Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is in a unique position to assess books about space. After
all, he's been there. In this essay, Aldrin writes about Wyn Wachhorst's
collection of lyrical essays, "The Dream of Spaceflight."
History will remember the inhabitants of our time as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years. I've had the good fortune to be an integral part of that journey, from my first ride in an airplane at the age of 2--a Lockheed Vega with my father as pilot--to F-86 Sabre jets in Korea, to Gemini and Apollo. One of my earliest memories is a piece of fabric from the Wright Flyer framed on my father's wall. He had been an aide to General Billy Mitchell and a physics student of rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. He later persuaded Charles Lindbergh to solicit Guggenheim funding for Goddard's rocket experiments in New Mexico. Growing up in the shadow of aviation and space pioneers, I was a close witness to the dream of reaching the moon and planets as it evolved from fantasy to reality. In the end, I was lucky enough to become part of that reality.
The heart and spirit of that journey are beautifully captured for the first time in Wyn Wachhorst's "The Dream of Spaceflight." For those who grew up with that dream during the forties and fifties, the book often feels like an old song or a forgotten scent. And for those who have actually flown in space, it can tap latent feelings that have gone largely unexpressed. But the book isn't only for space buffs, it's for everyone who sees the mystery of the cosmos as analog to the human soul. It's for anyone who seeks a meaning beyond the self, a destiny beyond ephemeral ills. Bypassing all the rationales and tired histories, it gets at the deeper motives, at what it feels like to dream the dream--the images and associations. It's a radical departure from previous writing on the subject, a merging of inner and outer that offers a new way of looking at spaceflight. Probing the soul of exploration, it reaffirms the nobility of the human species.
Wyn Wachhorst gets it right--the aura of those paintings that once radiated from the covers of Astounding Science Fiction, the groundbreaking films like Destination Moon and 2001, and those "cricket-pulsing, honeysuckle nights" when kids like me sat on the porch under a virgin moon, viewing the larger craters through Dad's binoculars--so close, yet so impossibly remote. The vignettes on the forerunners of spaceflight--from Kepler in the seventeenth century to von Braun in the twentieth--and on more recent figures such as Carl Sagan, Gene Kranz, and astronaut Ed White (my classmate at West Point and a close friend) are unique in combining little-known facts and historical insight with deeply moving narrative.
When I first saw the Imax films shot by the shuttle astronauts, I thought they were about as close as one could come to the visual and emotional experience of being in space without actually going there. Yet there are descriptive passages in this book--spacewalks, Earthrise, lunar landscapes, Saturn seen from its near moon, Mimas--that evoke the same feelings, with the same intensity. The deeper aspects of these experiences have never been captured so well as in this short, philosophic, and poetic book.
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"The Dream of Spaceflight"
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