Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Andrew Chaikin and Voices From the Moon

Episode Date: July 13, 2009

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Hello again, podcast listeners. Great fun this week as we begin our celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Next week, as you'll hear, Ray Bradbury will be on the show. I had great fun talking to Ray just a couple of days ago at his home that he's lived in for many decades here in Los Angeles. You won't hear Lou Friedman's pitch for donations to support the show in the middle of the show today. Couldn't resist the opportunity to include Robert Picardo's appeal for membership since he's featured with Bill Nye today. But I think we'll probably have Lou back for you one more time next week as our campaign to save the radio show continues. Again, and as always, thank you to those of you who have shown your support.

If you have been considering making a donation, trust me, now's the time. This is when it will mean the most to us. Thank you so much, all of you, for everything that you do, and especially for listening to Planetary Radio, which begins now. Radio, which begins now. Voices from the Moon, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Andrew Chaikin returns to Planetary Radio to help us celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. His new book matches dramatic images with the actual words of every surviving astronaut who made the trip. My conversation with Andy is just part of how we'll mark this accomplishment that was either 10 years or millions of years in the making. After all, we've been looking up and wondering about Earth's only natural satellite for a very long time. Bill Nye will be joined by actor and former emergency medical hologram

Robert Picardo in about a minute. Bill and Bob have cooked up their own tribute to the Apollo astronauts. And our salute will continue in the What's Up segment. Bruce Betts has a loony trivia contest planned. Remember Rich Vondrack telling us a couple of weeks ago that images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter might be received soon? He was right, and even these shakedown pictures look great. No, no, no, all the action is not on the Moon.

For proof, read the latest detailed update on the Mars Exploration Rovers at planetary.org. Have you heard about the Free Spirit campaign? It's all about the effort to get spirit unstuck from the sand that has kept it from rolling for many weeks now. Word also comes from the Planetary Science Institute that water may have flowed on Mars much more recently than has been thought. We'll put a link to the story at planetary.org slash radio. Okay, time for the Vice President of the Planetary Society, that's Bill Nye, to be welcomed at Chez Picardo for some haute cuisine. Very haute indeed. Actor, writer,

for some oat cuisine. Very oat indeed. Actor, writer, director, and chef Robert Picardo is a member of the Society's Advisory Council. I'll be right back with Andrew Chaykin. Hey Bill. Bob. It's great to see you here. We're celebrating a special event, you know that. Oh, it's very special, Bob. It is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, and I have made a very special meal in its honor. It looks exotic, Bob. It looks like something I wouldn't normally eat. Don't glance at the menu card. Well, of course, we're opening with a glass of Tang. That makes sense. And we're going to close with dehydrated ice cream. That makes sense.

Oh, you can dream and you can hope. But in between, what are we going to have in between? What's your guess? Irradiated meat. Irradiated meat is my first choice unless you're a vegetarian. No, not as an astronaut. Not at all. There were none back then. There were none back then, absolutely.

So we're having irradiated meat. And I was thinking of maybe sucking some mashed peas through it too. Oh, for the vegetables. For the vegetables. It does sound good. Yeah, but peas, frankly, they're a vegetable, but they're not necessarily very nutritious. They're high in carbs. High in carbs.

But on the other hand, what do you want to smash and suck through a tube? Let's not answer that now. Good call. In addition, I think for an appetizer, we'll have some sort of space food stick. Oh, love the space food. Are you going to go peanut butter or chocolate? Maybe an assortment. Well, it's an appetizer.

Now you're talking dessert or you're talking... No, that's the space food stick flavors. Sort of peanut and chocolate fudge thing. They didn't have like a hummus and broccoli? Not in those days, no. Sort of sugar, sugar with some sugar flavoring. Good. Well, they need energy, those guys. Yeah.

Let's face it. Anyway, we're here celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. Please join us for dinner if you can sit through this kind of a meal. Blast off. Andrew Chaikin has been moonstruck most of his life. His first bestseller, A Man on the Moon, was turned into the award-winning HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon with co-producer Tom Hanks. We've also talked to him about A Passion for Mars, his very personal look at the men and women who have kept their sights on the Red Planet for many decades.

