In the Shadow of the Moon

Monday 20 July 2009 10:05AM (view full episode)

Celebrating 40 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, two space historians transport us back to 1969 and provide an in-depth look at the previous lunar missions, the astronauts and the American and Russian lunar programs.


Ramona Koval: Today we find the words to describe human beings going to the Moon, because of course on the 20th July, 40 years ago, this happened:

[archive audio of Moon landing]

I remember when Neil Armstrong said those historic words and I still get a lump in my throat listening to them now. Given all of the technological advances since then, I don't think anything quite comes close to that adventure in the 1960s of rocketing people into space and to the Moon.

My next guests have been charmed by the magic of that time too. Space historians Francis French and Colin Burgess collaborated on a project that documents both the American and Russian space programs, from the first man in space, that Russian Yuri Gagarin, to that moment when the American Eagle landed in 1969. The project was so thorough they wrote two books; Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow of the Moon.

Francis French is the director of education at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, and Colin Burgess has written extensively on space exploration. Francis joins us from San Diego, California, and Colin from our Sydney studios. Welcome to The Book Show both of you.

Francis, can I begin with you. The words 'ambition' and 'courage' are the ones that get into my mind when I think of that achievement of the Moon landing. What do you think of it as?

Francis French: I think courage and ambition are definitely important, not only for the individuals we're talking about but also as a nation and as a universal expression of being able to travel and exploration it was an incredible decision to make, back in the time before we had computers of any decent size, before we really had the technology we have today, to decide that within ten years humans were going to land on the Moon. Politicians now are scared of saying we could land on the Moon in ten years time, imagine back at a time when nobody had done it yet.

Ramona Koval: What about you, Colin? Do you remember what you thought when the Moon landing happened?

Colin Burgess: Absolutely, it was a very pivotal day in human history, and it was something I wasn't going to miss. I was actually meant to be at work that day but I rang in sick because the Moon landing actually happened at lunchtime and...a small correction, if I may, that tomorrow in Australia we actually celebrate the Moon landing, it occurred on the 21st here, just before one o'clock in the afternoon. But certainly it was a momentous day, not only for mankind but for me sitting there watching it in my lounge room, it was just something that you can't forget, and, like you, every time you hear those words of Neil Armstrong, a small chill goes up your spine.

Ramona Koval: Francis, so many people have written about the Moon landing. Was it important for you to find a new angle on the story?

Francis French: Very much so. I think it may take 40 years for us to really be able to step back and look at something in a historical perspective. There have been a lot of books written about the politics of the time, there's been a lot of books written about the technology and the engineering at the time. Colin and I are pretty well steeped in those subjects, but we really wanted to use that as a backdrop for telling some very human stories, because it's really taken 40 years for a lot of the people involved in the program, both the astronauts and those that work with them, to really understand what the experience was to them and be able to express some of those emotions and feelings that they had. We had a wonderful time being able to sit down with Americans and Russians and really get some of those stories in print for the first time.

Ramona Koval: The titles of your books on the space programs are Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow of the Moon, which are from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. What led you to Coleridge for the titles?

Colin Burgess: It was a title that I'd been thinking of for some time for a book on space because I like the...'into that silent sea, we were the first that ever burst into', I like that for a title for a space book. And when this opportunity came about, when Francis and I were talking at first about writing this book, I suggested that title, and we hopped into the book and I guess we were a little bit too prolific, we ended up with this vast manuscript which we submitted and the publishers took one look at it and they said, 'Well, you've got two options; you either have to cull it by about 50% or we turn it into two books,' which to me was no option at all. And then we were asked to come up with the title for the second book, so we went back to Coleridge and there's a small part a little further on in the poem where he talks about the shadow of the Moon and we thought that's our title. So we just modified it slightly and that's how we came up with the second title.

Ramona Koval: Colin, in your books you dedicate them to the first American and Russian astronauts in space. Why was it important for you to write a combined history?

Colin Burgess: Because it's the sort of feeling that I had for the space program when I was growing up. I first became interested when I was 14 years old with the dramatic flight of John Glenn, the first American into orbit who was in danger of being incinerated on the way back to Earth. My grandmother was a great historian and we walked each other through this space flight, this historical time, and then she encouraged me to write to the astronauts, so I had a feeling for both.

