The Romance of Spaceflight: Nostalgia for a Bygone Future

The romantic vision of space exploration in the decades prior to Sputnik, when the fantasy and the reality seemed almost in balance.

Soon there will be no one who remembers when spaceflight was still a dream, the reverie of reclusive boys and the vision of a handful of men.  Most of those who met in ardent little groups in small cafés between the world wars, planning voyages to the moon and planets that they never hoped to witness, are no longer living.  And the last lonely youth to lie in a cricket-pulsing, honeysuckle night and gaze at a virgin moon is now in the latter half of his life.  On the yellowed pages of boyhood books the silver ships still poise needle-nosed on the craggy wastes of other worlds�"on moonscapes bathed in the stark light of some monster planet whose ring-shadowed hemisphere fills the horizon, looming behind space-­suited specks who wander across the incandescent night.

The dream had burned beneath the cold and solitary vigils of mountaintop astronomers like Percival Lowell, and in the visions of lone inventors like Robert Goddard.  The fantasy had fueled the science fiction of Verne and Wells, of Serviss and Smith and their pulp successors; it filled the monthly pages of Campbell's Astounding, the early novels of Heinlein, and the popular science of Ley and Clarke; it radiated from the covers of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the paintings of Chesley Bonestell, and the films of George Pal.  It was a dream of visible planets impossibly distant, of fantastic alien surfaces, awaiting for eons the beaching of man's boats.  It was a vision of steaming Venusian jungles and fine soft days on the green hills of Mars, cooled by coastal breezes from the Great Canal, looking over a far desert where ruins stood half in sand.    

It is not that the dream has disappeared; we may in fact be approaching a scientific watershed even more profound than that of Galileo and Newton.  But with the coming of spaceflight, as with all change, there was something gained and something lost.  Perhaps the public apathy surrounding the space program has reflected in some measure the discrepancy between dream and reality.  For though more meaning may lie in one message from the Mars lander than in the most exalted fantasy, the images of spaceflight that proliferated at midcentury arose from oceanic interiors more remote and mysterious than Mars itself.  The romance, in short, had a reality of its own.  Acquiring its familiar outlines in the pulp subculture of the twenties and thirties, it exploded into mass culture in the late forties and early fifties.

Perhaps I will be one of the last to have known this credulous dream in pre-Sputnik form.  I was seven when the first American V-2 rocket roared off of White Sands Proving Ground in 1946; I was ten when it boosted a small sounding rocket across the threshold of space, and nineteen when the first artificial satellite shocked the world.  The romantic dream of space reached its apogee in those postwar years, when the fantasy of spaceflight and the promise of reality seemed almost in balance.  Into this midcentury moment stepped a few writers, artists, and filmmakers who would epitomize the dream of other worlds.  Giving final impetus to a science-fiction boom that had been trying to happen since the twenties, they educated the man in the street to the possibility of spaceflight, bringing to mass consciousness the classic dream of the modern age.

Starry Days On the Coast of Saturn

Leafing through Life magazine in the last week of May 1944, one found familiar wartime fare: soldiers napping in foxholes amid the rubble of Italy, American boys with their English girls in London's Hyde Park, awaiting the invasion of France.  But the tide of the war had turned, and in the time between Hitler's retreat and the coming of the cold war, a fresh breeze blew across America.  One sensed it in the record success of Oklahoma! with its aura of youth, hope, and new beginnings, and in the spate of plays and novels set in the sunnier days of turn-of-the-century America.  But like the paradox of adolescence, torn between the security of home and the promise of the world, the new optimism often sought the simpler past within a wondrous future.  Thus that May 29 issue of Life included not only ads out of Currier and Ives and a long piece on Oklahoma!'s lyricist, but a large, singular painting, leaping out in vivid color amid black and white pages, depicting Saturn as seen from the surface of Titan, its largest moon. 

Since Titan is the only satellite in the solar system with an atmosphere, the giant Saturn looms low in a dark blue sky like an alien ship, a thin, gleaming crescent bisected by the glowing edge of its rings, afloat between jagged cliffs that jut from a frozen sea.  Warmed by the distant sun, the rocky cliffs and scarps rise sheer into the cobalt sky, casting a dark shadow on the icy sea.  There is an eerie beauty in the incongruity of light.  One feels that a storm has passed on a late November afternoon, yet the sky is specked with stars.  A hint of dawn lights the far horizon; and beyond a lofty pinnacle, out under the glow of the great crescent, lies a distant patch of noonday plain.  The painting could pass for a photograph in the era of Viking and Voyager, but on the eve of the invasion it was one man's vision of the future, later recalled by astronauts, rocket men, and science-fiction fans as their first encounter with a dream about to take wing.

