Moondust (29 page)

After the triumphant landings of
Apollo
s
11
and
12
in 1969, 1970 was as rough on NASA as it was on everyone else. No one reached the Moon that year and the public's attention was already draining away. Budget cuts, which had begun as early as 1963 as President Johnson struggled to protect his beloved lunar programme from the spiralling costs of Vietnam, now bit hard:
Apollo 20
was cancelled in January, followed by missions
19
and
18
(Dick Gordon's flight!) in August, and no one could be
quite sure where the slaughter would stop. Some media people claimed that Pete Conrad was to blame, had committed the one sin for which the emerging postmodern mind held no forgiveness – he had made the business of landing
Apollo 12
look easy,
undramatic
. Lunar-hoax enthusiasts will try to convince you that this is why NASA changed the script for the April launch of
Apollo 13,
naming the LM
Aquarius
after Fifth Dimension's hit single from the musical
Hair,
and writing in a crisis which blew the landing and would have – even
should
have – killed the crew but for a heroic show of ingenuity and courage.

Apollo 13
is worth looking at because it's instructive in a number of ways. The mission began with a successful launch and acceleration out of Earth orbit, but as the crew and their two spaceships drifted toward the Moon with just 45,000 miles to go, they heard an explosion. Moments later, Command Module pilot Jack Swigert noticed oxygen pressure dropping in one of the Service Module's two large oxygen tanks which supplied the crew and the Command Module fuel cells; shortly after that, the mission's courtly, forty-two-year-old commander, Jim Lovell, saw gas leaking into space. Although the minor electrical fault that sparked this drama was not immediately understood, the gravity of the situation was. One of the oxygen tanks had ruptured, crippling both and meaning that the ship had no means of continuing to generate oxygen, electrical power or water, and no sensors or instruments, while no one could be sure whether its engine would fire or explode if switched on. And all of this 200,000 miles from home. With hindsight, the only good thing about the situation was Lovell's response, expressed with an understatement and timing which the combined writers of
Friends, The Simpsons
and
Six Feet Under
would have struggled to better: “Okay, Houston,” he said as if addressing a dry cleaner who'd left a stain on one of his shirts, “we've had a problem.” The truth was that many dire scenarios had been written and played out in preflight simulations, but never any as dire as this. Flight director Gene Kranz chillingly recalls watching “the Command Module's life-sustaining resources disappearing, like blood draining from a body … the controllers felt they were toppling into an abyss.”

A glimmer of hope lay in the fact that the Lunar Module was still intact, even though it was only designed to accommodate two people for forty-four hours. Furthermore,
Apollo 13
was on what is called a “free return” trajectory, meaning that if nothing changed, the two conjoined craft could swing around the back of the Moon and use its gravity like a slingshot to speed home. Calculating that this would take four and a half days, which was longer than the available electricity and oxygen would last, controllers instructed the astronauts to burn the LM descent engine around the back side – a hairy undertaking for which the Lunar Module hadn't been designed – so reducing the return journey by twelve hours. The next four days were thus spent improvising makeshift solutions to problems that had never been imagined, much less addressed, the most celebrated being the fabrication of a life-saving air filtration system out of cardboard, plastic covers from checklist books, storage bags and anything else that happened to be available to the crew. Meanwhile, the astronauts froze, starved, thirsted, tried to function on no sleep, and the whole world watched: in Rome, Pope Paul VI prayed for the crew's return; in India, 100,000 pilgrims at a Hindu festival did likewise. Throughout, NASA officials told the crew's wives that the chances of a safe return were 10 per cent, and this was considered to be looking on the bright side.

There are three things to note about this episode: first, that the now-received perception of the
Apollo 13
save as “NASA's finest hour” dates no further back than Ron Howard's eponymous 1995 film of the mission (when coscriptwriter Al Reinert went looking for Jim Lovell in the late 1980s, he found him running a tugboat company, the forgotten commander of a “failed” mission … it was Reinert who wrote the “finest hour” line); second, that while crowds flocked to see the
Apollo 13
movie, the space shuttle
Atlantis
was making real-time history overhead by docking with the Russian Mir space station, while hardly anyone bothered to notice; third, that the team which designed the makeshift air filter was led by none other than John Watts Young. And it
was
a remarkable save. When the capsule splashed down after an agonizing period of radio silence, watched by what European networks claimed to be the largest worldwide TV audi-
ence ever assembled, a visibly faltering Walter Cronkite all but announced that the crew had been lost to their damaged heat shield. No one expected them to make it, yet they did.

After the close call of
13,
Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell's
Apollo 14
flight was postponed from July 1970 to January/February of 1971, closely followed by the July launch of
Apollo 15,
which was commanded by the elusive and scandal-prone David Scott, who we will come to later. By the time
Apollo 16
was ready to fly in April 1972, everyone knew that the jig was up, that commander John Young and his rookie Lunar Module pilot, Charles Duke, would be flying the second-to-last spaceship to the Moon.

What of this man Young? He was born into a military family in San Francisco in 1930 and raised mostly in then-rural Florida, which makes the origin of his Okie drawl uncertain; it's said that engineers often patronized him because of it, only to feel like fools when their Ivy League assumptions were demolished with a few choice words. He evidently had an unremarkable childhood, about which little detail is known, because by all accounts he is extraordinarily reserved and reluctant to offer much of himself to the world, even to colleagues and friends. Childhood neighbours describe him as a quiet boy with a passion for model airplanes and there are reports of him giving a talk on rockets to his eleventh-grade classmates. Subsequently, a degree in aeronautical engineering from Georgia Tech led to the Navy and test pilot school, where he established himself as an uncommonly brilliant pilot and set two time-to-climb records. Then it was on to NASA, where he became the first member of the second group of astronauts to fly (and was thus chosen over peers who included Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad). Indeed, by the time he commanded the shuttle's first space flight in 1981, he was the most experienced astronaut in the world, having been up four times previously on
Gemini
s
3
and
10,
and
Apollo
s
10
and
16.
I've noticed that Apollo freaks view him as a kind of Thinking Man's Armstrong; the one they want to meet and dedicate their Web sites to, despite being the least showy or voluble of them all. Pad
Führer
Guenter Wendt renders him thus:

“A sharp-witted one … he spoke with a drawl and was a man of few words, but what he said was always right on target …
he did not care if you wore a badge that identified you as an engineer or a vice president. He called it like it was. Some people didn't like him, but if they were honest with themselves, they would readily admit that his contributions were tremendous.”

Although a more gregarious astronaut remarks drily on Young's “bizarre behavior,” by which he means the commander's laconic bearing, it was mostly bureaucrats who didn't like him. He was in charge of the Astronaut Office when the shuttle
Challenger
broke up in 1986, meaning that the seven lost crew were
his
people and it is said he had nightmares about the disaster for months afterwards, then turned his anger and grief on what he saw as the complacency of Agency pen-pushers. At one point, he formulated a list of potentially serious safety problems which management had ignored in the face of a crazy launch schedule and straitened budget. When the memo was leaked to the press (amid suspicions that it had come from him), he was removed from his post and kicked into a less controversial corner of the organization. He'd been expected to fly the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, but there would be no more flights for him, even though he continued to hope that there might be. He's the only one of the first wave of astronauts still with the organization. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin has been quoted as saying that John Young “had the right stuff before we even had a name for it.” He did know how to have fun, though: a 1967 issue of a Manned Spacecraft Center newsletter has an impromptu group calling itself the Fearsome Foursome parodying two rewritten Broadway hits on an anniversary of Alan Shepard's Mercury flight, with the four being Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon,
Apollo 10
commander Thomas Stafford and Young. He reportedly also liked to draw cartoons of his colleagues in action and many of them agree with Guenter Wendt that he possessed a wit as dry as the driest martini.

The Johnson Space center looks like any postwar red-brick university campus, except for the rusty old rocket lolling on the grass out front. I stop at the visitors centre first, where the
usual collection of used capsules and clapped-out simulators is supplemented by a video presentation about crop circles, which asks ominously whether strange atmospheric conditions or something more “otherworldly” is responsible for them and I make a note to let John know that it's actually a bunch of stoned dudes with boards and rope. Once past the security building off Saturn Lane, a maze of covered corridors is paced by people in jeans and casual shirts. How different it must have been in the days when Buzz Aldrin could speak of these same paths churning with “earnest young engineers, their holstered slide rules slapping against their belts.”
Holstered slide rules!
But that's right, this was the new ocean then, the frontier. Quirkily, Norman Mailer found a connection between these people and the hippies when he visited here, because “both had no atmosphere surrounding them … their envelope was gone,” by which he meant that they'd lost their connection to the Earth, had become ethereal and sexless, but it doesn't sound like that when flight director Gene Kranz talks about what they did. During a flight, he told me, the atmosphere in this place was “basically a controlled fury: these people know that in the next few seconds, they might have to be making a decision which is going to alter history.” Never leaving the present tense, he described how, as the time approached for
Apollo 11
's lunar descent, he gave his staff a break to fetch coffee and go to the bathroom, and then when they came back into the control room, he locked the doors and delivered an emotional oration in which he reminded his young team – average age twenty-six, don't forget – of how much he loved them all and how confident he was of their abilities.

“I felt that I had to tell them something, that I had to tell them how I was feeling,” he said, “ 'cos their guts must have been boiling inside … because when you lock those doors, there are only three outcomes that day: you're either going to land on the Moon, you're going to crash, or you're going to abort the mission.”

Incredibly – uniquely in my experience of astronauts – Young is half an hour late, but I don't much mind because the NASA public affairs officer has plonked me down in the tiny Lyndon Johnson Room, which is set up as a shrine to the late
president and space advocate. On the way in I walked underneath one of the creepy “flying bedstead” LM trainers which nearly killed Armstrong, and past a huge mural in which I was surprised to see the loose cannon Young to the fore, but the presidential pens and desks and documents in here are far more mind-blowing than those. Take for example the framed NASA budget decrees from the 1960s. The one for 1967 is headed “Ninetieth Congress of the United States of America” and contains a list of figures that begins:

and carries on in a similar vein all the way down to twenty, at which point the “facilities costs” kick in. I've never seen anything like it. By the time it was finished, the total cost of the Apollo programme would be $24 billion and I'm trying to work out how much that would be in today's money – about $100 billion, in fact – when I become aware of a gentle tapping of leather on linoleum and look up to see a slight man in a grey jacket and maroon turtleneck, with ash-flecked hair and bowed legs and unusually broad shoulders ambling down the corridor with his eyes trained on the floor as though he's counting ants or trying to avoid the cracks. Kacy, my young host from public affairs, later tells me that he'd felt unable to leave a meeting he was in, but that when she'd gone to drag him out, his words had been, “Thanks for saving me from that stupid meeting.” She adds that this was the most she'd ever heard him say in one go. “It's funny,” she muses, “because I see him just walking around the campus and every now and again I think, ‘God, that man has been to the Moon.' ” Nothing in his bearing would suggest that if you didn't know it. He could just as easily be a particularly fastidious janitor.

He looks a little like the
Silent Running
actor Bruce Dern in his younger days and the sharp cheekbones are still there, book-ending his arrowhead nose and darting eyes. His frame is small and wiry, with not an ounce of excess anything on (or
in
) it, and this distilled, rarefied leanness seems to hover in the air around
him like a force field: throw anything nebulous or unnecessary into this field of exactitude and it simply drops to the floor at his feet, where it lies embarrassingly until you can find something else to send in. This becomes apparent, almost comically apparent, the moment I sit down at the rectangular conference table in the centre of the room and he sits down, too … so far so good … except that John Young doesn't sit opposite me as people have been doing since tables and discussions were invented – rather, he places himself two chairs along, which wouldn't seem so disquieting if he didn't then proceed to stare fixedly at the wall behind me … just sit … and stare,
staring even when he speaks,
as though the wall has just voiced the question which I thought I'd asked, and before long this is starting to seem really, really odd. As the conversation progresses and he loosens up, he occasionally flicks his eyes in my direction, like a chameleon hunched on a branch (and, Christ, there is something reptilian about him!). Sometimes he offers an atom flash of smile, which I come to recognize as a sign that he's made a joke.