Shortly after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed in 1958, its engineers began visiting elementary schools in the leafy suburbs of Washington, D.C., to practice inspirational speeches in front of kids. The space program hadn't yet hardened into a race against the Soviets. It was still pictured as a journey of exploration, one that would eventually lead to colonizing first the moon, then Mars and the rest of the solar system. At least, that's the way Gregory Bennett remembers the message the NASA guys gave to his third-grade class.
From that day on, Bennett was wedded to the space program. The Mercury shots thrilled him. Gemini entranced him. But nothing beat Apollo. It wasn't just Neil Armstrong's "small step for man" or the Apollo 13 cliff-hanger. The missions opened up spectacular vistas of an alien world, culminating in 1972 with Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt's 18-mile, 22-hour jaunt throughout the breathtaking Taurus-Littrow Valley, just southeast of the Sea of Serenity, a 3.7-billion-year-old, 350-mile-wide lava-flooded valley.
But then Cernan and Schmitt parked their Apollo 17 rover, walked up the steps of their lunar module, sealed the door, and blasted off back to Earth. With the lack of atmosphere, it would have taken only a few minutes for the dust kicked up by their rocket exhaust to settle on the equipment they left behind. But once covered, it lay there undisturbed, a lunar version of Miss Havisham's wedding cake. It lies there still.
Over the passing decades, Bennett has grown into a man with thinning hair and a full beard and the gentle mien of a giant plush bear. Now he is in his late forties, and on a typical day he can be found in meetings at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The photo id hanging from his neck identifies him as an employee of Boeing, NASA's primary contractor for the International Space Station, where he is senior principal engineer for extravehicular activity (EVA) operations. In other words, when it comes to figuring out how astronauts are going to assemble the station, Bennett is the Man. He gives the impression of being one of those fortunate souls who gets paid for having fun. This good nature, however, masks a decades-long grudge.
"Apollo was worse than an anticlimax," he says. "It showed that space is nothing but a political football, which it always was. Building space colonies was never on NASA's shopping list." Bennett tries to propel these lines with vitriol, but he can't muster very much. He is not a bitter man. He loves his day job. And even though it does little to satisfy his longing for the moon, there's always his other identity to fall back on. On evenings and weekends, Bennett is one of the leaders of what you might call a lunar underground, a group called the Artemis Society, which is bent on circumventing the politics and bureaucracy of NASA and striking out on its own for the moon. Bennett probably knows more than anyone how this might be done; he has written hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages of plans, and he is the unlikely chief executive of a commercial company, Lunar Development Corporation, empowered to execute them. "I figure we can put a man on the moon for about $1.5 billion," he says matter-of-factly. After an awkward silence, he adds: "We're going to do it. We are going to the moon."
