ROCKET DREAMS

The dream of a Space Age that blossomed in the 1960s, nourished by NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, faded in the following decade and now lies withered and crumbling on the hard ground of reality. Many writers have explored the fading of that dream, and sought to explicate what it did to the generation that thrilled to America's moon walks. The best of those are the writers who lived at least part of that historic period. Marina Benjamin is one. Growing up in London, she was too young to appreciate Mercury and Gemini but, in her words, "tracked the moon landings with a diligence that bordered on obsession." Thirty years later, in central Florida for unrelated work, she visited Kennedy Space Center on a whim and reawakened that former self, "the child whose space-related hopes were boundless." Travelling the broad highway through empty country east from Orlando, then surveying the coastal communities from which the wave of hope and glory had long since receded, raised a host of unexpected questions in her mind. This book is the result of her attempt to answer those questions.

One of the first things she finds is that space flight, like early aviation1 before it, became a vessel for mystical aspirations toward a perfected humankind. She writes that Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neil was one such mystical dreamer, arguing in 2018: A Hopeful View of the Human Future that the space colony concept he pioneered would "eventually ease the population crisis, solve the energy problem, end international conflict, and usher in a period of 'perpetual plenty'."

Meanwhile, the individuals making up the common run of humanity had other things on their minds. There was a war on, inflation was rising, and the only thing that seemed perpetually plentiful was conflict in the Middle East. Space was right out of the picture. Ms. Benjamin puts it vividly on page 21:

For Ms. Benjamin, the Apollo program was notable not only for its genuine achievements but for the sense that while the astronauts circled or walked on the Moon, Earth was what occupied their thoughts. To her it somehow represents a betrayal of purpose that while bound on a grand outward journey they should dream of home. In her own look backward to the 1960s and 1970s, she finds that even the surviving astronauts from that era don't quite believe in the Space Age dream any longer. In her view, visionaries like O'Neill, Arthur C. Clarke, or Wernher von Braun have turned out to be just a more refined variety of huckster. Pages 38-39:

In Chapter 3, Ms. Benjamin turns from orthodox space advocacy to what might be termed the "loyal opposition". She journeys to Roswell, New Mexico, where in 1947 an alien spacecraft purportedly crashed, to take in the UFO Museum during its annual UFO Encounter Festival. This event, with its incredible and mutually contradictory stories from those who claim they witnessed the crash or saw the debris (and the bodies), its lectures on zero-point energy and other "New Age physics", its celebration of alternative belief systems generally ("UFOs and the Psychic Sasquatch", page 95), makes sense to her only as hucksterism. Roswell, like many American cities, fell on tough economic times when its military facility closed down, and tourism is a good way to take up the slack. Later in the chapter she draws a sharp contrast between this and Roswell's other museum, honoring Robert Goddard. The rocket pioneer did a large part of his development work at Mescalero Ranch just outside Roswell, perfecting devices valued highly today but which were little appreciated while he was alive.

In Chapter 4, Ms. Benjamin's quest leads her to Cyberspace, where she finds the dream of human perfectibility taking root in virtual communities like Alphaworld. She "immigrates" to Alphaworld, becoming a virtual citizen with full privileges including the power to build her own castle (or any form of dwelling place she chooses) on any unclaimed "land" (which ability she does not linger long enough to perfect.) She then compares this with O'Neill's virtual (so far) communities in space, and traces the history of this ideal from its inception in the works of Tsiolkovsy and J. D. Bernal's "small but influential" book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. O'Neill's vision of an expansionist future appears in sharp opposition to Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1974). Of the latter, she writes on page 128 that

Somewhat surprisingly, these two "gloom and doom" projections come in for a lot less criticism than do O'Neill's hopeful ones. Ms Benjamin quotes blasts from urbanologist Lewis Mumford and novelist Wendell Berry (among others) and ends the chapter by comparing the "O'Neillean" colony concept to shopping malls, the failed Biosphere II project, and the Walt Disney Company's planned community of Celebration, Florida2 which belied its idealistic precepts with shoddily constructed houses and rules restricting residents' protests (or most any political activity, apparently.)

I find this surprising because the following facts are now clear:

• that Earth's resources are finite, even if sufficient for the near term;
• that our solar system contains large additional quantities of many needed materials, as well as abundant energy; and
• that the technological know-how (if not the specific infrastructure such as Moon bases and the associated transport systems) to send hundreds of people yearly into space already exists. Given the need and the political will, those systems could be created within a decade or two, enabling workers in space to begin exploiting the resources there as well as building more infrastructure such as electromagnetic launchers and solar power satellites.

This points up my objection to Ms. Benjamin's implicit conclusion about the Space Age: that it died because current technology is not up to the challenge3 of practical space commerce; that, in her words, "long-distance human travel in space is not going to happen, at least not for centuries." At bottom, this is nothing more than saying that because a thing has not yet happened, it will never and can never happen. To me it seems an incredibly short-sighted viewpoint.4 Yet I encounter it often.

I want to make three points about Ms. Benjamin's conclusion:

1. First of all, the Space Age did not die; it continues in the private sector, albeit at a slower pace and with smaller immediate goals. (Even at the post-Apollo NASA, which for 30 years has bungled a disgustingly large percentage of the missions it undertook, worthwhile projects continue. They just hit the evening news but seldom.)
2. Second, the dream has not died; it has only receded to the back of humanity's collective awareness, from which it promptly revives whenever there is some interplanetary triumph to celebrate.
3. Third, specifically with respect to Ms. Benjamin, I am sure she has not given up her personal version of that dream, despite the keen disappointment she obviously feels at the current state of affairs.

Let there be no doubt: Although I disagree with the conclusions offered by this book, I recommend it highly. It is exhaustively researched, engagingly written, and carefully produced. An extensive section of chapter-by-chapter notes on sources and a very thorough index follow the excellent (if occasionally somewhat rambling) text. Beyond that, it holds our multifaceted visions of a Space Age up to the light, usefully pondering how they fit into the larger contexts of human life.

About those conclusions: I believe I will confirm my own by letting the last word here be the author's. Writing about Al Gore's proposed scientific satellite Triana, she says on pages 215-6:

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