In Which We Try Not To Blow Up The Moon

This Is How We Walk On The Moon

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Apollo 11 was, of course, the first manned mission to land on the moon. Why exactly we were there it's hard to say this far out, to recover the driving spirit of the Cold War. In these days human accomplishment wasn't limited to The Duel. It is hard to believe we landed on a lunar body. We did this — America!

I mean we had done a few good things along the way, some of them marred by the blood of patriots and traitors. But were we America then? We were surely America now, a vital potent force for making trouble in the world. Occasionally, as in this example, it was the right sort of trouble.

It wasn't easy. It came at a great financial cost. But we were first, which is still something even now.

We barely had civil rights, but we had space travel. What better sign that humanity was moving in the right direction, than the launch in July of 1969? We even had a media we sort of trusted. Major changes were happening in people's lives. They did not know that effectively, they were living through a golden age. World War II was a dim memory, international conflict wouldn't go away. But peace — and the triumph of American power — was on the horizon.

Robert Heinlein's Rocketship Galileo told of three boys and their brainy uncle taking a manned spacecraft to the moon thirty years before the feat would actually be accomplished. They trained and launched in an abandoned area near Nevada, and discovered a Nazi conspiracy on the moon. (That was later.)

"There's no economic value in a trip to the moon," their uncle tells them. "If there was, we'd have already been there." As time has gone on, we have better maps of Mars than we do of the Moon. The golden age turned bronze.

Now we're going back, and it's costing the government $580 million at a precarious time in the economic history of our country. So it is easy to say, "Why are we spending this sort of money?" "Aren't there better things to spend it on?" As if our taxes were just pocket money that we should reallocate to whoever was most deserving.

Now look, I don't believe in taxes, but priorities are relative. It's the same thing in the debate about global warming; the truth is barely any humans know a goddamn thing about the Earth. For christ's sake, we haven't even explored 100 percent of it! Same with space travel — extra-terrestrials could arrive here tomorrow.

In fact, it's likely that they will. We don't live in one of the only solar systems. To put it as mildly as I can while talking about this subject, there's a lot of them, and they have suns, too. Heat brings life, maybe not evolved as ours, but likely in a similar fashion. But people in government are more focused on handing money to Chrysler — where we actively know it can't do any good.

America of 1969 had no such problems; its greatest moments were ahead of her.

Everything was in black and white black then. You turned on the evening news, you turned on the late Walter Cronkite and you heard things of relevance, of tremendous relevance, to your own life. The world we live in was being formed, and all did not go according to plan.

The training was difficult, exhausting, exhaustive. They walked around in their pressure suits, they practiced climbing the ladder. Cronkite was decently amazed — his humanity was the reason he kept that job all those years, didn't you know?

Plans on the earth are just that — plans on the Earth. There's a lot you simply can't know about the Moon until you're on it, including what its ass (dark half) looks like.

America lubricated its genital area for this launch. It got the excitement going. You can see how pumped they were in the photos the Globe selected. NASA didn't fight for attention or interest. Hell, it could have been charity-funded enterprise if it didn't need so much money. In those days a photo in the media was a lot more impactful; people read newspapers, they didn't have 600 in their office every day.

That's why it's so fun to listen to Luddites now — they actually prefer not to know anything. They want to sit in the same place, static, not moving while the world moves around them.

We're on the moon now, a sort of anniversary voyage. This one has a serious purpose. Water:

Much of the exploration on this mission will therefore focus on the lesser-known dark side of the Moon, which scientists believe is cold enough to trap water molecules as ice.

The discovery of water at the lunar south pole would be “like finding a gold mine,” Dr Tooley said. Lunar water could be used for more than drinking because it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel and breathable air, a crucial part of Nasa’s planning for a permanent, manned base.

This is Heinlein talk! He wrote it, of how we would use the Moon as a prison, how the different gravity would create a harder world, where the petty insolences of terran life would be deadly.

This is for the future, when humanity has used up all the natural resources Earth has to offer. In 1969, we were attempting an act of great beauty, we were Columbus and Magellan and Cook all wrapped into one white phallic package, ascending into the sky as millions watched on television.

Kennedy had given the mandate in 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In other words, this nation. In other word, not the fucking Soviets!

