Moondust (32 page)

“Well, yeah. The technologies are easy to develop, but they're pretty expensive. But still the benefits would be remarkable. They could probably revolutionize the way we live on this planet.”

He rails briefly against “bureaucratic inertia,” confessing that “We're looking at 251 improvements to the space shuttle, but it's slow work … in the old days, we discussed stuff at meetings, then went away and did it – now we have meetings to arrange more meetings …” I tell him that a senior executive from a NASA contractor admitted to me privately that the risks taken with Apollo would be unthinkable today, and when he speaks, to ask who said that, there's an edge to his voice, the spark of anger that I couldn't find earlier. Fearing that I've got someone into trouble, I hurry to a question. Would it be safer today?

“Well, hopefully.” His voice is calm again. “But you either accept a degree of risk or you don't do anything. We reckoned to have about a one in two chance of getting back from the Moon at first, but by the time I flew, it was about five to one. I think it's always gonna be high risk. Be worth it, though.”

We stand up. I thank him again. He says: “Thank
you,
sir. And good luck with yer book,” then turns and adds, “It's hard,” but before I can ask whether he means writing a book or going to the Moon, he's rolling slowly back down the corridor. In my imagination, he's looking for his horse. The perplexing thing is that when I see him the next morning, at a ceremony to mark his induction into an “Astronaut Hall of Fame” (which really is a
hallway at the conference centre with a few pictures in it), he greets me like an old comrade, is friendly and warm and happy to stand around chatting with no minidisc to mock him, until he is called to face a scrum of photographers and reporters. Then he nods bashfully, blinks away the camera flash, says hardly anything at all. And I think that maybe the Apollo-nut fascination with him stems from the fact that neither they, nor I, nor anyone else, has ever really known what he felt about anything – save for three days out of his life which he spent on the Moon, during which no one could have been in any doubt about what he was feeling, because he was just so full of
joy
. And for all the difficulty of sitting (not-quite) opposite John Young, some of that joy must have rubbed off on me, because whenever I think about this eccentric, elemental man hereafter, I can't stop myself from smiling.

Only much later do I notice that John Young is the first of the six mission commanders I've spoken to at any length and it will be longer still before I understand the significance of this. In the meantime, there are several things to think about as I join the traffic vomiting into Houston from the I-45.

I'd started out wondering where you go after you've been to the Moon, but from what I've seen so far, the answer is that
you don't:
I've met five Moonwalkers now and each seems in a different way to remain in its spell. There's Ed Mitchell, still roaming the benign and beautiful Universe he touched, and Buzz and John Young with their compulsive dreaming of a return; a similar inability to let go. There's Alan Bean with his equally compulsive efforts to capture what he saw and felt, make it somehow solid and communicable; and Neil Armstrong, who wants to live quietly with whatever it was he experienced or didn't experience, but can't because we won't let him; who's spent thirty-five years running from us and
it
and will probably spend the rest of his life doing the same.

I'm also seeing that there is a more practical side to my own interest in these men, because they seem to symbolize, even embody, a question that I and most people I know find themselves
asking at regular intervals. Do I stick with life as I know it, be happy and content with the considerable challenge of appreciating and improving that, or shoot for the Moon and risk being dissatisfied, finding that it wasn't what I expected, or that nothing else can ever match it afterwards (as per Michael Collins's “earthly ennui”)? Indeed, it's possible to see the whole of Apollo, not as a metaphor for this condition, but as a solid expression of it at the most fundamental level, which the Moonwalkers
lived
and had to try to make sense of afterwards, fermented into that eternally nagging question which Ed Mitchell first raised: “Who am I and why am I here?” At this halfway stage, I'm not ready to draw any conclusions on that yet, any more than I am about whether going actually changed anyone or whether the adventure was worth the cost, or even what that cost was. But I feel sure that answers are here, buried in these nine men, who've been far more exotic and in their different ways impressive than I'd imagined they would be. As to what it was like to stand on the Moon, I'm beginning to think that the sensation was either too complex or too primitive to describe, or that the weight of expectation, of that “Earth's collective dreaming,” paralyses those who could. My initial instinct that the most powerful part of the experience was about returning to Earth – and that we're as much a part of the dynamic behind this paradox as the spacemen are – seems to have been right, though. That no one can easily say what it was like to stand on the surface simply makes the question all the more interesting.

