Blue Sky Dream (5 page)

The
Collier’s
package included pieces by other space experts, but what made the parts join into an irresistible panorama were large, lush paintings by an artist named Chesley Bonestell. There was a swept-winged spaceship, more rakish than any Oldsmobile hood ornament. There was a white, windowed doughnut wheeling over blue earth. There was a desert mountain chiaroscuro and tiny human shapes in the shadows, gazing toward a red ball far off in the blackness. Under this last painting was the explanatory caption:

“Mars, at its closest 35,000,000 miles from Earth, as seen from the outer moon Deimos, where man could land before going on to the planet.”

The words, postcard language, are of a perfect tone, for Chesley Bonestell was a painter of postcards from Wernher von Braun’s inevitable future.

My father has shown me a book given to him as a boy that made him ache for that future. The book is
The Conquest of Space
, published in 1949 when my father was sixteen. The numbers-dense text is by one of von Braun’s German peers, Willy Ley. The illustrations, dozens of them, are Chesley Bonestell’s postcards from
out there.
On orange Venus, “windblown dust etching the rocks into fantastic shapes.” On Mercury, mustardy mud plains cracked by sun so hot, “explorers could not leave the protection of their ship for long.” On Saturn, rings of rainbow hues, viewed “during a midsummer night.” On the moon, “the mountains of eternal light.” On Jupiter, a fiery waterfall pouring out of the gloom; the “lake below is liquid ammonia.” On Mars, a snowdrift foreground, just as it would appear while “looking towards the setting sun.” Chesley Bonestell created the travel brochure for a sight-seeing trip through space, the collective vacation awaiting the nation when a generation’s hard work was done.

As early as 1952 Wernher von Braun was telling America we could achieve all this and, with the shrewdest intuition about his latest client, he was conveying something more. We would domesticate space even as we carried on for the cowboys who were, at the time, cramming the television channels. We would do it even as we fulfilled Manifest Destiny: “Crossing the Last Frontier” is what Wernher von Braun named his
Collier’s
article; the best-selling book that sprang from it he called
Across the Last Frontier.

And yet nothing in this catalog of persuasions is the central story of my people, the story that makes Wernher von Braun our visionary patriarch. That story may be found in the introduction he penned for the 1962 edition of
The Mars Project
, a book he’d written a decade before. The language is not at all as sensual as a Chesley Bonestell painting. But beneath its beige tones lay a new creation myth for America, a re-imagined story about how technological superiority comes alive.

The old myth taught that the lightbulb, the telephone, the
airplane—almost every American history-changing machine—had sprung from a lonely visionary tinkering alone. First, individual triumph. Then, via the marketplace, national progress. But that was a quaint story now finished, and Wernher von Braun said as much. He wrote that we of the now-arrived space age must face the death of “backyard inventor, the heroic inventor.”

Accept it, said Wernher von Braun. Any “true” space effort “can only be achieved by the coordinated might of scientists, technicians, and organizers belonging to very nearly every branch of modern science and industry. Astronomers, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, physicists, chemists, and test pilots are essential; but no less so are economists, businessmen, diplomats, and a host of others.”

A
host
of people, Wernher von Braun saw, all ready to be
coordinated
and put to work on great projects of the state. The time had come, he was saying, for nothing less than the reorganization of America’s way of making a living. Wernher von Braun saw, in missiles and satellites and spaceships and the people who would create them, no threat to suburban gentility. Unlike angst-ridden Ike, Wernher von Braun saw in aerospace the work of a worthy new middle class, not an elite so much as a
host
of scientific-technological-military-industrial-complex families living lives of modern purpose. He saw my family, joined to some bigger design.

A bit further down in the same book introduction, the father of our tribe discusses the “grand scale” of work to be done on his “flotilla of space vessels” destined for Mars. The crew would be “not less than 70 men.” Presumably they would leave behind the millions more of us building his space rocket product, living in our many Valleys of Heart’s Delight. Here is the central story of my tribe, as told by Wernher von Braun:

“Great numbers of professionals from many walks of life, trained to co-operate unfailingly, must be recruited. Such training will require years before each can fit his special ability into the pattern of the whole.”

“G
ot your bearings yet?” My father is helping me locate myself in relation to the earth as we fly on toward our neighborhood, our house, my mother who will be down there waving to us. “Those big structures there, recognize them? They’re the hangars at Moffet Field.” My father has told me about those before, hollow hulks by the highway, once home to huge military blimps, somebody’s idea organized on a grand scale that turned out, in the end, to be a detour on the way to a dead end.

“Next to those, in there somewhere, is your dad’s place of work. That’s Lockheed.” This holds great interest for me, given that I have never been inside Lockheed, have only seen, once from the company parking lot, the barbed wire and chain-link and sentry kiosks that my father passes through whenever he goes to work. What I see, as I follow my father’s eyes down, is a very large, white radar dish pointed into the heavens, and around it many tight-lidded shoe boxes, windowless, gray, some with smaller dishes and antennas twisting off their roofs.
In there, somewhere.
I remain vaguely terrified.