And the era that I grew up in was the space race, and unfortunately people these days just don't have that same sort of push, that same drive that was going on back then. You'd wake up in the morning and the Russians had achieved some momentous space feat in advance of the Americans, and it was truly a race. It was a race to the Moon and there was a tangible excitement about the whole thing, and that's what I enjoyed. But I realised there were two sides to the story; the story of the Soviet Union and the Americans, and I wanted to explore both along with Francis.

Ramona Koval: And Francis, how do you think the space race fed into the Cold War? Do you think in some way it prevented WWIII?

Francis French: Very much so. As Colin said, to tell just the American side of the story, as many other books have done, is really only telling one side of the story, and it really is only after the Cold War is over and we were able to get access to some archives and some interviews and have people open up and tell us things from a Soviet point of view that they would never have been able to do before, that we could really tell both sides of that story.

The Cold War was definitely a very interesting time in history and the space race is one of those very unique moments when the ability to financially do something, to technologically do something, to have political will behind something, to have tax payers willing to pay for it and to have a time when people don't want to go to war but they do want to compete against each other.

All those things happened to line up in a couple of years. By around 1965 that impetus had already gone. By then however the Apollo program was rolling, everything had essentially been bought and paid for in those early years, and it rolled through until 1969 and that first Moon landing. But it was just a very short five or six-year span when everything lined up in the right way and probably, yes, the space race may have avoided another situation such as the Cuban missile crisis or something else turning into a very hot war.

Ramona Koval: Colin, you also thought about dedicating the books to the second astronauts in space. Is that so that we're reminded that every step in the space programs of these countries was significant, because there's was always something a bit sad about the person who wasn't allowed to walk on the Moon or the person who did incredibly brave things but was the second to do it rather than the first.

Colin Burgess: Oh yes, history is replete with stories like this. I mean, who knows who flew the Atlantic after Lindbergh? We looked at the situation of dedicating the book and we decided that we wouldn't dedicate it to the first pioneers, we would dedicate it to those who followed, who followed in their shadow but improved on what the first person did. We found that we enjoyed the concept of recognising everybody in this program. We included the astronauts' nurses, we included physicians, we included technicians, engineers, controllers, everybody had a story to tell, and it's not just the astronauts and cosmonauts' stories, it's the stories of that massive effort in both nations to get that first person on the Moon.

Ramona Koval: Of course Russia had the first woman in space and you also look at the American women who didn't go to space in the Mercury program because of a ruling from 1944. Tell us why they weren't able to go.

Francis French: It's a really interesting story in that a lot of people look at a group of women who went through medical testing at the time and yet weren't allowed to join the space program and see it as NASA discriminating against women at the time. What we did was get underneath that story and really look at the underlying social aspects behind it. What we found out was that NASA really didn't have a choice. They had to choose the best people in the country to fly those missions and they chose people who were qualified test pilots who were essentially the only people that could have flown those spacecraft and survived at the time.

There were no women who were qualified military test pilots at the time, because there had been women back in the 1940s in WWII who had those qualifications, but as soon as WWII ended the military changed their roles. Over a whole generation women weren't allowed to fly those aeroplanes. So when NASA came looking for the best people, there were no eligible women. NASA did get a lot of criticism for not selecting women but it really wasn't anything they could have done. As soon as women were able to become test pilots in America and went through those academies, NASA actually picked the first three women that came right out of the academy; one of them went to work in Mission Control, the other two became astronauts, one of them became the first woman to command an American space shuttle.

Ramona Koval: Francis, you and Colin interviewed many of the people involved in the space programs. The American astronauts of course had contracts with Life magazine, the cosmonauts all had to toe the party line. How hard was it to reconstruct people's lives without the propaganda?

Francis French: That's an interesting point because people think of the Russian program as being very sanitised, very propagandised, as it really was at the time. They forget that the American program was very much that way too. As you mentioned, Life magazine had most of the astronauts under contract for their personal stories, and they didn't want to cause any waves. There were some astronauts who had pretty rocky relationships, rocky marriages, had some colourful personalities and got up to some colourful stuff, but you would never have known that by reading these official sanitised accounts that made them all sound like all-American, apple pie kind of glowing role models.

