TO WALK ON THE MOON
Three of the six surviving lunar astronauts from the historic Apollo programme reveal to Bryan Appleyard what it’s like to set foot on an alien world
TWO paying customers are looking forward to a voyage around the moon, scheduled for next year. Their identities are being kept secret, although the ticket price is not: $80 million (more than R1,04 billion). They’ll fly SpaceX, the company formed by internet billionaire and Tesla car builder Elon Musk. It may not happen – space is hard – but if it does, will it mean human space exploration is back on the agenda? Are we going back to Mars and the stars? The surviving six moonwalkers hope so.
The last words spoken on the surface of the moon were: “Engine start push.” That was Eugene Cernan, the Apollo 17 commander ordering the launch of the lander Challenger from the Taurus-Littrow Valley on 14 December 1972. He died in January this year, aged 82, never having seen another human go beyond low Earth orbit in the intervening 44 years.
Myths have been spun around those last words. It’s been widely reported that the supercool Cernan actually said, “Let’s get this mutha outta here,” a suitably legendary payoff. But Harrison Schmitt, who walked with him on the surface, insists on the more mundane version: “It’s not in the transcript; let’s put it that way. We were on voice-activated communications at that time, so I’m afraid that wasn’t said. I think the last words on the moon were ‘engine start push’ – and once you push that button you’re not on the moon anymore.”
Between July 1969 and December 1972 just 12 men walked on the moon. Nasa had three more Apollo missions ready to go, but popular excitement and political will had evaporated.
An ugly, accident-prone dump truck that went only as far as low Earth orbit – the space shuttle – replaced the gorgeous Saturn V rockets.
The memories of the 12 moonwalkers were all that remained. I ask Schmitt if he left anything behind. “Well, a lot of geological equipment . . .”
Charlie Duke, an Apollo 16 walker in April 1972, opted to leave something more personal – a picture of his family. Would he like to go back and get it?
“After more than 40 years of monthly temperature variations between minus 275 degrees and 400 degrees Fahrenheit (between -175 °C and 204 °C), I think it will be all shrivelled up and blackened by now.”
All the Apollo astronauts seemed to possess a unique purity, a saintly purposefulness. Only they have stood and worked on another world. Engineers, scientists and pilots – often all three – they got on with their supremely difficult job with matter-of-fact heroism. So what did it feel like? “Fighter pilots weren’t trained or wired to feel,” Buzz Aldrin says. “We had a job to do. I like to say we had ice water in our veins.” No fear, then? “What was there to be afraid of? We’d trained for years and we knew what to do. I’ll tell you what’s scary – having a MiG [ jet aircraft] on your ass trying to shoot you down, like when I was a fighter pilot in Korea.”
ALDRIN was the second walker. He stepped onto the lunar regolith (moon dirt) 19 minutes after Neil Armstrong on 21 July 1969. The world was watching.
“Everywhere I go in the world someone tells me where they were the night Neil and I walked on the moon,” Aldrin says.
His fighter-pilot calm wasn’t shared by the flight controllers in Houston. Duke was then capcom – capsule communicator – on Apollo 11. His is the voice you hear talking to the astronauts, and he knows better than anybody what a damn close-run thing that mission was.
“When we started the descent on Apollo 11, the whole place just started falling apart. Communications dropped out, we had to reorientate the spacecraft, we had to change antennae, the computer kept overloading.”
Then, most famously, Armstrong steered away from the planned landing site – too rocky – a move that left the lander with just a few seconds of fuel by the time it touched down.
Finally, he announced, “The Eagle has landed.” And Duke replied, “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue; we’re breathing again.”
A little of the ice in Aldrin’s veins seemed to melt when he first stepped
onto the surface. “My first words when I stepped on the moon were ‘magnificent desolation’.” Duke is more lyrical. “We could see up to the Arctic Circle and down through Canada, the US and Mexico. The colours were just incredible: the crystal blue of the ocean, the brown of the land, the white of the snow and that jewel of Earth just suspended in the blackness of space. The sun shines so brightly you don’t see any stars. The blackness of space was very vivid to me.”
He adds that, thanks to the training, “When I hit the surface I felt right at home.”
