Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (40 page)

So Aquarius, happy with this supervulcanism, would have the moon not only responsible for writing much of the record of its own history, but in fact could go so far as to search for evidence that the face of the moon might be a self-portrait which looked to delineate the meanings of its experience in that long marriage with the earth and its long uninsulated exposure to the solar system and the stars.

Well, Aquarius was in no Command Module preparing to go around the limb of the moon, burn his rocket motors and brake into orbit, no, Aquarius was installed in the act of writing about the efforts of other men, his attempts to decipher some first clues to the unvoiced messages of the moon obtained from no more than photographs in color of craters, chains of craters, fields of craters and the moon soil given him through the courtesy of the Manned Spacecraft Center, photographic division of public relations, NASA, yet in the months he worked, the pictures were pored over by him as if he were a medieval alchemist rubbing at a magic stone
whose unfelt vibration might yet speak a sweet song to his nerve. But he had all the failures of the occult in all the ages for model, and so he knew as he wrote that if the riddle of the ages was at the root of every form—a pure medievalist is Aquarius!—so, too, was every temptation of insanity. The profligacies of thought—total irresponsibility of connection, and complete loss of the ability to convince—sat in every widening ripple of contemplation over form. If he would travel into the inner space of his brain to uncover the mysteries of the moon, he could dignify that expedition only if he obeyed the irritatingly modest data of the given, the words, the humor, and resolute lack of poetic immortality in the astronauts’ communications with the earth, say, even more than that, would have to certify his respect for the particular endeavor of Apollo 11 by returning to the room where the Capcom speaks.

If we would talk of mysteries, forms, projects, riddles and all of their roots, it is as well to recognize that the root of the Command Module as she approaches the moon is a room on the southeastern plains of Houston in a building called the Mission Control Center of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and this room, the Missions Operations Control Room, MOCR, a room perhaps thirty feet deep and sixty feet wide, is divided into a floor of desks and consoles and television monitors with a gallery of raised seats for dignitaries to observe at one end, and a set of projection screens and maps at the other, an air-conditioned windowless room lit by fluorescent light, with nothing but illumined graphs, quotations of number, and the intent locustlike feeding of flickering electronic dots on empty screens, the very gems of static, to come back to the visitor. Men in the uniform of NASA, white sleeveless shirts, dark ties, dark pants, sit before the consoles and confer, and on the illumined wall maps, a little figure of green light shaped like the silhouette of the Lem with the Command and Service Module attached, that flying-bug-with-a-bullet-up-its-bung goes crawling across the screen. The map up for display is the equator of the moon. In sixty
minutes the bug will travel some ten feet across a lunar map. It is the most interesting sight in that intent space.

The spacecraft now is almost a quarter of a million miles away, but the MOCR is its neighbor. Closer than that, Apollo 11 and Mission Control in MOCR are as close as dialogues between conscious and unconscious mind. Here, like every other broad expanse of brain, ready to work on each problem the conscious mind can provide, are the collected resources, habits and themes for the flight. Outside the MOCR are Staff Support rooms, and on the first floor is the Data Processing Area—a large and open room which could be a diorama of a housing development of the future, its ceiling a mammoth artificial sky of square panels of fluorescent light, its boxlike machines equal to windowless buildings. It is the Real-Time Computer Complex, containing five IBM 360/75 computers plus facilities for flight dynamic analysis, telemetry, processing, acquisition predictions, flight controller display generation with call-up capability, etc., etc., a particularly interlocked nest of jargon to describe the total management of the mathematical and visual displays of the flight on the floor above.

There, back in the MOCR, is the Capcom, his formal title the Spacecraft Communicator, and he sits before a console in the second of four rows of desks and consoles which seat representatives in the Mission Control Team—the officers, directors, and engineers of each relevant department and function of the flight. Just behind the Capcom in the third row is the Flight Director, situated as near to the center of these sixteen responsibilities as the four rows permit—the critical decisions of the flight are to be made by the Flight Director. Almost within reach of his arms are the desks of the Mission Director, the Director of Flight Operations, the Assistant Flight Director, the Capcom, the Vehicle Systems Engineers, and the Experiments and Flight Planning Officer. Near the Capcom are the desks of the Surgeon, the Booster Systems and EVA Mobility Unit, the Retrofire Officer and the Flight Dynamics Officer. Further away from both Capcom and Flight Director are
the Public Affairs Officer, the Department of Defense Officer, the Network Controller, and the Guidance Officer. These sixteen men with their links and taps and lead-ins and consoles and commo loops, their commands of data received and data processed by the computer complex below, their reference slides, their formats, combinations, pictorials, their alpha-numerics, analog plots, plotting data, their nerves and their experience, their knowledge of flight parameters, their red-lines and qualifications for GO or NO GO in each and every separate department are the base for one constant run of comments and queries and warnings and advertisements of future warnings about the functioning of the equipment, the condition of the flight and the oncoming tests and procedures of the flight plan, all funneled into the receiver and ear of the headset of the Flight Director who holds this web of sixteen rays of information in the bowl and dome of his skull and relays to the Capcom (not much more than the tap of an arm away) what piece of information might next be advanced up the quarter of a million miles to the minds and controls of the astronauts. And the Capcom in turn relays the requests, local data, appreciations and complaints of the astronauts. The Capcom, astronaut himself, is thus the advocate, mediator, lifeline, counselor, coxswain, gripe-box, court wit, and expediter for the styles and habits of the astronauts, their modes of procedure, the intimate who recognizes their separate voices and attempts in these static-filled limits to cater to the rhythm of their duties and their literal positions in the cramped quarters of the Command Module with which, as an astronaut himself, the Capcom is familiar.