On the same page are two smaller views of Saturn as seen from its farther moons Phoebe and Iapetus.  Since neither moon has an atmosphere, the distant Saturn floats in a black sky on the phosphorous mist of the Milky Way.  The absence of haze and dust gives the landscapes such clarity, the light such purity, that rocky features remain sharp in the distance.  The scene has the feel of a great indoor arena, of a room so large that one cannot see where the dark ceiling begins.  The paintings were intended to show the changing aspect of Saturn as seen by a traveler hopping toward it from moon to moon.  On the next page one finds a gargantuan segment of the planet as seen from its near moon Mimas.  With its stark slash of ring shadow, the yellow-banded Saturn balloons into the blackness.  Sheer cliffs and jagged mesas meander the red-brown desolation of Mimas, strewn with rocks and ragged craters, stretching away to the hazeless horizon that slices across the monster Saturn. 

The six paintings were the work of an architect who spent nearly three decades helping to design landmark buildings across the United States.  He went to Hollywood in 1938 at the age of fifty and became the highest paid special effects artist in the business.  The notion of rendering astronomically accurate views of Saturn came not only from his architectural focus on realistic detail but also from his skill in achieving the continuity required for matte paintings representing different camera angles on the same scene.  In 1944 he took the paintings, unsolicited, to Life, which bought them immediately.  Though crude images of spaceflight had been the staple of pulp covers in the thirties, the leap to a larger audience was almost completely the work of this one man.  Among those who grew up in the forties and fifties and later became prominent in space fact or fiction, there are few who would not cite the art of Chesley Bonestell as a significant personal influence.

His photographic realism gave the readers of Life a new perspective on the night sky.  According to the best science of the time, this would have been their view had they actually stood on the moons of Saturn.  Bonestell did for the heavens what the microscope did for our perception of life, opening worlds within worlds, inviting adventure, converting points of light into real places.  “You may roam about here,” his paintings seem to say. “This mysterious island, fresh from creation, is made a place by your mere presence.”  Bonestell put tiny space-suited figures in most of his scenes, for which one could search like a signature, a perspective reminiscent of the sublime landscapes of nineteenth-century romantics.  In painting the planets of other suns, where the setting of a red giant might span the whole horizon with an ethereal arch of deep orange fire, Bonestell expressed his faith that light-years would not forever imprison us in the solar system; for in the late forties, even Mars seemed so remote that whoever could touch it would surely reach the stars.

For those who grew up with Bonestell's painstaking accuracy in light, shadow, perspective, and scale, the reality of spaceflight seemed a foregone conclusion.  In March 1946, Life published twelve more paintings by Bonestell depicting a hypothetical flight to the moon; and in the next two years, his space illustrations appeared in Scientific American, Coronet, Pic, and Mechanix Illustrated.  For the October 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction he did the first of his many covers in that genre.  But it was The Conquest of Space, a book published in 1949 with text by German rocket expert Willy Ley, that was primarily responsible for bringing Bonestell's planetary landscapes to a new generation of spaceflight enthusiasts.¹  It included the paintings from Life and many more:  fairy-tale landscapes laced with castlelike rocks carved by drifting dust; lava spilling over the icy cliffs of Jupiter; the rocky green hills of Mars, rolling like the coast of Maine along the great canals; and on the near moons of enormous planets, knife-edged peaks and needles of rock stabbing into a star-filled sky.  Together, the scenes suggest a kind of cosmic shoreline, a composite of stark and eerie beaches on the near edge of the starry deep.

It is not surprising that the most popular of Bonestell's paintings, the view of Saturn from Titan, resembles a rocky coast in the frozen reaches of the far north.  For the image of the beach is not incidental.  Like the dream of spaceflight itself, the appeal of The Conquest of Space, which went through four printings in the first three months, owed much to the archetypes of the seashore.  My discovery of that book on Christmas night of 1950 had an impact very similar, in fact, to my earliest memory of the beach. 

The Only Real Place

I was four years old in 1942 when the army sent my father to Fort Ord on California’s Monterey Peninsula.  We left a dreary flat in the gray mist of San Francisco for a sunny cottage near the cypress-lined, white-sand beaches of Carmel.  As if to ritualize this rebirth, my mother took me for a walk that wound through a dark grove of those great brooding cypress�"leaning and reaching with their gnarled, windswept limbs, growing ever more foreboding�"until the path opened suddenly onto a long stretch of pure white sand and a vast expanse of silver-blue water that sparkled and shimmered to the edge of the world.  It was my first waking encounter with the Pacific Ocean.  I ran barefoot over the hot sand, stopping at a safe distance to gape at the bellowing breakers, feeling the cold foam on my feet.  As vivid still as the smell of ice plant on the dunes, it is a moment burned into memory, like an astronaut's image of Earthrise from the shores of the moon.

