Product Description

In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, 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 and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and 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, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey 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 Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent.

In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space.

Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2194406 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
After the last moon landing in 1972, America's space program seemed to come crashing down to earth. Now journalist Benjamin (Living at the End of the World) looks at how earthbound Americans have continued their fascination with outer space. Sometimes this fascination veers to the extreme, as with the Roswell true believers who can recite by heart details of the spaceship with three aliens aboard that supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 and was spirited off by the military. At the other extreme, Benjamin describes the SETI@home project, through which millions of people around the world donate their computers' extra processing capability to analyze radio signals collected by the enormous Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, hoping to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Benjamin also details the effects of the decline of the space program on the fortunes of communities, real and virtual: the problems faced by many real estate ventures in central Florida, including the Disney Company's utopian visions, as well as the growth of virtual communities whose members can buy plots on Mars and establish their own colonies like something out of Ray Bradbury. This is also an elegantly written memoir, as the author tells about her youthful fascination with the space program and her travels to places like Arecibo and Roswell, as well as her virtual travels among various computer groups over the last 20 years. Space buffs will appreciate many aspects of her story.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The thrill was gone after the Apollo astronauts departed the moon: the futurism of human space exploration expired and was replaced by a routine of running laps around earth in space stations. Essayist Benjamin ventures a suite of explanations for the disappointment (to space enthusiasts, at least) that play off the visions of Arthur C. Clarke, Werner von Braun, and Gerard O'Neill, which fired up so many imaginations through the 1970s. Their outward-directed attitude to discover and colonize space, she avers, is quite moribund today, succeeded by a more inward orientation that, she provocatively argues, we can blame the astronauts for. Benjamin finds that the discovering spirit occasionally reemerges with missions such as the 1997 Pathfinder landing on Mars. However, she demonstrates the weakness of that spirit by contrasting it with the strength of belief in UFOs, amusingly captured by her irreverent tour of Roswell, New Mexico. A perceptive lamentation. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Publishers Weekly Elegantly written....Space buffs will appreciate many aspects of [Marina Benjamin's] story. -- Review

Customer Reviews

What happened to the dreams of Apollo?
This wonderfull book reads like a collection of fascinating magazine articles. The common connection is the human aftermath of the moon landings. From meeting astronauts at an autograph function, to Area 51, to Star Trek, to virtual worlds online to SETI and way out of this world.

There are loads of books on the history of flight and the actual space program. This is a book on how we are now dreaming and doing in leaving this pale blue planet. It's very readable, and quite unlike any other book I can think of. Comes complete with a biography of sources and other places to continue your own dreams of space.

Interpreting the Cultural Relic of Spaceflight
The author ruminates on the scarred spaceflight culture that Apollo created and the later space program destroyed. She visits Roswell, New Mexico, with its alien kitsch, and the Kennedy Space Center and Cocoa Beach, Florida, with its gigantic rocket assembly buildings and launch complexes and reminders of the heyday of Apollo, when humans went to the Moon. Now, more than half of the world's population has been born since the last Apollo mission to the Moon in December 1972, and those exciting events seem much less real than previously. She also explores the frontiers of cyperspace, suggesting that this may become the final frontier instead of the Moon and Mars and other places in the universe.

Wow!
Sputnik was launched when I was in the [...], and I have followed the space program with rapt attention ever since. But even though I count myself among the geekiest of space buffs, I've sometimes felt that there is a deep contradiction at the heart of the human spaceflight effort. I could never put my finger on it, but Marina Benjamin has.

For one, it never occurred to me that the mesmerizing short film "Powers of Ten," which has been widely shown in schools and museums for 30 years, has been unwittingly undermining the case that we will ever go anywhere in the cosmos. Space is just too vast and empty, as that film shows with visceral impact.

Benjamin uses another film, the 1972 Russian version of "Solaris," as the jumping off point for this thought: "Is mankind's push into the cosmos the result of a natural drive--an urge as deeply embedded as the other basic impulses, for example, the sex drive? Or are we in our determination to fling ourselves off the planet contravening the very essence of who we are?"

Elsewhere, she observes that commerce usually follows in exploration's wake, except that it hasn't really worked out that way for space. "Without successfully accommodating the interests of business, space could never measure up to the 'new frontier' legacy, much less become the 'final frontier'.... It would only be another Everest or another South Pole--which is to say, it would merely be a place whose emptiness and isolation piques our vanity." Wow, has she nailed it!

Her book will be upsetting to those who unreflectingly believe that we are destined to spread throughout the cosmos just as we spread across the Earth. But if you're interested in getting at the origin of that peculiar notion and want to have your mind jostled in a myriad of other ways, I encourage you to read this stimulating little book.