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

by Marina Benjamin

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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Sky's the Limit
One Small Step
Forever Roswell
Space for Rent
Aliens on Your Desktop
Ground Control to Major Tom
Works Consulted
Index

Genres: Space, Nonfiction, Cultural, History

243 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Marina Benjamin worked as a journalist before turning to non-fiction and, later, memoir. She has served as arts editor of the New Statesman and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard and has written features and book reviews for most of the broadsheet papers. Her first book Living at the End of the World (1998) looked at the mass psychology of millenarians. Rocket Dreams (2003), an offbeat elegy to the end of the space age, is at the same time a story about coming of age in the 1970s, while Last Days in Babylon (2007) blends memoir, political commentary and travelogue to explore the story of the Jews of Iraq.
These days, Marina works as senior editor at the digital magazine Aeon. She teaches regular life writing and creative non-fiction courses for Arvon, and runs workshops for graduate students and staff as an RLF Consultant Fellow. In recent years she has doubled down on her commitment to exploring what memoir can do, with a modern take on the essay form in The Middlepause (2016) – a personal interrogation of what it means to be middle aged. Her new memoir, Insomnia – part confession, part poetic exploration and part philosophical reflection – is published in 2018. She lives in London with her husband, teenager and dog.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bit of a slog. Outdated but not offensive

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uneven and somewhat dated musings on the meanings of the Space Age. I could have done without the chapters on virtual reality and Roswell and the conclusion that cyberspace is the new frontier of our time is rather trite.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a history of the United States space program as a cultural phenomenon with an emphasis on its subsequent revenants--a light and sometimes amusing read.

[Kadri · Rating 3 out of 5]

An okay read, some parts were more interesting and necessary than others. In general it has a sad undertone, as most of the dreams have only remained dreams...