The fair-haired boy, John Glenn, was such a good astronaut that he went into politics and slipped in a bathtub. Gus Grissom (now dead) let his capsule sink in the Atlantic. Yuri Gagarin (now dead) circled the world. The Americans sent up a monkey which lived. The booster was as American as Werner von Braun, but it did not explode and the race to the moon was on. The army developed the Jupiter rocket with the spinning Explorer satellite as its payload. But the shiny object could fly only a yard before collapsing inward.
#Contraption maker space madness free#
(and Nixon was only Vice-President.) Then America's hopes, indeed, the free world's, depended on a frail rocket named Vanguard. Where is the bravery that sustained the nation through the rigors of the space race? Before historical revisionists set in, the fifties were known as a time of postwar boom. The cities hold more dangers in store for the timid. At any rate, we gaze into the night sky with unaccustomed security these days. Perhaps the massive 800 page Condon report dealt the death blow to the boom. Occasionally a local newspaper will print one housewife's account of how she met the flaming creatures from the sun, but our fears have been relocated. The golden days of UFO scares in little California towns are gone. Yet there are still more severe side effects of the Nixon years. No more will the great von Braun shout, "This whole space program is based on the theory that three pregnant women can have one baby in three months!" The program is stillborn.
And they no longer speak with a German accent left over from a great world war. The scientists themselves are more concerned about the marital problems their involvement with machines has caused. Even the staff at Cape Kennedy is quitting without having been brainwashed by the Spiderman from Mercury. Clark), deadly, suffocating moondust (Howard Fast). The astronauts found no subterranean insect monsters (H. We must place part of the blame on the fact that landing on the moon was much duller than any story could have been. The recession has become so widespread as to paralyze our space program. How else would we know what is going to happen to the Earth in five billion years? How else could we encounter the blob or see whole galaxies destroyed? Does it not also fulfill a higher need-to find a myth of the twentieth century? Yet despite the myth-making 2001, we currently languish in a Science Fiction recession. Who believes this sort of escapism anymore? Rather, who does not? What else fills the same unconscious needs with such a broad arsenal of devices and monsters. "Wow! Oh boy! Hoo! Have you got some imagination" The Funco File 1969 by Burt Cole. But no one knows for sure.ĭjeela-Lal said: "With no way to stop it until this entire planet becomes an orbiting ball of brain rattling around the sun?" One theory has it that it grows its own crystals down below. "We know it operates its own robot circuits. This is all speculative, you understand." "What probably happens is that it seeks natural crevices and interstices in the rock and spreads through them. "How do you mean, 'exists'?" Djeela-Lal said curiously. "The machine, as we know it, exists for the most part underground."
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