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Scattered across the US are a small group of men whose exploits grant
them life membership to the most elite club in the world. One of them is
Pete Conrad. Clad in a dark business suit, and sitting in his office at
the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in Long Beach, California, Conrad looks
like any other executive. Who would pick him out as one of 24 men who have
been to the Moon and, indeed, among the dozen who have set foot on it?
Yet in November 1969, only months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin became history’s first moonwalkers, Conrad left his own
tracks in the lunar dust, as commander of the Apollo 12 mission.

Normally you won’t find Conrad – now aged 64 – living in the past. Like
many of the Apollo astronauts, his motto is: ‘Don’t look back’. But from
time to time, however, Conrad and the other lunar veterans can be persuaded
to reminisce. Since 1985, I have talked at length with each of the 23 surviving
Moon voyagers (Apollo 13’s Jack Swigert died in 1982) to document the experiences
of the first men to visit another world.

It wasn’t always easy to get to the astronauts, many of whom were reluctant
to give interviews. And with good reason: ever since they came back from
the Moon, they’ve been hounded by people who want to know ‘What was it like?’
But my efforts paid off. One by one, the Moon voyagers opened up.

Bill Anders, for example, a veteran of the Apollo 8 mission, described
the sobering beauty of seeing the Earth rise beyond the pockmarked, lifeless
surface of the Moon during history’s first lunar voyage. Buzz Aldrin spoke
of his wonder at standing on the ancient dust of the Sea of Tranquillity
and looking out at the stark, alien landscape all around him. Due to the
Moon’s small size, he explained, the ground fell away noticeably in all
directions: he could actually see that he was standing on a sphere.

Even Neil Armstrong, who has shunned the interviewer’s microphone since
becoming the first man to walk on the Moon, was a gracious and engaging
participant as he shared his memories of those heart-stopping minutes when
he piloted the lunar module Eagle down to the lunar surface on 20 July
1969.

A thousand feet above the Moon, Armstrong looked out and saw a crater
the size of a football field looming ahead, ringed with boulders the size
of small cars. For an instant, he told me, he considered setting down among
the boulders, knowing the geologists would be overjoyed if he and Aldrin
could bring home samples of lunar bedrock. But the next instant he rejected
the idea because, he confessed with a laugh, ‘I didn’t have that much courage’.

When Armstrong guided Eagle to a safe touchdown, the challenge that
John F. Kennedy had set before America in 1961 was nearly met: to land a
man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the
decade. On 24 July, Armstrong, Aldrin and their crewmate Mike Collins splashed
down in the Pacific and Apollo’s mission was accomplished.

RIPE FOR EXPLORATION

But Apollo didn’t end there. Suddenly the Moon was no longer a light
in the sky, but a world ripe for exploration. In November 1969, Conrad and
Alan Bean touched down on the Moon’s Ocean of Storms, less than 200 metres
from the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe. By demonstrating the ability to land
on target, they paved the way for the first scientific expeditions to another
world. To the scientists, the Moon was nothing less than the Rosetta stone
for deciphering the earliest history of the Solar System, a story long erased
on Earth by geological activity.

Three missions later, in 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott and Jim
Irwin spent three days on the Moon, making three moonwalks of up to seven
hours each and ranging miles across the surface using a battery-powered
car in search of geological treasure. Their explorations brought them to
the edge of a giant canyon and hundreds of feet up on the side of a lunar
mountain, where they discovered a rock that represented a chunk of the Moon’s
primordial crust.

But even as NASA extended Apollo’s reach, space budgets were being
slashed in Washington. The public, divided over the Vietnam War, had turned
its attention to more earthly concerns such as the decaying inner cities
and the threatened environment. NASA’s dreams of more ambitious space programmes
met a wall of criticism. How could anyone talk of sending humans to Mars,
asked politicians, when there were people starving on Earth?

By the time that Apollo 15 was launched, NASA had already cancelled
the last three Apollo missions to save funds. On the final mission, Apollo
17 in December 1972, Gene Cernan and geologist-astronaut Jack Schmitt –
the first and only scientist to walk on the Moon – spent three days prospecting
in the spectacular Taurus-Littrow Valley while their crewmate Ron Evans
explored the Moon from orbit with a battery of cameras and sensors. And
then, the first great age of lunar exploration came to a premature end.

