Moonstruck

On July 20, 1969, the collective imagination of the planet was captured by the grainy black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. On a family holiday in Bettystown, County Louth, my childish thoughts were focused not on the two indistinct figures beamed back from the Moon’s surface, but on the other guy; the one left behind in the spaceship circling above them, waiting in limbo for what must have seemed like an eternity for the safe return of his comrades.

Michael Collins, the astronaut in question, missed out on the great symbolic moment of man setting foot on the moon, yet his role in the unfolding drama seemed to me the most heroic, certainly, the most lonely, of all. “Collins moved through a continual succession of sun-drenched lunar day, soft earthlight, and unyielding blackness, ” writes Andrew Chaikin, in his extraordinarily detailed and evocative book about the Apollo missions, Man On the Moon. “For 48 minutes out of each orbit, from Loss of Signal to Acquisition of Signal, he knew a loneliness unprecedented in human history.”

Collins was alone in the Columbia spacecraft for 22 hours. In the event, he did not even get to hear the most famous words uttered in the 20^th century. As Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface – “That’s one small step for man…” then, that Shakespearean pause, “…one giant leap for mankind” – the Columbia has just slipped behind the far side of the moon and he had lost the moon-earth-moon link-up engineered by mission control for his benefit. By the time he reappeared, Armstrong and Aldrin were planting the American flag on the Sea of Tranquillity, but a technical fault kept him cut off. While an estimated 600 million people on planet earth watched and listened, transfixed, the man closest to those momentous events could only imagine them.

Reading Chaikin’s book brought home to me the full responsibility and risk of Apollo the adventures. If disaster had struck Apollo 11 – say, if the Eagle, the landing craft, had malfunctioned doing its take-off from the moon, or if it had later failed to dock with the Columbia craft – Collins would have had to do the unthinkable: leave his partners behind and journey back to earth alone. For the rest of his life he would have had to carry an impossibly heavy burden: the loss of his friends, and the death of the greatest of all American dreams. It would have been a disaster with implications we can barely imagine.

Pyke never got to meet Collins, who declined to be photographed for personal reasons – he had just lost his son – nor Armstrong, who now fiercely protects his privacy and had retreated to a remote home in rural Ohio, but he did photograph and talk to the other Apollo 11 astronaut, Aldrin, as well as 10 other men who had been in outer space. He asked each of them what space meant to them and, unsurprisingly, got some interesting answers.

“I was ordered to Washington DC in 1959 to listen to overtures about going into space in a capsule on top of a rocket, ” replied Wally Schirra, whose career spanned both the Gemini and Apollo missions. “I was not interested, and I lost interest completely when it was added that they would launch monkeys and chimpanzees first. Later, I realized that, as a fighter pilot, if I wanted to go higher, faster and farther, this was the way. I left earth three times and found no other place to go. Please, take care of Spaceship Earth.”

To Pyke’s surprise, he found that many of the American space pioneers had, like Yuri Gagarin before them, been treated shabbily by the government that was, simultaneously, holding them up as the ultimate exemplars of the American dream. “Armstrong was sent out on extraordinary meet-and-greet itineraries, doing maybe 15 interviews a day as well as speeches, but nobody really looked after him. He was booked into cheap hotels, often he didn’t have time to eat all day.”

If Armstrong took his destiny in hand and retreated voluntarily from the glare of celebrity, Buzz Aldrin had an altogether more difficult time: he struggled with maniac depression before finding a new role as a one-man think tank, designing everything from new launch vehicles to scenarios for returning on the Moon. Charlie Duke, the tenth man to walk on the Moon, went the other way and set up his own church in Texas. In all there have been six successful missions to the Moon (and one unsuccessful one, Apollo 13), and 12 men have walked on it, two during each mission.

Rusty Schweickart, known to his compatriots as ‘the hippy astronaut’ because he preferred to listen to the Grateful Dead in space rather than the regulation country-and-western recordings, brought a collection of quotations by John and Robert Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He secretly attached them to the inside of his spacesuit, and they were there with him when he walked out of Apollo 9 into space.

Schweickart also experienced something that no other astronaut, before or since, has: because of a technical hitch that occurred just as he stepped outside the craft, he had to wait five minutes while it was corrected. Instead of working at his tasks quickly and intensely, as he had been trained to, he suddenly had breathing space, time to try and take in where he was, what he was doing. He held on to the rail of Apollo 9 and – for five long minutes – glided through the vastness and silence of space. Below him he could see America drift by, and even, after a while, make out southern California, where he lived. It was a life-changing moment, and, like the rest of them, Schweickart has, to some degree, lived in the shadow of that moment ever since.

The last word goes to Frank Borman, who journeyed into space on Apollo 8: “My experience on Apollo 8 helped me to see how isolated and fragile our earth really is. It was also beautiful. It was the only object in the entire universe that was neither black nor white.”