On this hour, as the spacecraft came nearer to the advancing moon, now nine hundred miles from the outer edge, now six hundred miles from the limb, as the ship of space came closer and closer to disappearing around the back, so a tension began in Mission Control; the spacecraft would be out of radio contact on the far side. Radio waves were rarely modest in their properties, but they did not bend like waves of water around obstacles nor could
they penetrate a sphere. On the far side, for a period of forty-seven minutes, there would be silence—it was called Loss of Signal. In that hour no ordinary anxiety would be felt. Once again the nightmare of technology was aroused. For if something happened to the astronauts on the far side—if the spaceship disappeared without a sound, then there would be no report to give on the source of the malfunction, no logic to the destruction, no pattern to the failure—only misery, the misery of exploring a thousand equally mysterious possibilities. Worse by far than failure was failure for undetermined reasons. So even the head of NASA himself, Dr. Thomas Paine, had asked the astronauts not to fire the Service Propulsion Motor and thereby brake their speed into the lower velocity of moon orbit if they thought anything was wrong; in such a case it would be better to coast out on the other side of the moon and swing back to earth. So concerned was he that the astronauts not take chances behind the moon that he promised them another flight soon if they were forced to return immediately.

If tension had been palpable in the Public Affairs Officer’s voice, one can easily imagine the forty-seven minutes of dread experienced in the MOCR when the flight of Apollo 8 took Borman, Lovell and Anders over the hill, and men saw the far side for the first time. There had of course been photographs received from unmanned spacecraft, but those photos had been transmitted back to earth by television data and were blurred. They had hardly been a full preparation for the sight turned up to the eyes of the crew of Apollo 8, and Apollo 10, and now repeated for Apollo 11.

The side of the moon which faced the earth had features, it had oceans and seas and mountain chains and straits. If there was no water in the seas, and they were in fact dark and desert plains, still they possessed features. One could speak of the man in the moon for his face could be found in the contrasts between the highlands and the seas. But the far side, on superficial view, was nearly without distinguishing marks, an endless waste of craters laid upon craters. If the moon had kept her face looking toward earth, the back side of the moon was as undistinguished as a head of hair. Later, out of better photographs would come maps, and subtle features might begin to emerge, but for the present only a few huge craters stood out in all that near hemisphere of hitherto unplotted terrain—a great crater with a great peak in the center and a very dark moon floor had first been seen by Lunik 2, first Russian unmanned spacecraft to circle the satellite, and had been as quickly named the Crater Tsiolkovsky after the father of Russian rocketry. Other craters of real dimension appeared here and there, Mare Moscoviense for one, another was even named Jules Verne, but the mass of terrain
appeared to be little but a mire of endless holes, a barnyard trod by countless hooves, a beach with hollows and mounds from thousands of feet. Borman was to describe it as like a battlefield and since this hidden moon land was obliterated of variety, an apparent dump and blasting ground of all the angers of the heavens, the meteoric hypothesis regained force here where the ground of the moon seemed subjected to every size and variety of meteor. The ground humped and holed, it writhed and twisted like a spill of sand thrown over nests of snakes, it seemed to boil, it was as trackless as the rough bark of a tree, as filled with the holes of craters of every size as a molten slag boiling in a pot. Yet the longer one looked, the less was the impression of meteors, the stronger a sense of volcanic forces which had once boiled beneath and emerged in poppings and blowholes of crust. Search the lip of every large crater and there in the center of the circumference of each round ridge was a little crater so perfectly placed it must have boiled up out of the lip, and indeed nothing for hundreds of miles before the eye but swellings and distensions of the terrain like a skin beneath which furies must have wrung themselves, a bewildering endlessly worked-over expanse almost without rays, a stretch of bumpy knobby pockmarked upthrown churnings equal to the view from a low boat—without horizon one could never sight a level, and direction was hopeless, a windtwisted choppy sea had been frozen on the instant to stone. So one had no sense of scale. Staring down on a photograph of the far side it was not possible to tell without text whether the picture was of a square mile or of a square five hundred. Craters the size of New York were indistinguishable from craters the size of a house. All orders of magnitude were gone. Giving oneself to these studies of the moon, there followed that hypnotic sense of falling out of human magnitude into other magnitudes. It came upon the senses that in the hour of death, consciousness might separate into other dimensions, dissipate into other orders of the immense and the minuscule, consciousness might at last be off on terminal voyages to microbes, molecules, or the stars. Aquarius had been devoted to
painting for close to thirty years; an amateur of the mysteries of form, it took him close to thirty years to comprehend why Cézanne was the father of modern art and godfather to photographs of the far side of the moon.