Moondust

by Andrew Smith

  In the days since I last saw Alan Bean, I’ve been surprised by a number of things. The first is that I drove away from him thinking not “I wish I could go to the Moon,” but rather: “I hope I can be like that when I’m seventy.” I’m beginning to see patterns again, like I did in the old apartment on West Fourth Street, and if it’s becoming clearer to me that the astronauts’ journey wasn’t really about the Moon, it’s also dawning that neither is mine.

  Another surprise is how much I’m growing to like Houston, which, for all its rubble jungle of vacant lots and parades of traffic-choked, twelve-lane flyovers, is full of vitality, seems to be in a permanent state of invention, and I’m unexpectedly pleased to be staying for another week. And I’m staying because of the final surprise, which is that, in three days’ time, the spectacularly retiring Apollo 16 commander, John Young, has agreed to receive me at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on the road to Galveston, where he still works, the last of the Moonwalkers to do so, a Space Age heirloom at the age of seventy-two. Before it was renamed, the Johnson Space Center was called the Manned Spacecraft Center and when astronauts referred to “Houston,” this is what they meant. So I’m meeting John Young at Mission Control.

  It gets better, too. By priceless coincidence, the World Space Congress is also in town this week and I am registered as a delegate. The congress happens on this scale just once a decade and here Apollo’s legacy will be laid out like a banquet in the big tin hangar of the George R. Brown Convention Center. In fact, as I take my seat for the inaugural ceremony, the eighty-five-year-old veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite is already hailing the presence of over one hundred Nobel Prize–winners this week. He talks up the forbidding programme of lectures, seminars and events, then launches into a series of tales about his time reporting the space programme, the best of which concerns being in the studio when Armstrong and Scott started to tumble in Gemini 8 and it looked like they were going to be lost, at which moment his team had “seized the air” and started to breathlessly report the episode – not a story Cronkite enjoyed reporting but his duty all the same – and the station switchboard had been instantly assailed by so much traffic that the phone company strained to handle it … calls sparked not by anxiety or alarm or concern for the astronauts, but because Cronkite had interrupted a broadcast of Lost in Space. That’s right, Armstrong and Scott were cramping the style of my foily friend, Major Don West. This will be a theme I hear often this week: how the fickle public would rather be spoon-fed fantasy than pay for awkward and unpredictable reality. Then Cronkite introduces a celebratory collection of space clips from Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows and I seem to be the only one to find this riotously ironic.

  Downstairs in the cavernous hall, the congress looks like two different conventions sharing the same space. There are dozens of small stalls concerned with satellites, or trumpeting technologies and programmes aiming to catch NASA’s eye, because they’re the only ones with money to spend. Then there’s the monolithic NASA, which dominates and is here to persuade the public and media that it’s exciting, necessary and value for money. This is a tough job, because no public in the world is more shrewdly skeptical of (real) space than the American public at the end of 2002. In Europe, India, China, Japan, it can still fire the imagination and inspire pride, but to most Americans it’s history – expensive, tax-inflating history. Space people complain about this, even though the original push was presented to the people as a race which needed to be won, then was: and once a race is won, only a fanatic keeps running. This is in no way NASA’s fault (remember Bob Gilruth’s screams in the night?), but they’ve had to live with it ever since.

  Which is not to say that NASA is blameless. Old-school engineers will tell you that the bureaucrats started to lose their nerve and their way long before Apollo was over, while bureaucrats blame politicians, the public and the media for their lack of resolve, a little like Hitler and the people in the subway. Before I came here, I was pleased to track down the English engineer John Hodge, one of a visionary four-man team who designed Mission Control and went on to be the unflappable flight director on Armstrong and Scott’s near-fatal Gemini 8 mission (witnesses describe him pacing the floor in his tweed jacket, smoking a pipe as he issued instructions). Almost unknown in his country of birth, Hodge lives in Virginia now and his story is telling in a number of ways. To begin with, it’s another little-known fact that he was part of a tranche of twenty-five crack British engineers who’d been recruited from the Canadian aircraft makers A. V. Roe when it suddenly went bust in 1959. They’d been working on a super-advanced jet fighter called the “Arrow,” and when NASA heard of the company’s collapse, they hurried over the border with a chequebook and signed up the design team. It was a smart move: flight controller Chris Kraft enthuses that “In one bunch, we got engineers who would make major contributions to getting us into space.” Thus, when Hodge arrived two months after NASA’s formation, 50 per cent of the engineers were Brits like him. Yet according to Hodge, there was more to this than met the eye.

