In the middle of the alcove is a squat cylinder like the continental-tire cubby on the back of a pre-war Oldsmobile, though not as wide across. It is the engine. In all the earlier spacecraft, the engine was somewhere else—strapped over the heat shield in the Mercury capsule, in its own separate chamber on the Geminis, the Vostoks and Soyuzes, the Apollo service module. In the LM it is right there in the middle of the crew space, tube-fed with fuel and oxidizer that are both toxic and explosive. There is a story that a LM fuel tank unwisely tapped with a ball-point pen during outdoor testing resulted in that pen being embedded in a fence post some way away, along with some of the unwise tapping finger.
During development, the fuel and oxidizer lines will not stop leaking. When Grumman ships the first purportedly flight-ready LM down to Cape Kennedy, it is rejected as not fit for the launch pad let alone for space: “Junk. Garbage.” Trying to solve the problems makes the third LM so late to the Cape that there is not enough time to ready it for its scheduled flight.* What was expected to be a routine vacuum test for the fifth LM goes catastrophically wrong when one of the windows explodes.
The windows are crucial. There is a much-told tale that the first design for the Mercury capsules had no windows: the engineers saw no need for the astronauts to be able to see out, because they were basically just payload. Landing on the Moon, though, is not something that can be left to Ground Control—among other things, it takes radio waves just over a second to get there and just as long to get back. As Jack Myers, a life-support researcher at the University of Texas, put it at the time, “The human goes into space, not as a passenger, but as an essential part of the instrumentation needed for a particular mission.”
The windows let the mission commander and the LM pilot, both of whom can land the craft, see what they are doing—they also connect them to the computer which turns the adjustments they make to joystick and throttle into digital instructions for the engines and thrusters. Born to give substance to science fiction’s fascination with spaceflight in the context of a world reshaped by the arrival of science-fictional superweapons, Apollo added new depth to a third of the genre’s concerns: new manifestations of intelligence and control in a world of thinking machines. The computer’s requirements shaped the astronauts’ world. For example: engraved on the inside and outside of the window glass is a sort of reticule. By holding his head so that the engravings on both sides of the glass line up with each other, the commander knows he is looking exactly where the computer thinks he is looking. That matters. The computer can respond to its human only if that “essential part of the instrumentation” is precisely aligned.
Computers on the ground also help with the windows’ design. But this is the exception, not the rule; computer-aided-design software is not remotely up to handling the whole job as yet. All the LM’s complexities are drawn out by hand, and many are built by hand, too. The aluminium is so thin that it cannot be stamped into shape; it must be crafted. But computers are crucial, not just within the LM, but in the process of its creation. It organises. It measures. Software called PERT is used to schedule the development programme at Grumman, and most of the rest of the Apollo programme too, churning out new schedules every day, seeing what things that need to be done have not been done, what has to be done elsewhere so the next thing can be done here, marshalling an army of workers according to the planning procedures its programmers laid out for it.
Computers are the manifestation of the future that makes the future possible. They also make it visible, synthesizing experiences for which there is no prior experience. Flight simulators have been around since the early 1930s, when an enterprising young man called Edwin Link realised that the pneumatic systems his family used in their church-organ business could adjust the attitude of a pseudo-cockpit as if it were in flight. Having become widespread in the Second World War, this technology reaches its pinnacle in the Apollo simulators. Nothing has ever been simulated in advance remotely as thoroughly as the Apollo missions: the hours of simulator training run into thousands. In the LM simulators, computers coordinate instructions from the throttle and joystick with the movement of tiny fibre-optic cameras over plaster models of the lunar surface that would have made James Nasmyth deeply envious, thus showing the pilots the relevant bits of the Moon as they learn how to control their strange new craft under all conditions.
The need for such simulation pushes the computers into new virtual realms. The flight hardware needs to be re-created in ground-based software so that the simulators respond just as the real craft will. Virtual machines that exist only as lines of code run programs designed for real machines just as the real machines would—or so it is hoped. No one has made machines of pure logic before. As the programme goes on, some of the pilot’s experience becomes purely virtual, too. The LEM Spaceflight Visual Simulator, created by General Electric in 1964, responds to the pilot’s commands simply by moving pixels round a screen. In doing so it creates the first virtual landscape: no animated drawings, no plaster models, just zeroes and ones. At first it is purely geometric; with time it develops relief and shading. The technique starts to be used to explore different sorts of places, other sorts of travel. What would someday become cyberspace, and after that just the way that all images are created, starts off as a new way of showing the Moon to those about to walk on it. The prospect of an unprecedented physical experience brings forth a new virtual one.
