Tom Wolfe started with a simple question:
What do you do after you walk on the moon?
How do you top that?
After romping around on the lunar surface, you can imagine the empty feeling that comes upon you even when you do something exciting. Going to Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning loses its thrill. After all, you’ve been on the moon.
Wolfe called it “post-orbital remorse,” the condition that affected the astronauts who walked on the moon.
How many of us know for certain that our lives have peaked?
The look at the astronauts started as a Rolling Stone series Wolfe wrote in 1973. When he began digging deeper into the story for the book-length version, he got so involved that he had to cut off his manuscript before it became unwieldy. When it came out in 1979, The Right Stuff (Picador, $16) told the story of the space program from the test-pilot days of the pioneers in the late 1940s, up through the end of the Mercury program, in 1963. The story of the third generation of astronauts, those who were part of the Apollo program, remains tucked away in his archive of magazine articles.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2009.