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Now, Voyager hen I was a kid, I loved the Hayden Planetarium. I don't jiow what it's like now, but the show used to begin with a simulated sunset. Graduallythe skywould darken and the stars come out, till I was sitting engulfed in a night more absolute, dusted with lights infinitely more numerous and brilliant, than the ordinary city nightscape could ever be. It was thrilling no matter how many times I saw it. I read to death a booklet the planetarium put out called The Sky Above Us, which, along with some basic information about the solar system and the galaxy, retold the myths about various constellations —Pegasus, Orion, the Great and Little Bears. Space was, for me, the home of the imagined and the imaginary: on one level those points of light were the rings of Saturn, the red planet Mars; on another they were bears and horses and hunters; on still another, memorials to the mythic heroes and heroines and their tragic fates. Later, I read a lot of science fiction and began to understand space as a metaphor for liberation and loneliness: there were all those images of men (sic) watching from their spaceships as the earth receded , tumbled through the expanding universe like a rolling stone. The origin of the universe worried me. Isn't it a contradiction in terms for the universe to begin? How can the boundless have a boundary? Aren't we really talking about the shattering of the universe —the eternal All One—by change, therefore time, therefore history? But then, how can a true unity be shattered? And if there never was a unity, don't we have to envision an infinite series of beginnings ? Since I'd never heard of Lacan or Derrida, I didn't know these were naive questions. My response to the Challenger explosion washorror, depression, and a sense of some missing connection I couldn't define. Finally I w Now, Voyager 2.41 realized that this was the first time something about the space program had reallymoved me. Even the first man on the moon had not excited me as much as the planetarium shows of my youth. In fact, I somehow missed watching the moonwalk on TV.I don't remember the circumstances—did I purposely decide not to watch it? did I forget? did I have a deadline?—but the deeper reason is clear: I felt alienated from the American version of space flight. I wanted to go to the moon myself—what science fiction fan doesn't? I at least wanted to imagine going to the moon myself. But NASA's iconography left no room for such fantasies. Not only wasthe space program in those days as masculine as a cowboy in a foxhole, not to mention relentlessly WASP and middle-American, it was sealed off, owned by a separate, secret society—the military. Surprise, surprise: space had been packaged and sold to Congress as a metaphor for conquest. The Right Stuff, a book that gets better and better on rereading, is not about space but about the psychology of fighter pilots. My thumbnail review used to be that TomWolfehad used the space program to explore his personal obsessions about the nature of heroism, which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but gave the book a kind of tail-wagging-dog quality. Now it seems to me that Wolfe's perspective is right to the point—that the story of the astronauts is not about space, not about the experience of space, at any rate, and that this is a central irony in the book. How could I have missed it? (How could I have missed the moonwalk?) I even thought, at the time, that TheRight Stuff was a little boring. I know about that kind of boredom—it's the product of repression. I was angry about. . . losing space, and I didn't want to think about it. On the other hand, I've never shared the antispace bias nice progressive people often express.Yes,the effort to "conquer" space may be a piece of cold war public relations, a conspicuous form of phallic display, an assault on the limits of "man's" control over his environment , and now, most ominously, an arena for extending the arms race. But it's also an expression, however distorted, of humaninventiveness and curiosity and mysticism and aesthetic passion. I have no patience with the argument that before spending all this money...

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