So over time now we're getting to talk to some of these people and their families and those who worked with them, a lot of these guys are now willing to talk far more freely and candidly about what they really got up to. A lot of the people who worked with them would say the same thing. You mentioned earlier on about the first and the second people to fly into space and how we dedicated some of it to the second, that's also something that's interesting because sometimes the first person to fly something isn't necessarily the best because the first mission is often the shortest and the simplest, and they were saving some of the better people for later missions. And those people tended not to get the public attention and the adulation as much, which means they haven't been asked the same questions over and over again, so when we showed up and started talking to them, there were some stories we'd never heard. Sometimes their wives and children said, 'They never told us that story and we're in their family,' so we got some real original interesting stories precisely because they hadn't been picked to death by other writers before.

Ramona Koval: Colin, tell us about Scott Carpenter's Mercury flight into space.

Colin Burgess: Scott Carpenter was the backup to John Glenn for the Friendship 7 flight. He actually got his flight when the original backup pilot Deke Slayton was set aside with a heart complaint and Scott Carpenter took his place. Scott was scheduled to fly a mission very similar to John Glenn, a three-orbit mission, but he encountered problems not necessarily of his own doing on that flight. And after the mission was over he landed some 250 miles away from where he was supposed to, and there was a lot of drama on American television that they were saying that we may have lost our first astronaut, so there was a lot of relief when he was picked up, but there was also a lot of criticism from the senior people within NASA's Mission Control.

He was ostracised quite bitterly, and unfortunately a lot of it was not warranted. A lot of it was mechanical, it was to do with the systems onboard the spacecraft, and in fact he did a magnificent job in getting that spacecraft back into the ocean in one piece, and himself of course. He basically saved the American space program at that time, and we felt that this needed to be recognised, more than the flight, in that chapter that we cover of John Glenn. We felt that there was enough drama in Glenn's flight, but the human side of the story was Scott Carpenter's, how he performed so magnificently but when he came back to Earth he was ostracised and never flew in space again.

Ramona Koval: Francis, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders was the first astronaut to leave the Earth's orbit. What did he say about that experience?

Francis French: Bill very luckily is a local neighbour of mine, so I had a lot of time to sit down with Bill and really chat further and further and deeper and deeper behind his memories. A lot of astronauts have what we call the 'mego' moment which is the 'my eyes glaze over' moment. You ask them the same question, 'What was it like to walk on the Moon?' and they have their stock answer. But when you visit somebody's house often enough, you sit down and you have dinner with them, then the real stories start to come out.

Bill Anders is a really interesting guy who...basically the philosophy of what he saw and the way he experienced that was something that no robot or no photograph could ever capture. It really proves the value of putting humans into space because he was, as you say, on the first mission to leave Earth's orbit and go to the Moon. The expectation was the astronauts were going to go to the Moon, look at the Moon, learn a lot about the Moon, that should have been enough. But in Bill Anders personal case, he didn't find the Moon that interesting, he found it a beaten up, dead, lifeless place.

The fascinating thing he found was when the blue marble of the Earth glowing above the horizon gradually rose above the Moon. He saw the Earth rise, the very first time a human had ever seen that. He was profoundly moved by that and he realised that the whole point of going to the Moon wasn't what they thought it was going to be. It wasn't to explore the Moon, in his case, it was to look back at the Earth and discover the Earth as a fragile tiny little place he could put behind his thumb. No human had really thought about that before. Within a year (and a lot of people say it's not a coincidence) the environmental movement really kick-started in this country, based a lot on that photo. So, things happened through his mission and through other missions that nobody expected to happen. This is just one of many, many different impressions we've managed to capture, what it was like to travel to the Moon.

Ramona Koval: Francis, one thing that struck me was the different background stories that the astronauts had. Yuri Gagarin's life history is interesting. He had a rough childhood. It's amazing he ended up where he did.

