Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

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

  “Well, the thing is, I think the pictures make it look a lot more fragile than it is. The Earth is very resilient. Again, geologically, I see that. I know what blows it’s taken, environmentally, before humankind ever appeared. And survived it. And even since humans have been here, the things that have happened … such as ice ages. And humankind has survived it, too. And in fact those rapid changes on Earth may well have been what forced human evolution to where we are today. You had to adapt, particularly during these cold periods, or you didn’t survive. And so there was a very, very strong selection process. And human beings have probably had a much faster evolutionary forcing function than people realize.”

  We pass through money and families and end up at Schmitt the scientist’s different take on the divorces, with him pointing out:

  “Because it was obviously frowned on for a long time, there were no divorces at first. And then there was some pent-up demand, of course, that finally occurred. But remember, you’re dealing with a fairly specialized selection of Americans. Most of them were only sons or eldest sons in Apollo, and they almost all exhibited what psychiatrists, I think, would call ‘Type A’ personality traits. And so you have to evaluate everything that they’ve done since or during that time against that kind of a general personality background.”

  And I say: My God! Why didn’t I notice this earlier? When I get home, I call some psychologists and they recommend a book called Born to Rebel by Frank Sulloway, who sees families as “ecosystems in which siblings compete for parental favour by occupying specialized niches.” In his view, the strategies required of these niches become major influences on personality formation. It’s a startling fact that every Moonwalker I’ve met has been either an eldest sibling or only son. More astonishingly still, this will turn out to hold true for them all. Is that what brought them here? Driven, work-obsessed, time-obsessed, fiercely competitive, prone to stress-induced heart disease … Type A. As the eldest of three sons, this produces a particular queasiness (bordering on panic) in me. At any rate, the Type A thesis would chime with the competitiveness Gene Cernan and others have described in the Astronaut Office – though Schmitt, another only son, takes a typically rational and somewhat different view of this, too, averring:

  “It wasn’t so vicious, because nobody quite knew how Deke Slayton picked his crews.”

  Yet some people think they do, and among them is the Mercury 7 icon Scott Carpenter. Carpenter was different from the other Mercury 7 pilots to begin with. Unquestionably the finest physical specimen, he was the only product of a single-parent family, the only non–fighter pilot, the only instinctual Democrat (a trait inherited from his maternal grandfather, the progressive liberal editor of the Boulder County Miner and Farmer). He dug folk music, played guitar and sometimes went out at night just to gaze at the stars through his telescope. The space historian James Oberg tells me with real feeling that “Scott Carpenter was the only one of the seven who appreciated the significance of where he was and what he was doing,” which makes the controversy surrounding his command of the fourth Mercury mission in May 1962 all the more important.

  Whereas other Mercury pilots fought to keep the science geeks and psychologists away from their roster of in-flight tasks, Carpenter embraced them and their experiments until the flight plan was extremely tight; then, when he looked out of his window and beheld swarms of the little sparkling “fireflies” which had so excited John Glenn on the previous mission, he was enchanted and intrigued and spent valuable time trying to work out what they were or might have been, at the expense of more prosaic objectives. Later, it would be claimed that he squandered fuel by swinging his Aurora 7 ship around to get a better view of the Earth, leaving too little to negotiate a safe reentry into the atmosphere – although a recent memoir penned by Carpenter and his daughter Kris Stoever blames a hitherto unacknowledged guidance system malfunction for the pilot’s liberality with his fuel. What we know for sure is that there were fears for his safe return, with Walter Cronkite ashen-faced on CBS, and that the acerbic engineer-turned-flight-director Chris Kraft was incandescent at Carpenter’s perceived failure to follow instruction from the ground. We also know that someone subsequently circulated a rumour that the Mercury man had panicked (the ultimate throttle-jockey sin), despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Afterwards, Deke made it clear that he wouldn’t get another flight, and with a heavy heart he turned to undersea exploration, later parlaying his experiences into a pair of novels, the second of which, The Steel Albatross, turns out to be a decent page-turner in the Clive Cussler mode. He also tried to establish a company that converted industrial and agricultural waste into energy, but he wasn’t as good a businessman as he had been an explorer.

