A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

Aldrin, the formalist, had said just previously, ‘I think the most critical portion of the EVA will be our ability to anticipate and to interpret things that appear not to be as we expected them to be, because if we don’t interpret them correctly then they will become difficult.’ It was the credo of the rationalist. Phenomena are only possessed of menace when they do not accommodate themselves to language-controls. Or, better, to initial-controls. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, that is for action taken outside their vehicle, the Lem. EVA therefore referred to their walk on the moon; but the sound of the letters E, V, A might inspire less perturbation than the frank admission that men would now dare to walk on an ancient and alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies were dead.

So again their activity was hazardous, far-flung, bold, demanding of considerable physical strength, yet the work and physical condition called for the ability to live in cramped conditions with passive bodies, the patience to remain mentally alert and physically inactive for days. They lived, it was evident, with no ordinary opposites in their mind and brain. On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit – if only in one’s dreams – that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself. The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars. It was the most soul-destroying and apocalyptic of centuries. So in their turn the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own...

One of the cess-filled horrors of the Twentieth Century slowly seeping in on the journalists was that they were becoming obsolete. Events were developing a style and structure which made them almost impossible to write about. If a reporter did his homework for space, which is to say went figuratively back to school and got himself up again on forgotten physics and learned near-unpronounceable engineering terms, he could still hardly use this language in stories for popular consumption. Yet if he tried to do features on the people in the Space Project, he encountered the familiar difficulty that engineers who worked for NASA seemed to pride themselves on presenting personalities which were subtly faceless and interchangeable. A process was taking place that was too complex to be reported for daily news stories by passing observers, and so the process itself began to produce the news for the reporters. Their work had come down to rewriting publicity handouts. When they interviewed a personality in the Space Program, the eminent figure gave them quotes which sounded exactly like the handouts, except the handouts, being freed of the vicissitudes of communication between brain and tongue, were more detailed and more quotable. Computers could have written their pieces.

Twenty seconds and counting. T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal, 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero, all engines running, LIFT-OFF. We have a lift-off, 32 minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11. But nobody watching the launch from the Press Site ever listened to the last few words. For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition, and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press Site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames. No, it was more dramatic than that.

When he got back to Houston that first night, they were fourteen hours out, so their journey had already covered sixty-six thousand nautical miles! All that while he had been surf-boarding, celebrating, and then flying back from Melbourne, Florida, to Intercontinental Airport at Houston. Indeed the astronauts even covered another five thousand miles in the hour it took Aquarius to drive his rented car the fifty-odd miles from the airport through Houston, to Nassau Bay on the other side of town. Next afternoon, thirty hours into their flight, they were over one hundred and twenty thousand land miles out, and their speed had reduced to thirty-five hundred miles an hour. Their voices were of course the same. It did not matter whether they spoke from three miles away or one hundred and thirty-three thousand miles away, the hard peasant facts upon which Aquarius’ education had been built, the consciousness that numbers were real units, hard as hours of work and miles one walked, now had to be discarded into some waste-nexus of the mind, some stink of the unusable like the Jersey flats. The real fact was that distance was now an abstract concept; men performing brave and heroic acts were communing over radio whatever the distance.

So America and the world would be in a round of congratulations – we had landed a man on the moon. The event was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not conceivably been an event staged in a television studio – the greatest con of the century – and indeed a good mind, product of the iniquities, treacheries, gold, passion, invention, deception, and rich worldly stink of the Renaissance could hardly deny that the event if bogus was as great a creation in mass hoodwinking, deception, and legerdemain as the true ascent was in discipline and technology. Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged.

It was somehow superior to see the astronauts and the flight of Apollo 11 as the instrument of such celestial or satanic endeavors, than as a species of sublimation for the profoundly unmanageable violence of man, a meaningless journey to a dead arena in order that men could engage in the irrational activity of designing machines which would give birth to other machines which would travel to meaningless places as if they were engaged in these collective acts of hugely organized but ultimately pointless activity because they had not the wit, goodness, or charity to solve their real problems, and so would certainly destroy themselves if they did not have a game of gargantuan dimensions for diversion, a devilish entertainment, a spend-spree of resources, a sublimation, yes, the very word, a sublimation of aggressive and intolerably inhuman desires, as if like a beast enraged with the passion of gorging nature, we looked now to make incisions into the platinum satellite of our lunacy, our love, and our dreams.

