MOON, Pa. — On July 22, 1969, barely 48 hours after a human being
first stepped onto the moon's surface, a community in Pittsburgh's
western suburbs called Moon Township had a parade, as suburban
communities do.
Understandably, Moon had achieved some notoriety
in the weeks leading up to Apollo 11's lunar landing. And on this day,
it named Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins honorary citizens and lowered an
"astronaut" from a hovering helicopter into Moon Park.
And why
not? This was a time of great joy. The Pittsburgh Press was
editorializing about the "Moondust Glowing in America's Eyes." The
downtown district's "Moonday" shut down offices and some businesses.
The Foodland supermarket announced a sale that promised
"out-of-this-world specials" to customers: "We've gone lunatic!"
Moon
was also the home of Pittsburgh's airport, where soaring into the sky
in a metal bird remained a romantic notion. These were still the days
when, as TWA once put it, you could climb aboard "super-skyliners" that
were "skyclubs by day, skysleepers by night."
We are 40 years older now, we Americans. And many things have changed.
The
final Apollo mission came home before Nixon resigned. Skylab fell to
Earth. Challenger disintegrated going up, Columbia coming down.
Kennedy's New Frontier ethos — space as a kinder, gentler Manifest
Destiny — slouched into the "Alien" catchphrase: "In space, no one can
hear you scream."
Today, the reasons for Americans to pay
attention to the ground, rather than the heavens, can be rattled off
like a parody of a Billy Joel song. Terrorists. Global warming. Swine
flu. Economic collapse. Nukes in North Korea and mass shootings in the
heartland.
In Moon, the old airport is gone; its gleaming
replacement opened 16 years ago, one township over. Jets still rumble
overhead, but airline ads today skip the romance of the skies and
emphasize workaday convenience. "Boundless free snacks," says a Jet
Blue billboard on nearby I-279.
Yet Moon still hopes. In the
park, adults eat in the Apollo picnic area while kids cluster in the
playground around the spaceship seesaws, the rocket climber, the piece
of metal twisted whimsically into an abstract lunar lander. "Explore
Our Universe," the township says, a slogan it introduced in 2004.
But
is that something that Americans still desire? Is space, the final
frontier, still the American place to aim for? Or when it comes to
exploring the stars, was Yogi Berra right when he said that the future
ain't what it used to be?
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"At the frontier, the bonds
of custom are broken, and unrestraint is triumphant." So said Frederick
Jackson Turner, the 19th-century historian whose ideas showed Americans
how important their frontier experience was to them.
"I wanted to
be a spaceman — that's what I wanted to be. But now that I am a
spaceman, nobody cares about me." So sang Harry Nilsson, the musician
who in 1972 channeled the changing feelings about space exploration in
this country.
Today, somewhere between those two absurdly different ideas, sits America's attitude about space.
Through
the 1950s and 1960s, it was the vast, uncharted place where the
American imagination dwelled, pushed by the fear that the Soviets would
get there first. The Space Age was everywhere: Even when it was
threatening, it was enchanting. Even when it was menacing, it beckoned.
Even when it was lampooned ("The Jetsons") or sublimated (car
tailfins), it only reflected how deeply entrenched in the culture it
truly was.
But today space occupies a very different place in the popular culture.
Our
visions of it have become darker, more suspicious, more xenophobic.
When a space shuttle launches, many Americans don't really notice
unless something goes wrong. In a country defined by its obsession with
novelty, often the response is predictably American, the thing that
makes us great and weak at the same time: Been there, done that.
We
have gone from stirring Kennedy oratory about "landing a man on the
moon and returning him safely to the earth" to an ad for Alexia Crunchy
Snacks that promises its product is — wait for it — "a giant leap for
snackkind."
We have lapped many of yesterday's visions of
tomorrow. "Lost in Space" was set in 1997, "Space: 1999" and "2001: A
Space Odyssey" in their own obvious years. So many American futures are
now in the past.
We have traded optimism — even the more horrific
sci-fi of the 1950s generally operated on the presumption that America
would, should, engage with space — to the creeping menace manifest in
"The X-Files," after which you ended up wishing that anything unearthly
would just go away.
Pick up a fresh copy of the rebooted,
reconstituted, reconfigured comic-book tales of "Flash Gordon" and
"Buck Rogers" and a far more malignant vision of a spacefaring future
smacks you upside the head. Even the Superman myth has been retooled,
in the TV show "Smallville," to include "meteor freaks" and Kryptonians
who seem more at home in a Wes Craven movie than Clark Kent's backyard.
Even
in this summer's new "Star Trek" movie, the culture's most optimistic
take on space travel, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy's usually cheerful
cantankerousness plumbs its deepest reaches yet: "Space," he grouses,
"is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence."
What happened here?
