Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

  The seminar room at the plush hotel playing host to the Global Travel and Tourism Summit is airy and bright, semicircular and walled in glass, and carpeted in rich blue, and if you listen you can hear the sea sighing in the background. I’m not surprised that only a dozen or so delegates have turned up to hear space tourism being discussed, because this is a business conference and mass space tourism is still a pipe dream. Most delegates are either in the bar or on the beach, or chatting in the pleasant sun on the terrace, or attending more practical seminars, but here are Scott and other panelists, who include Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, sitting at a long table waiting to begin. The programme doesn’t mention it, but Anderson was partly responsible for getting the second proper space tourist, the South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth, up to the International Space Station on a Russian rocket. The same programme makes me smile by listing the Moonwalker in our midst as “David Scott, Astronaut (first Moon landing),” but now, with his ruddy complexion and white hair, astonishingly trim in dapper black suit worn with tasteful op art tie, he reminds me of the actor Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. Introduced as a representative of the Vanguard Space Corporation, a “satellite recovery” operation, he opens with a joke about a Russian astronaut boasting to an American one that it doesn’t matter about losing the race to the Moon, because they’re going to the sun, and when the American responds, “But it’ll be too hot – you’ll burn up!” the Russian says, “Ah, well, we’re going to go at night.” Everyone laughs, though I’m not sure that we’re all laughing at the same thing, because since the loss of Columbia, the U.S. has been relying on those zany old Russians to get people and materials up to the space station.

  Throughout, Scott seems the least passionate and most dismissive of the prospects for mass space tourism, to the extent that I begin to wonder why he came. Afterwards, as the panelists and audience linger momentarily before sweeping off to a lavish lunch, I approach with no idea of what to expect. He looks me in the eye and listens as I tell him about the places I’ve been and people I’ve met and the questions I’ve been trying to find answers for, chiefly What was Apollo about? and to my astonishment he appears to leap at the idea of speaking further, sounding full of enthusiasm as he coos, “Sure, that sounds great – be happy to!” Still not quite able to believe this, I take his address and tell him that I’ll write with a few more details when we get back to London and we can arrange to meet there. “Yeah, be happy to. That’s a great story. A great story!” he repeats as a very attractive young woman in a white dress appears at his side and they disappear toward the terrace with the other panelists. Later, I unexpectedly bump into him, dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket at an end-of-summit beach party, with the same woman on his arm, looking more like the Doobie Brothers’ keyboard player than an aged space cowboy. He’s awkward in conversation, stilted, as though his face and his voice and his thoughts are operating at tangents, but we small talk about London and Portugal and California for a while and I leave him with the words, “See you in London, then,” to which he replies, “Yeah! sure!” – although when I replay the scene afterwards, I see a curious twist in his features and a beading of his eyes. Back in the U.K. I write to the Hammersmith address he gave me, but hear nothing back. So I write again. And again, delivering the letter by hand this time to make sure that the address is real, and it is, but there’s still no reply. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  Almost a year later, there’s a chance to see Scott in a more sympathetic light. A memoir of the Space Race, which he’s had ghostwritten in conjunction with the former Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, has just been published and of necessity it’s drawn him out of his shell. He’s not submitting to any media, knowing that the first question will concern either stamps or Anna Ford, but he is giving a few talks around the U.K. and one of them is at the Natural History Museum in Oxford. As a bonus, it’s being chaired by the ever-smiling Colin Pillinger, God’s gift to mad-professordom and leader of the team behind the Beagle Mars probe, that monument to British pluck and resolution in the face of insuperable odds, right down to the essential clinching detail that it didn’t quite work.

  The odd thing is that by this time, the pre-Apollo Scott looks even more complex to me, and for an unexpected reason. Race intersects this story at every turn, but is seldom mentioned specifically in relation to the space programme, outside of noting that the first black astronaut candidate, Major Robert Lawrence, died when the plane he was flying spun out of control and crashed in 1967. However, the Kennedy administration had instructed the Air Force to find them a candidate long before that, believing that a black astronaut would help to draw African American kids into higher education, and the story of the one they turned up is like a cross between Top Gun and In the Heat of the Night. Ed Dwight is a successful sculptor in Denver now and I sit listening to him for several hours, and could sit for several more. He was relieved not to be selected for duty by NASA in the end, because he hadn’t wanted to be an astronaut, but one of the things he will tell you is that when other pilots in the Air Force’s astronaut training programme, which fed NASA, tried to freeze him out – less out of bigotry than resentment that he’d jumped the queue, he generously maintains – his classmate David Scott was the one who broke ranks and befriended him. Dwight confesses not to know whether the other man acted out of kindness or a sense of justice, or because he knew the White House was watching and it would be good for his career, but it helped to make the situation more bearable.

  Scott’s talk is in a museum lecture theatre. The audience is mixed, but contains a notably large portion of T-shirted men with longish hair and squarish glasses. They clap enthusiastically as Pillinger enters stage right, all beaming face and biker jacket and Einsteinian free-range hair, followed closely by a navy-suited Scott, who acknowledges the applause stiffly and sits down. Then he gets up and begins to talk about the book, Two Sides of the Moon.

