Perhaps the idea of waking from a 600-year cryosleep searching for a new planet in some far-off solar system isn’t for you. A three-year round trip to Mars might be too much of a strain. Perhaps a journey of just a few days, or even a few minutes, is all you need to scratch your itchy feet. The promise of a short package holiday away from earth is something that we’ve often been told is imminent, but we’re living in a time where this could actually be a reality – where a trip into space isn’t just for the professionals, but for you. And by you, I mean someone a lot richer than you.
In 1968, Apollo 8 took humans to the moon for the first time. Just as significantly, that year saw the release of Stanley Kubrick’s visionary interpretation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film which inspired and influenced a generation of astronauts and space travel visionaries. It depicts a future of routine trips to the moon, with pristine turbaned stewardesses, and exciting trays of space food. The film merged the reality of the moon as a destination with a new age of aviation and travel glamour that had landed on earth – the brand-new spacious Boeing 747 that would bring jet-set travel to the people was about to come into service and shrink the world. The message was clear – flying to the moon would soon be as accessible as flying across the Atlantic.
In that same year, capitalizing on this new optimism, the American airline Pan Am, who we see in the film, started its ‘First Moon Flights Club’ back on earth. Pan Am was at the forefront of the new dawn of aviation expansion, with a ‘meatball’ logo just as iconic as NASA’s own. A quick call to your travel agent would get you on the Moon Flights Club list, which over the years grew to 100,000 members. Of course there were no firm plans. There was no Orion 3 spaceplane, the spacecraft we see in the film. Instead you received a card and a letter of intent that this would one day happen – despite fares that ‘may be out of this world’. This was one of the first loyalty cards. Pan Am knew what people wanted, and knew how to tap into that dream.
ASTRONAUT WANTED: NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
In the 1980s, the reusable Space Shuttle ushered in a world of new opportunities. With more seats on board than any other spacecraft before, it paved the way for access to space for a more diverse group of people, including, for the first time, ‘citizen observers’ – most famously Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire schoolteacher who flew on Challenger STS-51-L in 1986, who tragically died along with her six other crewmates.
As the political landscape changed in the Soviet Union during the years that followed, the cash-strapped Russian space programme announced that their Mir Space Station was opening its hatch for business and accepting paying guests. In 1990 Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese journalist, became the first commercially paying civilian in space. According to Russian space historian Anatoly Zak, a Japanese broadcasting crew from TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) had been covering a launch at Baikonur and had joked to their host about the possibility of hitching a ride. They were more than surprised when the answer they got back was a ‘Da’. Despite apparently chain-smoking four packets of cigarettes a day, Akiyama was selected out of 163 other applicants, along with a camerawoman called Ryoko Kikuchi who later had to pull out due to an illness. Giving up the booze and cigarettes, Akiyama underwent the formal training at Star City in Moscow, including the daunting task of having to learn Russian. The week-long trip on the Mir Space Station cost $11 million, and was sponsored by the TBS network. Despite suffering from severe space sickness Akiyama performed his duties as a journalist, photographing the earth and broadcasting his overview effect experiences back to his public on earth. He described the view of the earth from space as ‘like listening to an orchestra of colours’.
Britain also bought a visit to Mir through a consortium of commercial investors, which became known as Project Juno, named after the Roman goddess whose temple was guarded by geese. Chemist Helen Sharman was selected for the trip after hearing the job advert on the radio – ‘Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary’ – and hastily scribbling down the phone number on a petrol receipt while sitting in a traffic jam. Thirteen thousand people applied for this rarest of rare opportunities. Helen became Britain’s first astronaut and spent eight days aboard the station in May 1991, doing a variety of scientific experiments and outreach work.
At the end of the 1990s, the creaking Mir Space Station was being increasingly exploited as a commercial platform. The American TV network NBC had even greenlit a reality show called Destination Mir, in which contestants would train as astronauts, with the winner launching into space. The idea was set up by MirCorp, the maverick private space company who had leased the station from the Russians. The show never made it off the ground and Mir was finally decommissioned in 2001.
