JG Ballard
WHAT happened to the Space Age? Its once heroic vision of our planetary future now seems little more than a mirage. Yet in 1957, I remember listening to the radio call-sign of Sputnik 1, relayed on the BBC bulletins, and the sense I had that this was the only news that mattered. As it raced around the planet, its urgent tocsin seemed the harbinger of a new age, a rallying cry that summoned the human race to embark on its greatest adventure, the colonisation of the entire known universe.
In 1961, Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and became, I thought, the only human being from our millennium who would be remembered in 50,000 years’ time. The Apollo spacecraft carried yet more jut- jawed astronauts to the Moon. The grainy pictures on our screens followed the astronauts as they bumbled about like so many silver-suited Poohs on the lunar surface, carrying out token scientific experiments and keeping up their spirits with lumbering humour.
The great vision of galactic exploration had begun to fade. The suspicion dawned that outer space might be – dare one say it – boring. Having expended all these billions on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn’t very much to do there.
Besides, absolute zero was not a temperature at which anything very interesting ever happened. We began to realise that the most fascinating planet in the universe, and by far the strangest, was the one that the astronauts had left behind them. Deep space was a vast and empty cul- de-sac, of interest only to astrophysicists and poets.
Any hint of poetry, of course, had been carefully screened out by Nasa. Already, in the earliest days of the orbital Mercury flights, the space agency’s spokesmen had presented the astronauts as dedicated test pilots, untouched by any psychological or mystical factors that might exist, in the shadows of their technical missions.
Here, I think, Nasa seriously blundered. “Columbus,” Andr Breton once wrote, “had to sail with madmen to discover America.” A hint of madness, of the solitary dreamer’s private obsessions, might have transformed the Apollo flights in the public’s eyes.
The astronauts, claimed the Nasa spokesmen, never dreamt in space, and for that matter were not the kind of guys who dreamt much back home on Earth. A pity, I felt. I would like to have known what the astronauts dreamed of as they lay asleep on the Moon’s surface. Did they remember their early childhoods more vividly, or have a deeper premonition of their own deaths? Has a sex act, of any kind, ever taken place in space? As the astronauts paraded for the Life magazine photo-shoots with their impossibly plucky wives and over-groomed children, I longed for a hint of an improper emotion, an unseemly sentiment. Yet their subsequently unhappy careers reveal the severe tensions these outstandingly brave men endured. Aldrin’s breakdown, Armstrong’s silence, the excursion by the others into alcoholism, mysticism and ESP, suggest many more conflicts were going on in their minds.
Perhaps they were simply too afraid. It may be that extreme fear is a built-in extra that can never be erased from space flight. Perhaps the prolonged periods of zero- gravity recapitulate states of infantile dependency, or stir frightening memories of our earlier arboreal existence when the weightlessness of free fall generally ended in a waiting predator’s jaws. Whatever the reason, the Space Age slowly dismantled itself. Far from lasting for hundreds of years, as seemed likely in 1957, it may have lasted for barely 15, from Gargarin’s flight in 1961 to the Skylab splashdown in 1974, the first not to be shown live on TV, because the American networks realised that the public was bored.
Perhaps, too, we suspected that the rocket- powered spacecraft belonged to the same brute-force nineteenth-century technology that powered steam engines and artillery weapons, rather than to the invisible electronic technologies of the late 20th century. A curious feature of the Space Age was its lack of any real spin-off, its failure to excite the public imagination, to influence fashion, consumer design or architecture. How different from the Thirties, when the ever faster trains, planes and cars, exerted an enormous influence on consumer design, streamlining everything from department stores to teapots.
Nevertheless, the dream of space travel endures. Dr Robert Zubrin, the chairman of the National Space Society, insists on America’s need to set itself the highest goals, to rekindle the frontier spirit and to think in the largest terms, which he equates with the limitless dimensions of the external universe.
But is pondering upon the universe really thinking on the largest possible scale? It may be a disguised way of thinking small – for all that superabundance of light years, an infinitude of nothingness is still nothing.
Writer JG Ballard has just published a collection of non-fiction, A User’s Guide to the Millennium
ENDS