Within these new directions of abstraction, though, intimacy remains—nowhere more than in the suit. Preconceptions suggested that the suit would be hard cased, with articulated arms—that it would make a man look like a robot. It is not. It is made of soft fabrics sewn together by women working with Singer sewing machines not unlike those found in half the houses of America, working not for a defence contractor but for the International Latex Corporation, makers of Playtex bras and girdles.
The spacesuit is the world shrunk skin-tight, the world three times removed. From the warm air of Florida to the command module; from the command module into the LM; from the LM into the suit. Sealed away airtight each time, and at the end of it all the breathable world is just in a bowl around the head and a pack on the back. The suits are better fitted to the wearers than any garment ever, sewn to an accuracy defined with aerospace exactitude, no stitch to be further than 1/64th of an inch—two-fifths of a millimetre—from the defined line of the seam. Not all the 21 layers are sewn; 16 of them, latex and Mylar, Dacron and Kapton, are glued together, no wrinkling allowed, the top layer almost indiscernibly larger than the bottom one, since what is outside must always be bigger than what is inside. Undergarments are webbed with waterfilled tubes to cool the skin; in the bright Sun with no flow of outside air to carry heat away there is always the risk of overheating. But warmth can be provided, too, as required. A different tube takes water to the mouth; another grips the cock to drain it away. That tube eventually comes in three sizes: large, extra-large and extra-extra-large; the first run, in small, medium and large, unaccountably saw some astronauts fitted with the wrong size.
As that shows, the suits, made by women, are for men. Astronauts were test pilots, and test pilots were men. Women could pass the same tests—and did, when they were applied privately and not by NASA—but they were not test pilots nor fighter pilots, and astronauts were. Some questioned this. Not many, though, and not high up. When Kennedy had said “a man on the Moon” it was not shorthand for a human of either gender. Such things were what men did.
As well as being men, the astronauts were white, too, white as the spacesuits.* That was not quite such a done deal. The White House knew that a black astronaut could be a big win, at home and abroad; it edged NASA in that direction, ensuring that there should be a black candidate in the next class of Air Force test pilots. The politicians did not, though, push the point when he was not selected for astronaut training. The first African American astronaut flew in only 1983, the same year as the first female American astronaut—who headed to space in the shuttle 20 ye
ars and two days after Valentina Tereshkova took off in Vostok 6.
Backing out of the angry-mouth hatch and down the ladder, the cycles of their lives wrapped around them, the men of the LM step onto the Moon. In a way they never reach it. Cocooned, drained and diapered, they are swaddled in the world they came from and return to.† They do not feel the lunar temperature—they have their own. They do not breathe the Moon, or pee on it, or truly touch it; the gauntlets are wonders of dexterity, given their thickness, but they cannot transmit the tactile. They can hear only themselves, and the voices of others, far away.
But for a few hours or days, depending on the mission, they inhabit it. They move back and forth across it, they jump above it and feel the light shock of landing in their knees as their muscles absorb their body’s momentum.
They feel time pass on it. Though the Sun hardly moves in the sky, their hearts are beating, their reserves depleting.
They watch it respond to them; they see its surface pierced as they dig their trenches, and what they see matches what their muscles feel. They see its soft contours, pocked surface, hard-to-judge distances and near horizons in the way you see places that you may or may not go to while visiting nearby, not as you see things to possess, not as you see representations, or illusions, or other people’s points of view.
It does not see them. And they do not see each other, at least not their faces. The sun-screening gold of the helmets’ faceplates means no expressions make it out of the suit. Looking at each other, they see in the faceplates only pictures of the Moon, just as we do in the pictures they take of each other and bring back. They see what Moonwatchers have always seen: reflections. They see themselves.
They only experience the Moon in the flesh after regaining the LM. They bring its dust and grit in with them on their suits. They smell it in their air when the tiny volume of the LM repressurises and the helmets come off—it smells like gunpowder, or ashes doused with water. Sharp, electric sensations from reactions that could never take place in the vacuum outside catalysed in the air within.
The fine Moonstuff that coats the interior is dirt. It is pollution, in the way that the anthropologist Mary Douglas defined the word: matter out of place. Matter from the unworld in a new world.
In the LM, before he walks out into the dust, Buzz Aldrin takes Communion with bread and wine consecrated on another planet. “‘I am the vine’,” he says, “‘You are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.’” It is not the only lunar sacrament. In her book “The Planets” (2005), Dava Sobel recalls hearing that her friend Carolyn, on being presented with a speck of moondust by a planetary scientist boyfriend, impulsively ate it. The Apollo astronauts ingest it without choosing to. In their dust-dirtied LM tiny particles move through the alveoli of their lungs and across the microvilli of their guts into their blood, tissues and cells. They bring the Moon home incorporated. They bring themselves home changed.