Now he has published Voices from the Moon. It combines stunning images, mostly taken by the Apollo astronauts, with the words of those men who became the first, and still the only, humans to leave Earth behind. Andy collaborated with his wife, Victoria Cole, on this magnificent work. The couple has also worked with Apollo astronaut and artist Alan Bean to create Mission Control, This is Apollo, a book for young people. I got Andy on the phone after a day of public appearances in Northern California. Andy, thanks so much for joining us once again on Planetary Radio.

And also, thank you for joining us to help celebrate this 40th anniversary of humans walking on the moon. Well, as you know about me, Matt, this stuff is in my blood. And so I'm very happy to help you celebrate. And we have other reason to celebrate, or at least you do, and I can thank you for the latest work that you put together with your wife, Victoria Cole, and that is this beautiful book, Voices from the Moon. I picked it up a few days ago, and I thought, oh, well, looking at it in the bookstore, this is going to be nice. It was much more, it is much more than nice. You have done nothing less than reawaken my sense of awe regarding what this nation and a lot of people on the ground and 24 guys in space managed to pull

off so many years ago. That is really gratifying to hear you say that. And I have to say that for me, Apollo is a story that is so enormous in scope. It's so momentous that we have to keep coming back to it and re-experiencing it again and again to really, you know, really grok what Apollo was. And for me, the most compelling part has always been the men who actually made the journey and what their experience was making that otherworldly trip. And so, you know, I had done over 150 hours of interviews with 23 out of the 24 Apollo Lunar astronauts. The only one I didn't talk to was Jack Swigert from Apollo 13, who died before I started. But, you know, all the others,

Alan Shepard, Frank Borman, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, you know, you name it. I sat down with them at great length. And my goal was, in A Man on the Moon, was to tell the story through the eyes of the astronauts, to make you feel like, you know, you could relate to the man inside the spacesuit. The conversations that Victoria and I have now gone back to and excerpted for this book, that humanity was front and center of what we wanted to put on the page. was front and center of what we wanted to put on the page. I think much of what you were able to achieve with this, at least in my mind and my heart, really,

it's not just the photos, it's not just the words from the astronauts, but that it really captures their humanity. I mean, you did not pretty this up. It all sounds very raw. Yeah, and that was very intentional on Vicki and my part. We wanted to put the words down as they were spoken to me, and so you see all the ums and ahs and the occasional cuss words and the sentence fragments where they interrupt themselves and put together a thought. And that, to me, makes it much more real. It makes it immediate when you hear them talking about, you know,

this experience of drifting in behind the moon and going into blackness. And then all of a sudden, you know, Stu Roos at one point says your first view of the moon from orbit nearly knocks you out of the cockpit. You know, you out of the cockpit. You know, you knew what the pictures look like, and there it is, but you never really thought it would look so much like the pictures and be so real. And the words that come out of their mouths are, you know, they really convey that these are three-dimensional human beings having the most extraordinary experience

you can imagine. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's that juxtaposition that is also so striking, because they're regular, well, they're not quite regular guys, they're hotshot pilots. Yeah, they're not regular guys. They're definitely not regular guys. They're all very smart, very competitive, very motivated. And the other thing, and we make a point of saying this at the beginning of the book in our preface, and then we sort of step out of the way and we just let the astronauts speak for themselves. But in the beginning of the book, we point out that these men, they came out of a time and a generation that was not comfortable with feelings and plumbing the depths of their own experience.

That was not what these guys were about. They grew up in the 1930s, most of them. They were men who were devoted to their country. They were military pilots, most of them. What you did was a heck of a lot more important to them than what you felt about it. In fact, Ed Mitchell at one point from Apollo 14 said to me that when he came back from the moon, he said, I didn't know what feelings were. You know, it really bugged him. And he had to really go back and explore what his own experience was.

And you see, the real, the crux of the matter is we handed them a mission when they came back from the moon after flying these missions that they had practiced and knew every second, practically, of the flight plan and everything that they did in space, they practiced it again and again. When they got back from the moon, we, the public, handed them a mission they had never trained for, because we were constantly confronting them with the question, what is it like to go to the moon? You said they really, most of them or many of them, really got tired of being asked, what's it like and how did you feel?

Yeah. In fact, the very first sentence in the preface is a quote that took place during one of my marathon conversations with Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott. We were sitting in a restaurant near L.A. At one point he said to me, I cannot count the number of times somebody has asked me what it felt like to be on the moon. I'm tired of that, Andy. I don't want to figure that out anymore. I've done my best.

