Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

CHAPTER 2. What It Felt Like to Walk on the Moon

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 2009

Maybe you’ve seen it. Many people have—at least 800,000 have clicked on various YouTube iterations of the same moment. It looks like nothing at first. The video is fuzzy, amateur, handheld. We hear the muffled verityé sound of wind against the microphone, of the excited breath of the camera operator. People are standing around, their postures reflecting boredom, their faces and movements obscured by the shaky camera work and low resolution.

On YouTube, of course, this poor video quality, combined with a high hit count, contains an inverse promise: something is about to happen.

We can make out a white-haired man in a blue blazer, partially obscured by a sign. He seems to be talking to another man, in a black jacket, whose back is to the camera. Out of any context, the white-haired man would be unrecognizable because of the bad video quality, but if you know to look for him—and you do, because of the title on the YouTube page—the man is recognizable as astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, one of the first two men to walk on the moon.

The muffled audio obscures the voice of the black-jacketed man, who is speaking now. Passion or nervousness makes his voice waver.

“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t,” the man says. He is holding an object out to Buzz. A subsequent Google search reveals that it’s a Bible—he is trying to make Buzz swear upon it.

Overlapping him, Buzz Aldrin’s voice says, clearly and unwaveringly, “Get away from me.”

“—calling the kettle black. You’re a coward and a liar and a thief—”

At that moment Buzz’s arm comes up and cracks the black-jacketed man in the jaw. Even with the poor video, we can see that it’s an impressive punch, well-aimed and powerful. We can’t see the punched man’s face, but we see his head recoil backward. The camera recoils too, as if in sympathy. Something has changed in the scene, you can sense it. One public figure’s image has been complicated, another person now has a story to tell, a video to put on YouTube.

“Did you get that on camera?” the man in the black jacket asks breathlessly, a note of joy in his voice. The black-jacketed man is Bart Sibrel, moon hoax conspiracist. He believes that all of the trips to the moon were faked, were in fact physically impossible, and that the Apollo astronauts have agreed to uphold the lie because they benefit personally and financially. (He has also stated at other times that the astronauts are not consciously lying but were subjected to mind control by the government to convince them that they did in fact go to the moon. Today, clearly, he is working from the former theory.) He has made it his life’s work to expose the conspiracy.

“Did you get that on camera?” This line of dialogue, spoken so clearly and happily, subsequently helps to acquit Buzz Aldrin, seventy-two years old at the time of the incident, of assault charges.

Everyone agrees that NASA’s finest hour was the journey of Apollo 11, which left Earth with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins aboard on July 16, 1969. During the three days it took them to get to the moon, the astronauts grew beards, took measurements of the stars out their windows using sextants to make sure they were still on course, chatted with Houston, listened to music on tape, shot films of each other doing somersaults and making ham sandwiches in microgravity, got mildly on one another’s nerves, and refrained from considering the enormity of their undertaking. Each of them has said in the years since that they actively kept themselves from thinking about the long chain of risky events it would take to get them back home. This particular avoidance was an ability they had honed as test pilots of experimental aircraft. It seems desirable for astronauts to be able to resist grand and potentially panic-inducing trains of thought, yet all three of them have expressed regret that this same character trait kept them from being able to adequately convey to us spectators what it was like to experience the things they experienced.

It’s difficult for those of us born in a later era to imagine the historical phenomenon of Apollo, a moment when Americans came together over an enormous science project funded entirely by the federal government. We must take our elders at their word when they talk about what this was like, as we’ve never seen such a thing ourselves. Some years, during the run-up to Apollo, Congress voted to allocate NASA a larger budget than NASA had requested. The effects of this kind of public support were unprecedented outside of war, and may never be seen again. As important as this financial support was for the early days of Apollo, it also created a tragically inaccurate impression within NASA that its projects would continue to be funded at this rate. In the midsixties, everyone thought the construction of the Kennedy Space Center was taking place at the start of an exciting new era. No one could have known that in fact 1966 was to represent the zenith of that unanimity. The public’s imagination for fulfilling President Kennedy’s challenge would prove more shortsighted than anyone at NASA had hoped.

Space historians divide the fifty-year period of American spaceflight into two eras: the “heroic era,” which includes the Mercury project to put the first Americans into space, the Gemini project to expand NASA’s abilities and test techniques for getting to the moon, and the Apollo project, which achieved the moon landings. The second era of American spaceflight is known as the “shuttle era,” and its being named for a vehicle rather than a lofty attribute says a lot about the difference between the two, about the loss of grandiosity in the goals we set ourselves, about the ways in which NASA had been forced to repackage spaceflight as an economical and utilitarian project. The heroic era spanned only eleven years (1961–72) compared to the shuttle’s thirty, with a much longer list of firsts, and this fact contains an important lesson about the history of American spaceflight as well. We did a lot in a very short span of time, and then we did a lot less for a lot longer. Soon, of course, we’ll be doing nothing at all. Faced with the fact that we are losing American spaceflight altogether, suddenly the workhorse shuttle seems as beautiful and daring as the Saturn V did in the sixties.

This is the paradox of growing up in the shuttle era: the vehicle is more complex and advanced, its reusability makes it much more cost-effective, and its versatility makes possible missions the Saturn V never could have accomplished, such as repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope and construction of the International Space Station. Yet the sense of danger, the sense of achieving the impossible, was what made the heroic era feel heroic. If we could somehow get that back, many people feel, we could restore NASA to what it once was. The sense of collective adventure from the heroic era has never left us. At the same time, it’s the shuttle’s disasters that brought about its end. We want the danger, but without any actual risk.

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA’s heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his “moon speech” to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon “before the decade is out.” In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy’s speech and Neil Armstrong’s historic first bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits.