We went often, through the dark trees to the sunlit beach.  I built sand castles while my mother sat on the grassy bank with the salt-kelp breeze in her hair, watching boat specks on the horizon.  Her death, shortly after we left Carmel the following year, seems to have merged my sense of the mother with that of the ocean�"Great Mother of all, mystery of origins, milk of the world; the Good Mother, nurturing a silent undersea fantasy of living things; the Dark Mother, swallower of worlds, the black sea-bottom of death itself, strewn with Titanics, digesting Atlantis and Lemuria.

The epilogue came a few years later at a summer camp in the high mountains.  I awoke one night in a sleeping bag under a wilderness of distant worlds, recalling Asimov's story about a planet with six suns, where “Nightfall” occurs but once every 2,050 years and the sudden appearance of a soul-searing canopy of stars plunges civilization into chaos.  Gazing out into the immense ocean of light I reexperienced my encounter with the Pacific, though there was no odor of ice plant on the breeze, no sound of breakers nor wind in the cypress, only the silence of those trillion worlds, waiting, eyes within eyes, coming through a million lifetimes to meet mine�"which glanced away, struck with what we all come to know:  that each of the unfathomable immensities�"Mother, Ocean, Death, and Stars�"­share the barrier between known and unknown, enfolding the familiar world like the pre-Columbian gods and monsters, bounding all beginnings, all ends, all meaning.

Perhaps it was gods and monsters, not gold and glory, that inspired young Cristoforo Columbo on the shores of his boyhood Genoa, gazing out on a sea that encircled the known world like the night sky�"a fathomless enigma, fading off into forever.  Men once looked out over the melancholy wilderness of water as we now look to the stars, knowing it to veil some great mystery of unknown size and origin.  Though the sea no longer bounds the universe, it remains a vast, inscrutable presence, growing darker and deeper in the distance, the darkness of a world before man, unchanged through eons of continental evolution, yet ever restless, relentlessly pounding the land, through all lifetimes.  The rush of the surf echoes the ancient Earth�"the wind in the once great forests, the thunder of free-­running herds�"while the sea alone remains truly free, the last untamed remnant of Earth's tempestuous youth.  And out beyond the breakers abides the silent face of the Great Mother, an effervescence of light, flashing like countless suns. 

Though the archetype of the ocean shapes the aura of Bonestell's paintings, the root metaphor is more precisely the shoreline itself.  The interface of known and unknown, civilization and wilderness, conscious and unconscious, the beach is that narrow band of equilibrium where the city meets the sea.  To go down to the sea-scented shore on a cold, gray day and wander amid the wrack and debris of both worlds, to sit on a half-buried whiskey box, watching the birds dip and hunt with their small sad voices, is to enter sacred space, to walk the razor's edge between time and eternity, matter and spirit, isolation and communion.  The seashore is a sanctuary, the eye of the storm, where our polarities are momentarily balanced.  It is where the temporal realm of the hot street�"even the run­down hot-dog stand�"is bathed in transcendent energy, touched by the breath and pulse of the sea. 

The transformation is reciprocal.  With each mortal breaker the eternal sea dies a momentary death, descending into time as it licks the sands to the soft cries of gulls.  Yet the beach is a place of rebirth, where each wave erases the tracks of life and time, leaving the broad sand flats gleaming like glass.  It is a place where false selves are shed and companions transcend their separateness.  It is a holy place, perhaps the only real place. 

Islands at the Edge

The same paradoxic polarities are at the core of Bonestell's appeal.  To feel the lure of the seashore is to know why the near planets still beckon, even when the hope of inhabitants is lost.  By 1950, humanity itself had become the city on the shore of the cosmic ocean�"a growing cancer of disconnected egos living in the shadow of the bomb.  For an eleven-year-old awakening to that larger reality, the barrier between known and unknown first encountered on the coast of Carmel now became the pristine beaches of Bonestell's planets (it is fitting that Bonestell himself lived in Carmel).  Like the seashore, his alien landscapes domesticated the transcendent while elevating the mundane, familiarizing the mysterious and mystifying the familiar.  His most popular painting, the view from Titan, with its giant Saturn afloat in a blue sky over sunlit peaks, seemed the ultimate marriage of strange and familiar.

In the hidden heart of science fiction had always been the hope that the moon and planets promised a personal adventure akin to my encounter with the Pacific�"a transitory, enchanted moment when man, like Fitzgerald's Dutchmen, would hold his breath before the fresh green breast of some radiant new world.  At that moment, the cosmos would become a place.  This was the promise of Bonestell's beaches�"that those peaceful points of light in the night sky are places, that virgin rocks, asleep for a billion years, await my touch no less than the cup that sits here before me, that there is a “transcendent mundaneness” abiding in parallel time and space, one that somehow merges the cosmic and the personal.  A Bonestell moonscape is a sacred place at the edge of the known world�"an altar set before the barrier, a piece of the mundane bathed in oceanic mystery.

