Leaving Orbit (19 page)

I give my students the real numbers. “NASA gets 0.4 percent of the national budget,” I tell them, “and that’s been true for most of its history. Most of you said around 20 percent—you should know that 20 percent is more than the entire
defense
budget. Last year NASA’s total budget was less than the cost of
air-conditioning
for troops in Iraq. The bank bailout of 2008 cost more than the entire fifty-year budget for NASA.”

My students sneak looks at each other. Can this be right? It’s hard to comprehend numbers in the billions. When people talk about the cost of spaceflight, they usually refer to it in terms of a project that, whatever its inspirational qualities, is not an investment that will pay off financially. Yet in my reading I recently came across a surprising quote from Lyndon Johnson—he once remarked that the information gained from satellite photography alone was worth “ten times what the whole program has cost.” Before the space program had made satellite spying possible, gaining information about our enemies’ military capabilities was difficult, costly in money and lives, and often unreliable. Inaccurate data led the American military to overprepare to meet threats that turned out to be exaggerated or nonexistent. “Indirectly,” historian Howard McCurdy explains, “space research enhanced the funds available for domestic development.” NASA’s public image might be even more positive if it were generally known that the space program might in fact have paid for itself.

When my students are given the sad facts and asked why they gave such outlandish answers, they shift their feet and look embarrassed. But one brave woman gives an interesting response.

“I knew we went to the moon in the sixties,” she explains, reddening, “so I assumed whatever we’re doing now with all the technology we have is—like
—better
than that.” It’s true, technology does generally work that way. If your parents had big slow expensive computers, you get fast cheap portable computers. If your parents got to go to the moon, you get to go to Mars. It’s sound enough logic, if innocent of the realities of public policy.

As frustrating as my students’ misunderstandings are, I can’t say I blame them. People my own age aren’t much better informed. We didn’t get to watch that one small step for a man live on TV, can only view that footage now through layers of history and cliché. MTV’s reappropriation of Buzz planting the flag, the bits and images used again and again to symbolize, variously and contradictorily, HISTORY and THE FUTURE. It’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, and people too young to remember the moon shot have grown tired of listening to this one. Encumbered by such dreams myself, I squint at the footage brought back from the moon landings, and I have to agree that we who are watching from 2011 can’t ever really see what those innocents who watched those events unfold in real time saw, what it looked like to watch while the dream came true.

It’s close to three years after Neil and Buzz’s giant leap for mankind, April 1972. Two men bounce along together, almost skipping, exuberant and unstable as toddlers in their bulky space suits. This is Apollo 16, NASA’s sixth mission to the moon, and while the journey to the moon will never become routine, it is no longer regarded with the same breathlessness and wonder as it once was. The number of people who turn out to see the launches on the Space Coast has steadily shrunk, as have the TV audiences. Politicians have started to wonder aloud why we need to keep going to the moon when the race with the Soviets, ostensibly the reason for doing all this, is over. NASA’s budget is in steep decline. I won’t be born for another four months.

Today, John Young and Charlie Duke are walking on the moon. Far ahead of them, mountains stand stark white against the deep black of the sky. These men have work to do here on the Plain of Descartes, but they enjoy themselves as they work. You can see it in the way they jump higher than is strictly necessary, you can hear the glee in their voices through the crackling of the static between the moon and Houston. Even without looking up the video online, you can picture their low-gravity antics: you’ve seen it many times. Envision the astronauts bobbing along gently in their white space suits, their light-heartedness in strange contrast to the alien hostility of the terrain, in contrast to the risk of death all around them, the risk of death ahead of them on their way back home. You aren’t concerned for them; you already know they’ll get home safely.

As they work, John Young and Charlie Duke chat happily with each other, with their crewmate Ken Mattingly, alone in lunar orbit, and with Mission Control in Houston. In the course of a daily news update, the astronauts learn that Congress has just approved a budget for fiscal 1973. This budget includes funding NASA has requested to get started on its still-hypothetical space shuttle program. When he hears the news, John Young remarks, “The country needs that shuttle mighty bad. You’ll see.” He doesn’t know yet that he will command the very first space shuttle mission, and he also doesn’t know how frustratingly long it will take to get that shuttle flying. He can’t guess the mixed history the shuttle will live out, the way it will be doomed by compromises even before it rolls out to the launchpad for the first time. He can’t know that two shuttle disasters will kill fourteen of his fellow astronauts, forever changing the history of American spaceflight.

It is this moment I want to describe to my students who don’t understand the difference between Apollo and shuttle. This moment, a moonwalker reacting with joy on the surface of the moon because the shuttle era has officially begun, is the seam between the two.

After one last moonwalk, John Young and Charlie Duke climb back into their lunar module, secure their haul of new moon rocks, and fire the ascent rockets to lift them up to orbital rendezvous with Ken Mattingly and the command module. After a four-day journey back to Earth, the crew in their capsule splash into the Pacific Ocean and are greeted aboard the USS
Ticonderoga
with the same patriotic fanfare with which every American astronaut has been welcomed home. But when I study those photographs now, I can see a wistful, bewildered look in the eyes of the astronauts, a look that can be seen in the eyes of the current crop of American astronauts. It’s a look of being grounded, of being trapped on the surface of the home planet. A look of wanting to go up in the bird, though they had only just returned. A masculine envy of their own selves.

