The dreams of men, 1970

The astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission were running out of oxygen, the team on board the vessel staring into the abyss. NASA was doing everything possible to bring the three Americans back to Earth safe and sound. It was Commander Jim Lovell’s third mission, after Gemini and Apollo. The space agency’s engineers were working around the clock to fix the problems on board. Two days ago, Lovell had alerted the control centre of an explosion of unknown origin, damaging the lunar module and making it impossible for the team to land on the moon. The team now had a new mission: making a complete orbit around the moon so they could be pulled back into Earth’s gravity. Nobody knew if they would make it home. “The primary mission may have failed, but if our brave astronauts come back home we’ll rejoice in their success...” read Marylin Lovell, Jim’s wife, in her daily paper.

The spacemen said that all they’d found on the moon was ash and craters, but they had also seen the magnificent beauty of the planet we live on: Earth. She was so beautiful, so tiny in the cosmos, so close to the sun. What should have been a lesson in humility was, in reality, a triumph of narcissism. To see the Earth as a speck of dust in the universe was to outgrow and eclipse that dust, to become more powerful than the beings who lived on it. Getting to the moon was partly symbolic; it was about betterment, pushing beyond the known limits of human capability. If Americans could conquer the moon, their achievement promised new technological possibilities for future generations. America needed this adventure; they wanted it, and they coveted it.

Marylin was worried. Her husband might suffocate hundreds of thousands of miles from his home, far away from his wife and their four children, far from those who loved him and cared for him, not as an astronaut serving his country, but as a husband and a loving father who liked eating hot dogs and going to the movies. It had been Jim’s dream to walk on the moon. Setting foot on its surface and waking up to the raw sunlight now seemed an infantile ambition. Here he was, a prisoner in his spaceship, at the mercy of his most basic need, to breathe, hoping desperately for oxygen so he might return safe and sound to the arms of the Pacific Ocean. Marylin cried. At least Jim had seen his adventure through, never stumbling, never doubting. His passion might cost him his life. He’d spent long nights staying up, thinking, calculating in order to graduate to the rank of mission commander. He didn’t seem to care about what happened on Earth; he was already worlds away, far from the events that were turning society on its head. Here in Houston, no-one had been shipped off to Vietnam, no-one had felt the revolution of the Black Panthers or the dizzying highs of Woodstock. Here in Houston, men wanted to land on the moon, and not just once. As if the moon belonged to them, as if they could colonise it like a cotton field, as if you could freely build your house on that dust.

The moon was there, mirrored in the surface of our lakes, reflecting the sun’s light at night. It would never not be there, but man was an ambitious animal. Man had fallen under the spell of the desire to break his earthly chains, to fly further and climb higher. The mission controllers were hoping for the crew to come home safe and sound, with or without a moon rock, and for their capsule to splash down in the Pacific. It would be a victory and a failure too. Perhaps Earth was simply too beautiful to stay on, not hostile enough to tame our natures. Earth had life, Earth was life; she was water and water was life.

This morning, the guests and the engineers were gathered around Marylin Lovell and trying to comfort her. A week ago, Jim and Marylin had kissed goodbye in their garden; she had said goodbye as if he was just going off to work, just a regular husband setting off on a business trip. Time moved slowly; time was deadly.

Alan Alfredo Geday