A Day at the Space Center; or, Lamenting our Lost Space Age

Playground of the Musks: although historic Launchpad 39-A looks empty and still now, SpaceX has the commercial lease to launch from there in the future.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it felt like there was something suspicious in the way our tour guide at Kennedy Space Center kept talking about Elon Musk. In my last post, I gushed about how much I enjoyed our visit to the center, but hearing so many times about how this South African billionaire equity dude was a "visionary" and the future of our space program seemed inappropriate.

Every museum is a window into the time and place where it exists. So, while the American Museum of Natural History is a case study in the "benefits" and contradictions of modern American plutocracy, the lesson at KSC seems to be the ways Americans are avoiding the subject of how wealth polarization is an integral part of our national decline, and how it is a process we refuse to acknowledge, let alone understand or attempt to address.

Everything at the space center is a celebration of a specific moment in American history. That period of a few decades — which is emphatically now in the past — when we had a sense of common purpose, and the ingenuity and motivation to do amazing things. We look back at what we did with awe and pride, but when we turn to the present and the future, we have… well, Elon Musk.

We are now at a very low point of the history of our space program — though you hate to say "the lowest" point because it certainly could get worse. We have to rely on the Russian's to get to and from space. The Chinese have the kind of "let's show the world who's boss" gumption that we had 50 years ago. And the void is filled with Musk's SpaceX, and other companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Sierra Nevada. Each of these is a perfect representation of late-stage capitalism: entities designed to create value for shareholders, not to produce a profit while doing cool and useful things for all of us.

These companies alone are what makes KSC what it always has been — a working spaceport and the 20th century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. That's important to the tour guides who now talk about CEOs with the same kind of awe we once reserved for John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and for the entire regional economy, which with zero irony calls itself the "Space Coast." Guys like Musk are the only viable future in sight — a future that is also seductively exciting and profitable as well.

This is the great fever dream of privatization — the twisted logic that things that ought to be free of the greed and callousness of the market should be handled by anything other than the government. It is a dream shared by the stunted adolescent boys who think Ayn Rand is a great thinker, and the centrist Democrats who so admire their own genius and virtue that of course they should get fabulously rich solving the world's problems.

But to have these thoughts at Kennedy is an insult to the memory of what Americans did there. You see very clearly, now that nothing is really being launched from all those disused pads spread all over, that the glory days are well past. That the practical reality of what SpaceX and the others propose (not the fanciful p.r. chatter about going to Mars), is merely redoing what we figured out how to do 40 years ago.

The heroic Space Age celebrated at KSC is the product of a stream of circumstances in the post-War years, when most of the world had blown itself to rubble and the U.S. completely remade the global economic system to our advantage. Back in the day when we had the will to dream big, the willingness to pay our f--king taxes so we could have nice things, and the trust that collective action could do things like send us to the moon. When we had a rival in the USSR that pushed us stay on track.

But that's all well over. We've turned into a third-rate plutocracy where NASA has to beg hillbilly congressmen who believe in the literal truth of fairy tales from the Book of Genesis for change from the sofa.

Space is gonna do me good

The early ones

As we drove across Merritt Island, which in addition to being the home of the Kennedy Space Center is also a giant nature preserve, we kept count of the alligators we saw in the drainage trench beside the road. The idea of wild alligators is a trippy one for northerners, but Florida is like that in every single way. You get to have fun down there with sharp contrasts — palm trees all over, egrets and herons hanging around, air temperature that isn't too cold. The land is lush, packed, and green, and it is a bit jarring to think that it is from there that humans blasted off to explore the cold vastness of space.

We went to Cape Canaveral on our last trip to Florida with Mila and my mom, and it was something I'd been looking forward to for years. That place is deeply burned in my memory, because I must have been about seven years old myself when I went there. That whole trip is pretty much welded into my consciousness — right from the flight on Eastern airlines, which was quite an odyssey to me. About the space center I remember lots of open spaces, and a kind of bright sunlight that made everything glow in a weird way. I remember the sandy soil and sharp prickly grass, and the rockets lying around at all angles around like broken pipes.

