Rocket Dreams
How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end.
Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed.
In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent.
In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space.
Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the last moon landing in 1972, America's space program seemed to come crashing down to earth. Now journalist Benjamin (Living at the End of the World) looks at how earthbound Americans have continued their fascination with outer space. Sometimes this fascination veers to the extreme, as with the Roswell true believers who can recite by heart details of the spaceship with three aliens aboard that supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 and was spirited off by the military. At the other extreme, Benjamin describes the SETI@home project, through which millions of people around the world donate their computers' extra processing capability to analyze radio signals collected by the enormous Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, hoping to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Benjamin also details the effects of the decline of the space program on the fortunes of communities, real and virtual: the problems faced by many real estate ventures in central Florida, including the Disney Company's utopian visions, as well as the growth of virtual communities whose members can buy plots on Mars and establish their own colonies like something out of Ray Bradbury. This is also an elegantly written memoir, as the author tells about her youthful fascination with the space program and her travels to places like Arecibo and Roswell, as well as her virtual travels among various computer groups over the last 20 years. Space buffs will appreciate many aspects of her story.