All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years. I have read many detailed accounts of how this happened from scientific, engineering, and political standpoints. What it means that all this happened—what it means that it couldn’t happen again—is yet to be written.

The astronauts did well not to linger too much on the meaning of their undertaking, because the number of steps it would take to complete the mission was daunting. As command module pilot Michael Collins put it, “The press always asked what part of the upcoming flight would be the most dangerous, and I always answered, that part which we had overlooked in our preparations.” In his memoir of the journey, Collins lists the eleven points in Apollo 11’s flight plan that “merited special attention”: (1) leave Earth’s surface under the power of the world’s largest rocket and attain Earth orbit; (2) burn the engines to set course for the moon and spend three days traveling a quarter million miles; (3) separate the lunar module and remate it with the command module; (4) achieve lunar orbit; (5) separate the lunar module (carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin) from the command module (now carrying only Michael Collins, who, while he was on the far side of the moon, set a record for being the farthest a human has been from any other); (6) land the lunar module safely on the moon; (7) put on space suits, open the hatch, and climb down the ladder to step onto an alien planetary body, gather moon rocks, plant a flag, conduct a few experiments, talk to the president, pose for pictures, climb back into the lunar module; (8) burn the engine to leave the moon’s surface; (9) rendezvous with the command module in lunar orbit (which is to say, line up the two spacecraft and remate them, easier said than done when the two spacecraft are traveling at different speeds in different orbits); (10) ditch the lunar module and burn the engines again to set course for Earth; (11) survive the heat of reentry and hope the chutes deploy properly, allowing the capsule to splash down into the Pacific, from which the astronauts will be fished out by a helicopter rescue crew from a nearby aircraft carrier.

Different people give different estimates of the odds involved, but Michael Collins privately gave the whole chain only about a fifty-fifty chance of success. A failure at any one point would mean failure of the mission, and most would also mean the deaths of at least two, maybe all three, crew members. (Wernher von Braun told Oriana Fallaci that “fifty percent of the risk is that before they set off they’ll die in a car crash here on Earth: they drive like madmen. The other fifty percent is that they’ll die going to the Moon.”) Many of these steps had never been attempted before, and some of them could not be properly tested on Earth. By far the riskiest step in the sequence was (8): burn the lunar module’s ascent engine to leave the moon’s surface. This step simply had to work, or Neil and Buzz would be left to die there. But designing an engine to ignite in a vacuum in one-sixth Earth’s gravity was at best a series of educated guesses.

The lunar module, on its own going by the call name Eagle, undocked from the command module, now called Columbia, leaving Michael Collins behind, on July 20, 1969. Eagle’s descent toward the surface of the moon was not without incident: multiple computer alarms went off and the data screens went blank during the riskiest part of descent, with only sixty seconds of fuel left; neither Neil nor Buzz had ever seen these particular alarm codes in their training simulations. A twenty-six-year-old computer engineer in Mission Control in Houston had a fraction of a second to choose whether to call out “no-go” or “go”—whether to abort the mission and send Eagle back up to redock with the command module, losing the chance to land on the moon, or whether to continue.

“Go,” the engineer said into his microphone.

“Go,” repeated Mission Control to Neil and Buzz, “we are go.” In fact, none of them had any way of knowing whether the computer error might prevent Eagle from lifting off properly when it was time to rendezvous with Columbia, and the possibility weighed on them all for the next two days. The Apollo computer was one of the many components that simply had to work or the astronauts would die; its total memory was smaller than the file size of a song I just downloaded on my phone.

Neil Armstrong climbed out the hatch and set his boot onto the surface of the Sea of Tranquility at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 20, 1969. Some people suspect that NASA hired a team of copywriters, or poets, to come up with the historic first words to utter along with his first step, but in fact no one told him what to say or even asked what he would say, if all accounts are accurate. “That’s one small step for a man… one giant leap for mankind.” We’ve grown so used to this sentence, we don’t even really hear it anymore. In fact, I grew up with a mishearing of it (“one small step for man”) that renders the words senseless. It turns out that a quirk of Armstrong’s regional accent led to the confusion—among Ohioans, “for a man” can come out “fra man,” and the indefinite article was lost. But even with the misunderstanding, the line still rings in schoolchildren’s ears.

Buzz Aldrin once told me that he envies writers their ability to put things into words. Yet one of his first utterances after stepping out of the lunar module, in an attempt to describe the landscape to Mission Control, was the phrase “magnificent desolation.” This is surprisingly poetic for an astronaut, and it has stayed with me ever since I noticed it in a NASA transcript years ago. Every minute of the astronauts’ time on the moon was planned, and they wore printed copies of their schedules on their wrists to keep them on track. But I have to imagine that, once in a while, Neil and Buzz looked up at the far-off mountains at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility and thought to themselves, I am on the moon. This is all happening, right now, on the surface of the moon. Buzz Aldrin said many years later, “Every step on the moon was a virginal experience. Exploring this place that had never before been seen by human eyes, upon which no foot had stepped, or hand touched—was awe-inspiring.”

Neil, Buzz, and Mike traveled farther than anyone ever had and were gone only eight days. The images they brought back are among the most beautiful ever produced—all the more so, perhaps, because none of it was particularly intended to be beautiful. The jettisoned interstage adapter of the Saturn V tumbling, on fire, in a slow-motion ballet toward the gorgeous blue of faraway Earth. Buzz Aldrin smirking in a shaft of pure sunlight streaking through the command module window. Neil Armstrong overbundled in his space suit like a child dressed for cold, standing on the ladder and cautiously dangling one boot above the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility. The three astronauts confined to an Airstream trailer for quarantine after their return, smiling out at the president through a picture window. The perfect blue earth, thumb-sized, hanging in a deep black sky.

