A Speech, Never Given

What if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had died on the moon?

A good trailer can do a lot for a movie’s success, and Gravity has one of the best. It gives just enough away to be intriguing, makes you care about what’s happening to poor Sandra Bullock, and (perhaps most importantly) includes this horrifying image:

I’ve seen various versions of the trailer several times in theaters, and this particular bit engendered the same reaction from the crowd in every instance: a sharp, wincing intake of breath followed by an uncomfortable silence.

It’s a wonder that anyone goes up there at all when that is a possibility, albeit a remote one that hasn't actually happened yet. In all the myriad ways one can die in space — burning up in the atmosphere on re-entry, suffocating in the void because of a leak in your suit, pummeling by a meteor — the one that seems to make people the most nervous is the idea of simply floating away, untethered and adrift.

Death is a tragedy, but death and disappearance is a horror. It robs us of all the rituals we use to cope. A funeral without a body or ashes is incomplete — a grave without remains just a marker. Amelia Earhart disappeared almost 80 years ago and people are still looking for her, scatter-plotting her plane’s final destination and descending on distant islands to examine the lairs of crabs. It feels like we owe her that much.

Dying on Earth leaves open the possibility that your remains can be recovered. Even the unfortunate climbers who perished above Mount Everest’s death zone have their final locations marked (and, in some grisly cases, used as waypoints for other climbers), but space is effectively beyond the veil. Until we develop transcendent advances in fuel and propulsion and viability, anyone who dies in space is likely irrecoverable, unless their natural trajectory brings them into Earth’s gravity well and they return as ashes in the atmosphere.

We don’t confront this possibility much anymore, but it was a constant threat during the space race. Only three people have actually died in space (that is, farther than 100 kilometers above sea level) — the three unfortunate cosmonauts of Soyuz 11, who died when a faulty valve opened during undocking from space station Salyut 1. Many others died during re-entry or during accidents on the ground, like the crew of Apollo 1, who perished in a cabin fire before takeoff.

Later astronauts named stars used for navigation after the three Apollo 1 astronauts, so their friends could help them find their way home in the dark.

The actual Apollo 11 moon landing mission went off without major incident, but it had a dark contingency in place. If something went wrong on the moon — if Armstrong and Aldrin crashed the lander, or damaged their suits, or the lunar module’s launch rocket failed to fire upon their departure — then there would be no way to rescue them. They’d be forever stranded, their spacesuit-clad bodies serving as mummified markers of a mission gone wrong.