  When we speak on the phone I hear a modest and engaging man, still sharp at seventy-eight, and our conversation ranges from his itinerant father and mixed business career to relations between the Mercury 7 (“we have a bond that I think is probably unequalled anywhere”), how a man explains going through four wives (“I don’t know what to say: it’s one of those things …”), and the mystery of his eldest child, Scotty, who was a bright, brilliant kid, but developed chronic schizophrenia and now lives in a little studio on his own. When I confess mild disappointment that his seat-of-the-pants reentry aboard Aurora might have a practical explanation – that it flowed from something other than his own rapture – he laughs delightedly, then becomes animated as he reminds me how little they knew about space in 1962, exclaiming as if it were yesterday:

  “Well, we thought they might be creatures out there! To find out that they were in fact ice crystals was a eureka moment.”

  Ice crystals catching the light. The next flight, captained by Wally Schirra, contained no science, contemplation or passion at all.

  Another one to suffer was Rusty Schweickart, who helped test the lunar module in Earth orbit on Apollo 9 with Mission Commander Jim McDivitt (last heard coaxing Ed White in from his spacewalk) and the future Apollo 15 commander, David Scott. Mike Collins casts Schweickart as “a blithe spirit with an eager, inquisitive mind, not appreciated by the ‘old heads’ … mildly nonconformist, with a wide range of interests, contrasting sharply with the blinders-on preoccupation shown by many astronauts,” while crewmate Scott pegs him as “a really cultured man” who took quotations from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thornton Wilder into space, along with a cassette of Vaughan Williams’s Hodie cantata, which Scott, no fan of classical music back then, claims to have hidden until they were ready to come home (“he never forgave me for that”). More seriously, flight director Gene Kranz notes that he was “probably the most liberal guy in the office” and that his wife was probably the most liberal person some in the office had ever met – meaning outspokenly antiwar – and that this may have “caused him problems.” Schweickart, now a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, laughs this off and betrays no ill feeling toward anyone in the programme when I locate him in the Netherlands, where he is based during an extended stay in Europe with his wife. The fact remains, however, that he flew no more after Apollo 9, because he’d suffered badly from space sickness, a form of motion sickness that some astronauts fall prey to and others don’t. An expert in space medicine explains to me that space sickness is still not fully understood, but seems to arise from sensory conflict, from the fact that “four out of five of your senses will tell you that you’re free-falling,” with only the eyes insisting that you’re stationary (a current astronaut describes the sensation of holding on to the International Space Station during a spacewalk as “like hanging on to a cliff that’s already falling”). The expert then explains that as far as equilibrium goes, human beings fall into distinct groups, with two different balance paradigms: those who trust to their internal mechanisms for orientation and those with an “external frame,” who take their bearings from the world around them. The lat
ter tend to get sick in space, because nothing makes sense, and it won’t surprise anyone to learn that Schweickart was in this outward-reaching, exocentric group. Susceptibility to motion sickness on Earth is a poor predictor of what will happen in weightless conditions, but most people adapt to the new conditions within forty-eight hours anyway.

  Against expectation, Chris Kraft offers a sympathetic view of Schweickart’s travails, pointing out that the crews carried medication for sickness. Had commander McDivitt let go of an otherwise laudable desire to protect his crewman’s dignity and informed Houston of the problem earlier, Kraft suggests, medical staff could have helped. Then he complains:

  “The astronaut image had always been one of physical strength and fortitude. Now Rusty’s space sickness made him seem weak, and his reputation never recovered. Deke didn’t help. He exercised his sole authority to keep Rusty from flying again. That kind of authority bothered me … Deke’s flaw was that he accepted it all and acted accordingly.”

  Despite never leaving Earth orbit, Schweickart became one of the most vivid communicators of the space experience. If we were unnecessarily deprived of a chance to send the likes of him and Scott Carpenter to the Moon because one man’s prejudices were given too much weight, that would be a great, great shame. Kris Stoever goes so far as to maintain that in the wake of her father’s Mercury flight, Kraft and Slayton staged a coup d’état within the programme, “remaking [it] so that there would be no more Scott Carpenters and John Glenns.” She tells me:

  “I think there was a sense after Dad’s flight that we had the wrong type of astronaut going up into space, so it was a coup. They built it in accordance with their vision, which had more to do with machines than exploration, and in time, of course, they lost the hearts and minds of the American people.”

  Chris Kraft declines to comment on this view of events when offered the opportunity, but it chimes with an impression which has been growing, and which I’m beginning to take great pleasure from: namely, that while Bill Anders is obviously right about the Cold War impulses behind Apollo, the more you look at it, the more there seem to have been two sharply delineated space programmes running parallel within the programme – an official one about engineering and flying and beating the Soviets, and an unofficial, almost clandestine other about people and their place in the universe; about consciousness, God, mind, life. Reluctantly cast as the hippies of the piece, scientists were known around the MSC as “the long-hair-and-tennis-shoe types.” One of them says, “All they [the engineers] wanted to do was get to the Moon and back without a thought as to why they were going or what to do when they were there.” An engineer retorts that if it had been left up to the scientists, no one would ever have gone, because they’d still be talking about it. The possibility exists that both were right. Still, there’s something glorious about the fact that, hard as anyone might have tried to sift imponderables out of the venture, they couldn’t do it.

  I ask whether Schmitt thinks that going to the Moon changed him, repeating Alan Bean’s view that all the Moonwalkers came back “more like they already were,” and his face lights up. He says he didn’t know that Bean had said that, but it’s exactly what he, too, has felt for the last thirty years. The only one who went in a direction no one could have imagined, he suggests, was the Apollo 15 commander, David Scott, whose lustrous career was destroyed by the “stamp scandal” which overtook him a few months after his return: a storm which broke over NASA’s discovery that he and his crew (LM pilot Jim Irwin and CM pilot Alfred Worden) had smuggled 400 commemorative envelopes to the Moon, then sold them to a stamp dealer for a profit of around $6,000 per man. There was nothing illegal in this, but it was against regulations and the crew were canned, with the incident following Scott like a toxic cloud ever after, because he was the commander and thus forced to shoulder the responsibility. Over the three decades which followed he would become the most evasive of all the astronauts, including Armstrong. I find his story intriguing and a little scary.

  “Dave just made one very bad decision,” Schmitt says, grimacing.

  Did Jack feel bad about that?

  “Believe me, everybody felt bad about it, ’cos everybody liked Dave. It was just a dumb decision. And unfortunately, his crew was immersed in that as well. So it’s too bad. It certainly stopped his military career.”

  I tell him that Scott now lives in London and was splashed over the U.K. tabloids not long ago, following a liaison with the beautiful newsreader Anna Ford. To my surprise, Schmitt looks aghast.

  “What, is he not married to Lurten anymore?”

  Uhm, I don’t know. I guess not. Anna Ford took the newspapers to the Press Complaints Commission for running paparazzi photos of her and Scott on holiday.

  “Ooooh. I thought they were still married, so I … so Lurten …”

  It turns out that Schmitt had been trying to contact the Scotts about a reunion and even he, a Moonwalker, couldn’t make contact. So thanks to Dave Scott I’m seeing something I never thought I would see: Jack Schmitt caught off balance.

  “Well, Dave is an extraordinarily bright guy,” he concludes. “He was probably the best trained of the pilot astronauts up to his flight. He was very, very cooperative with the geology programme I put together for the later missions and I had great respect for Dave as a professional. It’s an unfortunate decision that he made in respect of the envelopes and I wish him well. I hope that he’s doing fine.”

  I wonder if he is? At this point, I don’t expect even to clap eyes on Scott, but we’ll see.

  Jack shakes my hand warmly and drifts back to the tiny office that he didn’t want me to see, as I ghost away up the Turquoise Trail to Santa Fe harbouring a sense of dissatisfaction which I’m at a loss to explain. Schmitt has been interesting, instructive, helpful, yet some unvoiced expectation of mine hasn’t been met and this unsettles me, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned so far, it’s that expectations are the enemy; I try not to have them. So like Alan Bean and geriatric dog, I can see that the problem is mine and am thus drawn back to a question I left lying like a discarded cigarette butt in the Mojave Desert sand. What do I want from these people? Why am I here?

