In Honor Of Man's First Landing On The Moon 40 Years Ago

Small world
By Neville Hawcock
Published: July 10 2009 22:37 | Last updated: July 10 2009 22:37

‘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
EDITOR’S CHOICE
More from Books - Nov-24

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