The Mission of a Lifetime

Preface

FINDING THE EAGLES

Space is making a comeback. Cable news networks are once again broadcasting the live countdowns of rocket launches—this time of the privately built rockets of billionaire visionaries such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Their plans for colonizing the moon and Mars are making regular headlines, and a new generation raised on movies like Gravity and The Martian has gotten the bug for space. In 2017, 18,300 people applied to NASA for fourteen available astronaut slots… all of them hopeful that they might, one day, run their gloved fingers over the surface of another world.

How extraordinary to think that with all the technological progress of the last fifty years, no country today has a rocket powerful enough to achieve the six Apollo moon landings that took place between 1969 and 1972. No human has left low earth orbit or kicked up any moon dust since then. That’s a long time. What, I wondered, do the twelve of the remaining twenty-four Apollo astronauts who either orbited or walked on the moon think about all of this—not just about the state of today’s space program and its future but, more intriguingly, the life lessons they learned from humanity’s ultimate road trip of exploration? While their lunar missions have been written about exhaustively, including their autobiographies, those were written years ago and stopped short of probing the more primal questions each of us has wrestled with. It’s possible, I thought, that as they were closing in on their nineties, they might be willing (even keen, perhaps) to offer the kind of life reflections generated by the accumulated wisdom of their emeritus years. Reflections about courage. About conquering one’s fears. About what constitutes a worthwhile personal and professional life. About the latest information on our home planet’s perilous state and their thoughts on the bold plans of innovators like Jeff Bezos to colonize the universe. I decided to make it my mission to hear what they had to say.

The men who went to the moon remain history’s most elite fraternity. Their extraterrestrial view of Earth from the moon changed them and the world. As of this writing, only twelve of the twenty-four lunar voyagers are alive. Time was running out to talk to them. The bigger challenge I faced was how to reach them.

The improbable answer came on the night of October 29, 2014, with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, which mutated into a monster that meteorologists needed a new name to describe. They called it FRANKENSTORM! Lower Manhattan was deluged by a fourteen-foot wall of surging ocean water and went dark. In Connecticut, where I lived, uprooted trees and downed power lines cut the electricity to my Westport home. My immediate concern was for my retired neighbor who moved next door to me the week before. I was unaware that he was one of the nation’s leading space historians. When I knocked on his door to check on him, I could see right away that he needed more than candlelight to safely navigate his living room, so I returned with a few spare storm lanterns. The room lit up to reveal the lair of a writer. The center of Bill’s living room was dominated by an eight-foot-long table covered with multiple rows of neatly labeled manila file folders arrayed against open books loaded with sticky notes. Clipped newspaper articles were scattered near his computer, and bookcases gobbled up the rest of the room. Above his small, round wooden dining table hung a corkboard with a single sheet of bold lettering spelling out WE ARE THE SPACE RACE.

“Are you the same Bill Burrows,” I asked him, “who wrote This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age?” His big smile said yes. My new neighbor was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, former New York Times reporter, retired professor of journalism at NYU, and the author of twelve books (most on space and national security issues).

Bill and I would share our passion for the moon shots as he worked on his newest book, The Asteroid Threat, which was published two years after we met. Bill (now eighty-one) became more than a friend as he began advising me in this undertaking to give readers a prescription for living boldly (and deeper reflection) from the men who went to the moon.

The ex-journalist in me kicked in to start tracking down the men I’ve come to call the Eagles. Bill, of course, was the obvious starting point. But the only contact information he had was for shuttle astronaut Tom Jones (TJ), who wrote Sky Walking and gave a dust jacket testimonial for The Asteroid Threat. But even TJ had no e-mail addresses for the Eagles, which I soon discovered are known only to a select few who essentially serve as their gatekeepers.

So, who are the gatekeepers? I wondered. TJ suggested going to Andy Turnage, the executive director of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), to whom he made an introduction. I knew I had one shot with Andy, and condensed my e-mail to him into a few compelling paragraphs about the theme of the book, and gave him a short list of the Eagles I wanted to interview first (among them Apollo 8’s Bill Anders, who took the celebrated Earthrise photo, which gave humanity its first clear look at Earth from the moon, and ultimately helped launch the environmental movement).