APOLLO 11: SEA OF TRANQUILITY
On the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
In lunar orbit: Michael Collins
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 102:45:58
—Engine arm is off.
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
—Roger, Twan… Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
—Okay. Let’s get on with it.
103:03:55—THE VIEW
—The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters of the 5- to 50-foot variety; and some ridges small, 20, 30 feet high, I would guess; and literally thousands of little, 1- and 2-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.
109:19:16—STEPPING OUT
—Okay. Houston, I’m on the porch.
—Roger, Neil.
109:23:38
—I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. Ground mass is very fine.
Okay. I’m going to step off the LM now.
That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.
109:43:16—TWO MEN ON THE MOON
—Beautiful view!
—Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.
—Magnificent desolation.
[silence]
Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effects on it right here, Neil.
110:13:42—WALKING
—You do have to be rather careful to keep track of where your center of mass is. Sometimes, it takes about two or three paces to make sure you’ve got your feet underneath you.
About two to three or maybe four easy paces can bring you to a fairly smooth stop. [To] change directions, like a football player, you just have to put a foot out to the side and cut a little bit.
The so-called kangaroo hop does work, but it seems as though your forward mobility is not quite as good as it is in the more conventional one foot after another. As far as saying what a sustained pace might be, I think that one that I’m using now would get rather tiring after several hundred feet. But this may be a function of this suit, as well as the lack of gravity forces.
110:16:03—CEREMONY
—All right. Go ahead, Mr. President. This is Houston. Out.
—Hello, Neil and Buzz. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you have done. For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what an immense feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one; one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.
—Thank you, Mr. President. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations, and with interests and the curiosity and with the vision for the future. It’s an honor for us to be able to participate here today.
110:24:11—SOUND CHECK
—Buzz, this is Houston. You’re cutting out on the end of your transmissions. Can you speak a little more closely into your microphone? Over.
—Roger. I’ll try that.
—Beautiful.
—Well, I had that one inside my mouth that time.
—It sounded a little wet…
121:40:45—AFTER THE REST PERIOD
—Good morning, Houston. Tranquility Base. Over.
—Roger. Loud and clear. And how is the resting standing up there? Did you get a chance to curl up on the engine can?
—Roger. Neil has rigged himself a really good hammock with a waist tether, and he’s been lying on the ascent engine cover, and I curled up on the floor.
124:21:54—LAUNCH
—9, 8, 7, 6, 5, Abort Stage, Engine Arm, Ascent, Proceed.
We’re off. Look at that stuff go all over the place. Look at that shadow. Beautiful.
26, 36 feet per second up.
—The Eagle has wings.
APOLLO 12: OCEAN OF STORMS
On the Moon: Pete Conrad and Alan Bean
In lunar orbit: Richard Gordon
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 115:22:16
—Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me…
I’m
going to step off the pad…
Mark. Off the… Oooh, is that soft and queasy…
Hey, that’s neat. I don’t sink in too far. I’ll try a little…
Boy, that Sun is bright. That’s just like somebody shining a spotlight in your hand.
Well, I can walk pretty well, Al, but I’ve got to take it easy and watch what I’m doing.
Boy, you’ll never believe it. Guess what I see sitting on the side of the crater!
—The old Surveyor, right?
—The old Surveyor. Yes, sir. [Laughs] Does that look neat! It can’t be any further than 600 feet from here. How about that?
—Well planned, Pete.
115:27:27—NOT FALLING OVER
—Say, Houston; one of the first things that I can see, by golly, is little glass beads. I got a piece about a quarter of an inch in sight, and I’m going to put it in the contingency sample bag, if I can get it. I got it.
Am I really leaning over, Al?
—You sure are. On Earth, you’d fall over, I believe.
—Huh?
—On Earth, you’d fall over leaning that far forward.
—It seems a little weird, I’ll tell you. Don’t think you’re going to steam around here quite as fast as you thought you were.
137:39:26—CONTENTMENT
—We’re just sitting here now; we’ve got the spacecraft all squared away. I’ll say everything’s tied down, but man, oh man, is it filthy in here; we must have 20 pounds of dust, dirt, and all kinds of junk.
—Roger, Pete. That’ll be an interesting zero g.
—Right. Al and I look just like a couple of bituminous coal miners right at the moment.
[Silence]
—But we’re happy…
APOLLO 14: FRA MAURO
On the Moon: Al Shepard and Edgar Mitchell
In lunar orbit: Stuart Roosa
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 135:08:17
—Houston, while you’re looking that up, you might recognize what I have in my hand is the handle for the contingency sample return; it just so happens to have a genuine six iron on the bottom of it. In my left hand, I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans. I’ll drop it down. Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can’t do this with two hands, but I’m going to try a little sand-trap shot here.
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