The dark side of the moon men

The astronauts on Apollo 11 soared to heights never before reached by humankind. The return to Earth was, perhaps inevitably, traumatic, as Craig Nelson reveals in an exclusive extract from his upcoming book, Rocket Men.

Just after the Apollo 11 landing, CBS commentator Eric Sevareid said of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: "We're always going to feel, somehow, strangers to these men. They will, in effect, be a bit stranger, even to their own wives and children. Disappeared into another life that we can't follow. I wonder what their life will be like, now. The moon has treated them well, so far. How people on Earth will treat these men, the rest of their lives, that gives me more foreboding, I think, than anything else."

The men returned to the United States, first stopping at the White House, where Pat Nixon gave them a tour of her husband's collection of historic gavels, and the President commented that night at dinner that Romania's president Ceausescu had finally agreed to a state meeting in the wake of Apollo 11, a diplomatic breakthrough that Nixon believed was worth the cost of the entire space programme.

Armstrong next accompanied Bob Hope on his Christmas USO tour of Vietnam, Guam, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy, and Germany. The American tabloids used this generous effort on behalf of American soldiers to report on a scandalous affair between Armstrong and fellow United Service Organisations (USO) volunteer Connie Stevens, an affair that both publicly denied. The following May, Armstrong toured the Soviet Union, giving Premier Aleksei Kosygin a moon rock and a flag of the USSR that had travelled to the lunar surface.

During the foreign travel for "Giant Step", Buzz Aldrin, usually a reasonably outgoing man, had begun to lapse into periods of brutal silence. After the Los Angeles Century Plaza dinner, Joan Aldrin wrote in her diary: "The tinsel is tarnished. Buzz, who was never comfortable with all this, pushes loyally on. I cooperate, but I am tired and unhappy." In Sweden, the couple had a terrible fight.

"We fell into an uneasy silence which I ended by saying I felt all six of us were fakes and fools for allowing ourselves to be convinced by some strange concept of duty to be sent though all of these countries for the sake of propaganda, nothing more, nothing less,"

Buzz Aldrin remembered. "We proceeded to get drunk and we both cried. That night we slept like two frightened children, hanging onto each other."

Afterward, Michael Collins said: "Fame has not worn well on Buzz. I think he resents not being the first man on the moon more than he appreciates being the second."

Aldrin conceded, "This guy walked on the moon! I've got to uphold that image for the rest of my life. What do I do?"

The answer would be long in coming, leaving Aldrin lost and in misery for a number of years.

NEIL ARMSTRONG had spent his adult life as a military pilot, a test pilot and an astronaut. Had he been aware that, after becoming the first man on the moon, no one in the United States would want to take the chance of letting him fly anything that posed even the slightest risk again?

"I never asked the question about returning to spaceflight, but I began to believe that I wouldn't have another chance, although that never was explicitly stated,"he said.

Armstrong claimed to be perfectly content with this dramatic reversal in his life, but "he was a pilot, and he was always happier when he was flying," wife Jan Armstrong later admitted.

Instead of getting back into the Apollo rotation, he was made deputy associate administrator for aeronautics in the Office of Advanced Research and Technology. Considering Neil Armstrong's keen interest in state-of-the-art aeronautical engineering, this would seem a position tailor-made for him.

He would barely last a year. In his new position, Armstrong sought to promote digital fly-by-wire, a system that replaced the ropes, pulleys, and hydromechanics of the stick-and-rudder era with a computer and signal transducers that could respond simultaneously to pilot control, autopilot, and the ship's instruments.

Though he made some progress, he was continually sidelined by a flood of speaking engagements, dinner invitations and other PR requests. Nasa, however, seemed incapable of making any attempts to relieve Armstrong's pressure. In August of 1971, when Armstrong resigned, the agency did little to try to keep him.

Armstrong became a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and moved his family to a dairy farm in Lebanon, Ohio.

"I know I could make a million dollars in personal appearances on the outside, but I just want to be a university professor and be permitted to do my research," he said.

When UC became a state school, Armstrong's unusual status became a bureaucratic problem, and in 1979, he resigned to become a national spokesman for Chrysler automobiles, as well as serving on various corporate boards of directors, including that of the Utah aerospace firm Thiokol, creator of both the X-15 and the Space Shuttle rocket engines. He helped raise funds for Purdue University, the YMCA, and the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. In April 1985, he went to the North Pole with Sir Edmund Hillary and, in 1986, served as vice chairman for the presidential commission on the Challenger shuttle disaster.

