The men who fell to earth

Duke’s words on hearing the news--"Now there are only nine of us"--resonated with Smith. He was struck by the realisation that in the not-so-distant future there will be no man alive on earth who has had that extraordinary experience of viewing our planet from the moon.
In Moondust, Smith sets out to interview all nine surviving moonwalkers, meditating on their experience and how they made sense of it in their later lives.
"For me, this is not a space book; actually, the most important thing the moonwalkers did was to look back at the earth. For the first time human beings saw the earth as really small against this vast backdrop, seeing how beautiful it is, possibly unique in the whole universe.
"One of the things they were all struck by was that, as they looked around them, the earth was the only colour they saw. Space itself is apparently this kind of sheeny, penetrating black, and the stars of course don’t have colour, and don’t twinkle outside of the earth’s atmosphere. So there was no movement you could see, which is an amazing thought in itself. I think they all came back with a feeling of how unique and precious the earth really is.
"I’m old enough to remember when the first landing happened. When the lunar missions stopped, we all just stopped thinking about it. Then I met Charlie Duke, and suddenly the idea that those astronauts would all be gone one day, and there would be no one on earth who had once stood on the moon, seemed really bizarre and alarming, and made me feel sad.
"I think those three years from 1969 to 1972 are absolutely fascinating. The world really did change in those years, from a time of massive prosperity to the age of economic crises and recessions we have had ever since.
"The moon landings were presented to the American people as a race to beat the Russians. Nasa had no plans to land on the moon at all, but supercompetitive Kennedy could not bear being beaten by the Russians. He made a speech on television, saying ’I’m going to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade,’ and the director of Nasa claims he woke up screaming that night because they had no idea at that moment how they were going to do it.
"One of the things that really delighted me about it was that, as much as the project was supposed to be all about science and technology and beating the Russians, the human element always came in. The 1960s was the time of the counter-culture, and for people such as Edgar Mitchell [the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14, who experienced a euphoric ’epiphany’ on his space journey], the project was always about humanity and our place in the universe too. He didn’t tell anyone about his ESP experiments. So there was the official mission the astronauts were supposed to be carrying out, and an unofficial one that always got smuggled in.
"I met all the surviving astronauts. Neil Armstrong [the first man on the moon] wouldn’t be interviewed--he never has been--but we did exchange a lot of emails and he was interested in what I was doing. He’s been brutalised by his experience after returning to earth; the astronauts didn’t sign up for the kind of celebrity status they now have and he hates it. He’ll talk about technical things, but won’t give opinions about anything.
"There was a very high divorce rate among the astronauts. There’s only one crew whose marriages all stayed intact. That’s partly because the demands of the job were very intense and they didn’t see a lot of their families. But I think they all faced the same problem: if you go away and have an experience as vast as that, how do you settle back to living on earth?
"Charlie Duke is a lovely, lovely man, but by his account when he came back from the moon he became a complete tyrant, he just could not readapt."
"The situation was exacerbated by the fact that in 1972 this programme that was supposed to be the bold new future stopped, just like that. The race was won, so why continue? The astronauts were all coming up to the age of 40, more or less, so it was prime time for a midlife crisis anyway. I asked myself, ’Is it worth doing something like that, if the rest of your life becomes an anticlimax?’
"Buzz Aldrin [Neil Armstrong’s companion on Apollo 11] grew depressed and became an alcoholic. Charlie Duke did too. That’s why I valued Alan Bean [an Apollo 12 astronaut who later became an artist] because he seemed to be able to come back and use the experience creatively. He was on the second mission and they were on the moon for just a day. He’s endlessly repainting the lunar missions; I think he wants to leave something of it behind."
Andrew Smith Moondust (Bloomsbury, 4th April, £17.99, 0747563683)