Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

INDEX

PROLOGUE

THEN THERE WERE NINE

ON THE MORNING of July 9, 1999, I set out to meet Charlie and Dotty Duke in the bar of a London hotel. It was to be a brief encounter for a small magazine article of a type that I normally avoided, but even at a glance the Dukes were too intriguing to pass by.

What I knew about them was that in April 1972, Charlie had become the tenth of only twelve human beings to gaze back at the Earth from the surface of the Moon. I knew that he’d stayed there for three euphoric days, then come home and imploded: that he’d lost his moorings and been unable to settle; had terrorized his children and tormented his wife, before eventually finding peace and resolution with her through faith in God. Now the pair ran a ministry out of New Braunfels, Texas. They were in town to talk about it.

The longer I looked, the more fascinated I became with the strange and intense three and a half years in which the landings took place, during which the world seemed to shudder and change shape forever. By the end, a black Rolling Stones fan had been beaten to death at Altamont and the Beatles had split in acrimony, with JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King seeming like distant memories. Vietnam was effectively over and the counterculture which defined itself in opposition to the war was drifting off to nowhere like dust in a desert wind, while Watergate reared and racial conflict escalated and the pop music that swirled around my ten-year-old head seemed cooler and more cynical than it ever had before. As NASA flight director Chris Kraft would remark, The best of times for America was also the worst of times. Now recession was bearing down and a darker, harsher world was emerging.

And although the space programme was begat by the Cold War, the lunar landings still looked like such a crazy Sixties thing, a last waltz with optimism in a decade which arguably ended on December 19, 1972, when the Apollo 17 astronauts sailed home knowing that the adventure was over and its promise had been a mirage. No Merry Prankster or acid-popping mystic ever did anything freakier than this, and yet the ambiguities of the enterprise seemed endless. What had humanity gained from President Kennedy’s capricious decision to launch his nation at the Moon, and the outrageous cash it required? The lunar programme cost twenty-four billion 1960s dollars: at its peak, NASA was swallowing 5 per cent of the U.S. federal bud get. Was all that time, energy, money, life, wasted?

Charlie Duke wasn’t the only one for whom the return to Earth was difficult. I traced the others and found that they’d reacted to their experience in wildly different ways. The First Man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, became a teacher and retreated from public view, getting back to the fundamentals of the planet, while his partner Buzz Aldrin spent years mired in alcoholism and depression, then threw himself into developing space ideas which all looked impossibly fanciful to me. The naturally rebellious Alan Bean of Apollo 12 quit space to become an artist, endlessly rendering scenes from the lunar quest in oils, and Edgar Mitchell experienced a flash of understanding in which he switched on to the Universe, sensing an intelligence he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand. Even more dramatically, Jim Irwin purported to have heard God whispering to him at the feet of the majestic, gold-coloured Apennine Mountains, leaving NASA for the Church upon his return. Meanwhile, the fearsome Alan Shepard, the only one to admit crying on the surface, did the one thing no one thought he would do – could do: he mellowed.

Among the rest, John Young became a fierce critic of NASA after the Challenger shuttle disaster and left the Astronaut Office in a fog of anger and grief, and Last Man on the Moon Gene Cernan admits to a nagging disappointment with everything that has followed his experience with Apollo 17 (it’s tough to find an encore). His flight companion, Jack Schmitt, became a U.S. senator, but found politicians myopic and frustrating after the creativity he’d grown used to. He wasn’t re-elected and I’d heard that he latterly worked as a space consultant in Albuquerque. All described an almost mystical sense of the unity of humankind as seen from afar. A lot happened up there. The post-flight divorce rate was, in more than one sense, astronomical.

With hindsight, the astronauts’ reactions should have been predictable. Suddenly, the twelve had to find answers to a question that had never been asked in quite the same way before – namely, Where do you go after you’ve been to the Moon? In addition to their own hopes and expectations, they had the fantasies of faceless millions at their backs and millennia’s worth of lore. The Nepalese, for instance, believe that their dead reside on the Moon; when the Apollo 14 veteran Stu Roosa visited there, he grew increasingly flustered at being asked, So did you see my grandmother? The walkers will forever be caught between the gravitational pull of the Moon and Earth’s collective dreaming. Charlie Duke grew angry as he admitted getting letters from conspiracy theorists who hold that the moonlandings were staged and call him a liar.