BUYING YOUR OWN TICKET
It was Dennis Tito, a millionaire and former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, who would eventually claim the honour of being the first self-funded astronaut. His trip was made possible through Space Adventures, the first and only space travel agent, who right now are waiting to take your money and organize your trip. Tito bought a seat on board a Soyuz to the brand-new International Space Station. This went ahead despite the protestation of NASA who weren’t convinced that Tito was ready and thought he could be a safety issue. His trip marked the beginning of new possibilities for access to space for a very select few – a small group of committed super-rich individuals, who had the opportunity, passion and financial resources to make their dreams come true.
Even being a multimillionaire doesn’t guarantee you a ride in the coveted right-hand seat of a Soyuz. Successful training has to be completed, the Russian language has to be learned, and exams and medicals passed. Sarah Brightman, the singer, paid $52 million for her ten-day mission to the ISS, which was to include singing a specially composed song in space. But despite all her training, she was forced to pull out for personal reasons.
The British/American video-game pioneer and entrepreneur Richard Garriott lifts up his shirt and shows me a huge scar across his belly. We’re in the Duke of Yorke pub in Holborn and I’m presenting him with his replacement silver British astronaut pin. Richard ran into medical problems during training for his self-funded flight. Russian flight doctors had identified a problem with his liver. It was so minor that he may well have lived his life never knowing about it, but it was enough of a risk for the doctors to ground him – despite having already paid millions of non-refundable dollars. On hearing the news, Richard took matters into his own hands, and his own doctor in America went ahead and surgically removed a sizeable chunk of the offending organ. When he came around from the anaesthetic, his doctor informed him that the operation was a success and his liver was in good shape. He pointed out that he’d also noticed something odd about his gall bladder while he was in there, so had taken the liberty of whipping that out too. Richard asked the doctor if he’d checked that this unscheduled medical procedure had been approved by the Russian flight doctor back in Star City. Do you need a gall bladder to go to space? It hadn’t even occurred to the doctor to ask. Panic ensued, phone calls were made, but eventually Richard got signed off to fly.
THE ORIGINAL SEVEN SELF-FUNDED ASTRONAUTS
Until recently, national government controlled space agencies were the only ones holding the keys to space. For the space frontier to be truly opened to all it needed an incentive, something tangible for the dreamers and entrepreneurs to get behind. While political conflict provided the impetus to get us into space in the 1960s and 1970s, now it was about the money.
Incentive prizes of the past, which offered cash, like John Harrison’s Longitude Prize, or the Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh for flying non-stop from New York to Paris, have made a return to help drive exploration and innovation. It was reading Lindbergh’s book The Spirit of St Louis that inspired Peter Diamandis to create the X Prize in 1995, to ‘build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, twice within two weeks’. Domingo Gonsales and his flock of geese (even though he had built his own spacecraft) would have sadly been ineligible because his ‘flight of fancy’ was a one-off.
A whole world of different solutions to Diamandis’s challenge appeared: space planes, ‘rockoons’,* and vertical take-off and landing rockets. It was aircraft designer and entrepreneur Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, with its revolutionary shuttlecock folding tail section used to slow it down on re-entry, that would claim the prize. On 21 June 2004, and again on 29 September, test pilot Mike Melvill flew this pioneering new spacecraft into history. At 47,000 feet, SpaceShipOne was released from the carrier aircraft, and its rocket engines were lit sending Melvill straight up at over 2000 mph. He said, ‘It was like being hit with a sledge hammer in the back.’ Melvill, and later Brian Binnie, had crossed the Kármán Line, making them the only two people so far to receive FAA astronaut wings as commercial pilots.
