[新鮮書市]當鷹號登月艙着陸

當鷹號登月艙着陸

來源：The Wall Street Journal 編輯：Vicki

現在全世界都已經知道第一批登月者阿姆斯特蘭等人，在40年後的歷史今天，我們再次紀念這個人類創舉。幾十年來，這個創舉也激勵了一批又一批的作家爲此做出了很多的創作。現在又有三本新書面世了，一起來關注一下吧。

When the Eagle Landed

Now that the world’s most notorious (臭名昭著的)moonwalker is dead and memorialized, let us turn our attention to the original, entirely admirable moonwalkers, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (with Michael Collins circling overhead), just in time for the 40th anniversary of their historic stroll on the Sea of Tranquility.

Not since the walk up Calvary (which followed a reported trek （徒步旅行）on the Sea of Galilee) has an ambulation （移動，步行）attracted such attention, though the July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 lunar walk benefited from a much larger support staff, budget and audience. At least 600 million people watched Neil ­Armstrong take his “giant leap for mankind.”

Four decades on, the sheer ­magnitude （重大，巨大）of the mission is still ­stunning（令人震驚的）, inspiring a handful of books that also remind us how much the world has changed since the Eagle ­lunar module（鷹登月艙） touched down at 3:20 p.m. CST that summer Sunday.

Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” is a broad and often entertaining account. Based on 23,000 pages of NASA （美國宇航局）oral histories, interviews and other ­documentation, the book is also a fact-junkie’s dream, starting with its opening description of getting the Apollo-tipped Saturn V （土星五號）rocket from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site.

The 129-million-cubic-foot ­building had doors 45 stories high and a 10,000-ton air conditioner, without which, Mr. Nelson writes, clouds would form inside the building—followed by intermittent showers. The “crawler” that lugged （用力拉）the 363-foot rocket five miles to the pad (at one mile per hour) was the world’s largest land vehicle, weighing in at six million pounds. It was almost as heavy as the Apollo-Saturn V rocket, which weighed just under 6.5 million pounds, was built with six million parts and represented the combined effort of 400,000 people and 12,000 companies.

The jaw-dropping numbers just keep coming: At takeoff, the Saturn V’s engines consumed 10,000 pounds of fuel per second, and to break free of Earth’s gravity the rocket hit 24,182 miles per hour “over ten times faster than the bullet of a ­Winchester .270.” In the carbon- footprint competition, Apollo 11 was a true Sasquatch（北美野人）.

Mr. Nelson, who has written books about Thomas Paine and the Doolittle bombing raid on Japan in World War II, provides plenty of ­historical perspective. He notes that while President John F. Kennedy, who announced in 1961 the mission to put a man on the moon, may not have been a full-blown （盛開的，成熟的）“space cadet（年輕宇航員）,” he worried deeply about falling behind the Soviet Union.

Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president, lit a fire under those fears. “Control of space means control of the world,” he thundered. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause droughts and floods, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, divert the Gulf stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.” (What is it with vice presidents and climate change?)

The project had other fathers, ­including rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, whose genius had been put to evil use by Adolf Hitler. ­Comedian Mort Sahl, an occasional contributor to Kennedy’s speeches, once said that during World War II von Braun “aimed at the stars, but often hit London.” After the war, von Braun came to the U.S. and ­experienced a religious conversion（變換）, joining the Church of the Nazarene and even reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Apollo 11’s lift-off. Then he turned to a colleague and said: “You give me ten billion dollars and ten years, and I’ll have a man on Mars.”

Mr. Nelson offers an often ­gripping narrative of the roughly 240,000-mile flight (each direction), along the way answering several questions likely to pop up in the minds of landlubbers. Claustrophobia? He quotes astronaut Frank ­Borman: “Here on Earth usually, when you’re trapped in something, what’s good is on the outside. In a spacecraft, what’s good is on the ­inside and what’s outside is death.”

Regarding the “facilities” issue, we’re reminded that amazing feats of science are often undertaken by men wearing diapers, at least part of the time, though in space even the most mundane matters take on a magical air. After explaining that liquids ­discarded （拋棄）in outer space（太空） freeze in a “shower of glistening ice crystals,” Mr. Nelson quotes an unnamed ­astronaut who says that the most beautiful thing he saw while gazing out of a space-capsule（太空船） window was a “urine dump at sunset.”

