Muldoon was saying, “To see the Earth fall away behind your receding capsule… To stand on the Moon, and see that little world curve away under your feet: to be cognizant that you are one of just two humans on this whole goddamn planet, and to be able to hold your hand up and cover the Earth…”

Here you had a handful of men who had done something extraordinary: flown beyond the air, even walked on the airless surface of the Moon — unimaginable things, things which nothing in their human evolutionary heritage had prepared them for. And York began to see that something in the press people — masked by all the banter and joshing and bluster — was responding to that. Something primeval.

You’ve been up there. I could never go. Don’t say you’re just an ordinary guy. What is it like? Tell me.

As the astronauts spoke to the public — even though, for God knew what reason, even a skilled operator like Muldoon always seemed to fall into a stilted jargon littered with “somewhat” and “cognizant” — a very basic and primal communication was struggling to happen, a layer under the spoken. The words of Muldoon and the rest weren’t enough; they could never be. York often had the feeling that people wanted to close in and touch the astronauts. As if they were gods. Or as if information, sensations, memories could be transmitted through the skin.

But she could not contribute to that process. How could she? She’d never flown higher than in a T-38.

She felt like a fake, sitting there bathed in TV lights, alongside a man who had bent down and run his fingers through lunar dirt. October 1984

…How frequently we perceive our national debates about the future of SPACE TRAVEL veering between hysterical extremes! And all of it is played out against the background of the most cynically AMORAL times in living memory.

While the “yuppies” parade their Rolex watches and their BMW sports cars, and while our illusory economic “upturn” is fueled only by the President’s massive rise in MILITARY EXPENDITURE — which is itself inherently inflationary, and to which the Mars mission has become explicitly linked, by NASA’s supporters in politics — all of which is leading to an immense DEFICIT which we will bequeath to our children — the income gap between richest and poorest is at its widest in two decades.

And that very DEFICIT is itself a cynical manipulation of the economy by an administration which is determined that there shall be no opportunity, because of the DEFICIT burden, for an expansion in welfare spending or other programs in the years beyond President Reagan’s retirement in 1988.

At its grandest, the dehumanizing experience of SPACE can lead us, paradoxically, to a fuller understanding of the HUMANITY the astronauts must cast aside. Indeed it can teach us a truer perspective:

— CONTEMPT for our works.

— VALUE of ourselves.