Moondust by Andrew Smith

Author:Andrew Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2005-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

The museum district comes on like a pleasant afterthought to the city, manicured green and – with no reason for anyone to go there other than culture – quiet. It’s nice, though, and the gathering at the Museum of Natural Sciences is an intimate thing, with cocktails preceding a “VIP dinner” attended by educators and Houston philanthropists, the theme being “Make Space for the World’s Kids.” I arrive late and sit at the back, watching chicken bones being cleared away until, lo and behold, those familiar ascending chords come spearing from the PA system. Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Bean steps to the front of the circular room in brown trousers and a pale blue, long-sleeved cotton shirt with a NASA logo on the pocket, and a big smile on his face. “Hello, Earthlings,” he says into the microphone, which erupts into feedback. He steps back and someone fiddles with a knob. A slide show begins and Bean’s words start to tumble out as the images flash by. There’s one of the computer room at Mission Control, which contains all the computing power of several modern mobile phones (the onboard LM computer had a memory of 36k), and another of a strange harness designed to simulate the one-sixth gravity found on the Moon, which appears to be suspending Bean by his testicles. “We realized that not only did we not know how to git to the Moon, we didn’t know how to train to git to the Moon,” the former astronaut deadpans. “You’ll see that I’m not smiling here.” The audience dissolves into laughter. There’s a picture of a reluctant Bean being taught geology and another one with his crewmates Conrad and Dick Gordon, where he points out that he went all the way to the surface precisely because he was the least experienced of the three; because Gordon had been into space before and could be trusted to tend the Command Module alone; and I realize that I’ve never heard or seen any of the other LM pilots acknowledge this. It wasn’t a “single-shot thing,” he says as a slide of Aldrin on the Moon appears. They hadn’t assumed that the first attempt would be successful, had half expected that it might take two or three to get it right.

“We were stunned, we were amazed when that happened,” he admits. “We came back and thought, ‘This is amazing that we did this’ – the same feeling that all the people on the planet had at that time.”

Bean tells us that he called Neil Armstrong on the phone when he started to paint the Apollo 11 commander planting the first flag, and that Armstrong had declared this to be the scariest part of the mission, because lunar soil is like dust mixed with coral – sharp and hard because there’s no weather to erode and smooth it – and he couldn’t force the flagpole more than a couple of inches in. He became convinced that when he let go of the staff, it

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