cover image The Dream of Spaceflight Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity

The Dream of Spaceflight Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity

Wyn Wachhorst. Basic Books, $22 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-465-09057-0

""Spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity."" Wachhorst's brief, lyrical essays trace an enraptured and sometimes informative triad of historical trajectories; each of his five chapters covers space travel as idea and imagination (a strand in the history of science fiction); space travel as scientific accomplishment (part of the history of technology); and space travel as a motif in Wachhorst's own life and mind (a kind of autobiography). Moving from the 1500s to the year 2000, Wachhorst covers the planetary voyages of 17th-century proto-SF; the cash-strapped early rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard; 1940s architect and artist Chesley Bonnestell, who painted vivid, realistic space flights and planetary surfaces; the film Destination Moon, on which Bonnestell collaborated with producer George Pal and Robert A. Heinlein; and, for most of the book's last half, the space program itself. At the time, the Apollo program met with both admiration and deprecation. Wachhorst wants to exult it anew, and his final agenda is philosophical and polemical, as well as literary. He believes that human beings should, can and will travel back to the planets or the stars in order to realize our higher nature, and that to abandon space travel would represent an ultimate ""failure of nerve."" Wachhorst's prose can be as wondrously compact as a moon rock--or as glowingly gaseous as the Crab Nebula; readers who already share his enthusiasms may wish he had given more space to facts, descriptions and arguments, while those who remain of two minds about the final frontier may learn more--and find more sheer wonder--in Carl Sagan's writings. Agents, Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada. (June)