Blue Sky Dream (4 page)

The new rules emerged from one of the military’s oldest and simplest theories: Occupy the high ground. Now the high ground was space. Now there would be a scramble to perfect the rocket boosters to lift us there, to build the space platforms from which we could track our enemies, perhaps fire down on our enemies, perhaps knock our enemies’ space-borne weapons out of the sky. Now the money flowing into aerospace would be hundreds and hundreds of billions, and anything that was integral to aerospace, from supercomputers to science scholarships, would be shoved to the top of national budget priorities.

Now a generation of men like my father would spend their lives working on “projects” they could not tell their families about. Now their families would be imbued with a culture that made a faith of fashioning the fastest, farthest, highest technology. A culture that taught the more momentous a machine is, the less likely you are ever to touch it, perhaps even to see it, certainly ever to use it, because it is built to go
way out there.
A blue sky tribe whose fertile crescents were sunny suburbs like my own.

H
ere is an odd thing about this shared story of ours. My tribe’s future was not anything that Dwight D. Eisenhower ever wanted. You would think it might be. He was, after all, the United States President whose sky
Sputnik
trespassed. And he was then the emblem of suburban gentility, the man who earned his good life,
his famously eternal boy’s grin of contentment, by making himself supremely useful to a militarized nation. Ike was the general who golfed. Wasn’t that the very thing that we, my tribe, chose to see in the glint of
Sputnik?
We saw the promise of suburban gentility extended to us as we made ourselves useful to an aerospace militarized America. But no, Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t care much at all for our star or our story.

Ike didn’t like us.

Eisenhower looked at the nation’s accounts back in 1953, the year after he was first elected, the year the Korean War ended, and he was dismayed to see that Truman’s steady rearming had stuffed the federal budget, a growing budget, nearly two-thirds full of defense-related spending. Eisenhower was a man who considered every extra dollar given to the Pentagon a threat to the dream of suburban gentility. He dourly joked that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “don’t know much about fighting inflation.” He said, “This country can choke itself to death piling up military expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.” And so by 1955 Ike was proud to declare he had cut the military budget by 20 percent. His desire to push that graph line further downward was merely bolstered the next year by his resounding re-election.

Like Truman, however, Eisenhower also firmly believed that America must continue to wage the Cold War. Also like Truman, perhaps even more so, Eisenhower saw nuclear weapons as the cheap way to go about it. If America could ring the Soviet domain with nuclear-armed bombers and convince the world we were ready to drop them on our enemy’s advancing tanks and troops, then our citizenry need not choke on the cost of maintaining a much larger conventional military presence abroad. This approach explains why, during the very years that Eisenhower chipped away at military spending, he invested strongly in the foundation of aerospace. He did so not out of any zeal for military expansion, but in pursuit of a less expensive evil.

The inherent flaw to this strategy is that it worked too well. The Soviets did apparently come to believe the United States was
willing to fight “strategically” with nuclear bombs, willing even to use our new, improved hydrogen bombs, a thousand times more powerful than atomic weapons before, as part of our official doctrine of “massive retaliation” against Soviet ground gains. And so the Soviets redoubled work on an H-bomb to answer our own and, having exploded one nine months after we did in August of 1953, they continued developing missiles meant to carry their H-bomb very far, as far as any golf course within any one of America’s genteel suburbs. By the mid-1950s, both nations were pouring more and more millions into the perfection of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Dwight D. Eisenhower dreaded this ICBM race not only because it was dangerous and expensive, but because it was creating before his eyes a new class he didn’t like. In the late days of his presidency he would damn us with now infamous names, calling us “the scientific-technological elite” and “the military-industrial complex.” He would warn of the “danger” posed if public policy fell “captive” to the culture of the technocrat, people like my father.

He would tell a group of reporters: “When you see almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas … there is … almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles.” He would note that a weaponry-driven “technological revolution” made research more critical and also “more formalized, complex and costly,” and that this meant “a steadily increasing share is conducted by, for, or at the direction of the Federal government.” He would mourn what came with this technocracy: The state was now expected “to make life happy in a sort of cradle to grave security,” and this augured the end of “self-dependence, self-confidence, courage, and readiness to take a risk.” By the end of his presidency, Ike would say such things with the air of a general weary in retreat.

Yet, throughout his eight years in office, President Eisenhower found himself with little choice but to promote the ascendence
of my blue sky tribe. Even his brightest hopes carried with them an implied lasting dependence upon us. Eisenhower knew his only bet for making ongoing military cuts was to stop the missile competition with the Soviets, to forge some arms control. This made one of the great obsessions of my tribe, the race into space orbit, a thing that Eisenhower, as much as he wished it, could not ignore. Should there be in the president’s best scenario a treaty freezing the Cold War missile buildup, an orbiting satellite could verify compliance by looking down on the Soviets. Should there be instead Cold War as usual, a spy satellite could tell the president how many missiles were being added to the Soviet arsenal so that we might not over-invest in our own supply. Either way, a satellite could save money for the parsimonious Cold Warrior. Either way, the Soviets, with their improving ground-to-air missiles, were only getting better at shooting down our U-2 spy planes, trapped as they were in Earth’s atmosphere. And so, in addition to the millions he forlornly gave the missile makers, Eisenhower signed the work orders for a fledgling satellite industry.

Once onboard, Eisenhower intended America’s try at a satellite to be a thorough and successful one. But during most of his tenure, the satellite program was also largely civilian-directed and unhurried, for this president chose not to imagine that national prestige, or for that matter his popularity as a president, might be tied to an orbiting symbol. Eisenhower did not particularly believe in a space race. Not even America’s stunned reaction to
Sputnik
changed that about Ike.
Sputnik
, he said, “does not rouse my apprehensions, not one iota … They have put one small ball in the air.”

