Space Chimp
I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with the moon landing, mainly, I think, because it happened the year I was born. I remember being bitterly disappointed when I found out that you have to be good at sums to be an astronaut. Foiled again. You have to be able to do trig and algebra for all the good jobs.
So many years later I’m in Florida visiting a friend working in Disneyworld as part of my summer mission in the US to systematically test pilot all the cocktails of the region. At the same time NASA are launching a space shuttle about an hour away. I have to go. I just don’t want to have to take public transport.
One night about a week before the launch we meet two Italian blokes in a nightclub who happened, as luck would have it, to be easy on the eye and have a car. Always a winning combination when you’re 21 years old and shy of a driving license. The idea of going to NASA is floated, although in retrospect my hand gestures indicating the launch of a rocket may have been misinterpreted at first and led to one of cultural misunderstandings that have peppered my life. Anyway, the plan is set and we’re poised and ready to make our way down to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I am ridiculously excited. I feel part of history. I mean I’m not, these launches were ten a penny at the time…but I feel that I am all the same.
By the day of the launch I am so beside myself with excitement that at one point I almost have an out of body experience where I see myself behaving like an excited loon and look down upon my earthly personage and scoff at how much of an ass I’m making of myself.
Night falls like a cat jumping down from a ledge, like it seems to do in that part of the world. It happens so quickly you almost get a fright. T minus 4 hours. Time to dress up like and astronaut’s wife in the 1960s and think about miming “Shall we think about getting going so that we can get a good spot?” to the Italian guys.
And then it happens. The news breaks. The launch is cancelled due to “a technical fault”. I set about cursing all the technicians of the world. How could they have been so slack? Who put that washer in the wrong way round- the fools?
The shuttle was launched three weeks later when I was on a plane back to the UK. Nineteen years later I’m still bleating on about it. Even Michael Collins has got over his disappointment quicker than me.*
*As the man who was left on the spaceship whilst Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong went down to the Moon surface to play golf, he is actually the coolest of the three men on the Apollo 11 mission. He had the hardest job and was responsible for the lives of his two buddies. He also knew he might have to come back alone if things went wrong (which they pretty much thought they would) and the world would despise him. I hate it when people say “The Other One” when they can’t remember his name. He is also the only one of the three that is still married to his wife and didn’t go all nuts when he returned. He claims that not going on the surface of the Moon wasn’t a big deal. I think he may be fibbing slightly about that, though.
