Leaving Orbit (9 page)

Buzz Aldrin was among the third group of astronauts, chosen in 1963. Those early astronauts, crew-cut Caucasian men, family men, military men, all seemed immune to the emotion of what they were doing. They never waggled their heads at the wonder of it all. There are no reports of them tearing up upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building. They quickly changed the subject when they were asked about the possibility of their deaths, and politely filibustered questions about God and the heavens. This was what was expected of them, of course—this calm in the face of danger. This is what Tom Wolfe found remarkable about them. Their ability to step onto unstable rockets, to take perilous risks seemingly without fear, their ability to carry out the greatest achievements of their species without raising their heart rates or losing their swagger. This was exactly why they had been chosen as test pilots and then as astronauts. Yet—and here was the contradiction—people wanted to see emotion from them.

I knew that before being selected as an astronaut Buzz Aldrin earned a PhD in astronautics at MIT, where he designed orbital rendezvous techniques for spaceships docking in orbit (still a highly theoretical prospect in 1963). According to all reports, this was a project that required a freakish level of intelligence, a mind-spinning application of physics, intersecting multiple orbits that young Buzz, in that time before computers, calculated by hand with a slide rule. (His fellow Apollo astronauts also recall that he was unique among them in his ability to calculate orbital rendezvous in his head.) The techniques he created were critical to early spaceflight, and some of them continue to be used today.

Out of curiosity I decided to get hold of Buzz’s 1963 PhD dissertation through my father, whose status as an MIT alumnus allowed him to download a copy from the MIT library site. The dissertation is titled “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” Hand-typed, the equations make me imagine Buzz (or maybe it was his wife, Joan) painstakingly rolling the platen up or down half a click to create superscript and subscript numbers, dozens of them per page. The abstract introduces the project as a study of “the inertial rotation of the line of sight throughout three dimensional Keplerian rendezvous trajectories.” A whole page reads like this—words I don’t know, or words I thought I knew that are clearly being used in an extremely specific way.

But on the sixth page I find a dedication:

I feel a surge of happiness. Here is my reward: Buzz Aldrin has, unwittingly, dedicated his dissertation to himself.

When I’d first learned about the orbital rendezvous piece of Buzz’s story, the math genius piece, I was surprised by it. I’d known that Buzz Aldrin was handsome and brave, unnervingly competent, but not that he was the sort of person capable of doing complex math in his head. Those people are necessary to spaceflight, but we think of them as the guys in short-sleeve dress shirts and dark ties, slide rules in their pockets, the
nerds
—not the astronauts, possessors of the Right Stuff who actually get to fly the missions and bag lots of babes along the way. The Apollo astronauts were avatars for our own dreams of spaceflight, in the same way that movie stars are our avatars for romance and relevance, and it’s perhaps not entirely flattering to us as a culture that we require of astronauts that they be athletic and daring, but not especially book-smart. The truth is that the astronauts were and are book-smart, all of them, and by most accounts Buzz Aldrin was the book-smartest of them all. Alan Bean, a fellow Apollo astronaut, once said: “One thing I know about Buzz: he’s one of these guys that’s a lot smarter than most of us. You didn’t want to sit near him at a party because he would start talking about rendezvous.”

It’s hard to say precisely when the first moon hoax theory emerged, and harder still to say when it picked up steam. Maybe there were always people who doubted, even in the moment, even as the images were playing in black and white in their living rooms. Maybe some people’s trust in government had already eroded that much—maybe in certain circles it was starting to be a more fashionable stance to question everything.

What we do know is that by the thirty-year anniversary of Apollo 11, in 1999, about 6 percent of Americans told Gallup they believed the moon landings were staged and another 5 percent said they had no opinion, leaving only 89 percent who firmly believed we went to the moon. Things were worse by 2004, when a survey of people eighteen to twenty-five years old revealed that 27 percent of them “expressed some doubt that NASA went to the Moon,” with 10 percent of them indicating that it was “highly unlikely” that a moon landing had ever taken place.

No one from NASA Public Affairs has ever undertaken to answer the hoax charges in a systematic way. The only rebuttal to appear anywhere on the
nasa.gov
domain is from the Science and Technology Directorate at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and dates from 2001, shortly after Fox aired a special called
Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?
You can see why there wasn’t a larger, more official response from within NASA—to do so would be to engage in, and thereby dignify, an argument that should not be mistaken for an actual controversy.

I have met moon hoax True Believers in my daily life, and while many of them are precisely the sorts of libertarians and
X-Files
fans you would expect to relish such a juicy conspiracy, I’ve often been surprised by stealth conspiracists, the non-paranoid-appearing, buttoned-up types whom you wouldn’t expect to question much of anything. They smirk at me condescendingly, shake their heads a couple of times, and explain to me why we couldn’t have done it.
Couldn’t have.
If they seem open to discussion, I have a couple of key pieces of counterevidence I like to offer.

