Free Moondust by Andrew Smith

were at the time, this now looks like outrageous luck. Come to that, the flight-line presence of ego-rich Mercury 7 jock Shepard was outrageous to begin with: shortly after his Mercury flight, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s syndrome, a malfunction of the inner ear which brought vertigo and dizziness and caused him to be grounded for the next six years. A risky operation made him available once more at the advanced age of forty-seven, but one respected authority on Apollo will spit to me that sending the science- and geology-phobic Shepard to the Moon “was a complete waste of time – we might as well have sent that jerk to Dallas.” Every morning, his secretary hung a sign on the wall to indicate what sort of mood the man they called the “icy commander” was in on that particular day, and this was to the Astronaut Office what the shipping news is to mariners. Alan Bean of
Apollo 12
describes him as like “a tiger shark swimming around a tank of fish.” In fact, if Ménière’s syndrome hadn’t intervened, he might well have captained
Apollo 1
and so claimed commander Gus Grissom’s place in wherever it is that tiger shark throttle jockeys go when they fall in the line of duty. Remarkably, though, he was the only one to shed tears when he stepped onto the lunar surface, or at least the only one to admit it.
    Mitchell was the anti-Shepard.
Apollo 14
would be his first and only flight. He describes the Saturn V at launch as “coming alive with a kinetic violence unlike anything any of us had ever experienced.” Once up, space was “just as beautiful and strange as anything conjured by a child’s imagination…. There is a sense of unreality here, with the absence of gravity and the tapestry of blackness broken only by an overwhelming glitter ofstars that surrounded our craft.” He echoes others in marvelling at how “the intricate beauty of Earth overwhelmed the senses,” and I find it impossible to read his descriptions of spaceflight without yearning to follow him there, a yearning I haven’t felt since I was a boy looking up at the sky.
    The
Apollo 14
launch went to plan, but trouble started as soon as they left Earth orbit, when the Command Module
Kitty Hawk
slipped the spent third stage of the Saturn and turned to pull the LM
Antares
after it, only to find that the docking mechanism wouldn’t work. A solution was improvised in time to save the mission, but four days later, with the two craft separated over the Moon and ninety minutes to the LM’s descent, Mission Control became aware that the guidance software was intermittently receiving false abort signals from somewhere. If this continued into the powered-descent phase, the computer, believing there to be an emergency, would automatically activate the ascent engine, separating the upper and lower halves of the LM and firing the crew back up into space. If
Antares
was near the surface, it could crash. Worse, the danger became apparent just as the LM was preparing to pass around to the far side of the Moon, meaning that there would be no radio contact for the next ninety minutes. Back in Houston, there was a thick manual containing procedures for every difficulty that had been imagined. This one hadn’t been.
    At Mission Control and MIT in Boston, desperate computer experts supposed that a quick-and-dirty response would be to write the abort switch out of the software, and a lank-haired young programmer named Don Eyles, who looked like a Pink Floyd sound engineer, set about doing just that. When it came time to power up
Antares
’s descent engine, Shepard and Mitchell held their breaths, but the fix worked; there was no bang and rush and wrenching of gut at the realization that the landing was off. They understood this to mean that, should an abort actually be required as they neared the surface, a lengthy and potentially fatal series of commands would have to be