Aquarius, aware of the profundity of his natural bent for error, aware of the ineradicably romantic inclination of his mind to believe all those tales and legends he desired to believe, nonetheless came to a conclusion on this hot Saturday evening, July 5, on the southeastern rim of Houston, that Armstrong when a boy had indeed had a recurring dream in which he would hold his breath and rise from the ground and hover, and on this dream Aquarius, who had been reconnoitering for months through many a new thought (new at the very least to him) on the architecture and function and presence of the dream, would build his theory, on Armstrong’s dream would Aquarius commit himself. Any notes toward a new psychology could take their departure from here, from this fact. And as this evening went on, and he continued to the party at Pete Conrad’s house and talked to the future commander of Apollo 12 over the steaks at charcoal grill, and Conrad made his confession of dreaming for years of going to the moon, and now concluded somberly, manfully—one had to be manful when contemplating the cost of desire—“now the moon is nothing but facts to me,” Aquarius felt confirmation building in his mood, his happiness and his senses, that this grim tough job of writing for enough money to pay his debts and buy his little plot of time, was going to be possibly, all passions directed, all disciplines flexed, a work whose size might relieve the chore. And as he thought of the little details he had picked up in the biographies of Collins, of Aldrin, of Armstrong, he thought that yes, the invasion of the moon was signal direct to commence his new psychology—he would call it, yes, beneath this Texas moon, full near the Fourth of July, he would call it The Psychology of Astronauts, for they were either the end of the old or the first of the new men, and one would have nothing to measure them by until the lines of the new psychology had begun to be drawn.
CHAPTER 3
Some Origins of the Fire
We move on to Florida and the launch. If Aquarius had spent a week in Houston, he was to put in ten days on Cape Canaveral. He was loose in some real tropics at last with swamp and coconut palms. It was encouraging. Technology and the tropics were not built to hide everything from each other.
Let us take the tour. On Merritt Island and old Cape Canaveral, now Cape Kennedy, the Space Center has been installed, a twenty-mile stretch between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic, a terrain of marshland and scrub where raccoon, bobcat and alligator are still reported, and moors and truncated dunes lie low before the sea. It is country beaten by the wind and water, not dissimilar to Hatteras, Chincoteague and the National Seashore on Cape Cod, unspectacular country, uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations, for there are few trees and only occasional palms as ravaged and scabby as the matted backside of a monkey, a flat land of heat and water and birds, indeed birds no less impressive to Aquarius than ibis, curlew, plover and tern, hawks and vultures gliding fine as squadrons in formation, even bald eagles, ospreys and owls. In the brackish water are saltwater trout, redfish, largemouth bass, and bream. It is country for hunting, for fishing, and for men who seek mosquitoes; it was next to uninhabited before the war. Now, first spaceport—think on it! first spaceport—of an industry which pays salaries to perhaps so much as half a million men and some women before it is through, and has spent more than four billion dollars a year for average the last few years, a spaceport which is focus to the aerospace industries, a congeries of the richest corporations supplying NASA. Yet this port to the moon, Mars, Venus, solar system and the beyond is a first clue to space, for it is surprisingly empty, mournful beyond belief for the tropics, and its roads through the Air Force Base and the Space Center pass by empty marshes, deserted dune grass, and lonely signs. Every quarter-mile or so along that low grassy ridge toward the side of the sea is a road sign pointing to an old launch complex which on exploration turns out to consist of an unoccupied road and a launching tower for rockets no longer fired, and so left to commune by itself on a modest field of concrete, a tall, rust-red vertical structure of iron girders surrounded by abandoned blockhouses and utility sheds. To Aquarius the early history of the Space Program is contained in these empty launch towers, now as isolated and private as grain elevators by the side of railroad tracks in the flat prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the town low before them, the quiet whine of the wind like the sound of surf off a sea of wheat. It was the grain elevator which communed on prairie nights with the stars. Here in the cricket-dinning tympani of Florida’s dunes and marshes, the launching towers of rockets now obsolete give that same sense of the sentinel in a field of space, stand already as monoliths and artifacts of a prehistoric period when rockets usually exploded in the first few hundred feet of their flight.
Yes, the Cape has given a turn to Aquarius. If at Houston he still remained attached to a somewhat disembodied ego (which felt like a balloon on a tether)—if for all his extorted admiration at the self-sufficiency of NASA and its world, he could still not quite like it, quite rid himself of the idea that finally space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires, his ego was therefore of use. He would pull in the string from time to time to criticize what he saw. If he were heard to utter “This is not unimpressive,” when encountering some perfection of cooperation or technique, he was also ready to whisper—in his heart at least—that the Manned Spacecraft Center was not the coziest home for the human heart. Indeed, it was so cold that one could finally walk away from it like from a chill corridor in a dream. The beauties of MSC went on in the minds of technicians, but the soul of a visitor felt locked in the vault with an air conditioner. So it was attractive to think that one could end the dream, unlock the door, and walk away.
