It’s that time of year again. Sister-in-law
and I have been on a road trip, driving her car from sunny Florida along with
legions of other “snowbirds” heading back up north for the summer. This time, our first stop was going to be
the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. No,
it wasn’t Disney World but a vast swathe of
empty land on the eastern coast of Florida which, to someone growing up
in the latter part of the twentieth century had just about the most exciting place
name on earth: Cape Canaveral. Technically, the Cape is a small offshore headland though it’s
name is popularly used for all the land around it, including the fabled Air
Force Base and Kennedy Space Center. It’s
here, of course, where the first American
astronauts went up in their Mercury and Gemini rockets, where the Apollo moon missions blasted off, where, more recently, the space shuttles started
and ended their voyages. Now even the
shuttles have had their day. The last one
was pensioned off a few weeks ago, doing a triumphant circuit of Washington riding
piggyback on a plane before going into honourable retirement in a museum.
At Cape Canaveral, what was once the future is
now history. The nostalgia fix starts in
the car park, with each section named for some half-remembered astronaut. Ours was Wally Schirra, who flew three
missions including Apollo 7 in 1968. Models of spacewalking astronauts flank the
entrance, along with posters advertising “lunch with a veteran astronaut” for 24 dollars.
A bus took us to a viewing
platform where we gazed from afar at the launch pads. We drove past the “largest tracked vehicle in
the world”, that transported shuttles and rockets at a steady one mile-per-hour
crawl. The marks of its monster tracks
in the sand were as spine-chilling as dinosaur footprints.
We saw grainy film
of President John F Kennedy proclaiming, “We choose to go to the moon”. We sat through a presentation on the launch of
Apollo 8, our seats shaking with the simulated vibrations from a distant
lift-off. The presentation was in the actual
control room for the Apollo missions – those rows of desks and primitive
screens, each chair draped with a white
lab coat with a logo saying “IBM” or “McDonnell Douglas”, each desk littered with
bulky headphones, old-fashioned specs
and the sort of big, clumsy ring binders I used for my school notes. What once seemed so high tech is now as dated
as the first horseless carriage – or the
blown-up 1960s photos of hairy hippies and the Monkees records that entertained
us while we waited. .
Cape
Canaveral isn’t defunct. The era of
space exploration still goes on in different ways. Yet perhaps, these days, there’s as much of a tourist market in
nostalgia for the grownups as in thrills
for the kids. It’s the nostalgia for the
passing of an age – an age when a
supremely confident America took on the Soviets to get to the moon first, when
humbled pioneer astronauts marvelled at the wonders of the universe by quoting Scripture, when families sat
through the night glued to their TVs, watching momentous events – the first moon
landing, the rescue of Apollo 13 - which modern children probably take for
granted.
Times have changed and not just because
Americans and Russians now work together in space. On our bus they showed us stirring videos about shuttles
and rockets but also about the 21st century’s big idea - nature
conservation. Empty of houses and closed
off from hikers and hunters, Cape Canaveral is one huge nature reserve. A small alligator basked on a bank, reminding
us that he and his kind had been around long before space travel and intended
to be there long after. Road signs said,
“Wildlife Crossing, Give ‘em a Brake”. Our
bus driver pointed out a gopher tortoise, “Looks like a World War Two helmet
with legs,” and an inlet where some endangered manatees, or sea cows, were allegedly frolicking, though I must have missed them. An excited little girl grabbed her mom’s arm, “I do hope
I see one!” Who needs the moon when
you’ve got manatees.
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