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

Marina Benjamin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2004

Remember when the race to the moon held the rapt attention of millions? Remember the Apollo missions that were supposed to herald the beginning of the Space Age? Thirty years after the last moonwalk, those missions now appear to have ushered in an era's conclusion. What happened?

Marina Benjamin has been asking that question ever since her childhood fascination with space exploration ended in disappointment. Rocket Dreams is her thought-provoking look at the Space Age and the shadow it casts on the fabric of our modern lives. When the futuristic expectations we pinned on Apollo came crashing back to earth, Benjamin argues, new phenomena took up the cause. Pulling movies, literature, junk culture, and the Internet into an irreverent alternative account of the post-Apollo years, she links the demise of the Space Age to groups like the "church" of Noetics -- founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell -- to the spread of UFO believers, even to the birth of fantasy literature. Propelling us through the golden age of Space Age-dreaming during the seventies and eighties, Benjamin finally touches down on...the Web. Has cyberspace become the new frontier we once thought outer space would be?

From Florida's overgrown rocket graveyards to Roswell, New Mexico, and beyond, this skillful blend of history and social observation examines the rise and fall of America's space obsession as never before.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743255348
• ISBN-13: 978-0743255349
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,900,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What happened to the dreams of Apollo?, August 11, 2003

By 

Dave English (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rocket Dreams : How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interpreting the Cultural Relic of Spaceflight, August 7, 2003

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rocket Dreams : How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!, November 7, 2004

By 

Otto Wood (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rocket Dreams : How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (Hardcover)

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.