one of these churches, where a young woman knew there was a famous astronaut living in town somewhere, but couldn’t recall his name. I joked that she’d probably recognize his voice at least, because he played “Houston” when the First Man on the Moon Show ran all those years ago: John Updike described him as having “that Texan authority … as if words were invented by them, they speak so lovingly,” even though Duke was from South Carolina. Chris Kraft recalls watching him gulp two deep breaths of air before saying, “Eagle, Houston, we read you now. You’re go for PDI,” which meant they could begin their descent and try to land. The woman looked at me blankly, perhaps thinking, “My dad says it was a fake anyway.”

  The Dukes live on a nice estate on the outskirts of town, looking out over Landa Park. The Stars and Stripes is everywhere and “God Bless America” signs skewer flawless lawns, but their garden is secluded and uncluttered. A black mailbox at the end of a long drive croons: “Duke.” A basketball net is folded down. The rear of an SUV peeks from a garage and the house seems to float on wood decking. I park and climb out of the car, but before I can ring the bell, Charlie’s opened the door and is shaking hands and beaming welcome. Guenter Wendt said, “You’ll be hard put to find someone who doesn’t like him,” and unlike some of the others, you don’t ever wonder how he expects to be addressed, because there’s something so essentially Charlie about him. Again I’m struck by the contrast between this tanned and smiling host and the sunken, grey man I met that curious day in London, the day Pete Conrad died; and also between this and the mean-minded tyrant Duke describes himself as having been when he returned from the Moon. He makes it sound as though he left a part of himself up there, or brought back some insidious malaise. Then Dotty appears with he
r beatific air and the offer of coffee.

  Women got a hard time from the space programme in all sorts of ways. Even as the Mercury wives struggled to adjust to their new lives in 1960, a woman pilot, Jerry Cobb, was being put through the same battery of tests that the men took at the Lovelace clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Cobb owned four altitude records and flew everything from trainers to four-engined bombers and passed the tests so impressively that she was asked to find some sister aviators to try out for the programme. Eventually, twelve more made it through the selection process – yet none would fly in space. The Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova up in 1963, but NASA would wait until 1983 even to put a woman on the shuttle, and it would be 1995 before one flew the thing; 1999 before that same woman, Col. Eileen Collins, became the first female commander. Any way you look at it, it’s a shocking record and the “Mercury 13” are now a cause célèbre in some sectors of the space community. There has even been a campaign to send Jerry Cobb up belatedly.

  All of which leads us into even messier regions. In Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins confessed to relief that there were no women on his crew, because the privacy on those tiny craft was nonexistent. I was surprised to find this coming from so subtle a man as Collins, because it seemed to me that anyone capable of contemplating the myriad nasty ends available to an Apollo astronaut could probably learn to bare his arse in front of a lady without bursting into tears. But when I ask Duke, he says the same thing – that he thinks it was the lack of privacy that kept women off the crews – and I try hard to make myself remember that the Sixties hadn’t happened for these people yet. Then we talk about the earthier aspects of Apollo life and even I find it hard to imagine men and women of his generation sharing these experiences.