When we think about the Apollo project now, we think of it as being a time when all Americans were united behind a project they could take pride in. The fact is that Americans were slowly falling out of love with Apollo right from the beginning. Even before Neil, Buzz, and Mike made it to the moon, only about a third of Americans thought the moon project was worth the cost. At the same time, a clear majority of Americans throughout the sixties said they
approved
of Apollo; in other words, uneasiness about the cost of spaceflight has always been paired with widespread positive feelings about spaceflight. This contradiction has made NASA the site of one of the deeper ambiguities of American culture: spaceflight is an achievement we take great pride in, paid for with our own money, over our objections.

Hugely wasteful; hugely grand. Adjust the focus of your eyes and the same project goes from being the greatest accomplishment of humankind to a pointless show of misspent wealth.

None of my students have heard of Wernher von Braun or the German rocket program. Von Braun ran the rocket design facility for the Third Reich at Peenemünde, where he was responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket, the first human-made object to enter space, a weapon used to bomb Allied cities. At the end of the war, von Braun and his team surrendered to the United States and managed to immigrate here in order to resume their work on rockets. Von Braun’s membership in the SS and the Nazi party would haunt him, and throughout his life he would have to answer to new charges about what he knew and what he was responsible for, especially having to do with the slave laborers forced to construct the V-2. As popular a public figure as he was in the United States, von Braun could never entirely get away from the specter of the concentration camps, and even at the moment of triumph for his Saturn rocket, his adopted country couldn’t quite forget his past. Von Braun maintained all his life that he only wanted to build rockets for the peaceful exploration of space, and that he worked on weapons only because doing so allowed him to continue his research. The evidence seems to bear this out—in researching his biography of von Braun, historian Michael J. Neufeld uncovered documents that show von Braun resisting joining the SS as long as possible, even after he had become director at Peenemünde. Though when it became clear that his failure to join would not be overlooked, von Braun did join the SS and was seen wearing the uniform on a number of occasions, including in several surviving photographs. Some survivors later accused him of overseeing beatings and executions of prisoners, though historians question whether this was a case of mistaken identity.

Von Braun himself has always denied that he had anything to do with violence against prisoners, or that he knew the extent of their mistreatment. Of course, he knew his rockets were being built by prisoners, and to some this is enough. To many, though, surprisingly many, von Braun’s crimes can be if not forgiven at least
contextualized.
When Oriana Fallaci met him, she described his large frame, his “heavy paunch, the florid complexion of a beer drinker,” his handsome face. She describes his Prussian accent: he “manages to make the softest words sound hard: such as
Moon.
”

As an Italian who worked for the Resistance and lost a great deal in the war, Fallaci is well positioned to articulate certain grudges, to argue that von Braun was an opportunist and a murderer. But she finds she can’t. “Although I am one who doesn’t forget,” she writes, “I find it dishonest and unfair to deny von Braun what is von Braun’s, to leave him out of a tale of this kind.” She points out that Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer made the atom bomb that killed civilians in Japan. Is von Braun different?

When Fallaci asks von Braun whether he would go to the moon himself, he answers that he’d go in a second. (Neufeld’s biography reveals that this has been his desire since childhood, that the dream of space travel is what led him to develop rockets in the first place.) “Maybe they’ll put up with me on flight number 10,” von Braun muses to Fallaci, “like you put up with a grumbling old uncle, to make me happy.” When the space shuttle emerged as the spacecraft to follow his Saturn V, with its lesser physical demands on astronauts, von Braun speculated it might be an appropriate vehicle for an older spacefarer to travel on, and indeed NASA may have let him, as they indulged John Glenn in a flight on
Discovery
at age seventy-seven, but by the time the shuttle was ready to fly, von Braun was dead, from pancreatic cancer, at age sixty-five.

Apollo 17, the last mission ever flown on von Braun’s Saturn V, is remembered largely for a photograph the astronauts took of Earth once they were far enough away to see the whole thing. Nicknamed the “Blue Marble,” the image was the first to show the entirety of Earth illuminated and suspended in space. Carl Sagan called the photograph an “icon of our age.” Africa can clearly be seen, and the white cloud cover over Antarctica swirls like a delicate lace. The image is one of the most widely distributed photographs ever taken—next time you see an image of the whole earth in any context, look closely: it’s probably the Blue Marble. The image has even been credited with the rise of the environmental movement in the seventies. A few years ago, I met Jack Schmitt, a geologist who flew on Apollo 17 and walked on the moon. There is some debate over which of the astronauts actually snapped the picture, but Schmitt told me it was him, and I believe him. There is a large framed copy of the photograph hanging on the wall in my son’s room, with an inscription Schmitt wrote for him: “To Elliot, and the future.”