Moondust

by Andrew Smith

  So it was that the abundant pathos of Apollo 17’s launch was shot through with paranoia when Black September threatened to sabotage it. A metal-piercing bullet from the beach is all it would have taken. There was anger, too, with aerospace workers protesting job cuts outside the MSC. Two years before, Brevard County, Florida, had been the fastest-growing county in the USA, but now it was officially classed as an “economically depressed area,” while Cocoa Beach seemed to be crumbling back into the sea. Yet still the Cape was crammed with more people than came to watch Apollo 11: the public had steadily lost interest in the programme after that successful first landing, but now they scrambled back to catch its last gasp. The sci-fi master Isaac Asimov described watching this surrealistic spectacle from a cruise liner in the Atlantic, among guests and speakers who included Robert Heinlein and the omnipresent Norman Mailer. There were big delays in the launch, but when the fuse was lit just after midnight, the sound took forty seconds to reach the boat, then felt like an earthquake.

  “It lit the sky from horizon to horizon, turning the ocean an orange-grey and the sky into an inverted copper bowl from which the stars were blanked out,” Asimov gasped.

  Schmitt thereafter made an unwitting nuisance of himself by jabbering nonstop observations on the appearance of the Earth and its weather systems all the way from 100 to 180,000 miles out. This might have endeared him to the Briton Reg Turnill, but even he rolled his eyes and told me that Schmitt, for all his enthusiasm, was “a complete pain” on the early part of the trip. Nevertheless, he and Cernan managed to be civil with each other all the way to the surface, and if the commander has since bemoaned his LM pilot’s impassive, scientific responses to what they found there, that doesn’t mean the geologist wasn’t privately rapt with what he saw. Command Module pilot Al Worden had first spotted the Taurus-Littrow valley as he drifted above the Sea of Serenity nineteen months earlier and he’d been excited, because the site looked like a geologist’s paradise; an ancient basin nestling between the ghostly domes of the Taurus Mountains, seventeen miles southwest of the big crater Littrow and dusted with darker soil than could be found anywhere else on the Moon – which might provide evidence of much more recent volcanic activity than had previously been supposed, perhaps dating back only half a billion years. In addition, rocks found at the foot of the mountains and among the knobbly Sculptured Hills promised to reach back almost to the formation of the solar system. After the disappointing lack of geologic drama Young and Duke had encountered in the Descartes highlands, Taurus-Littrow held great promise and Schmitt felt awe when he trained his expert eyes on the stark beauty of a landscape such as could never be seen on Earth, with the fluid plain rolling between steep-sided mountains, glittering with crystalline rocks and small craters, each with a shiny bead of fused glass at its centre. Light reflected from the slopes of the mountains, making them appear spotlit and creating crazy shadows on the floor below, and a bright blue Earth hung above as if set in black velvet. No wonder that by the end of his third excursion into this alien terrain, Schmitt was spontaneously bursting into song, leading his commander in a hearty rendition of “I Was Walking on the Moon One Day.”

  The pair stayed three days and collected 240 pounds of rock. For their second outing, they drove ten miles through this exotic land to reach the base of the 7,500-foot-high South Massif, one of the two largest Taurus mountain peaks. Jack’s discovery of orange soil, which appeared to suggest the possibility of water and perhaps life at some point in the distant past, was one of the highlights of the whole programme. Then he and Gene came home knowing that the whole thing was over.

  He saunters in unobtrusively. Not for the first time, I want to laugh at the sight of everyone else going about their business – chatting and checking in; asking directions or buying drinks or waiting in the lobby for travelling companions to show … unaware that standing quietly in their midst is someone who lived on the Moon for three days. Most of the time I forget how strange what I’m doing is, but every so often it hits me like an Arctic wind. It does now.