Francis French: If anybody could have said 'I didn't make anything of myself in life and I have every reason not to' it would have been Yuri Gagarin. He had an incredibly tough life, as you said. He grew up in a village that had one telephone, one radio, no electricity, water came from a well. It was an agricultural family. And then the Nazis invaded, came through the village in WWII, the village was the front line of a battle. His brother and sister got taken off to a slave labour camp, he parents were tortured by the Nazis, his brother was hung from a tree and barely survived. All his schooling went out the window, he had very, very little schooling as a child. Then the Russian army pushed the Nazis back and the village was a front line again. And just when you think life is going to quieten down, Yuri Gagarin grew up a little bit, became a typical rebellious teenager like many teenagers, didn't know what he wanted to do with his life but knew it wasn't what his father wanted him to do which was stay in the village and become a carpenter...

Ramona Koval: And his father was never particularly supportive, was he.

Francis French: Not at all, no. Yuri eventually decided to run away to the big city and try and join a gymnast school, only to find that there were no places available. As he ran away his father said, 'Don't you dare shame the family name of Gagarin.' He was expected to be the family black sheep, and yet within ten years Gagarin's father was being ushered in Red Square by the premier of Russia and brought up onto a big presidium while tens of thousands of people were cheering him as the father of the space farer. I think at that point it was fair to say he hadn't shamed the family name. But an incredible story.

Ramona Koval: What about Gherman Titov, the second Russian? He had a love of literature, didn't he. How did he describe being where he was?

Francis French: Titov is a very interesting character. Again, sometimes the second people are more interesting than the first and even better qualified. They saved him for the second mission in some ways because it was a lot longer; he actually spent the whole day in space and slept in space. But also he was somebody who was from a more middle class background, his father was a teacher, and it didn't fit with the propaganda they wanted to do. Because his father was a teacher he grew up steeped in particularly the poems of Pushkin. He was a very poetic, very lyrical guy.

When they would put them in isolation training to train them for what they imagined to be the loneliness of space and basically shut them in a room for sometimes days at a time, Titov would recite poetry to himself to keep himself interested, and when he got into space that poetic vein continued. he writes about the light coming through the spacecraft window as if it was filtered through a stained-glass window, and just very, very poetic descriptions that are beautiful, and may not be that hard for an astronaut to write today when we've had hundreds of astronauts go into space and they can compare experiences, but for those very first people they had nothing else to compare this to, they had to come up with original ideas and interpretations. So to be able to capture and repeat some of these early impressions, it's just fascinating for us.

Ramona Koval: Tell us about Michael Collins' memoir, because you both say that that's the most riveting account. What distinguishes that book Carrying the Fire?

Colin Burgess: It's just the language that Michael Collins uses in Carrying the Fire. In the space fraternity it is widely recognised as the best book ever written by an astronaut and possibly ever about the space program. I recently saw a documentary that coincidentally is also called In the Shadow of the Moon and in that Michael talks in lyrical terms about flying to the Moon, what he did, what his companions did on the Moon, and it's a book that you can read over and over again. It is filled with the most delightful anecdotes.

The good thing about it is that everything about the book is positive. He's very positive about what he did, about what his colleagues did. If somebody did something extraordinary, Mike would write about it in this most wonderful fashion, and it's the way he still talks today. Francis and I both met him in February in San Diego, and he's still very much the same person. A little reclusive, but once he gets to know you and trust you then he'll open up to you as well.

Francis French: He was also very delighted to contribute to our book. He told us a lot about his first space walks before Apollo 11. He told us some fascinating and very funny stories that we managed to get in our book which he'd never told in his.

Ramona Koval: And other astronauts have written about their experiences, haven't they.

Colin Burgess: They have indeed, yes. There have been many memoirs. In fact it's very hard now to find a niche where something hasn't already been told. There are very few recognised astronauts that haven't had a memoir written about them or tried to write or co-write a book about their experiences. That's probably the hardest thing for an author writing about the space program, is to try and find something that hasn't been written about and to try and tell it in a new and novel way.

Francis French: That's where we had fun, that's for sure, because people like Bill Anders, as you mentioned, he's never going to write a book, he's too busy flying. He is now a multimillionaire and he has his own...basically a museum of old antique WWII planes and he's off every day flying planes. The last thing he'd want to do is sit down and write a book, but he was quite happy to talk to us, and maybe our book is the closest we'll ever get to a Bill Anders story. The first person to fly to the Moon will never write his own book but hopefully we got his memories.