“See the freeway? Going in over there,” says my father, pointing to a great trench of flattened dirt. I know there is a great trench of flattened dirt not far from our house, but I also know it is but one of many. Wherever my family drives, it seems I see out the car window the yellow graders and dump trucks and bulldozers making their endless gouges in the ground. And so I wonder, is that great trench of flattened dirt down there ours?

“Eighty-five, and over there two-eighty.”

Yes, those sound like ours, the ones the adults talk about eagerly as they stand in front of their new tract homes on these warm summer evenings, their cigarettes glowing, their laughter drifting over to us kids as we chase each other from yard to yard. Eighty-five and two-eighty sound like the freeways that, if ever finished, will connect to the expressways that connect to the street that connects to our cul-de-sac.

I
t took little time at all for Lyndon Baines Johnson to exploit the luck of
Sputnik
. The senator from Texas had a problem, which was that a wing of his Democratic Party wanted the desegregation of America, and this probably made his party’s next presidential candidate unelectable. What LBJ saw in Sputnik, therefore, was a fortunate icon of promise and peril to dangle above the middle class he needed. He had in hand a political consultant’s memo saying the issue of
Sputnik
“is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic party, and elect you president.”

He opened proceedings of his Senate Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs on November 25, 1957, by describing the two
Sputniks
as a technological Pearl Harbor that Eisenhower’s Republicans had missed on their watch. He, for one, was worried about U.S. missile supremacy. He summoned Vannevar Bush, the framer of “big science” policy for Franklin Roosevelt, and Vannevar Bush declared
Sputnik
“one of the finest things Russia ever did for us” because it “has waked this country up” to the need for more science education, more respect for the scientist “as a fellow worker for the good of the country.”

Americans listened to all this and pondered in their newspapers a certain proof that Communists were heartless. To great outrage here, the dog in
Sputnik II
had been left, by Soviet plan, to die in space.

This is the point in time where Walter A. McDougall, noted historian of aerospace politics, locates the full firming up and taking charge of what he calls the space era “command economy.” The command economy was the sort of economy Dwight D. Eisenhower dreaded and Wernher von Braun made his creation myth. It was the government mobilizing and funding technology with a zeal that would burn even hotter once LBJ and John F. Kennedy rode their
Sputnik
scare strategy to the White House in 1960.

It was the state commanding, in a sense, that not only technology but
places
come into being.

Blue sky metropolises, nurtured by federal dollars, would be commanded to rise out of orange groves and scrublands and prairies and deserts and other former boondocks to industrial America. The money would flow to the Northwest of Boeing, to the Texas of Bell Aviation and Mission Control, to the Rocky Mountains of the North American Air Defense Command, to the Florida of Martin-Marietta and Cape Canaveral, to the Alabama of Wernher von Braun’s U.S. Army Redstone rocket works. The money would generally flow to where land was cheap, even better if the land was federally owned and so could be bought at subsidized bargains. The money would tend to flow to places the military liked, and this often meant places wide open, remote, and quite far from the stodgy East.

The money would go, as well, to certain centers of technological innovation, the realms, for example, of Boston’s MIT and Pasadena’s CalTech, universities that made a specialty of military contracts. A basic rule of thumb is that the money flowed to where life could be made affordably good for the blue sky professional and family. This meant that even when the money found its way to Massachusetts and New York, it tended to pass up the old manufacturing cores for suburbias like Bethpage, Long Island (Grumman), and those around Boston’s Route 128 (aerospace electronics).

Ann Markusen, a Rutgers professor of urban planning and policy development who has studied the patterns closely, has written that after the Korean War the flow of military contract dollars shifted away from traditional industrial centers in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast states, irrigating instead the Pacific Coast and “all other outlying regions.” Looking at the population booms that resulted, she traces “an arc stretching from Seattle down through California and the Intermountain West, Texas, isolated spots in the Southeast and up the Eastern Seaboard to Long Island and New England.” A great curve of blue sky communities, commanded into being.

The biggest of them all, of course, was and is Southern California, home to Aerojet and Convair and Ford Aerospace and Hughes and Litton and Lear Siegler and McDonnell-Douglas and Northrop and Rockwell and RAND and TRW and the United States Air Force Space Division and all the hundreds of subcontractors that serve them as well as many key military bases and universities. The San Fernando Valley of Southern California is home as well to Lockheed, and a time came in the late 1950s when Lockheed was commanded to build an answer to
Sputnik
. This caused Lockheed to seek out a second California home farther north and to locate its Missiles and Space Division in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Lockheed moved 2,000 families there within a few weeks in 1956, at the time the largest single move of corporate personnel. Over the next five years the division’s ranks would rise to nearly 20,000, making Lockheed the area’s single biggest employer by the early 1960s.

The Chamber of Commerce brochure meant to entice families like mine showed pictures of blossoming orchards in “California’s All-Year Garden,” one of “the most beautiful valleys in the world” where “life moves smoothly under a benevolent kindly sun.”

We were assured, too, that a “prominent educational psychologist of Columbia University” had used “modern quantitative methods” in comparing “thirty-seven points of commonplace excellence” in 310 U.S. cities. His judgment of the Valley of Heart’s Delight: “Tops in general goodness of living.”