That trip we also had a chance to watch a space shuttle launch. It was a few days later, and it was from Daytona Beach up the coast, but I remember being told about it and being very excited. I was a bit disappointed when the thing itself was just watching a long matchstick arc into the sky over the ocean, along with a distant rumble. I was expecting something more akin to what you saw on t.v., so I was a bit disappointed. I tried hard to remember that feeling as I got all excited explaining things to Mila, to not take her occassional indifference personally.

I realized the challenge right off the bat, when we signed up for a bus tour of the vast facility, driving out to the old launch pads by the sea, which at this point are really not much more than disused industrial sites. The idea of what happened there requires a massive act of imagination, and I'm not sure if I convinced her it was worth her time.

She bravely got through the experience, but I was fascinated throughout. NASA has been the repository for so many dreams of what it means to be on the technological cutting edge that seeing the actual buildings where it happens is very weird. At the center of the base is a non-descript cluster of buildings called the "Industrial Area," which features the center's headquarters and its operations building. That's the one where astronauts would train and be quarantined just before their missions, the one they walked out of to the bus for the drive to the pad. The buildings are almost comically common, like some backwater office complex. And it is hard to believe that men and women could plan and execute the launch of people to the moon and back from from a plain building make of cinder blocks, with air conditioners droning in the windows, and blinds keeping out the intense afternoon sun. With a few alligators lolling about not too far away.

And there are the hilarious contrasts down there that you can't really appreciate. The Vehicle Assembly Building is one of the most interesting structures on earth — the world's largest single-story facility, with nearly the most interior volume on earth, and at 526 feet high believed to be the tallest building outside a city. That last fact is what grabs you — you stare at the place and realize there is something up with it, but it feels like some kind of optical illusion because there is no context whatsoever. 

Bigger than it looks

The KSC experience really takes off with the exhibits, which are slick but not simple, and dump a lot of information at you in a flashy and fun way. There's lots of engineering and aviation science, and well-done history. You get a real sense of the enormous leap between the early Mercury-Redstone rockets of the Mercury program and the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program just a few years later — the jump from modified ICBMs with people strapped to the top designed to throw you off the face of the earth, and actual spacecraft designed to throw you out of earth's orbit. They do an amazing job of presenting just how amazing and strange the Apollo program was — that we really haven't seen or done anything like it before or since.

If there is a disappointing angle to all this, it has to be the coverage of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which are assigned to their own pavilion near the entrance. The exhibit feels campy in a way that disrespects what these these guys in aluminum foil suits with their buzzcuts and cool expressions represented.

The new big thing at KSC is the space shuttle "Atlantis," which has been housed in its own brand new pavilion since last year. The shuttle program gets the respect it deserves, which had definitely faded in the years of routine missions to haul up satellites and space station modules. The exhibit makes you realize what a technical achievement the program was, and that there was never anything routine about what they were doing.

As you can see, the visit brought out something unusually boyish in me, and I'm aware how silly it seems. Earlier this spring, I took Mila to hear two astronauts speak at MCLA, and there was something about their demeanor and the way they spoke that was timelessly earnest. It was in the way they rattled off statistics about mission specs, payloads, and the mechanics of keeping yourself alive in an absurdly hostile environment. And at other times they became awkwardly poetic as they described watching whole continents pass under their eyes, or about the giddy sense of purpose that comes with being able to see the whole earth as a frail little ball hanging in vast black nothing.

KSC has created a space that allows you to appreciate all that, and frees you from the obligation to be an eye-rolling teenager. For me, I realized that if you look at it with a squint, the entire space program doesn't have to have been about what I cynically assumed it was. Not a public relations branch of the military/industrial complex, nor a heroic advance in the science of understanding our universe, nor about practical stuff like better communications and weather satellites. In a sense, it is a great big poetry program designed to make us wonder in a secular, humanist, nondenominational way about what we are and what we could be. About the great things we can do when we inspire one another, and share the burden of designing our technology and paying our bills. To feel pride and astonishment about what we did in the past, and to think constructively about our future.

Jeez, that's corny. They must've put something in the water.

The stones of San Juan

The way these things work, I didn't get to see a lot of San Juan — let alone Puerto Rico — when we passed through last month. We spent most of our day climbing around the fortress at San Cristobal. For fans of fortifications, like me, this is plenty fun — even if I had to play up the pirate attack angle to keep my daughter's attention. Here's are the coastal defenses of the old city, looking over toward El Morro and the entrance to the bay.