Schmitt is a geologist and he spent much of his time looking downwards at the dust, rocks and regolith of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, but occasionally he looked up.
“When you begin to look around and you see that you’re in this magnificent valley, brilliantly illuminated by a sun that’s obviously brighter than any sun you can imagine, and all against the black of a black sky.
“The mountains themselves at 1 500 to 2 100 metres high on either side of us. It was really quite something . . . And Earth is always in the same part of the sky. It really is a fantastic visual experience.”
Clearly all the training in the world can’t stop you being shocked by wonder. But there were also smaller unexpected things about the journey. Schmitt was surprised into what sounds suspiciously close to fear as the Saturn V exploded into action.
“It was surprising to me just how much vibration there was. There were these five engines, each developing 1,5 million pounds [680 000 kg] of thrust, and we got this low-frequency vibration. You couldn’t read the gauges on the instrument panel . . . That feeling gets your attention.”
Aldrin was struck by the fineness of the regolith dust.
“Like talcum powder. That’s why I took one of the few photos on the moon of the iconic boot print.”
The dust also got to Duke. He noticed, back inside the lander, that when you rubbed it between your fingers it felt “oily, like graphite”. He also said it smelt like gunpowder. Other walkers have said the same thing. But when transported back to Earth it seemed to lose this smell.
So does the moon smell? Well, it’s possible the regolith emitted an odour on contact with the oxygen in the lander – so maybe yes, the moon smells of gunpowder.
Aldrin spent two hours and 15 minutes on the surface; Duke and Schmitt each spent more than 20 hours. Longer times on the surface – the latter two did three shifts of about seven hours each – meant exhaustion became a problem. Nasa was cautious about this. The walkers were ordered to pause every time their pulse rate went over 140.
“I found walking quite an easy thing to do,” Schmitt says. “I was used to cross-country skiing and I could use that technique of toe-push and glide across the surface; it took very little energy and I got quite a good clip.” But handling things was hard work. “The gloves really wore out your forearms pretty quickly. It was like squeezing a tennis ball.”
Sleeping baffles me. In my mind, you’d have to have dangerously high levels of the right stuff to doze off in a tiny pressurised can on the moon. They all tell me about the alarmingly delicate skin of the lander when unpressurised – “It had a beer-can feel to it,” Duke reveals.
When pressurised it becomes taut and hard – but still, it’s not a comforting thought that this paper-thin sheet is the only thing between you and the vacuum of space.
Duke’s partner, John Young, had no problems on their first night, but Duke did.
“Yeah it was a problem . . . we had some
(From previous page) sleeping pills in our medical kit. They weren’t knockout pills; they were just enough to put your mind on idle, so I got about four hours.”
THE pre-moon biographies of all these men clearly have things in common, but there are variations. Aldrin was an engineer and fighter pilot, as was Duke. Schmitt was a geologist who had to undergo aircraft and helicopter training to become an astronaut. Aldrin was religious, a Presbyterian. He took a special kit with him and gave himself communion. He did it without publicity as the crew of Apollo 8 – which orbited the moon but didn’t land on it in December 1968 – had got in trouble for reading from the Bible. Nasa didn’t want any religious comments made by any of them.
It was to be post-moon that they were really tested though. After years of intense training followed by enormous global publicity and the high-adrenaline adventure of going further than any humans had been before (or since), they seemed to run into a wall of bafflement after the mission. Especially Aldrin.
“I struggled for a while. I decided to return to the air force and I was the first astronaut to do that, but they didn’t know what to do with a guy who walked on the moon, so I didn’t get the assignment I was hoping for . . .
“I floundered, struggled with alcohol and depression, and my family life suffered and ended in divorce.
“It took me a while to get my life back together and focus on my passion – space. Now, at the age of 87, things are better than ever!”
Duke at first had similar problems. “The question of what are you going to do now came up almost immediately after Apollo. I was offered a job in Washington by Nasa, to be a deputy administrator, but my marriage was such a problem at that stage, and I knew it would end if we went to Washington.” He was restless, frustrated. “I had this problem that I couldn’t find any peace. I should be satisfied; I’m one of the 12 guys who walked on the moon. Through all this, things were getting worse.