After young, I thought my job here in Houston was done, but some inner voice persuaded me to stay and by the end of a lunatic week I'll be very glad I did. I wanted to know more about the ways in which perceptions of Apollo have changed, and in which it's been internalized by the culture. I wasn't expecting anything tangible by way of evidence, but here in Houston, I've found some; a group of people who prove as unexpected and compelling to me as the astronauts themselves. Apollo's children.

Way back in LA, as I dragged myself shattered from Buzz's place to my hotel, a soft-spoken man who looked like a kindly plainclothes detective from
Hill Street Blues
was waiting for me in the bar. His name was Gene Myers and he'd come to tell me about his company, Space Island, which hoped to construct a hotel in space from discarded space shuttle fuel tanks just as soon as they'd scraped together ten to fifteen billion dollars in investment. It sounded fantastical to me, but he said they could do it in five years and recited a list of possible uses for such a facility, which included science and tourism, and medical and artistic activities. He said you could leave Earth orbit and go to the Moon in three days if you wanted and that he'd like to run a competition to send up a songwriter, and when I ventured that the world might not thank him for the sort of tunes that came back – but that if they were going to do it, they might as well cut to the chase and send David Bowie – his eyes lit up. Perhaps when I got home, he enthused, I could get word to the pop star that, should he choose to accept it, there's a free spaceflight waiting for him. I promised to let the former Mr. Stardust know.

The thing about this is that Gene Myers is not alone. There are all sorts of organizations planning all kinds of more or less extravagant projects. Some are run by billionaires such as the hotelier Bob Bigelow, who's spending five hundred million of his own dollars on manufacturing an inflatable space hotel in the desert outside Las Vegas, while others, like Armadillo Aerospace, run by the über-computer-game-designer John Carmack, coauthor of the mega-selling
Quake
and
Doom
series, are part of an expensive race to develop the first low-cost spaceships. The one problem they share in 2002 is NASA, and behind NASA the federal government and its tight regulations. And so it was that after meeting Myers, I turned left off Sunset, went up the hill past Mulholland Drive and down to Studio City, where just off Ventura Boulevard I found the offices of the Space Frontier Foundation and Rick Tumlinson.

I took to Rick instantly. At a local bar, he told me about his English mother and Texan serviceman father and his speckled past as a video maker and twentysomething bong worshipper.
Like Andy Chaikin, he was born in 1956, but looks much younger, like a character from
National Lampoon's Animal House,
in fact (most specifically John Belushi). He wore a goatee and had just cut off his ponytail and we talked for a while about the Foundation's aims, which boil down to wresting control of space from NASA's bureaucratic paws so that the space frontier can be opened and the people might get up there themselves, as per Apollo's promise, and at a certain point the penny dropped and I found myself exclaiming: “So wait – you're a space activist!” to which he replied:

“Oh, yeah. Hard-core! Space advocate and activist. The opening of something as big as the space frontier is not a thing that can be left to a few bureaucrats and corporations. It's a much bigger change and challenge that's facing us and a much bigger set of possibilities than should be guided by government agencies.”

He talked about the “Lewis and Clark” model they see, where NASA, like the trailblazers of the western frontier, goes over the hill and tells us what's there, leaving others to settle; and how, when he started, “there were no space groups of any size and credibility who actually disagreed with NASA.” When I got worried and wondered whether we really want WorldComs and Enrons chomping up the Moon in glorious privacy, he countered:

“Yeah, but what we've had here, particularly in relation to the space station, is a combination of some of the worst aspects of both. You have giant corporations working with a very elite insider group that has a quasi-militaristic leaning. You have to bear in mind that, in the beginning at least, NASA was a partial fig leaf to cover the Cold War antagonisms of the Fifties and Sixties. There was all that ‘We came in peace for all mankind' stuff, but they literally were part of the military-industrial complex – it was the same companies designing and making the military hardware and all that. If you were an antiwar hippy protester, they looked like the same group of people.”