SOMETHING FOR EVERY BUDGET
MOON
COST: $$$$$$
SPACEX’S DRAGON 2
The new Chief Designer, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, has just announced that two self-funding space adventurers have signed up and paid the deposit for a week-long trip around the moon on board his Dragon 2 spacecraft, currently slated for the end of 2018, although I suspect this date will change. Those two people are ____________ and ____________, and between them they’ve forked out an eye-watering $_____ million.** This is SpaceX’s first foray into the commercial ‘space tourist’ business. If it happens, SpaceX could pip NASA’s Exploration Mission-2, a similar route around the moon on board the new Orion spacecraft launched on NASA’s forthcoming SLS rocket, due to be launched around 2022 – again, subject to delays. Both these projects represent a huge step forward in human space flight: the first time we will have gone back to the moon for half a century.
But don’t worry if you don’t have a spare $_____ million. There are other options on the horizon…
SUBORBITAL
COST: $$$$
The two frontrunners in the race to suborbital space are Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. Both systems – the reusable spaceplane of Virgin and the ballistic capsule design of Blue Origin – along with SpaceX are the most visible part of what’s dubbed as the NewSpace culture. A drive for space access led by entrepreneurship.
VIRGIN GALACTIC –
WHITE KNIGHT/SPACESHIPTWO
Since the X Prize was won in 2004, Richard Branson has been trying to get his own Virgin-branded reusable tourist spacecraft up and running. But as with any new rocket technology, this has been beset with technical, bureaucratic and political problems.
The idea is for a suborbital flight for tourists – a lot simpler than the speeds and complexities needed for full orbital spaceflight. This will take paying customers on a huge parabolic ride, crossing the 100 km Kármán Line, before landing on a runway back on earth. The apex of the parabola, just like on my roller coaster, will give the astronauts their few precious minutes of weightlessness.
A jet-powered aircraft (WhiteKnightTwo) carries the rocket-powered spacecraft high into the atmosphere to 50,000 feet, almost the limits of a jet engine, before releasing it. The spacecraft then fires its rocket motor, and heads straight up to cross the all-important line before gliding back to earth, ready for you to show off to all your friends.
On the Virgin Galactic company’s website you will be asked: ‘What are your motivations to go into space?’ Hopefully this book will help you come up with a pithy answer. Tucked away at the bottom of the webpage is: ‘By ticking this box you are confirming you are over the age of 18 and understand a spaceflight requires an upfront deposit of US$250,000.00.’
NEW SHEPARD – ‘Gradatim Ferociter’*
Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, the man who delivers your stuff in brown cardboard, has his own solution to deliver you into space.
In 1946 the British Interplanetary Society came up with a project called ‘Megaroc’ – a two-stage, V-2-inspired, ballistic suborbital craft that would propel a crewed capsule over 300 km. It’s an idea that never made it past the drawing board, but it’s an almost identical concept to that of Blue Origin. Here’s the plan: a vertical take-off vertical landing (VTVL) rocket booster with a big feather painted on the side called New Shepard (after Alan Shepard) will launch a crew capsule above the 100 km Kármán Line. Most importantly, the capsule you travel in will have room enough for you and five friends to do your somersaults, with big 28.6 x 42.7-inch windows where you can bear witness to a universe of overwhelming indifference. You will then come back down to the ground suspended from three parachutes.
The company’s coat of arms features two awestruck tortoises (reminiscent of those who went to the moon) reaching for the sky holding a shield. Above the door of the crew capsule, the theme continues: a tortoise picture is stamped to mark every successful test flight.
Price: TBC
– THE ORBITAL PERSPECTIVE
COST: $$$
These days it’s de rigueur to send unusual things like meat pies to the ‘edge of space’, tethered to helium-filled weather balloons. On Bang Goes the Theory, we even sent up a small 3D-printed doll version of me, which ended up landing in a Travis Perkins builders’ yard somewhere near Cambridge. The closest I will ever come to spaceflight.
The ‘edge of space’ is a bit of a cheat because it isn’t really the edge of space at all – 40 km or so is the limit of a weather balloon. The pronounced curvature of the horizon you see in many of these photographs is as much an effect of the camera lens as altitude. In fact the term ‘edge of space’ has become a catchall for anything above 60,000 feet (18 km) or so, getting on for twice the cruising height of a commercial airliner. Here the air is so rarefied most jet engines are no longer of any use – the only way to access this realm, other than with a rocket, is with a gas-filled balloon.