If someone asked to me to sum up what is great about my country, I would probably tell them about Apollo 11, about the four hundred thousand people who worked to make the impossible come true within eight years, about how it changed me to see the space-scarred Columbia capsule in a museum as a child, about how we came in peace for all mankind. Yet I feel the built-in pointlessness at the heart of Apollo as much as I fiercely admire it—it’s the same pointlessness shared by any artistic gesture. I feel it most at that moment when Neil and Buzz have stepped off the ladder, taken their bearings, picked up a few moon rocks, photographed the scene, and looked around them. A weird thought hovers over their helmets in the bright sunlit vacuum. What now? It’s a peculiar feeling, after the unspeakable effort and expense. None of the answers are entirely satisfying.

I’m watching the YouTube clip of the Punch because I’ve just confirmed that I’m going to meet Buzz Aldrin. I’m going to spend most of a day with him, actually. We will both be at the Southern Festival of Books, held each October in Nashville. Buzz is in the middle of a huge book tour behind his autobiography, whose release has been timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11. I had committed to being at the festival long before, to talk about my Challenger novel, and the organizers had quickly figured out that I would be the only other writer at the festival with much knowledge about space-flight. After I agreed to give Buzz’s introduction (which, I was told many times and in no uncertain terms, could absolutely not go over two minutes), I began to panic. What does one say about Buzz Aldrin in under two minutes? I looked back through everything I’d learned about his accomplishments—my books about Apollo, my copies of Buzz’s previous autobiography and his forays into science fiction, Michael Collins’s memoir and Neil Armstrong’s biography, the many documentaries and interviews in which Buzz has participated. I could write a book about him if I were asked; it was harder to sum up everything about him in one hundred twenty seconds.

I imagined standing up in front of a packed auditorium and telling the crowd, “You guys, you know the greatest achievement of humankind? Okay, this guy? Right here? He did that.” Point dramatically at Buzz, take my seat. Well under two minutes.

Buzz Aldrin was among the third group of astronauts, chosen in 1963. Those early astronauts, crew-cut Caucasian men, family men, military men, all seemed immune to the emotion of what they were doing. They never waggled their heads at the wonder of it all. There are no reports of them tearing up upon entering the Vehicle Assembly Building. They quickly changed the subject when they were asked about the possibility of their deaths, and politely filibustered questions about God and the heavens. This was what was expected of them, of course—this calm in the face of danger. This is what Tom Wolfe found remarkable about them. Their ability to step onto unstable rockets, to take perilous risks seemingly without fear, their ability to carry out the greatest achievements of their species without raising their heart rates or losing their swagger. This was exactly why they had been chosen as test pilots and then as astronauts. Yet—and here was the contradiction—people wanted to see emotion from them.

I knew that before being selected as an astronaut Buzz Aldrin earned a PhD in astronautics at MIT, where he designed orbital rendezvous techniques for spaceships docking in orbit (still a highly theoretical prospect in 1963). According to all reports, this was a project that required a freakish level of intelligence, a mind-spinning application of physics, intersecting multiple orbits that young Buzz, in that time before computers, calculated by hand with a slide rule. (His fellow Apollo astronauts also recall that he was unique among them in his ability to calculate orbital rendezvous in his head.) The techniques he created were critical to early spaceflight, and some of them continue to be used today.

Out of curiosity I decided to get hold of Buzz’s 1963 PhD dissertation through my father, whose status as an MIT alumnus allowed him to download a copy from the MIT library site. The dissertation is titled “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” Hand-typed, the equations make me imagine Buzz (or maybe it was his wife, Joan) painstakingly rolling the platen up or down half a click to create superscript and subscript numbers, dozens of them per page. The abstract introduces the project as a study of “the inertial rotation of the line of sight throughout three dimensional Keplerian rendezvous trajectories.” A whole page reads like this—words I don’t know, or words I thought I knew that are clearly being used in an extremely specific way.

But on the sixth page I find a dedication:

I feel a surge of happiness. Here is my reward: Buzz Aldrin has, unwittingly, dedicated his dissertation to himself.

When I’d first learned about the orbital rendezvous piece of Buzz’s story, the math genius piece, I was surprised by it. I’d known that Buzz Aldrin was handsome and brave, unnervingly competent, but not that he was the sort of person capable of doing complex math in his head. Those people are necessary to spaceflight, but we think of them as the guys in short-sleeve dress shirts and dark ties, slide rules in their pockets, the nerds—not the astronauts, possessors of the Right Stuff who actually get to fly the missions and bag lots of babes along the way. The Apollo astronauts were avatars for our own dreams of spaceflight, in the same way that movie stars are our avatars for romance and relevance, and it’s perhaps not entirely flattering to us as a culture that we require of astronauts that they be athletic and daring, but not especially book-smart. The truth is that the astronauts were and are book-smart, all of them, and by most accounts Buzz Aldrin was the book-smartest of them all. Alan Bean, a fellow Apollo astronaut, once said: “One thing I know about Buzz: he’s one of these guys that’s a lot smarter than most of us. You didn’t want to sit near him at a party because he would start talking about rendezvous.”

It’s hard to say precisely when the first moon hoax theory emerged, and harder still to say when it picked up steam. Maybe there were always people who doubted, even in the moment, even as the images were playing in black and white in their living rooms. Maybe some people’s trust in government had already eroded that much—maybe in certain circles it was starting to be a more fashionable stance to question everything.

What we do know is that by the thirty-year anniversary of Apollo 11, in 1999, about 6 percent of Americans told Gallup they believed the moon landings were staged and another 5 percent said they had no opinion, leaving only 89 percent who firmly believed we went to the moon. Things were worse by 2004, when a survey of people eighteen to twenty-five years old revealed that 27 percent of them “expressed some doubt that NASA went to the Moon,” with 10 percent of them indicating that it was “highly unlikely” that a moon landing had ever taken place.