On November 7, 1957, four days after the Soviets had beaten us into orbit again with far larger
Sputnik II
, six tons of space vehicle carrying one dog, President Eisenhower told the nation:

As I say, Ike did not care much at all for my family’s star, our future, our story.

P
erhaps that is why the blue sky children of my generation have made Dwight D. Eisenhower into a figure of addled docility. We have made him our retro mascot for a lost era’s bliss, and this has allowed us to forget his scolds. He may never have liked us, but we like our idea of Ike. He is our kitschy joke of a grandpa.

Our true father is someone quite different, a man who not only embraced our star, our story, but wrote that story for us over and over again in whatever way suited the mood of the moment, in whatever way made our version of the future seem inevitable. Many times the ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun has been named “the father of America’s space program.” He is father to more. Wernher von Braun fashioned a new creation myth for his tribe and (lasting awhile, at least) for all of America.

Three years before
Sputnik
’s launch, this is what Wernher von Braun said about the prospect of a satellite to those American officials who held the purse strings. He said he could build a “humble” one right away for a mere $100,000, that it would work just fine, and that
“it would be a blow to U.S. prestige if we did not do it first.”
In this familiar patter—
Low, low price. Immediate delivery. Be the first to have one.
—we find the hard-selling entrepreneur, a type that belongs to all America timelessly. But here, too, is a quality quite particular to my people, our moment.

The classic American entrepreneurial hero searches out unmet
desires in the everyday world and then, with a certain flexible flair, invents the answers, products for the masses to use. Von Braun’s genius lay elsewhere. He was brilliant at inventing new and different uses for the only product he ever desired to make, the space rocket. He was a master at selling his one product to the only customers who could ever afford it, a nation’s rulers. The big, blond man who was gently funny and firm, always so firm in his purpose, had a certain flexible flair for making powerful men believe in him.

And because rulers survive by shaping and reflecting their nation’s collective psyche, von Braun came to their aid in fomenting mass imagination, mass desire. Von Braun made it his business to understand the workings of so gossamer a thing as “national prestige” and what might be a “blow” to it. Wherever he happened to find himself, in Hitler’s Germany or Ike’s America, Wernher von Braun wrote the sales jingles for his product in the local dialect.

As a teenager, von Braun already was learning these skills of salesmanship from a mentor, the mathematician Hermann Oberth, famous for his pioneering calculations and speculations about space travel. In 1923 Oberth grabbed attention with a slim volume called
The Rocket into Planetary Space
, and in 1929 he published a greatly expanded version,
Roads to Space Travel.
In between, the beetle-browed professor with the black mustache signed with the film director Fritz Lang, who was looking for some spectacular way to publicize his upcoming space rocket movie,
The Girl in the Moon.
Oberth took studio money on the promise he would build the first honest spaceship, a two-stage manned rocket, and blast it off at the movie premiere. The professor, not surprisingly, was still tinkering with the very beginnings of his prototype well after the film premiere had come and gone.

But Oberth’s vision had galvanized some young rocket enthusiasts in Berlin who formed themselves into the German Society for Space Travel, and one of these young men was Wernher von Braun. Eighteen years old in the year 1930, Wernher von
Braun came to Hermann Oberth and asked to work for free on the rocket motor that was left over from
The Girl in the Moon.

I
n the Piper Cherokee we are flying, my father and I, somewhere between Earth and the other planets who look down upon us. I know the planets are there even when the sky is bright with daylight. I have been told this by my father, who always seems very pleased to be asked any question about the planets. I know that the planets will be there every hour of the day forever, and that the planets are connected to my father’s work. To cover the empty wall of my new bedroom, my father has given me a map of the solar system, and so the planets are the first things I look at upon awakening. As I lay in bed studying their various faces made up of moon shadows and swirling gas patterns, Jupiter seems to me big and friendly, Saturn haughty with all its rings, Pluto sullen at finding itself frozen at the outer edge of outer space. The solar system is a crowded and important place with a rectangular border, I can see by the map, and a boy like me should know his way around it. Why else would my father have placed the solar system next to my bed?

A
fter the end of the Second World War, Wernher von Braun, by then the world’s leading authority on rocketry, came to live in the United States and began to sell his space rocket dreams, in many varieties of ways, to his new customer base. Upon arrival, he wasted no time dashing off a short fiction about going to Mars and meeting the green Martians who lived there. Over the years he summoned the biggest possible names, Charles Darwin and God, as endorsers for his cause. He said going to the moon meant “a completely new step in the evolution of man,” and that “we are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits.”

A good and early example of the supple appeal of Wernher von Braun lies in the article he contributed to a 1952 edition of
Collier’s
magazine, a special issue titled: “Man Will Conquer Space
Soon
.” The Cold War was on, of course, and so von Braun’s glossy prophecy began this way:

“Within the next 10 to 15 years, the earth will have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could either be the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war—depending on who makes and controls it.” Wernher von Braun saw market potential in the draconian logic of the Cold War.

Wernher von Braun saw potential, as well, in the decade’s nervously conformist mood. And so, our “technicians in this space station … will keep under constant inspection every ocean, continent, country and city. Even small towns will be clearly visible,” he promised. “Nothing will go unobserved.” America might, in short, occupy the heavens to monitor deviance at home. We would conquer Communists and space itself while freezing in place what was clean and good and neighborly back on Earth. Those were just a few of Wernher von Braun’s reasons for why his new country needed a space rocket.