In 1990 Armstrong's parents died, and his wife Janet left him. In February 1991, he had a heart attack. Between his speaking fees, stock options, and investing, however, he had finally made some money, and was worth over $2 million.During this period, the interminable Shuttle/Space Station era, when Nasa seemed to fall into a holding pattern of somnolent torpor, its most historic and galvanising figure, Neil Armstrong, was nowhere in evidence.

Neil Armstrong: "I recognise that I'm portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my perspective it doesn't seem that way, because I do so many things, I go so many places, I give so many talks, I write so many papers that, from my point of view, it seems like I don't know how I could do more.

"But I recognise that from another perspective, outside, I'm only able to accept less than 1 per cent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I'm not doing anything. But I can't change that."

Armstrong, especially, would be struck by the paradox of modern celebrity, of being both idolised as a hero and degraded by tabloid leers. He tried to sum up his experience: "It would be presumptuous of me to pick out a single thing that history will identify as a result of this mission. But I would say that it will enlighten the human race and help us all to comprehend that we are an important part of a much bigger universe than we can normally see from the front porch."

After all, he said, the Earth itself is a spacecraft. "If you're going to run a spaceship, you've got to be pretty cautious about how you use your resources, how you use your crew, and how you treat your spacecraft."

Of his life after Apollo 11, Armstrong laughed. "If they offered me command of a Mars mission, I'd jump at it."

Since, in January 1998, the 77-year-old John Glenn returned to spaceflight, perhaps there's still hope.

BUZZ ALDRIN tried to get his life back to normal. Instead, he essentially found himself in the emotional position of a famous rock star just coming off an enormous world tour, trying to wind down from the adrenaline highs, to returning home to pay bills, do the laundry, and empty the cat box.

"I don't think either my mother or my father were prepared for what happened,"Buzz's son Andrew said. "The guy was a scientist; he could tell you how they made it happen but didn't have the words to describe how it felt. My dad was trained to be a pilot, an engineer and an astronaut, not a public figure or a philosopher. From his point of view, it was time to move on to the next mission something which never happened."

Goddard liaison William Easter attended a cocktail party at the Aldrin home in Nassau Bay, where Joan Aldrin confided that nobody would offer her husband a job.

"Buzz never did go to work for anybody in a big job. Really, neither did Armstrong," Easter says. "I remember he never had any money ... I thought, 'Jeez, here's a guy that landed on the moon, somebody should be giving him some money.' It didn't work that way."

Unable to right himself in the enormous wake of Apollo 11, the second man fell into a cataclysm of depression, becoming debilitated.

Buzz Aldrin said the correct quasi-medical term for what happened to him was 'dysfunction'. " What it means is that I stopped. Stopped everything. I'd go to my office in the morning, determined to work a full day and then go home to more work. I'd sit down at my desk and stare out the window. A few hours would go by and I'd drive to the beach in Galveston and walk. Then I'd go home for dinner, turn on the television, and get a bottle of Scotch ...

"Every time I decided to get help I began to cry; the only help available was official Air Force treatment and the matter would go into my record."

After his return to the USAF, Buzz had to pay his psychiatrist personally, since there is no insurance for the destruction of a service career when an officer undergoes mental-health treatment.

When, four years after Apollo 11, journalist Paul Hendrickson interviewed Aldrin, the writer went back to his car and sobbed. Buzz "is the Disintegrated American Hero ... the one who didn't make it back all in one piece," he said.

Aldrin, he added, was a man who at times looked at the moon and thought, "You son of a bitch ... you're the one that got me in all this trouble'."

Eventually, one of America's most admired men needed to be secretly hospitalised.

Aldrin: "Apollo 11 may have been a small step for Neil but it was a beginning of a tremendous hurdle for me. And that hurdle eventually led to the disease of alcoholism ... The space programme was kindergarten in comparison to coping with the culminating effects of alcoholism."

In time, Buzz became one of the bravest of all of America's astronauts by publicly revealing his mental illness, to the extent of writing a memoir on his troubles and his recovery, Men from Earth, and serving as chair for the National Mental Health Association.

IT IS ironic that the happiest post-Apollo 11 life seems to have been lived by the one man who didn't walk on the moon. After a career with the State Department, Michael Collins became the first director of the world's most popular museum, Smithsonian's National Air and Space.

He has, however, admitted: "I share with [Buzz] a mild melancholy about future possibilities, for it seems to me that the list of exciting things to do here on earth has diminished greatly in the wake of the lunar landings. I just can't get excited about things the way I could before Apollo 11."

Today, he is still married to Pat, and in his spare time, paints watercolours of Florida landscapes and wildlife.

Collins says, "I've always wondered why it is that, because we're crew members of a particular mission, that we all of a sudden became experts in trying to figure out what the future ought to be ...

Rocket Men by Craig Nelson is available from July 20 (John Murray, RRP $39.99).