The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Moon:Head July 25, 2009

There’s something about this photograph that I find undeniably weird. It could be the inversion of the Lunar Module, it could be the fact that it is orbiting Earth, this was from the Apollo 9 mission which was sent up to test the LM in Earth orbit prior to a lunar orbital test on Apollo 10.

There’s some sense of otherness about it, but what precisely I can’t determine. Maybe it’s the sense that the LM shouldn’t be in Earth orbit, that it’s utterly unsuited for that purpose. I don’t know.

Anyhow, while reading about all things Apollo I came across this. It details JG Ballards fascination with the supposed alienation that space flight engendered. A notable strand of Ballard’s fiction depicted societies laid waste by travel into space, not so much physically as psychologically. In one story a disease is brought back, one of the symptoms of which is to make the sufferer believe that they were once astronauts. They wander about Cape Canaveral unable to come to terms with reality, either their own or others.

Still, Ballard’s explanations for his predicted end to space travel cannot be entirely discounted as explanations for our ongoing disinclination to venture deeper into space. A recognition of the panoply of perils awaiting space travelers, emphasized each time an astronaut dons a bulky spacesuit, is surely an unstated factor in our reluctance to travel thousands or millions of miles away from Earth where a crisis could not be dealt with by rushing back to the safety of home. And one concern about a proposed flight to Mars which has been explicitly raised by experts is that the long, lonely voyage there and back may well drive astronauts insane. Furthermore, there is unquestionably a metaphorical truth, if not a literal truth, in Ballard’s argument that ventures into space would upset humanity’s sense of time. Consider the impact of those first photographs of Earth from lunar orbit taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts, showing our world as an island of blue in a vast imposing blackness, and the data and photographs obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope and other unmanned space probes. The message from our contact with space is clear: we are beings who live only for several decades, on a world that is only a few thousand miles in diameter, but we live in a cosmos that is over thirteen billion years old and vast enough to contain billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars and planets. Properly understood, that information would certainly function as a shock to the human perception of time, as an incentive to ponder static eternity as an alternative to our brief, frenetic experience of time, and perhaps even as an inducement to a complete, stunned paralysis.

I’ve never found that idea entirely compelling. Not least since humans have somehow managed to go to unusual parts of our own planet without plunging into psychosis. Antarctica is close to the magnificent desolation described by Aldrin of the Moon. And the isolation of those environments is not entirely different to the isolation of stepping onto the surface of the Moon (indeed years ago in Tunisia in the south of that country I found it telling that the local landscape was described as being like the surface of the Moon – the description wasn’t entirely wrong, and the landscape was stunning, but… it weren’t the Moon).

And of those who visited the Moon there have been, perhaps distressingly for that analysis, no real instances of outright madness. If anything the divorces, alcoholism and suchlike made the astronauts almost too typically of their generation of Americans.

Which is not to say that some interesting behaviour didn’t manifest itself. Edgar Mitchell who visited as part of the Apollo 14 crew underwent a self-defined epiphany while journeying back and in subsequent years tilted towards all things paranormal. Within a couple of years he established the Institute of Noetic Studies which examined issues of consciousness and psychic phenomenon. He later attested to his belief in UFOs and made some remarks about Roswell being a genuine incident that he later had to retract.

Was it the pressure of the Moon landing which precipitated this?

Not necessarily. He was already interested in such matters and apparently conducted ESP experiments covertly while on Apollo 14.

Back to Andrew Smith and Moondust….

Mitchell [conducted] a private experiment ‘transmitting’ mental images of randomly chosen shapes to four people back on Earth at prearranged times. Unfortunately, his accomplices had vfailed to take account of a slight delay in the launch, so were out of sync with his attempted projections. In what looks a little like rationalization, the astronaut claims that the results were still significant, as the other subjects’ guesses were far wider of the mark than would statistically be expecting, suggesting that they had a subconscious knowledge that something was wrong. What ever the case Mitchell was betrayed by on of his collaborators and word leaked to the media shortly after splashdown. Another independent-minded Apollo astronaut assures me that, had commander Shepherd known of Mitchell’s intentions before hand, the younger man would certainly never have flown – on any mission. But Ed kept it wholly to himself. No one at NASA had the vaugest notion that this hippy stuff was going on right under their noses. Curiously Deke Slayton claims to have been more open-minded. “I thought it was worth a look,” he says. “Hell, NASA doesn’t know everything”.

That said there’s no doubting the experience pushed Mitchell further along the trajectory he was already on…

The epiphany led Mitchell to ask, “What was causing the exhilaration every time I looked out the window?” It seemed that nothing in conventional science or religion could explain in a way that satisfied him…

Well, I have a few suggestions as to what might make me feel even slightly exhilarated, and I’ll admit it – downright terrified, were I halfway between Earth and moon. That reminds me of a programme I saw on the Shuttle back in the early to mid-1990s. It was pretty detailed, but the thing that struck me was – looking out of the windows of the Shuttle – just how dark space was. It was like a physical presence pressing against the frail skin of the spacecraft. Of course that’s the wrong way to look at it. The tiny bubble of air and life that the Shuttle represents is like our own planet in miniature and one could see it representing that air and life pressing outwards.

And that, perhaps is where Ballard, for all the genius of his fictions missed an essential dynamic of the space age (and so does John Waters in the piece referenced yesterday), a dynamic that links directly into our own motivations as individuals and species. Yes, of course there is the pull home both physically and psychologically, but there is also the opposite, the urge to push away. Those are in a tenuous balance and often fighting with each other, indeed the history of human space flight is indicative of this. But they remain and presumably will do so well into the future.

Meanwhile, what are we currently left with? Fictions for the most part… such as this here, another Moon related curiosity. It’s a hoax, meant to be footage from a ‘secret’ Apollo 20 mission, a joint US/Soviet mission that following the identification of an alien spacecraft on the Moon landed and investigated said spacecraft and found… well… watch or read for yourself. I’ve read that this is the product of a French performance artist, supposedly one Thierry Speth (although who is to say – perhaps the joke is infinitely recursive and there is no Speth, he too being a fabrication). If so fair dues to him or her.

It could be better, not so sure about the CGI alien spaceship stuff… and it’s all very ropey. But the idea itself is great. I’d have loved to have seen this done in a better way. Or perhaps this is the best way, sitting on the edge of amateurism and authenticity, that that ropey aspect is somehow an interpretation of those blurred images and jerky movements as when Armstrong climbed down from the Lunar Module…

Moon:God July 24, 2009

There’s quite a nice piece by John Waters in the Irish Times today. In it he discusses his own memories of the Moon landing, and sadly he was unable to watch it on television, his neighbour with said device having visitors. So John spent the day up a sycamore tree, or as he puts it:

I walked around thinking about what was about to happen and put my eye upon the tree. Other boys had climbed it, but I had never seen anyone go right to the top. I timed my assault for the precise moment Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were due to walk out on the surface of the moon.

I wasn’t looking for a means to remember. Perhaps at some level I understood the Apollo mission as a way of getting closer to God. Or, perhaps I was seeking to go some place no man had gone before.

No doubt.

Still, this being John Waters he cannot but fail to move into the language of transcendence. This irritates me somewhat less than his usual offerings in this vein because I too share a sense of that transcendence when it comes to the space programme (and incidentally, I include the efforts of the Soviets/Russians, Chinese and so on under that blanket term…).

Actually, as John Gray has observed, both responses are “religious” – the idea of faith in human progress just as much as belief in a higher intelligence. Both seek to transcend what is “obvious”. We seem to hold both perspectives within us, moving between them. Perhaps they represent not opposites, but a single complex mechanism for dealing with our situation, ostensibly improvable but essentially fixed, and ultimately mysterious.

Well, not so mysterious. But still awe-inspiring.

Anyhow, as he strays away from transcendence he strays towards fact. Always perilous in his case, and never more so when he says:

Perhaps the most salutary image we received that hazy July day was not of the magnificent desolation of the moon face, but the poignant perspective from that vantage point showing planet Earth, apparently suspended in space, humanity balanced perilously on its surface. No image has more beautifully captured the fragility of human hopes for omnipotence, or of man, imprisoned within his desires, doomed to sabotage his own efforts by misusing his freedom.

