Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  CapCom sounded like doom. “Thirteen thousand six hundred. Have you got anything yet, Antares?”

  “Negative,” Alan said crisply.

  Jesus, he doesn’t care. He’s gonna land, Deke told himself.

  Flame began to reflect off the higher peaks below. Mountains, boulder fields, gaping craters waited.

  Gloom filled Mission Control. No way out. Time to abort.

  “Hold on, Houston!” Mitchell’s voice burst from the squawk box, through headsets.

  Ed glanced at Shepard. “Al, look at that.”

  “Houston,” Al said smoothly, “we’ve got a radar lock.”

  Mission Control hung by its fingernails from one moment to the next. CapCom’s voice went up sharply. “Antares! We’re confirming incoming data on the onboard navigation system.” Relief mixed with wonder. “All systems are functioning.”

  “We copy that, Houston.”

  “Antares, you have a GO to land.”

  “You better believe, Houston.”

  “Your altitude is thirteen thousand.”

  Shepard whooped in an exuberant war cry, slammed a gloved hand against Mitchell’s back. “Hell, man, we’ve hung it out further than this before, Ed.”

  “Ten thousand two hundred,” CapCom called.

  “Houston, we’re pitching over.”

  “You’re looking good.”

  Mitchell chanted out the changing altitude and other readings from his consoles.

  Seven thousand feet.

  Now they had a visual on their landing site. The surface came through clearly through ghostly flame beneath them. “That’s a rough runway down there,” Mitchell remarked.

  “What a sight!” Shepard yelled.

  “Cone Crater,” Mitchell sang out, “and there it is right in front of us.”

  Shepard stood braced at the helm, feet apart at the commander’s post, and he took Antares down on an invisible rail toward the ancient craggy highlands of Fra Mauro.

  Alan Shepard, using thirty years of pilot skills, threaded a needle between the hills and ridges along their approach path and dropped his ship down into a narrow valley, craters and boulders everywhere.

  “One thousand,” Mitchell called, “and we’re right on the money.”

  “Antares, you’re GO for a landing,” CapCom announced.

  Alan could be generous now. “Thank you, sir. Fantastic!”

  His lunar module was a dancer balanced on flame.

  Five hundred feet. Down steadily.

  Shepard’s eyes darted back and forth as he sought a touchdown site. Antares was now more a helicopter riding on fire than a ship for deep space. The bug-eyed machine glowed in shimmering white and gold as the surface reflected backlight from its flame.

  “Shifting course,” he murmured, avoiding scattered rocks and craters.

  Antares skipped and floated like a huge insect skittering along invisible water.

  Shepard dodged. Thrusters banged again and again to keep them upright. Alan locked his gaze on a rocky plateau dead ahead. “We’d better move it up a little,” he told Ed.

  “Good move.” Mitchell pointed to his right. “Right there. We can land over there . . . coming down steady, down, down, down . . . there’s some dust, Al.”

  Fifty feet up. Fire tore into ancient lunar soil.

  Mitchell spoke steadily, calmly. “Twenty feet. Descending at three feet per second . . . ten feet . . . ”

  A small probe beneath Antares jabbed into the moon.

  “Contact!” Ed reported.

  “Throttle’s off,” Shepard said.

  Flame vanished.

  Eerily quiet. Until Ed whooped it up. “Great! We’re on the surface.”

  “We made a good landing, Houston,” Alan called CapCom. “About the flattest place around here.”

  They were just sixty feet from the X they’d marked on their landing map many weeks before—within walking distance along a rugged incline to the rim of Cone Crater, their main geologic target. There they would retrieve debris blasted out of that crater by meteoric impact scientists told them had taken place more than four billion years ago.

  Mission Control, emotionally drained, was bedlam once again. They’d ridden Antares’s problems all the way down with Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell, who had turned what appeared to be certain failure into a perfect lunar touchdown.