Plans are afoot to send humans up here, and not for the first time. Project Excelsior and Project Manhigh were US Air Force high-altitude balloon programmes from the late 1950s and early 1960s that took Colonel Joe Kittinger to 102,000 feet (31 km) before he jumped out, breaking the altitude freefall record. This longstanding record was beaten in 2012 by Felix Baumgartner and then again by Google executive Alan Eustace in 2014.
Companies such as Zero 2 Infinity are now developing edge-of-space balloon rides offering much cheaper access for would-be astronauts looking for the ‘orbital perspective’. Ron Garan is a veteran Space Shuttle pilot who is the chief pilot and public face of World View, a company that sends paying customers into the stratosphere. Their balloons can be used as scientific platforms and ‘stratolite’ delivery systems (satellite, but in the stratosphere). But most interesting is the Voyager capsule – a ‘comfortable, stylishly-appointed spacecraft’ that will get you to heights very few have visited. For two hours you’ll be able to experience your own overview effect, gently suspended at the very top of the atmosphere, at the limits of where a balloon can reach. It will also be the first spacecraft-rated vehicle to have a dedicated fully-stocked cocktail bar on board.
Price: $75,000. Coming soon.
‘VOMIT COMETS’ AND FOXBATS
COST: $$
If you suffer from motion sickness, then make sure you take an appropriate pill and something to throw up in. The ‘vomit comet’ is a commercial aircraft that flies in a series of parabolic arcs. At the apex of each arc you become weightless, until the aircraft goes over the top and begins to dive again where you will feel ‘hyperschwerkraft’* – about 1.8-g – the same way you experience weightlessness on a roller coaster, or your stomach goes tingly when you drive fast over a hill, but obviously a much bigger ‘hill’ giving you a period of much longer weightlessness. For about twenty seconds per arc, you’re experiencing what it’s like in orbit – one endless arc. What you’ll need is something roomy like an Airbus 300 or a Boeing 727, or even an old Soviet Ilyushin il-76, which you could pick up pretty cheaply these days. Get them to take the seats out so you’ve got lots of room to float about in. Luckily for you, there are now various companies like Air Zero G in France who have arranged all this for you. Then find a brave pilot with a strong stomach. Zero-g flights have long been a useful analogue for astronauts to train with, as well as a research platform for experiments that require microgravity.
For €20,000 you can get a ride into the stratosphere on board a Russian Mig ‘Foxbat’ fighter jet, a service that several private Russian companies provide. Four hundred kilometres from Moscow is the Nizhny Novgorod air base. From here your friendly Russian pilot will take you to around 18 km. Up there at the top of the atmosphere, through your all-glass canopy, the sky will darken to almost black and the curve of the horizon will be seen – a tantalizing hint at what’s in store if only your pilot could take you higher.
– WHERE DREAMS ARE LAUNCHED FROM
COST: $
Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club hasn’t been serving up its legendary free steak dinners since a fire razed it to the ground in 1953. Pancho was the barnstorming female aviator who bought a ranch near what was the Muroc Air Force Base before it grew into Edwards Air Force Base, where the Space Shuttle sometimes landed. She set up the restaurant and bar hangout beloved of the test pilots and made famous in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The first free steak dinner was given to Chuck Yeager in 1947 after he finally went through the Mach 1 barrier in the Bell X-1. The steak dinner prize was subsequently offered to every pilot who did the same. The ruins of Pancho’s club are slowly being eaten away by the desert. A few foundations, the odd wall and the old swimming pool are up there in Mojave, just off the road that leads to Edwards, a few hours drive north of Los Angeles.
