The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity (review)

The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity. By Wyn Wachhorst. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Pp. xx+225. $22/$14.

While seeking the funds necessary to carry out expeditions, advocates of space exploration frequently defend their dreams with promises of technological spinoffs, commercial opportunities, and enhanced national security. Such utilitarian promises mask motivations that often go unspoken. For space, the deeper reasons can be found in curiosity, the desire for play, the search for immortality, and the natural human tendency to want to visit distant places.

Wyn Wachhorst examines these motivations in The Dream of Spaceflight, a short book encompassing five essays on why humans are driven to explore beyond the earth. He characterizes the first advocates of spaceflight as dreamers more comfortable with heavenly contemplation than worldly existence. Kepler, Goddard, even von Braun, Wachhorst suggests, led painful lives that drove them to seek "the pristine edges of reality" (p. 12). For these men, thinking about space yielded more pleasure than living on earth. Wachhorst likens the lure of the planets to experiences such as those children enjoy when they encounter new places--a first experience with the seashore, for example. To early generations of space explorers, the mysteries of Mars and artistic renderings of extraterrestrial landscapes excited the same sense of wonder and anticipation. Imagination encouraged space exploration because it was thrilling.

Wachhorst blames recent disenchantment with the space program on a loss of this sense. On the one hand, the Moon and Mars no longer reside in the realm of the imagination. They have become as common as earthly places--unvisited by most people but familiar nonetheless. On the other hand, to paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane, space is turning out to be weirder than many people can imagine. Confronted with big bangs and the behavior of black holes, people have chosen to tune out the news from space. It is simply too complicated. Wachhorst suggests they lack the capacity to perceive the wonder of the cosmos as it truly exists. He recalls the behavior of Los Angelenos during a recent city-wide blackout induced by an earthquake. At night, residents flooded the Griffith Observatory with calls. Had the earthquake somehow affected the atmosphere, they asked? "The city-bound callers," Wachhorst observes, "had never seen a star-filled sky" (p. 133).

The attractive power of science fiction, in vehicles like Star Trek and the Star Wars tales, resides in the ability of its producers to rip familiar experiences from the human past and place them in otherworldly settings. Thus the Mos Eisley Cantina on the planet Tatooine, where Luke Skywalker meets Han Solo, is an extraterrestrial version of the American frontier saloon. Being familiar in an otherworldly way, the scene does not plead to be explained. From Mars to the Milky Way, space is little like the romanticized visions that have propelled its exploration over the past half century. It requires effort and intelligence to understand, an increasingly difficult challenge.

Most books about space exploration embody intricate histories or interesting forecasts written for an educated public. The marketing staffers who wrote the dust-jacket copy for The Dream of Spaceflight explain that this book deals with major historical figures, science fiction, and moon landings. In fact, Wachhorst's essays do not fall into such conventional categories. The essays are personal statements, lyrical recollections of someone born in the first half of the twentieth century who grew up watching the space program unfold. To explain his enthrallment with space, Wachhorst borrows an analogy from the work of Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of earthly mythologies. Campbell once observed that countless myths from around the world confirmed the proposition that humans mastered fire not because anyone calculated what its practical uses would be "but because it was fascinating" (p. 153). Wachhorst's book explores human fascination with the realm beyond.

Howard E. McCurdy

 

Dr. McCurdy...