I liked Duke. At the age of sixty-four he was still tall and handsome and spoke with a balmy drawl that seemed familiar, though it took a while for me to place it. I felt like a child lost in a favourite bedtime story as he described his flight and the striking luminescence of our world as it moves through the lonely black void of space. From the Moon, he said, the planet was like a jewel, so colourful and bright that you felt you could reach up and grab it, hold it in your hands and marvel at it like the precious thing it is. Then he described his horror at realizing that his life could only be one long, slow anticlimax from there. All that effort and creativity . . . what had it been for? The development of Teflon? A few photographs? By 1972, Americans didn’t give a damn about space. Then Duke spoke of his touching hope that one day we’ll go back there and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that from where I was sitting, that didn’t look likely – at least not in his lifetime. Perhaps not even in mine.

When our time was up, I thanked him for a conversation I’d greatly enjoyed and made to leave, but Charlie told me that he had a gap in his schedule, so we could talk a while longer if I wanted to. He then explained that he and Dotty had received some troubling news the night before, when word arrived that Pete Conrad, the wisecracking, larger-than-life commander of the Apollo 12 mission, the second one to land, had been injured in a motorbike accident near his home in California.

Conrad was the one whose colourful swearing worried NASA suits, but who had kept cool when his Saturn rocket was hit by lightning – twice – on takeoff, sending cockpit alarms into a cacophonous frenzy and the ground into panic. When a journalist doubted his assertion that Armstrong’s One small step . . . speech was not scripted, Conrad secretly bet her $500 that he could say what ever he wanted when his turn came and nominated his words on the spot. Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a long one for me! she duly heard the diminutive astronaut trill as he became the third person on the Moon on November 19, 1969. He was also the one who took a cassette player on the trip so that he and his crew could bounce around to The Girl from Ipanema and The Archies’ Sugar Sugar, and allowed copilot Al Bean to take the pirouetting gold Lunar Module, so spidery and fragile-looking, for a joyride round the back side of the Moon, where NASA couldn’t see what they were up to. When they went for their lunar stroll, Mission Control had to tell the two friends to stop yammering and exclaiming their delight to each other, as they couldn’t hear a word Dick Gordon was saying from the orbiting command craft.

Then Dotty was called to the phone and came back with the shocking news that Conrad had died of his injuries, and I wasn’t surprised to see Charlie Duke’s eyes cloud over as he talked about his comrade. I later learned that the place where he fell was called Ojai, a Native American word for Moon, but it was the words Duke left me with that set my mind reeling that day. He said them quietly and evenly, as though uttering a psalm.

Now there’s only nine of us.

Only nine.

On the way home my mind buzzed with the stories Duke had told, yet I also found myself overtaken by a sadness I hadn’t seen coming – not because only nine people remain who’ve seen us from the surface of the Moon, but because one day, possibly one day soon, there won’t be anyone who has. Nevertheless, I went home and carried on as before, expecting to think no more about the Apollo project, banishing it to the corner of my mind that it had occupied so obediently for three decades.

But something unexpected happened: the spacemen wouldn’t go away. Three years later, I still found myself slipping outside to stare at the Moon in a way that I hadn’t since childhood, trying to imagine the tense drift toward it, the ecstatic return. I wondered whether the Moonwalkers had reconciled themselves to being Earthbound; whether they’d made peace with our world or continued to mourn their strangled hopes. I wanted to know what kind of people they’d become and what they’d learned; how they felt about the weird trip now and whether they thought it had changed them. Even more than this, I wondered why I suddenly cared when I hadn’t before. I began to ask myself what the whole thing had been about – what it had meant, if indeed it meant anything – and to develop an inchoate sense that the answers to these questions were important, even if I wasn’t yet sure why.

And in the end I realized that there was only one way to try and answer them. I was going to have to find the nine Moon-walkers and see for myself where the odyssey had led, while I still could.

1 DREAMING OF A MOONAGE

WHEN YOU’VE SHARED a moment with the whole world, it can be hard to know precisely where your memories end and everyone else’s begin.

