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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Tom Hanks Reads His Tale of Going to the Moon
00:19:47
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.
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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 +4 and we published it in the New Yorker in 2014. Here's Tom Hanks reading Alan Bean +4.
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Alan Bean +4 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 within a muscle, said Toole would make a 500,000 mile figure 8 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 M. Dash, 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 weight return. She is ever doubtful of my space program bonafides. She says I'm always Apollo 13 this and 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 Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter of no Way why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon, written by an immigrant 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 8 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 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 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 27, 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 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 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 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. 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 business to make him some big time NASA cash. He died in his sleep just before his 94th 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 Allen 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. 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 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. The plant, the flag, kangaroo hop in 16 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 ball game. 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 boot prints 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 the took two days. We packed granola bars and water in squeeze top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages in the hypergolic chemicals for the one shot firing of the transliter 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 Allen Bean. Not a one of them knowing who Allen Bean was or why we'd named the rocket ship after him. The kids begged for peeks inside the spacecraft, but we didn't have the insurance. What are you waiting for? You gonna 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 Max Q app 99 cents showed us pulling 11.8 times our weight at sea level. Not that we needed iPhones to tell us 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 space goers who for no apparent reason spend their first hours up there upchucking 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 translunar injection, Steve Wong's tummy finally settled down somewhere over Africa. We opened the valves in the transliter motor, the hypergolics worked their chemical magic, and voosh. We were hauling the mail to Moonberry RFD, our escape velocity a crisp 7 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 mucho handy, especially during the downturn time. 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 Allen Bean for views of some of the few stars that were visible in the naked sunlight. Antares Nunci the globular cluster NGC 6333, none of which twinkle when you're up there. Among them, the big event of transliter space is crossing the Equagravisphere, a boundary as invisible as the International Date Line. 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 pilots wings. I put the Allen Bean in a passive thermal control barbecue roll, our moon bound 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. When 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 gibbous 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 Alan 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 M. Dash 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 lunatic app $0.99 showed us traversing south to north, but we were mentally lost in space. The surface's chaotic as a wind blown gray capped bay until I matched the Poincare impact basin with the this is our moon guide on my Kobo. The Allen bean was soaring 153km high, 95.06 miles Americanus 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. Arezmi Crater had white finger painted streaks heaviside showed rills and depression like river washouts. We split dufay right in half a flyover from its 6 to its 12, the rim, a steep, sharp razor. Mare Moscoviense was far to port, a mini version of the Ocean of Storms, where four and a half decades ago, the real Alan 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 d', Alembert, large craters linked by the smaller sleeper. 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 sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph, Haydn or George Harrison, but the circle of life from the Lion King scored our home planet's 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 iphotos. But questions arose about what we were going to do upon our return, apart from making some bitchin 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 Equagravisphere. 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 duffet down the middle? Tbd, I suppose. Whoa, Kamchatka. 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 chute pyro shot off, the Allen Bean jolted our bones, causing the jam box to lose its duct tape purchase and conk em 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 mal de mer. 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 whooshed in as soft as a kiss from Mother Earth. But owing to what turned out to be a huge design, flawless, 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 day boat 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 a 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.
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That was Tom Hanks, reading his short story Alan Bean +4, which was published in the New Yorker in 2014. You can find it@newyorker.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.