Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (52 page)

So Project Apollo was born. On a landscape of machination, economic cynicism, warlockery, the maneuvers of Lyndon Johnson’s gravyboat navy, and out of John F. Kennedy’s profound respect for the dynamics and mechanics of new romantic ages, was Project Apollo born. She would prime a pump for the Government until the war in Vietnam would rip the handle out of her grasp, she would gild the balance sheet of many a corporation until the war in Vietnam would cause a crisis of priorities for the work of corporations, she would give work to hundreds of thousands, and did, until she had to let many of them go; she would create towns and counties; she would be handmaiden, then wife, to the computer; and her spin-offs had hardly begun, she would still change the age; but she had failed until now to become a vision of technology which would put light in the eyes of every poor man. She had failed to become a church for the new age. She was only a chalice for the wounded bewildered heart of the Wasp, a code of honor for corporation executives hitherto bereft of pride. She set electronic engineers and computer programmers to dreaming of ways to attack the problems of society as well as they had attacked the problems of putting men on the moon. But she had not unified nor purged that accompanying world of feverish development and pollution which had kept pace with her pure endeavor.

In this hour they landed on the moon, America was applauding Armstrong and Aldrin, and the world would cheer America for a day, but something was lacking, some joy, some outrageous sense
of adventure. Strong men did not weep in the street nor ladies copulate with strangers. Any armistice to any petty war had occasioned wilder celebrations. It was almost as if a sense of woe sat in the center of the heart. For the shot to the moon was a mirror to our condition—most terrifying mirror; one looked into it and saw intimations of a final disease. But probably it will take the rest of the trip to absorb the remark.

Armstrong and Aldrin were to do an EVA that night. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, and that was presumably a way to describe the most curious steps ever taken. It is one thing to murder the language of Shakespeare—another to be unaware how rich was the victim. Future murders stood in the shadow of the acronyms. It was as if on the largest stage ever created, before an audience of half the earth, a man of modest appearance would walk to the center, smile tentatively at the footlights, and read a page from a data card. The audience would groan and Beckett and Warhol give their sweet smiles.

So, now, on that moon (whose name was
Mond
in German, even if
monde
was the word for “world” in French, now on that moon called
maan
and
maane
in Dutch and Danish) a set of television activities would soon begin. The astronauts would go out from the Lem and set up a TV camera and the American flag, they would lay out three experiments, obtain two tubes of moon soil, fill two boxes of rocks, speak to the President, take photographs, and go back to their Lem. Never would they be more than a hundred feet from the ship. Out of the variety of activities available, they would go through a schedule about as attractive to watch as an afternoon of qualitative analysis in a college lab. Fact, they would not even perform the experiments—they would merely lay them out.

Somewhere in the center of NASA was the American disease: Focus on one problem to the exclusion of every other. When Communism had been the problem, nothing had existed for national policy but anti-Communism. Now, ever since the fire of Apollo 204, there had been only one idea at NASA. Get men to the moon by the end of the decade and get them back. If drama had to
be sacrificed, rid the situation of drama. If scientific investigations would hamper a smooth flight, restrict scientific investigations. A narrowness of vision, constricted by the panic which followed the Apollo fire, lost all register of the true complexity of the event. Propriety had always been the natural soup of any engineering society; now NASA propriety spoke of supercongelations of moral lard. No curse, omen, oath, scar or smell could intrude on the landscape, no revel, no voice, and no unnecessary chancing of human life. It was not that anybody wanted the blood of astronauts any more than they desired the death of bullfighters, auto racers or boxers, it was that NASA had come to believe that if Apollo 11 resulted in death, all space investigation was gone, whereas in fact the irony was that the world, first sacrifices in outer space paid, would have begun to watch future flights with pain and concern. It was not that anybody was about to argue for the taking of unnecessary chances, it was more as if some of the precautions became absurd and so expensive that the mind had to engage in brute thoughts of what the money would mean in all the other places one could name.