I see a blindingly bright California day. I am cruising on my bike, a metallic green Schwinn with swept-back handlebars and a long chopper seat, which I’ve only just stopped parking in my bedroom at night so I can fall asleep looking at it. I want to be Evel Knievel and have spent the unending American school holiday building ramps with bricks and bits of wood lifted from local building sites. And no one can outjump me, no one, especially not David, who rides by my side . . . mad, weird David, who’s twice everyone else’s size and has a penis like a man’s and spends all his time trying to make hang gliders out of 2×4’s and sheets of plastic. This morning, I found him begging my brother to jump off his garage harnessed to one of these contraptions and when I pointed out that if the thing plummeted like a stone without anyone attached to it, it would probably do the same with my brother aboard, he insisted that, if you looked – like really, really looked – you would find that it had moved forward from the vertical by at least eight inches. It had, in other words, flown. David’s parents sunbathe nude in his backyard sometimes. I can’t imagine mine doing that.

No one’s in the backyard today. We’ve just come from his place and his mom and dad are hunched in armchairs, squinting at the TV. We’ve been riding around for hours, and it’s the same everywhere. Cars bake in drives. Dads are home. It’s as though the grown-up world is frozen and the Universe holding its breath while these spectral black-and-white images float across the screen, the same pictures in every single house, like the ghosts of ghosts of ghosts.

They’re going to the Moon. My dad took me into the garden to look at it last night. I saw him frown as it reflected watery gold on his upturned face, as if someone had stepped over his grave or shone a bright light in his eyes. It was one thing to land a man on the Moon, quite another to bring him back afterwards. But to have stood there in the first place . . . the thought alone made you tingle. Perhaps coming back wouldn’t be such a big deal after that. No wonder David and I, and everyone we know, have spent this summer trying to reach the sky in one way or another.

We’re in Orinda, California, a quiet suburb on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. It’s Sunday, July 20, 1969, and the good things in my life are as follows: my bike; the chattering creek that runs through a ravine at the end of the garden; the fact that my teacher next term is going to be Mrs. Lipkin, the foxy twenty-six-year-old hippy chick who’s already been married and divorced twice and plays Jefferson Airplane songs to her class on guitar. And there’s my friend Scott McGraw, who’s older than me, wears lank long hair and bell-bottom jeans, goes everywhere barefoot and is the first person to tell me that Santa Claus is a lie but if you think that’s bad, check out what fuck really means. Scott’s brother plays in a band called Love Is Satisfaction. Love Is Satisfaction: I love that.

All the streets in our neighbourhood are named after characters from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This is the kind of thing people do when they’re building from scratch, out of nothing, with no past to constrain them. My street’s called Van Ripper Lane and it slopes in a long arc from top to bottom. At the top end are the sun-soaked hills of Orinda Downs, where we pretend to ride motocross and find fossils and catch lizards in the rocky outcrops perfumed by wild thyme. When there’s a breeze, ripples drift across the tall, golden grass and the hills seem to shimmer and I love to lie in it and let it tickle my face as I stare into the cloudless sky. Sometimes, if you stay there long enough, the smaller creatures forget that you’re not part of the hill and they’ll scuttle around you without fear. Then you do feel part of the hill and the infinitely receding worlds within it. Within a few years, this will be an estate, full of mock-Georgian houses and fences everywhere. The world is changing.

We coast down the hill and into my drive. David throws his bike on the lawn. I park mine on its stand, issuing a warning to my brother and his tiny, blind-as-a-bat friend Ernie that if they knock it over, I will kill them. Without the wind in our faces, it’s hot outside, so we trot through the screen door and into the kitchen, from where a trail of sound and excited voices draws us toward the living room. It’s 1:15 pm. My parents’ friends the Reuhls and the sweet and elderly Fishes from across the road are leaning forward on couch and chairs, forward over the gold-and-orange shag carpet, clutching beers or cups of coffee tightly with varying mixtures of anxiety and disbelief on their faces. A familiar singsong southern drawl is floating from the TV, decorated with static and peculiar little squeaks and pings which sound like someone flicking the lip of a giant wineglass with their finger. We know this as the voice of Mission Control. His name is Charles Duke, but the astronauts just call him Houston. There are other voices, too, but they all sound distant and intermingled and it’s hard to get hold of what they’re saying. An air of expectancy hangs in the room.

Now we hear:

Thirty seconds.

Silence.

Contact light.

