Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (46 page)

Still, his faith was not merely a support. If Aldrin’s sense of ceremony could excite his wife to remark—hearing his voice across space—“Doesn’t he say numbers beautifully?” he had still gone out to march on Palm Sunday of 1968 in downtown Houston in order to pay his respects to Martin Luther King just assassinated. In
the political straits of NASA it was a brave act. It could have affected his career. People in his office even called the march a peace parade; little could damage a man more than to be considered sympathetic to peace in Vietnam while working in Houston.

It was apparently part of his philosophy that you must not only use your religion but must make it work as well. With his minister, Reverend Dean Woodruff, the man with whom he had marched in Houston, Aldrin looked to prepare some explanation of the moon trip “which would have universal appeal.… The symbolism of the flight—of what we were looking for, of what I was interested in—seemed to transcend modern times. I searched for some words, or some symbol to be representative of man’s expandng search.” Woodruff took up a thesis of Ernst Cassirer and wrote a paper:
The Myth of Apollo 11: The Effects of the Lunar Landing on the Mythic Dimension of Man
.

The hopes Aldrin contained for this thesis were not necessarily so small. It is natural for Americans to believe that an idea will shake the world if every newspaper prints it the same day on the front page. The Woodruff-Aldrin manifesto was however relatively unremarked and Aldrin was later to say, “I was a little disappointed in this.” Still, Aldrin was one astronaut who would not have to wonder why he was on his way to the moon.

But the night will soon be over. Already Apollo has lost signal for the sixth time, reacquired it, lost it, regained it, gone around again
and again. It is into the eighth and the ninth revolution about the moon and still the astronauts sleep. It is four, and now five in the morning back in Houston.

Before they wake, let us give a last pass at their psychology by inquiring into the objects they bring to the moon in their Personal Preference Kit (which is a white diddie bag two inches by four inches by eight inches closed by a string). Aldrin has brought first-day philatelic covers, and gold olive-branch pins of peace he has ordered specially, one as a gift for his wife. There are also a few rings and medallions, and a gold bracelet which belonged to his mother Marion Moon. The names of the children and the grandchildren in the family have been attached to the bracelet on little gold discs. Carried along as well has been the small bottle of wine, the bread, and a little Eucharist cup. One salutes the lack of fear in Aldrin that the moon might ever be malign or the powers of ceremony insufficient before it.

And Armstrong? He has taken packages for friends, and for members of NASA with whom he had friendly relations. “I don’t even know what was in them,” he would say later. “They were wrapped and I stuck them into the bag, then gave them back when we got home.” It is a perfect expression of I Ching. The priest is not to perform the ceremony nor to intervene between the subject and his relation to nature—the priest is there to make it possible, no more. But then Armstrong is not without Oriental bent—a large Buddha stood on a table in his living room and he told a visitor, “I believe you would find in a Buddhist house that the central beam … would be painted red to ward off evil spirits.” For his wife and mother he would bring back no packages from the moon as if objects to which he might here attach personal desire could be affected by strange forces.

And Collins, whom we have ignored out of the cruel reality of his inferior position (snobs may seek to rise not because they love elegance so much, but for fearing inattention more!), what did Collins take? Well, his position was certainly cruel. The others had two white bags, one for the Command Module, one for the Lem,
Collins had only a single Personal Preference Kit. He took “mostly small flags and little medallions of our shoulder patch—a whole bunch of small things for people in the program, people we work with.” There were personal items as well, a college ring, a locket, a cross, but it was the items he would dispense later to others which remain in the mind, all those cuff links, tiepins and crosses. He had the politician’s knowledge that politics is planting and a handshake is better than a vote, for a handshake breeds votes in the man you greeted. So a little gift from a large mission is the equal of a hundred handshakes. Collins was already on his way to a new profession—he would join the State Department when this mission was done and seek to rally the young to the merits of the war in Vietnam. It is difficult to conceive of anyone performing such work as a labor of love—it seems more like the beginning of a new career. Still, Collins is the man who said, “It’s been one of the failings of the Space Program … that we have been unable to delineate clearly all the reasons why we should go to the moon. I think the key to it is that man loses something if he has the option to go and does not take it.” That was the same Collins who could confess with charm that in the days before World War II when his father, Major General Collins, was commanding a post in Puerto Rico, he used to sit on the stone walls of an old Spanish fort outside his home, and look down on a brothel on the other side. “They did a thriving business. I used to … talk to the girls, and I can remember they used to—oh, I was a rat fink—they used to toss me money to get me to come down and visit them, but I never would. I was scared to death to.” He was also ten years old. But he had learned already that a “man loses something if he has the option to go and does not take it.” What might be his subtle intellectual consternation when he learned the young rebels he would talk to shared his belief. They thought they should go to Canada to avoid the war in Vietnam. But then all of America except the Indians and the Blacks could share such a belief, for they had once taken the option to come here. Now, not a few hours away, was the event which might yet begin the forging of a new migration.

It is time to look at the Lunar Module. The astronauts have only to remove the overhead hatch cover in their compartment, unscrew the probe and drogue, then go to work on opening the overhead cover of the Lem. When they are done, they can float through a tunnel connecting the two ships. It is about thirty-three inches wide, and probably a little more than three feet long, and when it is open, there is nothing to keep them from taking a small jump off the floor of the Command Module (providing the center couch had been removed and so made a piece of floor available) and in such a weightless environment, if aim is good, they will pass on a trajectory up the six or seven feet to the beginning of the tunnel, then will stream through, fingers steering lightly along the handholds on the walls of the cylinder which form this short passage, before they debouch into the open volume of the Lem. Now, they can either finish the trip on the engine cover of the Lunar Module ascent stage, or with a half gainer proceed another few feet to the floor. So it is a leap from one floor to the other; the two spacecraft are attached head to head like the most unhappy version of Siamese twins.