So it had been with every Mercury flight, so was it to be with each of the ten Gemini missions, from Gemini 3 to Gemini 12, thrusters failing, short circuits, electrical problems, control systems affected, cooling systems failing to cool, overshot landings, missed rendezvous, computer failures, fading fuel cell batteries, transponders running out of power, engine abort because of a dropped plug, Armstrong in direct peril in Gemini 8 when the capsule began to whirl around frantically at sixty revolutions a minute, face-plates on EVA suits fogged up, eyes irritated by antifogging mixture, defective turbopumps – yes, mixed into all the triumphs of the Mercury and Gemini programs were the flaws whose reason could be found and the flaws which defied reason, and then the total of all these triumphs and all these ruptured taboos, all the flaws which had been corrected and all the luck which had been gathered, blew up into one vast moment when a machine to everyone’s horror might even have developed a psychology of its own, for Spacecraft 012 mounted on top of Uprated Saturn I booster Number 204 during a pilot-manned check-out had a fire in the cockpit at 6:31 in the evening on January 27, 1967, there out on Launch Complex 34 at Kennedy Space Center and before the hatch was opened, the crew, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were dead.

On went the sequence. The gas generator valves in the base of Saturn V now closed on command, the main fuel valves from the Mobile Launcher shut off, the Emergency Detection System was activated in every circuit, the exhaust igniters came forward, the explosives for a destruct in midair were made potential, the hydraulic pressure in all systems were checked at once – OK; the voltage in all systems – OK; Instrument Unit ready for firing – OK; check-out valves in ground return position – OK … OK … OK … Oxidizer tanks in the upper stages now pressurized. Transfer to internal power on entire spacecraft. Astronauts report in. They are GO. The guidance system for controlling the ship in flight is now on full internal power. Seconds go by. Fifteen seconds to lift-off. Twelve seconds. The swing-arms begin to pull away. Five hundred volts pass through a cable still attached by its umbilical and goes into the bowels of the rocket to ignite the turbopump exhaust gases which burn the igniter links which trigger an electrical signal to open a four-way valve which opens the main Lox valves and propellants flow into the combuster. In seventeen separate split-second steps are gases ignited into fires which ignite other gases whose exhaust pressures open giant valves which release the orifice in the main tanks and on the fire of other fires are the rocket engines lit.

If a car had been made whose motor had two carburetors, a double set of tappets, two sets of dual spark plugs, two batteries, two generators, two coils, two distributors and condensers, a double bank of mufflers and twin exhausts, a gear shift and an automatic transmission, a double set of valves and tappets, a set of auxiliary axles and auxiliary wheels and tires to drop out of the chassis when a tire blew, a horn and a siren, a steering wheel and a control stick, a left foot brake and a right foot brake, a hand brake, and a transmission parking lock, horizontal windshield washers and vertical windshield squeegees, a door which could be opened and locked from inside and outside with two sets of locks functioning in connection or independently, and windows which were automatic or hand-operated, as well as a gas tank with two reserve gas tanks, an air-conditioning system for the front seat and another for the rear seat each capable of being used for the entire car, heaters which worked off the battery and heaters warmed by the temperature of the motor, double radiators, double air filters, a hood which lifted from the front, and motor panels which lifted from the side, seat belts and fenders built in eggcratelike compartments to absorb collision, an AM radio, an FM, a stereo, and a radiotelegraph system, all of which components were capable of sending back to the garage all available information on the rigidity of the chassis, the wear and heat of the tires, the temperature...