We think of the boundaries of the known, the outer rim of our reality, as somehow harboring the answers to our “Why” questions.  Whether it be Aristotle's geocentric spheres, Columbus' ocean-sea, or our own space-time continuum, we conceive of this Larger Context as ultimately separate from and alien to our everyday experience simply because it is assumed to mask the unknowable, the meaning of all meaning, as inaccessible to us as cosmology to an ant.  To encounter the blue skies of Bonestell's Titan, or to find that the reddish, rock-strewn desert of Mars looks hauntingly like the American Southwest, suggests that the near edge of the Larger Context is a reality as familiar as our own back yard.  Just as the beach is perceived as the edge of an otherwise boundless sea, Bonestell brought the edge of infinity out of the abstract and into the realm of direct experience. 

The two realms, abstract and direct, are quite different.  In one, red is a designated wavelength of light; in the other, red is a color.  In one, the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves about the sun; in the other, the sun rises and sets.  The photographic realism of Bonestell's cosmic beaches brings the realms together at their point of tangency, allowing one to experience the heliocentric reality from a geocentric perspective, giving the Larger Context a tactile immediacy.  The paintings had a disorienting effect, similar to that experienced by astronauts seeing Earth from the moon.  Standing beneath the blue swirl of Earth, said Gene Cernan, “I had to stop and ask myself, ‘Do you really know where you are in space and time and history?’”  To believe, with a foot in each world, that one can retain an earthly reality yet stand on another ground under another sky, has the transforming impact of an out-of-body experience, or an encounter with the doppelgänger, a duplicate self.

The lack of inhabitants allows Bonestell's barren astroscape to become an extension of oneself.  The image suggests a colossal stage set or a giant playroom, a toy world of one's own.  There is a timeless stasis about these bright islands, offering safe passage through the void as one might ride a cozy car through the Tunnel of Horror.  A virgin purity, untouched by everyday life, not only makes the place one's own but beckons in the way that tiny islands lure the canoeist.  The scenes, like the islands, invite one to become a world unto oneself.  It is the narcissistic fantasy of infusing whole societies, planets, or universes with one's own nature and agenda�"an utter absence of personal limits.  But unlike the way of the mystic, the ego is not sacrificed; it is merely romanticized.  For Bonestell's landscapes, like the canoeist's island, remain pieces of the real world, filled with those craggy shadows, hidden caverns, and pristine horizons that are natural to the romantic imagination. 

Such romantic flights from personal limits were more than the marks of innocent youth.  For as long as spaceflight was far from reality, one could immerse oneself in the subject with the intensity and resolve of real exploration�"the exhilarating sense that one stood very near the leading edge simply by combing musty libraries or gluing balsa models in a cluttered garage.  Such mundane pursuits seemed to merge with the ultimate quest and adventure on its realistic timeline.  Lying in the hammock and gazing at the moon, viewing the larger craters through Dad's binoculars�"so close, yet so impossibly remote�"one reached another world by the same means to which even the most heroic adventurer was then bound.   

Yet one took the risks without leaving home, gained the world without losing the soul, pursuing the real adventure in a context as warm and secure as reading comics in bed while mother nursed the common cold.  For space travel, like all mythic visions, was paradoxic, containing at its core the very polarity most peculiar to adolescent males.  The parental womb�"the inner solipsistic world of childhood�"became the secret spaceship, while the external world was removed to outer space, where one's omnipotence was safely assumed.  One eluded the looming world of adult responsibilities, the messy arenas of peer conflict and opposite-sexed enigmas, withdrawing to a larger realm that encircled those lesser things.  There one finds Bonestell's planets inhabited by other childlike beings, or by benevolent and omniscient Cosmic Parents.  Substitute for the parental womb the technological society, where the illusion of infinite leverage compensates for a state of abject dependence, and one has an inchoate hypothesis with which to explain the rise of science fiction itself over the past century.

Before I sentence all science-fiction fans to schizoid adolescence, however, I should note not only that all neuroses merely exaggerate facets of normal behavior but also that the progressive/regressive polarity is common to all transition, individual and collective.  The adolescent is in fact a microcosm of the modern condition, wandering the beach between two worlds.  His isolation is that of humanity itself, a species cut off from its traditions, its instincts, its animal forebears, even its home planet, while riding the momentum of history like a runaway train. 