  “The interesting thing about it was that they couldn’t get people in America,” he told me with a note of amusement in his voice. “People in the States thought it was just a fly-by-night thing that wasn’t going to go anywhere. So when we came down here, we were about twenty per cent of the total organization! We were a big part of the programme at that time.”

  He talked for a while about being part of the team that dreamt Mission Control into existence and how exciting those early years were. Then he spoke of how NASA ossified through the Sixties, as the bureaucracy became more top-heavy and entrenched and remote from the creative engineers. By the end of the decade, he was working on shuttle and space station designs, but the crafts which struggled through endless committee meetings and political compromises weren’t what he’d imagined or hoped for.

  “No, the space station they built is not the space station I designed,” he mourned. “It’s a very bad space station. And of course we need a new shuttle. That was not a good design either.”

  Neither was money a key factor in this, in the engineer’s opinion.

  “No, I don’t think it was about the budget, because we spent thirteen billion or something like that. It had to do with the attitude of the people in Houston. They really knew what they wanted and it wasn’t the right thing. They’re very precocious down there …”

  So now I’m “down there,” looking directly at them; at the expansive stands displaying all sorts of speculative designs for sexy space planes and new propulsion systems that run on air itself, and socially conscious schemes for generating clean energy in space. The trouble is that everything’s on paper, backed by an occasional scale model, and almost nothing looks likely to be realized anytime soon, save in response to some so far unseen threat or tragedy. No one in the hall knows that, fourteen weeks from now, in February 2003, the shuttle Columbia will provide just such a spur when it breaks up in the clear morning sky right above this place, as if on some mean cosmic cue. Like everyone else, my first thought then will be for the crew and their families, but my second involves remembering that Columbia had been the first shuttle to plummet back from space at twenty-five times the speed of sound in April 1981, and that the pilot who placed her triumphantly on a desert runway at Edwards that sunny day was the Apollo hero John Watts Young.

  After the triumphant landings of Apollos 11 and 12 in 1969, 1970 was as rough on NASA as it was on everyone else. No one reached the Moon that year and the public’s attention was already draining away. Budget cuts, which had begun as early as 1963 as President Johnson struggled to protect his beloved lunar programme from the spiralling costs of Vietnam, now bit hard: Apollo 20 was cancelled in January, followed by missions 19 and 18 (Dick Gordon’s flight!) in August, and no one could be quite sure where the slaughter would stop. Some media people claimed that Pete Conrad was to blame, had committed the one sin for which the emerging postmodern mind held no forgiveness – he had made the business of lan
ding Apollo 12 look easy, undramatic. Lunar-hoax enthusiasts will try to convince you that this is why NASA changed the script for the April launch of Apollo 13, naming the LM Aquarius after Fifth Dimension’s hit single from the musical Hair, and writing in a crisis which blew the landing and would have – even should have – killed the crew but for a heroic show of ingenuity and courage.