That was hardly possible on the Cape. If the abandoned launch towers and the hot lonely ocean breeze opened vistas of the West and thoughts of how many of the most important events in America seemed to take place in all the lonely spaces—as if the Twentieth Century had become the domain of all the great and empty territories (the Saharas, the Siberias, and the Minutemen in the buried silos of the West)—that was forced to give way to a sense of huge activity and gargantuan dimensions. If MSC near Houston was a brain, then Cape Kennedy was the body, and at Launch Complex 39, up twenty miles to the north of Cocoa Beach and Canaveral, were found the bones and muscles of a Colossus. Here the big components of Saturn V came in by cargo plane, came by ship through the Panama Canal and by barge through the Gulf, came from Los Angeles and Sacramento, from Huntsville in Alabama to Michoud in Louisiana, and from Michoud to the Cape; here at Complex 39 the parts were assembled in a mammoth cube of an edifice with a smaller box attached, the Vehicle Assembly Building, 526 feet high, a building just about as large as the combined volume of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the Pentagon. Covering eight acres, enclosing 129 million cubic feet, the Vehicle Assembly Building was nonetheless windowless, and decorated from the outside in huge concentric rectangles of green-gray, and charcoal-gray, ivory-gray and light blue-gray; it looked like a block of wood colored by an Op Art painter, but since it was over fifty stories high, it also looked like the walls of a gargantuan suburban department store. If by volume it was when built the largest building in the world, the Vehicle Assembly Building, as one saw it standing on the flat filled-in marshes of the Cape, had to be also a fair candidate for the ugliest building in the world. Viewed from any external approach it was the architectural fungoid of them all.
Once inside, however, it was conceivably one of the more beautiful buildings in the world. Large enough to assemble as many as four moongoing Apollo-Saturn vehicles at once, it was therefore open enough to offer interior space for four tall bays, each of these niches tall enough to house the full rocket, which was thirty-six stories high. Since the rocket in turn sat on a transporter, called a crawler, of some dimension itself, the doors to the four bays were each over forty stories and therefore high enough and wide enough to take in through their portals the UN Building or the Statue of Liberty. Yet for all its size, the VAB was without decoration inside, rather a veritable shipyard and riggin
g of steel girders which supported whole floors capable of being elevated and lowered, then rolled in and out like steel file drawers in order to encircle each rocket with adjustable working platforms from either side. Since some of these platforms had three complete stories contained within them, the interior of the VAB was a complexity of buildings within buildings which had been first maneuvered then suspended ten and twenty and thirty stories above the ground. Because the sides were usually open, one could look out from the platforms to other constellations of girders and buildings and could look down from whichever great height to the floor of the VAB, sometimes as much as forty stories below. Note however: one was still inside a closed space, and the light which filtered through translucent panels rising from floor to ceiling was dim, hardly brighter than the light in a church or an old railroad terminal. One lost in consequence any familiar sense of recognition—you could have been up in the rigging of a bridge built beneath the dome of some partially constructed and enormous subterranean city, or you could have been standing on the scaffolding of an unfinished but monumental cathedral, beautiful in this dim light, this smoky concatenation of structure upon structure, of breadths and vertigos and volumes of open space beneath the ceiling, tantalizing views of immense rockets hidden by their clusters of work platforms. One did not always know whether one was on a floor, a platform, a bridge, a fixed or impermanent part of this huge shifting ironwork of girders and suspended walkways. It was like being in the back of the stage at an opera house, the view as complex, yet the ceiling was visible from the floor and the ceiling was more than fifty stories up, since above the rockets were yet some massive traveling overhead cranes. To look down from the upper stages of the rocket, or from the highest level where the crew would sit, was to open oneself to a study of the dimensions of one’s fear of heights. Down, down, a long throw of the soul down, down again, still falling was the floor of the building, forty floors below. The breath came back into the chest from an abyss. And in one corner of the floor like a stamp on the edge of a large envelope was a roped-in square of several hundred tourists gawking up at the yellow cranes and the battleship-gray girders.
Taken originally on a tour by a guide, Aquarius had spent the good part of a day in this building, and was back again twice to be given a more intimate trip and a peek into the three stages and the Command and Service Module of Apollo 12, which was then being prepared for its flight in November. Looking into any portion of the interior of a rocket was like looking into the abdominal cavity of a submarine or a whale. Green metal walls, green and blue tanks, pipes and proliferations of pipes, black blocks of electrical boxes and gray blocks of such boxes gave an offering of those zones of silence which reside at the center of machines, a hint of that ancient dark beneath the hatch in the hold of the bow—such zones of silence came over him. He could not even be amused at the curtained walls of white and the in-sucking wind of the dust collectors and the electrical shoe polishers, the white smocks and the interns’ caps they were obliged to put on before they could peer through the hatch of the Command Module, and see the habitation of the astronauts. A gray conical innerland of hundreds of buttons and switches looked back at him, and three reclining seats vaguely reminiscent of instruments of torture. Three dentists’ chairs side by side! Yes, he could have found the white outfits they were wearing a touch comic—if dust they were to protect the machine against, then garments they could wear, but why white, why the white hospital walls? And thought that of course they would keep it like the sterile room in a delivery ward, for indeed there was something about space which spoke of men preparing to deliver the babies they would themselves bear. The aim of technique was to parallel nature, and the interior of the VAB was the antechamber of a new Creation.
So, it was probably the Vehicle Assembly Building which encouraged Aquarius to release the string of the balloon and let his ego float off to whatever would receive it. It was not that he suddenly decided to adopt the Space Program, or even approve it in part, it was just that he came to recognize that whatever was in store, a Leviathan was most certainly ready to ascend the heavens—whether for good or ill he might never know—but he was standing at least in the first cathedral of the age of technology, and he might as well recognize that the world would change, that the world had changed, even as he had thought to be pushing and shoving on it with his mighty ego. And it had changed in ways he did not recognize, had never anticipated, and could possibly not comprehend now. The change was mightier than he had counted on. The full brawn of the rocket came over him in this cavernous womb of an immensity, this giant cathedral of a machine designed to put together another machine which would voyage through space. Yes, this emergence of a ship to travel the ether was no event he could measure by any philosophy he had been able to put together in his brain.
Yet all the signs leading to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB. VAB—it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communication had become the mechanical function, and the machine was the work of art. What a fall for the ego of the artist. What a climb to capture the language again! It occurred to him on the instant that one’s fear of height must be at least a partial function of the importance of one’s ego. Or was it a direct function of that part of one’s ego which was useless? A man was presumably ready to take any drop when the ego was finally congruent to the soul and all the signs said go. Yes, one would have to create a psychology to comprehend the astronaut. For a beginning, however, it would be good to recognize how simple he must become. Do not dominate this experience with your mind was the lesson—look instead to receive its most secret voice. He would be, perforce, an acolyte to technology. What a gruel. By whatever measure, he was now forced to recognize the ruddy good cheer and sense of extraordinary morale of the workers in the VAB. As they passed him in the elevators, or as he went by them in the halls and the aisles, a sense of cooperative effort, of absorption in the work at hand, and anticipation of the launch was in the pleasure of their faces. He had never seen an army of factory workers who looked so happy. It was like the week before Christmas. As at the Manned Spacecraft Center they seemed to be ranked by the number of admission badges they wore. The smiles of the ones who wore the most seemed to thrive the most, as if they were not identification tags which reduced them to parts of a machine, but rather were combat ribbons, theater-of-war ribbons. Trade-union geezers, age of fifty, with round faces and silver-rimmed spectacles strutted like first sergeants at the gate for a three-day pass.
So Aquarius began to live without his ego, a modest quiet observer who went on trips through the Space Center and took in interviews, and read pieces of literature connected to the subject, and spent lonely nights not drinking in his air-conditioned motel room, and thought—not of himself but of the size of the feat and the project before him, and by the night before the launch, he was already in orbit himself, a simple fellow with a mind which idled agreeably, his mind indeed out in some weightless trip through the vacuum of a psychic space, for a mind without ego he was discovering is kin to a body without gravity. He was there now merely to observe, to witness. And the days went quietly by. We would pick him up on the night before the launch, but we may not be able to. He is beginning to observe as if he were invisible. A danger sign. Only the very best and worst novelists can write as if they are invisible.
II
Saturn V would take off from a plain of gray-green moor and marsh, no factory or habitation within three and a half miles. Saturn V had almost six million pounds of fuel. So it would take the equivalent of thirty thousand strong men to raise it an inch. It would take liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and a very high grade of kerosene called RP-1. It had hydrazine, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, and nitrogen tetroxide in the Service Module. It was
in effect a bomb, thirty-three feet wide—the length of a long living room. Corporation executives earning $50,000 a year just begin to think of a thirty-three-foot living room for themselves. And it was the height of a football field set on end. Sometimes they described it as a thirty-six-story building (ten feet to a floor) but a football field was a clear measure of size, and this bomb, 363 feet high, 33 feet wide at the base, would blow if it blew with a force kin to one million pounds of TNT. That was like an old-fashioned bombing raid in World War II—one thousand planes each carrying one thousand pounds of bombs. So Saturn V would devastate an area if ever it went. Flight Control, the Press Site and the VIP stands were located therefore three and a half empty miles away across barren moors which, having been built by dredging fill into marshland, looked as if a bomb had gone off on them already.
Of a Fire on the Moon Page 6
