Ancient Astronauts and Forgotten Dreams

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True, NASA continues to launch satellites and unmanned missions, while the International Space Station and space shuttle programs limp along. In 2004 George W. Bush had a Buzz Lightyear moment: Delivering an uplifting homily that sounded, at times, like a reading from the Book of von Braun, the president dreamed aloud of a $15 billion 'crew exploration vehicle,' a lunar base, and, sometime after 2020, a manned mission to Mars. To infinity-and beyond!

But building popular support for the mega-billion-dollar program will be a tough sell in a country bled white by Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the horror of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, not to mention more laughable pratfalls, such as the 1999 screwup that sent the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter kamikaze-ing into the red planet (NASA had failed to convert English measures to metric values), much of the nation seems convinced that boldly going where no man has gone before just isn't worth it.

The Space Age is ancient history. Why not admit, then, that its greatest contribution to American culture is the rich fund of symbolism it has given us? The 20th century's greatest myth, space exploration is the only true new religion since the Bronze Age. Christianity gave us the unforgettable fable of the alien messiah who touched down on planet Earth, assumed human form, sacrificed himself in order to save the species, then rose from the dead and returned to the stars.

The Space Age offers a new cosmology, better suited to our age of technological wonder and terror, scientific miracles and monsters. NASA has given us martyrs, saints, and icons, proof positive that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in our old-time religion: Gemini 4's spacewalking Edward White, savoring the sheer ecstasy of unfettered freedom as he tumbles weightlessly over the Gulf of Mexico at 17,500 miles per hour. Bootprints in lunar soil, like traces of the last human on some postapocalyptic beach-prints that are likely to remain sharply etched for a million years or more. A snapshot of Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke's family in their Houston backyard, left by Duke on the sands of the moon's Descartes Highlands-an image of almost unbearable loneliness. And, at the other end of the emotional scale, the awful grandeur of a 36-story Saturn V rocket, shattering gravity's shackles in a mighty blast. 'I didn't think my heart could take it,' said one observer. 'It was such an intense experience. I felt it shake every bone in my body. It was an exalted feeling.' The image of technological transcendence par excellence, a Saturn V blasting off was the 20th-century version of Burke's sublime, with 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

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