Shutdown.

Descent engine command override. Engine arm, off, 413 is in.

A pause.

Silence.

More silence.

"Houston, Tranquillity Base here . . . the Eagle has landed."

No one in the room seems to get it straightaway. The adults look at each other. Then cheering in the background somewhere and the drawl, like a sigh, the first hint of emotion from inside the box.

Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.

The room erupts. We erupt, too. My dad ruffles my hair and slaps David on the back. All the little kids run in.

Boys – they’re on the Moon!

Dad has tears in his eyes. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him with tears in his eyes, and it will only happen once more.

None of us have any idea what has been going on behind the scenes during those final moments, although the evidence was there in the coded monotone exchanges if you knew how to read them.

THE CREW NASA chose for this landmark mission consists of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, and they’re a peculiar trio. The flight plan called for Collins to orbit the Moon in exalted frustration, tending to the ship that would provide their ride home, the Command Module Columbia, while his colleagues dropped to the surface in the Eagle lander. He is a communicative character; enjoys fine wines and good books; paints and grows roses. But Armstrong is remote and self-reliant – Collins likes him, but can’t find a way through the defences – while the live-wire Aldrin just strikes him as dangerous.

The build up to the mission was insane. On one occasion the astronauts went on a geology trip to the mountains, but couldn’t hear a word their instructors were saying for the sound of media choppers jostling and whirring overhead like ravenous giant mosquitoes. No one knows for sure what’s up there, so the newspapers and TV current-affairs programmes have been full of catastrophic predictions. One academic has been assuring audiences that Moondust on the astronauts’ abominable-snowman suits will ignite the moment it comes into contact with oxygen back in Eagle’s cabin, if it doesn’t simply explode underfoot. Another warns that the surface may be composed entirely of dust, into which the craft will sink embarrassingly the moment it touches down, never to be seen again. Still more experts worry over the prospect of inadvertently bringing back an alien bacterium that will destroy all life on Earth, as in the sci-fi movies The Quatermass Experiment or The Andromeda Strain. Magazines contain drawings of what strange, subterranean creatures may lurk below the surface, hungry for roly-poly white snowmen from Earth.

So it’s hardly surprising that there’s been tension in the cabin of the Columbia Command Module. In the early part of the flight, Aldrin kept describing these flashes he would see in the corner of his eyes as the Moon loomed before swallowing them into orbit, and Armstrong was irritated by this suggestion of something unknown and mysterious, just as he is when the other man drops to his knees and says Communion after touching down safely. In the lander, the Lunar Module or LM (pronounced lem) – a bizarre and spindly construction which looks as though it was assembled from toothpicks and egg cartons by a class of five-year-olds, then roughly covered in foil by their moms – he has constantly felt behind the airplane. Not quite in control, and Armstrong doesn’t like that, either.

But the real drama happened as they were coming down, nearing the surface. As David and I sped unsuspecting down the road; as Mum was pulling some beers from the fridge; as my father and Mr. Reuhl and Mr. Fish, who used to pay me a princely two dollars to mow his minuscule lawn and would have paid more if Dad hadn’t instructed him not to, were discussing the implications of all this and the probability that they would get to visit the Moon as tourists in their own lifetimes. Mike Collins had released the Eagle from Columbia’s grip just after 10 am our time. They’d flown in formation for a short while so that the Command Module pi lot could inspect the other craft from his porthole. Satisfied that it was in good repair, he masked his anxiety with a joke.

"I think you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine, there, Eagle, despite the fact that you’re upside down."

In zero gravity there is no upside down. Armstrong played along. Somebody’s upside down, he said.

Then a burst of thrusters took Columbia away until the Eagle was a little sparkly point of light, like a tiny diamond floating between Collins and the cratered surface. He had considered the chances of success and privately rated them at about 50 per cent, unaware that his commander had come up with the same odds. These were generous according to some of their colleagues’ calculations.

With ten minutes remaining to touchdown, Eagle was 50,000 feet above the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin stood side by side, spacesuited, anchored to the floor by harnesses. Everything had gone according to plan so far and preparations were on schedule. They had pressurized Eagle’s fuel tanks, primed the computer and checked their trajectory by training their navigation telescope on the sun. They activated the camera and armed the descent engine. Then Aldrin pressed the ignition button and the rocket engine came to life. Thirty seconds later, the cabin shuddered as they roared to full thrust.

