Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age shaped our vision of a world beyond

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2003 by Harrington, Ralph

Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: how the Space Age shaped our vision of a world beyond, London, Chatto & Windus (2003), 302 pp., L12.99.

This Space Age has yet to find its historians. There are plenty of journalistic accounts of space flight, a good deal has been written on the science and hardware, and works on the 'military-industrial complex' and other aspects of post-war US and Soviet military development have dealt with the role of the space programmes and space technology on the two sides of the Cold War; and of course there are heroic accounts of space explorers and the achievements of visionary scientists and engineers. There is nothing as yet, however, that does for the Space Age what a legion of railway historians have done for the Railway Age, and that others are now doing, gradually, for the Motor Age. Perhaps it is all still too recent. Certainly space is an unexplored frontier for transport historians, although it surely falls within the remit of historians of movement and mobility, imagined and actual. Any transport historian wanting to look to space for a new field of research could do much worse than turn to Marina Benjamin's new book as a guide, not to what has gone on in space during the Space Age, but to what people have thought about it and why it matters.

Marina Benjamin's book is not a scholarly history, but nor is it a shallow populist work of the journalistic school. It is a serious and thoughtful attempt to take a long view of the Space Age, from the early satellites to the troubled recent history of the Space Shuttle. It is written from a personal viewpoint. Benjamin, a child of the 1960s (as is her reviewer) grew up in a world filled with the imagery of space - and not only space itself, but the conquest of space. The reality of manned space flight filled the newspapers and the television screens of her childhood, and around them flourished an even more intoxicating world of the future promise of space: colonies in orbit, landings on Mars, space-based science that would transform the world, exploration, conquest and trade among the stars. Her book begins from wondering where all those dreams went and when the bright promise of space began to wane; and, more interestingly perhaps, why these dreams and hopes had the hold they did over people, and what they tell us about the society that nourished them.

There are various reasons why readers of the Journal of Transport History might look askance at this volume. It is unreferenced and has a thin bibliography. Stylistically it is not entirely free from the vices of journalism; there is sometimes a little too much verbose scene-setting, a little too hard a search for immediacy and impact, and a little too much subjectivity. Yet the merits of the book far outweigh these drawbacks (which, to be fair, reflect the kind of book it is; and it does not pretend to be anything else). At her best Benjamin is a thoughtful, insightful and well read guide to the place of space in post-war Western consciousness. She eschews technical details and hero worship, the familiar drama of rocket launches and space walks, for a lower-key but profound meditation on how space came to be seen as a new promised land for many in the post-war world, the reasons for the hopes and dreams they projected into the stars, and what the obtruding of reality, in the form of militarisation, corruption, cutbacks and compromises meant for those heady ideals.

The sheer range of topics Benjamin covers reveals how wide and deep the influence of space has been over the past five decades: space stations and hippy colonies, planetary exploration and cyber-communities, universal surveillance and one-world consciousness, all are skilfully brought together in a synthesis that does not always hold together or convince, but is consistently analytical and thought-provoking.

Space has been seen as the final frontier because it has been perceived as limitless. As Benjamin observes, with any frontier, exploration and conquest would mean a process of taming, with traders following in the wake of explorers, dull technicians succeeding daring swashbucklers. But space, it was believed, would always provide new realms and new frontiers: its potential and its excitement were seen to be endless. For scholars of transport history in its widest sense, Marina Benjamin's illuminating study of the ways in which the dream of space has haunted the modern imagination provides object lessons in the limits and the potentials of human mobility, both actualised and imagined.

Ralph Harrington, University of York