And he was really being candid with me. And I understand what he's saying, because if you went or I went, we might be much better equipped to come back and take that experience and express it in a way that would have emotional content and would have, you know, much more vivid descriptions of the feelings and the thoughts. But like I say, these guys, number one, they came from that generation. Number two, not only were they pilots, most of them were engineers. And engineers, you know, I think of as the ultimate left-brain thinkers, right?

So they're not really focused on feelings. They're focused on getting the mission done and doing it right. Yeah, and they weren't philosophers. They weren't scientists, with one exception, of course. And a couple of them said, we've got to send a writer. We've got to send a poet to the moon, to Mars, or at least into orbit. Yeah, they did say that. They said, Ken Mattingly said, I don't know how you pick the person,

but it would be worth the money we spent on Apollo to just send one person into the moon who could do justice to the experience. But I have to say that for all the difficulty that they may have felt in carrying out the mission that they never trained for, the mission we gave them to describe the experience, they came through beautifully. I was absolutely amazed by what I heard. I was thrilled by what I heard. I used to sit in those interviews and kind of sneak a glance at my tape recorder to make sure it was still working.

And when it was over, I would walk out of there with those cassettes in my bag and just think, oh my God, I can't believe what I've got on these tapes. More from Andrew Chaikin about Voices from the Moon when we return. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration.

The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this

greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. This is a nationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Andrew Chaikin is helping us celebrate the 40th anniversary of one giant leap for mankind. Andy and his wife, Victoria Cole, have published Voices from the Moon, a beautiful and inspiring

collection of images mostly taken by the Apollo astronauts, combined with fascinating and never before published excerpts of the extensive interviews Andy did with the astronauts for his classic A Man on the Moon. I was surprised by how deeply this book reawakened my passion for exploration. And the other thing that surprised me is that I really got the feeling that I got to know these guys as individuals. And they are individuals. You know, you get beyond them all having the right stuff. I'm glad you mentioned Ken Mattingly,

because he was just fascinating throughout the book. At one point, talking about how on Apollo 16, when he made it, how, yeah, he wished he could have gone down to the moon, but how absolutely thrilled he was to stay in the command module and be totally alone. And the best of all was on the backside of the moon when he couldn't talk to anybody. Yeah. In fact, he said to me, I can't say for sure since I've never done it, but I just can't imagine that bouncing across the surface of the moon would be more personally exhilarating than being solo orbiting the moon over the far side. Out of contact, here's this spectacular, unreal world, this panorama drifting by silently.

You're just floating in the cabin. There's no noise except for these very quiet fans that circulate the air. And he said, it's just you in this little bitty tin can. And it's spectacular and it's exhilarating. And, you know, this is not what the commentators were talking about back then. I remember watching the missions, and the TV guys used to say, well, you know, so-and-so is on the far side of the moon right now, out of contact, and he must be the loneliest man there ever was, wouldn't you say, Bill? And, you know, you and I might think it was a spooky experience. No, it's none of those things.

And also, I think of Al Worden from Apollo 15 did the same thing. He talked about the experience of flying through an orbital night when you could see so many stars that you could barely pick out the constellations. He came back, and as he kind of ruminated on that experience after being back on Earth, he really feels that, you know, if you see that star field, he said, I don't care what kind of odds you give me, if there's any chance at all of intelligent life out there, there's got to be a lot of it. Because, he said, because this thing goes on forever. Jim Lovell said something else that really caught my ear. It was subtle, but I think it's an example of how very well these guys actually do end up expressing themselves in the book.

He talked about the change in focus, our context, as you leave Earth orbit. He had orbited the Earth before, and you look down and you say, oh, there's Africa, there's North America, there's South America. But once you get out far enough, the continents lose meaning. It's really about the bodies you get out far enough, the continents lose meaning.

