HUNTER'S MOON 2024
Dear Lunatics,
Did you know that October’s full moon is also known as the Dry Rice Moon?
And the Falling Leaves Moon.
And the Travel Moon.
Whatever it’s called, this full moon, the largest of 2024’s four supermoons, is so bright I suggest sunglasses.
Or I would, but then you’d miss the Orionids meteor shower—those sparks of comet dust that are raining down like rice thrown at a wedding.
It’s such an eventful night that I got a late start on this Dispatch.
I hope you won’t take points off.
The Moon ate my homework.
I’m not the first.
In 1962, the grades of an aeronautics student at MIT began to dip.
His name was Charlie Duke and he had fallen in love with a secretary at Harvard Business School named Dotty Claiborne.
But all their moonlit walks along the Charles River resulted in Charlie’s being placed on academic probation.
Courting had become a scholastic liability, and he had to act fast.
Within six months, they were engaged. Six months after that, they were married.
Not long after they picked the wedding rice from their hair, the cracks in their marriage began to form.
Dotty was a romantic; Charlie was a workaholic.
Dotty would prepare candlelight dinners; Charlie would devour the contents of his plate and hurry back to his studies.
For years, Charlie worked sixty to eighty hours a week.
When he was selected for the crew of Apollo 16, Dotty put her marital efforts on hold, “like a war bride, waiting until the war is over to have her husband home again.”
As the wife of a flight crew member, it was her responsibility to make sure her husband was not encumbered by pedestrian tasks:
“Most wives cut the grass, took out the garbage, and kept the house and kids in order,” she wrote. “That was our contribution to the U.S. effort in space.”
Charlie Duke landed hard on the Moon. The Apollo 16 commander John Young cut the engine early and their lander dropped the final four feet onto the lunar surface.
Charlie teased his crewmember that the landing had jarred his fillings loose.
He was struck, as all space-goers are, by the view of the distant Earth. “It was as if someone had taken a brilliant diamond and placed it on a black velvet pillow,” he wrote.
Charlie felt oddly at home on the Moon.
When it was time to go, he left a portrait of his family in the lunar sands. On the back of the picture, he wrote: "This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke from planet Earth who landed on the moon on April 20, 1972."
It was the least he could do.
In the frenzied, years-long preparation for his mission, Charlie been an absentee Dad.
After Apollo 16, Dotty expected to get her husband back, not to mention the father of her children.
But when Charlie fell back to Earth, he plummeted into an existential crisis.
He’d reached the top of his field, and he was only thirty-seven years old.
“What am I gonna do now?” he asked himself. “How do I top a flight to the moon?”
Restless, he threw himself back into work, preparing the crew of Apollo 17.
As Dotty wrote later, “Happiness continued to be elusive—not because Charlie was an astronaut and traveled a great deal, but because I didn't feel the love from him that I wanted. Whether he was gone or at home, I felt alone. His career was the most important thing in his life, and I knew it.”
The spouses were living in the same house, but they may as well have been living on separate worlds.
During the Gemini and Apollo programs, the divorce rate of NASA astronauts was astronomical.
Out of thirty marriages, only seven survived.
(The marriage of one astronaut, Apollo 7’s Donn Eisele, dissolved immediately after his splashdown. He was barely out of his suit when his wife Harriet, who had put up with years of his infidelity out of patriotic duty, handed him divorce papers.)
Not long after his own return to the planet, Charlie’s marriage reached a crisis. Things got so bad that one day Dotty told him, "I don't want to live anymore. I want to die."
Charlie had known his wife was unhappy, but this came as a terrible shock.
It would take a miracle to save their union.
One promptly arrived.
Dotty attended a church and, in her words, gave her life to Jesus Christ. “I had put [Charlie] first in my life when we married, and I continued to look to him for my fulfillment,” she wrote. “If he was nice to me, I was happy; if he ignored me, I was sad.” For Dotty, God proved a more reliable source of stability, healing, and happiness.
Charlie didn’t follow his wife into the church right away.
His own conversion was delayed.
Perhaps it was his long trip to and from the Moon. After all, some believe we experience jetlag because it takes a while for our souls to catch up.
Or perhaps it was simply because he had been, for so long, a man of science.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but there may have been one in a lunar crater.
When Charlie Duke disembarked from his spacecraft, leaving a trail of footprints that will last millions of years, he held up his glove, blocking out the Earth, feeling the utter strangeness of holding beneath his hand four billion people.
He felt wonder—but not transcendence.
“It was not a spiritual experience for me at all,” he recalled. “It was a technical experience.”
A reporter had once told him that the moon landings were the greatest things to happen since man invented religion. Charlie embraced this line of thinking:
“We can be gods,” he thought. “We can solve all the problems in the world whatever they might be. Look what we had already achieved! I was in charge of my life and things were going well. Who needed God? Only people who couldn't make it needed God. I didn't need God.”
He didn’t even pray during reentry as he and his fellow astronauts waited for the parachutes to release just before they splashed down into the Pacific.
Had the parachutes not bloomed, they would have had only a few seconds to contemplate their fate before their spacecraft slammed into the ocean, instantly killing all onboard.
The parachutes deployed; no divine intervention was required.
So what changed Charlie Duke’s mind about God?
I decided to ask the moonwalker himself.
“Six years after the flight,” he told me, “I went to a Bible study.”
Once he accepted Jesus as his Savoir, he experienced “this insatiable desire to read scriptures.”
There, he found two passages that cemented his faith:
"It is He who sits above the circle of the earth" (Isaiah 40:22), and "He hangs the earth on nothing" (Job 26:7).
