Ancient Astronauts and Forgotten Dreams

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And then, as soon as it began, the future was over. Partying in Los Angeles with President Richard Nixon after Armstrong and his crewmates had gotten out of quarantine, a drunken astronaut raised his glass in a sardonic-and prophetic-toast: 'Here's to the Apollo program. It's all over.'

He was right. Apollo 11, the capstone of the Space Age, turned out to be its tombstone. My Lai, Kent State, and Watergate steadily eroded the Father Knows Best trust in authority that had written President John F. Kennedy a blank check to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. To many, the space program looked like a costly boondoggle (Apollo alone had cost a staggering $24 billion), diverting the nation's attention from more pressing matters: Vietnam, racial tensions, urban blight, the environment. When the last of the moon missions, Apollo 17, splashed down on December 19, 1972, the world barely noticed.

Driving through San Diego's inland suburbs one furnace-hot August recently, I wondered what benefits we had reaped from our lunar crusade. Inevitably, footage of Apollo 14's Alan Shepard golfing in the moon's Fra Mauro highlands, or Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt singing 'I was strolling on the moon one day' in the Taurus-Littrow valley, makes boomers like me wonder: What did it all mean?

The lunar missions pushed the envelope of knowledge, though they would have pushed it far further if Schmitt hadn't been the only scientist NASA sent up. For politicians, of course, the benefits of the space program were clear: JFK's stirring declaration that 'we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard' covered the dashing young president in moondust and glory-and facilitated his political resurrection, after the embarrassment of Sputnik and the Bay of Pigs.

For the rest of us, the moon shots were sacred events, robed in religious rhetoric: In the seconds before Apollo 11 lifted off, an expectant Norman Mailer realized that he 'was like a penitent who had prayed in the wilderness for 16 days, and was now expecting a sign.' Then his prayers were answered: 'White as the shrine of Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky.'

These days, the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral is a shrine to fading glories. In Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond, the cultural critic Marina Benjamin describes the Atlas, Titan, Gemini, and Redstone missiles at the visitor complex's 'Rocket Garden' as 'so lackluster, so tired, they speak only of yesterday. And yesterday is where the Space Center and its surrounding attractions are for the most part stuck, caught up in a loop of reminiscence for Apollo.' Despite the insistent title of the center's imax movie The Dream Is Alive, NASA is the Vatican of the Space Age, reverently preserving the sanctified fragments of futures past.

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