Interesting book

"Book Reviewed by David Beers - Washington Post

I once asked a son of Neil Armstrong what it was like,
growing up, to watch "Star Trek" with the first human
being to set foot on the moon. " 'Star Trek' drove
my father crazy," Mark Armstrong replied. "The Starship
Enterprise would whoosh by and my father would shake
his head. He'd say, 'You wouldn't get that noise in
space. Sound is caused by molecules moving, and
molecules in space are too few and far apart to
generate sound.' " Which makes Neil Armstrong all
the more heroic. One has to admire his disciplined
adherence to the facts of space no matter how desolate,
how dull.

So many others who should know better have yielded
to delusional space fever. So many others have wasted
their energies, and ours, on wild flights of
fancy. Choose your earthly anxiety. Overpopulation?
Just offload millions of people into space colonies,
preached Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand
and physicist Gerard O'Neill. Existential angst? No
worries. Outer space enfolds all of human consciousness,
according to the Noetics organization founded by Apollo
14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Still lonely? Join pilgrims
to Roswell, N.M., who believe aliens have reached out
and probed us.

Such gaseous eruptions of culture, rather than hard
scientific data, are what British journalist Marina
Benjamin sets out to explore in Rocket Dreams. The
crash of the space shuttle Columbia after the book
went to press has made the trip all the more compelling.

Benjamin, who confesses to having "space mania," is a
deeply informed tour guide. Having visited the faded
glory of Cape Canaveral, she offers a short course on
Space Age-inspired philosophy, from James Lovelock's
Gaia hypothesis of Earth as a self-regulating system
to former NASA chief James Webb's vision of a nation
as the perfect melding of man and machine. In Roswell,
she hung with UFO nuts and traced the lure of conspiracy
theories. Via her computer, she joined a virtual
community pretending to colonize Mars. In North Hollywood
she found three "leathery" Apollo astronauts signing
autographs for cash with forgotten TV celebrities. And
yet, when space hypesters seem most in need of ironic
puncturing, Benjamin remains oddly indulgent.

In 1971, for example, Krafft Ehricke of Rockwell
International boasted that space colonies would evolve
from Earth's "mudhole" into superior societies
intolerant of "all that is small, narrow, contemptible
and repulsive." Benjamin meekly muses: "Visionary
utopianism or proto-fascism? It's hard to say. . . . "
Not that hard. Ehricke did start out designing Hitler's
rocket weapons. Indeed, all but missing from Rocket Dreams
are the military dreams driving most space technology.
Fear of Sputnik funded development of not just nuclear
missiles but also satellite platforms for directing
conventional warfare. Battles are won by seizing the high
ground. Space is the highest ground, and whoever controls
it may rain destruction upon enemies.

But Benjamin's quest is to reaffirm her wondrous childhood
faith in the Apollo effort. She begins with her sense
of betrayal that we never got to Mars and the stars. She
wants to chase "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." She finds kindred spirits at the
SETI project who scan galaxies for radio signals from
advanced civilizations. We learn that an early SETI
advocate, Bernard Oliver, "took it for granted that
civilizations that managed to develop beyond that phase
of 'technological infancy' when societies are inclined to
flirt with self-destruction would not only be long-lived,
but would possess . . . wisdom, patience, benevolence,
selflessness and . . . the secret of immortality."
Such civilizations have already made their secrets
available to us. To unlock them, we need only learn to
read the "Encyclopedia Galactica" encoded in cosmic
vibrations. "Access to this 'galactic heritage,' "
declared Oliver and his NASA-funded team, "may well
prove to be the salvation of any race whose technological
prowess qualifies it."

Even here the author does not fully activate her b.s.
radar. Instead she credits Oliver with unknowingly
heralding the Internet. Cyberspace, she writes, enables
"the kind of mind-meld that is just not possible in a world
handicapped by terrestrial geography." And cyberspace
has proved far better than outer space for hosting
the "tenacious" belief that "we might start over
somewhere new." It is jarring to encounter such techno-
rapture after the dot-com debacle, Sept. 11 and
the proliferation of weapons nuclear, chemical and
biological.

But Benjamin refuses to shoot down the dream. That is
not her mission. She clings to the anything-is-
possible optimism of her youth by rediscovering it
on the 'Net. Rocket Dreams, therefore, is about the
twin escape hatches we are tempted to reach for
whenever the ride gets rough. One is faith in the
essential goodness of technological advance. The other
is belief that our species is capable of some great
leap to utopia. Despite little evidence that either
is valid, a lot of us would rather look to the sky for
salvation than accept human limits. How much more thrilling
is the whoosh of Starship Enterprise compared to the
chore of making our own little worlds a bit more kind,
a bit more healthy, a bit less alien.

David Beers is the author of "Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir
of America's Fall From Grace."