No one from NASA Public Affairs has ever undertaken to answer the hoax charges in a systematic way. The only rebuttal to appear anywhere on the nasa.gov domain is from the Science and Technology Directorate at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and dates from 2001, shortly after Fox aired a special called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? You can see why there wasn’t a larger, more official response from within NASA—to do so would be to engage in, and thereby dignify, an argument that should not be mistaken for an actual controversy.

I have met moon hoax True Believers in my daily life, and while many of them are precisely the sorts of libertarians and X-Files fans you would expect to relish such a juicy conspiracy, I’ve often been surprised by stealth conspiracists, the non-paranoid-appearing, buttoned-up types whom you wouldn’t expect to question much of anything. They smirk at me condescendingly, shake their heads a couple of times, and explain to me why we couldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have. If they seem open to discussion, I have a couple of key pieces of counterevidence I like to offer.

One I like to repeat is from Michael Collins: over four hundred thousand people worked on Apollo at its height, he points out, and not one of them has come forward to spill the secret in the intervening decades. “I don’t know two Americans who have a fantastic secret without one of them blurting it out to the press,” he points out in a documentary interview. “Can you imagine thousands of people able to keep this secret?” The idea that so many people, many of whom would have to be in a position to know of the deception, kept such an incendiary secret for decades strains even the most generous understanding of human nature.

My other favorite counterargument draws on evidence that is more empirical. All six missions to land on the moon brought back pounds of moon rocks. These rocks have been made available to scientists, who have studied them using technologies that had not yet been invented during Apollo. Either NASA figured out a way to create fake moon rocks convincing to the molecular level, or the hundreds of scientists from all over the world who have been allowed to study the rocks over the years are in on the conspiracy. Neither seems likely. It seems much more likely that if NASA wanted to fool people with a fake moon landing, their first order of business would be to come up with a plausible reason why the spacecraft couldn’t carry back any rocks.

But none of my counterevidence will make much difference, I know. There is a pleasure in doubting. I’ve felt it too, about other things: a satisfaction at being smarter than those who have been duped, a satisfaction at being ungullible. I once met another Apollo astronaut, Jack Schmitt, a geologist and the first scientist to travel in space. I told him that his name is in my novel—my main character was born in 1972, the same day Schmitt and his crewmate Gene Cernan fired their lunar module’s ascent stage and lifted off the surface of the moon for the last time. I asked him what he says to moon hoax conspiracists.

“Well,” he said, slowly, “I describe to them my personal experience of walking on the moon. And if they choose to believe I am a liar, there is nothing I can do to help that.”

“Good answer,” I said.

It’s the condescension in the conspiracist’s smirk that drives me insane. The smirk makes me a credulous dupe, one of the clamoring naive who believes the bedtime story. The conspiracists want to erase from the official record the achievement that some call the greatest achievement of the United States, the greatest achievement of the twentieth century, the greatest achievement in the history of humankind. The rage this elicits in me (a tiny flame, entirely controllable in social situations, yet rage is the word for it nonetheless) is hard to describe. It is a patriotic rage, on behalf of forces much larger than myself, people much greater than myself. The doubters are calling people I admire liars, men who risked their lives for their country before they risked their lives for the exploration of space. Buzz Aldrin a liar, Neil Armstrong a liar, Michael Collins a liar. And the worst kind of liars—those who would manipulate our highest values for their own personal gain. It makes more sense to the doubters that NASA is an organization of frauds and opportunists than that a government agency achieved something beautiful and important, and this angers me on behalf of both the past and the future.

I’ve talked to people, friends and strangers, about what it means that the shuttle era is ending, and I’m both heartened by the sadness people seem to feel over its loss and frustrated by the general ignorance about spaceflight and its costs. People tell me that the shuttle program is being sacrificed so the money can be diverted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the shuttles had to be retired because they have flown more missions than they were designed for, that we are stepping aside as leaders in space in order to create a “more egalitarian” position in the world as part of our president’s general move toward socialism. None of these claims have any truth to them.

“Why are we stopping then?” people ask me. I’m always a little more flummoxed by this question than I should be, given how much time I’ve spent reading and thinking about it. It’s complicated, I say. The loss of Columbia was the beginning of the end—that much is true no matter whom you ask. After that disaster, politicians in Washington would have had to spend a lot of political capital to save the shuttle, and a recession would be an especially treacherous time to do that. All this sounds weaker than what I really want to say, though, which is partly that the public’s own apathy is to blame. It’s closest to the truth to say that the fundamental problem is that most people had not really noticed that we were still flying in the first place.

I watch the video of the Punch that night after my family is asleep, over and over, trying to get some feeling for the man. But we are not ourselves at our most extreme—not in a moment of rage at being called a coward, not in the moment of the utmost courage, guiding an untested spacecraft down, down, down toward the surface of a desolate alien world while the alarms blare and the fuel runs low. I know only that I don’t yet know Buzz Aldrin at all.

Waiting on a street in downtown Nashville for Buzz Aldrin’s limo to arrive from the airport, I decide not to ask him about the Punch, or about Bart Sibrel, or about hoax conspiracy theory in general. That’s what everyone else asks him about, people who don’t know much about spaceflight. They ask him about the Punch, they ask him whether Buzz Lightyear was really named for him (he was), they ask him what it felt like to walk on the moon. Buzz Aldrin has been surrounded by space groupies since he was selected as an astronaut forty-six years ago; he has been followed and accosted and approached and stared at and flirted with by people who know only that he is an astronaut, which is to say that they know he is famous, or that he is a hero, without really understanding the details of his fame or his heroism. I want Buzz to know that I am not one of those people.