Nixon viewed the mission from the Oval Office.

Cronkite, too, watched from his desk. As Armstrong and Aldrin reached the surface, they reported they were long — a difference of mere seconds in viewing landmarks meant a completely altered trajectory.

Although Apollo 11 landed with less fuel than other missions, they also encountered a premature low fuel warning. It was later found to be caused by the lunar gravity permitting greater propellant 'slosh' which had uncovered a fuel sensor. On future missions extra baffles were added to the tanks.

Buzz Aldrin spoke the first words (albeit technical jargon) from the LM on the lunar surface. Throughout the descent Aldrin had called out navigation data to Armstrong, who was busy piloting the LM. As Eagle landed Aldrin said, "Contact light! Okay, engine stop. ACA - out of detent." Armstrong acknowledged "Out of detent" and Aldrin continued, "Mode control - both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm - off. 413 is in."

neil

Then Armstrong said the famous words, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Armstrong's abrupt change of call sign from "Eagle" to "Tranquility Base" caused momentary confusion at Mission Control. Charles Duke, acting as CAPCOM during the landing phase, acknowledged their landing, expressing the relief of Mission Control after the unexpectedly drawn-out descent.

Shortly after landing, before preparations began for the EVA, Aldrin broadcast that:

This is the LM pilot. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.

Like any good Catholic, Buzz then took communion.

earth from lunar orbitWhat could keep us from a place like this and the knowledge it contains? What could stop us from continuing to understand why we are here on this planet and if anyone else is also in this universe. It is the main function of humanity. It is not to live in a house and wonder sometimes when the sky lights up, what's out there? That is primitive talk. Caveman became us, but they need not be us.

What wonder in this small chunk of rock? I dare tell no one Heinlein's predicted future of an independent, hostile state on the Moon, but surely better a cranky neighbor than a repeat of the whole Australia situation. He believed the Moon would want to be independent. His belief thickens mine, that we could have relations with the people of another celestial body. And if there's natural resources to sustain human life, I suggest we had better find out. In fact, I volunteer — someone should be the first blog on the moon.

There is no amount of elocution that can describe a lunar landing. We spend our entire lives on Earth — to these astronauts their home and favorite broadcaster were some distance away. You can find the restored HD video streams that were made here. But it always looks like the best kind of fun to me.

Nabokov would later say of the landing:

Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight.

It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does.

I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?

After the landing, Buzz Aldrin drifted into drinking and depression. How could he not? You can't go home again, especially when your home is the Moon. We have a deep inner desire, some small piece of it America, to make new worlds our own. It fascinates me that the Russians also had something of this composition, but they have never been a people to underestimate either — remember Stalingrad?

That is the beauty of this race. Any man may save the world.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here, and twitters right here.

"Across the Universe" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

"Let It Be" - Nick Cave (mp3)

"This Is How We Walk On The Moon" - Arthur Russell (mp3) highly recommended

"Blackbird" — Sarah McLachlan (mp3)

"Golden Summer, Carry That Weight, The End" — Phil Collins (mp3)

"Two of Us" — Aimee Mann & Michael Penn (mp3)

earthrise"Paperback Writer" - Kris Kristofferson (mp3)

"Helter Skelter" - U2 (mp3)

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" - The Black Crowes (mp3)

"All You Need Is Love" — Elvis Costello (mp3)

In Which I Saw Stephen Hawking In His Prime Another Time Another Time

Time Keeps Skipping

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.

— Helen Keller

Time began millions of years ago, perhaps even billions. The universe is continually expanding to take in the reality of this. Turning that kind of information into a mass market paperback was the work of Stephen Hawking.

Other theoretical physicists made fun of Stephen because he never got sexual innuendo. Also because he, without being more brilliant than any of them, was more famous than all of them.

More than anyone else, theoretical physicists should understand that notoriety is meaningless, and so perhaps is the universe. When there is nothing to believe in, there's a whole universe out there. We seem to have temporarily forgotten that.

Going around to places and talking about space is a good way to pass the time. Especially when the time between that is something near excruciating. Thus Hawking became a fertile symbol of what someone disabled could accomplish, given the right resources and love around them.

Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. Like most medical conditions, it's become progressively worse over time. Or, as I should say, Time.

Hawking's parents moved from North London to Oxford for the birth of their first child. The years after Stephen would expand the family to include two daughters. Outside, World War II was going on and missiles were a fact of life. Young Stephen knew nothing of this.

When he was very young, and his father was away, his mother brought the children to the Spanish island of Mallorca to stay at the home of the poet Robert Graves. It is a hiding place. He attended St. Albans High School for Girls, where he was so smart he didn't have to study — so he never did.

Hawking met Jane Wilde at an Oxford party, which was probably balls-out crazy. Then he invited her to his birthday party. Stephen was very awkward at Oxford, being several years younger than his classmates, and having already designed a primitive computer with his friends. Soon after meeting Jane, he found out he had a prognosis of two years to live. He and Jane began dating. She allowed him to put his penis inside her, but only a little bit.

stephen as a coxswainOxford gave Stephen a whole lot of bad news, but he did meet his wife there. They had children. At first when his Lou Gehrig's disease started coming on, he didn't think much of it. He had an exam to worry about, and he had always sort of been a klutz.

After he took a particularly bad fall, he took a Mensa test to check if he was still a genius.

In 1965, suspecting his life might be brutish and short, he married Jane Wilde, a language student. He had twenty years left of speech before pneumonia forced a trachetomy, and took his voice from him. Helen Keller once said, "The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction." Hawking didn't necessarily agree.

Hawking's paper "Black Hole Explosions?" appeared in Nature and immediately gained him considerable notoriety in academic circles, a cycle of acclaim that would continue throughout his life. A scientist never grows tired of hearing himself praised. It is impossible to become bored of it.

Months after Hawking completed his first draft of A Brief History of Time in 1988, Jane told him that she was cheating on him with the widower who led their church choir and helped take care of Stephen. He was none too pleased about this development.

He opened A Brief History of Time with the following anecdote: A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: 'You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's turtles all the way down.'

One of the key distinctions that Hawking attempted to 'square the circle' in his work was time as we perceive and time on the scale of a universe. People whose heads are occupied with this kind of information are necessarily disconnected from life, to the point where it is difficult to contemplate that life ending. Since Stephen was beating a death sentence he'd been given as a young man, he may have felt differently. In any case, he is now resting comfortably at Cambridge University Hospital.

Jane cared for him until 1991, when after three children, he dumped her for his nurse, Elaine Mason, formerly wife to the man who designed the computer who allowed him to talk.

Hawking was well aware of this irony, but for a man whose mind and body were in a precarious place, it's unclear what exactly happened in the 17 years with Mason that followed. Some have accused Mason of abuse, including medical professionals who worked with Hawking after she became his wife. In 2006, Stephen divorced her.

There are now statues of Hawking in South Africa and El Salvador.

In 2004, Hawking claimed to have solved a paradox in his own work, while it just sounded like he was high again. Quantum mechanics is all getting stoned at its base.

Hawking has a sparkling wit. Though it took him minutes to formulate simple answers once he was wholly dependent on machines to speak, once they emerge, they are delightful machine-formulated pearls of wisdom. He can only enter commands with his cheek, as the rest of his body is almost entirely paralyzed, accounting for the delay.

hawking at his first wedding in 1965In the second half of his life, Hawking promoted space travel, believing that it would at some point be necessary for humans to abandon Earth. I don't know what's more frightening — faith in God to prevent that eventuality, or faith in NASA to survive it.

He intends to resign his academic post at the age of seventy, having lived longer than John Lennon, longer than the most optimistic estimate after his diagnosis. He continues to travel, to live his best possible life. There is a grievous kind of hope here, a dark hope in this man, of surmounting death and the unknowable so routinely it is a fact of existence. He is fighting for his life as I write these words; somewhere else, at some other time, he is no longer fighting for his life. At a lecture recently, Hawking answered a question from the audience about extraterrestrial life: "Primitive life is very common, and intelligent life is very rare."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Eventually" – Geoff Farina (mp3)

"The United States" — Geoff Farina (mp3)

"Not About A Birthday" — Geoff Farina (mp3)

Geoff Farina website