Americans in space

I read A Brief and Incomplete History of Launching Animals Into Space with great nostalgia, especially for Ham, who was quite the celebrity in his day. Of course, it made sense to send animals into space first, to test the waters, so to speak. That’s one of the big stories in The Right Stuff, where the engineers intended to send the astronauts up just as they had the animals, in capsules without windows, and with no real controls. The Mercury astronauts referred to this famously as “spam in a can.” They won the argument to both see where they were going, and to have some control over the trip.

I’ve written about space exploration pretty regularly, because for my generation the idea was more than just something scientific that sounded sort of nice. We were raised on this stuff. On the one hand, for kids there were the regular Disney shows set in Tomorrowland, which sang the praises of outer space and man’s attempts to get there. These shows made it seem a foregone conclusion that before long we’d be on our way to the moon, then Mars, then the stars. From a historical perspective, this was simply the expansion of the American frontier that had theoretically been closed since the census of 1890. All of America’s story until then had been about its expansion. And then suddenly we were on both oceans and everywhere in the middle, from top and bottom, and there was nowhere else to go. Our Manifest Destiny had been met. Our story had reached an abrupt end, and when a couple of generations later the possibility of a new frontier arose, we were ready for it. Disney, for its part, wanted to make future astrophysicists out of all of us little Mousketeers. It was part of the American DNA.

The problem was, space exploration also seemed to be in the Russian DNA. The Cold War was an amazing business. On the one hand, we continued to pile up weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, we competed in everything else. Ours were bigger than yours, faster, richer, better, nicer, whatever. The idea of the Olympics, athletes competing to represent their countries against the world, applied in every venue. But space was the big one. Whoever won space demonstrated that they had the money, the smarts, the technology, the engineering, the sheer wherewithal to do what was perceived as the hardest thing to do ever, that no one had ever done before. On top of that, there was the idea of control of space, that whoever owned the skies could control what was down below. This is why there were so many alien invasion movies in the 50s. What we were really scared of was Russians in space, so we shifted over to aliens and got a little national catharsis. And finally, in addition to demonstrating Number Oneness and Dominating the Sky, there was the final belief that whoever won space would claim it, and the next thing you would know, the moon or Mars would become Russian soil.

I’m not exaggerating any of this. When the Russians launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957, it was our national nightmare come true. As Sputnik (pictured above) circled the globe, it made little beeps that could be picked up on the ground via shortwave. That sound, played over regular radio, was the sound of terror hitting the American solar plexus.

We lost every early battle in the war of space, but managed to score big with Apollo 11. That seemed to be the endgame marker. We repeated a few times, and the Russians never did put a man on the moon. And then the world changed, and before long there was no more USSR and space seemed too expensive for the rewards being reaped, and today, it looks as if private enterprise and countries with something to prove will be the ones to eventually pick up the slack. The American search for a new frontier has ended. We’d rather just snipe at one another and believe that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark and generally go into the inevitable decline of empire that all empires eventually meet. In our case, it will be by forgetting that we live in a country established on the principles of freedom. Every freedom we limit, however we limit it, is a step in the direction of our spiritual dissolution. If you think I’m sounding a little hysterical, go out and watch a political campaign.

Meanwhile, as a kid, I remember looking up at the night sky when we launched satellites that could be seen by the naked eye. The communications satellite Telstar was one, if I remember correctly. They would publish in the local paper the times it would fly over us, and we’d go out and watch this blinky little light pass from one end of the sky to the other in a short couple of minutes. And we’d dream not of beating Russians but of expanding ourselves, of expanding the human adventure, in a direction that really made it an adventure. By the time we first heard the words, “Space, the final frontier,” in 1966, that idea was already a reality to us. That future, however, now sadly seems to be lost in the past.
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