  And plowing through the autumn dust to Santa Fe, I realize that I know.

  The Moonwalkers are interesting because of what we’ve invested in them. For me, this means that here we have nine men, nine left from twelve, who will eventually crumble away to eight, seven, six, five … none … who travelled further, saw and sometimes felt things that perhaps no one ever had before, or will again in quite the same way; who then had to come back and dissolve their queer odyssey into some kind of Earthly existence, trying to make peace with us and the everyday. They had to relearn how to live a life, try to find new meaning in it and in this tiny corner of a vast cosmos which it had been their obscure fortune to confront. And just as they travelled to the Moon only to find the Earth, I’ve come to find them, but what I seem to be seeing is myself and everyone else reflected in them, finding that the thoughts and questions the Moonwalkers provoke when we look at them are more valuable than any answers they might attempt to provide; that our fascination is not about them, it’s about us. I also understand that for me, there may be a heightened dimension to this exchange, because although it took me a while to notice, when they got back nearly all of them were about the age that I am now.

  The drive to Santa Fe is beautiful and I love everything about New Mexico, which feels somehow secret and discrete, even though there are times in the high desert when the earth and sky seem to spark and commingle and you could swear that it goes on forever. They say that in the badlands to the south you can even now find spots to stop and feel sure that no other human being is within thirty miles of you, and that some areas are still being settled, while to the north and east are mountains which glow so red at sunset that wandering Spaniards called the range Sangre de Cristo, Blood of Christ. Fewer than two million people live in a state of 122,000 square miles and a Republican
lawmaker recently introduced a bill to establish an annual “Extraterrestrial Culture Day” in commemoration of the Roswell incident. And that’s still not the most unusual thing you’ll find here.

  For, halfway up the Turquoise Trail is the tiny hippy village of Madrid, where shacks-turned-craft shops offer “Navajo, Tibetan, Aboriginal” souvenirs as if these words referred to near neighbours, while also meekly announcing themselves as “FOR SALE,” and homespun 9/11 memorials beseech “May we know peace one day.” I spend a long time looking at a notice board which advertises meetings of the “Madrid Free Forum” and the First Church of Science, and discussions on “alternatives to water” (if they crack that one, I hope they tell NASA) and gigs by crusty bands sporting David Crosby mustaches, who look as though they’ve not only heard a few Grateful Dead albums in their time, but smoked them. As a stringy old boy in a washedout Quicksilver Messenger Service T-shirt sways down the middle of the road with a coil of rope over his shoulder and a Bud in his hand, tourists in SUVs like armoured personnel carriers slow down to gawp, point a camera, then speed off as if the inhabitants were bears in a wildlife park. Places like this flinch in backwaters across the globe, harrowed little sanctums where the hippies sought refuge when the Sixties finally ended in 1972.

  Early that year, a United Nations report on the health of the global economy saw no reason to doubt the foundations of our charmed lives, but there was change blowing in the wind. As so often, we knew before the economists: the evidence was there on Friday night TV, where The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family turned the collapse of the nuclear family into whimsy, and in the cinemas, where Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the eco-parable Deliverance were shocking audiences with their bleak assumption of humanity as an essentially destructive force. Meanwhile, my radio brought new groups like Steely Dan, who were named after a dildo from a Burroughs novel and sounded so acid and detached that you couldn’t imagine them ever believing in anything, while Neil Young’s Harvest, which all the older kids owned, seemed to ache with some unspecified disappointment. In fact, not long before, I’d saved up for months to buy the album of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, which was designed to raise money for Bengali victims of the continuing hostility between India and Pakistan, but turned into a pop presentiment of Watergate when all the money disappeared in expenses and tax. Poor George: he’d had to coax Bob Dylan out of sulky retirement and book a smack-addled Eric Clapton on every flight out of London for a week before the guitarist known as “God” managed to catch one. Rock had an aristocracy now; the fun was gone. The concert also introduced the image that would replace rockets launching and napalm falling as ubiquitous in the Seventies and Eighties – that of the starving exotic child victim – because, incredible as it seems now, we hadn’t seen it before. Civil war and political madness aside (as in the Biafra region of Nigeria), there had been no mass famine through the 1950s and 1960s.