  Apollo 13 is worth looking at because it’s instructive in a number of ways. The mission began with a successful launch and acceleration out of Earth orbit, but as the crew and their two spaceships drifted toward the Moon with just 45,000 miles to go, they heard an explosion. Moments later, Command Module pilot Jack Swigert noticed oxygen pressure dropping in one of the Service Module’s two large oxygen tanks which supplied the crew and the Command Module fuel cells; shortly after that, the mission’s courtly, forty-two-year-old commander, Jim Lovell, saw gas leaking into space. Although the minor electrical fault that sparked this drama was not immediately understood, the gravity of the situation was. One of the oxygen tanks had ruptured, crippling both and meaning that the ship had no means of continuing to generate oxygen, electrical power or water, and no sensors or instruments, while no one could be sure whether its engine would fire or explode if switched on. And all of this 200,000 miles from home. With hindsight, the only good thing about the situation was Lovell’s response, expressed with an understatement and timing which the combined writers of Friends, The Simpsons and Six Feet Under would have struggled to better: “Okay, Houston,” he said as if addressing a dry cleaner who’d left a stain on one of his shirts, “we’ve had a problem.” The truth was that many dire scenarios had been written and played out in preflight simulations, but never any as dire as this. Flight director Gene Kranz chillingly recalls watching “the Command Module’s life-sustaining resources disappearing, like blood draining from a body … the controllers felt they were toppling into an abyss.”

  A glimmer of hope lay in the fact that the Lunar Module was still intact, even though it was only designed to accommodate two people for forty-four hours. Furthermore, Apollo 13 was on what is called a “free return” trajectory, meaning that if nothing changed, the two conjoined craft could swing around the back of the Moon and use its gravity like a slingshot to speed home. Calculating that this would take four and a half days, which was longer than the available electricity and oxygen would last, controllers instructed the astronauts to burn the LM descent engine around the back side – a hairy undertaking for which the Lunar Module hadn’t been designed – so reducing the return journey by twelve hours. The next four days were thus spent improvising makeshift solutions to problems that had never been imagined, much less addressed, the most celebrated being the fabrication of a life-saving air filtration system out of cardboard, plastic covers from checklist books, storage bags and anything else that happened to be available to the crew. Meanwhile, the astronauts froze, starved, thirsted, tried to function on no sleep, and the whole world watched: in Rome, Pope Paul VI prayed for the crew’s return; in India, 100,000 pilgrims at a Hindu festival did likewise. Throughout, NASA officials told the crew’s wives that the chances of a safe return were 10 per cent, and this was considered to be looking on the bright side.

  There are three things to note about this episode: first, that the now-received perception of the Apollo 13 save as “NASA’s finest hour” dates no further back than Ron Howard’s eponymous 1995 film of the mission (when coscriptwriter Al Reinert went looking for Jim Lovell in the late 1980s, he found him running a tugboat company, the forgotten commander of a “failed” mission … it was Reinert who wrote the “finest hour” line); second, that while crowds flocked to see the Apollo 13 movie, the space shuttle Atlantis was making real-time history overhead by docking with the Russian Mir space station, while hardly anyone bothered to notice; third, that the team which designed the makeshift air filter was led by none other than John Watts Young. And it was a remarkable save. When the capsule splashed down after an agonizing period of radio silence, watched by what European networks claimed to be the largest worldwide TV audi-ence ever assembled, a visibly faltering Walter Cronkite all but announced that the crew had been lost to their damaged heat shield. No one expected them to make it, yet they did.

  After the close call of 13, Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell’s Apollo 14 flight was postponed from July 1970 to January/February of 1971, closely followed by the July launch of Apollo 15, which was commanded by the elusive and scandal-prone David Scott, who we will come to later. By the time Apollo 16 was ready to fly in April 1972, everyone knew that the jig was up, that commander John Young and his rookie Lunar Module pilot, Charles Duke, would be flying the second-to-last spaceship to the Moon.