Ironically, while Bonestell's island beaches are stepping stones to the discovery of higher life, they also intensify this sense of isolation.  Looking out over the ocean or gazing back on the home planet, one feels the solitude of humanity, a species cast up from the ancestral seas and forests, standing alone at the leading edge, like an old man who has lost all those from whom he issued.  Just as whole cultures reach a zenith of awareness and creativity when old and new are in polar tension, so awareness itself may be the product of the “bicameral mind,” the hemispheric tension which allows the stereoscopic, three-dimensional thinking that is consciousness.  This reflexive self-awareness, the ability to think about thinking, differentiates us from other animals.  It is the source of all good and all evil, all cruelty and all compassion.  It is this reflexive tension that pervades the shoreline, terrestrial or cosmic.  It is the fragile polar balance that defines the human condition, bringing both heightened awareness and the concomitant solitude of separation.  On the beach, faces flicker in the firelight�"creatures marooned on the shores of evolution, gathered to mourn and to celebrate their loss of innocence.

Destination Moon

In one of Bonestell's paintings for The Conquest of Space, a sleek silver rocket towers on its gantry against the stars.  Men move about in light and shadow as though huddled around a great silver flame, a signal fire warming the night at the edge of the cosmic ocean.  In a second painting, the same ship rests on its fins in a valley of the moon against black sky, sunlit mountains, and the distant Earth.  Light radiates from the hatchway as the crew explores the site, a rugged outpost on the frontier of evolution.  In the hearthlike glow of these scenes lies a communal longing, life reaching out for some indiscernible secret, some wormhole to the long forgotten Source, the heartsong of creation. 

The paintings, along with additional moonscapes, became the basis for visual effects in Destination Moon (1950), the film often credited with launching the cinematic science-fiction boom of the fifties.  Film historians traditionally note that Destination Moon was the first science-fiction film worthy of the term since Things To Come (Britain, 1936) and that its success led to the boom that followed.  Written by Robert Heinlein and Rip Van Ronkel, directed by Irving Pichel, and produced by George Pal, with panoramic matte paintings by Bonestell, Destination Moon depicts a trip to the moon, true in almost every detail to the scientific projections of the time.  The result is a docudrama surprisingly close in particulars to the flight of Apollo 11 nearly two decades later.  Although it was Eagle-Lion’s top moneymaker for the year, earning enthusiastic reviews and an Oscar for special effects, the film has not worn well.  Film historians lament the absence of plot, women, and depth of character, dismissing the film as dated and dull. 

The problem with this kind of film history, of course, is that it lacks historical perspective.  Not only do many film critics seem bound to secular realism, but most of the writers are too young to have seen Destination Moon when it was released.  When the long silver ship set down on the surface of the moon and the crew descended in silence, it was as though irrelevancies dimmed and essentials came clear.  Viewing the first realistic depiction of a visit to another world (also the first in color) had an effect similar to the televised landing of Apollo, or to the dazzling NASA footage projected onto the five-story Imax screen in Blue Planet (1990).  The one previous attempt at an accurate representation of space travel, Woman in the Moon (Germany, 1929), was far less compelling, not only because its moon sequences reverted to fantasy but also because it was silent at a time when most films had incorporated sound.  The degree to which Destination Moon escaped hack concessions to Hollywood formulas is a credit to Heinlein and Pichel.  With the help of Bonestell and Pal they conceived a prophetic film, an ode to the romance of spaceflight that retained, even in its pedestrian moments, an aura of transcendence.

But was it responsible for Hollywood's spate of science-fiction films?  In truth, the producers of almost all of the significant sf films released in its immediate wake had conceived their ideas and purchased their properties prior to the contracting of Destination Moon.  Along with the surge of sf magazines, the notion of filming serious science fiction was in the air in the late forties.  Although the optimistic and visionary Destination Moon was virtually first in the cycle, its impact was confined to demonstrating that expensive sf could be profitable.²  Most succeeding sf films fell into the Gothic mode, embodying the mutated monster and evil alien themes of King Kong (1933; rereleased in 1952) and The Thing (1951). 

In the end, Destination Moon was less a beginning than a culmination.  Epitomizing that balance of fantasy and reality that characterized the dream of spaceflight itself at that transitional moment, it was the confluence of three historic careers: Bonestell, the first realistic space artist; Heinlein, whose gritty realism depicting life in space had made him the first science-fiction writer to break into a mainstream magazine (with his Saturday Evening Post stories in 1947); and Pal, the first science-fiction filmmaker to show concern for scientific credibility.  Pal’s bias toward realism had been evident in his Puppetoons, which were not only the first socially-minded cartoons but also first to use stop-motion photography of real figures in place of animation. 