In my hotel room the night before, I’d looked over everything I had learned about him: Buzz Aldrin graduated from West Point and served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. He became a war hero when he shot down two MiGs and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross. He then earned a doctorate in astronautics from MIT by the age of thirty-three.

Buzz has also been getting quite a bit of attention lately. Around the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings, he did interviews with USA Today, the New York Times Magazine, the Today Show, CNN, NPR, C-SPAN, Fox News, the Guardian, Interview, and GQ. He rapped with Snoop Dogg; appeared in ads for Omega watches, Louis Vuitton luggage, and Krug champagne; and started tweeting actively. He did a cameo on 30 Rock, served as an announcer for a professional wrestling match, and held up his end of a cha-cha on Dancing with the Stars. For a few weeks before I met Buzz Aldrin, I couldn’t poke around online or turn on my TV without seeing him. The three-man crew of Apollo 11 has displayed the full range of approaches to life as an aging moonwalker: near-total recluse in the person of Neil Armstrong until his death in 2012; active autographer and occasional interview subject Mike Collins; and at the other extreme Buzz Aldrin, who, at least for a while there, was constantly in the public eye.

The idea of introducing Buzz Aldrin to a huge crowd later today terrifies me, but I’ve agreed to it specifically because I want to have the chance to talk with him one-on-one about the impending retirement of the space shuttle. I’ve tried to anticipate what he might think about the end of shuttle, the fact that the fifty-year era of human spaceflight he participated in so admirably is ending, and my best guess is that he will say it’s a failure of imagination. Everyone who lived through Apollo, it seems, bears a memory of a time when nothing was going to be impossible, when those first steps would be the beginning of a new era in which we would accomplish more and more in space. If it felt this way to people who watched Buzz walk on the moon, I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to Buzz himself.

Sitting at the undersized desk in my Nashville hotel room, I wrote a two-page introduction outlining Buzz Aldrin’s accomplishments. I decided to end with the inscription on the stainless steel plaque that he and Neil left behind on the surface of the moon. I stood up to practice reading the introduction out loud to make sure it was under two minutes, and when I reached the end, I tried to deliver the inscription boldly: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon…. We came in peace for all mankind.” But, embarrassingly, I got choked up. Some people are the same way with the preamble to the Declaration of Independence or the last verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; for me, this is the poem that most stirs my patriotic sentimentality. It’s still hard to believe that these words rest on the surface of the moon two hundred and fifty thousand miles away, have rested there since before I was born; it’s even harder to believe that the plaque so modestly refrains from bragging. I’ve always thought this was part of the answer to my question about what the era of American spaceflight has meant.

So I wait on Seventh Avenue in downtown Nashville, where I am to meet Buzz. It’s a disconcerting sensation, waiting on a sidewalk with my coat over my arm, dress and lipstick on, like waiting to be picked up for a date. Book festival patrons on their way to events meet my eye, seem to wonder why I’m standing here. I’m waiting for Buzz Aldrin, I want to tell them. But I would sound like a lunatic.

When the limo finally pulls up, Buzz Aldrin pops out of it as if on springs.

“I’m Buzz Aldrin,” he says as I approach him. But I’d know him anywhere. He is nearly eighty years old, but he is still cartoonishly handsome in a Dudley Do-Right way, with the deep chin cleft and sparkling eyes of a forties movie star. To my delight, he wears the same blue blazer he wore in the YouTube punch video; the color brings out the startling blue of his eyes. Buzz Aldrin is animated, twinkling, even, while we shake hands. He has absolutely no trace of the frailty or hesitation one might expect from a man his age. I introduce myself, and he repeats my name back to me, which thrills me.

I realize I am holding on to Buzz’s hand too long. I can’t help it. I am exquisitely aware, in that moment, of the fact that his hand has been on the moon. This hand—this eighty-year-old white man’s hand—has traveled farther than anything I will ever again have the chance to touch. This hand, I think in that split second, may still have residual moon molecules on it. I think to myself: I am touching a moon hand. These thoughts are goofy and vaguely childlike, like so many we have about spaceflight, but I know the day is coming, not too long in the future, when there will no longer be any living human beings who have walked on the moon, no more moon molecules lingering in the creases of aging men’s hands. All this makes a handshake hard to pull off elegantly.

Buzz turns to help his wife, Lois, out of the car. Lois is tiny and elegant, dressed in a sequined NASA shirt. They both carry Louis Vuitton overnight bags, part of his compensation for appearing in the ads connecting the brand with the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings. They have just arrived from a long flight but appear perfectly pressed and alert.

Once we reach the authors’ green room, Buzz and I put on our name tags, look in our author goodie bags (each containing, among other things, a Moon Pie and an airplane-sized bottle of Jack Daniel’s), and settle in to wait for our event. We have nearly two hours until his talk is scheduled to begin. Lois has brought a magazine and leaves Buzz and me to chat. This is my chance.

I don’t really know how to bring up my question, though. I am suddenly conscious of how annoying it must be for Buzz Aldrin to have these big questions sprung at him without warning, knowing that his answers may appear in print. He would probably rather relax and make small talk like anyone else. I hate to be the one to do this to him, to force him into interview mode.

While I dither internally, Buzz asks politely about my book. I hand him a copy (having finished my own book event earlier in the day), then watch as he scans the jacket. Even though my book has been out for a while, has withstood reviews and polite corrections from people like Omar, this still makes me extremely nervous.

“Did you read Encounter with Tiber?” Buzz asks.