Out here is another important space hub – The Mojave Air and Space Port. For the last two decades this facility has been the beating heart of the NewSpace movement, the home for the new private rocket-ship builders, who risk it all to try to leave the planet. It’s a wild west, tumbleweed kind of place. As you drive in, you’re greeted by one of the monuments to the early days. The 63-foot tall Roton Rocket stands like an obelisk, once the ‘future’ of reusable spacecraft – designed with rotorblades at its tip so it could auto-gyrate back to earth. A good idea, which like many good ideas, was hobbled because the world just wasn’t ready for it. Men like Jeff Greason – one of the early pioneers – packed up his life and moved out here to pursue this dream. Having worked on the Roton, he moved on to co-found the XCOR Aerospace company, which, like Branson and Bezos, is trying to help you get into space as cheaply as possible.
The Mojave Air and Space Port even has its own restaurant, The Voyager Restaurant Diner, which proudly advertises, ‘Aviation spoken here’.* Not quite as legendary as Pancho’s, but you might bump into one of the NewSpace pioneers, like Dave Masten whose Xombie rocket I watched being tested here a few years back – a stripped down, alcohol-fuelled prototype balancing on a column of hypersonic gas, that landed back on its feet long before Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 stunned the world doing the same. Maybe if you cross the Kármán Line the Voyager diner might offer you a free steak dinner on the house. If they won’t, I will.
As the finishing touches are still being finalized on the new generation of private space vehicles, it is worth thinking about where you are going to fly from. What should a modern spaceport look like? Grand, exciting, state-of-the-art. Something to rival the world’s great airports. Something you’d commission the great Norman Foster and Partners to design, as your first-choice architect. The good news is that planet earth’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport is ready. Looking like a horseshoe crab, or a crashed flying saucer clinging to the New Mexico desert near the town of Truth or Consequences,* Spaceport America is a grand, exciting, state-of-the-art building designed by Norman Foster and Partners. This is the shiny new home for Virgin Galactic, as well as a test facility for SpaceX and others. They have their own fire department, twenty-four-hour security, a medical centre and huge hangars to park your spaceship. Being the only spaceport limits your destination choice. But that will hopefully change one day too.
If you’re in a hurry, you can visit it right now and do the official tour. There won’t be any flights leaving yet, but you can always turn up early and be first in line.
Name.
Alfred M. ‘Al’ Worden
Occupation.
Test pilot, engineer, astronaut.
Claim to fame.
Apollo 15 Command Module pilot. Remained in lunar orbit conducting scientific work while Jim Irwin and Commander David Scott were on the moon’s surface.
BEING AN ASTRONAUT
Did you see yourself primarily as an explorer, an ambassador, a scientist, a test pilot or an engineer?
I considered myself probably more of a scientist than anything else. The Mercury 7 astronauts were picked because they were test pilots – guys who would stand the best chance of surviving in space, not knowing what they’re gonna find when they got up there. And that was very successful. By the time they got to my group, academic background was almost as important as your flying background – I was teaching at the Test Pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, but I already had three Master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, and that made me the perfect candidate for the program. As pilot, I did all the piloting going out and back. That’s a skill that you learn, it’s not an intellectual pursuit, it’s like learning to drive a car, like learning to fly an airplane – you learn the systems, you learn what to do if something goes wrong, but it’s a skill – it does not require a lot of knowledge or intelligence. The science part did require that, like the remote sensing of the lunar surface and the photography that we did on the flight. It required interpretation of what we saw.
Did you discover a love for lunar geology?
No question about it. When we made our flight, there was still a question of what made the features on the moon: was it meteor impact, or volcanic activity? Of course it’s a little of both.
As a rookie, how was your relationship with the Project Mercury guys?
Hah! I will never forget walking into the astronaut office the first day I got there and being treated like I was a janitor. The older guys, those who had flown, kinda looked down their nose at the new guys coming in, because they hadn’t flown. You really don’t count for anything until you’ve made a flight. There were only 25 of us in the office when I got there. I was number – I dunno, I forget my number now, but there were a couple of Mercury guys left, there were quite a few of the Gemini guys left. We were the go-fers for everybody above us – we would go-fer the coffee and sweep the rooms. And then when I got assigned on the backup crew for Apollo 12 everything changed. We were part of the group then.