Say, it was even that the most necessary experiments were not made. The most cumbersome element in all the flight was the Pressure Garment Assembly, the bulky-wham suit. It was a danger in itself, for it was all too easy, as Aldrin had noted, to press against a whole bank of buttons. It had been designed to protect the astronauts in the vacuums of space, and it consisted of fifteen layers of plastic material, a suit as hard as the material on a fire hose—it took prodigies of strength to move it and intricate adjustments of grace and balance—it is yet worth describing in detail—and this suit, which left the astronauts about as much coordination as a two-year-old in three sets of diapers, was designed to protect them against puncture. Yet no one knew what puncture might mean in space. It was uncertain whether exposure of the flesh to a vacuum would result in quick death or supportable injury. Still, no canary was brought along to be partially exposed, its death or its ability to survive for a time carefully noted. It is a horror, of course, to let a
bird die on the moon—ecology hard upon us, who can jeer at the claim of the antivivisectionists that something divine might not also die, but animals are used everywhere in every closet of behavioral psychology labs, rabbits go out of their minds in electrode-laden harnesses before they are finally fed to the town dump, so what would it have cost NASA except an incision in their hypocrisy if the first critical experiments had been taken to see if partial or temporary exposure to a vacuum was feasible. If so, the suits could be made more agreeable—the explorations more adept.

Well, such experiments were for other occasions. The astronauts, in preparation for the EVA, had been garbed in EMU, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or moon-walk space suit complete. EMU consisted first of three envelopes, a liquid cooling garment, a pressure garment, a thermal-and-micrometeoroid garment, plus a Portable Life Support System for oxygen, plus a backup system, a radio, a waste-management system, a maintenance kit (to work on their own life-supporting machinery), a set of special visors for their helmets, and the ubiquitous biomedical belt. The total weight was one hundred eighty-three pounds—on earth the astronauts staggered around in the EMU when they were able to move at all. On the moon, weight of the suit and pack would be more like thirty pounds, but it still had to feel as much like a spaceship as a space suit, and indeed with a quadrant of rocket thrusters, a computer, and a bag of food-injector, there would have been little to keep the astronauts from going into orbit for a revolution or two. Six hundred pounds of fuel weighing only one hundred pounds on the moon might have done the job!

That was a joke which in another year or two could prove less of a joke. In any case, the EMU was designed to provide an environment in which a man might live while walking through the vacuum of space and the radiations of the solar wind plus the cosmic rays—a suit designed to be bulletproof as well against the occasional micrometeoroid. Most meteoroids were smaller than buckshot, but they traveled at a speed of forty-five thousand miles an hour. (Still, the chance of getting hit was only one in ten thousand—no
army was going to be stopped by that.) More to the point: the EMU would also protect against the heat of the sun in the full lunar day when temperatures rose clear above boiling to 243 degrees Fahrenheit on the moon soil. So the suit had to be insulated against the heat of a fall on the seared ground.

We can imagine what a construction was involved. Early that morning, over nine hours before their landing, back in the Command Module, they had taken off their constant-wear garments, been naked for once after all these days, and as quickly had put on the liquid cooling garment, which was a long-sleeved pair of long johns with two layers of Beta cloth, one on either side of a network of tubing through which cooled water would pass—the liquid cooling garment was not dissimilar in appearance to a scuba diver’s rubber formfitting suit. It was estimated that their labor on the moon pushing the total EMU around would be equal to the exertions of a man shoveling sand, or snow, or sawing wood. So cooling was critical. In that sealed envelope, that man-shaped spaceship surrounding their skin, even a little too much overheating could fog their visor, overload all purge systems.