Pioneers in fantasy and innovators in realism, the three men surfaced at a time when the developing facts of spaceflight had begun to reshape the nature of the dream.  Destination Moon perfectly bridged the romance of the dying pulps and the coming realities of Apollo.  After Destination Moon, in fact, spaceflight on film suffered a fate similar to that of the real thing after Apollo.  In the public mind, the deed had been done.  Pal retreated to traditional science fiction, turning first to the destruction of the Earth, in which the same sleek ship from Destination Moon became a planetary Noah’s Ark (When Worlds Collide, 1951, with artwork by Bonestell), then to alien invasion (War of the Worlds, 1953), time travel (The Time Machine, 1960), and finally back to fantasy from whence he came.  Pal tried a second docudrama (The Conquest of Space, 1955), but its success fell short of Destination Moon to about the same degree that public interest in the space shuttle fell short of attention to the moon landing.  Heinlein attempted another script (Project Moonbase, 1953), expanded from an unsold TV pilot and rewritten by the producer, with results that forever soured Heinlein on Hollywood.  His later books, like Pal's films, moved away from the pure extrapolative realism of earlier sf.  Bonestell, on the other hand, moved toward the emerging realities with his illustrations for Wernher von Braun's famous Collier’s articles in the early fifties.  Thus the romantic vision receded with Destination Moon, where it abides like an old daguerreotype, the finest and final hour of a dream now faded and transformed.

Yellow Brick Road to Redrock Corners

Perhaps the images of unencumbered human flight that preceded the realities of the airplane included winged torsos hovering high above trees and houses, soaring like eagles over hill and forest, swooping like hawks down rivers and valleys.  During the first half of the twentieth century, the romantic vision of coming adventures in the solar system compared in spirit to just such reveries.  The depersonalized, mechanical reality of astronautics was never a part of the dream.  When we finally went to the moon it was not on a wing and a prayer but on a pyramid of mathematics and technological expertise.  Every move was part of an exhaustively detailed script.  Should the left or the right hand pick up this piece of equipment on the moon?  Should the knuckles point up or down?  With simulations more novel and rigorous than the actual flights, the moon's only surprise was that it held no surprises.  In our business, said Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins, “boring is good because it means that you haven't been surprised, that your planning has been precise and your expectations matched.”³  “Adventures,” said polar explorer Amundsen, “happen to the incompetent.”

What faded in the years following Sputnik was not the dream itself but its naïve forms.  The astronomical interests of most rocket pioneers were superficial, romantic, and unscientific, while few professional astronomers took spaceflight seriously.  Even rocket research had once been romantic.  Robert Goddard's telemetry in Roswell consisted of a pair of binoculars, an old alarm clock to drive a recording drum, and Esther Goddard's movie camera.  She was photographer, secretary, and parachute seamstress, among other titles.  It was an intensely personal quest.  Goddard and fellow rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth all devoured the science fiction of Verne and Wells, with Oberth's interests extending even to the occult.  Like the masses who panicked during Orson Welles' 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast, early spaceflight enthusiasts not only took seriously Percival Lowell's insistence on Martian canals but envisioned a lush, tropical Venus and solid, surrealistic surfaces on the outer giants.  Drawing on the primitive state of astronomy, pulp fantasies seemed to confirm that if one could somehow hurl oneself off the Earth, one would encounter myriad yellow brick roads to an infinity of Emerald Cities. 

Today the moon and planets are not only inhospitable but have undergone a certain desacralization.  The romantic, mysterious, inaccessible moon that made the water silver, the swollen tangerine Allegheny moon, the “ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,” the moon that only cows in nursery rhymes could jump over�"that moon is gone.  The once holy ground of myth and magic is now a barren, hostile desert. 

It has been suggested that there are seven zones of human experience: (1) the area of sensation immediately touching the skin, (2) the area within two or three meters in which most social interaction takes place, (3) the maximum area of social interaction, reaching out a few hundred feet, (4) the area that extends as far as one can see or otherwise gather information from any one location, and (5) an irregular and varying area made up of all the zone-four areas that a person experiences during a lifetime.  Beyond these five natural zones are two conceptual constructs: (6) the surface or biosphere of the Earth and (7) the universe as far out as one can conceive.⁴  Our extraverted, Newtonian culture has viewed the outermost zone as the realm of transcendence, the literal locus of ultimate answers to all our “Why” questions.  In the course of one lifetime, this zone has expanded at least three-hundred-thousandfold.  With the discovery in 1921 that our galaxy was not the sum total of existence, the solar system moved from zone seven to zone six.  In the new cosmos, the planets seem to lie less on the near edge of infinity than on the far edge of the Earth.   

Yet just as the beach is bathed in the aura of the sea, Bonestell's planets could still symbolize that unfathomable immensity.  It was not until we viewed the Earth from space, left our spoor on the moon and Mars, and intruded on the timeless solitude of the outer planets that we began to experience what we had known.  The rolling gray lunar hills have belied the jagged, craggy wonderland of Destination Moon; and the rocky red desert of Mars is more like a spherical New Mexico than the home of Wells' doomsday machines.  Now a part of “where we are,” of zones four and five, given the disorienting impact of electronic media, they become Grayrock Junction, Redrock Corners, and Gasball City, associated less with the Land of Oz than with Steinbeck's flat-country truck stops�"those dilapidated diners with a gas pump in front, where flies strike the screen door with little bumps and drone away.

