Where do you go after you’ve gone to the moon?
That’s the question addressed in Moondust by Andrew Smith, a wonderful book about the twelve astronauts who walked on the moon and how their lives were forever altered by the experience. I’m only about sixty pages in, but I’m completely caught up in the story.
Here’s Smith describing his first meeting with astronaut Edgar Mitchell:
“The undertaking may have ended abruptly thirty years ago, but it has never been equaled since – in fact, with every passing year it has come to seem more eccentric and incredible. Science has advanced and technology leapt forward at a dizzying rate, but in this one domain, Deep Space, their domain, there has been . . . nothing. So while the world has changed, we have changed, the pictures and deeds of the Moonwalkers have remained ever present, yet frozen definitively in the imagination as they were then, making sight of them as they are now a shock. It’s like Dorian Gray in reverse; they have a real age and a Moon age and your first impulse is to stamp your feet and cry, “How dare you be old!”
Another passage about perspective from space:
“Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space – all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between the two enterprises is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful and shockingly alone. In a rare instance of candor, Neil Armstrong once remarked that while on the Moon, he became aware that he could blot out the Earth with his thumb and when someone asked whether this made him feel really big, he replied, “No, it made me feel really, really small.”
Get the book here: