Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

Anna is as thin and smart as a whip, and driven like no one else I have ever dated (for three exhausting weeks). She saw a challenge here. She wanted to succeed where the Russians had failed. It would be fun. We’d all go, she said, and that was that, but when? I suggested that we schedule liftoff in conjunction with the anniversary of Apollo 11, the most famous space flight in history, but that was a no-go, as Steve Wong had dental work scheduled for the third week of July. How about November, when Apollo 12 landed in the Ocean of Storms, an event now forgotten by 99.999 percent of the people on Earth? Anna had to be a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding the week after Halloween, so the best date for the mission turned out to be the last Saturday in September.

Astronauts in the Apollo era had spent thousands of hours piloting jet planes and earning engineering degrees. They had to practice escaping from launchpad disasters by sliding down long cables to the safety of thickly padded bunkers. They had to know how slide rules worked. We did none of that, though we did test-fly our booster on the Fourth of July, out of Steve Wong’s huge driveway in Oxnard, hoping that, with all the fireworks, our unmanned first stage would blow through the night sky unnoticed. Mission accomplished. That rocket cleared Baja and is right now zipping around the Earth every ninety minutes and, let me state clearly, for the sake of multiple government agencies, will probably burn up harmlessly on reentry in twelve to fourteen months.

MDash, who was born in a sub-Saharan village, has a super brain. As a transfer student at St. Anthony Country Day High School with minimal English skills, he won a science-fair Award of Merit with an experiment on ablative materials, which caught fire, to the delight of everyone. Since having a working heat shield is implied in the phrase “returning safely to Earth,” MDash was in charge of that and all things pyrotechnic, including the explosive bolts for stage separation. Anna did the math, all the load-lift ratios, orbital mechanics, fuel mixtures, and formulas—the stuff I pretend to know, but which actually leaves me in a fog.

My contribution was the Command Module—a cramped, headlight-shaped spheroid that was cobbled together by a very rich pool-supply magnate, who was hell-bent on getting into the private aerospace business to make him some big-time NASA cash. He died in his sleep just before his ninety-fourth birthday, and his (fourth) wife-widow agreed to sell me the capsule for a hundred bucks, though I would have paid twice that. She insisted on typing a receipt on one of her husband’s old typewriters, a green Royal Desktop, a behemoth, just one of many that he collected but failed to maintain, as there was a stack of them growing rust in a corner of the garage. MUST TAKE DELIVERY IN 48 HOURS she typed, as well as NO RETURNS/CASH ONLY. I named the capsule the Alan Bean, in honor of the lunar-module pilot of Apollo 12, the fourth man to walk on the moon and the only one I ever met, in a Houston-area Mexican restaurant in 1986. He was paying the cashier, as anonymous as a balding orthopedist, when I yelled out, “Holy cow! You’re Al Bean!” He gave me his autograph and drew a tiny astronaut above his name.

Since four of us would be a-comin’ round the moon, I needed to make room inside the Alan Bean and eliminate pounds. We’d have no Mission Control to boss us around, so I ripped out all the Comm. I replaced every bolt, screw, hinge, clip, and connector with duct tape (three bucks a roll at Home Depot). Our privy had a shower curtain for privacy. I’ve heard from an experienced source that a trip to the john in zero gravity requires that you strip naked and give yourself half an hour, so, yeah, privacy was key. I replaced the outer-opening hatch and its bulky lock-EVAC apparatus with a steel-alloy plug that had a big window and self-sealing bib. In the vacuum of space, the air pressure inside the Alan Bean would force the hatch closed and airtight. Simple physics.

Announce that you are flying to the moon and everyone assumes you mean to land on it—to plant the flag, kangaroo-hop in one-sixth gravity, and collect rocks to bring home, none of which we were going to do. We were flying around the moon. Landing is a whole different ball game, and as for stepping out onto the surface? Hell, choosing which of the four of us would get out first and become the thirteenth person to leave bootprints up there would have led to so much bad blood that our crew would have broken up long before T minus ten seconds and counting. And let’s face it, that crewman would have been Anna anyway.

Assembling the three stages of the good ship Alan Bean took two days. We packed granola bars and water in squeeze-top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages and the hypergolic chemicals for the one-shot firing of the translunar motor, the minirocket that would fling us to our lunar rendezvous. Most of Oxnard came around to Steve Wong’s driveway to ogle the Alan Bean, not a one of them knowing who Alan Bean was or why we’d named the rocket ship after him. The kids begged for peeks inside the spacecraft, but we didn’t have the insurance. What are you waiting for? You gonna blast off soon? To every knothead who would listen, I explained launch windows and trajectories, showing them on my MoonFaze app (free) how we had to intersect the moon’s orbit at exactly the right moment or lunar gravity would…Ah, hell! There’s the moon! Point your rocket at it and put on a show!

Twenty-four seconds after clearing the tower, our first stage was burning all stops, and the Max-Q app ($0.99) showed us pulling 11.8 times our weight at sea level, not that we needed iPhones to tell us this. We​…​were​…​fighting​…​for breath​…​with Anna​…​screaming​…​“Get off​…​my chest!” But no one was on her chest. She was, in fact, sitting on me, crushing me like a lap dance from an offensive lineman. Kaboom went MDash’s dynamite bolts, and the second stage fired, as programmed. A minute later, dust, loose change, and a couple of ballpoint pens floated up from behind our seats, signaling, Hey! We’d achieved orbit!

Weightlessness is as much fun as you can imagine, but troublesome for some spacegoers, who for no apparent reason spend their first hours up there upchucking, as if they’d overdone it at the prelaunch reception. It’s one of those facts never made public by NASA PR or in astronaut memoirs. After three revolutions of the Earth, as we finished running the checklist for our translunar injection, Steve Wong’s tummy finally settled down. Somewhere over Africa, we opened the valves in the translunar motor, the hypergolics worked their chemical magic, and— voosh— we were hauling the mail to Moonberry RFD, our escape velocity a crisp seven miles per second, Earth getting smaller and smaller in the window.

The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get email or use Google to settle arguments. The iPads we took had something like 70 billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch the final season of Girls. We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna. I worked the attitude jets in pulse mode, yawing and pitching the Alan Bean for views of some of the few stars that were visible in the naked sunlight: Antares, Nunki, the globular cluster NGC 6333—none of which twinkle when you’re up there among ’em.