Moondust by Andrew Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

his stories we find the Cape abandoned, laid waste by microbes from Mars as dead astronauts circle the earth in their capsule coffins, or serving as a beacon for falling space debris, roamed only by irradiated scavengers seeking icons in mangled bits of spaceship or spaceman bones. We find space explorers going insane midflight, haunting a whole world with their “nightmare ramblings.” In “A Question of Re-Entry,” Ballard’s protagonist hunts for a capsule lost in the Amazon forest, amid growing anxiety that “the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies … the missing capsule [was] itself a fragment of a huge disintegrating fantasy.”
    In “News from the Sun,” I find: “Certainly, the unhappy lives of the astronauts bore all the signs of a deepening sense of guilt. The relapse into alcoholism, silence, and pseudo-mysticism, and the mental breakdowns, suggested profound anxieties about the moral and biological rightness of space exploration.”
    All of which may look like no more than a clever inversion of the claim that the first “Whole Earth” photographs brought back by
Apollo 17
changed our perception of ourselves for the better, but the author was right about one thing: that the Space Age would come to seem an historical anomaly, which didn’t lead where expected and significant numbers of people would come to doubt the very existence of. Meanwhile, his references to the fates of the astronauts … well, these aren’t complete fictions. Ballard knew where he was coming from. Like so much in this tale, what he says is not true, but it has truth.
    Perhaps he was also whispering in my ear as I passed through the turnstiles at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s contribution to the rubric of Florida theme parks. Midday is approachingand the ground is like a skillet. Everyone else is indoors, but I had to come here first, to the
Rocket Garden,
because this is the real thing; an outside park where the astonishing machines spacemen rode into the sky are on display. And they
are
astonishing, but not for the reasons you’d think, because the surprise is how terrifyingly small they are. I could grab a pipe on the side of the Atlas rocket which powered the last Mercury missions and shimmy up in seconds, while the Mercury Redstone that Alan Shepard flew is slender and frail-looking, topped by a little ribbed bird’s beak of a capsule. Who would agree to crouch on top of what now clearly reveals itself as a
missile,
which might otherwise be used to smash a tank, and be shot into Ballard’s “cyanide-blue” Florida sky? Assuming the thing didn’t blow up first. The capsules weren’t even going to have any port-holes to see out of until the astronauts/passengers/test subjects/Spam insisted. Only a Saturn IB, which launched
Apollo 7,
the nervy first crewed flight after the
Apollo 1
fire, looks as though it was made to carry people. Yet even that, slumped on its side, is less impressive than in the imagination. Still, the Saturn V, the vehicle which powered Apollo to the Moon, is yet to come. If you want to see that, you have to buy a ticket and be bussed to a special hangar.
    Indoors I find a large collection of space art, including a painting by
Apollo 12
LM pilot Alan Bean; a shimmering Annie Leibovitz portrait of shuttle commander Eileen Collins, who became the first female shuttle commander in 1999; a haunting silver-black 1982 rendering of the shuttle
Challenger,
which exploded like a firework directly above this place four years later. The most familiar works are Andy Warhol’s Day-Glo
Buzz Aldrin
and Rauschenberg’s fast-paced
Hot Shot
montage, which is built around the powerfully phallic image of a Saturn V lifting off. As I look at these last two, I’m reminded of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s dismissal of them, and Pop Art