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| ‘All
humanity is there’: the photograph taken on July 21 1969 by Mike
Collins captures Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
returning in the lunar module after the landing, with the earth on the
horizon and the moon’s surface below |
Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon
By Buzz Aldrin with Ken Armstrong
Bloomsbury £16.99, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
By Craig Nelson
John Murray £18.99, 404 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19
Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts
Edited by Robert Jacobs, Michael Cabbage, Constance Moore and Bertram Ulrich, foreword by Stephen Hawking and Lucy Hawking
Abrams £12.99, 130 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39
God made the moon on the fourth day, according to Genesis:
“a lesser light to rule the night”, as against the “greater light to
rule the day”. This may not be the literal truth, of course, but the
Bible story does reflect the moon’s place in our consciousness.
The
moon is part of the furniture of the world, pointed out along with the
sun and stars, clouds, birds and trees to children starting to build an
inventory of what lies before us. For the hundreds of thousands of
years that homo sapiens has walked the earth, he has gazed up at the
moon; it is embedded in myth and folklore, its cold, silvery radiance
the stuff of poetry, its cycles the basis of calendars.
Forty
years ago this month, two men overturned that ancient order. Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood on the moon and gazed down at the
earth. For billions of years, the moon – barren, airless, dead – had
remained aloof from the great, gathering tumult of life on its parent
world. In 1969, for the first time, humans crossed the vast and hostile
void separating the two worlds.
It was a defining moment in the
history of the world. But the US achieved this landmark primarily
because, as the wealthiest nation on earth, it was prepared to devote
the most resources to the mission. Even today, the technology of the
Apollo programme, as these moonshots or missions were known, has the
power to awe. Between 1968 and 1972, nine missions crossed 240,000
miles of vacuum to reach their goal; of these, six landed on the moon.
No one else has travelled so far from the earth – or, of necessity, so
fast. Guinness World Records still lists the crew of Apollo 10 as
achieving the greatest speed ever attained by a human, at just under
25,000 mph.
As time has passed, these achievements have started
to look like a parallel world of progress. Only 12 men have ever landed
on the moon – only nine of them are still alive; since 1972, no one has
set foot on the moon. Manned spaceflight has stayed closer to home,
typically no more than a few hundred miles from the planet, focusing on
orbital laboratories and research into weightlessness. The exploration
of other worlds, meanwhile, is carried out by unmanned probes, which
have achieved spectacular success: flybys of the solar system’s remote
outer planets; exploration of Mars by wheeled rovers.
Did the
moon landings amount to anything more than a spectacular – if costly
and dangerous – diversion? Looking up at the moon 40 years on, we can
feel awe that men once stood there – or we may feel bafflement that so
many resources were poured into an apparent dead end of progress. So,
what was the point of it all?
Publishers certainly hope that
we’re still wowed. A slew of books marks this month’s 40th anniversary
of Apollo 11, the mission that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to their
destination.
Of these, three exemplify different ways to illuminate the question of what it was all about. Rocket Men
by Craig Nelson is a punchy, popular history that focuses on the first
moon landing within the context of the space race – the US and the
USSR’s contest to outdo each other in space technology. Gripping,
geekily detailed accounts of what it was like to ride a Saturn V or
walk on another planet are interspersed with an equally lively take on
the cold war strategising behind the mission.
Magnificent Desolation is Buzz Aldrin’s second
autobiography, the latest addition to the sub-genre of Apollo memoirs.
It effectively picks up where Nelson leaves off: he starts with the
moonshot and details what happened next.
Finally, Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts
is a smart, well-designed coffee table book of Apollo photographs
chosen by the programme’s 24 surviving astronauts, boasting a foreword
by physicist Stephen Hawking.
Aldrin is not a great writer, but
an eyewitness account of being on another world can hardly fail to
fascinate. “In every direction, I could see detailed characteristics of
the gray, ash-coloured scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters
and with every variety and shape of rock,” he writes. “I saw the
horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was
no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.”
He also catches
sight of the earth in the pitch-black lunar sky, and becomes conscious
of the TV audience watching his every move. “In a strange way there was
an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and
everyone back on earth. Yet, we were physically separated and farther
away from home than any two human beings had ever been.”
For
Aldrin, that shared human experience is the great justification for
Apollo: “No other single event had ever galvanised the world’s
attention to such a degree,” he writes. “People on every continent
shared in our triumph as human beings.”
Not everyone in that 600m-strong TV audience shared in the
triumph, however. Aldrin recalls visiting a university in the Midwest
in 1969, to be greeted by ill will and a barrage of eggs and tomatoes
from students protesting against the Vietnam conflict. “Rather than
being proud of us for going to the moon, they chided us for wasting so
much money while wars and famine plagued parts of the earth,” he says.
This
episode in fact mirrors Aldrin’s own post-mission comedown, the jarring
transition from achievement to ordinariness. Much of the book focuses
on his bouts of depression, drinking, his divorce, futile attempts at
reinvention, and the slow path to sobriety and renewed purpose.
Today
Aldrin spends his time pushing the case for space tourism, hoping for a
private-sector boost to what he sees as the vital task of space
exploration. Part of the rationale is cold economics: space-based
extraction of solar energy could “make budget deficits literally
unthinkable”, Aldrin told a congressional committee in 1997. But the
bulk of his testimony reiterated his belief in the transcendent value
of collective endeavour. As he sums it up, we must “explore or expire”.
This view is echoed in the foreword of Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts,
though Hawking’s emphasis is different. For Aldrin, space missions are
valuable as the focus of shared human experience. For Hawking, it’s
simply getting away from the home planet that matters. He compares
Apollo to Columbus’s discovery of the new world in 1492 – of enormous
but as yet uncertain consequence. In particular, the 1969 moon landing
may prove to have been a pivotal moment in the human race’s
colonisation of space, “which should be our long-term strategy”. Yes,
we should focus on environmental issues too, he says, “but we can do
that and still spare a few per cent for space. Isn’t our future worth
it?”. He also sees space exploration as a good way to spark young
people’s interest in science.
Whether you subscribe to Hawking’s
hopes for the future depends on whether you see space exploration as
embodying a wholesome, life-affirming curiosity – or the
less-than-wholesome desire of governments, military and business to
demonstrate their technological prowess: as a symptom, in other words,
of the very pathology that’s making earth less habitable. Not that
these views are necessarily mutually exclusive. Rocket Men,
Craig Nelson’s whizzy history of Apollo 11, is particularly good at
unpicking the tangle of motives behind President John F Kennedy’s 1961
decision to send a man to the moon “before this decade is out”.
Apollo
was nominally a scientific mission, administered by a civilian agency,
Nasa. The rocks it brought back from the moon helped answer
long-standing questions about the moon’s composition and origin. But
its purpose was, above all, to show the world that America’s version of
civilisation was superior to that of the Soviet Union, which had
launched the first satellite (1957) and propelled the first man into
space (1961). Even today the moon remains a powerful totem of national
prestige: in the past decade, China and India, Asia’s nascent
superpower rivals, have both sent satellites to orbit the moon.
Yet Rocket Men
also illustrates how Apollo managed to be about more than cold war
power-play – about more, even, than the conquest of space. Even as the
astronauts hurled themselves outwards into space, they looked back to
where they had come from.
“At one moment, Armstrong realised
that he could extend his fist and, using only his thumb, blot out the
earth,” Nelson writes, describing the astronaut’s walk across the
moon’s surface. “Asked later if this made him feel like a giant, he
said, ‘No, it made me feel really, really small.’ ” Stuart Roosa, an
astronaut on a later mission, is also quoted: “It’s the abject
smallness of the earth that gets you”.
It’s striking, too, that in Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts,
many of the pictures are of the earth. One of the most extraordinary is
the image chosen by Armstrong and Mike Collins, who remained alone in
orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon: it shows a small,
half-full earth, brilliant blue and swirly white in inky black space
and, set against the grey, gently curved line of the moon in the bottom
half of the image, the lumpily functional box of the returning lunar
module. All humanity is there – 3bn or so on the planet, two in the
module – bar the heroically isolated photographer.
The thrill of
Apollo lies as much in these vertiginous, unprecedented shifts of
perspective as it does in its potential place in some future human
extra-planetary diaspora. Indeed for now, it is the more certain of
Apollo’s achievements, oddly of a piece with the aspirations of that
other great 1960s programme of consciousness expansion: the
counterculture.
Earth’s vast isolation in the gulf of space had, of course, long been known. But it had never been seen.
The moon’s overwhelming strangeness – less gravity, no air – had been
anticipated too, but it took human eyes to make that strangeness real:
to note, for example, that the dust kicked up at each step did not puff
or billow, but volleyed smoothly out on a perfect Newtonian parabola.
In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin also recalls the “pungent
metallic smell” of moondust in the lunar module, “something like
gunpowder, or the smell in the air after a firecracker has gone off”.
As Lyndon Johnson, quoted by Nelson, wrote in a 1961 memo to Kennedy
urging the value of space exploration, “It is man, not merely machines,
in space that captures the imagination of the world.” Robot probes
bring back data; humans bring back experiences.
Experience, of
course, is not worth acquiring at any price. “Because it’s there” is a
bold justification but also a lousy guide to conduct. The experiences
recorded in these books did not come cheap, in lives lost, marriages
wrecked or money spent.
But we did get two new worlds for the
price of one: the cratered, airless, asphalt-grey one of the final
frontier; and the brilliantly blue, fearsomely lonely one we call home.
Neville Hawcock is the FT’s deputy arts editor
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