To conceive of the transcendent requires a symbol.  One cannot worship “God”�"a word, a vague feeling, an intellectual abstraction; one needs an image: Jesus, Buddha, a bearded man in the sky, a painting, a statue.  Yet the natural tendency is for the image to literally become God, and the larger, elusive feeling that empowered the symbol fades, eclipsed by a host of this-worldly connections.  Finally demystified, the statue reverts to its status as mere artifact.  Thus every symbol contains the seeds of its own desacralization.  The millennial nature of Christian theology generated the idea of spiritual progress, which spawned the notion of salvation through success in this world, which led to the secular idea of material progress, which in turn began to desacralize Christian theology.  The last stage of this process is fundamentalist dogma, in which symbols have lost their numinosity and have degenerated to mere signs.       

The Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, which has deferred its “Why” questions to the empirical edges of space and time, faces a similar cycle.  Like the instruments of Christianity, discoveries at the leading edge of science desacralize the very things that compelled the quest in the first place.  The sense of wonder surrounding those objects suffers the fundamentalist fate: the mythic moon becomes a wilderness of cinders and ash, and the red star of evening becomes a barren, rocky desert.  The bright light of science dissolves the mysteries that animate its objects; the observer alters the observed, and the aura of wonder recedes with the horizon.  We pine for the lost images demystified by modernity, and the innocent dream of spaceflight joins the romance of the railroad in coffee-table nostalgia. 

The Archimedean Point

Now that we have touched a heavenly body, the rockets themselves no longer seize the imagination.  In a field near the Houston Space Center, the last Apollo lies like a beached whale amid a trickle of visitors.  It was once enough merely to escape the Earth, but now the core motive comes clear: cosmic communion.  “Even the traveler's mind,” wrote a post-Apollo poet, “now shoots quicker than a gecko's tongue beyond the sun for the sweet stars, thrilled by demons, by impossible virtue and impossibly wise old men.”⁵  Like Bonestell's planets, the moon was once as remote as the stars; just to stand on it would unmask the night sky, rendering the whole cosmos as accessible as the worlds of science fiction.  But the realities of reaching the moon drove science fiction from the “hard,” mechanical extrapolations of Destination Moon to the “soft” phantasms of 2001, E.T., Starman, Cocoon, and Contact.  Forced inward to the promise of Christlike aliens, paranormal realities, and mystical resurrections in space, science fiction no longer pretends to paint the near future.

Perhaps the new dream is less naïve than the old.  Arthur Clarke has noted that we tend to overestimate what we can do in the near future and grossly underestimate what can be done in the distant future.  This is because the imagination extrapolates in a straight line, while real events develop exponentially, like compound interest.  Perhaps communication is not limited by the speed of light; perhaps there are “wormholes” in space-time; perhaps we will receive some mind-altering message from superior beings.  Such hopes were the subject of Clarke's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first film of any consequence about spaceflight since Destination Moon, and the only other such film scripted by a major science-fiction writer.

2001, in fact, capsulized the transition from the old dream to the new.  When the ape-man spins his bone tool into the air, where it dissolves to a wheeling space station complete with pay phones and a Howard Johnson's restaurant, the message is that the colonization of space will be no more than an extension of man's tool-making nature.  In the first half of the film space is presented as essentially more of the same, a bland, anonymous world set to the “Blue Danube” waltz, a Howard Johnson's in the sky, where means remain ends in themselves.  The second half of the film moves from the “how” of spaceflight�"the rockets, space stations, synthetic foods, and supersophisticated computers�"to the “why,” symbolized by the inscrutable aliens who transform the astronaut into the mysterious star-­child, drifting toward Earth to be born.  The two halves of the film depict the shift from the old dream, terminating in the simple act of escaping the planet, to the new dream of discovering some clue to our meaning and destiny, of finding life, and of launching the long journey in which man may evolve into a new galactic species.

What, then, is the lure of the near planets?  Why dedicate a life to a landing on Mars?  Like the spice islands envisioned across Columbus' ocean-sea, Mars was once the mystery of the cosmos incarnate.  Now it is only the near edge of the night sky.  Yet the red sands of Mars, now part of our reality, still lure us to the shore of the cosmic ocean. 

Although Mars is no longer shrouded in mystery, it remains what Hannah Arendt called an “Archimedean point” (it was Archimedes who said that with a long enough lever and the moon as a fulcrum he could move the Earth).  Applying the term to the tendency of modern science to substitute its heuristic constructs for direct experience, Arendt suggested that man increasingly encounters only himself.  Viewing spaceflight as an attempt to reach a literal Archimedean point, one that must always require a still further point, she saw the leap into space as a flight from the human condition.  But as the vision animating all forms of exploration and discovery, the Archimedean point is the human condition. 