  Schmitt is dressed simply in slacks and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and wears round, gold, wire-rimmed specs. At sixty-seven, he’s tanned, swarthy, solidly built, perhaps five-nine and 180 pounds, with a head of curly hair that’s still mostly black and the confident physicality of someone who’s spent a lot of time outdoors and knows how to look after himself. I’ll find it hard to hold his face in my mind, because he projects no image, is curiously quirk-less and frill-less. In conversation he fixes you steadily with his eyes and bowls his gravelly Lee Marvin voice at you, speaking with the same meticulous diction as Ed and Buzz and Neil, as though precision has its own karma and even a loose vowel might invite chaos. He chuckles good-naturedly as I apologize for my shabby attire, because my bag got stuck in Denver: today – it had to happen – I am underdressed.

  Jack doesn’t soften his intellect the way that Alan and Charlie do and I wonder whether this is what rubbed Cernan the wrong way. Jack knows stuff, lots of stuff; stuff you don’t know and didn’t even know it was possible not to know until he told you, and when you stray onto a subject he doesn’t like or isn’t exercised by, he’ll issue a blunt “What else can we talk about?” You can tell he was a politician, too, because he is as interruptible as a herd of stampeding wildebeests and very ready to tell you when he thinks you’re wrong, with questions not so much answered as addressed. For a long time, I’m struggling to find a gap between him and this vast reservoir of facts – I find that I like him, but feel, as Neil Armstrong did when landing the Eagle, somewhat behind the airplane.

  A comment on that extraordinary CV draws a smile.

  “I’ve been fortunate. Lots of opportunity. Can’t hold a job, so …”

  A little laugh, then two and a half hours of trying to work out what going to the Moon meant to Jack Schmitt, while he goes off in every kind of direction and I try to wrestle him back and pin him down, and it’s fascinating, but not what I was expecting at all.

  Topics we deal with in passing are: the political situation in Turkey; the wonder of capitalism; the parlous state of the education system and abdications of the media, whom Schmitt blames for the abandonment of Apollo (where the Nuts tend to blame ’Nam). There’s the importance of minerals to the human metabolism and evidence that, in the brief time since lead began to be smelted in Europe, an adaptive process has taken place whereby the metal becomes attached to red blood cells – “So we’re keeping lead out of sensitive organs and more firmly fixed in the blood, and that’s just in 6,000 years! ” And all before we even reach the Little Ice Age, which gripped Europe for four hundred years from the mid-1400s and may be implicated in the persecution of witches, the French Revolution and the mysterious sublimity of Antonio Stradivari’s violins, and Schmitt’s unsettling doubt about the theory that global warming is human-induced. (He thinks we might have more to fear from the fact that periods of warming are often followed by rapid cooling: interestingly, current NASA scientists profoundly disagree with him.)

  We roam at length through the looming pensions crisis – the world’s most unsexy issue back in 1980 when Jack tried to bring it to a reluctant Senate’s attention (precipitated by our old friends the Baby Boomers, who will die with the rare distinction of having royally pissed off their parents and progeny in equal measure); and over the careerism, venality and bias toward incumbents that Schmitt encountered in the Senate, where “there’s no competitive races anymore … the gerrymandering … if an incumbent decides to run for reelection, they’ve got a ninety-eight per cent chance of winning, and it’s been that way for decades.” We also discuss the elections in post-Ceauşescu Romania, which Schmitt observed with Al Gore’s former running mate Joe Lieberman and a British MP, and which Schmitt was alone in refusing to ratify finding the experience disturbing and “very emotional in some respects.” During our time together, this will be the only occasion on which he refers to an interior process or feeling. It’s all very interesting, very e
ducational, and not about the Moon. The aggressiveness of European autograph hunters, whom Schmitt insists are even worse than American ones, and the fact that he doesn’t do signing shows and all that lucrative celebrity stuff, is the nearest we get to the subject for a while.

  We do manage to settle on the Schmitt childhood, which was spent around mines, steeped in geology. His mother was a teacher and amateur botanist and zoologist, he tells me, “So we had a very active household in terms of natural phenomena.” He has two sisters; one lives in Arizona now and one in California. I wonder whether he ever had even a faint urge to fly like the other Apollo guys? No, he says, although if he hadn’t gone into science, he might have ended up in the marines.

