Sex on the Moon

by Ben Mezrich

  “It looks a lot bigger in person,” he mumbled.

  The simulator was made up of two separate parts. The smaller of the two, the motion-based crew station (MBCS), as it was called, was attached to a huge scissor crane—a jointed, steel monstrosity, loaded with springs and curled-up pneumatic hoses, that assumedly provided incredible levels of hydraulic lift. The MBCS looked like the nose cone of the shuttle, gripped by a massive robotic arm. Although Thad couldn’t see inside the thing from where he was standing, he knew that the MBCS was configured just like the real cockpit of the actual space shuttle, with room for the shuttle commander and the shuttle pilot. The arm gave it six degrees of motion—which meant the thing could simulate every phase of spaceflight, from launch to landing. It could tilt up to ninety degrees in every direction and could simulate acceleration, even moments of weightlessness.

  The second part of the simulator was the fixed crew station. A rectangular box, it was a veritable porcupine of wires, antennas, and even miniature radar dishes. The MBCS had room for a commander, a pilot, a mission specialist, and a number of other crew members. It wouldn’t simulate motion, but it was also raised up on an elevated platform, and it was supposed to perfectly simulate the interior environment of the shuttle itself. For long-duration mission simulations, crew members could spend days or even weeks in the MBCS. Food and water would be raised up to them so that they could live exactly like they would in an orbital environment.

  “That’s what one hundred million of your tax dollars will get you,” the technician responded as he finally stepped away from the circuit board and approached Thad. “I assume you’re here for the monthly systems check?”

  Thad looked at the guy again. The technician was in his mid-thirties, with a receding hairline and a few extra pounds hanging down above his belt. Probably a contractor, obviously not someone Thad would consider an authority figure. No doubt the tech had confused him with someone who was supposed to be there. Or maybe he just didn’t care. He saw the NASA shirt, and that was enough.

  For a brief moment, Thad considered ending his charade. Something felt wrong about the deception, even though he hadn’t actively done anything to convince anyone he was supposed to be where he was. At the same time, Thad couldn’t ignore the spikes of pure adrenaline that were ricocheting through his system. It was like the first time he’d flown a single-engine plane by himself, but even more intense. He felt really alive, and the fear of getting caught no longer crossed his mind.

  “That’s correct,” he heard himself respond. “I’m supposed to observe the test run.”

  “The rest of your crew is already inside,” the tech responded, starting forward toward the simulator. “If we hurry we can make it before it begins.”

  Thad’s eyes widened. He had assumed he’d be observing the test run from where he was standing. Well, in for a penny, in for a one-hundred-million-dollar simulator. There was no turning back now. He quickly followed the man toward the massive machine.

  A second later, he was a few feet away from the giant hydraulic crane. The MBCS’s nose cone was right in front of him, and the tech headed for an open hatch affixed to one side. The tech pointed through the oval opening.

  “You guys have the coolest fucking toys.”

  Thad wasn’t sure he was even breathing anymore as he stepped past the tech, bending his head so he didn’t hit himself on the simulator’s ceiling. Before he could blink, he was inside the cockpit of the space shuttle. At least, a mock-up so realistic no astronaut in the world would be able to tell the difference.

  In some ways, it was like the interior of an airplane. Except a million times more. There were triangular viewing windows ahead, windows on either side—and every other surface of the thing was covered in switches, diodes, buzzers, and levers. There was already a man strapped into the pilot’s seat to Thad’s right. He couldn’t tell if the man was an astronaut or a technician, because he was wearing what looked to be gray-on-gray overalls. But there was no doubt he knew what he was doing. His hands were flicking around the switches, beginning what had to be the launch sequence. Without looking up, he gestured toward the other chair—the commander’s seat.

  Thad felt another moment of extreme panic, which he quickly swallowed down. As he told the tech, he was just there to observe. That was the charade he had invented, and that was the charade he was going to stick with. Just a lowly co-op who had been sent by his mentor to witness the monthly check of the Space Shuttle Simulator.