Next came the Pressure Garment Assembly, a submarine chamber complete in itself. Putting that on over the liquid cooling garment, they would be safe in flight if there were any leaks or punctures in the Lem. The Pressure Garment Assembly was in fact a true space suit itself, the one indeed they wore for the launch; this PGA consisted of a helmet, gloves, and the torso-and-limb suit. PGA had a “comfort” layer of nomex, then a neoprene-coated pressure bladder, finally a nylon restraint layer. The bladder pressed against the skin of the astronaut, pressed all over their bodies with a pressure about a quarter of the earth’s normal atmosphere. Without this bladder, it was assumed that blood might boil in the veins or skin pop open from the internal pressure of the body, which from birth had been stressed to maintain itself against normal atmospheres on earth—in fact no one knew exactly what would happen if a few square inches of skin were suddenly exposed by a tear in the suit to the moon vacuum, no one could even be certain
whether the skin would burn, or the heat of the sun might be less than 243 degrees Fahrenheit even a foot above the moon soil since there would be no air to trap the heat. In any case, once in the pressure garment suit, the effect was equivalent to moving about in a man-shaped balloon. There were restraints on the bladder of course, subtle hoops and rings at all the joints, not altogether unlike the joints in armor; the gloves, in fact, to enable bending of the knuckles, were reminiscent of jouster’s gauntlets, but a balloon it was still, and movements were necessarily deliberate in order not to work at further compressing air already overcompressed in a joint. Needless to say the Pressure Garment Assembly had a plenitude of valves, faucets, plugs, taps, and redundancies. There were four gas connectors, two for oxygen in, two for oxygen out, a water interface between the Portable Life Support System (PLSS) which was worn on the back and the liquid cooling garment underneath, an electrical connector to provide communications, instrumentation and power interface from PLSS to PGA. There was also a urine transfer collector (with valve) to avoid depressurizing the pressure garment. Also pressure gauges, pressure relief valves and seven pockets for data cards, penlight, sunglasses, lanyard, scissors, checklist and utility.

This was the space suit for wear inside the cabin of the Command Module or Lem during launch, docking, undocking or through any period when the hatch door had to be open. For the walk itself, they would add still another covering, the Integrated Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment, a formfitting cover which was laced over the pressure garment and consisted of a plastic armor, proof against heat and meteoroids, composed of two layers of nylon, seven layers of Beta Kapton space laminate, and an outer cloth of Teflon-coated Beta, Teflon being the synthetic with which nonchar frying pans are coated.

The helmet was a transparent polycarbonate shell of Lexan with a sealing ring for attachment to the collar of the suit. For the moon walk two extra visors were attached, a lightly tinted inner visor to reduce glare and fog, and an outer visor in appearance like a fencer’s
mask with a gold film on its surface to reflect solar radiation. When lowered, one could not see the face, but the gold film obstructed no vision from within and altered no colors.

Finally, there was the PLSS and the Oxygen Purge System, which had a half hour of oxygen supply as backup for the PLSS. Both were packs, the Oxygen Purge sitting on the PLSS, and both were hefted in a special fiber-glass shell molded to fit the back. The PLSS contained four hours of oxygen supply and a VHF transmitter and receiver to enable the astronauts to address each other, or by relay to connect themselves to the S-band on the Lem and thereby be able to speak to the ground. There were batteries in the PLSS, and oxygen supply, and ventilation, and a cooling system for the water in the liquid cooling garment, also a remote control system worn on the chest with a camera attached. It had a fan switch, a pump switch, a space suit communicator switch, a volume control for voice, an oxygen quantity indicator, five status indicators, and an interface to switch over to the oxygen purge system. Slung around the neck just beneath the helmet, it was as if a slab of the instrument panel on the Lem had been brought along.

So equipped, in an outfit bulkier than a diving suit, an enormous pack on their back, and heavy lunar overshoes, they were ready to go out on the moon. But we have leaped over their activities in the hours between; it will come without surprise that the astronauts have hardly been idle.

They had landed, there was jubilation in Mission Control, and a moment of fraternization between Armstrong and Aldrin, but in fact they were actually at work in the next instant. No one knew what would await them—there were even theories that most of the surface of the moon was as fragile as icing on a cake. If they landed, and the moon ground began to collapse, they were ready to blast off with the ascent stage even as the descent stage was sinking beneath. But no sound of crumbling came up through the pipes of the legs, no shudder of collapse. A minute passed. They
received the order to Stay. The second Stay–No Stay would be on them nine minutes later, and they rushed through a checklist, testing specific instruments to make certain they were intact from the landing. The thirty-odd seconds of fuel they still had left when they touched down was vented from the descent stage, a hissing and steaming beneath the legs like a steed loosing water on icy ground. Verbs and Nouns were punched into the DSKY. Now came the second Stay. There would not be another Stay–No Stay until the Command Module had made a complete revolution of the moon and would be coming back toward them in good position for rendezvous. So, unless some mishap were suddenly to appear, they had at least another two hours on the satellite. It was time to unscrew their gloves at the wrist and take them off, time to unscrew their helmets at the neck, lift them off.