What is there to do after you’ve walked on the moon? Other than confirm once and for all that it is not made of cheese, not a lot. In 1973 the Observer Magazine tracked down the 12 space heroes who had gained international acclaim for being the only mortals to walk on the moon and, it seems, it wasn’t just their spacecrafts that had come crashing back down to earth.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon and a notorious recluse, was living on a remote farm 30 miles from the space station when our reporter Daniel Greene tracked him down. Armstrong was both monotone and prickly, and insisted that ‘the feat’ had changed him in no way. He was too busy doing his job – including landing the lunar module manually, with 30 seconds of fuel left, after an overloaded computer nearly caused disaster – to ponder cosmic meanings of what it was all about.
Buzz Aldrin, who after his space travels turned to drink and an extramarital affair, eventually suffering depression, was far more candid about life after the moon. ‘I had gone to the moon. What to do next? Without a goal I was like an inert ping-pong ball being batted about by the whims and motivations of others.’
Aldrin told Greene he’d gaze up at the moon and mutter to himself: ‘You son of a bitch... You’re the one that got me into all this trouble.’
Some of the astronauts also suffered from strange space injuries which would plague the rest of their Earth-bound lives. Michael Collins, who orbited the moon with Aldrin and Armstrong, said he was ‘pierced by cosmic rays’, while Aldrin worried that ‘flicker flashes’ killed too many of his brain cells.
Al Worden, the only member of the lunar crew who inherited the god Apollo’s poetic nature, warns us not to judge yesterday’s space hero too harshly: ‘Or try to psych the metal man/Because he has a hollow brain/And tarnishes quickly in the rain.’