  At her home, Louise Shepard shrieked with her own release of tension and joy at what her husband had accomplished. Laughing and crying, she told her family, “We can’t call him Old Man Moses anymore. He’s reached his Promised Land!”

  The only two living beings on the moon shook hands.

  Ed Mitchell gave his friend a long, hard look. The icy commander was gone, and the warm, charming Alan Shepard was on the moon beside him.

  “Come on, Al. Just between you and me.” He poked a finger at Shepard, “Would you have really flown us down without the radar?”

  The Tom Sawyer grin was never so wide. “You’ll never know, Ed.” The future Admiral laughed. “You’ll never know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Longest Walk on the Moon

  HE STEPPED OFF THE SMALL PORCH outside the hatch. Backward. Down the ladder slowly, the moon’s surface waited only a few steps below. Antares was on the moon, but to Alan Shepard his long journey wouldn’t be complete until his boots sank into lunar soil. Nine rungs down the ladder. A pause. He gripped the handrails carefully, pushed off backward. The last three and a half feet down were a lazy drop.

  Moon dust flowed up and outward in a fine spray, settling quickly. He stood still for several moments. Then he turned suddenly, enthralled by where he was, by the stark, barren slopes of a landscape that had remained essentially unchanged for billions of years. Meteorite impact had blasted huge craters or simply pockmarked the surface with the fragments of disintegrating comets. Moonquakes would disturb the inner slopes of craters, sending lunar soil sliding like desert sand toward crater bottoms. Sometimes the jarring impacts of meteorites or moonquake rumblings would collapse the walls of craters, cascading dust and boulders downward.

  Antares rested in absolute silence in a world that as far as Shepard could see was frozen motionless.

  Immense satisfaction went through him. His first words spoken from the moon came in an inner rush of deep emotion. He had no speech prepared for posterity. He spoke what he felt.

  “It’s been a long way, but . . . we’re here!”

  His words sounded a clear message to his Mercury Seven brethren and a handful of folks who believed in him, who had never lost faith with his goals, who had never wavered once in their absolute conviction that he would one day stand right where he was. In his mind’s eye he saw, and shared this moment not only with his six Mercury brothers, but above all others with his wife, Louise, and the girls, Laura, Julie, and Alice.

  On the planet where it had all begun, smiles lit up in Mission Control. They seemed to sense the feelings of that man on the faraway moon. They were with him.

  “Not bad for an old man,” CapCom answered. Controllers clasped their hands over their heads in the silent signal of triumph.

  Antares, Shepard reported, had touched down firmly on a slight slope that was the “flattest place around here.” He had maneuvered the moon ship to a landing in a great, shallow bowl-like formation. He pushed his boots into the soft, grayish-brown dust. No living creature had ever done this before in this desolate, utterly silent field of craters. “Gazing around at the bleak landscape, it certainly is a stark place here at Fra Mauro. It’s made all the more stark by the fact that the sky is completely dark. This is a very tough place.”

  He studied the landing pads of Antares. “The soil is so soft,” he added, “it comes all the way to the top of the LM’s footpad.”

  He looked across the vast expanse of Fra Mauro, turning his back to the dazzling light in the heavens. The cratered surface faded into a featureless plain, a warning that the detailed experiments they would pursue must be performe
d with extreme care. Their landing site offered no reference points by which they could navigate.

  Shepard watched Ed Mitchell work his way down the ladder to join him in the dusty moon soil. Ed moved about quickly, testing his body reactions to the weak gravity of a world so much smaller than his own. To Mitchell this was a moment of triumph as well as immense joy. “Mobility is very great under this ‘crushing’ one-sixth g-load,” he quipped. The moon was a bouncy playground.

  The two men started their detailed work schedule. They placed samples of rocks and soil into containers for scientists back home to study. The flag went up on a staff pounded into the surface.

  They carried their remote-viewing television camera sixty feet away, set it securely into the ground on its tripod so that it would capture the Antares and two men hard at work. They unloaded a new device for lunar transport, a modularized equipment transporter, or MET. The astronauts dubbed NASA’s “super-advanced scientific development” with the inelegant title of lunar rickshaw.

