"The space program stands with the cathedrals and pyramids as one of the
great 'central projects' of history, epic social feats embodying the
worldview of a culture and the spirit of an age. On the launch pads, the
rockets point heavenward like Gothic spires. Searchlights intersect on a
waiting ship to form a great candescent pyramid, ablaze on the black horizon
like some alien encounter, radiating light to the heavens. To reach for the
heavens seems almost the signature of the central project. The pyramid was
called the 'stairway to heaven,' the cathedral the 'gate of heaven.' The
archetype is in Genesis: 'let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may
reach unto heaven.'

"Literature on the pyramids, cathedrals and moon shots has tended to miss
the significance not only of great height as the signal feature of central
projects, but also their function as means through which whole cultures have
found symbolic expression. Writers often pay lip service to the official
rationales -- immortality for the Pharaoh, a shrine to the Holy Virgin, or
the quest for the grail of lunar rocks -- while stressing the negative
function of these projects as a source of shallow political pride...or as a
display of collective vitality... Though some have noted that the central
project focuses the energies and educates the consciousness of a population
during periods of cultural transition, attracting the best and most
adventurous minds of the age, most of the interpretation has been narrowly
political, reflecting the pedestrian, power-oriented, if not paranoid, slant
of contemporary social science. Thus the pyramids become a ploy for
political control, the Gothic cathedral is rooted in royal squabbles, and
the space program is but a product of WASP prejudice or cold war
hypocrisy -- themes that lack all perception of the projects as spiritual
quests in the broadest and deepest sense."

Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp.
99-100.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/2005.05.15_arch.html#1116688718458