Over the Moon

At an impromptu party a while ago, it turned out that one of the other guests had walked on the Moon. We couldn’t have been more amazed if Apollo himself had turned up in a taxi, but in fact he was affable and modest, heroic only in treating our naïve questions with kindness and making it seem as if he’d never been asked them before.

He was David Scott, and even if he wasn’t quite Apollo there was plenty he could tell us about life beyond Earth, the worst of it and the best. He understood viscerally the dangers of space travel – the danger of being burnt to a crisp or, worse, being stranded beyond rescue on the Moon, or drifting eternally in the void. Or, even worse, having to leave a buddy to one of those fates. Like all astronauts he’d contemplated those risks. But he’d also got closer than anyone before to the physical beginnings of our universe. The voyage he captained was one of the later ones – Apollo 15, in 1971 – when mission goals were no longer just military and technical but scientific as well. Riding his ingenious fold-out lunar buggy on research manoeuvres, he noticed a ridge of strange white forms unlike anything yet seen, and dislodged one to bring it back to Earth. It was the luckiest find. He’d chosen a risky moment to stop and wrestle with rock – he was nearly out of oxygen – but what he broke off turned out to date almost from the birth of the solar system. And it’s volcanic rock, which proves that the Moon is not just space lumber pulled and pummelled into a sphere. It’s more like a smaller sibling of Earth, extinguished when both were still young. And being unchanged since that time it’s the nearest we’ll get to a snapshot of Earth at the same moment. If we want to know what the planet beneath our feet was like before tectonics and water and weather erased the craters of 4 billion years, and humans and other lifeforms created the chaotic home we now share, we need only look up. Then the Earth was majestic, desolate, grimly magical, ‘like the deserted battlefield of the final war’. And it smelt like spent gunpowder. After the party I went in search of the necessary book, and luckily there’s a classic: Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon (1994). It’s quite different from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (see SF no.82), which is about spectacular test flights and early forays into space in the ’40s and ’50s. Chaikin’s book is measured, wide-ranging and evocative, full of surprising detail on every part of the vast twelve-year Apollo programme from 1960 to the last lunar footstep so far – including the scientific weirdness and technical wizardry, which it makes easy to follow. Out of all the richness it offers, I’ve concentrated here on the astronauts’ experiences and their responses to them, including religious feelings and a sometimes wacky spirituality I hadn’t expected at all. A lot had changed from the times Wolfe described. The men had changed, even those who were still the same ones. They were older and calmer, and some had PhDs. Flying had changed: instead of deafening supersonic flight through air there was silence and stillness at 25,000 m.p.h. through space. Being a pilot had changed too: skill and bravado were still needed, though now ideally only as back-up. There was a lot of time to pass, instead of none. Famously our smartphones now have 100,000 times more power than their onboard computers then, but even theirs could guide a rocket from Earth to Moon to Earth, applying Newton’s laws to the constant movement of orbits relative to one another – in fact they could almost handle the whole trip, provided everything went ideally. Heroic back-up was needed because of course it wouldn’t. Teamwork was new: instead of isolation there were now threesomes cramped up together for the long journeys there and back. Naturally crews were picked who got on with each other, but they still had to put up with stretches of boredom, lame banter, unbearable music on the portable player, or sometimes one another’s military-sized egos. Or with the never-solved problem euphemistically called ‘waste management’, whose side effects in so small a space could jerk fellow astronauts awake from deep sleep. Surprisingly, motion sickness is also possible in space: Chaikin provides a deadpan disquisition on Newton’s laws of motion as applied to throwing up while weightless – with a brief digression on butterfly hunting. What hadn’t changed was that need for men who could save the ship if the onboard computer screwed up, or there was an explosion, or there were unexpected boulders just where the spidery lunar module was set to land with only seconds of fuel in the tank, or the start-switch to take off and return home came off in the pilot’s hand. Those things all happened. Also unchanged was competitiveness. With courteous ruthlessness, Buzz Aldrin tried to arrange matters so he’d get his foot on the Moon ahead of Neil Armstrong’s. But that debate was resolved by the paper-thin lunar module itself – within its constraints the choreography just couldn’t be reversed. Even when bravado was off duty, there were overwhelmingly strong sensations to deal with. Unearthly screams from the rocket as it was filled with supercooled fuel. The knowledge when going aboard that this was no simulation, there was no turning back. Awe as the ship turned slowly from Earth orbit at the start of its half-million mile round trip. Trepidation as Earth shrank and then as the Moon loomed up vast and black. Mike Collins, who orbited the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin were on its surface, ‘knew a solitude unprecedented in human history’. ‘I am alone now, truly alone,’ he wrote of being on the far side, ‘and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.’ Another wrote of a darkness so deep he could feel it, but of how ‘in a finger snap the cabin was flooded with sunlight’. He spoke of becoming a new man. Seen from close up, the Moon’s surface was eerie and numinous. Since there’s no atmosphere to soften the view, everything was razor-sharp clear both near and far, so it was nearly impossible to judge distance, or guess the size of craters and scars or occasional lonely mountains rising from the bleakness. Trickily, changes in shadow and sunlight or blueish earthlight (the Moon’s moonlight) made memorized landmarks unfamiliar. The Earth was numinous too: the unexpected view of earthrise – the image now known worldwide – produced something like ecstasy. ‘We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.’ It’s no surprise that feelings took some handling, heightened as they were by danger and the overwhelming vastness of space. Strangeness even permeated dreams. Charlie Duke dreamt of spotting, from his lunar buggy, unexpected tracks very like those he was making himself. He followed them and eventually found a second buggy, but when he peered into its driver’s helmet the face he saw there was his own. Yet in his dream, bits of that buggy analysed on Earth were declared to be 100,000 years old. He must have been glad to wake up. The workload, some larking about, a bit of pretend golf and so on, could all help, but some astronauts were overwhelmed by a sense of the ineffable – especially those like Buzz Aldrin for whom religion was central to life. He brought along with him a miniature Holy Communion set, and it may be that he wanted to be first on the Moon partly because for him that step was a sacrament demanding more than secular ceremony. Even when crews were not notably pious, hymns would at some point emerge from the portable player. A reading of Genesis was beamed back to Earth, but that went down badly with militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She sued the government on the grounds that religious expression by federal employees at work was unconstitutional. (She was later murdered, though for some other tiresomeness; the Deity wasn’t implicated.) As well as Christianity there was freelance spirituality too. Ed Mitchell, ‘glancing at the bright crescent of the earth, felt as if he was hearing a new language, one being heard by the universe itself. [He had] a sense of order, of worlds and stars and galaxies moving in harmony’, an order of which he also was part. Maybe he wanted to send that idea back to Earth by express mail, because he tried an old enthusiasm, telepathy. He even claimed it more or less worked, though since ESP hasn’t had much undisputed success a little scepticism is perhaps permissible. Actually the nearest to a voice from on high was probably Richard Nixon’s, beamed to the Moon from the Oval Office, and what he could say must have been limited by his decision – not yet announced – to cut the Apollo programme short. He’d fancied pursuing a Mars landing but knew that by the time it happened he’d be out of office and so wouldn’t reap the credit. And even as it was, war in Vietnam was making the costs hard to justify. Ideas of heroism had darkened too. Was it so impressive that men chose to risk their lives when so many were risking theirs without any option? Ominously The Doris Day Show was no longer being paused to broadcast astronauts’ voices from space. That meant public attention was drifting. The astronauts who made it to the Moon found a whole range of ways to cope with the anticlimax of return. For some it was God, for others politics or wealth. Ed Mitchell spent the rest of his life trying to reproduce his experience through hypnosis, and working through his Institute of Noetic Sciences to unify evidence and mysticism. Bill Anders – who took the famous earthrise photo – half wondered whether the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate simulation. (How strange that the hoax myth cropped up even semi-seriously among those nearest the actual events.) On the other hand Charlie Duke said he rarely glanced at the Moon and when he did he felt no sense of having been there. Of the men on the very first mission, Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin fought off depression and alcoholism, and Neil Armstrong bought a farm in Ohio like the one on which he’d grown up. Half a century later exploration is slowly resuming, now under Artemis’s aegis instead of Apollo’s. Properly for the goddess, the Moon will be her demesne and she’ll go hunting further off. No doubt outer space will again produce an inner emotional descant, as it did before. I hope so. Human responses to the unknown are fascinatingly hard to predict.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Grant McIntyre 2025