  The MET carried an extensive supply of tools, cameras, instruments, safety line, core tubes for digging into the lunar surface, maps and charts for Shepard and Mitchell to use to navigate their way through and around craters, gullies, and boulder fields. Included was ALSEP—an elaborate package of surface experiments.

  Ed Mitchell set up a spread of geophones, placing mechanical ears against the ground. Then he walked away from Antares with his “thumper.” He was about to give the surface a series of hard blows with small explosive charges. When they went off, with their precise power and location known, scientists could read the geophone data to determine the density of material just below the surface.

  Every fifteen feet along a line extending outward for three hundred sixty feet, he pushed the thumper against the ground and squeezed the trigger. His equipment was less than perfect. Of twenty-one explosive charges, eight failed, and Ed had fits with the thirteen that actually fired.

  “Houston, this thing’s got a pretty good kick to it,” he reported. He was told the blasts would be on the order of a firecracker. “Firecracker, hell,” Mitchell said. “It’s like firing both barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun at the same time.”

  He managed a good series of moon poundings, and then for three straight attempts he had successive failures. “A hair-trigger this isn’t,” he commented.

  He gave the thumper a few good whacks of his own. Bang! The charge rattled through the surface, and back in Houston scientists nodded happily. It was quite a trick to take the moon’s pulse when you’re on another world.

  High overhead, aboard Kitty Hawk, Stuart Roosa continued on his whirlwind tour of the moon, every two hours swinging completely around the cratered mass beneath him. His voice rose with excitement as he told

  CapCom, “I can see Antares on the surface!” No question, with sunlight gleaming from the spidery moon ship and the wide area of dust splayed outward from the landing.

  The oft-repeated claims that the moon’s surface had remained unchanged for billions of years and would remain so for uncounted more billions were dispelled again and again by Roosa’s grand photographic tour. As Shepard and Mitchell ran through their experiments at Fra Mauro, Roosa directed his attention to the crater Landsberg B. This was the aiming point where ground controllers had directed the Apollo 13 third stage to crash-land to excite Apollo 12’s seismometer. Smashing into the surface at several thousand miles an hour, the huge hollow shell and its heavy engine compartment had blasted a crater two hundred feet wide in the surface.

  On the far side, Roosa came up with an unexpected bonus. Swinging across the craters never seen from earth, his cameras clicking away steadily, checking his position with photos taken on earlier missions, he was astonished to find an extremely bright crater directly beneath his orbital path. Unseen, unknown on the home planet, it was the result of a meteoric impact that was only weeks or months old—another pockmark on a world that seemed laid waste by incessant bombardment.

  Deke Slayton sat before a television monitor, leaning forward, oblivious to the passing hours, watching Alan and Ed going through their paces. No question which one was Alan. He wore bright red bands on the arms and legs of his pressure suit. Deke was doing more than watching. He could sense, even feel deep inside him, the sensations Alan was experiencing, the thoughts that must be in his mind. Deke watched him walk, half float in the gossamer lunar gravity, and soon Deke found his own leg muscles beginning to move in concert with his friend. When Alan lifted his arm, Deke felt the urge to do the same.

  Finally Deke closed his eyes, listening to the voices across space. Before the television monitor with its live scenes from Fra Mauro, he was one with Alan Shepard.

  In that silent union Deke began to smile. Then he laughed aloud as he heard Alan bitching about the lunar dust.

  The dust, Shepard described with commendable restraint to Houston, was “very fine, like talcum powder. It clings to everything.”

  The effect was as if the moon dust were metallic and their suits magnetic, and every time they moved and kicked up dust it rushed to collect on their boots and work upward along their suits.

  Deke opened his eyes. Alan had stopped. Something in the way he stood, the manner in which he had turned, told Deke that a powerful emotional strain was running through this man.