Talking about Apollo 12, would you be able to point to the SCE to AUX switch?
Dallas, my god man! I’m not sure I could do that anymore.
I think it was just behind Alan Bean’s head.
Yeah. I think it’s my ‘age progression’. So I forget all those things.
I think you can get it on a T-shirt now. It’s become a bit of a space geek thing.
I was out at the launch pad. I was the close-up crew guy, so I had to put all their straps on and connect the oxygen and radios. I was in the viewing area when Apollo 12 launched and they got hit by lightning.
Pete Conrad’s hand would have been on the abort handle wouldn’t it?
Yes indeed.
When you applied for astronaut selection, was it very similar to the Mercury guys? Did you have to do the Lovelace medicals and things like the Rorschach test?
We did the Rorschach, we did this, we did that. And I can remember distinctly asking the Air Force colonel who was in charge of all that, could they actually keep somebody out of the program based on psychiatric tests? And his response was: no we can’t. All our reports go to the board, but we do not have the authority to say yes or no. However, if we declared somebody clinically insane, then that was as far as they would go. We had some guys that were on the borderline that actually got into the program.
What did you see in the Rorschach? Any squashed Zebras?
I saw a lot of butterflies. <Laughs> There’s another test where they show you pictures – like a guy lying in bed in a jail cell and a bridge over a chasm going towards a castle. The last one was a blank white sheet and they asked Pete Conrad what he saw in it and I think his comment was, ‘Just a lot of snow.’ It was crazy kinda stuff.
Was it all very competitive?
Pete was pretty colourful. I don’t think they selected Neil Armstrong because they thought he should be the first man on the moon, I think they selected Neil because he was in the right rotation. All of us in those days never, ever thought Neil would make a landing. It was always assumed that something goes wrong on a first flight like that. We never really gave it any credibility that Neil would be the first one. We all thought that Pete Conrad would be the first.
WHY GO INTO SPACE?
Apollo was so much more than a political exercise, wasn’t it?
Dallas, let me ask you a question. Philosophically. What do you think the goal of the space program is?
Now? Or then?
From the very beginning till now and way into the future. What is the ultimate goal of the space program?
Several things – an emotional pull towards the idea of ‘the frontier’. To try and make sense of the universe…
Okay. Let me ask you the next question. What do you believe is the prime imperative of every living creature on earth? Everything – grass, trees. Animals. Humans. What is the prime imperative of all those living things?
Well, to survive. And reproduce.
It’s survival! Correct. And I happen to believe that we have a genetic tick in our brain that says the day will come when we can’t live here anymore, we gotta go somewhere else to live, so in my mind the ultimate goal of the space program is to find someplace else where we can go live.
And where did Apollo fit into that?
It’s the first step. Forget about going to the moon. The first step is developing the technology to do that. The next step is to go further, the third step is to go further, the fourth step is to go further, and along the way the most important thing of all that’s got to be developed is a propulsion system that will get us way out there, like Star Trek. We will not find another planet that we can live on until we get propulsion capability that will get us there in a reasonable amount of time. But you see, to me, the whole purpose of the space program, genetically driven if you will, is to give us the capability to take the human species somewhere else.
It’s a recurring theme I keep bumping into – that notion that we need to be out there.
Well I think there’s no question about it. And we’ve taken the first step in going to the moon. We couch these things in terms like ‘exploration’ and finding out what’s in the solar system, and going to other planets and that kind of thing, so that gets people interested in what we’re doing on a short-term basis. But in my mind, the long-term basis, and we’re maybe even talking about a million years, I don’t know, is to eventually give us the capability to go to another solar system, where there’s a planet that we can survive on.
LIVING IN SPACE
Jim Irwin and Dave Scott leave for the lunar surface, and then you’re suddenly in this extraordinary position of being ‘the world’s most isolated person’, as it’s often described. Alone in lunar orbit.
You know, that’s a bullshit record.