And now there was a problem.

Eagle was facing the Moon, and Armstrong noticed that the landmarks he navigated by were coming up two seconds ahead of expectation: they were set to overshoot the landing area, but the computer hadn’t picked up the error. At 46,000 feet, he flipped the craft over, so that the landing radar faced down and he and Aldrin found themselves looking up at the shimmering, miragelike Earth. The ride was noticeably jerkier than in simulation as Aldrin compared data from the radar and computer and found a discrepancy of several thousand feet. Knowing the radar to be more reliable, he decided to instruct the computer to accept its information and act on it, but as he hit the necessary buttons, the piercing buzz of the Master Alarm filled Eagle’s cabin. They looked down and saw the PROG light glowing sulphuric amber on the computer display.

Program alarm, said Armstrong.

His voice stayed even, but the words were clipped, urgent. Aldrin instructed the computer to supply the alarm code and 1202 flashed onto the screen. He didn’t know what this meant, but suspected that it was something to do with the computer being overloaded. This had failed to happen in any of the simulation he’d been a part of. Now wasn’t the time for it.

The focus turned to Earth and the thirty-five-year-old flight director, Gene Kranz. He knew the alarm was serious, because he’d seen something like it back in the first week of July and he’d aborted the virtual mission as a result. The truth was that he and his staff had been having problems for the last hour, with communications cutting out – sending Mission Control screens blank and filling headsets with static – then resuming for barely long enough to justify continuing the descent. There was a 2.6-second delay in communications with the Moon and so no time for elaboration. In simulations, controllers had discovered a dead-man’s box which was defined by this delay, in which the LM would always hit the surface before they could react to a problem and order an abort, and about which nothing could be done. Now the exchanges were breathless and suspended, like the Eagle itself.

Kranz quickly consulted the people around him, listening for signs of strain in their voices, then turned to the young MIT computer boffin Steve Bales.

But the Lunar Module computer was too complicated for one person alone to understand. Bales knew that it wanted to abort the mission. What he didn’t know was why. So he, in turn, relayed the problem to his team of backroom experts, who guessed that the computer, finding itself with too many tasks to perform – again, no one knew why – was automatically returning to the start of its computation cycle, to begin again. In the background, Armstrong could be heard requesting tersely: Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm. Aborting a landing at this stage was neither easy, nor certain of success, and once you’d done it, there was no room for further failure. They decided to carry on. So long as the alarm was intermittent, they could continue their descent safely. If it became continuous, however, the computer could stop working altogether and they were lost.

Standing at the flight controls of the plummeting lander, Armstrong heard Duke’s voice.

You are go for landing.

The trouble was that he and Aldrin had been distracted by the alarms and the mental preparations for an abort. By the time the computer had been pacified and attention returned to the task of getting Eagle down, the Moon was only 1,000 feet below and they were racing past the inviting plain on which their hopes had been pinned. In the huge, glowing control room, seventy people who’d spent months and years training for this moment caught their breaths in unison, like a theatre audience, when the landing radars abruptly corrected themselves and the little toy Space Invaders graphic in front of them jumped to four miles off-range: at six, mission rules called for a mandatory abort. Armstrong looked ahead and was not thrilled by what he saw: a field of huddled boulders, gathered like the remains of an ancient cemetery around the dark lip of a crater, into which the computer was blindly flying them. He made some quick calculations as to whether he could bring the craft down in front of the boulder field, knowing that they were probably composed of lunar bedrock and the geologists would be ecstatic, but realized that they were still going too fast. He pressed some buttons and took control of the craft, pitching it forward until it was almost upright. Now the rocket was slowing their rate of descent, without diminishing forward speed. He would try to set down in the first clear space he saw.

No one except Armstrong knew about the crater or the boulders. Aldrin had his eyes fixed on the instrument panel and was issuing a steady stream of data, which is what Mission Control and the rest of us were hearing.

Three hundred and fifty feet . . . down at four . . . three hundred thirty, three and a half down . . .

Aldrin’s remote mantra was reassuring, but masked the fact that, with his partner too absorbed in finding a way to bring Eagle down before her fuel ran out to tell anyone what was happening, even Mission Control was in the dark. All they knew was that the plan had been ditched and Armstrong was now on his own, a quarter of a million miles from home. There was nothing they could do to help. Duke whispered to Kranz, I think we’d better be quiet.