The food came in plastic bags. Some of it was hard like bread cubes or cereal cubes, cocoanut cubes, peanut cubes, or cheese cracker cubes. Some of the food was wet pack and could be eaten out of the bag, some was freeze-dried, and water had to be inserted through a one-way valve, the bag then kneaded to make cream of chicken soup, or Canadian bacon and applesauce, a species of pot roast, or beef and vegetables, or ham and potatoes. The mash could then be squirted through another valve into the mouth. Obviously most of the chow had a consistency like baby food. Any attempt to eat in other fashion required much care, for in the weightless space of the cabin, food lifted to the mouth by a fork or spoon was in danger of taking off from any sudden move and floating through the air, later to enmesh itself in the smallest apertures of the instruments, or be inhaled to irritate the lungs. Eating in such valve-and-mash fashion, they were obliged to drink that way as well. Water ran from a dispenser through a seventy-two-inch coiled hose which abutted in a pistol placed between the lips, a button-actuated pistol – one pressed the button and water shot through the barrel into the mouth. A miserable mode by which to eat and drink, yet the food was a considerable improvement over early space flights when there had been nothing but bricks of processed nutrient and water: that original space food had been designed to produce the lowest fecal content. Now the food was better – as a corol...

With the end of the television broadcast, the mood altered abruptly. In a few minutes less than twenty-four hours ahead, their attempt to land on the moon would be successful, or aborted, or a disaster – they would be successful, or aborted, or a disaster – they would be alive and heroes, or alive and failures, or dead. Just as if the clock of some inner schedule had rung a change, as if the act of finishing their television show was the end of some last view of a parlor and the sounds of summer on the lawn, so they stepped back into their worries again. Not everything was proceeding automatically.

Living in the privation of sending other men on a job he wished to do himself, Slayton’s sense of the abilities of particular astronauts to perform particular expeditions into the extraordinary must have taken on levels of acuteness one does not easily conceive. Almost any man other than Slayton was bound to classify Armstrong as accident-prone and a bad risk. Slayton, however, may have been working on the thesis that only a man who had been in and out of death as many times as Armstrong could be entrusted to pass through the unpredictable minutes of a descent to the moon, down to that untenanted and eventless ground, that dead body whose light, when full, inhabited the switches of human sanity on the living earth, yes, perhaps only a man familiar with that twilight of the sleeping sky which may be known in the soul when death lays near and the psyche begins to hover, only a man who has become familiar with how soon the psyche will lift and begin to depart, yes, only a man who has lived with death since a boy with a recurrent dream (‘I could, by holding my breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much happened; I neither flew nor fell in those dreams. I just hovered.’), only such a man, hovering for all one knew next to dying without a struggle in his sleep on many a long night of his childhood, could be the man to enter the sanctums and veils of the moon. For he had inhabited them since he was a child. He was familiar with the awe of his task. He could be capable of calm wh...

Now by remote electrical release, Collins throws open an extend latch on the probe assembly. The vehicles undock. The tiniest toot on the thrusters pushes them apart. Slowly they drift out from each other, at about the speed of a leaf moving downstream. The Eagle has wings. They will announce it as they come around the moon. Yet there has been an error in all this work. They have performed the checklist to perfection, they have made no mistakes. Still, a mistake is now buried in the bowels of the computer. It is waiting to be discovered that the checklist, finest product of some of the finest engineers in the land, has an undetectable error which like a disease will come roaring up out of the computer in the next couple of hours as they fire their motor to descend to the moon. The Eagle has a computer pregnant with alarm.

It was not so much. They led Aquarius through one back room after another, and up and down a stone stair or two. The week of exhibiting the rock at MSC was over – it was now on its way to the Smithsonian – and special favors were needed this particular afternoon to obtain a peek. But he reached a place at last he had been in months before, the room with the plate-glass window across its middle where magazine writers had hounded Armstrong until Armstrong confessed that man explored out as salmon swim upstream, and there on the other side of the glass was no astronaut today, but a small case vacuum-tight on the other side of the divide. He saw the lunar piece through not one glass but two, rock in a hermetically tight glass bell on the other side of another glass with still another hermetic seal. Yet she was not two feet away from him, this rock to which he instinctively gave gender as she – and she was gray, gray as everyone had said, gray as a dark cinder and not three inches across nor two inches high nor two inches for width, just a gray rock with craters the size of a pin and craters the size of a pencil point, and even craters large as a ladybug and rays ran out from the craters, fine white lines, fine as the wrinkles in an old lady’s face, and maybe it was the pain of all these months of a marriage ending and a world in suffocation and a society in collapse, maybe it was just the constant sore in his heart as the blood pumped through to be cleared of love, but he like...