Moondust by Andrew Smith

Shepard, who weeks earlier had dismissed a geologist’s attempts to provide extra tuition in the difficult business of lunar navigation, had spotted some boulders which looked to him like deep ejecta and he wanted to sample them, then turn back, but Mitchell was distraught at this suggestion.
    â€œOh, let’s give it a whirl!” he said. “We can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater. We’ve lost everything if we don’t get there.”
    No one had ever stood at the edge of such a crater before and Mitchell was desperate to do so. When Houston capcom (capsule communicator) Fred Haise suggested they were near enough, Ed muttered, “Think you’re finks” – until Haise offered a lifeline, announcing that the walk was to be extended by half an hour and that if they wanted to spend the extra time hunting for the rim, they could. The decision was theirs. Deke Slayton suggested they help themselves by ditching the tool cart, but Ed bravely claimed that it wasn’t slowing them down, because he knew they’d need the tools when they arrived.
    â€œIt’s just a question of time,” he said. “We’ll get there.”
    Dragging the cart, Shepard led the way, but they didn’t seem to be getting any nearer: it was only when the commander gave their position as “the middle of the boulder field on the west rim,” that Mitchell realized he was being taken in the wrong direction. Shepard thought they were west of the crater, but Mitchell felt sure they were to the south. He consulted the map, could now see where they were. Panting heavily, he told Shepard that if they headed north, they’d get there.
    So Mitchell pulled. The ground flattened out, which meant the rim had to be close, but they still couldn’t see it. It was as though the Moon was playing games with them and in desperation Ed rescanned the map. There was a big boulder which ought to be in view now, but was nowhere to be seen. He knew they were nearly there, yet the time had just run out. Fred Haise said:
    â€œOkay, Ed and Al.”
    Like Mom calling them home for dinner. Their time was up. So they sampled some interesting-looking grey-and-white-streaked rocks and headed for base and the safety of the LM, where the keen golfer Al Shepard pulled the stunt for which his mission is still best remembered, attaching a golf club head to one of the geology tools and sending a couple of secretly stowed balls arcing into the distance – an idea he got from watching Bob Hope mince about the space centre with a club clenched in his fist like a baby rattle. After another fitful nap, the pair of Moonwalkers blasted back into the sky and Edgar Mitchell felt a real, physical yearning, a “strange nostalgia” for the world he’d just left and knew he would never see at close quarters again. Back home, scientists would establish that he and Shepard had drawn within twenty yards of Cone Crater’s edge … it had been right under their noses, but evaded them anyway.
    After the return, Mitchell stuck around for another year, then left NASA to form his IONS research institute. He had found the Moon a welcoming place and had no trouble integrating it into the human story, or his own. To him, “the stillness seemed to convey that the landscape itself had been patiently awaiting our arrival for millions of years.” There’s a mystic edge to this observation, yet for the thirty-three hours that he spent on the surface, during which he and Shepard collected ninety-four pounds of rock, he felt constant frustration at being too busy to stop and simply look around, take in the feeling of being there. He also felt a powerful angst at leaving, knowing as he did that he would never return, and, once back, became worried by his irritation with the question “What did it feel like to walk on the Moon?” Unlike most of his colleagues, he decided that the problem was not with the