A Scottish space odyssey

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

John F Kennedy had a way with speeches and with this one he cajoled and inspired his nation to perform one of those rare events which will endure in the culture of humankind even beyond the next millennium. I was fortunate and privileged, as a nine-year-old, to have witnessed with 600 million of my fellow humans, the moment when the first of a dozen American test pilots placed his suited foot on the rough, ruined lunar tilth.

The media were running on their reserve supply of superlatives and cliches, proclaiming these men "heroes" and having the "right stuff". Teflon was erroneously held aloft as a "spin-off" from the space programme, and it began to seem that going to the moon was just one more television extravaganza, like a royal wedding or a cup final. But over the three-and-a-half years of Apollo, I watched the TV coverage of the six lunar landings with an almost primeval awareness that these events were beyond contemporary understanding. I still do not believe the meaning of these events has been realised by our culture.

Growing up under the flight path into Glasgow Airport, I, like all the boys around me, indulged in planespotting. I dreamt of the beautiful cloudscape environments in which the planes flew. But the environment beyond the atmosphere attracted me even more. The realm of planets and stars is an ancient backdrop for the dreams of people and I found that mine readily projected themselves on to its boundless scale. Then, after 400,000 American workers had toiled for a decade through 18-hour days, high divorce rates and unbelievable stress, and had spent 21 billion 1964 dollars, Neil Armstrong made this little boy's, and a dead president's, dream come true.

I made pilgrimages to Kennedy Space Centre to see what an Apollo spacecraft looked like up close and to take in the business end of a Saturn moonrocket. I discovered the rich seam of reading available on the internet, exemplified by one man's decade-long endeavour to document the exploration of Luna before the original papers and tapes crumble to dust. The unmatched Apollo Lunar Surface Journal by Eric Jones is a document which thrives on the net's ability to bring people together for a common purpose. As part of this effort I immersed myself in making the official histories of Apollo available to all on the web, for which NASA Administrator Dan Goldin saw fit to present me with an award - a humbling moment.

Now I am embarking on the best journey of all. The Apollo Flight Journal is my attempt to extend Jones's work and to explain how humans went about getting from the earth to the moon using 1960s technology. Like Jones's journal, it is a heavily annotated transcript of the crew's conversation with Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Moreover, two of those "heroes" who saw the moon up close have offered their help in fulfilling the journal's aim. Yet no matter how much I absorb about Apollo, the awe I feel at its achievement never fades.

I have discovered an entire slice of the population, now entering middle age, who like me were young boys and girls when the lunar module Eagle carried Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the grey, pulverised, basaltic surface of Mare Tranquillitatis. All these people harbour a deep appreciation of the quiet heroism displayed by NASA's pilots. It took rare qualities of skill to ride a flimsy spacecraft from a speed over twice as fast as Concorde to a safe landing on an unknown, rugged terrain - through an atmosphere more rarefied than the hardest vacuum we can produce in the laboratory and with the cool, green hills of earth over three days' travel away.

These pilots, especially those that followed Armstrong's initial timid steps, strode out into this unique landscape and became field geologists. Largely through their efforts, science has settled on an extraordinary theory for the genesis of the earth-moon system, whereby two planets collided in the early years of the solar system, coalescing to form the earth with the moon accreting from the vast amount of debris thrown off from the cataclysm.It takes a truly ancient place like the moon to yield up knowledge like this. The youngest rocks found on the moon are generally older than the very oldest samples found on earth. Had the first vertebrates been able to look at the moon half a billion years ago, it would have looked essentially identical to what we see today. Except for future human intervention, the sites where six crews worked 30 years ago will remain as they are today, utterly unchanged, for thousands of years to come. Apollo's legacy is beyond Star Wars and, in its truth, it is even more beguiling.

Now, 30 years on, we are in the process of losing the generation who gave us Apollo to the Grim Reaper, while some of us even refuse to believe the landings ever occurred. A fortnight ago, the fun- loving but hugely competent commander of Apollo 12, Pete Conrad, was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 69. The third person to step out on to the moon, he was more than just a moonwalker. He subsequently rescued the ailing Skylab space station which had been damaged at launch during one of the most daring spacewalks ever. Conrad described it as the highlight of his space career, beyond even his time on the moon. Skylab became an important chapter in the human occupation of space yet it is barely remembered except for its unfortunate demise over western Australia in 1979. The public's interest in space was waning.

After Apollo, the Americans spent 20 years and a sum of money greater than what was spent on Apollo in designing and redesigning a space station within the shifting sands of Washington politics. They cast off the hardware they had built for Apollo in favour of the Space Shuttle, a cost-saving transportation system that cost billions and arguably saved nothing. In short, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had become a mature bureaucracy. Forged as a Cold War tool, it had learned that its number one goal was to justify its continued existence.

The Soviets, who had tried hard to get to the moon before the Americans until catastrophic mishaps with their gargantuan launch vehicle set them back too far to catch up, settled on the worthy cause of establishing a permanently manned presence in space. Their gifted engineers and designers developed systems for sustaining people for very long periods in a spectacularly successful programme which culminated in Mir. It is a little unfair that the West's view of this remarkable spacecraft concentrated on admittedly serious mishaps towards the end of its extended life. The negative coverage took away from the achievement Mir represented in the finest spirit of human progress.

Now the fall of the Russian economy is set to physically pull Mir down too, and we are left with an ambitious and uneasy alliance between the American and Russian space programmes. With bit parts played by Europe, Canada and Japan, the International Space Station (ISS) will define human spaceflight for a long time to come. Where is this spacecraft going? Round and round the Earth for the next couple of decades with a programme of research that, while interesting, will feature little in the public consciousness.

Perhaps I ought not to expect spaceflight in the 1990s to live up to the magic of seeing men explore the moon as a child. Apollo came out of the confluence of disparate and unrepeatable political forces of the early 1960s. The Cold War was icy in the extreme and fingers were hovering over nuclear buttons while the superpowers glared at each other over Cuba. The supposedly backward Soviets had trounced an arrogant USA into space with rockets equally capable of lobbing warheads across the North Pole. Kennedy wanted a potent display of American technical superiority with peaceful overtones. The puissance of a Saturn V moonrocket lifting off and the triumphant return of crews with fingernails full of moondust served his purpose. None of us may live to see a similar result come from the throws of political dice.

But I have two sons with eager hearts and open minds who crave inspiration from the world and universe around them. I feel sorry that they may not witness a defining moment to rival Apollo. Though NASA is sending probes out to the solar system, some carrying my sons' names along with a few hundred thousand others, and some part of a flotilla of craft heading for Mars, these robots lack the spiritual link we make to human endeavours. David Scott, who commanded Apollo 15 and spent three days calling the starkly beautiful mountains of the lunar Apennines his home, said as he stepped on to the lunar surface: "This is exploration at its greatest". Now any prospect of a similar adventure to Mars is as remote as Apollo was to the Wright brothers. Yet it is technically feasible, lacking only political will.

Space has become the province of big business, with TV and mobile phone communications becoming increasingly space-based; and there is nothing wrong with that. Commercial pressures have always been important to the subsequent opening up of a new frontier. However, the fear of risk, failure and financial cost keeps us looking inward.

When Conrad died, discussion groups on the internet buzzed with an outpouring of appreciation for his flamboyant personality and respect for his talents as a space traveller. A contributor to one of these discussions reminded us all that with our nine remaining lunar explorers now reaching their late 60s and 70s, it would not be so long, perhaps a decade or so, before there will be no human walking on this planet who has also walked on the moon. I find that a profoundly sad thought.

David Woods is a post production editor at BBC Scotland and an authority on the Apollo moon programme. His Apollo flight journal can be accessed at www.wdwoods.demon.co.uk

Copyright 1999
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