Marina Benjamin - Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond

Sitting between the subtropical party towns of Daytona Beach and Vero Beach on Floridas eastern coast, Brevard County is a strip of humid backwater, mosquito infested and stiflingly hot. Everywhere you go the air is soupy, but it hangs more heavily in the northern and eastern districts, where the exotic-sounding Indian and Banana Rivers have sliced the land into spindly fingers and created steamy lagoons full of squawking wildlife and lazing alligators. Rising out of this prehistoric landscape is Merritt Island, a fat belt of white middle-class suburbia shaped like a clothespin and shored up by coastal dunes and brackish marshland. It is a place of little apparent distinction. With its rickety beach houses, green-blue swimming pools, and dowdy strip malls, Merritt Island looks like a poor cousin to the Florida Keys and life there follows the same idling rhythms of fishing and sunbathing. The island is an unlikely destination, yet each year it pulls to its swampy shores thousands of people from around the world. Driving east from Orlando, north from Palm Beach, and south from Jacksonville, the tourists pour in to visit what has become known as the Space Coast. In particular, they come to Cape Canaveral, the unassuming nub of shore land from where mankind took its greatest leap toward the stars.

A few years back, I followed the crowds to Merritt Island, genuinely curious to discover what was so spacey about the Space Coast. I wanted to take in whatever the tourist industry had to offer, cruise along coastal roads where Mercury astronauts once raced Corvettes, and size up the Saturn V moon rocket, now reposing in a huge storage hangar like a dozing giant. Beyond that I was open. I would see where fancy led me. Although I decided to trek out to the cape on a whim (I was in Florida for work, and visiting the Space Coast is one of the things you do when youre in Florida), I knew from the outset that I would end up taking the trip to heart, because, for me, revisiting the Space Age entailed revisiting a part of myself I had left behind long ago: the child whose space-related hopes were boundless. Growing up in central London, idolizing the astronauts from afar, I had tracked the moon landings with a diligence that bordered on obsession. If a flag had been planted, a buggy deployed, a crater explored, or moon rocks scooped into specimen boxes, I knew about it. Too young to witness Yuri Gagarins famed feats or John Glenns heroics, my head was filled instead with Apollo trivia. Crew members? No problem. Mission objectives? I was on it. Whats more, Id made a point of acquainting myself with the geography of the solar system, fully expecting that Jupiter and Saturn, Ganymede, Eos, and Callisto would in no time become as familiar as the outlying stops on the London Tube.

What I did not know when I set out for the cape nearly thirty years later was that this pilgrimage would produce only questions; it was as if the space fanatic in me had suddenly reawakened, demanding to know why the future had not unfolded as promised.

Some of the questions that nagged me were germane to the ongoing American space program, a schizophrenic enterprise that seems to lack any kind of continuity with the past. After the glory years of the space race and moon landings, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) shrank from the challenges of exploration in order to putter around in Earth orbit, belying its homespun tales of enterprise and daring. Why was the Moon abandoned? Why hadnt we struck out for Mars? And if space was a new ocean waiting to be explored, as John F. Kennedy once proclaimed, why hadnt commercial backers stepped in to establish the equivalent of trade routes? Other questions were more reflexive in nature, as they threaded back into my childhood dreams and threatened to expose them as delusions, or else reminded me why so many of us once invested so much in NASAs dream peddling. Was I nave to believe wed simply hop from the Moon to the planets and thence to the stars? Or did the prospect of leaping off the planet really speak to some deep-seated urge in the human soul? When it came to the hard-sell mythology of the space race, was I dupe or co-conspirator?

What happened after Apollo is a familiar story; funds were cut, jobs were lost, programs scrapped, and space ambitions curtailed, while telecommunications satellites burgeoned into a profitable business. But the history of the post-1969 space program sheds little light on the fate of the utopian, escapist, and conquistadorial hopes that originally enlivened the effort to put humans in space and meant so much to a generation of Space Age dreamers like me. What it highlights instead is how rapidly those hopes were frustrated by what we wereor in this case werentultimately willing and able to do. In the early days of space exploration, even those extraterrestrial aspirations that today strike us as outlandishbuilding moon bases, constructing floating space colonies, terraforming distant worldswent hand in hand with the development of space technology. Indeed, the two were so tightly coupled it was often difficult to tell which was driving which. But then the exigencies of politics and the limits of engineering wrenched them apart and they have gone their separate ways ever since. Technology looked to the market, to science, and to business for inspiration: the aspirations, as well, went elsewhere. This is the story I wish to tell.