Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Benjamin's book may burn with a sense of a dream betrayed, but her smoldering, often cynical anger never blinds or paralyzes her narrative. Without feigning objectivity, she takes on a very tough question: what does space mean to us? Then she follows it through launch facilities, astronaut autograph sessions, alleged UFO crash sites in Roswell, and, apparently, into many a library. Unlike most space writers, her facts check out completely. She's not kidding when she traces the modern dream of space-going utopias back to aviation fantasists such as Alfred Lawson. This is the guy who wrote in 1916 that airplanes would bring about the next phase of human development, a superior being known as "Alti-man" who would live in the sky. Echoes of this seemingly laughable notion persist to the present day in the lore of UFO enthusiasts and would-be space pioneers alike. Benjamin does a nice job showing how it's also alive and well among cybernauts building virtual-reality worlds for themselves. Rocket Dreams is a brutally honest journey that will shake spacers down to their core beliefs. For everyone else, it will provide loads of dry wit and some good laughs.

What the author Marina Benjamin attempts to do in her book, is to hold serious discussions about the US Space Program and NASA and all the related, high-tech spin-offs of that fast-paced time. She did an excellent job of describing what she felt and what she saw: Ms Benjamin was raised in England and when she came out to the US, one of the first things she did was drive out to see the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She was most dismayed to see all the Saturn V launch towers were gone.
The surrounding geography she describes as being a ghost town swamp, with acres of hungry yellowed grass - eager to swallow up the highway and all buildings surrounding the Space Center.
The once majestic Apollo rockets are still laying out there at the Space Center, but instead of gleaming white in the sun - they are instead..... decaying...rusting...and rotting. Not at all being inspiring or taking one's breath away in glorious display: in the fashion they deserve to be displayed.
She wonders what went wrong?
How did America come to abandon it's once lofty space goals?

She launches into beautifully written dialogue...take a look;
"...the pull of space has been understood to elicit in us a kind of spiritual phototropism, or flowering a desire to beleive that it is the better part of ourselves that responds to the call of the heavens. And so, when we dream of space travel, we dream of freedom and beauty; perfection and transcendence: we dream of what we may become."

Isn't that excellent?

She has alot more intellectual dialogue to offer up, and her theories of WHY we embarked on this magnificent journey up to the moon is deserving of winning distinguished writing awards and journalistic trophies.
In her attempt to explain our national drive to conquer the moon, she reels in our most grandiose insights...it's beautiful.

After she states the ideals of the Apollo program, she then launches into some negativity and of course, the national budget which destroyed all ideals that APOLLO had. Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were hurriedly shelved without any discussion it seems, and mysteriously Ms Benjamins wonders why Americans let go of the goals of the Moon and Mars to emotionlessly. This is how she discusses the unfortunate demise of our most brilliant NASA dreams.
She casts most of the blame on the astronaughts completely; because she feels that by landing on the Moon, studying the Moon and spending vast amounts of money, energy and talk about the Moon, all that we wanted to do was speak of the Earth.
We didn't really appreciate our planet until we left it.

Valid and interesting point...I only wish the author spent two chapters discussing the primal bond of Mother Earth and her native sons, who were astronaughts. She has some hostility towards them and further discussed it.

Her chapter on ROSWELL inspires me to take a long road trip out that way .... she warns that we may as well be on the surface of MARS when we're out there.
It was an amusing and fun chapter on that forlorn wide spot on the road...Roswell.
The place of alien dreams and possibly it is the UFO capitol of the nation.
She interviews the surviving local folks (who were alive at the time of the alien crash) who have some personal involvment with the alleged UFO crash from 1947. But she is a non-beleiver.

The book rambles on but hits a rough spot on chapters dealing with cyberspace and Alphaworld. I have no interest whatsoever to read about Internet interactive psuedo worlds.
2 chapters are wasted on this...I skipped them completely.
(Chapters 4 & 5).

By chapter six, Ms Benjamins' back in her rowboat and gets her prose rythm back on track. Discussions on the Pioneer 10 and 11 are held -
as well as discussions on SETI. All are pretty interesting, but her best writing is evidenced in chapters 1,2 and 3.

I found this book on sale and I must say, it was food for thought -- I enjoyed the first 3 chapters very intensely.

Her writing in most of the first three chapters can be described as brilliance in the face of the sun. I do recommend this book for all those persons who wish to upgrade their use of the English language, and range of topics to discuss while in the company of intelligent persons.

This book is rich in detail about how American psychology has adjusted to the failed promise of space exploration represented by the Apollo program. Benjamin accurately identifies the current of passion that runs through society that so desperately wants to make a connection with the meaning of outer space.

But, it seemed that Benjamin came to some very wrong conclusions based on her observation and research. Benjamin come across sounding like a 'lover scorned.' Profoundly pro-space in her youth, she deeply felt the betrayal of the demise of Apollo, as many of us did. Her reaction, however, reminded me of the woman whose failed romantic experience caused her to disavow the any possibility of a future loving relationship.

Benjamin wrongly concludes that because our current social/political environment rejected further manned exploration beyond Apollo, it meant that we were never really meant to do so in the first place. The fact is the passion for space flight, and eventual human habitation of space, was a passion that came well before and Apollo and still lives on as a burning desire that many are working to realize. That we may have stumbled temporarily as a society does not in the least deminish that passion.

It is a shame Benjamin didn't see it this way.

I found this book absolutely nauseating. The author has no knowledge of her subject, and completely lacks any sense of empathy with those who are trying to make the rocket dreams a reality. Don't buy it unless you own a dog who enjoys ripping up books.

As a genuine space buff, I read this hoping that the author would be able to find the legacy of the space program and its impact. She didn't. The book reads as a poorly written collection of magazine articles "from the field," complete with obscure references to other literature that we should have read and paradigms that all enlightened individuals should identify with. It seems as though the author had some notes on the UFO phenomenon and some other interesting pop culture fads and strung these notes into a book.

It's not that I didn't like her conclusions, but there weren't any conclusions to like or dislike. Or any arguments or revelations, for that matter. The only redeeming feature of the book is her space-related reference list, and that's the only thing keeping it on my shelf.