Deep in heliocentric space, dimly lit by the weak glow of the distant Sun, drifts a spacecraft which forever altered our view of the Moon and overturned long-held assumptions about Earth’s closest celestial companion.
“Dead as a doornail,” says Pete Wilhelm of Clementine. Wilhelm is the retired head of the Naval Center for Space Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., which built the half-ton spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon and pass the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos. “But the data it collected surely lives on.”
His rueful remark aptly sums up the tragicomic ballad of Clementine. The spacecraft owes its curious epithet not to the tangy citrus hybrid fruit native to Algeria’s northern shores, but to a woman who never really existed: a female literary trope whose persona and mythos are tightly woven into America’s cultural fabric.
The connections between Clementine and water
In the melody reputedly hummed by itinerant Mexican miners during the California Gold Rush – committed to prose by Percy Montross and popularised in Hollywood movies from John Ford’s My Darling Clementine to Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future Part III – Clementine was a miner’s daughter, a “forty-niner,” from the earliest era of the hustle for gold in 1848-1849. Her story is regaled by an unnamed lover. One day, the hapless girl stumbled and toppled into a raging river. Unable to swim, she drowned in its “foaming brine,” much to her lover’s insouciant distress.
Water, which was the tragic Clementine’s undoing, actually proved her 20th-century descendant’s enduring claim to fame.
