Free Leaving Orbit by Margaret Lazarus Dean

their species without raising their heart rates or losing their swagger. This was exactly why they had been chosen as test pilots and then as astronauts. Yet—and here was the contradiction—people wanted to see emotion from them.
    I knew that before being selected as an astronaut Buzz Aldrin earned a PhD in astronautics at MIT, where he designed orbital rendezvous techniques for spaceships docking in orbit (still a highly theoretical prospect in 1963). According to all reports, this was a project that required a freakish level of intelligence, a mind-spinning application of physics, intersecting multiple orbits that young Buzz, in that time before computers, calculated by hand with a slide rule. (His fellow Apollo astronauts also recall that he was unique among them in his ability to calculate orbital rendezvous in his head.) The techniques he created were critical to early spaceflight, and some of them continue to be used today.
    Out of curiosity I decided to get hold of Buzz’s 1963 PhD dissertation through my father, whose status as an MIT alumnus allowed him to download a copy from the MIT library site. The dissertation is titled “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” Hand-typed, the equations make me imagine Buzz (or maybe it was his wife, Joan) painstakingly rolling the platen up or down half a click to create superscript and subscript numbers, dozens of them per page. The abstract introduces the project as a study of “the inertial rotation of the line of sight throughout three dimensional Keplerian rendezvous trajectories.” A whole page reads like this—words I don’t know, or words I thought I knew that are clearly being used in an extremely specific way.
    But on the sixth page I find a dedication:
    In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country’s present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!
    I feel a surge of happiness. Here is my reward: Buzz Aldrin has, unwittingly, dedicated his dissertation to himself.
    When I’d first learned about the orbital rendezvous piece of Buzz’s story, the math genius piece, I was surprised by it. I’d known that Buzz Aldrin was handsome and brave, unnervingly competent, but not that he was the sort of person capable of doing complex math in his head. Those people are necessary to spaceflight, but we think of them as the guys in short-sleeve dress shirts and dark ties, slide rules in their pockets, the nerds —not the astronauts, possessors of the Right Stuff who actually get to fly the missions and bag lots of babes along the way. The Apollo astronauts were avatars for our own dreams of spaceflight, in the same way that movie stars are our avatars for romance and relevance, and it’s perhaps not entirely flattering to us as a culture that we require of astronauts that they be athletic and daring, but not especially book-smart. The truth is that the astronauts were and are book-smart, all of them, and by most accounts Buzz Aldrin was the book-smartest of them all. Alan Bean, a fellow Apollo astronaut, once said: “One thing I know about Buzz: he’s one of these guys that’s a lot smarter than most of us. You didn’t want to sit near him at a party because he would start talking about rendezvous.”

    It’s hard to say precisely when the first moon hoax theory emerged, and harder still to say when it picked up steam. Maybe there were always people who doubted, even in the moment, even as the images were playing in black and white in their living rooms. Maybe some people’s trust in government had already eroded that much—maybe in certain circles it was starting to be a more fashionable stance to question everything.
    What we do know is that by the thirty-year anniversary of Apollo 11, in 1999, about 6 percent of Americans told Gallup they believed the moon landings were staged and another 5