  “But who knows what I would have been doing? I mean, you can’t run two lives simultaneously as an experiment when you’re a human being. As opportunities come, you look at them and say, ‘Is that one you’d regret not grasping?’ That’s sort of the way I’ve run my life.”

  There follows a little lecture on the importance of a grounding in maths for all citizens and an insistence that he suffered none of the postflight letdown others experienced, because he had his science to go back to, even though he never returned to the life of a full-time academic and looks to live by an absorbing but precarious combination of activities. There’d been no delayed reaction?

  “No.”

  None? No What do I do now?

  “No, I don’t think so. I never felt that I did. All I had to make sure of was that I could pay the mortgage.”

  Which can be daunting enough.

  “Well, it scares me – every day. It still does. That’s why I keep working.”

  We eventually arrive at the Moon and wander briefly through the Chinese ambitions relating thereto. Schmitt correctly speculates that Earth orbit is within their grasp, but doesn’t place much store by that. He notes that “Earth orbit is relatively routine now”; that over the past two decades the human environment has expanded up to a couple of hundred miles above the surface. If someone has the right booster rocket – he shrugs – they can get up there.

  “Into Deep Space, though, is another kettle of fish. There is a requirement for discipline and competency that is far above what is now available to any Earth-based space programme. No one, including the United States right now, has the kind of agency, or discipline, or competency necessary to operate with minimum risk in Deep Space.”

  But isn’t the lesson of Apollo that it’s mostly about determination? I ask.

  “No, no – you can be determined as hell, as we were prior to the Apollo 1 fire, and as the Russians were prior to their debacles. But unless you’ve got that number of things working appropriately, particularly competent management and discipline in that management, you probably won’t succeed. One can in a sense say that there have been three space programmes with the goal of going into Deep Space: one was the Russian effort and the other two were ours. The first one the United States put together failed, and it failed spectacularly in the Apollo 1 fire. And it wasn’t until that fire showed the flaws in the management system that a new programme was devised, primarily under the guidance of people like George Low and Sam Phillips, Chris Kraft and people like that, that we then succeeded.”

  It strikes me for the first time that, for all their brilliance and determination, the Soviets never managed to break Earth orbit; that not a single cosmonaut left the planet behind and saw it from afar. That the difference between near space and Deep Space is like the difference between climbing a hill and flying, and only Schmitt’s fading cadre of twenty-four Americans was privy to this most profound of sights and experiences. The world won’t be different without them, but the idea of the world will; the collective imagination a little impoverished. Getting out there is hard, he reminds me – the Chinese can boast that they’re going, and if they don’t mind losing a few people on the way, they might eventually do it. If they want to go safely and repeatedly, though, there’s a lot to learn.

  I tell Jack that I’ve been surprised at how little time the lunar astronauts spent contemplating the loneliness of a death out there, and ask whether this was out of confidence or aversion. He exclaims:

  “No! Of course we considered it! The whole design of the spacecraft considered it. It was in the initial, conceptual design, and ultimately in the hardware used in these missions. You wouldn’t be successful if you left people on the Moon – the Kennedy challenge was to return them safely to Earth. That was built into the design. So the reality was always there, but the fear of it was not there. There was much less probability of that happening than of you encountering trouble on your flight back to England.”

  He chuckles as I contemplate this claim in more detail, because he knows that while it’s misleading, the statistics are on his side. Twenty-seven left, twelve landed, all came back. Something I’ve said before: the more you consider what Apollo did in so little time, the more unbelievable it seems. Another chuckle.

  “Yeah, we could get things done. But that was a combination of a number of things. One was extraordinarily motivated twenty-two-year-olds almost everywhere in the programme. The vast majority of the people were just out of engineering school and highly imaginative – basically, they didn’t know how to fail, they hadn’t been around long enough to know what failure was like, so they didn’t worry about it.”