I murmur vaguely. Encounter with Tiber is a 1996 science fiction novel Buzz cowrote with John Barnes. I own the book—it’s a mass-market paperback with a debossed alien solar system on its cover. I’ve read the chapter that describes a fictional space shuttle disaster with great attention. But the novel spans centuries—millennia, actually—and begins with a seventy-five-character dramatis personae, longer than those of most Russian novels. Despite glowing reviews from the likes of Alan Shepard, Michael Collins, and Arthur C. Clarke, I’ve never gotten around to finishing it.

Buzz asks a few polite questions—what kind of research I did, whether I, too, had been a thirteen-year-old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I tell him I was.

“A terrible thing,” Buzz says. “We always thought the shuttle project was so much safer. Going to the moon was supposed to be the big risk, and the space shuttle was supposed to be this move toward safety and reliability.”

This was part of the problem, of course—people thought the shuttle was as safe as an airliner, and were bored by that safety; they felt that much more betrayed when it turned out not even to be reliable. Buzz is right that it was a big risk going to the moon—I’d read the night before that President Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, had drafted a speech for the president to give in the event the lunar module of Apollo 11 was unable to lift off the moon’s surface. The speech is eloquent and moving, a haunting voice from an alternate universe in which the worst has happened. It begins with the line: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

“It was a terrible thing that one of the crew was a teacher,” Buzz adds.

I consider telling Buzz about my theory that the inclusion of a schoolteacher on the flight, and the ill-fated attempts to publicize that particular flight to schoolchildren, altered irrevocably my generation’s feelings not only about spaceflight but also about our country, about the way the world works. American spacecraft had been taking astronauts safely to space and back since long before we were born, and so we understood human spaceflight as a normal state of events, a pre-existing condition, a birthright. For those who were already adults, Challenger was a terrible accident, but for children it was something more like a betrayal of our deepest trust. It permanently damaged our faith that the world made sense and that the adults were properly in charge of it.

But I’m not confident this line of thinking will interest or engage Buzz. At a certain level, I’m afraid of seeming guilty of a particular type of unappetizing generational self-pity (“Boo-hoo, we watched a rocket explode on TV”) when everyone knows that, especially compared to his, my generation was strangely immune from tragedy. That an accident resulting in the deaths of seven people was, for us, the worst thing that had ever happened was evidence of how very sheltered we had been.

“I always thought John Denver should have gotten to go on that flight,” Buzz says, interrupting my thoughts.

“John… Denver?” I repeat, wondering whether he really means the singer.

“Yeah, you know, ‘Rocky Mountain High’? He was a great advocate of spaceflight, and when NASA first talked about sending a civilian, they considered sending a creative person, a performer. John Denver could have written a song in space that would inspire generations to come.”

I find myself unsure what to say to this. “I wonder if NASA feared that sending John Denver to space would have seemed more like a publicity stunt,” I offer.

Buzz furrows his brow at this. He seems to have no idea what I’m talking about.

“The whole point was publicity,” he says. “A schoolteacher might be a wonderful person, and teachers perform an important role in society, but a popular songwriter like John Denver reaches a lot more people. It’s just the numbers.” Satisfied, Buzz goes back to perusing my book. It’s true that Buzz’s own approach to publicity seems to bear out this philosophy.

When it’s time, we gather up our things and prepare to depart the safety of the green room. There is a growing crowd of space enthusiasts gathering outside, and it’s time to face them.

Buzz offers me his arm as we make our way toward the door, and I wish someone would take a picture of us so I can prove to my friends later that this is happening. On our way to the auditorium, we pass through a courtyard, where a table is set up for Buzz’s book signing after his talk; already a line of people, at least a hundred, snakes back and forth in front of the table. Some of those in the line are holding large stacks of books. It is an awkward moment, though one I suppose Buzz is accustomed to—passing within arm’s reach of the autograph seekers who would choose to stand out here for the duration of his talk, to hold their places in line rather than go inside to hear what he has to say. It’s uncomfortable to see the autograph seekers light up when they recognize Buzz, then look away sheepishly.

Luckily, there are still far more people who want to hear Buzz talk than those who hope to turn a profit from selling his signature. The auditorium seats sixteen hundred and is packed to capacity when we arrive. We loop our way around to the front, where seats have been reserved for Buzz, Lois, Buzz’s ghostwriter Ken Abraham, and me. I turn in my seat to take in the crowd, all of them watching us intently, and only then does my panic really set in. These people are hungry for Buzz Aldrin. You can see it in their eyes, especially the men of a certain age—the way they lean forward in their seats, fiddling nervously with their hands, searching Buzz’s face with awe. Squint a bit, and you can see them as little boys hunching in front of their TVs in the summer of 1969, their faces bathed in the silver light of the Sea of Tranquility.

I take the stage shakily and get through my introduction. I start with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about American lives not having second acts, a claim Buzz Aldrin’s life has clearly refuted. I run down a condensed list of Buzz’s accomplishments, quote from the plaque on the moon, refrain from weeping patriotically. Applause. Two minutes exactly.

Buzz Aldrin takes my place at the podium and faces an audience now applauding wildly. He greets the crowd.

They don’t stop clapping. In fact, they jump to their feet and clap harder.

Buzz Aldrin stands calmly at the podium. He is in no hurry. He watches me walk away, down the length of the long stage.

Then he turns to the audience and says, “Now, that’s a special lady.”

This is a polite gesture from Buzz, nothing more, but it’s a moment I expect to see play back before my eyes during any near-death experience. I feel the attention of the crowd flick to me, but they know better than to fall for the distraction. They return their attention to Buzz. The applause grows to a thunderous peak; no one is even thinking about sitting down. Buzz nods graciously, gestures for the crowd to quiet. Sort of a papal gesture.

I’ve never seen anything like this: it’s as if Elvis came back from the dead, or if the Beatles got back together. It’s palpable, this outpouring of love, of gratitude, just for his being here today, for having done what he did, so long ago.

Buzz Aldrin speaks for an hour with no notes. His verbal style is roundabout, tangential, loopy, anecdotes starting out and never quite reaching their points; clauses starting out and never quite reaching their verbs. He is charming and handsome and he has walked on the moon, and we hang on his every word. He tells stories about getting to the moon and back, about the world tour he, Neil, and Mike took upon their return, about the travel reimbursement form he received from NASA that detailed his work-related travel: Houston to Cape Canaveral; Cape Canaveral to Moon; Moon to Cape Canaveral; Cape Canaveral to Houston. His total reimbursement for the trip was thirty-three dollars. He tells us about his idea for the Aldrin Cycler, a series of spacecraft put into permanent orbits around Earth and Mars that would allow humans to travel to Mars by hopping from one to the next. (This proposal might sound silly coming from most public figures, but Buzz’s expertise in orbital mechanics demands that we take the idea seriously). He ends by telling us about his idea he calls ShareSpace—a way of paying for human spaceflight through a lottery. Buy a ticket, get a chance in a random drawing to be selected to go to space. If you don’t get chosen, you have the satisfaction of knowing that your money went to help further the project. It’s actually a pretty great idea.

After Buzz’s talk, followed by more thunderous applause, we make our way out to the table in the courtyard for the book signing. The line of people waiting now traces a winding path though the courtyard and out of sight, several hundred people at least. Buzz is unfazed. We take our seats at the table. Buzz greets the first person in line, signs the first book. The first person in line is, of course, a hard-core autograph collector—a white man in his forties, glasses and sweatshirt, with a workmanlike air and a complete lack of fawning. Though Buzz is polite, the exchange between them is one between people who have agreed to live with a certain amount of animosity. The autograph collector may in fact be a fan of spaceflight, may at one point have worshipped Buzz Aldrin and dreamed of being like him. Buzz, for his part, has probably met this autograph collector before, and at any rate has come to spot the type from a hundred paces. In addition to free events like this one, Buzz also participates in autograph trade shows, where attendees pay fees, often quite steep, for autographs. Buzz charges $500 for a simple autograph, more for signing an artifact, and even more as a “completion fee,” meaning a single photograph or artifact has been signed by all three Apollo 11 astronauts or both Gemini 12 astronauts. These items have exponentially higher value in the autograph market.

The autograph seekers: there are droves of them, wherever astronauts are to be found. A combination of fandom, profiteering, and cottage industry, the trade in autographs has created an offshoot to the public appearances of astronauts, especially moonwalkers. A person standing in line with a stack of four hardcover copies of Buzz’s book has invested about sixty dollars; once all the books are signed, the same stack will be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. These people follow Buzz and the other moonwalkers everywhere they go, and their presence is both a reminder of the depth of fascination people have for astronauts and of the limitless drive to profit from that same fascination.

Buzz encounters autograph collectors like this one at the trade shows, and in that context their relationship is more clearly defined—this man pays Buzz money, and in exchange Buzz signs whatever the man wants. But the man’s presence here today is a gray area—by showing up at a free book festival where Buzz is supporting his new book, the man is taking advantage of this appearance in a way that cheats the system, and both he and Buzz know it. The next in line is also an autograph collector, and the next. Buzz refuses to sign more than one book for the second man, though he’d done it for the previous one without complaint. The third autograph collector in line hands Buzz a book missing its title page. This is a trick some autograph collectors pull to get two autographs for the price of one book—he’d had Buzz sign the title page once, then knifed that page out to get the same book signed again. Buzz opens the book to find the title page gone, then slams it shut again and slides it back to the man with a scowl. The autograph collector accepts it and goes on his way without a word.

Soon we start seeing real space fans, die-hard fans, who want to talk to Buzz about his time on the moon. After an hour, the line has barely moved; things are progressing slowly because every single person not only wants to have a book signed, each also wants the chance to meet Buzz, to speak with him, to get a picture with him. They all want to touch the moon hand. A lot of people in the line are of the right age for the space obsession born in childhood, but not all of them—plenty of autograph seekers are old enough to have already been adults when Buzz walked on the moon or young enough to have missed it.

Among those of the right age range, everybody wants to tell Buzz Aldrin where they were and what they were doing while he was walking on the moon. These stories are almost uniformly uninteresting, as stories about watching TV tend to be. Buzz Aldrin nods and smiles politely. He is so patient with these stories it’s easy to forget that he has been listening to them for forty years.

Some people bring objects they want Buzz to sign: a moon-shaped nightlight, the yellowed and brittle front page of a small-town newspaper with Buzz Aldrin’s face, along with those of Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, under the enormous headline MAN WALKS ON MOON. A T-shirt with the NASA logo on it. A book about the planets published in the fifties. Buzz is not entirely consistent in his policy on signing these things—many times he simply takes the object and scribbles on it without comment, but other times he refuses—he’s here to sign his new book today, he explains to those people. One thing he is consistent about is Buzz Lightyear action figures. He signs them all happily. He even carries a special indelible pen that writes well on the white plastic of Buzz Lightyear’s thigh. The connection that ignites between Buzz Aldrin and the children who love Buzz Lightyear is truly adorable to behold.

Most people accept Buzz’s refusals politely and move on quickly. The professionals know that arguing or complaining will make no difference and could potentially get them blacklisted from future events; those who wanted his signature for themselves usually seem embarrassed and stammer out an apology.

But one woman argues with Buzz. She is middle-aged, with dyed red hair and a slightly harried look. She carries a huge autograph book under her arm. She doesn’t have a copy of Buzz’s autobiography, and holds the autograph book out to him instead. For a moment he seems to waver, but he sizes her up and signs the autograph book wordlessly. The woman watches him do it, lips pursed. She does not try to tell him where she was and what she was doing while he walked on the moon.

