Earl Swift - Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

THE U.S. SPACE AND ROCKET CENTER ANNOUNCES ITSELF FROM miles away, with a needle against the sky that orients, at a glance, anyone in Huntsville, Alabama: if you can see the Saturn V, you can place where you are.

The rocket towers 363 feet over an especially smart precinct of a smart city in a state largely uncelebrated for its smarts. Just to the north lies a University of Alabama campus big on science and engineering. Clustered nearby are dozens of high-tech companies doing business behind locked doors and security cameras. South of the Saturn V lies the magnet for this brainpower: the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. The place that produced the rockets that carried America to the moon.

The Saturn is a well-executed fake, erected in 1999 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center is not part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the federal agency that achieved that landing; its a museum operated by the state of Alabama. But its a good one, with an impressive collection of genuine space hardware and a world-famous Space Camp for aspiring astronauts, and with one of the earths three surviving real Saturn Vs on display inside.

I pulled into town one Wednesday in April 2019, spied the needle on the distant horizon, and followed it to the Space and Rocket Center. The mock Saturn had just received fresh paint in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of that first moon landing, and the museums gift shop was stocked full of T-shirts, ball caps, coffee mugs, and toys commemorating July 20, 1969. It being a school day, only a few customers browsed the shop. Most were older than menot surprising, perhaps, as I could recall little about Apollo 11; I remembered my parents excitement over the landing more than the event itself. It wasnt until the last few Apollo missions that I paid much mind to what was happening up there. By then, I was a teenager, and some mornings read a newspaper. Plus, wed moved to Houston, home to the astronauts and NASAs center for manned spaceflight, and my eighth-grade classmates actually discussed lunar exploration.

But I remembered those later missions, too, for a distinction that set them apart, a new piece of gear the astronauts of Apollos 15, 16, and 17 carried with them. An addition that had redefined lunar exploration, space science, and NASAs expectations of what could be achieved in brief visits to the moons inhospitable surface. The gift shop had no wares memorializing that transformative hardware, but I happened to know I could find it on display in the museum proper. Which is why I had driven eight hours to Huntsville: to see it in person, and to meet a man central to its creation.

My ticket bought me into the museums centerpiece building, the Davidson Center for Space Exploration. Its main floor is a single cavernous room, 476 feet long, 90 wide, and six stories high, down the middle of which runs its main exhibit. The Saturn V is displayed on its side and broken into its component stages to show off the engines on each. Three old-timers were seated together on a bench under the rockets enormous F1 engines, which jutted from the bottom of its S-IC booster stage. They are the strongest rocket engines ever put to use, and amid the museums bright, kid-friendly cheer, the brutal, elemental power manifest in their fat tangles of pipes, valves, and pumps was unnerving. Their fluted mouths, a dozen feet across and built to spout great tails of fire and thunder, were no less fearsome for their silence. The men on the bench were inured to the menace overhead. All wore white lab coats that identified them as museum docents and retired rocket scientists.

I stopped in front of the bench. They were in their eighties, by the looks of them, maybe older. Excuse me, I said. Im looking for Sonny Morea. Do you know where I could find him?

He was just here, one of the men replied. On the right breast of his lab coat, beneath his name tag, was an embroidered logo bearing the legend NASA Emeritus.

Hes here, another said. Hes around. He might have just stepped away for a minute.

He might be down there, the first man told me, pointing to the Davidson Centers far end. Thats where he usually is, back in that corner.

I thanked them and started that way, walking beneath the Saturn, which rests well off the floor on heavy steel cradles. Its scale borders on the absurd. The S-IC stage, essentially a flying gas can that muscled all 6.2 million pounds of the rocket off the pad and into the upper atmosphere, is 138 feet long and 33 feet in diameter; it occupies half the Davidsons lofty headspace lying down. The S-II stage, which took the Saturn into the airless black, came after, just as big around and 82 feet long. I passed under the S-IVB, or third stagenarrower, at 21 feet, 8 inches across, but still a monster. It put the astronauts into orbit, sent them on their way to the moon, and carried, in a shroud at its top, the lunar module. Beyond was a mock-up of the comparatively tiny Apollo spacecraft, the payload for all the rocket below. The main act, it consisted of the service module (supplying power, air, water, and electronics to the crew) and the command module, otherwise known as the capsule.

It took me several minutes to walk the length of this behemoth, with requisite pauses to admire its audacity. Stacked and ready for liftoff, it had stretched more than three times the length of the Wright brothers first flight. Up under the capsules nose, four hundred feet from the old-timers at the tail, I saw that theyd been joined by a fourth figure in a lab coat. I hurried back to introduce myself.

Id seen photographs of Saverio Sonny Morea taken in the late 1960snattily turned out, by the professional engineering standards of the day, in crisp oxford shirts, bow ties, and skinny-lapeled sport coats, his dark hair trimmed short on the sides in the prevailing NASA style. The photos hinted at a certain consistency of temperament: Whenever a flash went off, Sonny Morea seemed to wear an expression of expectant delight. They suggested that here was a guy who enjoyed conversation, liked people, didnt sweat the little stuff.

Fifty years had passed sincehe was now eighty-sevenbut it was instantly clear that Moreas long exposure to Earths gravity had done little to mask his cheer. We shook hands. Im sorry I wasnt here when you got here, he said, smiling. Have you been down there to see it? He had a crooners tenor still tinged with Richmond Hill, Queens, sixty-odd years after he left the old neighborhoodand with almost all of that time spent in Alabama, no less. No, I told him. I didnt get that far.

Well, then, lets go have a look.

Back up the length of the Saturn we ventured, Morea tilted forward about ten degrees and hurrying on very short steps to keep up with the lean. Past the rockets tip, the Davidsons gallery was twilit, with spots illuminating a few Holy Grail items of Apollo history: the scorched command module, Casper, from Apollo 16, interior lit to show off the three couches its crew occupied; an A7L space suit, worn in Earth orbit and now encased in glass; and what wed come to see.

The lunar roverin NASA parlance, the lunar roving vehicle, or LRVwas just beyond reach behind a low barrier. The moon buggy, as the press insisted on calling it when it carried the astronauts around in the early seventies. A spacecraft on wheels, as Morea and his fellow engineers preferred to think of it. There it is, he said now. What do you think?

What I thought was that it looked just as Id imagined it. All business. Built with the precision and purpose of all Apollo machinery. A wondrous meld of engineering and imagination, deceptively simple, conceived at a time when the available tools to work out its hidden complexities were slide rules, blackboards, and hand-drawn blueprints. Wow, I answered. Amazing. And I meant it, because I understood that I was beholding something truly revolutionary. And elegant. And rare.