  I called the publisher and got hold of a copy before I came, so know what’s in it: a juxtaposition of Scott and Leonov talking about their respective journeys through space and the Cold War, skillfully compiled by a journalist ghostwriter and especially interesting for Leonov’s revelations about the secretive Soviet space effort. By his modest and likable account, Leonov would probably have been the first cosmonaut on the Moon if the Soviet programme had survived the Politburo’s crippling ambitions for it. Scott delivers little that is new about the U.S. side of the race and seldom gives up much emotion, but there are a few nice anecdotes, among them his description of Richard Nixon – who was so awkward with adults – delighting as he led the Apollo 15 crew’s children around the White House “like the Pied Piper,” showing off secret passageways and bestowing gifts; and of himself landing in the Bahamas after Apollo 9, to find his nine-year-old daughter Tracy clutching an essay she’d written for her English class while he’d been away, in which she imagined the family flying to the Moon one night, bouncing around happily with oxygen tanks on their backs. It ended:

  “There was lots of dust. We decided that, next Saturday, we would go to the zoo.”

  Scott also admits to “a pang of nostalgia” when he looks up to the Moon and his eye picks out the largest circular marking on its surface, the Mare Imbrium, or Sea of Rains, on the eastern edge of which he spent “the three most memorable days of my life.”

  In the flesh, he talks about all this with a curious lack of urgency or engagement, as if debriefing a group of computer experts. At times he’s amusing, as when he recounts waking after the first rest period to open the shutters and suddenly remember, “Oh my God, we’re on the Moon!” Most of the time, he’s repeating stories from the book, the idea for which he claims to have presented to a literary agent with the words, “I’d like to do this, but I don’t want to do any work.” Only when Scott sits back down and Pillinger opens the floor to questions does the evening liven up. There are still a lot of platitudes and things I’ve heard before, like, “I sort of look upon
it [the Moon] as an old friend,” and, asked about the view of Earth, “It’s an oasis, very, very precious, and we’ve got to take care of it … we’re doing a lousy job …” and, regarding millionaire space tourists like Dennis Tito, “I think people who have that much money should sponsor a fund to send an artist or a poet up there.” Someone raises a hand and says:

  “My five-year-old son would like to know what’s it like to walk on the Moon?”

  To which Scott offers a prosaic description of its pristine appearance which will have had as much purchase on a five-year-old’s imagination as a command to tidy his bedroom.

  He’s better on solid stuff, like his excitement for Armstrong when he touched down (“that was a tough mission”) and the way he joked to Pete Conrad, whom he backed up on Apollo 12, that “if Neil doesn’t make it, you’d better watch your legs,” because if anything happened to the Apollo 12 commander prior to the flight, Scott would take his place. He strains to be diplomatic about the Bush plans for Mars, but his skepticism shows through.

  “The problem is where do you freeze the technology?” he asks. “By the time you’re ready to go, the technology you’re using is ten or twenty years old. It’s a difficult problem and I don’t know how you deal with it.”

  Then there’s a change in the mood, with someone raising a hand to ask: “How did life change for you after the Moon?” As Scott fumbles and fudges about its not changing that much and his search for “new challenges,” I’m wondering whether the question was innocent or loaded. Moments later, I know, as another young questioner smirks: “Is it possible to buy one of the envelopes?”

  Scott leans lower to the table, pretending he hasn’t understood, while Pillinger, with a look of merry amusement on his face, leans back and expands with the exaggerated ceremony of a quiz show host proffering a clue. He just manages to get out: “I think he means the stamps, David …” before the now puce-faced astronaut cuts him off with a rapid “No, they’re all gone,” then turns and mutters something which I can’t hear, but which a startled-looking Pillinger certainly does, because he snaps forward as if the back of his chair has just bitten him and sings, “Okay, let’s have another question.” Even now, here, there is no peace for Scott.

  I decide to help out. The Apollo 15 commander spent two days drifting home from the Moon with a man who had (or felt he had) heard God calling to him there – Jim Irwin – and I want to know whether the crew discussed this at all?

  The reply comes quickly.

  “No, there wasn’t really time, we were too busy doing the science.”

  And through the pause which follows, I’m thinking, “Oh well, I tried.” But then Scott continues.

  “That’s an interesting question, though, because Jim was deeply affected. For instance, before the Moon, he was a good speaker, but afterwards he was a great one. He really believed. Something real happened to him.”

  He then speaks about something which he called his “left seat–right seat” theory, referring to the fact that the commander stood to the left in the lander with the Lunar Module pilot on his right. He sounds reflective for the first time as he notes:

  “The six guys in the left seat went down paths you’d have expected, but the six in the right seats went off in all kinds of unexpected directions.”

  And I suddenly recall Ed Mitchell saying something similar. In fact he had a name for it. I’d asked whether he thought some of the Moonwalkers had been more open to the experience than others and he answered:

  “Well, one thing to note is that most of the guys who were vocal about the depth of the experience were Lunar Module pilots. It’s known phenomenon, from military studies, that the guy in the rear seat of a two-seater aircraft and the guy actually doing the flying have different experiences, because they’re focussed on different things. It’s the command phenomenon. The view of the guy who has to be alert and on top of things is different from the guy who’s just along for the ride. So those of us coming back from the Moon who were LM pilots, we weren’t just along for the ride – we had chores – but we didn’t have major responsibilities, because the spacecraft was functioning well. We could take it in and contemplate what we were doing more thoroughly.”

  He further added:

  “I think that was also true for people back home on Earth, though obviously in a different way. Those pictures of the Earth from the Moon are the most published pictures in the world. And so one has to ask the question: Why is that so? What is that? And to me, it’s because they speak to that spirit of quest that humans have. And to the question ‘Who are we? ’”

  Yes. Now Scott is talking about Ed and his noetic quest, and Buzz Aldrin with his postflight breakdown … and Alan Bean with his Close Encounters Moon art … and of course Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, who were directly or indirectly led to their faiths by the Moon. Only Jack Schmitt followed a straight and normal path, and then only if you consider a desire to enter the Senate normal. And for the first time, I fall to reflecting on my own encounters with these men; on the LM pilots’ eagerness to communicate what they’d felt up there and the way it seemed to still live inside them, as against the by-turns maddening and amusing imperviousness of the surviving mission commanders. Armstrong, Young, Cernan, Scott: I can admire them all in different ways, but wouldn’t want them near me if I were a talk-show host or composer of sonnets. Afterwards, I go to find Scott, because I want to know whether he thinks this postflight divergence is attributable to the different experiences of the Moonwalkers – as he seemed to be implying – or whether Deke simply assigned them roles according to character type, with focus and singularity seen as the stuff of leadership.

  Disingenuous to the last, he pretends not to remember me, while being unable to suppress the spark of recognition in his eye. He nevertheless confirms the first view straightaway.

  “No, character doesn’t come into it,” he says.

  Really? I ask, but he shakes his head firmly.

  “Character was never an issue.”

  So he agrees with Ed Mitchell that there was something primal in the experience, at least for those who had the time and mental space to be affected by it?

  “I think so. Yes.”

  He leaves a short gap, as though considering this for the first time.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?”

  Yes, I agree, it is – even though by this stage of my travels I can no longer believe it to be true. I think Deke Slayton chose his commanders precisely for their rarefied focus and tightly reined imaginations; for their relative immunity to doubt, ambivalence and vacillation – states that arise from sensitivity to one’s situation, but might also delay decisions by the split second that turned success to anguish. What Slayton wanted was impregnability. Many of the commanders appear to be fine men, but it seems to me unlikely that they were ever going to become painters or preachers or poets or gurus, or have much to say about the metaphysical resonance of their journey.

  There was another, bigger, surprise waiting for me when I got back from Portugal. Before I went, I’d finally made myself write to Neil Armstrong, expecting no more than a polite brushoff. Now, trawling through my e-mails, I came across a message from an unfamiliar address which suggested another piece of spam. I opened it and giggled like a schoolboy. The name at the bottom hit me first, sitting solid and square, as if carved on a tablet of stone, avatar of an alien world. Neil Armstrong.

  He told me that he received lots of requests from people writing books and making films, but he could see that this was a different kind of story about Apollo. He asked me to expand on what I wanted to talk about, to tell him who this thing was for and to provide a few sample questions so that he might decide whether he could “make a meaningful contribution.” By this stage, I knew that he had agreed to allow an Alabama history professor who specializes in aviation to produce a first biography. The academic had spent three years courting him and I was surprised by his assent until I read that what he’d sanctioned was “a biography
about [his] involvement in the evolution of flight.” Gene Cernan told me that “Neil’s not one to share his personal feelings with people he doesn’t know, so I think his book’ll have a lot of technical stuff in it about things he did, and his opinions on them, but I don’t think he’s gonna tell you about how his heart beat faster when he stood there and looked up at the Earth. Neil’s just not like that.” Charlie and Dotty Duke had said that trying to get Armstrong to speak or even turn up anywhere is “painful!” and when I’d asked why they thought that was, Charlie had told me:

  “I never asked him why. I know he just doesn’t like the public eye. And I think he made a decision that ‘I’m not gonna use this for any aggrandizement … it’s part of my life, it’s over and I’m going to be private.’ He’s a really nice guy, we’re good friends and I really like him. But he’s just private.”

  Desperately unsure of how to respond to the First Man’s request, I called Al Reinert, who told me that while the exastronaut had been supportive of his For All Mankind film, he had resolutely refused to add his voice to the others. A space writer whom I met in Houston recalled speaking to him briefly on the phone for a technical book about a particular airplane, and the answer to his first question being a barked, “Look, if you’re just going to ask me questions you could find the answers to in other books, I’m wasting my time.” Then Andy Chaikin, who put together his account of the first lunar landing with Armstrong’s cooperation, told me:

  “The thing you need to know about Neil is that he sees himself and his career in the context of the history of aviation – that’s what he’s interested in. He also thinks that interviews are not the most efficient way of getting information across.”