Within the hour, Andy responded to my note. I had passed the first test. He liked what he read, and said he would forward my book proposal to Bill Anders and Charlie Duke, the tenth man to walk on the moon. He did not, however, have contact info for the others I had requested.

My query hit its mark faster than I expected. That same day I received the following response:

Dr. DeLyser’s note triggered a deep breath of festive relief. But ahead, I knew, lay the make-or-break part. While Anders was intrigued by my e-mail, he understandably wanted his gatekeeper to start vetting me. Anders, my research showed, is a versatile maverick, a bit of a rebel with a scintillating intelligence, and the only astronaut to figure out how to beat one of NASA’s intelligence tests. He has a gift for reducing complex issues to their binary essence and has little tolerance for anything less than excellence. Warren Buffett told me that “every move Bill Anders made was smart” when he was CEO of General Dynamics, and it was the reason he gave Anders his board proxy in what is considered one of the great corporate turnarounds in modern business history.

Anders deals in facts and due diligence. Dr. DeLyser’s job was to find out if I was worth talking to. My job was to convince her that I was. Google searches can give you the facts of a person but rarely a sense of who they are. Before getting on the phone with Dr. DeLyser, I wanted to know more about her. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton. She is not your typical academic. As I read through her faculty bio section, it was this eye-catching notation, under her list of research interests, that told me I was dealing with a creative thinker: “How women pilots in the late 1920s and early 1930s used their practices of flying to advance feminism in the post-suffrage era.”

I could see why Anders picked her to organize the history of his life. In a disquieting aside, she recounted the deceptive lengths people have engaged in over the years to get autographs from the Apollo astronauts… including bogus letters from adults pretending to be children dying of cancer, and other sympathy-grabbing devices to get the astronauts’ attention and signatures.

I had no idea how bad it was. Obsessive autograph seekers and stalkers have driven the Eagles (the moon walkers, in particular) to closely guard their home addresses and e-mail information. “People want a piece of them,” Dr. DeLyser told me. Anything to be able to say they shook the hand, or got the autograph, of an astronaut who went to the moon.

Dr. DeLyser liked the fresh approach I was taking with the Eagles, and asked for my résumé, along with a two-page summary of the book to present to General Anders. I sent it off and hoped I would clear the final hurdle.

To my everlasting gratitude, Anders gave me the opportunity to interview him and invited me to his elegant home overlooking Burrows Bay in Anacortes, Washington. I have interviewed presidents and many other powerful figures at length, but I have never prepared more thoroughly than I did for Anders. When I arrived at the gate, he greeted me in his gardening clothes and semi-joked, as we walked to the house, that he’s preparing handicap ramps for the inevitable day when walking will become difficult for him and his wife.

Anders, at eighty-five, is nowhere near that point. What struck me first were his blue eyes, which still have the vigor, watchfulness, and intensity of the ex-fighter-pilot in him. In fact, he says, he’s never really gotten out of the cockpit. Like the rest of his lunar brethren who rode the Saturn V, the mightiest rocket ever built, the need for adrenaline-pumping adventure still beats strongly in his octogenarian heart. He sniffs at the idea of playing golf. Not surprisingly, Anders, who is still thin like all the Eagles, says his daily exercise routine is to fly at least one hour a day in one of the vintage World War II planes his wealth has afforded him. Flying keeps him young.

Similar eclectic tastes in history kicked off our conversation, and we moved quickly to the real-time impact his lunar voyage had on his notion of man’s place in the universe, the anatomy of courage, and the existence of God. Fully engaged by our talk, he invited me to dinner with two close friends. But before heading out, he couldn’t resist having a little fun with me. In his study is his prized collection of meteorites and fossils. “You know,” he said, “geologists say you can sometimes tell the origin of a rock by tasting it.” I was sensing a setup.

