The Fading Voices From The Moon

"I have done things and been places you simply would not believe, and I keep that inside of me." — Mike Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot.
 
 "…Most people just look at [the moon] as something flat out there in the night sky. But I look at it as a sphere. I can feel the depth of it. I know that it's in inner space. I mean, I know that it's not at the end of that blackness." — Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 Commander.
 
Cernan passed away a week ago Monday. He was the last human to walk on the moon and spent more time walking its surface than anyone. (His crewmate, geologist Jack Schmitt, missed out my just a few minutes.) There are only six people with living memory of walking on on the surface of another world, and the youngest is 81. The Apollo program was a remarkable achievement, certainly worthy of the many books written about it, the people in it, both famous and hidden figures. But it's the words of the participants themselves that have always grabbed me.

Moonwalkers share the rarest and most remarkable experiences. Reading quotes from before and after their trip, it's clear it changed them. Few of them were known for (appropriately) expressing themselves before their journey. Ken Mattingly, Apollo 16 Command Module Pilot, once said, "Money should have been spent to find […] a Hemingway that can capture the feeling and describe, to say, 'I saw this. And I saw that. And I saw this.' That would have been worth the price of Apollo." 
 
And yet many of them became poets on the trip there and back. (For variety, Apollo 12 CMP, Alan Bean became a painter of some note.)  
 
Voices From The Moon is a hardbound collection of stories, quotes, and photos by those who went there. Edited by Apollo scholar Andrew Chakin, it lets the astronauts tell their own stories in their own words, from pre-Apollo Right Stuff-era all the way through the end of the program and its impact today. It's as much (or more) a photo book as a story collection, each page containing excellent reproductions of the most stunning restored photos from the Apollo archive. There is no e-book version, which is for the better. It's best seen and experienced in its physical form. (Much like the moon.) Published in 2009, it's not a brand new book. Then again it's not a new story. The only chapters being written in crewed moon exploration are obituaries.
 
Maybe my fascination with Apollo is just me romanticising a time I never knew. Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt's journey on Apollo 17 was the only one to happen in my lifetime, and I was just a few weeks old. I didn't get to see the people of Earth take crewed space travel from its first tentative steps all the way working driving to work on the moon in a short decade—not only training the astronauts, but the much larger task of building the machines and technology for them to do so.
 
But space travel is getting interesting again, both as an observer and commercially. We have had people living and working in space for sixteen continuous years, which is just as much of an accomplishment as Apollo, and couldn't have been done without it leading the way. So who knows what I might yet see humanity (and individual humans) achieve in my lifetime.

(A version of this originally appeared in a past issue of the Reader's Room. Subscribe to get it (and more good things) in a more timely manner.)