Over the Moon

Last night, and for the last three nights, I’ve watched Chasing the Moon, the PBS/American Experience documentary that traces the lunar landing of 1969 from its inception with Pres. John F. Kennedy’s pledge to reach the moon by the end of the Sixties, through all the trials and difficulties of putting such an enormous project together, to the culmination on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped from his spacecraft and onto the moon’s surface and declaimed: 

            That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

For a breast-beating project like this, I found myself, surprisingly, riveted by most of the documentary. Robert Stone put together both ample quantities of rare footage, both of the rocket launches and public appearances, and also of more private footage such as showing the agony experienced by the wife of Astronaut Frank Gorman when he (and Lovell and Anders) were on the first shot to leave earth’s orbit to circle the moon, and make it back. Indeed, it was this first moon shot, Apollo 8, that, to me, conveyed the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. This was partly because of the clear difficulty of the maneuver: making sure to inject the space capsule at the very right moment to get it free of earth’s gravity and simultaneously into the moon’s gravitational sphere where it could circle the moon a couple of times, and then return to earth’s orbit for the return trip. Partly it was also due to the fact that, along the way, the orbit vehicle was hidden behind the moon and thus completely out of contact with the control center in Houston for several hours. Watching the faces of the ground crew in Houston (and the faces of the wives in Borman’s home), every one lined with worry about whether the astronauts and their little capsule would reappear, was high drama in the best sense of that word. This was made even more dramatic by what had been shown just before: the lightning-like fire in the capsule that killed the astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee as they awaited the ignition for Apollo 1, almost ending the Apollo mission on its first try. If anyone needed it, this initial tragedy made achingly clear the dangers inherent in riding an atomic blast into space—though the fire’s cause had nothing to do with rockets, but rather with oxygen in the cockpit set ablaze by a faulty wire. In addition to one’s consciousness of the ever-present peril in these early launches, though, the most iconic image ever captured—for me—took place on this trip: the image of Earth-rise, the blue and white half-globe of Earth rising up from the surface of the Moon. That is the image that reverses and upends the image of ourselves that humans have had since forever: we are the ground, and the moon is this magical, heavenly disc that rises regularly in the east, always changing shape, and dominating both our night sky, our mythologies, and our imaginations. Here, by contrast, the Moon is the ground, and the earth is what science had been telling us it is, but which we had never really beheld before: a fragile, lovely blue-and-white marble floating in black space—one that contains a homing appeal that we can never truly express, but that strikes us deeply, cosmically in heart and mind when we see it. 

            The other thing that Robert Stone did surprisingly well was to make us aware of the parallel political dramas that were going on at this time. In fact, one of the reasons this documentary proved so revelatory for me—even though I was quite alive and active when it was all happening—was that my attention, and that of most of my contemporaries, was focused on the high-energy politics of the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the protests against it were getting hotter and more deadly by the minute; the Civil Rights movement was accelerating with each piece of legislation and with each urban riot; and the cultural upheaval known as The Sixties was moving toward what seemed an apotheosis. All this aside from the deadly series of assassinations that took the lives of a President, a civil rights leader, and the President’s brother seeking to be president himself. In light of all this, the Apollo program to reach the moon seemed like an ironic sideshow, not to mention a colossal waste of money that could have been better used for social betterment. Stone shows this in several ways. He focuses on the only black candidate for the program, Edward Dwight, who somehow never gets selected. To make this understandable, Stone tells us that the head of Astronaut training, Chuck Yeager, simply told the other astronauts, all white, to ignore (i.e. ostracize) Captain Dwight, both professionally and socially, and within a short time, he would quit. When Dwight failed to be selected by NASA to be an astronaut, he rightly attributed it to “racial politics” and, proving Yeager right, resigned from the program and the Airforce in 1966. Stone also shows how surprised the Apollo 8 crew members were when, on their publicity tour of college campuses after their success, they were either ignored or booed by college students outraged at all programs having to do with a government that had come to seem the enemy. And he shows us Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who came to the launch of Apollo 11 to protest what he called the misuse of government funds, but was then appeased by the invitation of a NASA big-wig to enjoy a front-row seat to observe the launch. Finally, he points up the irony of having the climax of a program set in motion by the Democratic visionary John F. Kennedy and pushed and continued by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, being celebrated by the most mawkish and hawkish of all presidents (until recently, that is), Richard Nixon. Indeed, he lets us know that far from wanting to focus attention on the accomplishment as one not of a single nation or single human being, but rather of humankind as a whole, Nixon pushed to play up the cheap chauvinism even more: he urged that The Star-Spangled Banner be played when the astronauts took their first steps on the moon and planted the U.S. flag. We find ourselves thanking god that such a ham-handed display of “we’re number one” was suppressed by wiser minds. 

