—You got more dirt than ball that time.
—Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again.
—That looked like a slice to me, Al.
—Here we go.
Straight as a die; one more.
[Silence]
—Miles and miles and miles.
APOLLO 15: HADLEY RILLE
On the Moon: David Scott, James Irwin
In lunar orbit: Alfred Worden
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 122:44:45
—Oh, look back there, Jim! Look at that. Oh, look at that! Isn’t that something? We’re up on a slope, Joe, and we’re looking back down into the valley and…
—That’s beautiful.
—That is spectacular!
Get the antenna pointed here.
—And it probably is fresh; probably…
—Okay.
—… not older than three and a half billion years.
—Can you imagine that, Joe? Here sits this rock, and it’s been here since before creatures roamed the sea in our little Earth.
—Well said, Dave…
—Hey, Jim?
—Yeah.
—… well said.
—We ought to check the dust on the lens of these cameras.
145:41:48—THE GENESIS ROCK
—Okay, there’s a big boulder over there down-Sun of us, that I’m sure you can see, Joe, which is gray. And it has some very outstanding gray clasts and white clasts, and oh, boy, it’s a beaut! We’re going to get ahold of that one in a minute.
—Okay, I have my pictures, Dave.
—Okay, let’s see. What do you think the best way to sample it would be?
—I think probably… Could we break off a piece of the clod underneath it? Or I guess you could probably lift that top fragment right off.
—Yeah. Let me try…
Yeah. Sure can. And it’s a… a white clast, and it’s about.…
—Oh, man!
—Oh, boy!
—I got…
—Look at that.
—Look at the glint!
—Aaah.
—Almost see twinning in there!
—Guess what we just found.
—[laughter]
—Guess what we just found! I think we found what we came for.
—Crystalline rock, huh?
—Yes, sir. You better believe it.
—Yes, sir.
—Look at the plage in there.
—Yeah.
—Almost all plage.
—[garbled]
—As a matter of fact
[laughter]
Oh, boy! I think we might have ourselves something close to anorthosite, ’cause it’s crystalline, and there’s just a bunch… It’s just almost all plage. What a beaut.
APOLLO 16: DESCARTES
On the Moon: Charlie Duke and John Young
In lunar orbit: Ken Mattingly
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 124:55:39
—Hey, that LM makes a nice looking house.
—Especially since it’s about the only one there.
—Yeah.
—You’re right, Tony. It ain’t nothing much up here but a lot of rocks.
—Hope the door opens, Charlie.
124:56:58—RACING WITH THE ROVER
—Man, you are really bouncing!
(Pause)
—Is he on the ground at all…?
—Okay; that’s 10 kilometers.
Huh?
—He’s got about two wheels on the ground. There’s a big rooster tail out of all four wheels. And as he turns, he skids. The back end breaks loose just like on snow. Come on back, John.
And the DAC is running. Man, I’ll tell you, Indy’s never seen a driver like this.
Okay, when he hits the craters and starts bouncing is when he gets his rooster tail. He makes sharp turns. Hey, that was a good stop. Those wheels just locked.
APOLLO 17: TAURUS LITTROW
On the Moon: Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt
In lunar orbit: Ronald Evans
TIME SINCE LAUNCH 118:08:02
—Oh, man. Hey, Jack, just stop. You owe yourself 30 seconds to look up over the South Massif and look at the Earth.
—What? The Earth?
—Just look up there.
—Ah! You seen one Earth, you’ve seen them all.
145:26:25—PYROCLASTICS
—Wait a minute…
—What?
—Where are the reflections? I’ve been fooled once. There is orange soil!!
—Well, don’t move it until I see it.
—It’s all over!! Orange!!!
—Don’t move it until I see it.
—I stirred it up with my feet.
—Hey, it is!! I can see it from here!
—It’s orange!
—Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It’s still orange!
—Sure it is! Crazy!
—Orange!
—I’ve got to dig a trench, Houston.
—Copy that. I guess we’d better work fast.
—Hey, he’s not going out of his wits.It really is.
—Is it the same color as cheese?
170:41:00—DEPARTURE
—Bob, this is Gene, and I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come—but we believe not too long into the future—I’d like to just [say] what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”
* In his novella “US” Howard Waldrop touchingly imagines three futures for Lindbergh’s son, Charles junior, kidnapped and killed in 1932. One of them is to become the first man on the Moon.
* This is one of the reasons why it is footling to read texts like “From the Earth to the Moon” as either successful/accurate (three-man crew, launched from Florida) or unsuccessful/inaccurate (a gun, for God’s sake?) predictions, judged against the realities of 1969.
* It is telling that the countdown came from cinema, a medium in which time is encoded in a form that can move equally easily forwards and backwards.
† When the beloved tree was brought down by a storm in 1938, Goddard noted sadly in his diary that he would “have to go on alone”.
* Strangely, the archives of Allan Grant, a photographer assigned to a story on “Destination Moon” for Time magazine, contain a set of photographs of an apparently filmed dance piece taking place on the film’s set. What the performance was remains unknown.
* OK, the accountant is a spy, but that hardly matters.
* That was why Apollo 8, originally intended to be a mission to Earth orbit using both the LM and the command module, became a command-module-only mission that went all the way to the Moon, and Rusty Schweickart and James McDivitt were the first to fly the LM on Apollo 9, an Earth-orbit shakedown cruise.
* As part of an art practice that interrogates notions of fantasy, modernity and that which it is to be African, Yinka Shonibare has made various spacesuit sculptures from the colourful patterned batik fabrics widely associated with West Africa. A black British security guard at London’s Tate Modern who was spending a lot of time with those pieces once told my wife that he knew they were empty—but he felt a really strong urge to try to open their dark-glass visors and see if there was a face like his inside.
† In early planning, the idea of concentrating and controlling the astronauts’ diets sufficiently strictly to avoid defecation during the voyage was considered. The borderline traumatic bowel movements suffered by test subjects at the end of ten-day trials of this approach, though, led to it being abandoned.
ITS SURFACE
ITS SURFACE IS NOT UNIFORM. BUT ITS VARIATIONS ARE SUBTLE. On Earth, the surface is constantly re-created by cycles operating at every scale, from the deep-time dancing of tectonic plates to the freezing and thawing of d
ampness in the soil’s pores. Molten magma rises imperiously, shouldering old strata aside; sediments shift and are eroded away. Sand blows into wandering dunes, flour-fine dust into fields of loess. There are limestone pavements, mudflat estuaries, abyssal plains. On the surface of the Moon, there are just dry rocks, jumbled.
The lunar regolith—from the Latin, “broken rock”—is just that: a blanket of rock fragments of every size which covers the whole surface. It is the product of billions of years of bombardment that has shattered and redistributed once-solid crust. Such impacts scatter dust. In the absence of air to resist their passage, motes of dust move as far and fast as boulders. Everywhere you find fragments of rocks from elsewhere—indeed, from everywhere, since the biggest impacts throw ejecta all around the Moon.
Only a few processes on Earth can carry a big rock a long way. The rocks thus moved are called erratics, and treated as telling rarities, clues to a past of glaciers, tsunamis and the like. On the Moon the erratic is the rule. The regolith is always a mixture of the nearby and the far flung.
The local, though, predominates. The regolith in the highlands is mostly made of anorthosite, the rock from which the Moon’s primordial crust was formed, though it is laced with bits of basalt from the maria. The basically basalt regolith of the maria has a rather heavier admixture of anorthosite on the same basis. There is a smattering of other rock types, too. Not all molten rock that rises through the Moon’s crust comes to the surface and ends up as basalt—some is trapped on the way, forming igneous intrusions of various types. Big impacts throw those rocks to the Moon’s four quarters, too.
The Moon has no sedimentary rocks as such. Lacking flows of any fluid other than magma and lava, it cannot sort out particles into silts and sands and cobbles and lay them down in beds. Nor could it bury such beds and cook them into something new, as the restless Earth does. The nearest it comes to such transforming creativity is breccia, a rock made when the shock from a nearby impact fuses existing rocks and fragments of different sizes together.
Once formed, these breccias get slowly beaten down and broken up in their turn.
Beneath the regolith, the bedrock, too, is shattered—but into larger pieces. This fractured basement, which extends kilometres into the crust, is called the megaregolith. The boundary between it and the regolith proper is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the region’s age—which is to say, the duration of its pummelling. In the ancient highlands the regolith may be 10 or 15 metres thick; in the younger maria it is more like five. On the very youngest surfaces, such as the floor of Tycho, only about 100m years old, the regolith may be only a few centimetres thick; below it lies a sheet of melted rock created by the impact itself.
The fact that impacts determine the nature and features of the surface does not mean that appreciable ones are common. If you staked out a square kilometre of the Moon’s surface for close observation you would have to wait a few centuries to see it hit by something of a gram or more in mass. Impacts of inappreciable size, though, are constant. That square kilometre is hit by micrometeoroids a ten-thousandth of a trillionth of a gram in mass a hundred times a second or so. Each impactor would be only a couple of thousandths of a millimetre across—roughly the size of a bacterium. But again, in the absence of air, the little ones move just as fast as their bigger brethren, and their impacts have similar immediate effects, just on a far smaller scale.
Like the asteroid which formed Tycho, an incoming micrometeoroid digs out a crater a lot bigger than it is, melting some of the rock as it does so. This melted rock freezes back into a solid so quickly that instead of forming crystalline mineral grains, as lavas do, its constituents freeze higgledy–piggledy into glass. This glass sticks adjacent dust particles together.
There is thus a limit to the brokenness of the regolith, a steady state of creation and destruction.
- IV -
BOUNDARIES
PROJECT APOLLO WAS IMAGINED AS BREAKING A BOUNDARY IN time as well as space. A world where people lived beyond the limits of Earth’s atmosphere and gravity would be a world that had entered a new age: the Space Age. But the great push outwards achieved, instead, a turning inwards. The pocket turned inside out. The anti-Copernican revolution of “Earthrise” recentred the cosmos on closer concerns.
Like Odysseus back to Ithaca, those whose imaginations travelled to the Moon with Apollo returned not to some safe imagined home of the past but to one degraded, not to bright, confident Camelot, but to Watergate. America was losing a war and prey to inflation; its environment felt despoiled; its oil supply proved vulnerable.
Apollo was not universally admired. Both its ambitions and its costs brought forward critics as diverse as the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the artist Yves Klein and the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, the man who invented the term “Moondoggle”. To Marvin Gaye, Apollo was of a piece with Vietnam, pollution, racist policing, the inner-city blues: “Rockets, moonshots; give it to the have-nots”. To most, though, including many who shared at least some of those reservations, it was still inspiring in prospect and exciting in its execution.
Afterwards, though, Apollo quickly became, at best, irrelevant. It had done nothing to clean the world, or feed the world, or take burdens from the shoulders of the world, or make the world more equal. Everything was the same or worse despite, or perhaps because, as Gil Scott-Heron angrily had it, “Whitey’s on the moon”. A bold, affirmative declaration—Yes, we can put a man on the Moon—became an inverted negative conditional, sometimes bemused, sometimes angry—If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we…? Cure cancer, or clean the air, or win a war in Indochina, or end poverty or curb inflation? Sure, these things are hard. But isn’t hard what we do? Isn’t hard what we choose to do? Isn’t hard why we chose to do it? If we don’t do these other things, is it because we choose not to? And who do you mean by we, white man?
The promise of Apollo was a high-water mark in terms of what a nation might aspire to do; the lack of any post-Apollo transformation, either in the heavens or on Earth, showed, for many, the limits of such aspiration. That is not to say the world did not subsequently change. But the change was not the deliberately brought about dawning of the Space Age. It was the unwilled unfolding of a new and troubling Earth Age.
Since Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder at Tranquility Base, the Earth’s population has increased by 100%, the amount of economic activity it supports by 300%; and the amount of carbon dioxide dumped in the atmosphere every year by 140%. About two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide emitted since the industrial revolution has been emitted in that past half century.
Over Antarctica, an ozone hole opened up. A fifth of the Amazon forest was lost. At the same time, fed by the extra carbon dioxide, the planet’s plants put on a growth spurt. Seen from space, the Earth became perceptibly greener, and its red edge a bit sharper. Its seawater has become sourer, and the levels to which the Moon’s tides can lift that water a little higher. Today’s world is not yet as different from that of Apollo as Apollo’s was from the deep past. But it is getting there.
An increasing number of scientists and concerned commentators refer to the new Earth Age as the Anthropocene—the age of humans. The conceit behind this naming, which dates from the turn of this century, is that the influence of humans on the Earth is no longer one factor among many but the single most important variable changing the way the planet works. As a result, the Earth, too, has crossed a boundary, entering a new period of geological time. In his influential paper “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), the historian Dipresh Chakrabarty argues that the opening of the Anthropocene marks the point at which the Earth can no longer be treated just as a setting for human history, like the schoolroom globes that illustrators put in the Moon’s sky before 1968. It has become the “Earthrise” planet, its dynamism increasingly shaped by human history and an increasingly active participant in it. Processes previously treated as parts of natural science—the carbon cycle, the rate of erosion, the evolution
of the stratosphere—are now part of the political realm.
If this transition is to be treated as a formal transition in the Earth’s chronology, as well as a tool of political and economic analysis, then the geologists who are custodians of that chronology need to find it in the rocks. Proposing the existence of systematic distinctions between older rocks from one age and younger rocks from another, and then disagreeing vehemently about where the line between them is best put, has been the bread and butter of geology for centuries. On this occasion the debate, formally taking place in the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy within the International Union of Geological Sciences, is being joined by voices from far beyond the neatly arrayed world of geology: philosophers, historians, environmental activists, among others.
There are four main options on offer. The original proponents of the idea of an Anthropocene liked 1750 or thereabouts: the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the baseline for all those graphs of rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. Others went back thousands of years further to the spread of methane-emitting rice paddies, the advent of farming or even the extensive use of fire. Some moved forward in time, rather than back, making a case for the period between the first atomic explosions, in 1945, and the last atmospheric nuclear tests, in 1963. Long-lasting radioactive isotopes laid down in sediments at that time provide just the sort of widespread, durable physical marker that geologists like when trying to distinguish befores from afters.
More recently, a small group has begun to push for the beginning of the 17th century, when carbon dioxide levels recorded in the polar ice caps wobble and pollen from New World corn appears in European lakebeds. Both markers have the same underlying cause: the Age of Being Explored by Europeans reached the Americas. Maize, along with many other foods, quickly spread across the Old World; measles, along with smallpox and influenza, spread across the New. These were changes big enough to be written in geology, too. Evidence of the new crops shows up in sediments across Europe and Asia. When some 50m people in the Americas died, new forests took root in what were once their fields, trees broke through the fallen roofs of their homes. The biosphere withdrew billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, investing it in trunk, root and leaf.
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