Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (44 page)

Some may have been running for President. John Glenn had been campaigning for senator before his accident in the tub, Borman was now close to Nixon, Schirra was a television commentator (a holding position) and Collins was yet to enter the State Department. And there were bound to be others. If an astronaut had political ambitions he did not necessarily announce them.

Then there were men for whom a celebrity as astronaut was preferable to the professional anonymity of the test pilot. And some were patriots. There is no need to diminish the power of this motive. Once, in a meeting of astronauts, NASA executives and scientist-astronauts, the NASA administrator, then James Webb, had told them there would be a hiatus in the Space Program during the early 1970’s due to budget-cutting. The scientist-astronauts were gloomy. Last to arrive in the program, unscheduled for flights, they saw a delay of a decade or more before they could even go up. Scientific examination of the moon and space by experts such as themselves would be again and again delayed. One of the scientist-astronauts said, “Mr. Webb, this hiatus you’ve been referring to—how would you say that the scientific community—”

“To
hell
with the scientific community,” Frank Borman cut in. The astronauts laughed. The attitude was clear. They were not in astronautics to solve the mysteries of the moon, they were astronauts to save America.

Nonetheless, if two-thirds of the astronauts were politicians and patriots, the remainder might still be priests of a religion not yet defined nor even discovered. One met future space men whose manner was friendly and whose talk was small, but it was possible they had a mission. Like Armstrong or Aldrin they were far from the talk at hand. If they followed the line of a conversation, they still seemed more in communion with some silence in the unheard echoes of space.

The Director of Flight Crew Operations, the chief in effect of the astronauts, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, was a man with powerful big-knuckled hands and the rugged grin of a good mechanic. He had his own burden—he had never been up. One of the original seven astronauts, he had been scheduled for a Mercury flight, but a faint heart murmur had been detected. So he was grounded. Because he had not gone into space, he had not had the dubious opportunity of the others to come back down and tell about the experience to family and friends, go through debriefings and talk to the Press until half the life of the event was gone. He had had instead to listen to the accounts of others. So of all the astronauts his personal intensity was perhaps the greatest—indeed he was certainly the astronaut Aquarius would have supposed had been longest and farthest in space. Instead, he was the man who directed the Astronaut Office and was therefore responsible for picking the crews.

Slayton always pointed out that no one could be certain when schedules might be changed for reasons beyond the control of the Astronaut Office. If he had selected Armstrong to be first on the moon, a small shift in events could have made it Stafford of Apollo 10 or Conrad of Apollo 12. Nonetheless, it turned out to be Armstrong, and so it is hardly unnatural to assume that he was the particular pilot Deke Slayton wished to see there.

Naturally, there was more to selecting a crew than divining who might be the men most suited to fill the aesthetic outline of a mission. Seniority had to be taken into account and a matching of abilities. Even chance dictated how certain astronauts were teamed with others. Collins, for example, had been joined with Armstrong and Aldrin out of a process which was close to automatic. Originally with Borman and Lovell on the crew of Apollo 8, Collins had been obliged to give up the flight because of a bone spur in his spine which required a serious operation. By the time he was fit again, Anders had replaced him. Collins, however, was entitled by
the logic of these affairs to get on the first crew available. That happened to be Apollo 11. Whether he was particularly suited to work with Armstrong and Aldrin was probably not considered too long; indeed Slayton may have estimated that Collins was likely to get along with any crew. Besides, it is equally possible a man in Slayton’s position would look to eschew fine psychological match-ups. The logic of the missions demanded that the men, like the machines, be to a degree interchangeable.

Still, if you have the power to choose astronauts for a mission, you are most likely to exercise such a function when the mission is as important as an initial landing on the moon. Let us make the assumption in the face of every published statement to the contrary, that Armstrong was Slayton’s carefully considered choice and then go in for the further presumption of trying to enter Slayton’s mind.

What would one look for? Obviously any astronaut selected would have to be a superb pilot, better if possible than his peers. On the other hand, it would not hurt if he were a man who would appeal to large numbers of Americans. The size of NASA activities in the future was going to be determined in some degree by the response of Americans to the moon shot. While the flight of Apollo 11 would certainly excite America in the summer of ’69, how profoundly could the public be reached? Would it be deep enough to arouse desire for more space travel in the cold months of budget cuts in the years ahead? Or would it merely flip a thrill for one hot summer, after which the murderous laws of fashion would take over? To withstand that time when the moon shot could pass into discard, an astronaut able to capture the imagination of Americans was required. Slayton was in trouble already. He needed a man like Lindbergh.