  It took a moment to figure out how to strap himself into the commander’s seat. There were seat belts coming from every angle, and a holster that went around his chest. When he was done, the pilot said something into a communicator attached above their heads, and Thad heard the whoosh of the hatch sealing shut behind him.

  “Let’s finish the checklist,” the pilot grunted, and Thad quickly looked where the man was pointing.

  There was a printed checklist attached between their seats. Because Thad had his pilot’s license, he was at least barely able to follow what was going on. He didn’t know where anything was located, but he was able to mimic the pilot’s lead, flicking a switch here and there, reading an alternator or a temperature control.

  “Fire it up,” the pilot said.

  And the next thing Thad knew, the entire cockpit began to shake. At first, it was a low tremble, but then the thing was really jerking up and down, like a paper airplane riding across the top of a thunderstorm. And suddenly the whole cockpit tilted all the way on its back, nose pointing up. Thad stifled a gasp. To his surprise, the window ahead of him no longer looked out on a converted airplane hangar. Thad was looking at the sky. They weren’t windows; they were high-definition monitors, playing feedback from a real shuttle launch.

  A second later, Thad was slammed hard into his seat. The view through the windows became one of pure motion, streaks of light like laser beams flashing before his eyes. The noise of the engines was like thunder reverberating around him in truly deafening peals.

  Thad realized he was shouting, in pure unadulterated joy. Maybe the pilot noticed, maybe he couldn’t hear over the din of the mock thrusters—Thad didn’t really care. In his mind, he wasn’t in a simulator tucked into a secure building on the JSC campus.

  In his mind, he was sitting in the cockpit of a rocket ship, hurtling toward Mars.

  …

  It wasn’t quite the overwhelming energy rush of a simulated shuttle thruster pushing him back into a leather commander’s seat—but it was pretty damn close. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the same swimming pool from the week before, half the young population of Clear Lake spread out across the patio in front of him as he told the story—so many eyes and ears and minds focused entirely on him—maybe embellishing a little bit here and there, but keeping to the narrative as much as possible … well, it was a truly pivotal moment in Thad’s life. He could see his own charisma reflected in the eyes of the pretty girls closest to him, and even in the unabashedly awed expressions on the faces of the men.

  “So all in all …” Thad finally wrapped up the story. “I think it was a pretty good week.”

  There was a moment of frozen silence, just like there had been when he’d first proposed the idea of the contest a week ago. And then everyone was applauding at once, congratulating him, wave after wave of handshakes and pats on the back, and even a few kisses on the cheek. Helms gave him a grudging thumbs-up, shaking his angled head in admiration.

  Thad had secured his place at the top of the social food chain. It was a spot he’d never occupied before—and he liked it.

  When the crowd moved away, Helms sidled next to him, dipping his finlike feet into the cool water of the shallow end of the pool.

  “Your contest was quite a success. I think it might end up a weekly thing. But I doubt anyone’s going to top flying the space shuttle.”

  “It was just a simulation.” Thad laughed. “I’ll probably wait till my third tour to try and sneak into the real thing.”
r />   Helms laughed back—then paused and looked at Thad.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Thad slid forward into the pool, submerging himself all the way down to his bright green eyes.

  9

  It was a moment every true scientist knew well—although it wasn’t something quantifiable, it wasn’t something you could predict or reverse-engineer or data-map or even really describe—but it was a moment that anyone who had spent time sequestered in a lab or behind a computer screen or at a blackboard, chalk billowing down in angry stormlike clouds, could identify, if not define.

  Thad has his own word for it: serenity. The moment when the act of science organically shifted into the art of science; when even the most mundane, choreographed procedures achieved such a rhythm that they became invisible chords of a single violin lost in the complexity of a perfect symphony. Minutes shifting into a state of timelessness, where the world seemed frozen but Thad was somehow moving forward: content, fulfilled, free.