Once inside the Lem, few would claim they had improved their condition. The habitable volume of the Command Module was two hundred and ten cubic feet, something equivalent to the old army sump hole six feet by six by six enlisted men would dig. If in that arena they were obliged to sleep, sit, stand, eat, even take a step or two, their volume in the Lem was reduced to one hundred and sixty cubic feet. It consisted of a slice of cylindrical barrel not eight feet in diameter and only three and a half feet wide; it had not as much room as one of the cages on a ferris wheel, and if there was a view out of two triangular windows less than two feet high, the walls were covered with an array of circuit breakers, knobs, switches, controls, displays and alarm panels quite the equal of the Command Module. In addition they could not sit and could hardly sleep. It was a spacecraft designed to be flown while standing up, only armrests, cables and restraints to keep them in position at the controls. Since the line of sight of their radio antenna and radar would twist them into some most unusual attitudes, there would be times when though they might believe they were standing up (for their bodies were straight and their feet in Velcro boots were attached to the Velcro nap of the floor), they were in fact moving along in positions which relative to the surface of the moon had them standing on their heads or riding on their backs.

This had all been calculated to save weight. It cost an expenditure of sixty pounds of fuel on the Launch Pad for every pound of spacecraft to go into moon orbit, and five hundred pounds of ground fuel for each pound the Lem would bring to the moon. It suggests that a saving of one hundred pounds (perhaps the weight of two couches) is, by the most conservative measure, a net gain of six thousand pounds of fuel. It used to be that for every dollar spent on a Hollywood movie, eight dollars had to come back at the box office to pay for prints, distribution, publicity, overhead and theater exhibition before a profit was shown. These fuel figures were more impressive by far!

Yet this concept of a Lunar Module had once been considered revolutionary. It had been forced to fight its way against earlier
NASA plans which called for a brute rocket able to leave the earth, reach the moon, land and come back again. Such a rocket would have been as large as a battleship. Probably it could not have lifted off the ground with anything less than four times the fuel Apollo-Saturn was to carry. Therefore another solution was proposed. Two Saturns would go up. One would carry a spacecraft, the other a cargo of extra fuel to attach to the spacecraft. The bolstered ship could then proceed to the moon, land, and come back. Some argued it would take three Saturns, not two, for the job. Then, from a group at Langley Research Center, headed by John C. Houbolt, a suggestion was offered which said in effect: “Why land a yacht on an unprotected beach?—send in a rowboat with an outboard.” But feelings in NASA were delicate in 1960 and 1961, NASA officials were still in the bureaucratic nightmare of embarking on a multibillion dollar adventure which still might produce nothing but flameouts and failure. In such untried situations, the bureaucratic instinct is to look for precedent: there was evidence the big boosters could at least function—there was still no certainty rendezvous could be managed. In the mathematics of celestial orbits, unknowns were always more numerous than equations, and the computers were still too heavy to be installed on board. Aldrin in fact was working these years at MIT on precisely this problem of making rendezvous feasible. No surprise if some NASA men were devoted to the idea of a battleship which could go all the way and never have to rendezvous at all. Yet the real argument proceeded deeper. Men like Von Braun were willing to take the gamble that rendezvous could be accomplished, but he was in favor of Earth Orbit Rendezvous with the two Saturns. When Houbolt’s concept was put forward, Von Braun was quick to say, “That’s no good.” The hostility of others was intense. There was no question that in terms of economy of performance, the idea of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was clearly superior to Earth Orbit Rendezvous, but more than bureaucratic rigidity was at stake. One can assume that a number of the most practical men at NASA did not really believe in 1961 that we would get to the moon by 1969. Still, they were
rocket men who were attached to the idea of a continuing rocket program. A complete commitment to Lunar Orbit Rendezvous would show a complete loss if they failed to get to the moon. But Earth Orbit Rendezvous, under the guise of going to the moon, was the perfect program for developing a technology which would certainly result in elaborate space stations orbiting the earth. That offered a powerful appeal to the scientists in the program and to the military minds on detachment from the Pentagon. Going to the moon would be the most monumentally expensive gesture ever made, it would change the dreams of man himself, but it would not put an eye on the activities of the Russians, nor from the point of view of many scientists would a manned moon landing mean nearly as much as a space station for astronomical observations free of the earth’s atmosphere. Or a space factory for electronic components best manufactured in a vacuum.

So it may be that Houbolt’s struggle to get Lunar Orbit Rendezvous approved was in fact one side of an undeclared war in the minds of NASA officials to decide whether they really wished to commit themselves to the moon. It could be said that when Von Braun changed his mind, and Houbolt’s scheme was soon after approved, that the lunar program had then truly begun. For the first time in history, a massive bureaucracy had committed itself to a surrealist adventure, which is to say that the meaning of the proposed act was palpable to everyone, yet nobody could explain its logic.

It was also the first time in history that a manned vehicle had been designed which would never function in the atmosphere. The Lem was the pioneer man-carrying machine of the deep vacuums of space—it was designed to work in nothing but a vacuum, it would have collapsed in an instant if it had ever been obliged to travel unshielded through the air; rather, it had been brought up from earth like an embryo in the womb of the SLA, and was only later connected up to the Command Module and then transported in
moon trajectory like a babe at the breast. The image is not likely to please, yet it is hard to conceive that the astronauts would not personify the Lunar Module, not see it as a creature just born, for in a few hours they were going to direct this craft never flown before right down to the moon. Yet they had never operated such a vehicle, only crude simulations of it.