  We talk about the politics that led to Apollo for a while and Schmitt seems keen to credit the Republican Eisenhower with more enthusiasm for space than seems reasonable to me. When we get to JFK and I mention the Bay of Pigs as a factor, he shrugs, “Well, who knows?” with a glance that I take to mean “You woolly-headed liberals will say stuff like that” and makes me smile. We embark on a jolly conversation about the philosopher John Locke and Winston Churchill and the erosion of freedom and encroachment of government on our lives, which I find enjoyable, even if the couple eavesdropping in silence at the next table in this hotel bar look ready to hang themselves. Of particular interest to Schmitt is the way that “the existence and the creation of the United States allowed Europe to survive itself, and if you really want to look off into the future, it may be that settlements on the Moon and Mars will ultimately allow the world to survive itself. The idea of a new birth of freedom every now and again isn’t a bad thing. We tend to wear freedom out.”

  He adds that “the frontier is a great catalyst for freedom. And the frontier now is no longer on the Earth. It’s at the Moon and Mars. That’s where you’re going to see, I think, a rejuvenation of freedom, probably within this century.”

  I think: “Well, who knows?” Loaded and ambiguous words like “freedom” make me uneasy.

  Then we’re racing through Black September and the ease with which someone could have destroyed Apollo 17 with nothing more than a rifle, and NASA’s self-interested obstruction of private leaps of faith into space, by way of Eric Jones’s extraordinary Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, a massive work of oral history about the lunar landings which is available on the Web and being added to daily by people from all over the world. Schmitt helped Jones elicit contributions from some of the astronauts, which is a lovely thing to know, but still not what I was after.

  I tell him how struck I was by the differing assessments of his personality on the part of Kranz and Cernan. He hasn’t read Cernan’s book, but betrays no surprise upon hearing what his former colleague said. There is an uncharacteristic pause, though, prior to the inscrutable response:

  “People see what they want to see, I guess, huh?”

  Was it a thrill jockey versus egghead thing?

  “Well, I have no idea what was in his mind. I wouldn’t know. I spent a lot of time with the flight controllers. They were a good bunch of people. Your life was in their hands as much as it was in your own. We became very close friends, a lot of us. Still are.”

  I try again, suggesting that it must have been difficult for a scientist to fit into the military milieu.

  “Well, I don’t think so. Of course, I w
ould have a different view from a lot of the others who didn’t get a chance to fly. A lot of luck figured into it, but if you’re not ready to take advantage of luck, luck doesn’t do you much good.”

  Another question I’ve asked previously: Have the relationships between Space Age astronauts changed over the years, as they do with siblings? Another pause.

  “No, for the most part, whatever relationship we had has disappeared, because we’re very independent, we’re not joiners – you don’t find an astronaut alumni organization, not really. There is this Association of Space Explorers that was formed a few years ago [by the idealistic Rusty Schweickart], and most people are dues-paying members, but it doesn’t act as a … at least my sense of it is … well, I never go to meetings and not very many people do. They’re just not joiners.”

  Does the thought that someday soon there won’t be anyone left who’s stood on the Moon mean anything to him?

  “Hahahaha. Well, we’ll see what we can do. We’ll see what we can do …What else can we talk about?”

  Interesting: Schmitt didn’t like that question.

  We talk about helium-3 and “how, ultimately, it might get us back to the Moon” – a revealing choice of words, I think, because it suggests that the urge to go back precedes the justification. I note that the other lunar astronauts came back in awe of the Earth more than anything else, and wonder whether Jack’s view of it changed?

  “Well, I think what they came back with is an awareness. Geologists always have an awareness of the Earth.”

  And a respect, presumably.

  “Well, yes, it’s what you’ve been studying all your life. So I think I had a different perspective, understandably. But most people don’t pause and think about the Earth as a globe in space. And when you finally see it as that, against an absolute black background, it gets your attention.”

  You can only see it as such from the verge of Deep Space. Only twenty-four people have, ever. Everyone describes its seeming fragility.