“Run your tongue over this one,” Anders said, “and see if you can identify it.” I promptly gave it a lick. “You know what it is? Fossilized dinosaur shit.”

We both had an uproarious laugh and a wonderful interview.

There is no greater validation than one lunar astronaut recommending you to another, and that’s what Anders did when he promised to connect me with Frank Borman, his commander on Apollo 8 and his lifelong friend. Good to his word, I got the following witty e-mail from Bill a few days later on Easter Sunday:

The same insightful exploration continued with the ninety-one-year-old Borman who, like Bill, still flies his own vintage plane. Borman is as dynamic as ever. In coordinating our interview, he told me he was an early riser and offered to pick me up at my hotel at 8:30 in the morning after finishing his daily workout routine. His day starts at 5:30 a.m. and consists of one hour of weight lifting and treadmill work. From my research of the man, I had a feeling that the West Point graduate, a human dynamo guided by the Academy’s motto: Duty, Honor, Country, might arrive early.

Acting on my hunch, I decided to take an early walk around the hotel grounds. Within five minutes of inhaling Montana’s Big Sky air, I spotted a small SUV pulling into the driveway. A flash of certainty hit me that it was the colonel behind the wheel. He lowered his window, and as I recognized him, the first thing I noticed were his eyes bursting with alertness, the same eyes whose deep space view of the Earth from the moon rewired his brain’s perception of our home planet. He was clearly pleased that I was waiting for him ahead of schedule. We were off to a good start. As we concluded our interview, Frank made this touching admission after talking at length about his wife Susan’s Alzheimer’s: “As you can imagine, I live a pretty lonely life, Basil, and an intellectual conversation is a welcomed diversion, and I really enjoyed it.”

Frank then called Jim Lovell, the third crew member on Apollo 8, who also gave me a revelatory interview. Like Bill and Frank, Jim, who is ninety-one, has the same luminous eyes, which still radiate with the readiness of the majestic symbol that could be found on the mission patches popular with the lunar astronauts: the eagle. With his golden retriever, Toby, sitting at his feet, Jim cited optimism as the most important quality a person can have and says it’s what got him through the Apollo 13 crisis (“Houston, we’ve had a problem”), which was turned into a blockbuster movie. But Jim’s most tantalizing reflection during our conversation pertained to birth and death. It is a singularly original thought, a contemplation that the dean of Yale Divinity School says he’s never heard before and could only have resulted from Jim’s two trips orbiting the moon.

Lovell’s powerful formulation? “We don’t go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when we’re born.” There are other gems like this from the Eagles, as we’ll discover later in the book.

Sensing that their final resting place in history is just around the corner, the Eagles opened their homes and their hearts in ways that I don’t think would have been possible from their younger selves ten or twenty years ago.

They are intrepid souls whose wisdom has been forged by a voyage and a view of Earth that only they have experienced. “I grew up watching these guys,” says Bezos, who told me in a heartfelt interview that he was directly inspired by the moon landings and believes that the Eagles’ “elder statesmen” status and the “bluntness of age,” as he put it, make their final reflections worth listening to.

“They have a very low tolerance for bullshit. And they’re often very courageous in calling it out,” says former NASA flight surgeon and psychiatrist Dr. Patricia Santy, who has seen (and studied) the psychological profiles of the Eagles.

As an example, some of them call out senators and congressmen who wear the American flag on their lapels, as “false patriots and self-serving jackasses.” They remind us that courage, quiet patriotism, and conquering fear—the real right stuff—all emanate from deeper sources: a commitment to the common good, and belief in something greater than oneself.

They cry out for us to take care of the planet. They urge us to reframe our view of Earth to theirs: no identifiable nations, borders, or races. Just humans, planetary brothers and sisters riding on the Earth together.

Their wish for all of us is to keep pushing the boundaries (as they did) and always, always live life with fierce optimism and faith that, like the moon shot, any goal—no matter the odds—is as achievable as your resolve to see it through.