            All this being said, this viewer looked with great anticipation at the third episode of the program, the actual moon landing of Apollo 11. Strangely, it turned out to be anti-climactic. It is not fully evident why this should have been so—except in the long run. But in the short run, the drama of the big launch had already been demonstrated in previous missions. So had the real fear attendant on a major accident (the wife of Astronaut Ed White, we were told, actually committed suicide after her husband’s fiery death). So we were left with the technical feat—which was, it must be said, impressive if not amazing. The huge hurdle, that is, was what had to happen after the mother ship left earth’s orbit. That is, the mother ship—a rocket on its own—had to get into orbit around the moon, but not just by itself; it had to carry the lunar landing craft, equipped with its own power. Once in orbit around the moon, ship and lander had to separate and the spidery lander had to drop miles from space onto the moon’s surface, making sure that it did not (as the Russian lander, at about this same time, apparently did) descend too rapidly and crash into the moon’s surface. If this happened (and several newspapers had already prepared headlines announcing that the astronauts were stranded), the outcome was certain, and very public death. As the lander descended, in fact, we were told how much fuel was left: I think it made it with 19 seconds of fuel to spare. Drama. Then—and this strikes me as the most amazing technical accomplishment of all—the lander had to use its own mini-rocket power (apparently a source separate from the one that had braked it down to the surface) to fire itself off the moon and back up into an orbit precise enough to then link once more with the mother ship manned by the third astronaut, Michael Collins, for the home journey. This is truly ‘rocket science,’ physical calculation, and engineering of the highest order. Even the slightest error could have doomed the whole project. 

            Mirabile dictu, and against all inside expectations (Houston engineers truly thought that the first landing would not work and they’d have to try again), the whole thing worked flawlessly. Armstrong and Aldrin made it to the moon’s surface, planted their flag, cavorted a little for the cameras, and climbed back into the lander and rocketed back into orbit and connection with their mother ship. Then the three astronauts rode home unscathed to the cheers of an entire world—the TV broadcast seen worldwide was said to be the biggest ever up till that time. And well it should have been. The entire feat was stupendous. As for this writer, I and my then-wife had taken LSD that day, and what I remember most is the acid-driven strangeness (it would have been strange in any case) of seeing shadowy men cavorting on the moon in a way no one could ever have predicted, and at the same time running outside and looking at the moon in reality—and trying to comprehend the incomprehensible fact that two Americans, human beings, were at that very moment walking on its surface. Nothing prepares us for putting those two images together. It is simply too surreal. 

            And yet. The documentary ends on a rather disappointing note. It is hard to say exactly why, but that is the fact. And aside from easy answers such as—the first time is always the most anxious and therefore thrilling; after that, everything becomes routine—one can only speculate. For me, the answer is close to what we in the sixties thought at the time: once you’ve gotten to the moon, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing to gain (aside from Tang, the astronauts orange drink) from getting there, or even getting to Mars, for that matter. We are products of our earth, our atmosphere, and thus, inescapably linked to this planet and its air we breathe and its nourishment we depend on. No other planet that we know of, indeed no other planet in other star systems or other galaxies, has yet proven to harbor life, plants, oxygen. Without those basics of existence, we might visit other planets like Mars, but could not survive there without enormous constructions of artificial environments, the cost to maintain which would be stupendous, if not stupid. 

So what is the outcome of the moon landing? What is the next step to develop from it? We still, despite the enormous outlay of time, money and lives, have not answered those questions. And meantime, we have to answer the far more urgent question of how to survive our own foolish depredations on this planet, our apparent determination to poison the only living planet we know for sure exists. Until we do that, indeed, until we prove we can do that—beginning of course with climate change—space journeys might provide little blips of excitement and satisfaction and wonder, but little else. And documentaries about them must end with an unexpected letdown, and the inevitable question: OK Humans, What Now?

Lawrence DiStasi