Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

Armstrong’s wife would recollect that in early June after weeks and months of working ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day in simulators, “Neil used to come home with his face drawn white, and I was worried about him. I was worried about all of them. Their morale was down. They were worried about whether there was time enough for them to learn the things they had to learn, to do the things they had to do, if this mission was to work.” It gives a hint of how killing is the work in the simulators. To use all of one’s best energy hour after hour, working day after working day in order to keep up with a machine whose brain is more rapid if not more brilliant than one’s own, plunking all of one’s ambition, avarice, charity, pluck, discipline, and education into an electrical set of brains which will give back nothing but firm answers, can hardly improve the human brain at anything but the cruelest expense to the body. No wonder their morale revived when the flight date was made certain on June 17—the work till then must have been privately unendurable, a feat next to taking IQ tests for twelve hours every day in front of a six-hundred-fold instrument panel of blinkers, switches, alarm lights and warning bells—food for psychosis in rats! yes, it must have been so unendurable that the thought one might yet pursue this huge effort to no purpose—for one’s participation could always be washed out—was a way to lay the groundwork for the worst of diseases, the leaching out of one’s so...