One I like to repeat is from Michael Collins: over four hundred thousand people worked on Apollo at its height, he points out, and not one of them has come forward to spill the secret in the intervening decades. “I don’t know two Americans who have a fantastic secret without one of them blurting it out to the press,” he points out in a documentary interview. “Can you imagine thousands of people able to keep this secret?” The idea that so many people, many of whom would have to be in a position to know of the deception, kept such an incendiary secret for decades strains even the most generous understanding of human nature.

My other favorite counterargument draws on evidence that is more empirical. All six missions to land on the moon brought back pounds of moon rocks. These rocks have been made available to scientists, who have studied them using technologies that had not yet been invented during Apollo. Either NASA figured out a way to create fake moon rocks convincing to the molecular level, or the hundreds of scientists from all over the world who have been allowed to study the rocks over the years are in on the conspiracy. Neither seems likely. It seems much more likely that if NASA wanted to fool people with a fake moon landing, their first order of business would be to come up with a plausible reason why the spacecraft couldn’t carry back any rocks.

But none of my counterevidence will make much difference, I know. There is a pleasure in doubting. I’ve felt it too, about other things: a satisfaction at being smarter than those who have been duped, a satisfaction at being ungullible. I once met another Apollo astronaut, Jack Schmitt, a geologist and the first scientist to travel in space. I told him that his name is in my novel—my main character was born in 1972, the same day Schmitt and his crewmate Gene Cernan fired their lunar module’s ascent stage and lifted off the surface of the moon for the last time. I asked him what he says to moon hoax conspiracists.

“Well,” he said, slowly, “I describe to them my personal experience of walking on the moon. And if they choose to believe I am a liar, there is nothing I can do to help that.”

“Good answer,” I said.

It’s the condescension in the conspiracist’s smirk that drives me insane. The smirk makes me a credulous dupe, one of the clamoring naive who believes the bedtime story. The conspiracists want to erase from the official record the achievement that some call the greatest achievement of the United States, the greatest achievement of the twentieth century, the greatest achievement in the history of humankind. The rage this elicits in me (a tiny flame, entirely controllable in social situations, yet
rage
is the word for it nonetheless) is hard to describe. It is a
patriotic
rage, on behalf of forces much larger than myself, people much greater than myself. The doubters are calling people I admire liars, men who risked their lives for their country before they risked their lives for the exploration of space. Buzz Aldrin a liar, Neil Armstrong a liar, Michael Collins a liar. And the worst kind of liars—those who would manipulate our highest values for their own personal gain. It makes more sense to the doubters that NASA is an organization of frauds and opportunists than that a government agency achieved something beautiful and important, and this angers me on behalf of both the past and the future.

I’ve talked to people, friends and strangers, about what it means that the shuttle era is ending, and I’m both heartened by the sadness people seem to feel over its loss and frustrated by the general ignorance about spaceflight and its costs. People tell me that the shuttle program is being sacrificed so the money can be diverted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the shuttles had to be retired because they have flown more missions than they were designed for, that we are stepping aside as leaders in space in order to create a “more egalitarian” position in the world as part of our president’s general move toward socialism. None of these claims have any truth to them.

“Why
are
we stopping then?” people ask me. I’m always a little more flummoxed by this question than I should be, given how much time I’ve spent reading and thinking about it.
It’s complicated
, I say. The loss of
Columbia
was the beginning of the end—that much is true no matter whom you ask. After that disaster, politicians in Washington would have had to spend a lot of political capital to save the shuttle, and a recession would be an especially treacherous time to do that. All this sounds weaker than what I really want to say, though, which is partly that the public’s own apathy is to blame. It’s closest to the truth to say that the fundamental problem is that most people had not really noticed that we were still flying in the first place.

I watch the video of the Punch that night after my family is asleep, over and over, trying to get some feeling for the man. But we are not ourselves at our most extreme—not in a moment of rage at being called a coward, not in the moment of the utmost courage, guiding an untested spacecraft down, down, down toward the surface of a desolate alien world while the alarms blare and the fuel runs low. I know only that I don’t yet know Buzz Aldrin at all.

Waiting on a street in downtown Nashville for Buzz Aldrin’s limo to arrive from the airport, I decide not to ask him about the Punch, or about Bart Sibrel, or about hoax conspiracy theory in general. That’s what everyone else asks him about, people who don’t know much about spaceflight. They ask him about the Punch, they ask him whether Buzz Lightyear was really named for him (he was), they ask him what it felt like to walk on the moon. Buzz Aldrin has been surrounded by space groupies since he was selected as an astronaut forty-six years ago; he has been followed and accosted and approached and stared at and flirted with by people who know only that he is an astronaut, which is to say that they know he is famous, or that he is a hero, without really understanding the details of his fame or his heroism. I want Buzz to know that I am not one of those people.

In my hotel room the night before, I’d looked over everything I had learned about him: Buzz Aldrin graduated from West Point and served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. He became a war hero when he shot down two MiGs and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross. He then earned a doctorate in astronautics from MIT by the age of thirty-three.