Three hundred and fifty feet up, Eagle skimmed over the boulders. Armstrong pitched her back to a rearward angle in order to avoid picking up too much speed. He banked left to skirt another field of rocks as the Moon seemed to rear up at him and telemetry showed his heart rate surge.

How’s the fuel? he asked Aldrin. An unnatural calm in his voice masked the fact that his pulse was now racing at over 150 beats per minute.

Eight per cent, came the reply. Less than in the simulations.

At 250 feet, Aldrin stole his first glance out of the window, then quickly returned to his instruments. Armstrong was still searching for a landing site: he chose one, then discovered it to be flanked by another crater. There was now ninety seconds’ worth of fuel left, but twenty of those had to be saved for an abort: if they got to that stage and still hadn’t landed, the computer would automatically try to shoot them back into space and putative safety, no matter how close they were to the surface. Back in the control room, an automatic sequencer had begun counting down to such an eventuality, and everyone knew it. Armstrong edged forward and saw a clearing of about 200 square feet, bounded by craters on one side and more boulders on the other. The Moon was 100 feet beneath them. This had to be the place.

Eagle needed to be brought down in a straight vertical line. Any horizontal movement at the point of impact could snap off one of her matchstick legs. Yet, as he listened to Aldrin reciting his litany of figures – seventy-five feet . . . down two and a half . . . four forward . . . four forward . . . – Armstrong suddenly found his view stolen by an eruption of dust and rock that arced away in dense sheets, obscuring the landing area completely. Momentarily unsettled, he was training his eyes on some distant rocks in order to maintain his bearing when he heard Charlie Duke’s voice in his ear, warning sixty seconds. No one in Mission Control knew about the crater, the boulders, the dust. All they knew was that in every successful simulation Armstrong had landed by now. The years of preparation, the billions of dollars, the lives that had been sacrificed on the way – most notably the crew of Apollo 1 thirty months previously – all that energy and ingenuity and life was now compacted into the next sixty seconds and the judgement of one man. The room was held in an agonized silence.

At thirty feet, Armstrong found Eagle to be drifting backward. He didn’t know why, but knew that landing while he couldn’t see where he was going would be extremely dangerous. He wrestled with the controls, eventually halting the backward movement, but picking up a horizontal drift in the process. He felt frustrated that he wasn’t flying well enough, and would have given anything to buy more time, but there was none to buy. They were now hanging twenty feet above the surface of the Moon and had entered the dead-man’s curve – the point at which bailing out becomes impossible and if the manoeuvre doesn’t work, you crash.

From the earth: Thirty seconds.

Aldrin: Contact light.

Through the storm of dust, whiskery probes attached to the LM’s feet had made contact with something. The pi lot had been instructed to cut Eagle’s descent engine at this height, because engineers calculated that it could be blown up by the back pressure from its own exhaust if he didn’t. But Armstrong didn’t do it. In his fight to keep the thing steady, he failed to hear Aldrin’s call.

Fortunately, the engineers were wrong about the back pressure. Still firing, Eagle settled into the dust so easily that neither man felt the impact. Armstrong’s hand flew to the Engine Stop button and he announced, Shutdown. There was a whirr of action as he hit more switches and buttons and Aldrin ran through the post-landing checklist. Then there was a moment of stillness. The two men turned to face each other, grinning through their helmet visors, and clasped hands. After what seemed like an age, Armstrong advised a waiting world that the Eagle had landed. The announcement that his words were coming from Tranquillity Base momentarily threw Charlie Duke, who became tongue-tied and began Roger, Twan – before gathering himself and offering a correction.

Tranquillity. They were on the Sea of Tranquillity. With ten seconds’ worth of fuel to spare, they were down.

Those last ten minutes contained 600 of the most vivid seconds a human being ever lived and we knew nothing of them. Countless things went not exactly wrong, but different from plan and expectation, below optimum in NASA’s arid tongue, and for decades to come Steve Bales will find it hard to listen to tapes of the landing without feelings of discomfort and foreboding, even knowing that it turned out all right. Now Armstrong and Aldrin have to prepare the craft to take off again in a hurry, in case of trouble. After that, they are under orders to get some sleep, but Armstrong won’t sleep, because he’s trying to work out what to say when he becomes the first human to set foot on another world. No one seems to have noticed that this is also the first properly global media event: in a future the astronauts can’t yet see, politicians will have marketeers and spin doctors to help with this sort of thing. In July 1969, however, he’s on his own. It’s 3:17 pm Houston time, 1:17 pm in Orinda, California. The walk is set for ten hours from now. What are we going to do until then?

WHAT’S IT LIKE to be alive in 1969?

Bobby Kennedy has just been assassinated and so has Martin Luther King. It’s a strange word, assassinate, which to my eight-year-old ears sounds sort of clandestine and exotic, not like the blunt and scary killed or murdered. The Kennedy shooting happened a year ago, but I recall it very clearly, because we were driving to Disneyland the next morning and I woke to Dad telling me that we might have to call the trip off because people might not want to skip around having fun at such a terrible time. But in the end they did, so we went. I don’t know why they shot him, or his brother. No one seems to know.

I understand more about King than Kennedy. On the windowsill of our classroom last term, there were piles of biographies of famous Americans and I devoured them, but the one I liked best was about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who risked all kinds of harm to help lead other escaped slaves to freedom in the north on the Underground Railroad. The local education authority had cooked up a scheme to mix kids from our mostly white suburbs with black ones from Oakland and take them on field trips. I’d made some good friends at places like the University of California science lab, where you could watch massive, tape-spooling computers do amazing things like make a dot travel from one side of a screen to the other, or count until they reached infinity or you got bored and pressed a red button – whichever came first – at which point they would start over again. The thing I remember most clearly about those outings, though, is Andy Leeman, who was sitting next to me the day they announced it, turning and scowling, "I wonder what it’s like to sit next to a nigger." Every day on the news, there seem to be pictures of black people being hit with truncheons or pinned to walls by the jets of fire hoses. It’s frightening.

In fact, the news always seems bad. Mum watches TV on a weekday morning when they hold the Vietnam draft, live, like a lottery. If your number comes up, she says, you’ve lost and have to go fight. At summer school this year, they showed us a film called The Lottery, in which the population of a small town gathers for an annual festival of some kind, where everyone – men, women and children – has to take a little folded-up piece of paper from a box and open it up. They’re all laughing and joking with each other until one woman, whom we’ve watched shepherding her children to the gathering, opens her paper to find a black spot on it, at which point everyone stones her to death.

Afterwards, we had a discussion and I wondered whether the film was about bullying. There’s a girl in my class named Kelly, whom all the locally raised kids pick on viciously for reasons that I haven’t yet understood. Soon after we arrived from New York, I felt sorry for her and sat next to her on the school bus one day, but everyone else teased me so much that I stayed away from her after that. She seems to smile a lot, but not a happy smile. And last week, in her summer-school science class, Mrs. Lipkin came in to find that someone had drawn a swastika on the blackboard. She dropped her Coke bottle and threw both hands over her mouth and ran back out. Later she came in and explained why. She was Jewish. I’d been gazing at the symbol before she came in, thinking that it was an interesting shape. I had no idea what it meant. I loved Mrs. Lipkin, who would give me my first Beatles album at the end of the school year, and was upset that she was upset, and then a few days later Scott and I found a gopher snake that someone had strung up by the neck and used for target practice with an air rifle. There’s a lot of peace and love in the air according to the songs they play on KFRC, but not necessarily in the air around me.

So, like all eight-year-olds, I recognize brutality to be the inevitable defining feature of my world. And outside of school, life is really okay. We spend our days catching snakes and lizards and frogs and, as if on a mission to prove that adults don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, black widow spiders, which we keep in jars as pets. Accordingly, the things I wouldn’t mind being when I grow up are: Evel Knievel, obviously; a zoologist specializing in creatures that terrify my mother; an astronaut and/or the lead guitarist in a band, even if Scott assures me that I have to be the bass player because I’m skinny and tall for my age.