That’s a lovely idea. Sort of. If we didn’t go there we wouldn’t see. And in going we extend our… well, not omnipotence, there being no such animal, but at least our capacity to engage with the universe, or at least this tiny fraction of it. And for many of us that does of its nature extend the relationship with God.

Problem is, lovely or not, it’s wrong. I can think of two images that represent that notion but neither of them was associated with Apollo 11. The first, the “Blue Marble” was taken by Apollo 17 in December 1972 as it went to the Moon. Ironically Apollo 17 was the last of the Apollo missions, so we got a gem there. The interesting aspect of the photo is that it depicts the face of the globe entirely in sunlight. Another aspect of note is that it was originally taken upside down, due to the orientation of the astronauts when they took it.

So if Waters recalls that image from that hazy July we must grant him the power of precognition.

It is more likely that he’s thinking of Earthrise, a photograph taken by William Anders of Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the Moon. This took place in December 1968.

It’s another stunning image, the Earth half in shadow is depicted above the lunar surface. As with the Blue Marble image there’s an element of artifice about this (well, I guess that’s true of all photography). As viewed from the Command Module the Earth was to the left of the lunar surface and it’s only by pivoting it around that we get the image we see today.

There’s a second version taken around the same time in black and white which is almost as equally powerful as the Earth ascends from behind the Moon, but from a lower point.

There is a third image, also taken by Anders on this mission which is the first to be taken of the whole Earth. It too is remarkably, indeed even at this remove viewing these I find them enormously powerful.

Plenty of time then for a young Waters to assimilate it and its meaning and well before Apollo 11.

Actually there is a religious connotation to Apollo 8. After the mission there was a minor controversy due to the crew reading 10 verses from the Book of Genesis, an act which drew down the wrath of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a prominent atheist and an accompanying law suit. I have to admire the dismissal by the US Supreme Court of it on grounds of lack of jurisdiction. Mind you that might have set an interesting precedent. I wonder was the Old Testament chosen specifically (and by the by VNV Nation, amongst others, have taken the audio of that broadcast and put it to music in their fine track Genesis). It’s odd that Waters doesn’t see fit to mention that, or the even more compelling fact that Buzz Aldrin, a Presbyterian church elder, received Communion while on the Moon.

Yet there is another rather greater error in the article by Waters which is inexplicable. For he posits that:

And what a trick was played on us that day, as though in a conspiracy between technology and the ether! For months beforehand, a special Nasa sub-committee had been canvassing opinions with a view to formulating the first words to be uttered by the first human to walk on the moon. Presently, Neil Armstrong was given a memo with the agreed phrase. When the moment came, he faithfully recited the words.

That’s simply not true. All the reputable sources I can reference both on-line and off agree that it was Armstrong himself who composed the words. Let’s return briefly to Andrew Smith’s Moondust…

Now, what do you say as you become the first human being to set foot on the Moon? Neil Armstrong is an astronaut, not a poet and certainly not a PR man. He wouldn’t have bothered about it much, but people have been writing to him with all kinds of suggestions – the Bible and Shakespeare being the most popular sources of inspiration – and everyone he meets seem to have an opinion. The pressure is on. It’s irritating, because, for him, the landing was the poetry and taking off again his next major work. Still, as he thinks about it, he considers the paradox that it is such a small step, and yet… the laconic career pilot comes up with one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language.

Waters continues…

On Earth he was heard to say: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. This is what the recording recalls. But when you think about it, this makes no sense, because the words “man” and “mankind”, taken in context, mean exactly the same thing.

There’s no particular mystery to this… Smith again…

No one saw anything until Neil Armstrong pulled a cord which activated a camera on his way out of the LM. Then he jumped down to one of the lander’s big round feet, described the lunar dirt and stepped gingerly to the surface… he did get the words wrong, however, because he meant to say – and for years insisted that he did say – “One small step for a man….” Even his memory is not definitive, though in the freeze-frame world we’re about to enter,that doesn’t necessarily make it less true.

Waters however insists that his nascent and apparently self-generated conspiracy theory moves us to…

Thinking the words spontaneous, we glossed over the tautology. We knew what he meant. But what the recording attests is not what Armstrong said. The voice-activated transmission system momentarily cut out after the fourth word, tracelessly excising the indefinite article that would have made sense, and retained the humility, of the agreed phrase. “One small step for a man . . .” is what Armstrong was instructed to say, and what he insisted he did say.

And therefore comes to the conclusion…

It is as though something in time or space, or space-time, intervened to underline the distinction between what a human being can achieve from within an understanding of human nature and what we tend to extrapolate from these achievements about our collective and absolute potential. Perhaps, snipping out that fragile “a” to emphasise the tautological nature of human ambition, some benevolent force was whispering to us about the folly of thinking that we can climb out of our essential condition, gently reminding us that we make better progress when we think of getting closer to God.

Of course, again, how can we know if we don’t ever go. I may well be wrong, but I suspect that for almost all the actual meaning of the phrase will resonate as long as history is recorded. Something the deity might not be entirely unhappy about. And I can’t help but feel that in truth, the real history of those events demonstrates that for many – perhaps most – of those involved they managed, as with Apollo 8 and Aldrin, to bring God along or, more likely, to find God wherever they went.

Moon:Been there, done that? July 23, 2009

A brief but good piece on the Slate Culture Gabfest dealt with the meaning of this week both in terms of coverage and in terms of the event itself. It started with an excerpt from “Rocket Experience” with vocals added by Buzz Aldrin. You may like it. I don’t. But it rapidly improved with what I thought was one of the nicest summations of the whole thing…

We wanted to start out with insouciance on this topic… but I can’t help it. I thought this anniversary meant absolutely nothing to me. I started reading about it and I actually became quite emotional. i think this is one of those things for which an anniversary is utterly necessary to reawaken our mind to the sheer courage and ingenuity and shared public purpose, sense of public purpose, which put a human being on the surface of the effing Moon.

An interesting point was made about the ‘immediacy of the web’ and how we can now all watch these events in way that even ten years ago we couldn’t have. Actually, that reminds me of the first CD-ROMS with their Quicktime movies of the moon landing in tiny windows on computer screens. It’s funny how the moon landings became in the decades after a sort of visual short hand of excitement.

And yet, it’s paradoxical, because imagine if you will the use of almost any other artifact of high technological achievement from 1969 and consider whether that would have the same cachet. Indeed one contributor to the Slate Gabfest recalled a moment in the Ron Howard Apollo 13 movie where:

…somethings gone wrong and they cut to the huge team of people in Houston all operating slide rules. There were of course calculators at that point.. but people were also using slide rules to navigate that emergency…

It is almost disturbing when one thinks of it in that way. Like Concorde, another hugely ambitious piece of technology, but one very much of its time there is this sense of slippage. That the future we expected has somehow been deflected. And yet that future we project is of course the past as was.

…which raises a related question, you’d think we were now 40 years on in terms of computing power and technology and we exploit all sort of synthetic materials and plastics to make airplanes that we fly on routinely safer and quicker and yet…
the thought of putting a man back on the Moon is the one that so… almost as inconceivable to us as it was when Kennedy announced the ambition in the early ’60s.

That is a remarkably apt insight. It’s not just an issue of political or social will, although that plays an enormous part. It is in some respects the product of a need to reinvent the wheel. Orion may be Apollo redux, and form follows function, but for the US space programme to reimplement Apollo in this modified and modernised form is a task that even now is nearly beyond belief. Even in 2009.

I’ve been re-reading Andrew Smith’s excellent Moon Dust, which is both an history of the Moon programme and a sort of investigation of the lives of the astronauts both during and after. In regard to the actuality of the landings there is a fine four or five page sequence which cuts from the audio that the global audience heard during the descent by the Lunar Module to the surface of the Moon and what was actually happening on board it.