  Deke was right. At this moment Shepard, the man, had taken over Shepard, the explorer.

  Alan Shepard held this moment for himself.

  He stood rock still, feet braced for balance, enclosed in the elaborate pressurized garment that was his private world of life, filled with energy, with supplies of heat and cooling, water, oxygen pressure—a capsule of life created on his Earth which was hanging before his eyes in the velvety, utterly black drapery of the universe.

  Alan Shepard stood looking long and hard at his and Edgar Mitchell’s home planet, 240,000 miles and two days away.

  He was overwhelmed, his senses and his thoughts set afire with the miracle of what floated in ultimate darkness above him.

  At this moment uncounted millions of people on Earth would be looking into their night sky, and they would be seeing the moon—the moon of Apollo 14—in two-thirds of what was its fully rounded shape.

  Alan, looking at his home world, was seeing two-thirds of its sphere encased in diamond-hard blackness.

  One-third of his planet hung magically in the void, incredibly dimensional, suspended, floating, levitated. A third of a world, “yet it was breathtaking. Looking up in the black sky and seeing the brilliant planet . . . the ice caps over the poles, the white clouds, the blue water . . . gorgeous!”

  It was home. “Where all my friends were . . . ”

  It was an incredible vista. He understood now that while on earth, it seemed almost limitless to its people with its vast oceans and up heaving mountains, where there was always a distant horizon and changing dawns and sunsets.

  “But from here, from the moon,” he spoke quietly to himself, “it is, in fact, very finite, very fragile . . . so incredibly fragile. That thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the world—it can be blown away so easily! A meteor, a cataclysmic volcano, man’s own uncaring outpourings of poison . . . ”

  And suddenly this fighter pilot, this leading test pilot, astronaut, explorer, adventurer, master of wings and rocket fire, hero to millions, wept.

  Tears streaked his cheeks. He understood much of what he felt was tension draining away from the emotional travail of their flight, and then the relief of a successful landing, but all of that, magnified a thousand times over, faded before that utter, fragile beauty of “our planet.”

  He had the feeling that he and Mitchell, and those who had come before them, and those who would follow, were here for far more than walking through lunar dust and sending explosive booms through a scarred world’s surface, and measuring magnetic fields, solar winds, and radiation levels—all that was but prologue to the real reason they had done so much and come so far.

  It
all condensed into this one single, long look at fragile, beautiful earth, as though he were sent here, he and the others, so they might look back at that lovely, sensitive sphere and then carry home the message that everyone there must learn to live on this planet together. It didn’t matter who liked whom, or on what side a man might find himself, because they were all on the side of a world of very definite finite resources, and they would all suffer terrifying consequences if they drained to bare bones the world that had conceived the life of the human race, fostered and nurtured that life, which now threatened to contaminate and destroy—

  He stopped his thoughts, forced himself out of his introspection.

  Back to work! There’s much to do and miles to go before I sleep my first night here under the light of the . . .

  Earth.

  CapCom wanted to know how Mitchell found the trampoline of diminished gravity. Ed laughed, his delight infectious. “It’s easy,” he announced. “Just a little push and you spring right up.”

  He looked like a gazelle bouncing around a grassy meadow as he worked his way through his assignments. It might be work and they might be on schedules, but to Ed Mitchell there were no boundaries, no restrictions to what he did, what he saw, what he felt.

  Mitchell was swept along by a “peak experience” in which “the presence of divinity became almost palpable.” In that moment he knew, beyond question or counterpoint, “that life in this universe was not just an accident based on random processes.” It was knowledge gained through private, subjective awareness, every bit as real as the objective data upon which, say, the navigational program or the communications system were based.

  “Clearly,” he mused, “the universe has meaning and direction.” He had encountered through mind that “unseen dimension” that had brought to life the intelligent design of the universe and purpose they had never remotely dreamed would be their most precious find on a world where they were the only two living souls moving, working, thinking.