The triumph I experienced as a young person when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and the tragedy that draped me when the Challenger crew died in a space shuttle explosion appear to be memory-chapters in a predictable continuum, but is more complex than that, and now, more personal.
Margaret Lazarus Dean, as enamored of spaceflight as many of us were who grew up in the “heroic” age of NASA, embarks on an odyssey in Leaving Orbit to determine for herself the meaning of the end of NASA’s shuttle program, and of manned space flight as a government endeavor altogether.
She manages to both bring us back into that era of hope and adventure that Gemini and Apollo inspired, and also to capture the ambivalence and loss of momentum that the space shuttle program endured.
Hers is a personal journey. Indeed, it took me a while to warm to her new-journalism style of injecting so much of herself and her reflection into the story. Her persistence, however, helped me realize that all our national experiences take on meaning only through our personal relation to them. Understanding gathers from that perspective.
As our lives become more disparate, as we focus on our own “likes,” watch our “favorite” shows at our own times, and listen to the virtual world as we walk through the actual one, one wonders if we might loose a national cultural cohesion. Perhaps that is the story of the NASA spaceflight program; born when a national goal could captivate the country for a decade, and dissolved when the autonomy of our connectedness obscures what might be common among us.
Margaret Lazarus Dean, as enamored of spaceflight as many of us were who grew up in the “heroic” age of NASA, embarks on an odyssey in Leaving Orbit to determine for herself the meaning of the end of NASA’s shuttle program, and of manned space flight as a government endeavor altogether.
She manages to both bring us back into that era of hope and adventure that Gemini and Apollo inspired, and also to capture the ambivalence and loss of momentum that the space shuttle program endured.
Hers is a personal journey. Indeed, it took me a while to warm to her new-journalism style of injecting so much of herself and her reflection into the story. Her persistence, however, helped me realize that all our national experiences take on meaning only through our personal relation to them. Understanding gathers from that perspective.
As our lives become more disparate, as we focus on our own “likes,” watch our “favorite” shows at our own times, and listen to the virtual world as we walk through the actual one, one wonders if we might loose a national cultural cohesion. Perhaps that is the story of the NASA spaceflight program; born when a national goal could captivate the country for a decade, and dissolved when the autonomy of our connectedness obscures what might be common among us.
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