Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (34 page)

An hour later, close to midnight, eastern daylight time, the Black team came on to replace the White team at Mission Control. They were the monitors of sleep and would not waken the astronauts or have conversations with them as the ship rotated through the hours in PTC, all window shades pulled down, all but instrument warning lights turned off. The sun kept shining in the darkness of space, the ship coasted upward, revolving slowly, revolving slowly, three times an hour revolving in Passive Thermal Control. The thousands of miles went by. Apollo 11 was sixty-four thousand nautical miles from earth when sleep began. By morning when the crew was awakened, they were more than ninety-four thousand nautical miles away. The day to come would be filled with duties and empty of events. So it might be ideal for study—there was a boredom to space, a boredom not unlike the lethargy of people on a long trip by car, but here a boredom incalculable to the layman who did not engage the details, the buzzings and the hustings of one hundred thousand miles of intercom and interoffice memo. Few of the words would be clear to all, few of the words would give pleasure. It was technology pure coming up.

On Thursday morning, July 17, the crew was up before they were called. Presumably they lifted the shades, let in the sun of full free space (what a shine in the eternal darkness!), and worked their muscles with a spring exerciser in obedience to the depressing discovery by previous flights that muscles go slack in weightlessness at a much accelerated pace.

There, all resemblance to America’s good morning could end—the radio was working. They were on. There would be voices in their ear for the next sixteen hours.

A way to begin the morning! Now the time-line charge on Battery A is installed in their ear, then an updated set of angles in Program 52 for realigning the table on the Inertial Measurement Unit. Numbers come their way, more numbers, then instructions as to when to initiate a waste-water dump. It will be begun as soon as Program 23 concerning their midcourse navigation is completed.

The crew reads back the figures and their assent to the instructions, they delineate the attitude of angle of the craft, they offer numbers for the ground to check against Mission Control monitors. Now the crew presents crew status report. “CDR 3, CMP 7, LMP 5.5.” If it is correct in transmission, it means Collins slept seven hours, Aldrin five and a half, and Armstrong only three. The figure passes without comment. What may be said about insomnia in a monitored capsule? One cannot even lie and pretend the sleep was good.

Now comes the consumables update, a report on the amount of oxygen, hydrogen and fuel consumed by the thrusters and the fuel cells. It is sent up from ground to space, and downline from Apollo 11 to ground comes a report from the spacecraft on their own measure of fuel left. They have not used that much the first day—they have 96 percent left in Alpha Quad thrusters, 87 in Bravo, 88 in Charlie and 90 in Delta.

Next a discussion takes place on the charging of the batteries.
The batteries are exhibiting idiosyncrasies. A consultation with the electrical engineers at Houston assures the astronauts that the reasons are minor and concern no more than natural differences between individual batteries—all of this has taken no more than twenty minutes. The first twenty minutes of the first day of awakening in space has just passed. Think what a jolt those numbers would have been to a fine mind hung over with sweet recollections of the night before, acid stomach, whisperings of guilt, a disconnected head and dread remorse. Say, it is no light and easy load for the astronauts themselves—even virtue is incarcerated in the dungeon of numbers. Armstrong’s wife would recollect that in early June after weeks and months of working ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day in simulators, “Neil used to come home with his face drawn white, and I was worried about him. I was worried about all of them. Their morale was down. They were worried about whether there was time enough for them to learn the things they had to learn, to do the things they had to do, if this mission was to work.” It gives a hint of how killing is the work in the simulators. To use all of one’s best energy hour after hour, working day after working day in order to keep up with a machine whose brain is more rapid if not more brilliant than one’s own, plunking all of one’s ambition, avarice, charity, pluck, discipline, and education into an electrical set of brains which will give back nothing but firm answers, can hardly improve the human brain at anything but the cruelest expense to the body. No wonder their morale revived when the flight date was made certain on June 17—the work till then must have been privately unendurable, a feat next to taking IQ tests for twelve hours every day in front of a six-hundred-fold instrument panel of blinkers, switches, alarm lights and warning bells—food for psychosis in rats! yes, it must have been so unendurable that the thought one might yet pursue this huge effort to no purpose—for one’s participation could always be washed out—was a way to lay the groundwork for the worst of diseases, the leaching out of one’s soul. The thought that this huge effort of
training, this courtship of numbers could end in nothing, must have fired up a torture at the core of their unconscious, even that stoic imperturbable core of the astronaut heart. They had begun as active men with quick reflexes and the impulses of athletes—now they were dial-bound and fingertip quick, naught but blinkers and tweekers in their working day—it was like making a Ping-Pong champion out of a great tennis player.

Besides, the massive regions of their technical ignorance had to weigh on them. They were by now in varying degree not only expert pilots but expert engineers, expert mechanics, expert technicians. It was still not enough. Just as a devoted English professor cannot pretend to be equally knowledgeable on every last poem, jotted whim, or letter wrapped in ribbon in the Descriptive Bibliographies of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Milton, and Donne, no more than he can begin to cover the major sweep of English prosody from Beowulf to Allen Ginsberg, leave Shakespeare alone, Marlowe alone, Melville! think then of the astronaut who presides over a field of instruments whose engineering theory, while not necessarily so attractive to live with as English literature, nonetheless engages as many volumes of the mind as could any close-up survey of English, history, or medicine. Each astronaut must recognize that for all he knew, there were icebergs of mystery in all he did not know, all he could not keep up with. To a profound student of Shelley, the third beribboned letter might contain a phrase which could turn his notions of Shelley into new directions, but an expert on Chaucer or Faulkner would pass it by with a quick reading.
There
was the danger for the astronauts! To be insufficiently grounded in the subtlest hints of malfunction in any one of six hundred instruments which, perish them all, they had not become sufficiently expert upon, was an invitation not only to their own disaster but to the peril of the NASA program, last chalice of Good Square Life. Every Square is aware of his own devil—that is why he chooses to be Square. With failure, they could never be certain the program had been immune to their secret treachery. It is a fair
anxiety, enough to turn men pale and eat their liver. Of course, they had Mission Control behind them, and from Mission Control quick links extended to all the experts in all the fields—there were the engineering equivalents of experts on plainsong and experts on Burroughs, experts on Gay, Cheever and Updike, Bellow and Smollett, Swinburne and Walter Savage Landor, Ronald Firbank and Baron Corvo, Ben Jonson and Babette Deutsch, name it, name it—Mission Control was in touch with men who knew all about the subject of toggle switches or television grids, knew them like an English honors man knew Shelley’s letters after forty years, Mission Control was in touch with helium transfer men, honeycomb panel men, valve men and monomethyl hydrazine men, data acquisition system engineers and gigacycle deep space antenna fellows, solenoid experts and nuclear particle detection masters, single channel decommutator designers, and pseudorandom noise ranging test set doctors, specialists in mass flow-meters, astronomers, and air-conditioner men, flight direction system engineers, orbital physicists—the astronauts did not have to know it all. Every malfunction could be reported, discussed on the ground, considered, the solution of how to adjust to the difficulty radioed back. But there were anxieties nonetheless. The response might take too long to get. The crisis could accelerate. Any English professor entrusted with the last safeguarding of the English language would be secretly appalled at the dimensions of his own ignorance in such an apocalyptic mission even if he had ten thousand experts and graduate students to support him a few minutes of communication away.

Well, no need to assume the first twenty minutes on July 17 was even remotely suggestive of the pits of this venture. Routine, if painfully detailed instructions on exiting from PTC, on charging the batteries, updating the programs, updating the record of consumables and dumping the waste water had taken the time. Now the morning news came. Each morning Mission Control would give a five or six minute newscast—

Dig it! What unheard comments on the Loch Ness monster, or what Rozelle must have said to Namath. What probable laughter at the hippies—long hair and funky unwashed caverns were the zone of demarcation in the physics of smell, stink was the Siegfried line between magic and technology. But the astronauts were plenipotentiaries of space so they chose to respond to Vice President Agnew. “We hope we get a chance to see him when we return.”

“Roger,” says the Capcom, “and I understand he was down there and really enjoyed watching the launch. We think it was pretty magnificent and you-all are doing a great job up there.”

Spacecraft: “Thank you.”

Congratulations and good wishes having ranged back and forth, there was now a half hour with no conversation. Presumably the astronauts were eating breakfast. On DAY 2 the schedule called for Meal A: Fruit cocktail, sausage patties, cinnamon-toasted bread cubes, cocoa and grapefruit drink.

When silence was broken, a long set of instructions on how to avoid errors in angular readout on trunnion bias determination was given by the Capcom. This introduced a specific discussion on
how to locate a reference termed the M-line in the ocular system. It seemed the M-line was required to be parallel to the earth horizon at the “substellar point.” The spacecraft returned with the information that on the previous day they had not been able to bring the M-line into any kind of parallel.