Space Travel: This story of the nine surviving moonwalkers opens with Andrew Smith's memory at age eight of cycling home on July 20, 1969, to watch the first moon landing on TV with his family in California.
A moment shared with the whole world, he suggests, which allows me to recall the Costa Rican neighbour who congratulated me on behalf of my America that same day, and his compatriots who stood staring up in wonder that night at the moon above the small village where I was serving in the US Peace Corps.
Smith also acknowledges how few events have been as well documented as that initial moon-launch and the entire Apollo project: not just Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon or Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, but multiple histories, books by several of the astronauts, plus NASA's own mission reports. Undeterred, however, Smith sets out to interview the nine remaining moonmen, hoping to learn how Apollo marked their individual lives much as it helped define the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Along the way are potted accounts of everything from the geo-political genesis of the space race, to the near-disastrous first moon-landing when Neil Armstrong and Houston command central grapple with a series of last-minute computer glitches. Or, back on earth, the perhaps even more harrowing global PR tour that saw the celebrity astronauts forced to exchange small talk with Miss Congo, Queen Elizabeth, Gina Lollabrigida, and the Shah of Iran.
A quick sampling of figures suggests the gargantuan scale of that first touch-down and the subsequent Apollo launches which deposited 12 men on the moon between July 1969 and December 1972. Figures like the 36-storey-high three-stage Saturn V rocket with six million parts that powered the 240,000-mile journey, the million-plus who watched the launch live at Cape Kennedy, the estimated 600 million who watched the landing on TV worldwide, or the 24,000mph re-entry speed of the command module capsule prior to splashdown.
Smith manages to track down most of his nine subjects, whose disparate post-lunar trajectories include painter, professor, New Age mystic, businessmen, and former US Senator, but the interviews are uneven and largely unrevealing. Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin emerge as the most interesting; taciturn and fiercely private, Armstrong steadfastly refuses to trade on his storied past, whereas Aldrin, who battled severe depression and alcoholism after his moonshot, has sued Disney over their cartoon character, Buzz Lightyear, and carries a business card emblazoned simply "astronaut". Walking on the moon is no doubt a hard act to follow, and there is an understandable pathos in the memory of what astronaut David Scott and others describe as "the best days of your life".
Smith argues the Apollo project emanated from American popular culture, but his conflation of the space race with the 1960s' strange brew of alienation and rock'n'roll doesn't entirely wash. For one, his astronauts are all males, most with military backgrounds, who came of age in the early 1950s. Look again at those two golf shots Alan Shepherd took on the moon, and it's hard not to feel Apollo was, as Mailer wrote, "the revenge of the squares". Deep space exploration and the counterculture shared a fabled decade, and both embodied its sense of optimism, but in many other ways the two inhabited parallel universes. Woodstock followed directly upon the first moonwalk, and the next manned landing, Apollo 12, only four months later, was largely overshadowed by huge anti-Vietnam war protests.
In fact the space race was largely begat by the Cold War, and JFK's decision in 1961 to use lunar exploration as a means of demonstrating American technical superiority over the USSR. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 saw Senate Majority Leader LBJ fulminate that "communists have established a foothold in outer space", and House Speaker John McCormack warn that the US faced "national extinction". It was President Eisenhower, however, leery of what he dubbed the "military-industrial complex", who took space exploration away from the generals in 1958 by creating the civilian-run NASA. Smith is also good on how the US papered over the Nazi past of Saturn V rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who helped develop the V2 rocket using European slave labour in caves beneath Germany's Harz Mountains.
Smith clearly dug deep to fill out his astronauts' already-oft-told tales, unearthing how Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon, and noting how the fiercely competitive moonmen were all either first siblings or only sons. But the occasional image best captures the magnitude of this epoch and its aftermath: Gene Cernan writing his daughter's initials in the moondust, and Alan Bean post-flight in a Houston Mall, just eating ice cream for hours and staring in wonder at the shoppers. Or Neil Armstrong, seated unrecognised at a casino slot machine, having just fled an Apollo Astronaut Reunion Dinner downstairs.
Anthony Glavin is a novelist and short-story writer
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth By Andrew Smith Bloomsbury , 310pp. £ 17.99