Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

"That’s right, it’s a kind of road trip that Smith writes about. He’s another very charismatic writer. He writes beautifully and it’s very readable. The words in the story just leap off the page into your mind and memory. It’s a wonderful counter to Andrew Chaikin’s book because it’s written a couple of decades later. It’s about tracking down these 12 men who had this extraordinarily unique and rare experience of standing on another world, 400,000 kilometers from Earth, looking back at their home planet. Andrew Smith is interested in what that odd experience did to them and how they coped with it in the years after they came back. It’s a common misconception that everyone who stood on the Moon went mad when they when they came back to Earth. That’s just not true. There were multiple personality types that went to the Moon. There were incredible alpha male commanders who were very driven, in the years after they came back, to become captains of industry and follow very particular careers. Then there were those far more unconventional figures that he met as well. All the Lunar Module pilots had very little to do on the way back, because they’d left their spaceships on the Moon. Their job was done, and they were able to reflect more profoundly on the meaning of what they had just achieved. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As a result, when they came back, they thought more deeply about what it meant to be them, and what they wanted to do with the years ahead. Rather than pursue more conventional careers, they all went into these rather alternative lifestyles and life plans that took them in very interesting directions. For example, Buzz Aldrin has campaigned tirelessly for a return of human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit—back to the Moon and on to Mars. Alan Bean, who followed him, became a painter. Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study consciousness—decades before consciousness was a respectable field of study. Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin found God more vociferously than they had before. They founded their own ministries and in the case of Charlie Duke, still preach the message of God and Jesus to this day. Both of them were religious already, but Apollo freed them up to be more themselves. As it did with everybody. The last Lunar Module Pilot, Harrison Schmitt, went into politics and became a US Senator, which is another pretty odd career. Smith goes around America, mostly, tracking down these people and writing very perceptively—from a psychiatrist’s perspective almost—about how the Moon changed these people. He draws some really lovely conclusions that are universal truths about all of us, about what makes us us , and what holds us back. So I love Moondust for that reason. What comes out of his book—and others have written about this as well—is that once you’ve set yourself some incredible career goal and you’ve achieved it in this amazing way, what do you do as an encore? What’s next? Many of them didn’t realize this for years afterwards, because it wasn’t obvious, but it freed them up to be who they really were. We all wear masks in our lives, whether it’s in a relationship or at work. We are someone else when we are in these environments, because we are playing a role that we think we have to play to get on or to do what we have to do. But once we are freed up from that, only then can our wings properly unfurl and we can properly fly. That, I think, is what comes out of Andrew Smith’s book."