“Those scriptures are so vivid to me,” Charlie told me,” because it was what I really saw with my own eyes from orbiting the Moon. There it is, hung in the blackness of space, and though I didn't see God, I saw the circle of the Earth.”
Who told Isaiah that the earth was a circle? Charlie marveled. And how did the author of Job know that when God made the Earth, he suspended it upon nothing?
Charlie and Dotty’s full embrace of Christianity saved their marriage, which is still going strong after 60 years.
While many astronauts write memoirs, Charlie is the only one who co-wrote his with his wife.
Moonwalker, published in 1990, alternates between Charlie and Dotty’s entries as they look back on their lives.
Though hers took place on terra firma, Dotty’s odyssey is no less noteworthy.
I was struck by her willingness to discuss openly her suicidal thoughts when she was at her lowest emotional point. This would be a courageous admission for anyone to make, but I found it all the more remarkable coming from someone who had lived for so long in the public eye.
The Apollo wives have been called “America’s first reality stars,” as their domestic lives fell under intense scrutiny from reporters installed in their homes during the missions.
However, when I asked Dotty, she told me that she never felt pressured to keep the raw, difficult parts of her life a secret. In fact, she felt compelled to share them publicly.
“The Lord put compassion in my heart for those that were suicidal or suffering in depression or having unhappy marriages,” she told me. When she and Charlie speak to crowds now, she credits her faith with transforming her sorrow into joy.
“We're to help other people in the same way that God has helped us,” she explained to me. “There is no way I can be silent.”
For many years now, Charlie and Dotty have shared their story and their testimony.
It hasn’t always been easy.
As Charlie recalls in their memoir:
One person I wasn't sure was ready was my dad, so whenever I visited my parents in South Carolina, I would love to speak to them about the Lord and tell them stories about God's power. They seemed to enjoy listening, and Dad would humor me along, yet doubting most every word.
One time I was talking to them about angels and how they watch over us.
I said, "Dad, every time some friends of mine get on an airplane, they pray that God will send some angels to protect them. One day as they were flying at thirty-five thousand feet, they looked out of their airplane window and sitting on the wing of the plane was an angel."
Dad just cracked up! He thought that was the funniest story he'd ever heard. He laughed and said, "Well, I'll tell you what, if I ever see an angel, he'd better have on a parachute." "Well, Dad," I said, "I'm praying that you see an angel."
A few years later, while he was dying in the hospital, Charlie’s father finally opened to the spiritual truths his son had been trying to impart.
After his father passed, Charlie received a phone call from a close friend. "I was praying for your dad at 2:30 this afternoon and God gave me a vision!" the friend said. Charlie was startled as this was the exact time of his father’s death.
"God showed me in this vision, two angels who were coming to collect your dad and take him to heaven,” the friend reported.
Charlie was overwhelmed with gratitude.
"But Charlie,” his friend continued, “there was something very strange about those angels, which I don't understand—they both had on big parachutes."
In 1972, Charlie Duke became the youngest person to ever walk on the Moon.
Today, at 89 years old, he still is.
He’s the last living human to have trod the Moon.
And yet, when I spoke to him, he told me the Moon had been a stepping stone on his journey toward something greater, a journey he and his wife charted together.
There’s no doubt the moon landings were a miracle.
But there are other miracles, too.
On the second day of Apollo 16’s 11-day mission, the pilot Ken Mattingly lost his wedding ring. By the eighth day, when they were on the way home, the astronauts were still scouring the command module. The ring was nowhere to be found.
On day nine, Mattingly and Charlie conducted a scheduled spacewalk. Charlie lingered near the hatch while Mattingly, with his back turned, fiddled outside the spacecraft with a biological experiment on a pole ten feet away.
They were still 180,000 miles from Earth.
As Charlie waited, admiring the celestial view, something caught his eye. Mattingly’s wedding was floating out of the open hatch.
Rolling and tumbling in slow motion, the ring glinted in the sunlight. Charlie tried to grab it with his gloved hand but missed. “Lost in space,” he thought as the ring floated into the black void.
But then Charlie noticed that the ring was heading, ever so slowly, toward the back of Mattingly’s head. Mattingly, engrossed in his work, had no idea his precious wedding ring was spinning in his direction.
What is the chance, Charlie wondered, that this round ring would bounce off Mattingly’s round helmet at just the right angle that it would turn 180 degrees and return through the hatch, all while they were hurtling through space at 3,000 miles per hour? Practically zero, he concluded.
And yet that’s exactly what happened.
Some would call that a miracle.
Charlie called it “a happy ending.”
See you on the Beaver Moon!
—W
*All quotes from Moonwalker by Charlie and Dotty Duke, published 1990
Hi Will,
I did get to watch the moonrise last night. It was huge and yellow in color against a dark sky. A beautiful sight that I will remember for a while.
While we mostly hear about the astronauts, it was touching to learn about the sacrifices and struggles that their wives had to make. It was nice of you to share about the mental health issues that dotty faced. I hope each person who gets such thoughts of ending their life finds some person to talk to. For many religion indeed has been a solace when all else seems lost.
Looking forward to your next month’s post 😊🙌🏼
Another fantastic post Will. I had the good fortune to meet Charlie Duke once. In the course of making a documentary called Blast Off: True Stories from the Final Frontier, for the Discovery Channel done 20 years ago. I spent the afternoon with him in Death Valley - the most dry and desolate place we could find in North America to do the interview. He is one of the most friendly, giving men I have had the honour to meet and hang out with. There were many fascinating things that he shared, but one in particular has stuck with me all these years - that when standing on the moon he was struck by the fact that it was the brightest, sunniest day he had ever experienced, yet the sky - from horizon to horizon - was pitch black. Now - Every time I see a shot taken on the moon as part of an Apollo mission, I’m struck by that fact. M