Then came other categories of selection. They were less definable. All astronauts were brave men and all astronauts lived with death: landing on the moon, however, might require a special sensibility. While a man could get killed undergoing a routine checkout on the pad, while a man was certainly in danger going out into
space for a walk, where the crew of Apollo 8 had stepped right over to the unknown when they had gone behind the moon, still none of that was equal to landing on the moon! A man ready to do that would need not nerves of steel but some sense of intimacy with death, conceivably some sense of death as a pale ancestor one had met before and known for years, or, failing that, a sense of tradition so profound, a faith so great, that the moon could reside in some outlying yard of that faith. A more ordinary astronaut, no matter how brave, might be dislodged from normal command of his nerve by the psychical dimensions of the event.

Finally, there had to be motivation beyond measure, some need to succeed which would keep a man pointed to his target, locked into his target, ready to dare the very explosion of his flesh before he would give up his destination. It would have to be a motivation powerful enough to take him through training, public exposure, inhuman tension, and the dread weight of being responsible for NASA’s effort over ten years.

Slayton picked Armstrong. He had been one of the best test pilots in America, yet unlike many of the other astronauts, his personality did not suggest that there was a hive of possible occupations he had left behind. He would not have been a politician, a professional athlete, an Air Force general, a top corporation executive—no, something in his personality and in his history would insist that he seemed born to be a pilot. He had learned to fly before he could drive a car; he had paid for his lessons, nine dollars each, out of the forty cents an hour he earned from deliveries around a pharmacy. He had built model airplanes, read every issue of
Air Trails
, and had excelled at not too much else. He had not been an athlete in high school, nor the center of any high-riding social life—if he played baritone horn in a jazz band, he was still not winning dance contests, and if he went to college it was by the thrifty route of Navy scholarship to study aeronautical engineering, then on to Pensacola for flight training. Yet at twenty-one, he was flying Panther jets in the Korean War, had seventy-eight combat missions and three Air Medals, and had almost been lost twice.
Once he flew a crippled plane back to the carrier
Essex
, another time he brought a plane with one wing half-lost back far enough from enemy lines to parachute to safety. As there are bullfighters who will go back and fight bulls so soon as they recuperate from their last wounds, so Armstrong was always back in a plane, no matter how many experiences he had had which would have encouraged a man to quit. It is worth repeating that he was the only astronaut who did soaring in his spare time. It was apparent that his life was founded upon the act of being aloft.

Of course Armstrong’s qualifications as a matinee idol were not monumental. If he had a face as American as any astronaut in Houston, and a small-town background to match, if he would appeal to all of the silent majority in every town in the Midwest and South, he was still too perfect, too polite, too reserved, finally too pinched in manner to interest that part of America not partisan to space and inclined to give priority to the accelerating needs of the cities. Of course, none of the available astronauts were likely to satisfy. NASA had picked them in the first place for more functional qualities than the ability to arouse a continuing fascination in the public. Armstrong at least would not offend too many sensibilities for he would obviously respect the indefinable chastity of the moon ground; there were all too many astronauts who thought chastity was something which came with a belt. On the other hand, Armstrong had too many qualifications in the next regard. Over the years, he had had not only an intimate acquaintance with the nearness of death, but been in the literal presence of it. List not only the crashes and near-crashes in planes, there was also the death of his young daughter from a brain tumor, the near loss of his family when their house caught fire one night and burned to the ground. This was Jan Armstrong’s account:

Guess at the subsequent shock when Ed White was burned to death in the fire with Grissom and Chaffee.

Armstrong must have been a man for whom dread was as near as breath. Search for evidence in the very lack of emotion with which Armstrong relates what was probably the most unnerving malfunction of a spaceship up to that date. In his Gemini 8 flight with David Scott, the mission had called for rendezvous, then docking with an unmanned Agena capsule previously fired into
orbit. The rendezvous proved successful, so did the docking at first. But in a short period both vehicles began to spin, first slowly, then rapidly. Attempts to reduce the movement failed to work. Here is Armstrong’s account:

What a horror; what a paltry air of description! Two men in a cramped capsule revolving around once each second, the sun flashing with the delirium of a shield in combat, the dials turning with the revolving eye. How difficult to avoid the conviction that one’s existence was finally spinning into a vortex. Unspoken by any astronaut had been a covert wonder about the benign receptions of space. Was there no curse in space, no buried storms in the oceans of space? At that moment, Armstrong and Scott must have felt as if they had blundered past the last taboo into the whirlpool of all fury.