He was on a treadmill in the gym of a hotel at which we were both staying, and I walked past his whirring machine three or four times without satisfying myself that it was really him. Charlie had been one of the youngest of the Moonwalkers, but I knew that even he would be at least 74 now, and the tanned jogger before me looked fifteen years shy of that. Only when we met over dinner that night did I laugh at myself and accept the truth that all those Albuquerque needles and tubes weren’t for nothing. NASA chose their Moon men well. Looking back, my concern over the longevity of the Nine looks a little amusing; a young man’s sublimation of his own dawning sense of mortality. To be sure, they’re older now, but as I write they’re all still active and very much here – doubly good news, because this most exclusive of clubs looks unlikely to expand in the near future. For all Dubya’s TV rapture and Gene Cernan’s faith back in 2004, my instinct had been right: the now ex-President had committed little that was new to the cause, and whatever private enthusiasm his successor might have felt for the plan surely evaporated with the credit crisis.