We know this as the voice of Mission Control. his name is Charles Duke, but the astronauts just call him ‘Houston’. There are other voices too, but they all sound distant and intermingled and it’s hard to get hold of what they’re saying. An air of expectancy hangs in the room.
Now we hear;
“Thirty seconds.”
Silence.
“Contact light.”
“Shutdown.”
“Descent engine command override. Engine arm, off, 413 is in.”
A pause.
Silence.
More silence.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here… the Eagle has landed”.

And Smith delicately untangles the events each of those short sentences described, from the thirty seconds worth of remaining fuel, twenty of which were necessary to retain for an abort, to the events beyond the sentences, Armstrong realising that the landing area was littered with ‘a field of rocks’ and eventually having to made a decision with barely seconds to spare to land in ‘a clearing of about 200 feet, bounded by craters on one side and more boulders on the other’.

Even when one knows the outcome, the description is nerve wracking. And that too adds to the sense of the enormity of the project.

Smith’s book is equally good on how the lives of the astronauts were subsequently utterly altered by their experiences. These were almost exclusively military men, there was only one scientist amongst those to walk on the surface, who were ill-prepared for the fame that was to dog them afterwards. Alcoholism, relationship breakdowns, depression. the whole gamut of symptoms of humans pushed to extraordinary limits. Perhaps, perhaps if the Moon landings had been sustained that fame would have been diluted, as Apollo 17 was followed by 20 and 30 and whatever… But the curious thing is that the isolation of their journey was mirrored by the isolation of their lives thereafter. This was a place no-one was going to go back to, at least not in most of their lifetimes.

Which led on the Gabfest to the thought that the ‘wonderment’ of the event could be summed by the Onion’s entertainingly foul-mouthed piece:

And there’s an odd little precursor of that by Smith when visiting the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canveral, a construct so large that it is reputed to have its own micro climate.

Then there’s the nightmarish crawler, like something from a Judge Dredd comic, which transports rockets from the Assembly Building to the gantries at half a mile and hour, running on tank like treads that weigh one ton apiece. This is not like anything you’ve seen before. It’s unreal.

And now the bus has stopped and you’re climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and – fuck, there’s the Saturn V.

You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until you’ve stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but can’t, so you give up. What you think is not “How could anyone make something this big?” because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. BUt to make something this big, and intend it to fly – the audacity of this conceit alone – and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on, bigger, and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough to bet a life on, three lives, every time… it’s just… the mind reels in the same way that a Victorian’s must have been carried away by one of that era’s gargantuan steelworks or power stations. Even at thirty five years remove, it’s barely credible.

And the Gabfest recognises something of this when they argue…

…Essentially what it all comes down to… there are two tones to the coverage, that tone of wonderment… and then there’s this sort of chewing over of the regret that the space programme has stalled and even regressed.

On the latter point they also referenced Tom Wolfe’s article in the New York Times which takes the provocative notion that…

The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.

…

Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets … Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that … the galaxies beyond.

…

Three months after the landing, however, in October 1969, I began to wonder … I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program’s launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus’s Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s … and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn’t resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour … while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! …anywhere! … You couldn’t just run an ad saying, “Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert” … the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

It’s a good piece and worth reading. Essentially Wolfe sees the space programme, and in particular the bid to reach the Moon as a ‘single combat’ that would in its winning or losing rout the other side, in this case the Soviets. And they won. And within a few years the NASA budget was halved…

It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

Indeed…

Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.

And those thoughts in mind, every time I look at the simulations of Orion there’s part of me that does the calculus as to how Constellation will pass Congressional committees, how it will weather budgets and budget cuts and the need for this to be a programme that stretches past one Presidential term, past two, perhaps past three or four in order to produce outcomes. And a certain pessimism creeps over me.

What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.

July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.

And if that seems an odd juxtaposition with the Onion clip, well think again about that wonderment. And what it means both on a practical and philosophical level.

And although there have been the setbacks that Wolfe points to, the lack of progress, it remains true that NASA has been extant for fifty or so years and that might be worth a little sliver of optimism, because simply surviving is no mean achievement in the world we live in, particularly for an organisation whose aims are largely so ineffable. And in that survival is the merest echo of the survival, or need to survive, for us as a species and to continue to exist in a universe which is indifferently hostile to us. Wonderment. Not a bad way to proceed in light of that.