“I want to get the autographs of all the men who have walked on the moon in this book,” she says. “Do you know what is the best way to do that? Can I just mail it to people and ask them to mail it back?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Buzz answers sensibly. “We all get a lot of mail and a lot of requests for autographs, and things can get lost. If you really want to get as many as you can, you could go to trade shows.”

“What’s that?” she asks suspiciously.

“They’re held at convention centers and such. They charge admission, and all of the astronauts set their own fees for autographs and memorabilia and what have you.”

“You mean you charge money?” the woman asks, recoiling. I’m a single parent. I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars to go to these places and get these signatures.”

Buzz shrugs. “We all get a lot of requests for autographs,” he explains. “Some of us are reaching a point where we would think about saying no to everyone, and this is a way where we can do it where it’s a little more fair.”

“I don’t see how it’s fair,” the woman answers as she takes her autograph book back from Buzz. I don’t know who else has signed it, but it’s now worth at least $500.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Buzz says evenly. He may be sincere or completely sarcastic. He may be trying to get rid of her. This puts her over the edge, and she raises a single finger to lecture Buzz and me.

“I’m an American citizen,” she says firmly. “I helped pay for the moon landings. I helped pay for your trip to the moon. Now I want the autographs of the astronauts I paid to send, and you’re telling me I can’t get them unless I pay them money?”

“Neil Armstrong won’t do it at all,” I put in. “He doesn’t make public appearances anymore.” She gives me a look of hatred before turning her attention to Buzz again.

Buzz apologizes noncommittally, and she wanders away. It’s an interesting question, actually. Surely we who help pay for spaceflight have a right to the knowledge and images that come out of those missions. But how much access to these actual human beings have our taxes bought us? For how many years, how many decades afterward do they owe us their autographs and their answers to the question, yet again, how it felt to walk on the moon?

Over the course of the afternoon, as the line slowly wanders its way through the courtyard, I hear Buzz Aldrin asked dozens of times what it felt like to walk on the moon. He does not have a pat prepared answer—he tries to answer sincerely each time he is asked, and the answer takes on different nuances each time.

We were really just focused on staying alive, he says to some people.

We had a lot of work to do so we didn’t really have time to reflect, he says to others.

The feeling of one-sixth gravity was a lot of fun but also challenging to get used to, so we really had to concentrate on doing our jobs and not falling on our faces.

When we got back, we sort of felt we’d missed out on the whole thing.

When Buzz Aldrin expresses frustration at not being able to describe his impressions of space as well as a writer might, his statement is, on one level, merely a polite thing to say when he is excusing himself from answering a tough question for the millionth time. But taken literally, it means something quite startling. It means that Buzz Aldrin envies Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Oriana Fallaci, that—even more ludicrous—he envies me. Yet the thing we space writers have in common is the extent to which we admire and envy Buzz his experience of walking on the moon. We envy him so much that at times it’s hard for us to see Buzz at all, to see his accomplishment as something he did, a risk he took gambling against his own death, rather than simply as something we will never get to do.

Leading up to our day together, I’d tried to imagine what Buzz Aldrin would say about the retirement of the space shuttle. I anticipated that someone who has risked his life to walk on the surface of the moon probably thinks that the space shuttle, which can only reach low Earth orbit, has been a frustrating waste of energy and maybe a step in the wrong direction. But I would not have predicted that a conservative eighty-year-old Korean War veteran would support government funding for a massive science project as a general principle, or even less that he would support President Obama’s decision to cancel the Constellation project the following year, calling this “Obama’s JFK moment.”

It’s hard to reach conclusions about my day with Buzz Aldrin. One unavoidable fact: he is a pro at all this. Meeting hundreds of people who are in awe of him, people who ask the same questions over and over. The day I spent with him was an honor but also an exhausting ordeal—speaking to a packed auditorium, meeting hundreds of people, including several weepy and/or emotionally disturbed space enthusiasts. For Buzz and Lois, the event in Nashville was bracketed by two flights and followed by another event that same evening in another city. By the end of our day together, I was in need of a strong drink and a lie-down with a cold washcloth over my eyes, but Buzz was still going strong. He has had days like this nearly every day since he came back from the moon forty years ago. One can forgive astronauts like Neil Armstrong who found they simply could not take it and tried to disappear from the public eye. For his part, Buzz Aldrin is completely accustomed to being Buzz Aldrin and the fawning energy that generates itself around him, the way people want to have their pictures taken with him, the way they hold on to his hand a little too long.

When Buzz and I are saying our good-byes, I decide to blurt out my big question. “I have to ask you,” I stammer, “what do you think of the end of the space shuttle?”

Buzz shrugs.

“It’s too bad,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s all still perfectly good hardware, and we’ve got the facilities and the people who know how to keep it flying. We should have something newer by now, but we should be building on what we already have, not starting over.”

Buzz kisses my cheek before bundling Lois back into the limo with a daredevil’s wave.

In the end, Buzz Aldrin can’t tell me what to think. It’s hard for anyone to say, on this particular October day in Nashville, Tennessee, when seven hundred miles south of us Atlantis is stacked on the launchpad for the 129th space shuttle flight, what it means for American spaceflight to be winding itself down. Only when an era ends do you get to figure out what it has meant. Buzz Aldrin is a human being who personally planted an American flag on the surface of the moon. He doesn’t care if the shuttle is retired now or a few years from now. He knows, better than most of us, that the space shuttle is late-seventies technology. He had hoped to see an American go to Mars and has dedicated much of his post-Apollo life toward that goal. But he knows as well as I do that after the last shuttle launches, NASA won’t send up another crewed spaceship of its own until after he is gone from this earth.