Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg

Travelling 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 five-hundred-thousand-mile figure eight, sail around that very moon, and return 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 MDash, who’d shortened his long tribal name to rap-star 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-wait-return. She is ever doubtful of my space-program bona fides. She says I’m always “Apollo 13 this” and “Lunokhod 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-size Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter from “No Way, Ivan: Why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon,” written by an émigré professor with an axe to grind. According to him, in the mid-sixties 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 that they didn’t dare try again, not even with a dog. Kaputnik.

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 forty-fifth 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, also forty-five years ago but forgotten by 99.999 per cent 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 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 reëntry in twelve to fourteen months.

MDash, who was 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 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, 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-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 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-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 ballgame, 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 boot-prints 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.