Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  Wolfe’s book arrived while the country was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Vietnam War and the conflicted emotions that surrounded it. In the months before the book was published, depressing newspaper headlines told of an energy crisis, gas lines, a nuclear-plant mishap at Three Mile Island, and the president’s concern about America’s “crisis of confidence.” The Right Stuff rescued the early jet test pilots and the graying Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo veterans from American Express commercials and elevated them as exemplars of a select, elite brotherhood, defined by the phrase that Wolfe appropriately chose as his book’s title.

  Elegiac and nostalgic, The Right Stuff aimed to celebrate something many believed had disappeared in the decade since Apollo 11: a precious, elemental kind of heroic American masculinity. “The right stuff” at its core was personified by the career of test pilot Chuck Yeager, a man whose career and influence had become so pervasive that Wolfe claimed that it could be heard in the cadence of every commercial-airline pilot’s voice. A combination of rare skill and unwavering courage, “the right stuff” was what caused someone to willingly and repeatedly place his life on the line to fly an untested bit of machinery and push it to its limit. This was done humbly and without fanfare. The only accolades that mattered were those of their peers.

  A leading practitioner of the New Journalism, Wolfe employed the tools of a novelist to reveal what he perceived as the essence of his story. His approach allowed him to examine the astronauts’ complex psychology—their driving ambition, recklessness, courage, and flaws—with a freedom that had eluded the previous journalists who’d attempted to chronicle their story. The men portrayed in The Right Stuff are all recognizably human. They range from an excessively sanctimonious Boy Scout to a profane and bullying womanizer. One needs to relieve his bladder into his space suit during a delay on the launchpad; one drinks too much the night before breaking the sound barrier. Wolfe’s high-achieving, brave alpha males live on the page in vibrant colorful vignettes that reveal how much was missing from the sanitized, colorless, and unrealistic portraits that appeared in Life magazine for more than a decade.

  Yet Wolfe’s liberties with narrative and approach were not without controversy. Colleagues of the late Gus Grissom took offense at how the book depicted his near drowning during the second Mercury mission and how the test-pilot elite at Edwards Air Force Base reacted with ridicule. More problematic was Wolfe’s nostalgic celebration of a faded code of masculine meritocracy, seemingly in reaction to 1970s advances in gender and racial equality. The Right Stuff was written while the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the most decisive affirmative-action case of the decade, while the Equal Rights Amendment was awaiting state ratification, and as the first classes of women were attending the U.S. Air Force, Coast Guard, Military, and Naval academies. At the book’s conclusion, Wolfe specifically signifies the twilight of the age of right stuff with Ed Dwight’s experience at Edwards, presenting his story as a misguided early attempt at government-enforced affirmative action.

  Released a year before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, The Right Stuff appealed to readers eager to remember an America when a president could inspire the nation to take on daunting challenges—even beating the Soviet Union in a race to the Moon. It called to mind a time before the political assassinations of the sixties, urban riots, wars in Southeast Asia, and the erosion of confidence in national institutions, yet it viewed the past through a skeptical lens informed by the culture of the seventies.

  Perhaps due in part to its wistful evocation of faded American values, four decades after its publication, The Right Stuff remains the most influential narrative of the early space age. Its memorable set pieces deftly balance the courageous with the absurd, while never trivializing what Wolfe referred to as his “rich and fabulous terrain.” The book’s shadow falls across the hundreds of books and films that have come since it was published. For those born after 1980, the space age could be said to have begun on September 24, 1979, The Right Stuff’s publication date.

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  THE ENDURING MEANING of the space race remains elusive half a century after it came to its end. Tom Wolfe’s reexamination, written only a decade after the moon landing, allowed him the opportunity to define the rare combination of ambition, courage, and endurance that personified the first men to venture into the high frontier.

  A great deal less celebrated than the early astronauts are the space visionaries who looked into the future and whose youthful dreams instigated the race to the Moon. Fifty years after Apollo 11, the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who knew both Arthur C. Clarke and Wernher von Braun, continues to actively contemplate our destiny as humans to migrate from the Earth into the cosmos. Though he played no role in Project Apollo, in the 1950s Dyson was intimately involved with the development of Project Orion, a research study that considered the feasibility of a large spaceship powered by a series of controlled nuclear explosions. A decade later, he briefly served as a consultant to Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A space visionary much in the spirit of von Braun and Clarke, Dyson now looks back on Apollo as a marvelous achievement but one that was ultimately a wasted opportunity.

  While Kennedy’s challenge helped channel government and public support to meet a clearly defined decade-end goal, Dyson believes it would have been far more productive if the first missions into space had been delineated within the larger scope of space exploration over the coming centuries. Had this been the case, Dyson says, entering space would have been understood as merely an early step in humanity’s ultimate destiny in the stars, somewhat in the manner of Russia’s mystical cosmists at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Dyson likens space exploration to the human expansion across the remote Polynesian islands of the Pacific and believes spaceflight should be regarded as a series of steps in a quest—of men and women accepting great risk to venture into the unknown. The spread of human settlements across the Pacific was not instigated by a pursuit of scientific knowledge or as a form of political persuasion. What propelled that exploration was an innate curiosity and the urge to move into new environments. “It was about taking chances—the essence of what makes life interesting.”

  Though voiced by someone now in his tenth decade, Dyson’s audacious vision of humanity’s destiny in space may sound as startling to twenty-first-century ears as those of Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard did a century ago. But his thoughts follow those of Clarke, von Braun, and Tsiolkovsky, who metaphorically spoke of the Earth as merely the cradle of the human race.

  Dyson believes there is no more essential reason to send life into the universe than to diversify the species. A need to live and function in non-earthlike environments will lead to adaptations that will alter and expand the branches of the human family. Rather than constantly using a space suit, humans may develop a skin suitable to their surroundings and lungs that will allow them to breathe freely in alien habitats. Colonists on Mars may develop a furry exterior, as living comfortably on the Red Planet will be easier with an appropriate fur coat.

  And as biotechnology becomes more sophisticated, Dyson predicts this process of evolutionary adaptation will be engineered to happen much faster than in the past. Human transformation might occur within a few generations, possibly within one hundred years. The scope of evolutionary change he foresees won’t be confined to the human species alone. Entirely new ecospheres could be engineered, created to coexist in harmony with other creatures and flora developed for that environment.

  It’s a vision very much from the pages of a science-fiction novel. In the course of the Apollo program, the human species became the first to walk, work, and even drive a car on an alien world. That journey to the Moon began, in part, as a result of the mystical ideas of the Russian cosmists, who predicted the spiritual transformation of the human race as it ventured into space. Freeman Dyson’s vision also foresees
human transformation, albeit of a different sort, with biologically engineered intelligent life diversifying the species as it colonizes other planets.

  Humans first ventured into space little more than half a century ago, and within a decade they stood on the surface of another world. Those who walked on the Moon didn’t regard themselves as the denizens of two worlds, but should transhumanism emerge as the inevitable legacy of space exploration, the moonwalkers themselves are likely to be considered its pioneers.

  APPENDIX

  AFTER A FEW MORE REVOLUTIONS AROUND THE SUN

  BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ABOUT THE LATER LIVES OF SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO APPEARED IN THE PREVIOUS PAGES

  When he addressed a joint session of Congress a few weeks after his return from his Apollo mission, BUZZ ALDRIN found it far more terrifying than landing on the Moon. Aldrin’s difficulty coping with his daily life after becoming the second man to step on the lunar surface—his depression, anxiety, near-breakdown, and alcoholism—was recounted in a frank memoir, Return to Earth, published in 1973. Nevertheless, Aldrin became a vigorous advocate for a newly revitalized American space program, proposing an economical system with a series of spacecraft that would regularly cycle on scheduled journeys to Mars, back to Earth, and then out to Mars again on a continuing basis. He never flew in space again.

  After serving as the backup command-module pilot for Apollo 11, BILL ANDERS moved to the nation’s capital to serve as executive secretary of the National Space Council, where he witnessed the eccentric realities of Washington decision-making. He was surprised to observe the White House staff determine the space shuttle’s final design based primarily on which prototype would deliver the greatest number of votes in the 1972 presidential election. After holding other government posts, including ambassador to Norway, Anders entered the private sector to take up management positions at General Electric, Textron, and General Dynamics, where he was chairman and chief executive officer. His one trip to the Moon transformed his own personal philosophical and spiritual outlook. “Here we are, on kind of a physically inconsequential planet, going around a not particularly significant star, going around a galaxy of billions of stars that’s not a particularly significant galaxy—in a universe where there’s billions and billions of galaxies. Are we really that special? I don’t think so.”

  By the time he died at age eighty-two in 2012, NEIL ARMSTRONG had erroneously acquired a reputation as a recluse. Rather, Armstrong didn’t enjoy giving interviews, having his life scrutinized, or leveraging his fame to enrich himself. He allowed for occasional public appearances but avoided being the center of attention and made an effort to share the limelight with others. Few of his personal items were sold during his lifetime, so when it was announced in 2015 that his widow had found a stowage bag of random items brought back from Apollo 11 in a household closet, it was treated as space history’s equivalent of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Fortunately, rather than being auctioned, the bag and its contents were loaned to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

  ABC News science correspondent JULES BERGMAN covered every space mission from the flight of Yuri Gagarin to the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Like Walter Cronkite, Bergman wanted to travel into space and informed his other colleagues in the press corps that he had already passed a rigorous exam similar to that which all the first NASA astronauts had endured. In the waning days of the Apollo era, Bergman was assigned to cover daredevil Evel Knievel’s attempt to fly a rocket-powered Skycycle over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in 1974. Bergman was only age fifty-seven when he passed away in 1987.

  Contrary to the wishes of some in the Nixon White House, FRANK BORMAN never entered politics. Shortly after leaving NASA, he joined Eastern Airlines, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious air carriers, rising to the position of chief executive officer in 1976. After a few successful years, however, the effects of deregulation, debt, and squabbles with unions led to the sale of the airline and Borman’s departure. He told his story in Countdown, published in 1988. He and SUSAN BORMAN observed the sixty-eighth anniversary of their wedding in 2018.

  Precisely a year after the flight of Apollo 8, the California Chamber Symphony premiered a cantata composed by Jerry Goldsmith with a libretto written by RAY BRADBURY that reiterated his mystical thoughts on human space travel. By the 1970s, astrophysicist Carl Sagan and California’s governor Jerry Brown echoed Bradbury’s words predicting that space exploration would become the moral substitute for war. Shortly before his death in 2012, Bradbury recalled his CBS News Apollo 11 interview with Mike Wallace as among the high points in a long and illustrious life.

  At his home in Sri Lanka, ARTHUR C. CLARKE connected to the world via the Internet, living out the vision of future communication he had predicted decades earlier. In the 1980s he reacquired his long-lost collection of American science-fiction pulp magazines, in the form of scanned digital files. Though post-polio syndrome confined him to a wheelchair during his final years, he maintained an active writing career until his death at age ninety in 2008. After the millennium, the multiplicity of moon-landing hoax/conspiracy theories on the Internet prompted Clarke to confess he didn’t have time for lunatics: “I am too busy proving that George Washington never existed but was invented by the British Disinformation Service to account for a certain minor unpleasantness in the Colonies.”

  Subsequent to the Apollo 11 crew’s Giant Leap Goodwill Tour, MICHAEL COLLINS accepted an offer from secretary of state William P. Rogers to serve as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. The experience was not pleasant and coincided with continuing American involvement in Vietnam, the incursion of American troops into Cambodia, and internal tensions between Rogers and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Far more to his liking was his next assignment, as the director of the National Air and Space Museum, which opened its new exhibition building under his leadership in 1976. His memoir, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, remains for many among the best firsthand accounts of the Apollo era.

  Beginning a new life after leaving the Air Force in 1965, ED DWIGHT worked as an IBM sales executive and a construction entrepreneur, and in the 1970s he also earned an MFA in sculpture at the University of Denver. Not long afterward, he began a second career as an artist, specializing in retelling African American history in bronze, with depictions of the famous—Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Hank Aaron—and the neglected—a scout from the battle of Little Bighorn, black cowboys, and an early Colorado settler. His memoir, Soaring on the Wings of a Dream: The Untold Story of America’s First Black Astronaut Candidate, was published in 2009.

  American comedian and activist DICK GREGORY often referenced the space program in his comedy of the 1960s, with lines like, “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.” By 1968, however, he garnered additional press attention with a campaign as a write-in candidate for president of the United States. Later, he was among the first prominent celebrities to endorse a theory that the moon landings had been faked, part of an elaborate conspiracy between the two global superpowers, with the United States government trading wheat to the Soviet Union as hush money. He passed away in 2017 at age eighty-four.

  DAVID LASSER retired from a management position at the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers in 1968, the year after the Freedom of Information Act went into effect. He used a FOIA request to obtain the government’s files on his background dating from the 1940s and discovered pages of false allegations and fabricated lists of political organizations that he never had joined. After years of trying to clear his name, Lasser received an official letter of public apology from President Jimmy Carter for his treatment during the Red Scare. In the years after the moon landing, he met and became friends with the man whose life had been profoundly influenced by The Conquest of Space, Arthur C. Clarke. He passed away in 1996 at age ninety-four.r />
  WILLY LEY never found a permanent job in the aerospace industry, but his pioneering history of the early space age was first published as Rockets in 1944 and subsequently progressed through six different revised and expanded editions. The last, Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space, was released in 1968 and praised as a seminal reference. Ley died suddenly less than a month before the launch of Apollo 11, at age sixty-two. In the week before the launch of Apollo 11, NASA received a letter proposing that some of Ley’s ashes be among the items left on the Moon. While this request was never fulfilled, a crater on the far side of the Moon was named in his honor.

  Following the Apollo 13 mission, JAMES LOVELL retired from the Navy and from NASA. Not long after, Hollywood attempted to tell the story of Apollo 13 in the form of a melodramatic TV movie focusing on the lives of fictitious characters at Mission Control, who, when not putting in long hours to bring the astronauts home, also have to deal with a bad marriage, a child-custody dispute, a dying father, and a dangerous heart condition. Lovell was so upset by the film, Houston, We’ve Got a Problem, that prior to the network broadcast he publicly complained that the producers had transformed one of the space program’s finest hours into a trite soap opera. “I resent it,” he wrote in a letter. “There’s too much mixing up fact and fiction in the world these days.” In 1994 he set the record straight with his book Lost Moon, which came to the screen as Apollo 13.

  Named NASA’s deputy administrator in 1969, GEORGE LOW was instrumental in the development of the space shuttle and moving the space agency toward Earth-based science. In 1976, Low left NASA to become president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the day before his death from cancer in 1984 at the age of fifty-eight. His son David was named an astronaut in 1984 and flew into space on three space-shuttle missions.