Ancient Astronauts and Forgotten Dreams

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Disney's Tomorrowland fueled my fantasies. Once a year, on Rohr night, when the park opened its gates to Rohr employees only, I thrilled to the space-jock jargon and simulated microgravity of the Flight to the Moon (brought to you by McDonnell Douglas) and the Incredible Shrinking Man effects of the Adventure Thru Inner Space (brought to you by Monsanto). By moonlight, Tomorrowland's aerodynamically cool monorail and spaceport architecture made the master-planned technocracies and interstellar odysseys in my stepdad's Isaac Asimov novels and Popular Science magazines seem suddenly, thrillingly real.

But Tomorrowland only literalized the Visions of Things to Come floating around in postwar America. Space evangelists such as Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Lester Del Rey spread the gospel of space exploration and colonization through children's books that were equal parts edutainment, pulp science fiction, and boys' adventure story. Ley's inspiring 1949 tract, The Conquest of Space, cut the die for the genre: ringingly romantic evocations of space travel, brought to life by the superreal clarity of Chesley Bonestell's artwork. Bonestell's Saturn Seen from Titan, The Surface of Mercury, and Exploring the Moon were stills from a movie not yet made, one that every schoolkid was certain he would one day star in. 'The younger generation of rocket engineers is just beginning,' wrote Ley, in 1951. 'They are of the new generation to which space travel is not going to be a dream of the future but an everyday job with everyday worries in which they will be engaged.'

While my stepdad built the casings for the boosters that launched the moon rockets, I climbed Bonestell's dramatically lit lunar ridges, plumbing the depths of their shadowed craters. I teleoperated the spiderlike robots in Ley's 1958 Space Stations, assembling a huge, ring-shaped space lab high above the earth. I flew through the cosmic void in Del Rey's 1959 Space Flight: The Coming Exploration of the Universe, propelled by the jetpack in my weirdly medieval metal spacesuit, mechanical claws sprouting from my gloves and boots.

Like the rest of my generation, I was itching for liftoff.

On July 20, 1969, I watched, enthralled, with half a billion other earthlings, as Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong took that momentous first step onto the moon. I marveled at the astronauts' near-weightlessness in the moon's microgravity and strained to make out the desolate, meteor-bombed landscape around them in the ghostly TV transmission.

As everyone knew, Armstrong's 'giant leap for mankind' was only the first step. Within two weeks of the moon landing, von Braun was exhorting a presidential task group to pursue an integrated space program that would establish a permanent moon base and space stations, springboards for a nuclear-powered mission to Mars.

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