Physicist Philip Morrison tells a story about the Bushmen of the Kalahari, Africa's last society of hunter-gatherers, who forever move about the desert, carrying what little they possess, living in bands of extended families, each staying within a region about the size of Los Angeles County.  They meander through life, “stopping now here, now there, to sleep in a kind of nest, to try the fruit of this tree, to scratch up that waterhole,” or to meet for a “ritual encounter with their wandering friends.”  Their wants are so well controlled and their skills so well developed that they need not work any harder.  Their one need,

as they wander through the cool mornings, the cool evenings, and as they rest in the heat of the day, is to know exactly where they are.  They discuss it always. They note every tree, they describe every rock.  They recognize every feature of the ground.  They ask how it has changed, or how far it has been constant.  What story do you know about this place?  They recall what grandfather once said about it.  They conjecture, and they elaborate; their minds are filled; their speech elaborates exactly where they are.  You see they have built an intensely detailed, brilliant, forever reinvigorated internal model of the shifting natural world in which they find their being. 

Morrison suggests that our language, myth, ritual, tools, science, and art are all symbolic expressions of a “grand internal model” that every human makes, and that is always in need of completion.  The essence of human exploration is the attempt to fill in the margins of that model so that it will not “fade off into the nothing or the nowhere.”⁶

All such terms�"Arendt's Archimedean point, Morrison's grand internal model, space writer Frank White's “overview effect”�"are aspects of the reflexive thinking that is the hallmark of our species.  If the essence of exploration is to touch the boundary�"the beach, the mountaintop, or the moon�"the core of the human condition is the attempt to see the self in context.  To stand on the moons of Saturn and see the Earth in perspective is to act out the unique identity of our species.

The Star Thrower

That it is humanity's fate to live alone at the leading edge was a point often made by evolutionary biologist Loren Eiseley.  In “The Star Thrower” he describes a wave-beaten coast, littered with the debris of life�"upended timbers, “sea wrack wrenched from the far-out kelp forests,” and long-limbed starfish strewn everywhere, “as though the night sky had showered down.”  A hermit crab is tossed naked ashore, “where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces.”  Along the strip of wet sand “death walks hugely and in many forms.  Even the torn fragments of green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.”

In the end the sea rejects its offspring.  They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore.  The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand.  The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected.  The seabeach and its endless war are soundless.  Nothing screams but the gulls.⁷

Among the competing collectors, clutching their bags of beautiful voiceless creatures, was a human figure framed beneath a distant rainbow, spinning starfish far out over the surf.  The star thrower, “whose eyes seemed to take on the far depths of the sea,” represented for Eiseley the furthermost reach of humanity.  Shipwrecked on the shores of evolution, he is unique in his compassion.  He is the catcher in the rye, protecting the innocent from the abyss, doomed eternally to explore the margins, chasing his reflection down an infinite regress.

Like the immigrant wife, alone on the howling Kansas prairie with her Sears catalog and her secret dreams, those who settle the red sands of Mars will know that some of their roots must die on that barren shore.  Gazing back on the soft blue dot in the Martian sky, perhaps they will dream of dance music drifting over a moonlit lake, of twilight talk in a turn-of-the-century town, or the dark wet soil of the sunflower forest from whence we emerged like life from the sea.  But pioneers on the plains of Mars will no longer debate whether that pale blue point is the center or the edge, for the center, as Joseph Campbell has said, will be man himself, finally aware that he lives in the stars. 

The imperative to see the self from afar, to see the present from some external point in the future, is neither Promethean, as Newtonians assume, nor Narcissistic, as Arendt suggests, but closer to the task of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll the rock up the hill only to have it roll down and eternally begin again.  For the succession of Archimedean points�"whether metaphoric, as in art, or literal, as in science and exploration�"spirals through history.  Though we return always to the same point, there is a new perspective with each cycle, and we seem to know the place for the first time.  The process is unending, but we are process; and our soaring aspirations are finally cathedrals of the mind.  For latter-­day Argonauts to return with the poster of the whole universe would in fact be a form of idolatry.  Were we to awaken from the dream of space-time we might long for some eternal star thrower to return us from the center to the edge.  For it is not the treasure but the voyage itself that is the central project of our species.

       Again and again we come through the dark trees to the Pacific: the lookout on Pinta, spying a hint of white sand cliff in the moonlight; Amundsen, on a bleak, windswept plain of ice, reaching the pole with his few surviving dogs; and Apollo 8, in the hush of Christmas Eve, floating over the mountains of the moon.  This was the promise of Bonestell's vision, that people from Earth would one day flow into the ancient river valleys of Mars, down the gorges four miles deep, out over desolate, wind-torn plains, out to the ice seas of Europa, the yellow skies of Titan, and the Great Wall of Miranda, out into the ocean of light, to those worlds within worlds where the star-children wait.