That Day on the Moon – Oriana Fallaci
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
[”…] And on their return, rest assured, they won’t be writing poetry. If they were capable of it, after all, they wouldn’t be going to the Moon. And, most importantly, they wouldn’t be coming back.”
More or less what the wife of an astronaut scheduled for a later Moon flight says: “My husband is a robot. He wasn’t when I married him; he’s become one in the past few years training for the Moon. Understanding this has been a great sorrow for me, and at the same time, a relief. If he weren’t like this, I’d never see him again: you have to be a robot to go to the Moon and come back to Earth.”
[…] The world that technology imposes on us is not a world of individuals striving for beauty; it is a world of automatons aligned in the pursuit of success: and the most extraordinary of human adventures, the Moon, is based on a collective arithmetic operation.
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[…] In fact, I forgot to mention that Aldrin is an Air Force colonel, studied at West Point and, as a good soldier, believed in the sacred right of the United States to intervene in Vietnam; furthermore, he considered the fact that he couldn’t bomb Hanoi as the greatest sacrifice he could offer on the altar of the Moon. The pain this sacrifice caused him was compensated only by the joy of having dropped tons of bombs on North Korea: he had flown sixty-six missions with his F-86, and he was as proud of that as he was of his medals. In short, unlike Neil Armstrong, war was not for him an excuse to fly airplanes: it was a conscious duty to the flag.
“Buzz, don’t you think about the people you killed?” I asked him.
“Of course, they were my enemies.”
“Even the children in those villages, Buzz, the elderly, the women?”
“Of course.”
“And would you like to do the same in Vietnam, and does it upset you to be here?”
“Of course.”
When in a hundred years, or two hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand, we celebrate the Moon landing, we would do well to remember that the first two men on the Moon were two men who had killed a bunch of men in war.
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[…] Julian Scheer, head of public relations at NASA in Washington. “Generally speaking, all three are aware that they have already been elevated to the role of heroes. So, determining whether they’ll enjoy being heroes or they’ll feel like heroes is an academic discussion. They will be heroes whether they like it or not, whether they feel like it or not. And for the simple reason that the world will want it that way, imposing on them the label of new Christopher Columbuses. Clearly, the consequences of this imposition will vary from man to man: we can already predict who will handle it better and who will handle it worse. But I am optimistic. I believe that all three will accept with reluctance and with grace the duty of ending up in history as great men.”
Will they be great men, heroes? Are they? Obviously not. As individuals, as we’ve already seen, they matter relatively little. Chance has not been generous. As navigators and explorers, their merits are limited, and any comparison with Christopher Columbus is simply grotesque. Columbus was alone. He had conceived the journey in search of the Indies by himself, had organized it by himself, did it by himself against everyone’s opinion: and everyone’s opinion was that the Earth was flat, that at a certain point it would end and drop him into the void. (ed. an old urban legend—ancient Greeks already knew the Earth was spherical, having conducted experiments with shadows, stars, etc.; Columbus’s venture was still risky, though, because of uncertainty about distances: had America not existed, he would never have reached India) Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, on the other hand, know exactly what they’re going to find: minute by minute, meter by meter. In this journey certainly not conceived or organized by them, they are nothing more than chosen instruments; an extension of the machine. But there’s more: for the entire duration of that journey, they will never be alone: as with previous flights, they will be followed from Earth from the moment of departure to the moment of return. At the Houston Mission Control Center, they will be in contact with four hundred scientists, doctors, flight directors, astronauts, technicians, and outside the Control Center, there will be two thousand more. For instance, all the engineers who participated in building the Apollo capsule and the LM: for every little screw, every wire, every error, they will be protected, advised, helped. The only risk left for them is to die on the Moon. But it’s a risk so minimal by now, so ruled out by everyone, that at a certain point you wonder whether it really takes that much courage to go to the Moon. If it did take that much courage, why would the astronauts have demanded and obtained “a ninety-nine percent probability” of returning to Earth intact? I truly see nothing particularly heroic in this feat. The last little soldier charging a trench, the last Viet Cong throwing himself against a tank with three bullets in his rifle, is a thousand times braver than the astronauts going to the Moon.
But let’s suppose they don’t make it, and they die. Nearly half a million kilometers from Earth, on a lifeless, airless planet, in a heat of one hundred and twenty degrees. A terrifying end, agreed. But tell me: if you were an ambitious man like Neil Armstrong or a vain one like Buzz Aldrin, and they told you that on a day in July 1969 you were condemned to die, what kind of death would you choose? Me, in their place, I’d choose death on the Moon. Think about it: in front of the eyes of three billion people who know, who listen, who pray and cry for you. In front of television cameras, in front of radios broadcasting your epic, your sacrifice. For History, the altars. And so who is more courageous, who is more of a hero: the little soldier and the Viet Cong who die like dogs, with no one knowing, no one mourning them, at night, under the bombs, inside a trench—or Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin? The problem is that the concept of heroism has now been distorted. Because it’s fused with the concept of success, and a hero has become someone who succeeds: even if his success is the ultimate result of a collective effort or of an undertaking made possible by the use of billions. Of course, no one will ever take away Armstrong’s, Aldrin’s, or even Collins’s license to be called heroes. And the result will be three monsters the world will worship as angels. The only hope is that this might turn them from robots into human beings, and that time will humble them, explain to them that they are nothing more than what they are. As Pascal says, neither beasts nor angels: just men, that’s all.
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[…] That said, let’s move on to observe the lunar landscape that Armstrong and Aldrin see through the LM windows after the engine test.
It’s a truly ugly landscape. Everyone who saw it before them, from above, agrees in saying it’s the ugliest thing in creation. Bill Anders called it repellent: ”There’s something repellent about the Moon. Something evil. Something that pushes you away. I’m glad I’m not going back.” And don’t forget that, after the Apollo 8 flight, Bill Anders resigned as an astronaut and now works as an employee at NASA in Washington. Jim Lovell admits, yes, that as a landscape it could be called “interesting.” But he adds: “I wouldn’t want to live there even for five minutes. That endless beach with no sea. Brrr!” As for Frank Borman, he talks about it with a furrowed brow and a grimace on his lips: “It’s not just an ugly place, it’s a place forgotten by God. So desolate… desolate… Gray ashes, you see, and nothing else. It makes you think of the beginning of beginnings, of Genesis, with a shiver of horror.” Borman, too, after Apollo 8, left the astronaut business: from now on he’ll direct the space station center. From Earth. And what about Cernan, Stafford, and Young? Ask them about the Moon and they reply: “How beautiful the Earth is!”
That absence of color, for instance. From the LM windows you see nothing but black and gray, maybe brown at most; black sky and gray Moon, and on the gray falls a light that has nothing to do with our light, because our light is warm, yellow, bluish: on the Moon instead it’s livid, cold. Light, and nothing else. “To imagine it,” says Professor Hess, NASA’s scientific director, “you have to think of a room with black walls and a black ceiling, lit by a powerful neon lamp.” The lamp is the Sun. But while in our sky the Sun is a great diffused flame, in the lunar sky it’s a dot the size of a coin: let’s say, the concentrated beam of light eye doctors use to examine your cornea. Everything is so different, unreal. And what do Armstrong and Aldrin do after that first contact with the unreal? They go to sleep. First they eat their allotted ration of space food, and then they go to sleep.
The original idea was that, once they arrived, they would open the hatch and go down. But later Dr. Berry and Deke Slayton decided it would be wiser to take a nap: “To calm the nerves and prepare the body.”
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Cape Kennedy, July ’69
(ed. Wednesday, July 16, Oriana Fallaci, as a correspondent, on the phone with the editorial staff of “L’Europeo”)
[…]
– So you mean there’s a vulgar side to it, too.
“Well, of course. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Of course what’s happening in the souvenir shops is vulgar: just as it is vulgar what happens in the shops in Lourdes where they sell holy cards and statuettes. Man, says Pascal, is neither angel nor beast but both angel and beast: and this journey is about to be undertaken by men, not angels. Men are what they are: they want to make money off Lourdes and off the Moon too. They are not good, or not often. But if we waited to become good before doing things, we’d never do anything: would we? You talk about vulgarity, I would rather talk about good and evil: do you know what anniversary it is today? The explosion of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo. When Fermi and Oppenheimer and the others tested the terrible device that was later used in Hiroshima. That’s what men are like: they invent the atomic bomb, they kill hundreds of thousands of creatures with it, and then they go to the Moon. Neither angels nor beasts but angels and beasts. I don’t forget that, even when I let myself be moved by the immense star we call the Saturn rocket. And I think that right now hundreds of beings are dying in Vietnam, and that at the very moment the rocket lifts off from Earth and everyone shouts about the miracle, at least one being or ten beings will die, killed by a bullet or by a mortar shot… Minus four, minus three, minus two, minus one, and the rocket is about to launch, a man is about to die… It’s atrocious. And yet we still have to go to the Moon. And who knows, maybe it will help men be a little better, a little more angel and a little less beast…” (ed. it’s 2024 while I’m translating this text, and, well… nope!)
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Houston, Texas, July ’69
Now that the paradoxical spectacle is over, the drama concluded, and the boundaries of our intelligence and responsibility have stretched all the way to the Sea of Tranquillity, we feel almost accustomed to the idea of owning the Moon, and we nearly smile at our former anxieties and fears: it wasn’t that hard, some say, you strike a match and off you go. We get used to everything, even to the miracle of having broken out of our blue prison to reach that ugly island: soon we’ll forget it, just as we forgot the miracle of the first fish that emerged from the waters to crawl onto land and become a man. Repeating the challenge no longer seems like a blasphemous risk, and soon nothing will remain of the marvelous adventure but a circus around two pilots to whom we’ve already granted the license of heroes, their faces on postage stamps, their names in schoolbooks, a place in history. Perhaps success has made us lose our sense of proportion, perhaps what has happened is too vast to be judged by us: just as that fish didn’t realize it was leaving the water to become a man, we don’t realize we’ve touched another planet to become something we can’t even imagine. The judgment will belong to the children of our children’s children. For us contemporaries, for us spectators, there remains only to recount what we have seen and heard, at times with pride, at times with shame. Because we are made of both, and even in the journey to the Moon, men have shown their beauty and their ugliness, which is to say, their humanity. […]