We also learn that no matter how far you travel from Earth, you can’t escape the nags. Mr. Aldrin celebrated a brief Communion after touching down on the moon, though he kept it secret to avoid inflaming the militant atheist （無神論者）Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who had filed a lawsuit after moon-orbiting astronauts on Apollo 8 in 1968 read from the Book of ­Genesis. The courts rejected her ­separation-of-church-and-state complaint, pleading lack of jurisdiction（司法權） in matters of church and space.

Then there were the news media, which sometimes seemed intent on proving that journalism isn’t exactly rocket science. While Mr. Armstrong wowed the world with his “one small step” pronouncement（聲明，公告）, Walter Cronkite marked the event with: “Phew! Wow, boy! Man on the moon!” Reporters, of course, endlessly asked the astronauts how they “felt.” The best reply they could wring from Michael Collins: “It’s not within our ken to share emotions or utter extraneous information（額外信息）.” Neil Armstrong was no more eager to rise to the bait. Asked what it felt like to walk on the moon, he replied: “Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.”

Some astronauts are a bit more forthcoming, as we find in Andrew Chaikin’s “Voices From the Moon,” based on interviews with nearly two-dozen Apollo astronauts. Even then, the chatter is not exactly an emotive Oprahfest. Alan Bean, who traveled to the moon on Apollo 12 four months after Apollo 11’s journey, recalls how astonished he was to look up from the lunar surface and see the Earth. “I’m really here,” he thought, before quickly scolding himself: “I’ve got to quit doing this . . . because when I’m doing this I’m not looking for rocks.”

What goes up must come down, and after the return of Apollo 11, Mr. Armstrong, and especially Mr. Aldrin, hit some low points. (Mr. Collins ­enjoyed a relatively smooth post-­astronaut transition, joining the State Department and later becoming first director of the National Air and Space Museum.) Looking at the moon may inspire romance, but to judge from the experiences of Messrs. ­Armstrong and Aldrin, it seems that walking on it has the opposite effect. Mr. Armstrong—who moved in the 1970s to a dairy farm in Ohio, where he was a professor of aerospace ­engineering at the University of ­Cincinnati—was divorced by his wife of 38 years in 1994, three years after he suffered a heart attack. Mr. Aldrin had double the marriage trouble, plus some, which he chronicles in ­“Magnificent Desolation.” It’s a breezy （輕鬆愉快的）read, and it shows that Mr. ­Aldrin has traveled a long way—from astronaut-terseness （簡潔，精煉）to the self-revelation demanded of authors today.

“What does a man do for an ­encore （再來一個）after walking on the moon?” he asks early on. For him the answer was: crash. In the 1970s, he wrestled with alcohol and depression, sometimes rising from bed primarily to down a bottle of Scotch or Jack ­Daniel’s. At one point he took a job working at a Cadillac dealership.

Yet Mr. Aldrin eventually broke free from booze’s orbit. He gave it up in October 1978 and went on to marry—apparently very happily this time—a woman named Lois Driggs, on Valentine’s Day 1988. Nowadays one of Mr. Aldrin’s primary passions is encouraging private-enterprise space exploration so that civilians can experience the magnificent ­desolation he once knew.

Keke View：阿波羅計劃（Apollo Project），又稱阿波羅工程，是美國從1961年到1972年從事的一系列載人登月飛行任務。
　　　1969年7月16日，巨大的“土星5號”火箭載着“阿波羅11號”飛船從美國肯尼迪角發射場點火升空，開始了人類首次登月的太空征程。美國宇航員尼爾·阿姆斯特朗、埃德溫·奧爾德林、邁克爾·科林斯駕駛着阿波羅11號宇宙飛船跨過38萬公里的征程，承載着全人類的夢想踏上了月球表面。這確實是一個人的小小一步，但是整個人類的偉大一步。他們見證了從地球到月球夢想的實現，這一步跨過了5000年的時光。