Book Review: Moondust and the Future of Space Exploration

For about 33 years now, nobody has given a tinker’s damn about space exploration. Between 1969 and 1972 we walked, hopped, skipped, drove, stumbled and played golf upon the moon. Then we quickly forgot about it. As author Andrew Smith points out with characteristic irony in his new book Moondust, by 1980 Americans were spending more on playing video Space Invaders than they spent on the actual space program itself.

With questionable timing in the midst of an endlessly expensive war and with mounting storm repair bills, the current administration just announced a Back To The Moon agenda which has been described by the NASA brass as “Apollo on steroids.” Juiced or not, the plan has not whipped up the scientific, technical, romantic or popular frenzy of yore. Exactly what was that go-go era of can-do, A-OK enthusiasm? How did the Apollo project pull it off? Who were those guys? What, if anything, did we get out of it?

These are some of the justified questions bouncing around the nimble mind of journalist Andrew Smith, who was eight years old when man first touched the moon. He embarks upon satisfying some of the questions of his and our space age childhoods by fixating on the most visible symbols of the whole shebang–the moonwalkers themselves. They are, after all, like gods in our midst. Think about this a minute. We have among us now people who have done what no one in the history of the world has ever done: they have left this planet and visited another celestial body. Perhaps the most mind boggling aspect of this phenomenon is that these men are virtually anonymous. Not only are they not recognized, they tend to be ignored at Star Trek conventions. Not only are they not lauded, they had to find ways to pay their mortgages when they returned to earth. They are aging gentlemen and their numbers are dwindling. It is the thought, the certainty, that we will soon have no more living moonwalkers among us that ignited Smith’s anxiety and his need to meet with them. Smith takes us along on the ride as he hunts down each of these national treasures.

Moondust is decidedly not a mere where-are-they-now? book. As a matter of fact, we do find out where they are now, but that is learned as a byproduct of larger questions. As Smith says in the course of his exploration, “I’m also seeing that there is a more practical side to my own interest in these men, because they seem to symbolize, even embody, a question that I and most people I know find themselves asking at regular intervals. Do I stick with life as I know it, be happy and content with the considerable challenge of appreciating and improving that, or shoot for the Moon and risk being dissatisfied, finding that it wasn’t what I expected, or that nothing else can ever match it afterward…? Indeed, it’s possible to see the whole of Apollo, not as a metaphor for this condition, but as a solid expression of it at the most fundamental level, which the Moonwalkers lived and had to try to make sense of afterward…”

With this organic perspective, Smith applies various other labels to the Apollo mindset. He calls it a “freaky adventure,” an “immaculate folly” and “an arcane relic of a more affluent and optimistic time.” Smith recognizes that “the more you look at [Apollo], the more there seem to have been two sharply delineated space programs running parallel within the program–an official one about engineering and flying and beating the Soviets, and an unofficial, almost clandestine other about people and their place in the universe; about consciousness, God, mind, life.” Smith has mined the very idea of Apollo to its core and hits pay dirt with the fundamental dichotomy of science versus soul.

This revelation was not missed by the voyagers themselves, but they tended to “let it rest unexpressed” (in the words of Cole Porter). By training, these were fighter jocks and test pilots who refrained from chatter on radio frequencies and were knighted as astronauts because of, not in spite of their rarefied focus and tightly reined imaginations. Fine men indeed, but as Smith declares, “it seems to me unlikely that they were ever going to become painters or preachers or poets or gurus, or have much to say about the metaphysical resonance of their journey.” That territory belonged to the Soviets, who always had a more romantic attitude about space. Smith points out, “Yuri Gagarin’s first words to his public after his craft’s recovery were: ‘The feelings which filled me I can express with one word: joy.’ You could have coached Alan Shepard till his head exploded and never persuaded him to say something like that.” As true as this is, Smith is actually having his ironic way with us. As he meets up with the remaining moonwalkers, guess what he finds? A painter, a preacher, a poet, a guru and a metaphysician.

Playwright Tom Stoppard once expressed concern that landing on the moon would destroy classic lunar metaphors and that “once we could see ourselves from such a distance, all the absolute ideas of what is good and bad would come to look like local customs coming from a finite place and a kind of moral paralysis would occur.” Smith chides, “That neither of these things happened is fascinating. That it seems to have had the opposite effect on some of the few who actually went is doubly fascinating.” The moonwalkers felt the grandeur, sure enough, but we may have to take Smith’s word for it because they just weren’t the optimum conduits of expression. They still aren’t. This is how Smith describes the syntax of Buzz Aldrin (second man on the moon): “Sometimes when he speaks, you feel that what you’re actually hearing is the grunts and groans of two wrestling teams doing battle inside his skull.” Smith tries to be charitable toward Neil Armstong (first man on the moon), describing him as tantamount to “driving through a night mist: there are outlines and hints of something solid behind it, but any light you throw at him comes straight back at you, until, in the end, you see just what you imagine you see: the reflected glare of your own expectations.” Armstrong flat out won’t talk about anything subjective and his rare public speeches are, according to Smith, downright dull. The bizarre interview with the conversationally dysfunctional and socially challenged John Young (ninth man on the moon) as hilariously reported by Smith is worth the price of the book.

So we leave it to the skilled writers like Smith to put terrestrial words to the ethereal event. Such as his description of the utter isolation each lunar command module pilot experienced while orbiting out of communication contact around the back side of the moon “where the gulf between terror and exultation collapses.” Smith describes this as “a state best evoked on Earth either by drowning or going insane.” We leave it to the critical thinkers like Smith to derive a big picture context for the endeavor. “Apollo also seems to me,” he states, “to be the most perfect imaginable expression, embodiment, symbol, of the twentieth century’s central contradiction: namely, that the more we put our faith in reason and its delcared representatives, the more irrational our world became. Sane political leaders contemplated the mutual destruction of their societies; greater wealth lead to greater dissatisfaction; faster communications which should have made life easier made it harder, because suddenly we expected everything to happen instantly; more efficient food production led to poorer health … the list could go on and on and on.”

Perhaps most importantly, we need observers like Smith to bring perspective to our own concepts and accomplishments. “For all their brilliance and determination, the Soviets never managed to break Earth orbit; not a single cosmonaut left the planet behind and saw it from afar.” Smith reminds us that only a privileged, and now dwindling few Americans were privy to the profound vision and experience of gazing back at home from deep space. “The world won’t be different without them, but the idea of the world will,” Smith expounds. When we no longer have moonwalkers among us, it will leave “the collective imagination a little impoverished.”