Moondust by Andrew Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

Gordon)
    APOLLO 14 Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell (CM pilot Stu Roosa)
    APOLLO 15 David Scott and James Irwin (CM pilot Al Worden)
    APOLLO 16 John Young and Charles Duke (CM pilot Ken Mattingly)
    APOLLO 17 Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt (CM pilot Ron Evans)
    Irwin, Shepard and Conrad are gone (heart attack, cancer, motorcycle accident), so nine of the Moon men remain.
    Reg runs me through his impressions of the early space programme; then we fall to talking about the landings and what a queer ship the Lunar Module was.
    â€œI never thought they could land that thing,” he says. “And even then, the prospect of one leg landing on a boulder or a slope seemed so very high.”
    He also admits that when he heard Aldrin tersely announcing the 1202 alarm during the
Eagle
’s final descent, his one and only thought was, “That’s it. They’re going to crash.” In fact, the more you talk to Reg Turnill, the more extraordinary the whole thing starts to seem. He remembers being detailed to show the interloping Norman Mailer around the launch site as the countdown for
Apollo 11
proceeded (“You didn’t care much for him, did you, dear?” notes Reg’s wife, Maggie, as she sets a lunch of trout and new potatoes before us). He also describes
2001
authorArthur C. Clarke stopping by his table as the rocket roared through the clouds to gasp that this was the first time he’d cried in twenty years and the first time he’d prayed in forty. Then the author declared, “This is the last day of the old world,” and Reg thought that was marvellous. He also believed it. As they watched, surrounded by people punching the air, clapping, applauding, bawling and shouting “Go! Go!” they all did. When missions
18, 19
and
20
were cancelled for lack of funds, Reg shared the astronauts’ distress as if he’d been due to ride with them himself.
    â€œThey never really got away from the equatorial regions of the Moon,” he laments. “There was even talk of having astronauts descending into craters on ropes. These were going to be great missions of discovery.”
    I catch a cab back to the station thinking that this is the first time – it certainly won’t be the last – that I’ve heard Apollo spoken of as unfinished business. It may have been dead to me for many years, but for the people who were part of it, it remains vividly alive.
    Before the spacemen, Cape Canaveral – The Cape – was a sweltering nothing, paradise for malarial swarms of bugs and birds and alligators who’ll still slither into the backseat of your rental car if you ignore the warning signs about leaving doors open, but now it’s all flat, ruler-straight highways and boxy wooden houses and malls and motels and more highways. A permanent haze hangs over the area like an opaque shroud and seems to seep into the spaces between things: there are no natural vantage points and there is nothing to see – it’s a featureless, beautyless place, which is why the U.S. Air Force chose it as a launching ground for military rockets in the first place, and it wasn’t until air-conditioning and astronauts arrived that civilians came scuttling behind, chasing thrills and autographs and cut-price tans. These days,
these days
being July 2002, they call this place the Space Coast.
    On the flight from England, I was lost in a brilliant collection of J. G. Ballard short stories called
Memories of the Space Age.
Written between 1962 and 1988, most of them revolve around the Cape, and Cocoa Beach in particular, which is where the space programme’s human cargo lived in the run-up to missions. Ballard’s thrillingly jaundiced view of the Space Age is that it constituted a crime against evolution, a blind, hubristic leap into a realm where we do not belong, where all we can do is sow our disease and spread the human stain ever more thinly across the Universe. Accordingly, in