These days, Apollo is relegated to anniversaries. The astronauts, who
expected their work to be carried on by a new generation of explorers, now
face the prospect that they will be the world’s only Moon voyagers for the
rest of their lives. They do not hide their frustration.

Apollo 14’s Stu Roosa, who orbited the Moon while Alan Shepard and Ed
Mitchell explored the Fra Mauro highlands, says that Apollo reminds him
of a huge, unfinished granite obelisk he saw during a visit to an ancient
quarry in Egypt. ‘I always thought Apollo was our unfinished obelisk,’
he says. ‘It’s like we started building this beautiful thing and then we
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In truth, NASA had not intended to abandon the Moon. But in the 1970s,
faced with relative austerity, it focused on a new mission, to reduce the
cost of access to space with the reusable space shuttle. One of the key
players in that effort was John Young, the ninth man to walk on the Moon.
When Apollo ended, many of the lunar veterans retired and moved on to other
careers – but not Young. By his own admission, he ‘lives and breathes’ space.

In 1981, by then chief of the astronaut corps, Young commanded the shuttle’s
maiden voyage; two years later, he made a second shuttle flight as commander
of the Spacelab 1 science mission. By 1986 he was looking forward to his
seventh space mission. Then the shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all
seven of its crew. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Young’s angry memos
about safety violations were leaked to the press. In 1987, he was transferred
from the roster of active astronauts to a management post. Some NASA officials
denied that the memos had anything to do with it: he had simply been in
his astronaut post too long and it was time for him to move on.

Today, Young is anything but reticent when it comes to space exploration.
‘We ought to go put a base up there,’ he says. For scientists, the Moon
offers the chance to unravel more secrets about the Solar System. For astronomers,
it could serve as the best observing platform in existence – free of the
light pollution and radio interference on Earth but without the technical
complications that arise from trying to operate a telescope like Hubble.

The Moon’s soil is also relatively rich in helium-3, an isotope that
is all but nonexistent on Earth. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs researching nuclear fusion say
that a reactor using helium-3 as fuel would be cheaper, safer and more efficient
than the more conventional deuterium-based fusion process.

In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, Young applauded from
the sidelines as President George Bush announced the Space Exploration
Initiative, a far-reaching, 30-year space agenda that included a return
to the Moon and crewed voyages to Mars. But within four years the initiative
was dead, brought down by budgetary cuts. Young and other advocates of space
exploration are frustrated: no matter how clearly they describe the benefits,
the words seem to fall on deaf ears, even when they are coming from an Apollo
astronaut.

As you read this, NASA’s current project – the space station – is facing
the latest in a series of life-or-death battles in Congress. It remains
to be seen whether the US will renew its commitment to space, rekindling
the spirit that produced the first moonwalk 25 years ago.

MIXED FEELINGS

And what of the men who took those historic footsteps? What do they
feel when they see the Moon rising in the sky, looking just as it did when
they left their home world for brief stints as lunar explorers? Feelings
aren’t what most astronauts like to talk about. Conrad, for example, says
he doesn’t look at the Moon at all, and that when someone mentions ‘space’
he think of his mission to rescue the crippled Skylab space station in
1973. Schmitt – who served a term in the Senate after leaving NASA – insists
that walking on the Moon was just one high point in a ‘steadily rising curve’
of life experience.’

Of all people, the hard-boiled Shepard – whose lunar golf shots are
what most people remember of his Apollo 14 mission – confesses that he can’t
look at the Moon without a sense of awe. And for Roosa, there is a mixture
of nostalgia and disbelief at having been to the far edge of human experience.
‘Regardless of what Pete Conrad says, I look at the Moon all the time,’
Roosa says. ‘And I say those things: ‘I was there.’ Sometimes I joke, ‘Was
that another life? Another lifetime away?’ And it really is. It was another
life.

Andrew Chaikin is the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the
Apollo Astronauts, published in the UK by Michael Joseph, and in the US
by Viking.