BOOK
When the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake knocked out the power in the middle of the night," Wyn Wachhorst writes in The Dream of Spaceflight, "Griffith Observatory received numerous calls asking whether the quake was responsible for the sky being 'so weird.' The city-bound callers had never seen a star-filled sky."
In this small but ambitious book, nearly equal parts celebration and frustration, Wachhorst cites this episode as emblematic of the modern world's estrangement from the cosmos - which, not so long ago, was the catalyst of romantic longings and noble aspirations. He seeks to draw our eyes skyward to view the heavens anew, as a starry field of dreams where humanity will - or at least ought to - find its destiny.
The current status of space exploration - what Wachhorst calls the "central project of our history" - drives him at once to distraction and to some of his liveliest and crankiest prose. He inveighs against those people and things ("muckraking journalists," "the liberal agenda," "cancerous individualism") that he holds responsible for the space program's unhappy and underfunded state. To deny the urge to explore, he thunders, is to deny "the primary force in evolution since the first water creatures began to reconnoiter the land. ... The quest for the larger reality is the basic imperative of consciousness, the hallmark of our species."
Elsewhere, as he waxes lyrical on a range of space-related topics, the scent of nostalgia starts to waft. It's a nostalgia for the sci-fi future of the author's past, when Robert A. Heinlein's early novels, John W. Campbell's pulp anthology Astounding Stories, and George Pal's 1950 film Destination Moon lent wonder and escape to a generation of (mostly) adolescent boys. Wachhorst is especially eloquent on the great, if largely forgotten, space artist Chesley Bonestell, whose depictions of moons and planets wed gimlet-eyed astronomical authenticity with 19th-century landscape-painting Romanticism. During his heyday, in the 1940s and '50s, Bonestell's work seemed to make "the reality of spaceflight ... a foregone conclusion."
But of course it wasn't, and all those grand visions of humans astride the surfaces of other planets (and even our moon, after 1972) died in the wake of plummeting television ratings. Yet for all his exasperation with our terminally unimaginative civilization, Wachhorst thinks it's inevitable that humans will one day venture to the stars. And if that happens, he contends, a thousand years from now the moon landing will be seen as "the signature of our century" - just about the only thing the 20th century did that mattered.
The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity by Wyn Wachhorst: $22. Basic Books: (800) 386 5656, www.basicbooks.com.
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