How High the Sky : ...

Remember when man went to the moon? You may have missed it. Lots of us did. The summer of 1969 was tipped steeply toward the future, and for those of us who were certain that the U.S. empire was in its final days, who were making sandwiches for the radical underground or packing our bags for the back-country communes, and for millions of the less alienated as well, Neil Armstrong’s first step onto another world seemed, already, ancient history. A couple of white guys on the moon? A flag held out with wire? It was more artifact than harbinger, and to prove it, there was the voice of the trickster himself, Richard Nixon, looping back through space, congratulating himself on behalf of all humanity.

I thought then that the Moon deserved better. I think today that Apollo deserved better.

As Andrew Chaikin points out in “A Man on the Moon,” “Apollo was the last great act this country played out of optimism, if looking forward to the future.” But the America that Kennedy pointed toward the moon in 1961 was not the America that arrived there in 1969. It had been shattered and transformed by youth revolt and racial conflict. The irony of Apollo was that its achievement spanned one of the century’s pivotal decades and was overshadowed by another of humanity’s watershed triumphs: Vietnam, the first decisive military victory of a Third World people over a neocolonial superpower.

None of this was the fault of Apollo, which was one of the great voyages in human history, and we are nothing if not a voyaging species. Together with the Russians (for the cosmonauts provided the stimulus of competition, even if they turned out to have been only shadowboxing with the Moon), Apollo yanked the world from suborbital to off-planet flight, recapitulating aviation’s dizzying half-century of progress in less than a decade. And did it, let it be said, with grace and style and even a certain uncharacteristic (for America, and for science) humility.

It didn’t have to turn out that way. Apollo was a compromise from the start, a hybrid of Nazi rocketry, Cold War competition, L.B.J. pork-barrel politics and Kennedy glamour (with the astronauts as runway models). Yet it succeeded so magnificently because it had unique strengths. The Russians failed organizationally, not scientifically, with competing agencies fighting behind a wall of secrecy. NASA, by contrast not only with the Russians but with our own growing secretiveness, operated in the daylight with an extraordinary clarity of purpose and willingness to experiment. Perhaps most fortunate, NASA was independent of the military. By the time NASA become a proper, calcified, hypocritical, full-blown bureaucracy, Apollo was history and the footprints were on the moon.

Mercury/Gemini/Apollo is one story, and a story that has been told many times, by journalists and historians and hacks, by astronauts such as Frank Borman, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, and by belles-lettres luminaries such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and even James Michener, who made of space a sort of sub-subzero South Pacific. It was to be expected that the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 this summer would produce a fresh new spate of books. And I am pleased to note that one of them, Andrew Chaikin’s “A Man on the Moon,” is more than worthy of its grand subject.

Chaikin’s eight years of labor and hundreds of hours of interviews have yielded what will surely be considered the authoritative history of Apollo. A second newcomer, “Deke!,” ranks with Michael Collins’ earlier “Carrying the Fire” as one of the most vivid personal accounts. And a third, “Moon Shot,” falls back and burns in the atmosphere, so to speak.

All three books claim to tell the inside, the untold, the secret story of Apollo. But the real secret of Apollo is that there were no secrets. (Indeed, one wonders if we would have made it to the moon on Kennedy’s schedule--”before this decade is out”--if the Russians had been as open, and we had known how far behind they were.) There are details, trivia, personal glimpses (such as astronaut Pete Conrad’s bet with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci as to what his first words on the moon would be), but there are no shocking revelations. Perhaps that is appropriate, for unlike the poles or the upper Amazon, the Moon was an explorers’ goal everyone had already seen.

Chaikin’s book belongs to that new breed of personalized history perhaps best exemplified by the late Randy Shilts (“And the Band Played On”) or James Gleick (“Chaos: Making a New Science”) in which the scientific or political adventure is seen through the lens of personality. Chaikin lets the astronauts “take us” through the program and to the moon, but he doesn’t slight the less-known characters (some with peculiarly American names such as Chuck Berry, Tom Paine and Christopher Columbus Kraft) who built and ran NASA.

Especially memorable here are the geologists: Lee Silver, who took the astronauts on field trips to the Orocopia Mountains and taught them to collect rocks, and Farouk el-Baz (“Have we run out of geologists in this country?” asked Alan Shepard), who taught the command module pilots to not only look at but see the lunar terrain.

While authoritative, Chaikin’s book is anything but dry. Through the astronauts’ own eyes we see the luminous plains and dark escarpments; we feel the thrill, and the letdown as well (“It’s kind of like the song: Is that all there is?” astronaut Al Bean mused). And we never lose touch with the fear that is a pilot’s most trusted companion, especially so far from home. Every time a ship gets ready to lift off the moon, or even just to change orbits, the unspoken question rises, unbidden: “Is it going to light?”

And as we already know, it lights, every time. Apollo was blessed with that essential of the explorer, luck. Even the bad luck turned good. The fatal Apollo I fire forced a redesign of the capsule that couldn’t have happened if the fire had occurred off the pad. The explosion (another electrical fire) on Apollo 13 happened at the right time, and with the right commander, Jim Lovell, a veteran who had already been once around the Moon.

Chaikin’s “A Man on the Moon” starts with the Apollo I fire that claimed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and the man who might have been the first to walk on the moon, Gus Grissom, and ends with the Apollo 17 astronauts’ disgust at Nixon’s on-the-air dismissal of further space travel (“ . . . this may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon”). “Moon Shot” covers more ground, from the Mercury and Gemini programs through the Apollo-Soyuz linkups, and it looks promising, as it’s (ostensibly, at least) written by two of the top astronauts, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard.

Shepard, who was the only one of the original “Mercury Seven” to make it to the moon, combines in one person the high and low points of the program. Landing on the moon with Apollo 14, he steps out, looks up at the earth and, surprising himself, weeps like a child; or rather, like a man. The next day he trivializes the whole experience by swatting a golf ball out of sight.

Shepard and Slayton, who was chief astronaut and also one of the Mercury Seven, were genuine “right-stuff” guys. Just cautious enough, they knew how far you could push hardware; they knew teamwork; and they knew how to fly. They have a story to tell, but unfortunately their book reads as if it had been cobbled together out of first drafts of press releases. Here’s Armstrong during the Moon landing: “(He) gripped the hand controller in his fist, firm and strong, with a touch honed by years of flight in jets and rockets.” A description of air combat: “The sword play of flashing wings and howling engines in the thin, cold air of a high-altitude struggle where man met man.” And then: “The year 1967 rolled in like a political garbage truck with its wheels on fire.” Only those who have seen a political garbage truck with burning wheels, rolling, can appreciate just how precise that image is.

It’s a pity, but when all the books are telling essentially the same story, the telling is all. The hype, the hysteria and the sentimentality studiously avoided in the Chaikin book seems to have all ended up in “Moon Shot,” which spins out of control on almost every page.

Even though Apollo was the quintessential team enterprise, there were a few individuals who seem irreplaceable: James Webb, who ran interference with Congress; Wernher von Braun, who hit London with the V-2 and was convinced that his Saturn could do the same for the moon; George Low, who rushed the schedule to make Apollo Eight the first manned circumlunar flight (the Russians had done it, but the astronaut was a turtle).

The thing about astronauts is that they all can fly. The only one of them who seems essential to the success of Apollo is the one who never made it to the moon. It was one of the great fortunes of Apollo that Deke Slayton was grounded with a heart irregularity, for in “Father Slayton” NASA had a man who could set the rotations, pick the terms and make the decisions the astronauts wouldn’t have accepted from a bureaucrat or a scientist.

If “A Man on the Moon” is the authoritative masterpiece, “Deke!” is the book I read in one gulp. Slayton, who knew he was dying of cancer when he started writing, was fortunate to find as a collaborator Michael Cassutt, a respected science-fiction author good enough to make himself transparent. “Deke!” reaches back the farthest of any of the books--into Slayton’s days as a 19-year-old flying B-25s over Monte Cassino. If Slayton sometimes scants the personal, he’s intimate about the hardware in every area of his life. He discusses with affection and loathing not only the Saturn and the lunar landing module, but the F-100, the C-47, a creaky military transport and the Studebaker Light Six (which didn’t have the V-8’s weak valves).

Slayton was with NASA for 20 years, and finally made it into orbit as part of a Russian-American team. He is generous but candid about what happened to our space program after Apollo. When the shuttle blew up, he understood immediately: “The solid rocket motors simply weren’t designed to be launched with ice hanging off them.” He rates Jim Webb, the first administrator, as the best, and he left when the Reagan Administration replaced him.

Slayton never retired. Instead of going for one of the corporate board positions routinely tendered to astronauts, he characteristically ended his days playing with rockets, as head of a private company trying to launch (among other things) human remains into orbit. He died a year ago, the most down-to-earth man who ever went into space.

One closes these books with regret. Humankind may yet have a future in space, but the earth-tethered shuttle program isn’t it. Mars calls, but no one is answering. It’s as if Columbus, instead of returning to the “new world,” had settled for harbor cruises. As astronaut Stuart Roosa puts it, “Apollo was our unfinished obelisk. It’s like we started building this beautiful thing and then we quit.” Neither America nor Russia could do it today. The blueprints for the F-1 engines are lost, and if you want to see the business end of a Saturn rocket, you have to look into a mirror at the Air and Space Museum, for even that giant hall can only hold half.

If you want to watch a Saturn V lift off, and hear the roar as the heavens split open, and feel the earth shake as it slings a man toward the moon--well, it’s too late.

You missed it.

* Times Link: 808-8463

To hear Andrew Chaikin reading from his “A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts,” call TimesLink and press *7812

Call TimesLink from area codes 213, 310, 714, 818 or 909. From other regions, use the area code nearest you. To hear readings from other recently reviewed books, press *7810