Moondust (39 page)

“Hahahaha. Well, we'll see what we can do. We'll see what we can do …What else can we talk about?”

Interesting: Schmitt didn't like that question.

We talk about helium-3 and “how, ultimately, it might get us back to the Moon” – a revealing choice of words, I think, because it suggests that the urge to go back precedes the justification. I note that the other lunar astronauts came back in awe of the Earth more than anything else, and wonder whether Jack's view of it changed?

“Well, I think what they came back with is an awareness. Geologists always have an awareness of the Earth.”

And a respect, presumably.

“Well, yes, it's what you've been studying all your life. So I think I had a different perspective, understandably. But most people don't pause and think about the Earth as a globe in space. And when you finally see it as that, against an absolute black background, it gets your attention.”

You can only see it as such from the verge of Deep Space. Only twenty-four people have, ever. Everyone describes its seeming fragility.

“Well, the thing is, I think the pictures make it look a lot more fragile than it is. The Earth is very resilient. Again, geologically, I see that. I know what blows it's taken,
environmentally,
before humankind ever appeared. And
survived
it. And even since humans have been here, the things that have happened … such as ice ages. And humankind has survived it, too. And in fact those rapid changes on Earth may well have been what forced human evolution to where we are today. You had to adapt, particularly during these cold periods, or you didn't survive. And so there was a very, very strong selection process. And human beings have probably had a much faster evolutionary forcing function than people realize.”

We pass through money and families and end up at Schmitt the scientist's different take on the divorces, with him pointing out:

“Because it was obviously
frowned
on for a long time, there were no divorces at first. And then there was some pent-up demand, of course, that finally occurred. But remember, you're dealing with a fairly
specialized selection
of Americans. Most of them were only sons or eldest sons in Apollo, and they almost
all
exhibited what psychiatrists, I think, would call ‘Type A' personality
traits. And so you have to
evaluate
everything that they've done since or during that time against that kind of a general personality background.”

And I say: My God! Why didn't I notice this earlier? When I get home, I call some psychologists and they recommend a book called
Born to Rebel
by Frank Sulloway, who sees families as “ecosystems in which siblings compete for parental favour by occupying specialized niches.” In his view, the strategies required of these niches become major influences on personality formation. It's a startling fact that
every Moonwalker I've met
has been either an eldest sibling or only son. More astonishingly still, this will turn out to hold true for them all. Is that what brought them here? Driven, work-obsessed, time-obsessed, fiercely competitive, prone to stress-induced heart disease …
Type A
. As the eldest of three sons, this produces a particular queasiness (bordering on panic) in me. At any rate, the Type A thesis would chime with the competitiveness Gene Cernan and others have described in the Astronaut Office – though Schmitt, another only son, takes a typically rational and somewhat different view of this, too, averring:

“It wasn't so vicious, because nobody quite knew how Deke Slayton picked his crews.”

Yet some people think they do, and among them is the Mercury 7 icon Scott Carpenter. Carpenter was different from the other Mercury 7 pilots to begin with. Unquestionably the finest physical specimen, he was the only product of a single-parent family, the only non–fighter pilot, the only instinctual Democrat (a trait inherited from his maternal grandfather, the progressive liberal editor of the
Boulder County Miner and Farmer
). He dug folk music, played guitar and sometimes went out at night just to gaze at the stars through his telescope. The space historian James Oberg tells me with real feeling that “Scott Carpenter was the only one of the seven who appreciated the significance of where he was and what he was doing,” which makes the controversy surrounding his command of the fourth Mercury mission in May 1962 all the more important.

Whereas other Mercury pilots fought to keep the science geeks and psychologists away from their roster of in-flight
tasks, Carpenter embraced them and their experiments until the flight plan was extremely tight; then, when he looked out of his window and beheld swarms of the little sparkling “fireflies” which had so excited John Glenn on the previous mission, he was enchanted and intrigued and spent valuable time trying to work out what they were or might have been, at the expense of more prosaic objectives. Later, it would be claimed that he squandered fuel by swinging his
Aurora 7
ship around to get a better view of the Earth, leaving too little to negotiate a safe reentry into the atmosphere – although a recent memoir penned by Carpenter and his daughter Kris Stoever blames a hitherto unacknowledged guidance system malfunction for the pilot's liberality with his fuel. What we know for sure is that there were fears for his safe return, with Walter Cronkite ashen-faced on CBS, and that the acerbic engineer-turned-flight-director Chris Kraft was incandescent at Carpenter's perceived failure to follow instruction from the ground. We also know that someone subsequently circulated a rumour that the Mercury man had panicked (the ultimate throttle-jockey sin), despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Afterwards, Deke made it clear that he wouldn't get another flight, and with a heavy heart he turned to undersea exploration, later parlaying his experiences into a pair of novels, the second of which,
The Steel Albatross,
turns out to be a decent page-turner in the Clive Cussler mode. He also tried to establish a company that converted industrial and agricultural waste into energy, but he wasn't as good a businessman as he had been an explorer.

When we speak on the phone I hear a modest and engaging man, still sharp at seventy-eight, and our conversation ranges from his itinerant father and mixed business career to relations between the Mercury 7 (“we have a bond that I think is probably unequalled anywhere”), how a man explains going through four wives (“I don't know what to say: it's one of those things …”), and the mystery of his eldest child, Scotty, who was a bright, brilliant kid, but developed chronic schizophrenia and now lives in a little studio on his own. When I confess mild disappointment that his seat-of-the-pants reentry aboard
Aurora
might
have a practical explanation – that it flowed from something other than his own rapture – he laughs delightedly, then becomes animated as he reminds me how little they knew about space in 1962, exclaiming as if it were yesterday:

“Well, we thought they might be creatures out there! To find out that they were in fact ice crystals was a eureka moment.”

