Aleta Jackson (under her pen name) expressed similar frustration years ago ("Thinking Back to the Future," in the October 1985 L5 News). No doubt the Shuttle proved equally frustrating to someone who wanted us all to go. But now she is working hard at XCOR. Some people just don't give up.

Thinking Back to the Future

Nostalgia time. 20 JUL 69. Sprawled on the carpet in the den, where I'd literally been camping since liftoff, I pounded my fist on the rug while wild pride, joy, envy, longing, and awe all chased each other through my head until tears ran down my face, my only possible means of emotional expression at that moment. We'd done it. We'd made it. Touched a place we had never been. We children of random amino acids and electrical charges of three billion years ago had bit and clawed and lied and schemed and dreamed our way up Earth's gravity well to an alien planet. Well...moon.

I'd wanted to be a jet pilot since I could walk, and had wanted to be a spaceman ever since my parents had given me a copy of On the Trail of the Space Pirates, a Tom Corbett, Space Cadet book. I was six and Sputnik was a year away. Some of you will remember how it was during the fifties and sixties, but for those of you who missed your parents taking you into the back yard and pointing out a tiny new light arcing swiftly across the twilight sky, I want to talk a bit about what it was like. There I was, a gawking kid, seeing the first artificial satellite (I didn't need the newscasters to tell me what the word meant—Robert Heinlein, my spiritual uncle, had educated me the year before) and knowing...knowing...that we were now on our way to space. I took the exploration of space for granted—it was written about in books wasn’t it?—just as I also took for granted that I’d spend my adult life on the Moon. It was as certain as Mom's cherry pie every Sunday.

I was only dimly aware, then, of the ideological differences between the United States and Russia, though I knew that we were in a race to beat them; but that seemed just a side issue. We had to get into space, to strap ourselves atop some mighty space cruiser and feel the rockets bucking against our backs as we blasted up and away to the high, wide, and deep. Adults always did the right thing. I looked forward to weightlessness.

Eventually I landed a job with NASA: the most joyous time I ever remember. I was eighteen, fresh from my first year of college, and a junior draftsman at a place called McDonnell, later McDonnell Douglas. I was in the R&D lab, specializing in electronic packaging design for the Gemini Project. I met astronauts, my heart a-flutter. I’ll never forget my first meeting with Gordon Cooper. His eyes...! They were clear and cold and blue and full of things seen: vast distances measured, risks taken, glory won. Oh, yes, I know it sounds corny and romantic, but it's true. Think for a moment of the terribly thin film of metal and flimsy fabric which is all that separates your tiny piece of Earth environment from hard hungry vacuum. If you get into trouble there's no rescue helicopter, no Red Cross, no one, who can come to your aid. You're alone against the cold equations. That is still a personal nightmare.

Eight hours was the paid working day, but I remember most of us coming to work early and having to be pulled away late at night. Around nine or ten in the evening someone would get hungry and we'd all go to the Flaming Pit to chow down on juicy hamburgers and talk shop. We were all Buck Rogers and we were going to the Moon! And someone was willing to pay us to do it! I truly have difficulty expressing in words the magical quality of that time. The High Frontier beckoned. Never mind the war and rumors of war. Never mind. We'd work that out from 238,856 statute miles away while we built a telescope on the far side of the Moon and learned the secrets of the Universe. Dr. Sandage had just discovered something called quasars; let's go see what they were. Didn't the good ship Enterprise show us all working in harmony? I do not exaggerate the enthusiasm, the idealism, the hopes. Tom Wolfe's book is accurate, but it deals mostly with the astronauts and the test pilots. We grunt workers were so proudly happy to build and send into orbit our own little visions. "Yeah, me too, one of these days," we'd say when another rocket blasted off. "There's nothing we can't do. We’ll get there. See you on the Moon."

But something happened. It's been analyzed by hundreds of others; I needn't go into it here. What I want to talk about is the dimming of a personal dream. I was part of the Great Layoffs. My engineering career in college petered out, along with the money, and my high hopes faltered, lost altitude, and came crashing back to Earth with the space program. I remember sitting in a job placement office, hearing a Doctorate in Astrophysics being told he could have a job as a janitor, sign here and pay the placement fee before you leave, sorry about your house. The cutbacks and the disappointments hit hard, harder than I think most people will ever realize. When you take a large group of very bright people who have worked for a dream with all their heart and intellect and tell them it's not only over, but will probably never happen again, something bad happens to them. Some fight, of course, but even in that fight is despair and a terrible pain. We were so close! The talent, the energy, the will, and the sometimes desperate desire were there, and they were kicked in the face. Hard. Repeatedly. I found myself one day becoming so blindly furious when someone told me that the reason the Vietnam War was taking so long was the goddamned space program, and all the money we had thrown away for a bunch of worthless rocks, that I broke his nose. Frustrated ineloquence responding to willful ignorance. Not the best way to win friends and influence people. It seemed that everyone I talked to turned deaf ears. Hippies sang about angst and dropping out while young boys marched into green jungle horrors, and I watched the Moon slip from my fingers. The pain was real, physical, and inexpressible.

Now, we have the space shuttle: a true space ship. Kids are turning their minds up and out once more while governments debate in lofty chambers. All the grandly logical persuasion in the world will not prevail against closed little ground-hugging minds. As one person I make little difference; but many voices, speaking out insistently, can make a difference. I'm too old to become an astronaut, my body too broken by other things to endure space travel. But you young talented ones, you listen. Don't let them take this dream away a second time. We won't get a third. Tell them. Convince them. All the danger, wonder, grandeur of new knowledge is waiting up there in the high, wide, and deep. Yes, well be able to help all of mankind and the Earth with the new knowledge. But isn't it worth it just for the magnificent adventure of it all?

L. Jackson Gardner is a free-lance writer and a former electronics technician living in Tucson, Arizona.