“My wife, Dorothy, by 1975 she was on the verge of suicide . . . Looking back, that lifestyle we had during Apollo – it just stopped; that leads to problems for a lot of folks.”
He thought money might be the answer. He had rich friends and they seemed to be okay. He made money in business for a few years, but that didn’t provide the solace he sought. Finally, both he and his wife found peace in the faith of the Episcopal (Anglican) Church.
Schmitt didn’t have such a tough time adjusting to life back on Earth, perhaps because he’d gone to space as a scientist and that provided him with a role when he came back.
“I didn’t have the problems some of the guys may have had because I was immediately trying to understand the science of these samples.
“I always had an interest in politics, so I started thinking about running for the US senate, which I did in 1976.” He was a Republican senator for New Mexico between 1977 and 1983.
But there was one disaster they all – even Schmitt – had to deal with. Apollo 17 marked the end of the programme and the consignment of all that wonderful, beautiful engineering to museums. This was, like many collisions between politics and wonder, madness. The Saturn V technology had years of life left in it.
The cancellation was partly political – the US congress and the Nixon administration had imposed tighter budgets and Nasa’s workforce was being forced to shrink, down from 400 000 in the mid-’60s to 190 000 in 1970. But also, Nasa wasn’t sure that further moon missions represented value for money and there were competing programmes – a space station and the space shuttle.
“Nasa had three Apollo vehicles that were ready to fly and they cancelled those missions, which was very disappointing,” Duke says. “But that was a political decision. And then, while we were on the moon, congress approved the space shuttle programme. Well, that put us back into Earth orbit for the next 30 years.”
“When the Apollo missions ended we all felt that Mars was the next step,” Aldrin adds. “I wasn’t disappointed that we hadn’t been back to the moon because we needed to go beyond the moon. In 1985, I was working [on] cycling orbits between Earth and the moon for tourism, but Nasa wasn’t interested because we already knew how to go to the moon.”
Spacecraft that move in “cycling orbits” travel in continuous trajectories around the moon (or Mars) and Earth. These would be a much cheaper method of transport.
“There were a lot of mistakes that were made. We became risk-averse after the shuttle astronauts. Now we’ve been relying on the Russians to get our astronauts up to our $100-billion space station,” Aldrin says.
Schmitt regrets that the leadership of the United States decided not to continue producing the Saturn V rocket and use it on a regular basis, not only to explore the moon but to build space stations and ultimately to go on to Mars.
“There could have been an enhancement of that very, very robust Saturn V technology. History will look at that a little bit askance, but it’s the way it turned out to be.”
The upside to cancelling the programme is that it preserved the moonwalkers’ unique aura. In the absence of real space exploration they became the apostles of space, advocates of exploration.
“I consider myself a global space statesman,” Aldrin says. “Humanity needs to explore, to push beyond current limits, just like we did in 1969.”
Finally in old age their advocacy seems to be working. Nasa has plans to go back to the moon and then to Mars.
The Trump administration seems to be backing this. The president recently signed a bill authorising $19,5 billion (R253,5 billion) for Nasa. This means space funding won’t be cut and Nasa will be able to continue with its launch system and Orion capsule programme, which aims to land humans on Mars by the 2030s.
On top of that there’s a new wave of private spacefaring – like Elon Musk’s voyage around the moon and then, he says, Mars. It’s just what Aldrin wants. “We have to rely on the private sector to get to Earth orbit. Nasa should be focused instead on deep-space exploration . . . My cycler is the best transportation system to bring humans and cargo to Mars. But we can’t ignore the moon. It’s an important stepping stone for Mars.
“We, the USA, have to lead the rest of the nations of the world to build an international base on the moon to mine the ice. That ice can be turned into rocket fuel. From there we’ll learn how to live on another planet, along with all the things we need to do to enable missions to Mars.”
Politics ensured that the Apollo moon landings were the start of nothing – no space tourism, no voyages to Mars and beyond. Instead, they joined Woodstock, the Beatles, hippies and Muhammad Ali as something strange and astounding that happened in the ’60s and early ’70s. They’ve become exotic, almost unbelievable memories.
But the surviving walkers still dream of space adventures; of a time when the world agreed it was all worthwhile, and when men with the right stuff could say they’d seen and done things nobody had ever seen or done before. S