Ramona Koval: How did you find Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff which was made into a movie in 1983?

Francis French: Tom Wolfe's book is fascinating. The movie takes a lot of liberties and becomes a little bit more of a fiction, but the book itself is amazingly good. Wolfe is a very clever, careful writer in that he will always choose a pack of people who will have a particular personality and psychology, such as surf gangs, such as hippies, and he will write a group mentality in a certain way that will really get to the essence of what these people are like. It's a certain style which is only one facet of the astronauts and it would be wrong to say that was completely what they're like. There's a lot more Tom Wolfe in that book than you might imagine, but at the same time he really did capture them as people, probably for the first time after those Life magazine sanitised publications and other very, very sanitised versions. It's the first time you really got the sense of earthy humans, so his book was a great touchstone.

Ramona Koval: Talking about personal psychology, can you explain the fixation of astronauts with horses? Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire begins with a quote about horse riding, The Right Stuff begins with a test pilot on his horse, and Scott Carpenter was a lover of horse riding. What's the common connection there, besides horses?

Colin Burgess: Goodness me, where did that question come from, Ramona?

Ramona Koval: Just an observation.

Francis French: That's an interesting one!

Colin Burgess: It is indeed.

Ramona Koval: But obviously one without an answer.

Francis French: Well, you never know. We talked recently to some of the guys who flew around the Moon on their own, like Mike Collins who spent a lot of time on the back of the Moon on his own. People expected it to be the loneliest place a person could be. He was delighted. He said, 'Nobody was bothering me on the radio, I could look out the window, I could do my experiments and get on with what I wanted to do.' A lot of these guys were single-seater fighter pilots who spent most of their time flying a vehicle on their own without people in the way, and there's a certain frontier mentality and a solo horse riding mentality that actually may be a good link there.

Colin Burgess: Well done, Francis.

Francis French: Nothing I've thought of before but you may be onto something.

Ramona Koval: How do you write about a place you've never been? It's said to be indescribable. How do you find the words?

Colin Burgess: You describe it through other people's words. We take careful note of what people say, we record their interviews and we use their words. We don't try to analyse their words too much, we don't try to paraphrase what they say, we quote their words because they're the worlds that people want to know. They are the words that will live on history beyond...when we're not here any longer. So that, to me, is the best way to do it, is to tell the story, to tell what they saw through their eyes and through their own words.

Ramona Koval: Colin, you're in Australia, Francis is in San Diego, you communicated to write these books through email and computers, which in a way are a by-product of space exploration. Are you struck by this?

Colin Burgess: Absolutely. Francis and I first got to know each other back in the 1980s when we were both subscribing to a British spaceflight magazine, and Francis wrote a letter in one day in regards to a Czechoslovakian cosmonaut and I wanted to contact him, so I wrote to him in care of the magazine. And from then on we were communicating by airmail. So I would write a letter, Francis would get it ten days later, he would write to me. Now we email each other sometimes up to six, seven times a day. It's sort of an analogy of what's gone on in the space race, the fact that we take things so much for granted now that back in the '60s, such novel dramatic things...we just take them for granted now. The fact that the computer that landed Eagle on the Moon had a computer so low-powered that...I'm wearing a digital wristwatch at the moment and that wristwatch has got more power in it than the computer that landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon.

Ramona Koval: They were so brave, weren't they, they were so fantastic. What a fantastic...I love it, I just love it.

Francis French: They were brave but at the same time they had been in a very, very dangerous profession for a long time. Both Armstrong and Aldrin had been in the Korean War flying planes and fighting, and they'd also been flying very, very dangerous test pilot missions. So having people actively want to kill them in the war was...

Ramona Koval: That's true, that is a little bit more dangerous. Thank you for joining us today Francis French and Colin Burgess. Their books on the history of the Moon landing are Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow of the Moon, they're published by the University of Nebraska Press and they're part of the Outward Odyssey series.


Colin Burgess
Space exploration historian and author
Francis French
Space exploration historian, author and the Director of Education at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.


Colin Burgess and Francis French
University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 978-0-8032-2639-5
Colin Burgess and Francis French
University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 978-0-8032-1128-5


Ramona Koval
Sarah L'Estrange