It's really about the bodies you can see. Yeah, the celestial bodies. Your focus shifts from continents to celestial bodies. And that is when you know you are really going somewhere. And I don't mean to be disrespectful to the men and women of the shuttle program and the space station program, but you know, Gene Cernan made a comment that it's like two different space programs, that when you're in Earth orbit, you have not left the Earth. And I understand what he means after talking to these guys, because again, Cernan made the comment, you leave Earth orbit,

because, again, Cernan made the comment, you leave Earth orbit, the horizon closes in on itself, and suddenly it's not just a horizon, it's a planet. And he said, you have left society. And it's that feeling. And then there's, like you said, they're all different. There's so many variations. Stu Ruza from Apollo 14 said that it wasn't the sight of the Earth getting smaller that brought home to him that he was really out there. It was the delay in the radio communications. It was when he would say into the microphone, Houston, this is Apollo 14,

and then there would be this pause before he heard the answer from Houston, go ahead, Apollo 14. And he said, I don't know why that seeing the Earth shrink didn't bring that across, but the radio did, but that's the way it was. Boy, way do we go to Mars and try that delay. Listen, we're almost out of time. There is so much more here that we could talk about, including, you know, you might think they're small things, but they're not. And they are things that I don't remember Walter Cronkite or the astronauts themselves talking about. For example, the moon is filthy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, John Young, man of few words, said,

when people go back to the moon, the thing they better worry about is the dust. And that is the truth. And you look at the pictures and it's, you know, there's so much about the moon that I really, I don't even want to think about the time that lies ahead of us when no one who's been to the moon will be alive. And that's one of the reasons I feel so compelled to preserve these stories, because we need to hear these comments, not only about how dusty it is and how you've got to really take that into account, but just the idea that you're standing

on a surface that is brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and yet the sky is pitch black. Dave Scott said that we who have been to the moon have an experience of a black sky in the daytime that people don't have on Earth. And he said, that is a whole new thing for the mind to handle. Now, do you need any other evidence to know that going to the moon was a step in human evolution? Not to me. That says it all. Andy, with the youngest of these guys now in their mid-70s, I very much appreciate the fact that you've given us yet another vivid way of remembering, hopefully for all time, what they accomplished. It truly is a magnificent book about maybe the most magnificent thing humans have ever done. Well, I really appreciate that, Matt, and let me just say that I would love to hear from

listeners. If you want to contact me through my website, andrewchakin.com. We also have a book for young readers out about Apollo that's illustrated with Alan Bean's paintings. So check that out, too. And happy anniversary. And, by the way, on your website, it mentions at the end of the book, you've got some of the very high-quality images that you processed yourself that are in the book. I do, and I will be offering those for sale as a print series called Apollo Editions. Right now I'm kind of in the middle of all this anniversary hubbub,

so I've been a little bit too busy to get that launched. But look for that soon, and again, through my website, andrewchaikin.com. Thanks very much, Andy. Thank you, Matt. Andrew Chaikin is, of course, the author of A Man on the Moon, and we last spoke to him about his work, A Passion for Mars. The new one is Voices from the Moon. It's available right now from Viking Studio. Highly recommended. And we also recommend that you stick around for this week's edition of What's Up

with my friend Bruce Betts. That's coming up in just a few moments. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line. The clock is ticking in the background. So we'll get right on with What's Up. Welcome back. Thank you very much. So how's our busy night sky? It's fairly busy. We've got planets up there. Let me tell you very much. So how's our busy night sky? It's fairly busy.

We got planets up there. Let me tell you about that. And then I'll tell you about something special happening for some of the world. Special? There's something special. We won't see it, but some people will. Ooh, tantalizing, isn't it? It is.

But everyone pretty much can go out and see Saturn in the evening sky over in the west after sunset, looking like a yellowish, fairly bright star. You can also check out Jupiter really just the late evening now over in the east, looking like an extremely bright star-like object. And it's up in the pre-dawn, high in the south. And over in the east, actually getting pretty high up is venus looking extremely extremely bright even brighter than jupiter with its little red friend mars hanging out above it but let's get to what the the special thing on july 22nd a total eclipse of the sun visible from a small corridor that runs through india China, Japan, nearby countries, and the Western Pacific

Ocean. Did you plan on being any of those places, Matt? Wait a minute. I'm looking at my calendar. Oh, no. I'm just going to, I'm barely going to miss it. All right. How about a partial, you can see a partial solar eclipse on that day from most of Eastern Asia and the Western Pacific. Does that help? No. But you know what? In Andrew Chaikin's book that we just finished talking about, Voices from the Moon,

there is a picture of a solar eclipse taken from one of the Apollo command modules, except that it's Earth eclipsing the sun. Cool. I don't think too many people are going to be able to see that right away. No, I don't have that one on my calendar at all. All right. Speaking of calendars, let's go on to this week in space history. And Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz launched and docked in 1975, what was sort of Apollo 18, the Apollo-Soyuz project. And then, it's hard to believe it, one of those getting old things, 15 years ago, Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 started slamming into Jupiter.