So I seemed to have happened upon a space Country Joe McDonald, who went on to tell me about the Foundation's recent “Return to the Moon” conference and their sophisticated “jujitsu” lobbying model (an idea I first heard being used by environmental
groups in Naomi Klein's antiglobalization tract
No Logo
); about being part of MirCorp, the private, Amsterdam-based company partly run by people who'd marched against the war in their youth, which actually managed to lease the Mir space station from the Russian government for a brief period, only to be brutally “taken out” by the dark forces of the space establishment; about testifying before Congress and meeting high-level Russian officials in Moscow; about the various flashpoints within the organization, and all in a language that I understood.

He said: “Before it became unpopular to be such, we called ourselves the Mujahideen. We were the guerrillas of space!”

And: “When we created MirCorp, we went over, sat down with the Russians and said, ‘We're not like those aerospace companies or NASA, who come over here and go, “We're better than you are” – we represent a different part of American culture.' And it's true! The Russians have done amazing things in space, with no money and incredible common sense.”

And: “I used to wave my ponytail around in front of the military guys, just because I knew that if there was a military guy who could deal with my ponytail … then I could work with him!”

He said: “You have to be like water. Water is unstoppable, it finds the cracks.”

And: “Some of us are more predisposed to wander further away from the ants' nest than others … I say this because I've got an ant problem on my porch right now …”

I sat there and hadn't a clue whether a word was true, but it came at the end of a draining day and made me homesick for the more imprecise and elastic everyday world that I'd unwittingly left behind a couple of months previously, where reality doesn't hide behind NASA-speak and there are worse sins than extravagance and incaution, and where a little iconoclasm never hurt anybody. So when I heard that Rick Tumlinson was going to be in Houston, I was pleased. When I heard that NASA had reluctantly agreed to give him a platform on the main floor of the World Space Congress, I was overjoyed. A window was opening onto something that I hadn't even known to exist – the colourful realm of the “Space Movement,” for whom John Young, Buzz
Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, and, above all, Pete Conrad are heroes of an entirely different order.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon and chimes with something I noticed when tracing Luna's passage through the pop cultural sky earlier – that by the 1990s, the lunar programme was reacquiring a romance and mystique that had been absent since the early 1970s. Was this because the
Challenger
shuttle disaster of 1986 restored the Moon's
hauteur,
the sense of distance and unattainability that had once been attached to her? Or was the Moondust merely beginning to sparkle from a distance? Now there could be movies like
Apollo 13
and the Australian homage
The Dish,
and songs like PJ Harvey's “Yuri-G,” which was about a girl obsessed with the Moon, to which the chorus runs, “I wish I could be like Yuri-G” – not Alan B or Neil A, because Gagarin died the young, troubled martyr, as rock and roll as James Dean or Jim Morrison by now.

I wondered whether some of this was nostalgia on the part of a generation who watched the adventure with innocent eyes and now found it bubbling to the front of their imaginations again? It struck me that Bowie included a tune called “Gemini Spacecraft” on his
Heathen
album of 2002 and that the sleeve to Led Zeppelin's greatest hits CD depicts the group in Apollo space suits, reminding us that their portentous first four albums fell in those weird years from 1969 through 1972. It also struck me that in the year prior to this trip, characters as diverse as the Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the actor Vincent Gallo and musician Moby all told me, with no prompting, that the first thing they could recall wanting to be was an astronaut. They all remembered where they were when the first landing happened, but Wayne Coyne, singer with the Flaming Lips – born in 1961, the same year as Apollo – had the best story.