Of those four things, what I’d most like to be is an astronaut, but I’m not going to admit that, because all boys want to be astronauts at this time, really all boys and even some girls – like Erin Taylor, who I kind of like. And there’s nothing at all unrealistic about this, because one thing of which we’re all certain is that the future for astronauts is bright. Space sci-fi is everywhere, from Star Trek and Lost in Space to the Silver Surfer comics which taught me to read, to the era-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the inscrutable black slab that contains the key to the Universe is dug up on the Moon, by people living on a Moon base. We’re in one of those rare moments where imagination and expectation are converging and anything seems possible. In 1969, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that, by 2001, there will be bases on the Moon. There will be daily flights into the void, probably run by private companies, and mass space tourism. Communities will orbit the Earth and fan out through the solar system. Today proves that the technology to do these things is available. David is already talking about us saving up to buy a ticket for one of the first commercial space flights, which are on sale now. All we’ll have to do then is toss a coin or fight a duel to decide who gets to use it.

With so many troubles on Earth, perhaps escaping to the heavens seems natural and logical. They’re making a movie called Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern, in which this actually happens as a way of preserving the forests and deserts, and something similar seems to be going on in Neil Young’s song After the Goldrush, where the human race is fleeing its devastated cradle in spaceships, flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun. Everywhere we turn, there is talk of the Cold War, Vietnam, racial strife and looming environmental catastrophe. But all the bad things that are happening seem to have their corollary in good – none of them appear insurmountable – and we make no connection between those old-world horrors and the staggering ambition of the lunar programme. For all their ties to the military, the astronauts are pioneers, talismans, bringers of a bold new space-faring future . . .

Sometimes it really does feel like the dawn of a new age.

But the 1960s is the age of false dawns. Top of the charts is the bubblegum hippy anthem Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman. Closing in fast, though, is Credence Clearwater Revival and Bad Moon Rising.

The afternoon has passed in a blur. We watched some of the space coverage on TV. Joan Aldrin appeared with her three children outside her house in Nassau Bay. One of them was a boy named Andrew, who looked about my age, and an instant visual appraisal led me to believe that his mom cuts his hair, too. They had watched the landing at home with a group of family and friends and couldn’t understand the litany of technical data any more than we could. The difference was that Mrs. Aldrin had NASA pals on hand to explain what they meant. She heard them say that the fuel was almost gone and the astronauts hadn’t yet found a place to land, and her head spun. She stood in her crowded living room, holding on to a doorframe, eyes brimming with tears, waiting for the awful instant in which her husband’s voice would stop and be lost to her forever, while the whole world listened in. Then she heard him say, Okay, engine stop. She accepted a hug from someone and retired to her bedroom.

It’s coming up to 7:30 pm and dusk is falling. I can hear crickets and birds in the back garden, and the burble of the creek. The Moon’s in the sky, a big silver full Moon, and I’ve been on the porch in my pyjamas, which have little blue spaceships on them, just drinking the sight in. They’re up there. Up there. There. We’ve been watching the screen for an hour, because Neil Armstrong was due out at 7:00 pm, after he told NASA that he couldn’t bear to hang around until midnight, much less sleep. The TV anchor and various experts have been assuring us that everything is fine, though. It takes a while to get those big Michelin Man suits on.

Armstrong is late because stowing the dishes after dinner was never part of the practice routine and it’s taken longer than anyone expected. The first men on the Moon are being delayed by dirty dishes: there’s something wonderful about that. The Eagle is on a bright, rolling, crater-pocked plain. When they had a chance to take the scene in through the LM’s tiny, triangular portholes, Aldrin exulted at the unreal clarity in this atmosphereless environment, with features on the distant horizon appearing close by, contrasting beautifully against the boundless black backdrop of infinity. Armstrong wondered at the peculiar play of light and colour on the tan surface. He thought it looked more inviting than hostile. He knows this will be his home for only twenty-one hours.

Now, what do you say as you become the first human being to set foot on the Moon? Neil Armstrong is an astronaut, not a poet, and certainly not a PR man. He wouldn’t have bothered about it much, but people have been writing to him with all kinds of suggestions – the Bible and Shakespeare being the most popular sources of inspiration – and everyone he meets seems to have an opinion. The pressure is on. It’s irritating, because, for him, the landing was the poetry and taking off again his next major work. Still, as he thinks about it, he considers the paradox that it is such a small step, and yet . . . the laconic career pi lot comes up with one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language.

The door won’t budge and they don’t want to force it, because