For some, the U.S. space program has been like a high school year book that gets trotted out and cried over when a particularly rough day makes you nostalgic for those lazy summers and naive arrogance of youth. If you were lucky, it was your bread and butter. The never ending teat of government money and legitimacy guaranteeing the good life in great abundance.
Others saw it as a waste of time and talent. A pit in to which money and man-months were thrown without regard for what it was actually accomplishing. They interrupted 'I Love Lucy' for god's sake, how many more of these moon landings are we going to do before we focus on jobs?
I read a diary today that opened my eyes to an entirely new perspective. That of an outsider who saw only the pure product of our insanity. Someone for who the time dilation and air attenuation stripped away the noise and made the sharp edges indistinct and dreamy. The chariot of Apollo roaring across the sky, laden with a cargo of progress, rock and roll, and and heavy American achievement.
Me? I grew up in the aftermath of that beautiful wreck.
"The pure products of America go crazy" - William Carlos Williams
Somehow, I've always managed to live near the centers of the US space program.
I was born in Florida and lived for most of my childhood less than an hour from the Kennedy Space Center. It seemed like everyone's parents worked for NASA or a contractor that supplied NASA. When a Shuttle was going up, we all knew. TVs and radios were monitored with a fevered attention and when the last of the scrub points and built in holds were passed, the school administrators would make the announcement that the Shuttle was going to launch in less than five minutes.
Everyone dropped what they were doing and filed out of class, standing in the grass with our necks craned skyward, nervously waiting for something to happen.
The someone paying attention to the countdown would take up the chant and you were suddenly screaming at the top of your lungs "EIGHT! SEVEN! SIX! FIVE! FOUR! THREE!" grinning the entire time like Santa Clause and the Easter bunny were going to come roaring over the horizon and deliver a new bike filled with chocolate right in to your waiting hands.
"TWO! ONE! BLASTOFF!"
It was always blastoff because we all grew up in the ruins of the moonshot. Any family trip, any day spent at the beach, any time someone in the family craved pastries from Ronnie's in Cocoa Beach, you'd pile in the car and drive past the rotting bones of the buffalo that were slaughtered at the alter of American Exceptionalism.
There were hundreds of them, standing alone or in groups, guy wires taut and dingy, airframes in various states of repair, and no amount of sugary cereal or Saturday morning cartoons could kill the imagination fueled by those beasts. I mean, look at those things. If you could get your parents to stop, you could touch, TOUCH, a Mercury-Redstone, Atlas, Titan II... and my god, the engine bell off the Saturn V.
All right there, all rotting in the salt air and sun, all pointing like skeletal fingers at the place where those books in the library about Tom, and his dog, and the space station say you should be right now.
They were our fields of goldenrod, and in that stifling Florida heat and humidity, they slowly destroyed us.
They were our refuge. They cast shadows so long that sometimes the only place you could go to escape the hot sand and burning concrete was across the street to where the rockets waited. If you were the scrawny sort, you could roll under the lip of the F-1s nozzle extension and have all the cool privacy in the world. Never mind that you were standing in the thrust chamber of an engine that could put out one and a half million foot-pounds of thrust, it was your bastion against the orcs, your fort for holding off the marauding Apache, and perversely recursive, we also imagined they were space ships.
Then I got older and my focus of play shifted from the pirates of high space to the far more urge demands of the flesh. Doused in that constant red fog of teenage hormonal rampage, I'd drive my old Fairlane up and down the strip, mimicking through the muddy lens of time those devil-may-care men who had taken up space travel for the sheer lust of adventure, seeking out the young slatterns who were bathed in filth and tricked out that night with the gauds that inspired my imagination to give them pleasant character.
This time it was the tacky neon of the "Blast-Off Inn" and the "Starlight Motel" that watched me fumble and grope in the back-seat, lurching toward the exploration of a far smaller, yet no less mysterious space. If I felt guilt, it was only because I couldn't afford the shabby comfort of a ruined mattress that had probably played host to the sweaty exertions of the men I still called my heroes. Economies of scale though, you fly a rocket for a living, you can spend some of your living god money on nicer digs for dipping your wick in the moist creamy confines of a star-struck school girl.
Still, the rockets were always there on the way home.
And the schools still let you pile out and view the spectacle of fire and achievement when you were failing Algebra II, rather than acing that worksheet on fractions.
I always watched.
Always.
Because the one time I didn't, it all went wrong.
See, in third grade I had already become jaded to the phenomena. I knew astronauts. I had been in the Commander's seat of the Columbia during a refurb, flicking switches and really cranking on the stick, fending off the pirates and aliens who were trying to take me Lucky Charms.
Ho hum. The shuttle is going up again? But I've got this pudding here, and damn does it need to get eaten.
So I sat in the lunch room, trading knowing glances with the ten or twelve others who were far too mature and world-wise to gawk at something as pedestrian as a space ship launch.
Then Kevin Lester came in and said "Hey, you missed it, it blew up."
"Ha ha, whatever."
"No, I'm serious, the Shuttle blew up."
Which is when a tear streaked Miss Geiger hugged me from behind and sobbed in to my hair, and it struck me that maybe, just maybe, something was up.
As are the ways of the child-mind, I blamed myself. My burgeoning cosmic power was the only thing keeping that pile of engineering and science in flight, you see, and it made perfect sense that the psychic protection of one little boy was worth far more space mojo than any thousand engineering specs.
But maybe there is something to that after all. When the Columbia broke up over Texas, I was sitting in a data center in Houston listening to a man with more money than I'll ever see in my life explain to me and my employees how his new Ferrari was more important than our health benefits. Remembering of course that the Columbia was my ship, I mean, my god, when no one was looking I licked the RCS joystick in a ritual claim of ownership, so I was the responsible party here.
That is the shadow in which I walk. Every day on the way to work I drive past three-hundred and sixty-three feet of nostalgia, memories, and could-haves. Apollo 19 has her own hangar now, and has been restored from the rusting hulk that used to sit naked in the Texas sun.
Still, the rockets watch. From where I'm sitting now I can move twenty feet and see the tips of their nose-cones stretching above the small copse of trees on NASA Road 1. They tug at my thoughts and remind me of when we were rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky.