The New Yorker Radio Hour - Tom Hanks Reads His Tale of Going to the Moon

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

In 2014, Tom Hanks—the star of “Apollo 13,” among many other accomplishments—wrote a short story about going to the moon.  But his was not a dramatic story of NASA heroes facing grave danger. Hanks told the tale of a very twenty-first century mission, executed D.I.Y. style, with four misfits in a space capsule run off an iPad and held together with duct tape.  The story, “Alan Bean Plus Four,” was published in The New Yorker in 2014.  Hanks originally read the story for the New Yorker’s Writer’s Voice podcast.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and this is a bonus edition of our podcast. We're going to do something special to celebrate the moon landing, which took place 50 years ago this week. And there's going to be a lot more about that on this weekend's episode as well. Now, just a few years ago, Tom Hanks, the star of Apollo 13, among many other films, wrote a short story about going to the moon.

It's not a dramatic story about NASA heroes. It's a very 21st century version about four misfits who come up with their own do-it-yourself approach. Their space capsule is run off of an iPad and held together with duct tape. His story is called Alan Bean Plus Four and we published it in The New Yorker in 2014. Here's Tom Hanks, reading Alan Bean Plus Four.

Alan Bean plus four. Traveling to the moon was way less complicated this year than it was back in 1969, as the four of us proved, not that anyone gives a whoop. You see, over cold beers on my patio, with the Crescent Moon a delicate princess fingernail low in the west, I told Steve Wong that if he threw, say, a hammer with enough muscle, said tool would make a 500,000-mile figure-eight, sail around that very moon, and returned to Earth like a boomerang, and wasn't that fascinating?

Steve Wong works at Home Depot, so has access to many hammers. He offered to chuck a few. His co-worker, M-Dash, who'd shortened his long tribal name to Raptstar length, wondered how one would catch a red-hot hammer falling at a thousand miles an hour. Anna, who does something in web design, said that there'd be nothing to catch, as the hammer would burn up like a meteor. And she was right. Plus, she didn't buy the simplicity of my cosmic throw-weight return. She is ever doubtful of my space program bonifides. She says I'm always,

Apollo 13, this, and Luna called that, and have begun to falsify details in order to sound like an expert. And she is right about that, too. I keep all my nonfiction on a pocket-sized cobo digital reader. So I whipped out a chapter of No Way, Ivan, why the C-Syssey. CCP lost the race to the moon, written by an emigrate professor with an axe to grind. According to him, in the mid-60s, the Soviets hoped to trump the Apollo program with just such a figure-eight mission. No orbit, no landing, just photos and crowing rights. The Reds sent off an unmanned Soyuz with supposedly a mannequin in a spacesuit, but so many things went south they didn't dare try again, not even with the dog.

Caputnik. 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 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, the most famous spaceflight 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 also 45 years ago, but forgotten by 99.99% 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 September 27th a Saturday. Astronauts in the Apollo era had spent thousands of hours piloting jet planes and earning engineering degrees. They had to practice escaping from launch pad 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 4th of July out of Steve Wong's huge driveway in Oxnard, hoping that with all the firework. 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 90 minutes and let me state clearly for the sake of multiple government agencies will probably burn up harmlessly on re-entry in 12 to 14 months. M-Dash, who is born in a Sub-Saharan village, has a super brain. In junior high with minimal English skills, he won a science fair award of merit with an experiment on a blade of materials which caught fire to the delight of everyone. Since having a working heat shield is implied in the phrase returning safely to Earth, M-Dash 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 nine and his fourth wife-slash widow agreed to sell me the capsule for a hundred bucks, provided I got it out of the garage by the weekend. 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 coming around the moon, I needed to make room inside the Allen 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.

A privy was 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 a self-ceiling bib. In the vacuum of space, the air pressure inside the Allen Bean would force the hatch closed and airtight. Simple physics. Announce that you are flying to the moon, and everyone assumes you be to land on it.

To plant the flag, kangaroo hop in one-six 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 ballgame, and as for stepping out onto the surface, hell, choosing which of the four of us would get out first to become the 13th 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 10 seconds and counting. Assembling the three stages of the good ship, Alan Bean, took two days. We packed rinalabars and water and squeezed-top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages and the hypergolic chemicals for the one-shot firing of the transluiter motor,

the mini-rocket 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 peaks inside the spacecraft, but we didn't have the insurance. What are you waiting for? You're going to blast off soon? To every knothead who would listen, I explained launch windows and trajectories showing them on my moon phase 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.

24 seconds after clearing the tower, our first stage was burning all stops, and the MaxQ app, 99 cents, 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 M-Dash's dynamite bolts in 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 up-chucking, as if they'd overdone it at the pre-launch 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 trans-luner injection, Steve Wong's tummy finally settled down. Somewhere over Africa, we opened the valves in the transluter motor, the hypergolics worked their chemical magic, and, vosh! We were hauling the mail to Moonberry R.F. 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 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 much handy, especially during the downtime on our long haul. M-Dash used his to watch season four of breaking bad. We took hundreds of selfies with 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, and Terry's, Nunky, the globular cluster NGC-6333, none of which twinkle when you're up there among them. The big event of Transluter space is crossing the Equalgravisphere. A boundary is invisible as an international dateline, but for the Alan Bean, the Rubicon. On this side of the EQS, Earth's gravity was tugging us back, slowing our progress, bidding us to return home to the life-affirming benefits of water, atmosphere, and a magnetic field. Once we crossed, the moon grabbed hold, wrapping us in her ancient silvery embrace,

whispering to us to hurry, hurry, hurry, to wink in wonder at her magnificent desolation. At the exact moment that we reached the threshold, Anna awarded us origami cranes, made out of aluminum foil, which we taped onto our shirts like pilot's wings. I put the Alan Bean in a passive thermal control barbecue roll, our moonbound ship rotating on an invisible spit so as to distribute the solar heat. Then we dimmed the lights, taped a sweatshirt over the window to keep the sunlight from sweeping across the cabin, and slept. Each of us curled up in a comfortable nook of our little rocket ship. What I tell people that I've seen the far side of the moon, they often say,

you mean the dark side? As though I'd fallen under the spell of Darth Vader or Pink Floyd. In fact, both sides of the moon get the same amount of sunshine just on different shifts. Because the moon was a waxing givis to the folks back home, we had to wait out the shadowed portion on the other side. In that darkness, with no sunlight and the moon blocking the earth's reflection, I pulsed the Allen Bean around so that our window faced outbound for a view of the infinite time-space continuum that was worthy of IMAX. unblinking stars in subtle hues of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Our galaxy stretching as far as our eyes were wide.

A diamond blue carpet against a black that would have been terrifying had it not been so mesmerizing. Then there was light. Snapping on as if MDash had flipped a switch. I tweaked the controls and there below us was the surface of the moon. Wow. Gorgeous in a way that strained any use of the word, a rugged place that produced ooze and awe. The Luna Ticket app 99 cents showed us traversing south to north,

but we were mentally lost in space the surfaces chaotic as a wind-blown gray-capped bay until I matched the Puan-Carray impact basin with the This Is Our Moon Guide on my co-bo. The Alan Bean was soaring 153, kilometers high, 95.06 miles Americana's, at a speed faster than that of a bullet from a gun, and the moon was slipping by so fast that we were running out of far side. A resmi crater had white finger-painted streaks. Heaviside showed rills and oppression like river washouts. We split Dufe, right in half, a flyover from its six to its twelve, the rim, a steep, sharp razor. Marais Moscovience was far to port a mini version of the ocean of storms, where, four and a half decades ago, the real Allen Bean, spent two days hiking, collecting rocks, taking photos. Lucky man.

Our brains could only take in so much, so our iPhones did the recording, and I stopped calling out the sights, though I did recognize Campbell and Delam Bear, large craters linked by the smallest sleifer, just as we were about to head home over the moon's North Pole. Steve Wong had queued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise, but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna's Jambox, and was nearly late for his cue. M-Dash yelled, hit play, hit play! Just as a blue and white patch of life, a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been, pierced the black cosmos above the saw-tooth horizon. I was expecting something classical.

Franz Joseph Hayden or George Harrison. But the circle of life from the Lion King scored our home planets rise over the plaster of Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others' tears

which were floating around the Allen Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You'd have done the same. Coasting home was one fat anti-climax, despite the never-spoken possibility of our burning up on re-entry like an obsolete spy satellite circa 1962. Of course, we were all chuffed, as the English say, that we'd made the trek and maxed out the memories on our iPhones with eye photos.

but questions arose about what we were going to do upon our return, apart from making some bitch-and-posts on Instagram. If I ever run into Al Bean again, I'll ask him what life has been like for him since he twice crossed the equagravosphere. Does he suffer melancholia on a quiet afternoon as the world spins on automatic? Will I occasionally get the blues

because nothing holds a wonder equal to splitting Dufe down the middle? TBD, I suppose. Whoa, Camp Chattka Anna called out as our heat shield expired into millions of grain-sized comets. We were arcing down over the Arctic Circle, gravity once again commanding that we who went up must come down. When the shoot pyro shot off, the Allen Bean jolted our bones, causing the jambox to lose its duct tape purchase and conk M-Dash in the forehead. By the time we splashed down off Oahu, a trail of blood was running from the ugly, gash between his eyebrows. Anna tossed him her bandana because guess what no one had thought to take around the moon? To anyone reading this with plans to imitate us? Band-aids. At stable one,

that is, bobbing in the ocean rather than having disintegrated into plasma, M-Dash tripped the rescue-us flares that he'd rigged under the parachute jettison system. I opened the pressure equalizing valve a tad early, and oops, noxious fumes from the excess fuel burn off were sucked into the capsule, making us even queasier, what with the malamare. Once the cabin pressure was at the same PSI as outside, Steve Wong was able to uncork the main hatch, and the Pacific Ocean breeze washed in as soft as a kiss from Mother Earth. But owing to what turned out to be a huge design flaw,

that same Pacific Ocean began to join us in our spent little craft. The Alan Bean's second historic voyage was going to be to Davy Jones' locker. Anna, thinking fast, held aloft our Apple products, but Steve Wong lost his Samsung, The Galaxy, Ha! Which disappeared into the lower equipment bay as the rising seawater bade us exit. The dayboat from the Kahala Hilton, filled with curious snorkelers, pulled us out of the water, the English speakers on board telling us that we smelled horrid, the foreigners giving us a wide berth. After shower and a change of clothes, I was ladling.

fruit salad from a decorative dugout canoe at the hotel buffet table when a lady asked me if I had been in that thing that came down out of the sky. Yes, I told her. I had gone all the way to the moon and returned safely to the surly bonds of earth, just like Alan Bean. Who? She said. That was Tom Hanks reading his short story, Alan Bean Plus Four, which was published in the New Yorker in 2014. You can find it at New Yorker.com. On our next episode, we'll be looking at the moon landing, the real one in 1969,

and why so many people today still refuse to believe it ever happened. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening.