A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

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...