Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond

In 1958, a centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, millions were enraptured--1st, by the US-USSR race to the moon, & finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo. It's now more than three decades since the last walk on the moon--more time than between the 1st moonwalk & the beginning of WWII. Apollo didn't, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee & returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere--its economic, scientific & cultural atmosphere--made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. "Rocket Dreams" is about those solutions, about the places where the space program landed.In "Rocket Dreams", talented young writer Marina Benjamin takes you to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noetic Sciences. Roswell, NM is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief--a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent.Te 3rd law of motion states what goes up must come down. The motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved & transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia & giving symbolism to environmentalism. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on energy from the leap toward space."Rocket Dreams" tours this Apollo-scarred landscape, introducing some fascinating characters: Some long dead, like crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space a new stage of evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands half a mile from shops selling posters of aliens. Others are very much alive--like Stewart Brand, creator of the "Whole Earth Catalog" & partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, & SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who's spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for 1st contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original & wonderfully written, informed by history, science & an acute knowledge of popular culture, This is a brilliant bookt.AcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Sky's the LimitOne Small StepForever RoswellSpace for RentAliens on Your DesktopGround Control to Major TomWorks ConsultedIndex