Review: Moondust by Andrew Smith

There are once in a lifetime trips and then there are the six trips to the surface of the moon. Only twelve men have ever made this most unique of journey's – their every move broadcast into history, the weight of a super-power's global reputation in balance and the dreams of billions of people on their shoulders.

By 2005, 3 of the moonwalkers had passed away - “now there's only nine of us” noted Apollo 16's Charlie Duke. But who were they? Was their trip worth the 24 billion dollar price-tag? What did Apollo mean for them, for their families, for the world? Will we ever return? In Moondust (2005), accomplished writer Andrew Smith set out on an ambitious quest to meet and profile the 9 remaining Moonwalkers and to seek answer's to the rings of questions which orbit around them to this day.

Moondust is a joy to read. It is packed with down-to-earth conversations and eyewitness accounts yet full of starry-eyed dreams. Each chapter revolves around Smith's encounter(s) with one of the 9 and all of their intriguing idiosyncrasies. Armstrong is distant, enigmatic and dignified. Buzz is a bizzare livewire and the other seven all fascinating. These nine biographies in-and-of themselves would of made for an intriguing read but Smith, politcal-and-cultural journalist, child-of-the-sixties, chose a different path.

The pen-portraits of the nine are woven into the lives of former Nazi rocket-scientist-and-influencer-extraordinaire Werner Von Braun and all of NASA's other movers-and-shakers. Woven into Smith's travelogue of getting to each interview and his childhood memories. Woven into the high of Led Zepplin, Woodstock and the music and counter-culture of the sixties and it's demise. Woven into the panicked-pandemonium unleashed in Washington as Sputnik and then Gagarin orbited over America, sparking off the space race which led to the moon.

Nor is his account descriptive and linear - “destiny” does not get a word in. The space race was contested in so many ways with plenty of options on the table.  Kennedy wasn't an early promoter of the moon missions but instead largely saw them as a way of winning third world hearts-and-minds from the Communists, boosting his opinion ratings and developing the USA's military-industrial complex.  Disaster was closer than the broadcasts suggested, with many NASA insider's believing the lunar missions to have a 50/50 chance of succeeding. The X20 Space plane could have been fully developed decades ahead of the much more complex and larger space-shuttle. Lunar-rendevous was selected over Earth-rendezvous or Moon-direct or even a one-way trip (with return journey to be worked out after the fact!) because it offered the quickest way to land a man on the Moon – at the expense of establishing a permanent human presence there.

Suffice to say that in Moondust, Smith, like the 9 he chased, suceeded spectacularly in his mission.  But don't take my word for it, apparently The Times selected it as one of the 100 best books of the noughties and it was nominated as book of the year at the British Book Awards.