They Asked For The Moon

The folks at the Johnson Space Center in Houston have never much cared for their $225 million lawn ornament. Certainly, it's an impressive-looking thing; measuring nearly 400 ft. from its needly nose to its four stubby fins, it was designed on a scale more commonly associated with buildings than machines. The problem is, it's been decades since this particular machine actually stood to its full height. Instead, it has spent most of its life lying on its side in the withering Houston sun--beached, spent, a triumph less of engineering than of taxidermy.

The $225 million lawn ornament is--or was--a Saturn V rocket, one that was briefly known by the promising designation Apollo 18. Originally built to carry men to the surface of the moon, Apollo 18 was poised to go until the early 1970s, when the U.S. ran out of both the money and the will to make that kind of journey, and the giant missile was ordered to stand down.

Between 1968 and 1972, however, nine of Apollo 18's brother rockets did fly astronauts to the moon, six of them taking crews straight down into the powdered-sugar soil of the ancient lunar surface. Thirty years ago, Apollo 11, the first of those historic missions, took off from Cape Kennedy carrying space veterans Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. Four days later, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin actually set their ugly, leggy lunar module down on the plains of the Sea of Tranquillity, becoming the first two men to walk on another world. Over the next three years, Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 followed, putting down in such improbable spots as the Ocean of Storms, the Descartes highlands and the shadows of the soaring Apennines.

For most of the Apollo crews, trained in the lone-eagle ethos of the fighter pilot, lunar travel was an unsettlingly bureaucratic exercise. Flying to the moon was not about a solitary Lindbergh climbing inside a hammered-tin airplane and flying, skeeter-like, out over the Atlantic. Rather, it was an idea that was hatched by government, executed by industry and bankrolled by a taxpaying public that knew full well the breathtaking cost of the project and yet year after year kept writing the checks.

So absurd was the idea of lunar travel, so unlikely was its success, that at the moment of the Apollo program's crowning glory, it almost seemed as if it wasn't happening at all. In order to have any realistic chance of making it to the lunar surface, the astronauts had to spend years rehearsing their missions, drilling and drilling and drilling the landings until they almost drilled the juice out of them. The first words spoken after the Apollo 11 lunar module actually touched down were not, as most people believe, "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Rather, they were "ACA out of detent...mode control, both auto; descent engine command override, off," as Aldrin reconfigured his instrument-panel switches. It was only after that pedestrian bit of business was done that Armstrong spoke for the ages.

Once the hatches of the lunar modules were opened, all that changed. Out in the dunes of the moon, the Apollo astronauts behaved like nothing more--and nothing less--than human beings. They toddled around; they fell down; they got dirty; they kept house. They knew the whole world knew they were there, yet they nonetheless made it a point to leave behind small or sweet or poignant things to mark their brief passing. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, wrote his daughter's initials in the soil with his finger; Charlie Duke, lunar-module pilot of Apollo 16, left behind a picture of his family.

To be sure, what propelled the Apollo crewmen to the moon was more than just "Kilroy was here" egoism. Over the course of the half a dozen landing missions, the astronauts pried loose and carried home 838.2 lbs. of lunar rocks, providing Earthbound scientists with rare tissue samples of a nearby body whose geological origins mirror the solar system's own. Priceless as the artifacts were, however, in the days of Apollo, geology was always trumped by poetry, and everybody within the space community knew it.

Curiously, if there was any group that was not fully able to appreciate this victory of adventure over science, it was the Apollo astronauts themselves. (All told, there were a dozen moonwalkers; with the death of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad last week, nine of them survive.) Before his death in 1982, Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13 (a mission that taught NASA a thing or two about adventure), noted that the very thing that qualified lunar astronauts to fly the missions they were flying disqualified them from experiencing them fully. Can you fathom the utter, hostile emptiness of translunar space and still retain the calm to fly your spacecraft blithely through it?

No, Swigert believed, you can either go to the moon or you can appreciate the significance of going, but you can't do both. If that's the choice, it's possible that the nearly 4 billion people the astronauts left behind when they set off on their journeys--the people who get to look at the pictures and study the rocks and retell the tales the explorers brought home--just might have got the better part of the deal.