On Oct. 4,
SpaceShipOne blasted to the edge of space from a
Mojave Desert Airport for the second time in five days, winning its
design team a $10 million prize. The ship is the only privately
funded manned vehicle ever to leave the atmosphere, and has already
inspired the owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways to promise space
flights for tourists by 2008, under the name Virgin Galactic.
Orbiting hotels are expected to follow.
The flights
proved little about aviation, as the Air Force had made similar
flights more than 40 years ago. But the excitement proved once
again that the astronaut is fully enshrined alongside the cowboy in
American mythology.
The myth of the cowboy is so powerful
that any man donning a cowboy hat today is instantly imbued with
bravery, independence and masculinity. Never mind that 19th century
cowboys bore a strong resemblance to today’s migrant farm
workers, and not much resemblance at all to cowboy impersonators
like Ronald Reagan or Garth Brooks.
The idealized
astronaut shares many traits with the idealized cowboy: courage in
an alien landscape, toughness, individualism. That’s hardly
surprising, since myths are created by our aspirations and
propaganda, as well as by history. All the 20th century hype about
a future of lunar colonies and Martian settlements arose from the
same restlessness and delusional boosterism that enticed settlers a
century earlier to desolate places like eastern Wyoming, on the
premise that rain would follow the plow.
In the mythology
of the space age, the astronaut is a hero not just because space
travel is dangerous and difficult, but because space travel is a
gift to humanity, promoting peace, knowledge and progress, while
demonstrating the triumph of the human spirit.
Never mind
that NASA’s purpose, first and foremost, was to establish our
military and technological superiority over the Soviets. Never mind
that Neil Armstrong was blasted to the moon on a modified ballistic
missile, and that his “giant leap for mankind” was more a giant
leap for the military-industrial complex.
Despite the
high-tech image of the astronaut as a supreme American hero, the
first astronauts, as Tom Wolfe describes in his book, The
Right Stuff, didn’t need to be skilled pilots, but
rather were brave human guinea pigs willing to be blasted into
space in a tin can atop a missile. In fact, the very first
astronaut was a chimpanzee — even less glamorous than a farm
worker.
The power of the astronaut myth was dramatically
expressed when an otherwise-ordinary teacher, Christa McAuliffe,
along with six full-time astronauts, died in the explosion of the
space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
In
the ensuing national mourning, the level of sanctimonious
patriotism soared into the stratosphere. Surely the loss of
McAuliffe and the other astronauts was a tragedy.
But do
we ever see that level of empathy applied to the equally tragic
death of an equally worthy earthbound teacher? And did anyone ask
what noble cause McAuliffe died for? Was she selflessly risking her
life to enlighten all the children languishing ignorant and
neglected in the outer reaches of the cosmos? Nobody asks, any more
than they ask Garth Brooks for instruction on bull castration.
Perhaps the archetypical bearer of the spaceman myth
— the Marlboro Man of Astronauts — is John Glenn. His
mojo was so compelling that in 1998, when Glen was 77, and
representing Ohio in the Senate, NASA sent him up in the space
shuttle at a cost of some $500 million. The ostensible purpose of
the flight was to participate in experiments studying the effects
of weightlessness on old people — experiments that will have
great practical importance when gravity ceases to operate in
Florida.
The true purpose of the voyage was more like a
Western Pioneer Days pageant; it was a chance to relive the glory
of a defining historical period, while indulging the American
public with enhanced radiance from the astronaut’s halo.
It is this desire of Americans to touch the greatness of
astronaut-hood that explains why hundreds of journalists and
thousands of revelers flocked to Mojave, Calif., in jubilation over
the underwhelming achievement of SpaceShipOne.
They hope efforts like those of Virgin Galactic will allow us to
play astronaut as easily as we can now play cowboy on a dude ranch.
But success is hardly guaranteed. Pan Am accepted over
90,000 space flight reservations between 1968 and 1971, and never
made good on any of them.
Then again, if you don’t
need cows to be a cowboy, do you really need space travel to be an
astronaut?
Alex Roth is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He writes for fun and works as a credit
analyst in Portland, Oregon.
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