Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

358 reMeMberINg the SpaCe age
achieve “good ends”—the war on poverty, the peace Corps, support for civil
rights, numerous great Society programs, space exploration, and a host of other
initiatives are examples. these all represented a broadening of governmental
power for what most at the time perceived as positive purposes.
Such statements of triumph and exceptionalism have permeated the
narrative of spacefight from the beginning. for only one example among many
that might be discussed, andrew Chaikin’s 1994 A Man on the Moon oozes
the narrative of triumph in the context of apollo. 10 alex roland captured the
importance of this book best when he proposed that Chaikin ofered a retelling
of a specifc myth and in that retelling it performed a specifc purpose. It is not
so much history as it is “tribal rituals, meant to comfort the old and indoctrinate
the young.” he added:
all the exhilarating stories are here: the brave, visionary
young president who set america on a course to the moon
and immortality; the 400,000 workers across the nation who
built the apollo spacecraft; the swashbuckling astronauts who
exuded the right stuf; the preliminary fights of Mercury
and gemini—from alan Shepard’s suborbital arc into space,
through John glenn’s frst tentative orbits, through the rendezvous
and spacewalks of gemini that rehearsed the techniques
necessary for apollo. there is the 1967 fre that killed
three astronauts and charred ineradicably the apollo record
and the apollo memory; the circumlunar fight of Christmas
1968 that introduced the world to earth-rise over the lunar
landscape; the climax of apollo 11 and Neil armstrong’s
heroic piloting and modest words, “that’s one small step for a
man, one giant leap for mankind”; the even greater drama of
apollo 13, rocked by an explosion on the way to the moon
and converted to a lifeboat that returned its crew safely to
earth thanks to the true heroics of the engineers in houston;
and, fnally, the anticlimax of the last apollo missions.
roland fnds that Chaikin had to struggle to maintain a triumphal narrative of
apollo, however, for the missions became a deadend rather than a new beginning
and no amount of heroic prose could overcome that ironic plot twist. 11
american exceptionalism has dominated the vast majority of the national
discussion of spacefight, represented perhaps best in popular culture. as only
one example among many, the late comedian Sam Kinison once ranted to other
10. Chaikin, A Man on the Moon.
11. alex roland,“how We Won the Moon,” New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1994, pp. 1, 25.