  The project itself was far from spectacular. Slicing away at a piece of volcanic rock using a tiny diamond-tipped saw while keeping track of every microscopic wisp of volcanic dust—accurately documenting the final weight of the sample that was left behind. The work was painstaking, but the volcanic rock was just a stand-in, like the mocked-up cockpit of the space shuttle. It was supposed to represent something infinitely more valuable. A chunk of the moon, hand-delivered more than thirty years ago by men whose names were enshrined in history books. For Thad, it didn’t matter that the procedure was little more than a dress rehearsal. The process itself had overtaken him, and in that moment he was truly lost in the art of the science. The whir of the diamond saw, the pungent scent of the heated volcanic sample, the swirl of the dust as it billowed upward into a mercury-based measuring machine. He was in that serene place where nothing else existed. And he would have been content to stay there forever.

  “Wow. You did all this by yourself?”

  It took Thad a moment to process the words, to let the familiar voice yank him back into the lab. He switched off the saw and glanced back over his shoulder. Helms was standing by the counter where Thad had laid out all of his practice samples; everything from minute educational slices in individually wrapped Teflon bags to carefully constructed desiccators holding mock meteorites, ready to be sent to labs all over NASA.

  “I wasn’t sure when you were going to be finished running errands for Dr. Draper. So I figured I’d get started on my own. I guess I lost track of the time.”

  “I’ll say. I assume Dr. Agee showed you how to do all this?”

  Agee, Thad’s official mentor, had indeed stopped by earlier that morning to introduce himself, but he only stayed for a few minutes. Thad had been on his own most of the day. That didn’t bother him; actually, he found it quite liberating. His adventure at the mock space shuttle had taught him that NASA was a place an independent mind like his could take great advantage of. And Thad had become very independent. Ever since he’d been kicked out of the hermetic world where he’d grown up—the Mormon Church the way his father interpreted it, the heavy-handed way of the Mission Training Center—he’d become hungry to make his own future, to build his own name. The cool thing about the co-op program seemed to be that he’d be able to find his own way, to a large degree.

  “He gave me some pointers. But I learned a lot of it from reading your notebooks, and using the checklist I found on the laptop.”

  Helms glanced back at the computer station in the far corner of the lab. There was one laptop, a couple of desktops, and some wiring that led into NASA’s secure mainframe. It was a pretty high-tech station, and it was also highly secure. Helms had duly informed Thad that NASA security could monitor any use of the computer system, including personal e-mails. Thad figured that was for the best. Even a cursory search of the mainframe using the laptop had told him that there was a lot of pretty cool information available to an employee with his level of security. He could only imagine what higher security clearance would get you.

  “You missed lunch,” Helms said, moving next to Thad to help him begin to disassemble the saw. “But if we’re quick, we can grab something on the way over to the lecture.”

  Thad raised his eyebrows. He really had lost track of the time. He’d been at NASA over a week now, but he’d only made it to the Stardust Café twice. He didn’t really care—food had never been a real priority for him. Back at home, Sonya had often had to remind him to eat. As a struggling model, she had found the ease with which he skipped meals quite annoying. But certainly at NASA, no matter who you might run into in the cafeteria, Thad found meals the least interesting part of his day.

  The upcoming lecture was a perfect example. Although Thad had yet to meet Dr. Everett Gibson, he certainly knew the man by reputation. Gibson had been a standout scientist in the life sciences division for well over thirty years. One of the brightest stars in the astromaterials research office, he was the epitome of the old-school NASA scientist. After attaining a master’s in physical chemistry and a Ph.D. in geochemistry, he had gone to work for the JSC—or, as it was called at the time, the Manned Spacecraft Center—in July of 1969, just as the Apollo 11 capsule first returned from space.

  Thad was already in awe of the man. Gibson wasn’t an astronaut, but he was the closest thing a laboratory scientist could ever dream of becoming. It was fitting that he would be giving his lecture in the life sciences building, where Thad worked. Gibson had spent almost all of his thirty-plus years at NASA stationed in that building because—as Thad had learned only the day before, during a bull session with Helms and a couple of other co-ops—Building 31 had once housed the lunar receiving laboratory.

  When the first few Apollo missions had come back from the moon, NASA had set up a really tight quarantine; nobody had any idea what the lunar samples they had brought back might contain. There was a very real fear of alien pathogens spreading some strange, unearthly disease throughout the space center—and perhaps from there, the entire world. So a high-tech quarantine had been created not just for the astronauts themselves, who spent weeks in sealed chambers going through multiple levels of purification, blood tests, and even psychological evaluation, but also for the lunar samples—the moon rocks, as they quickly became known to the public.

  The protocol for the transport and storage of moon rocks was unbelievably strict, involving vacuum-sealed rock boxes, nitrogen chambers, bodysuits with self-contained oxygen.

  Gibson was one of the first scientists charged with preparing and studying the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo program, missions twelve through seventeen. He had conducted the original moon rock studies, searching for signs of life, unknown materials, pathogens—everything that made the lunar samples unique. Eventually, the quarantine on astronauts and materials was lessened, and by Apollo 15 dropped. The rocks, though deemed incredibly valuable, were no longer considered a danger. But they were still irreplaceable; after the Apollo program ended, it was immediately made illegal for American citizens to even own a real lunar sample.

  All together, the Apollo astronauts had collected 842 pounds of the stuff, divided into 2,200 individual samples, which were then subdivided into 110,000 studiable parts—and it had been determined that the moon rocks needed a building of their own. A self-contained facility, Building 31N, had been constructed right next door; Thad had yet to visit the Lunar Lab, but he had heard plenty of stories about the place. It was considered the most secure building NASA had ever built. Atmosphere-controlled, built without any connection to the outside world—no wires, pipes, ducts—it was supposedly strong enough to survive a thousand years underwater without damage to the inner contents. Hell, it would probably outlast the entire city of Houston.

  Thad hoped he’d get the chance to visit the Lunar Lab. Since he was involved in the study of space materials, he knew that it was not far-fetched. But until he got to handle the samples himself, the closest he would get to moon rocks would be hanging out with people
like Dr. Gibson.

  “Forget lunch,” Thad said, hastily cleaning up his workstation. “I’d rather starve and get a good seat up front than be bloated in the back row.”

  Helms smiled, though, as a second year, he’d heard Gibson’s lectures before. But nobody in Building 31 missed an opportunity to hear about the Apollo missions from a man who had been so involved himself. It was as close to walking on the moon as a guy who worked with test tubes was ever going to get.

  …

  Gibson began his speech on the moon, but the body of his talk took them millions of miles beyond; sitting in the very front row of the Greek-style amphitheater, leaning all the way back so that he had a better view of the stocky, square shouldered, sixty-something-year-old man behind the lectern, Thad realized he should not have been surprised. Like everything else at NASA, Gibson was caught up in the incredible reorientation of the American space program. But it was still amazing to see this gray-haired, slightly balding, bespectacled scientist—a genius who had taken part in the greatest adventure in modern human history—so enthusiastically involved in something new, something that would take at least a quarter of a century to become real.

  At the beginning of the speech, Gibson talked about the first samples he’d ever seen when he started at NASA—the Apollo 11 samples, which were collected by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Gibson went on to describe how different the samples were from each successive moon mission, how each of the six landing spots had been chosen to study different areas of the moon’s topography. The results were startlingly different types of rock, from the very fine-grained materials brought back from the valley of Taurus Littrow, a deep mountain valley in the northeastern part of the moon—a material that was made up of little tiny beads commonly known as “orange glass,” to the gray, almost black Apollo 17 samples—the very last samples ever collected by human beings, from the dark portion of the moon. In passing, Gibson acknowledged how utterly valuable the samples were—not just that they were irreplaceable, but that requests came in from all over the world, every day, from scientists, museums, and colleges wanting to display or study these national treasures. And every year, NASA chose a few hundred lucky souls who would have a chance to see a moon rock for real.