<Laughs>
But somehow that’s one that gets picked up. It’s kind of an interesting one. The one record I’ve got that nobody will ever beat is that I did the first deep space EVA.
Tell me about seeing the earth from the moon.
I saw the earthrise 75 times while I was there. I remember going to the window every time I went around the back side of the moon to watch the earthrise, because it’s just unbelievable. Oh my god, that’s 250,000 miles away, and I live there. Holy shit! And I can cover the Earth with my thumb. People ask, ‘What was it like being up there by yourself for three days?’, and ‘Weren’t you lonely?’ And I’ve gotta say, no. I wasn’t lonely at all. I loved it. As a matter of fact, I had room to move around without those two guys there. I’d been with them four and a half days. I was so goddamn glad to get rid of them. I thoroughly enjoyed the time by myself. And it allowed me to do a lot of things science-wise – I did a lot of photography of the lunar surface, a lot of remote sensing. I took pictures of things in the solar system that we’d only talked about, that we’d never proven.
Astronauts talk about the overview effect – this overwhelming sense of scale and connectedness with the cosmos.
I’m not sure I ever got that feeling. I used to look at the earthscape, and think oh I can see Florida, I can see the Gulf of Mexico, I know where Houston is, and then track down to the centre of my house. The Earth is so goddamn far away that it’s just another object in the solar system. Even though you say to yourself, ‘That’s home.’ Crazy.
How black is space?
Dallas, it’s the blackest you’ve ever seen. I was in a part of the orbit round the moon where I was shadowed from both the Earth and the sun. Absolute complete blackness except for the universe out there. I used to stare at the Universe absolutely amazed because I could not pick out an individual star, there were so many of them. It was a wash of light that was continuous, and only a very few of the brightest stars could you see in that background from all those stars that are out there. And if you start looking at what that all means – it tells you that we really don’t understand the Universe around us very well. We live in the Milky Way galaxy. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. And that’s all you can see from the lunar orbit, the Milky Way. But you look beyond that and astronomers will tell you that there are a couple of hundred billion more galaxies like the Milky Way out there. The numbers get so huge that I can’t comprehend them anymore. I could see the horizon of the moon, the mountain peaks, everything – not because you’re in sunlight, but because of the background starlight they obscure. There were so many stars. A blank white light. Truly amazing.
People are drawn to astronauts because you provide a human link to something much bigger. Are you comfortable with that responsibility?
To be honest with you, I think it’s great. Because I can say anything I want and who is going to dispute it? I mean unless you’ve been there you don’t. There’s no way you can question what I saw.
<Laughs>
NAVIGATING
They gave you a sextant as well as the primitive Apollo Guidance Computer. Did it makes you feel like a proper explorer using stars to steer by?
Well, the sextant we had was pretty much like sextants that have been used for a couple of hundred years, except ours was connected to the computer to calculate the angles; we didn’t have to do that manually. You know, I navigated all the way back home on my own, I did not use Mission Control. I used the sextant to calculate where we were and derived the course corrections from that, and I got us back as well as Mission Control would have. In fact, we landed closer to our landing point than Mission Control had us. It was an interesting exercise.
Was that due to the technology or your skills as a navigator?
I don’t think it was my skill. But there was a thought in my head: ‘If we’re gonna go to Mars, it’s gonna be a year and a half,’ and I got to thinking in a year and a half a lot of things can happen to electronics. So we’ve got to think of a way of getting back in the event of not being able to talk to Mission Control. So I convinced Mission Control and the guys there that we needed to give this a try. Mission Control had us accurately tracked, but I decided that I needed to prove that an onboard crew, given the right set of conditions, could still get back home, and we did. We did it very successfully.
If somebody needs a ride to the moon, they should get in touch. You’d be the perfect lunar Uber driver.
Yeah! Ha ha. The perfect Uber. You know, when we go back to the moon, they will have a GPS system around the moon. So it will make it much easier to navigate back and forth.
If a moon tourist asked you, where would you want to take them?
I think you’d wanna take them to the South Pole.
Shackleton crater?
Yeah. The sense is there’s water at the South Pole, so that would be an interesting place to go to. If you’re just gonna go up there and camp for a while, one place is as good as another.
THE FUTURE
What do you think of Elon Musk? He seems to be like Wernher von Braun, both as a pragmatist and a visionary in the way he talks freely about big, lofty ambitious goals.
I think Elon Musk is a lot like Wernher in that respect. He is designing things that work – his returnable first stage rocket is unbelievable. I think he’s an amazing guy, he’s very charismatic, he was able to raise money even though he didn’t have anything to show for it. I’m a little concerned that there’s this talk now how he’s gonna send a couple of guys around the moon in the next few years, and there will not be a pilot on board.
Get in touch with him and say, I know the way. I’ve been there.
<Laughs> Damn right I’ll take them! Well, if anything should go wrong, what are they going to do? We learned on our flight that robotic systems and artificial intelligence are great, but when something happens that they’re not programmed for, then you’ve gotta problem. And we had those kinds of things happen on our flight, where a robot would never have figured out the problem.
Would you go back?
Goddamn right! Why not? I’ve had lots of people ask me, ‘What kind of people should we send to Mars?’, and I point to myself and say ‘Me!’ In the first place, I’ve lived a very good life, I’m an old guy now (although my doctor tells me I’m twenty years younger than my age). And as an old guy, I can sit and watch TV all day.
Yeah, there you go!
I don’t care. <Laughs>
What do you think of the new NASA Orion spacecraft that’s going to go around the moon? You can do a deep space EVA from the Orion like you did on the Apollo Command Module.
Yeah I know. My honest answer, it’s a piece of shit.
Really?
It’s just a repeat of Apollo. I think there’s a huge, huge, deficit of creativity in NASA today. Now, the new SLS rocket might be okay, but I have a big problem with Orion. I took a group up to NASA headquarters trying to convince them of another shape, a re-entry shape that had all the capability in the world, but they had already started on Orion, they didn’t want to talk about it. So they’re stuck with old technology. Why is it that the Dragon works like Apollo, why does the Boeing Starliner look like Apollo? Why do all these machines look like the old Apollo? Because it’s the most simple, minimalist spacecraft you can build. None of those vehicles are designed to go as far as Mars, they’re all designed to work in earth’s orbit or maybe go to the moon. That’s it.
Back in 1638…
Holy shit! I wasn’t alive then…
… Domingo Gonsales was pulled to the moon by a flock of geese in an early science fiction story.
There are great similarities between how we dreamt we would go to the moon and how we actually did it.
Well you know what, there’s even a better one. Jules Verne wrote about three guys that went to the moon in a capsule, just like we did.
And they left from Florida!
Cape Kennedy or Canaveral was his launch site. He had that part of it all figured out, and he didn’t know anything about rockets. Do you think that he was right about so much of what he wrote because he knew enough about it even back then? Or did somebody read his book and say, that’s what we’ve got to do? I’ve never really resolved that question. But he was way, way ahead of us. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to get fired out of a cannon at 25,000 mph. Would there be anything left of you? I think you might be a puddle.
I think a lot of early rocket design solutions came as a direct result of trying to solve Jules Verne’s fundamental projectile design flaw.
Robert Goddard was part of that, Tsiolkovsky was part of it, Korolev was a big, big guy in that, von Braun was huge.
You must have known von Braun.
He was a very interesting guy. I met him at the Cape for the formal launch and I introduced him to my parents, by name: Tiny and Helen. And about three years later he was doing a series of talks through the country and he stopped at my hometown and gave a talk at the college there, Jackson Community College. My folks found out he was coming in town so they went to the talk. They were sitting about halfway back, he saw them there, and he called them out by name: ‘Hey Tiny, hey Helen. Nice to see you.’ And I thought, man, there’s one slick politician.
He was a real showman, wasn’t he?
Oh he was. Very charismatic. Very convincing and I think he made the whole thing possible.
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