Book

Moon Dust

Andrew Smith

About the Apollo program, what it meant and how it changed the astronauts that went up there. Reminded my of Geoff Dyer’s Zona even though a totally different topic.

Despite having gone to the moon, Dick Gordon’s greatest regret is not having spent enough time with his children.
“A lunar orbit took just under two hours to ride, but 47 minutes of each were spent in complete isolation as the CSM passed around the far side, bringing a solitude that one NASA employee memorably described as the most profound any human being had experienced since Adam.” Michael Collins quoted afterwards: ‘I just can’t get excited about things the way I could before Apollo 11. I seem gripped by an earthly ennui which I don’t relish, but which I seem powerless to prevent.’
“From what I’ve heard and read, trying to describe Armstrong is like 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.”
“Old-fashioned fame was acquired, but celebrity is bestowed: it only exists in relationship with the audience-jury we supply and comprise. Thus, we’re the arbiters. They owe us. We voted them in and we can vote them out, more immediately and effectively, in fact, than the politicians who themselves look and behave more like celebrities every day… Of course, Neil Armstrong is not a celebrity in the strict sense; because he did something to earn his status, his fame has a hinterland, but the boundaries between the two conditions have become so confused that we no longer recognise this distinction.”
Alan Bean on talent: “None of it ever came easy. I was never the best guy in class. I was never the best pilot. I was always trying to be the best pilot, but I was never the best. I was never the best artist in any class I’ve ever been in. If I went to a class now, maybe I would be, but it wasn’t that way then. I just always cared enough that while they slept I was toiling away, doing those things right over there and liking doing it.”
“One of J.G. Ballard’s stories contains the striking line, ‘the best astronauts never dreamed’. But before his flights, Charlie had a dream that he and John Young were driving the rover across the lunar surface when they found another set of tracks. They asked Houston if they could follow them and wound up confronted by another rover in which sat two people who looked exactly like them, but had been there for thousands of years.”
“When one of Andy Warhol’s friends asked him whether being shot in 1968 had changed him, he replied, Have you ever seen anyone really change?
Jack Swigert: “The existence and the creation of the United States allowed Europe to survive itself. If you really want to look off into the future, it may be that settlements on the Moon and Mars will ultimately allow the world to survive itself. The idea of a new birth of freedom every now and again isn’t a bad thing. We tend to wear freedom out.”
Every moonwalker was either the eldest sibling or only son.
“George Harrison’s concert for Bangladesh… turned into a pop presentiment of Watergate, when all the money disappeared in expenses and tax. Poor George: he’d had to coax Bob Dylan out of sulky retirement and book a smack-addled Eric Clapton on every flight out of London for a week before the guitarist known as “God” managed to catch one. Rock had an aristocracy now, the fun was gone. The concert also introduced the image that would replace rockets launching and napalm falling as ubiquitious in the 70s and 80s, that of the starving exotic child victim, because, incredible as it seems now, we hadn’t seen it before.”
“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.”
“Like conspiracy theorists everywhere, when one argument is sinking, Sybril merely hops onto another, like a lumberjack jumping logs on a river.”
“Apollo seems to me the most perfect imaginable expression, embodiment, symbol, of the 20th century’s central contradiction: namely that the more we put our faith and reason in its declared representatives, the more irrational our world became.”