Ice crystals catching the light. The next flight, captained by Wally Schirra, contained no science, contemplation or passion at all.

Another one to suffer was Rusty Schweickart, who helped test the lunar module in Earth orbit on
Apollo 9
with Mission Commander Jim McDivitt (last heard coaxing Ed White in from his spacewalk) and the future
Apollo 15
commander, David Scott. Mike Collins casts Schweickart as “a blithe spirit with an eager, inquisitive mind, not appreciated by the ‘old heads' … mildly nonconformist, with a wide range of interests, contrasting sharply with the blinders-on preoccupation shown by many astronauts,” while crewmate Scott pegs him as “a really cultured man” who took quotations from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thornton Wilder into space, along with a cassette of Vaughan Williams's
Hodie
cantata, which Scott, no fan of classical music back then, claims to have hidden until they were ready to come home (“he never forgave me for that”). More seriously, flight director Gene Kranz notes that he was “probably the most liberal guy in the office” and that his wife was probably the most liberal person some in the office had ever met – meaning outspokenly antiwar – and that this may have “caused him problems.” Schweickart, now a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, laughs this off and betrays no ill feeling toward anyone in the programme when I locate him in the Netherlands, where he is based during an extended stay in Europe with his wife. The fact remains, however, that he flew no more after
Apollo 9,
because he'd suffered badly from space sickness, a form of motion sickness that some astronauts fall prey to and others don't. An expert in space medicine explains to me that space sickness is still not fully understood, but seems to arise from sensory conflict, from the fact that “four out of five of your senses will tell you that you're free-falling,” with only the eyes insisting that you're stationary (a
current astronaut describes the sensation of holding on to the International Space Station during a spacewalk as “like hanging on to a cliff that's already falling”). The expert then explains that as far as equilibrium goes, human beings fall into distinct groups, with two different balance paradigms: those who trust to their internal mechanisms for orientation and those with an “external frame,” who take their bearings from the world around them. The latter tend to get sick in space, because nothing makes sense, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that Schweickart was in this outward-reaching,
exocentric
group. Susceptibility to motion sickness on Earth is a poor predictor of what will happen in weightless conditions, but most people adapt to the new conditions within forty-eight hours anyway.

Against expectation, Chris Kraft offers a sympathetic view of Schweickart's travails, pointing out that the crews carried medication for sickness. Had commander McDivitt let go of an otherwise laudable desire to protect his crewman's dignity and informed Houston of the problem earlier, Kraft suggests, medical staff could have helped. Then he complains:

“The astronaut image had always been one of physical strength and fortitude. Now Rusty's space sickness made him seem weak, and his reputation never recovered. Deke didn't help. He exercised his sole authority to keep Rusty from flying again. That kind of authority bothered me … Deke's flaw was that he accepted it all and acted accordingly.”

Despite never leaving Earth orbit, Schweickart became one of the most vivid communicators of the space experience. If we were unnecessarily deprived of a chance to send the likes of him and Scott Carpenter to the Moon because one man's prejudices were given too much weight, that would be a great, great shame. Kris Stoever goes so far as to maintain that in the wake of her father's Mercury flight, Kraft and Slayton staged a coup d'état within the programme, “remaking [it] so that there would be no more Scott Carpenters and John Glenns.” She tells me:

“I think there was a sense after Dad's flight that we had the wrong type of astronaut going up into space, so it was a coup. They built it in accordance with their vision, which had more to
do with machines than exploration, and in time, of course, they lost the hearts and minds of the American people.”

Chris Kraft declines to comment on this view of events when offered the opportunity, but it chimes with an impression which has been growing, and which I'm beginning to take great pleasure from: namely, that while Bill Anders is obviously right about the Cold War impulses behind Apollo, the more you look at it, the more there seem to have been two sharply delineated space programmes running parallel within the programme – an official one about engineering and flying and beating the Soviets, and an unofficial, almost clandestine other about people and their place in the universe; about consciousness, God, mind,
life
. Reluctantly cast as the hippies of the piece, scientists were known around the MSC as “the long-hair-and-tennis-shoe types.” One of them says, “All they [the engineers] wanted to do was get to the Moon and back without a thought as to why they were going or what to do when they were there.” An engineer retorts that if it had been left up to the scientists, no one would ever have gone, because they'd still be talking about it. The possibility exists that both were right. Still, there's something glorious about the fact that, hard as anyone might have tried to sift imponderables out of the venture, they couldn't do it.

I ask whether Schmitt thinks that going to the Moon changed him, repeating Alan Bean's view that all the Moonwalkers came back “more like they already were,” and his face lights up. He says he didn't know that Bean had said that, but it's exactly what he, too, has felt for the last thirty years. The only one who went in a direction no one could have imagined, he suggests, was the
Apollo 15
commander, David Scott, whose lustrous career was destroyed by the “stamp scandal” which overtook him a few months after his return: a storm which broke over NASA's discovery that he and his crew (LM pilot Jim Irwin and CM pilot Alfred Worden) had smuggled 400 commemorative envelopes to the Moon, then sold them to a stamp dealer for a profit of around $6,000 per man. There was nothing illegal in this, but it was against regulations and the crew were canned, with the incident following Scott like a toxic cloud ever after, because he was the
commander and thus forced to shoulder the responsibility. Over the three decades which followed he would become the most evasive of all the astronauts, including Armstrong. I find his story intriguing and a little scary.

“Dave just made one very bad decision,” Schmitt says, grimacing.

Did Jack feel bad about that?

“Believe me, everybody felt bad about it, 'cos everybody liked Dave. It was just a dumb decision. And unfortunately, his crew was immersed in that as well. So it's too bad. It certainly stopped his military career.”