  What of this man Young? He was born into a military family in San Francisco in 1930 and raised mostly in then-rural Florida, which makes the origin of his Okie drawl uncertain; it’s said that engineers often patronized him because of it, only to feel like fools when their Ivy League assumptions were demolished with a few choice words. He evidently had an unremarkable childhood, about which little detail is known, because by all accounts he is extraordinarily reserved and reluctant to offer much of himself to the world, even to colleagues and friends. Childhood neighbours describe him as a quiet boy with a passion for model airplanes and there are reports of him giving a talk on rockets to his eleventh-grade classmates. Subsequently, a degree in aeronautical engineering from Georgia Tech led to the Navy and test pilot school, where he established himself as an uncommonly brilliant pilot and set two time-to-climb records. Then it was on to NASA, where he became the first member of the second group of astronauts to fly (and was thus chosen over peers who included Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad). Indeed, by the time he commanded the shuttle’s first space flight in 1981, he was the most experienced astronaut in the world, having been up four times previously on Geminis 3 and 10, and Apollos 10 and 16. I’ve noticed that Apollo freaks view him as a kind of Thinking Man’s Armstrong; the one they want to meet and dedicate their Web sites to, despite being the least showy or voluble of them all. Pad Führer Guenter Wendt renders him thus:

  “A sharp-witted one … he spoke with a drawl and was a man of few words, but what he said was always right on target …he did not care if you wore a badge that identified you as an engineer or a vice president. He called it like it was. Some people didn’t like him, but if they were honest with themselves, they would readily admit that his contributions were tremendous.”

  Although a more gregarious astronaut remarks drily on Young’s “bizarre behavior,” by which he means the commander’s laconic bearing, it was mostly bureaucrats who didn’t like him. He was in charge of the Astronaut Office when the shuttle Challenger broke up in 1986, meaning that the seven lost crew were his people and it is said he had nightmares about the disaster for months afterwards, then turned his anger and grief on what he saw as the complacency of Agency pen-pushers. At one point, he formulated a list of potentially serious safety problems which management had ignored in the face of a crazy launch schedule and straitened budget. When the memo was leaked to the press (amid suspicions that it had come from him), he was removed from his post and kicked into a less controversial corner of the organization. He’d been expected to fly the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, but there would be no more flights for him, even though he continued to hope that there might be. He’s the only one of the first wave of astronauts still with the organization. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin has been quoted as saying that John Young “had the right stuff before we even had a name for it.” He did know how to have fun, though: a 1967 issue of a Manned Spacecraft Center newsletter has an impromptu group calling itself the Fearsome Foursome parodying two rewritten Broadway hits on an anniversary of Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight, with the four being Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, Apollo 10 commander Thomas Stafford and Young. He reportedly also liked to draw cartoons of his colleagues in action and many of them agree with Guenter Wendt that he possessed a wit as dry as the driest martini.
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  The Johnson Space center looks like any postwar red-brick university campus, except for the rusty old rocket lolling on the grass out front. I stop at the visitors centre first, where the usual collection of used capsules and clapped-out simulators is supplemented by a video presentation about crop circles, which asks ominously whether strange atmospheric conditions or something more “otherworldly” is responsible for them and I make a note to let John know that it’s actually a bunch of stoned dudes with boards and rope. Once past the security building off Saturn Lane, a maze of covered corridors is paced by people in jeans and casual shirts. How different it must have been in the days when Buzz Aldrin could speak of these same paths churning with “earnest young engineers, their holstered slide rules slapping against their belts.” Holstered slide rules! But that’s right, this was the new ocean then, the frontier. Quirkily, Norman Mailer found a connection between these people and the hippies when he visited here, because “both had no atmosphere surrounding them … their envelope was gone,” by which he meant that they’d lost their connection to the Earth, had become ethereal and sexless, but it doesn’t sound like that when flight director Gene Kranz talks about what they did. During a flight, he told me, the atmosphere in this place was “basically a controlled fury: these people know that in the next few seconds, they might have to be making a decision which is going to alter history.” Never leaving the present tense, he described how, as the time approached for Apollo 11’s lunar descent, he gave his staff a break to fetch coffee and go to the bathroom, and then when they came back into the control room, he locked the doors and delivered an emotional oration in which he reminded his young team – average age twenty-six, don’t forget – of how much he loved them all and how confident he was of their abilities.