Oh my, that long ago? Incredible. 1994, this week. Yeah. You know, I never thought about that with Apollo-Soyuz, by the way. They figured, what, hey, you know, we've got this command and service modules just hanging around. Why don't we go shake hands with the Ruskies? Yeah, I think that's pretty much the conversation as it happened, in fact. That's a direct quote. On to random space fact.

A very unexpected finish there, quite a crescendo. I was going for surprise. Yeah, it was very successful. Geostationary satellites, you know, those communication things that are up there, fixed relative to a given point on the surface of the Earth, they orbit about 100 times higher than the International Space Station. Twenty-three thousand? Close enough. Twenty-two thousand all the way up in miles. Yeah. And Space Station up there, actually it's varied quite a bit.

Space Station, a little bonus random space fact, you know, it's in the couple hundred mile range. It does make it interesting when you think that they're transmitting from that far out. Obviously, it had to be a great deal more powerful than an old Telstar back in the low Earth orbit communication satellite days. I'm thinking. All right, on to the trivia contest. We told you that Ganymede and Titan are larger in diameter than Mercury, and we asked you what additional moons are larger in diameter than Mercury. And we asked you, what additional moons are larger in diameter than Pluto?

How did we do, Matt? Not very many responses this time. I don't mind saying, I don't know if it was just the people thought it'd be difficult to find this, but a few people did. And in fact, we have our winner, Craig Journet. He came up with this. By the way, Craig Journet of Long Beach, California, my hometown. He came up with this.

By the way, Craig Journet of Long Beach, California, my hometown. The moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and Triton. The seven moons that are larger than the ex-planet Pluto. And someone else added, and Eris out there in the outback, if it's ever captured by a planet. Why, yes, I suppose technically that's accurate if we weren't asking for the present. Yeah. And Lindsay down under sent another one of his magnificent email responses. Did you see it? He actually sent the 3D models of all the moons to scale, showing their comparative sizes.

I'm going to get that blog, and we're going to post stuff like Lindsay's up there. And so be very afraid, folks, because soon I'll be telling you where the blog is. You know what else we need to do before you go on? What is your Twitter account? Because I've been getting appeals from people saying, how come you don't have a Twitter account? And I'm thinking, I do have a Twitter account. And what is yours? Mine is, I think it's just Matt Kaplan. That's very creative. Yeah. Mine's hard to remember for listeners. Mine is random space fact, all one word. Which is actually quite descriptive of what it is because you put a random space fact up there every single day. Close.

Miss it occasionally when life gets busy. But, yeah, you'll get a few random space facts per week delivered to your box, and you won't find out anything about what I had for lunch or other random. I'm hearing people and dogs in the background there. We better get on to the new trivia contest it's crazy here, we better finish up hey, let's give them another trivia contest please

continuing in the 40th anniversary theme who are the backup astronauts for the Apollo 11 crew go to planetary.org slash radio find out how to enter I don't have the slightest idea you've got until, why, what a coincidence July 20th, 2009 the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

July 20th at 2 p.m. Pacific time, and we'll have the winner for you, oh, pretty much a week after that. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about weddings. Hey, don't you have one of those coming up? and think about weddings. Hey, don't you have one of those coming up? Yeah, I'm thinking about weddings a lot. One in particular, my oldest daughter of the two is getting married on the Sunday just before this show starts to air, right off of the ocean, as a matter of fact,

down in a place you know, Torrey Pines State Park here in California. And we're all very excited about that and very excited for the groom. But I don't think he cares. I think he's excited enough all by himself. Well, congratulations to the little wedding people and the whole family. Thank you so much. Okay, we're out of here. He's Bruce Betts, and I think he likes weddings and dogs patting around in the ocean and all kinds of things, including joining us every week here for What's Up.

Our Apollo celebration continues next week with the one and only Ray Bradbury. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Happy landings, everyone. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова