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Moon Walker Who's so Down to Earth

Posted on: Friday, 21 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

THE space race is usually characterised by diametric opposites. America and the Soviet Union. Capi- talism and Communism. Free speech and a closed society.

In the middle of it all was an astronaut, David Scott, and a cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov.

Scott and Leonov met during the preparation stages for the joint USA-USSR Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the so-called "handshake in space" that would symbolically end the Cold War hostility. The warm political feelings didn't last, but their friendship did. They may have lived very different lives on their respective sides of the Iron Curtain, yet both were pilots by trade and both had been trained by their country's respective space programme. After a vodka- fuelled evening of argument in Moscow, 1972, they found more united them than divided them.

Scott is now in his seventies. He is dressed smartly in a navy suit jacket, shirt and tie, but it's impossible not to imagine him in a space suit, his silver hair obscured by a bulbous helmet. He's one of the 12 men to have walked on the moon, after all, and you expect this to define him and somehow be visible. But he sits sipping a cup of tea in a small room of a Glasgow hotel bar, affably but concisely chatting about his life and friendship with Leonov, the first man to venture into space with his 1965 "spacewalk". When waitresses and other hotel staff pass by, you hope they'll catch him saying "when I was on the moon" to stop them in their hurried tracks.

He doesn't do much "space stuff" these days, but he felt his new book, a joint autobiography with Leonov, had to be written. Two Sides Of The Moon: Our Story Of The Cold War Space Race tells their life stories in parallel, from their childhoods in Texas and Siberia to their collaboration on the Apollo-Soyuz and beyond.

"Our experiences were so similar but so different," says Scott, who advised on the set of Apollo 13. "We're both pilots. Our backgrounds were the same and our interests were the same, so we had a bond right away, something to talk about. It's always interesting to see how the other guy does what he does in any profession."

Then there was the different part. "We knew they had a secret society and I thought Alexei would be very closed and conform to that society, but in fact he was quite open. He began to tell me about the Soviet plan to land a man on the moon. It was fascinating, things I'd never heard before because in their society they just didn't let things out. It was quite different."

They conceived the idea for the book 10 years ago, seeing it as a way to continue the legacy of the Apollo-Soyuz Project. "We all learned how to communicate," says Scott, who was assigned as special assistant for mission operation. "That was the whole point: people need to communicate. Afterwards, the Cold War got colder again, at least for that brief time, but the mission came off just fine and it was really good progress between Soviet and American relations."

Scott left the mission to take up a job offer in management before it flew in 1975, but watched it from afar. He returned to Moscow in 1992 to find an entirely different city than the one he visited 20 years previously.

"They had to start from zero, they had no basis for a lot of things we take for granted," he says. "Alexei was a cosmonaut working for the government, so when the government changed he had to get a new job outside. He's now with Alpha Bank, one of the largest banks in Moscow. He's got a very good job, he's a very busy man."

For someone with so many historical landmarks in his life, Scott is surprisingly forward-looking. He worked with Neil Armstrong on Gemini 8, which survived a dra-matic tumble through space, performed an EVA (extravehicular) on the Apollo 9 mission and completed the most complex expedition there has ever been on the Apollo 15 mission, in the process becoming the seventh man to walk on the moon.

The latter was arguably the most important of his career. The Apollo 15 was principally a geological mission to find geological formations and take samples. Specifically, they were looking for crystalline or anorthosite rock, named "genesis rock" by the media, which would later help explain how the moon was formed.

"When I joined Nasa I didn't know anything about geology," says Scott. "We did field and classroom training and it was a completely different discipline from engineering and flying, which maybe made it more attractive after we got into it. We learned the formations on the earth and the types of rocks and you begin to see the character of the earth. It's a good process for understanding the moon."

As well as the specimen of anorthosite, Scott and his colleagues brought back another momento which fundamentally changed the way people perceived the world. "We brought back this image of the earth and people started getting more environmentally conscious," he says. "It's not very big and it's in the middle of nowhere, so we've simply got to take care of it.

"After Apollo, our congress had hearings with academics and intellectuals to describe what they thought the significance of Apollo was. The best was a chap named Norman Cousins, who was the editor of the Saturday Review at the time, he said: 'The significance of Apollo was not so much that man set foot on the moon, but that he set eye on the earth.' "

This sentiment sums up Scott's personal reaction to the earth having stood on the moon. "Everybody is on this little spaceship, a very small spaceship in a very vast universe. We all have to take care of it, and you know we're not doing a great job. I didn't think that much about it until I got up there and saw the earth."

Yet Scott is reluctant for any honour to be bestowed directly upon him for helping humans to comprehend their world. "I think we were messengers," he says. "We were doing our job. We were fortunate enough to go and have the experience and come back and share it with everybody else."

It's this kind of perspective that has informed Scott's choice to bow out of the modern-day, multinational space race. He still follows issues like missions to Mars, but chooses not to attend space-related events where he would be centre of attention.

"Some people do it, there are a couple of guys and that's all they do - space - but most of us find other things, new challenges," he says. "It's secondary in terms of what I do now. It's in the past."

But he still reserves a special kind of affection for the moon. "It's such a beautiful place. You never appreciate it with the pictures. It's a spectacular thing."

Two Sides Of The Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov, Simon & Schuster, (pounds) 17.99.

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