Rocket Man Quotes

An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.

Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long.' He snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man.' 'Old?' asked Clevinger with surprise. 'What are you talking about?' 'Old.' 'I'm not old.' 'You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?' Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. 'Well, maybe it is true,' Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. 'Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?' 'I do,' Dunbar told him. 'Why?' Clevinger asked. 'What else is there?

The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.

Rocket Man, burning out his fuse up here alone.

What do I do? (Jeff) Well, not to insult a man who looks like a rocket scientist in comparison to you, but…run, Forrest, run. (Rafael)

We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread. The woods were dark and deep. Before us demons fled. We checked Coke bottle bottoms to see how far was far. Our worlds of magic wonder were never reached by car. We loved our dogs like brothers, our bikes like rocket ships. We were going to the stars, to Mars we'd make round trips. We swung on vines like Tarzan, and flashed Zorro's keen blade. We were James Bond in his Aston, we were Hercules unchained. We looked upon the future and we saw a distant land, where our folks were always ageless, and time was shifting sand. We filled up life with living, with grins, scabbed knees, and noise. In glass I see an older man, but this book's for the boys.

That’s how I approach just about everything. I spend my life getting ready to play “Rocket Man.” I picture the most demanding challenge; I visualize what I would need to know how to do to meet it; then I practice until I reach a level of competence where I’m comfortable that I’ll be able to perform. It’s what I’ve always done, ever since I decided I wanted to be an astronaut in 1969, and that conscious, methodical approach to preparation is the main reason I got to Houston. I never stopped getting ready. Just in case.

You must completely dedicate yourselves to it. To do less will be to let down your country, your state, your parents, your teachers, and ultimately, yourselves. Remember this: The only good citizen is the well-educated citizen.

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream.

It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

Sure you are," Jack replied. He sashayed up next to me, and yes, it was a sashay, he was far too damn smug for his good looks. Damn me for getting all girly inside at the sight of him coming over to rescue my damsel in distress. Then he became the ultimate man. He picked up the flat spare, looked at it, and said "Yep, it's flat." "What are you, a rocket scientist in your spare time?" "Only on the weekends.

No man has to be a rocket surgeon to recognize love.

Mason let go of my hand, keeping pace with Logan. “What about all the hashtags? Hashtag limp dick. Hashtag my dick is in my girlfriend. Hashtag I’m the rocket man.

Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.” I stopped. “I mean it,” he said. “Because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that.

Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business.

I got really bored, so I decided to pick a theme song! Something appropriate. And naturally, it should be something from Lewis’s godawful seventies collection. It wouldn’t be right any other way. There are plenty of great candidates: “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie, “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. But I settled on “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees.

That's how I approach just about everything. I spend my life getting ready to play "Rocket Man.

Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years. “I think you’re crazy,” was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar’s discovery. “Who wants to know?” Dunbar answered. “I mean it,” Clevinger insisted. “Who cares?” Dunbar answered. “I really do. I’ll even go as far as to concede that life seems longer i—“ “—is longer i—“ “—is longer—IS longer? All right, is longer if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b—“ “Guess how fast?” Dunbar said suddenly. “Huh?” “They go,” Dunbar explained. “Who?” “Years.” “Years?” “Years,” said Dunbar. “Years, years, years.” “Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar asked Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.” “Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?” “Old.” “I’m not old.” “You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. “Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.

an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

River was a beautiful man, inside and out—too beautiful for this world, it turned out. It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down. Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us? River was a better actor than me; I was funnier. But I certainly held my own in our scenes—no small feat, when I look back decades later. But more important, River just looked at the world in a different way than we all did, and that made him fascinating, and charismatic, and, yes, beautiful, but not in a Gap ad kinda way (though he was that, too)—in a there-is-no-one-else-in-the-world-like-him kind of way. Not to mention he was rocketing to stardom, yet you would never know it.

Two Dutch, two Americans, one German and one Australian. And yet, as the rocket began to quake beneath us, my mind focused on a man in Antarctica. I thought about Sam "Snowbow" Archambeau waiting for the September sunrise to reach the South Pole. I smiled recalling him getting a haircut in a lawn chair next to the frozen barbershop pole." -- Nikki in the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)

And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.

You think nuts don’t apply to the FBI? We get ’em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied in St. Louis last week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf bag.” “Did you hire him?

An artist in this nuthouse century is like a man running an obstacle race fitted out with all the gadgets of our riotous technology. He gets blown a mile into the air on a jet of liquid helium, shuttles about on little rocket tubes, plunges into the deeps of the ocean, shoots out again a hundred miles into the space while lurid sights and sounds shred his senses. Every year, every month, and ‘panoptic’ work appears and warps his consciousness into a new shape. Knowledge itself is in a molten, a plasmatic state and what titanic electromagnetic grip of intellect would be required to lock it solid long enough to reach artistic fusion point? The damned language becomes obsolete as it clatters from the typewriter.

The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.

Before me, have you ever been fucked by a real man?” “What are you talking about?” “A real man. Have you ever fucked one?” “I’m confused.” “Then the answer is no, you haven’t. By the end of this week, I’m going to be inside you enough so you can start to tell the difference.” I blinked up at him, completely baffled. “What?” “A real man doesn’t fuck you for your money. He fucks you because you’re gorgeous. Because you come like a rocket. Because you have eyes that show him everything you’re feeling. He fucks you because nothing has ever felt better.” “Oh.” “Yeah, oh.

I was holding on to hurricane nights and lit candles and my acoustic guitar resting in your hands. I was holding on to the sound of your voice saying my name and the peace I felt with your arms around me. I was holding on to documentaries in bed and your beautiful eyes closed as you sang Rocket Man and all the songs we never finished. I was holding on to our first text and last phone call and the plane ticket you offered but never sent. I was holding on to our first Christmas together and the last few Christmas Eves apart and I've been thinking we should be together. we should be kissing even if there isn't any mistletoe because if I have you there' no reason to celebrate and fuck, your lips were mine. They were always supposed to be mine. I was holding on to hope and banana pancakes on Sundays. I was holding on to Main Street and sunsets in Jersey. I was holding on to two streets that separated us and blizzards that couldn't keep us apart. I was holding on to you. I was holding on to us. And it was killing me.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.

It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!

I listen, horrified. It's the laughter of a heathen priest. I listen like a blind man listening to a rocket explode.

At my bachelor party I had Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” play on repeat, while I enjoyed the spectacle of a midget stripper dressed like jet fuel (Rocket Man).

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Sign O' The Times Oh yeah In France a skinny man Died of a big disease with a little name By chance his girlfriend came across a needle And soon she did the same At home there are seventeen-year-old boys And their idea of fun Is being in a gang called The Disciples High on crack, totin' a machine gun Time, time Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling of a church And killed everyone inside U turn on the telly and every other story Is tellin' U somebody died Sister killed her baby cuz she could afford 2 feed it And we're sending people 2 the moon In September my cousin tried reefer 4 the very first time Now he's doing horse, it's June Times, times It's silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everybody still wants 2 fly Some say a man ain't happy Unless a man truly dies Oh why Time, time Baby make a speech, Star Wars fly Neighbors just shine it on But if a night falls and a bomb falls Will anybody see the dawn Time, times It's silly, no? When a rocket blows And everybody still wants 2 fly Some say a man ain't happy, truly Until a man truly dies Oh why, oh why, Sign O the Times Time, time Sign O the Times mess with your mind Hurry before it's 2 late Let's fall in love, get married, have a baby We'll call him Nate... if it's a boy Time, time Time, time

It was out of this river that the assassin's bullet came, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why. We accept, with the authorities, the guilt of the lonely psychopath because it tells a truth if not a fact. It dramatizes the refusal of Unreason to be silenced any longer by man's, Europe's,idea that he, Reason, rules the world. Humanism, however pretty, isn't for us because nature isn't human, and man willy nilly is of nature. Nature is unreason and God. It is the madness that runs through our lives and connects us to the stars in a way no rocket ship can ever duplicate. It connects us to all living things and to ourselves. To name this madness Holy doesn't promise peace or prosperity; it promises only a reason for being, a reinvestment of life into the dead matter of which the universe is now composed.

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns. Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions. And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.

We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread. The woods were dark and deep. Before us demons fled. We checked Coke bottle bottoms to see how far was far. Our worlds of magic wonder were never reached by car. We loved our dogs like brothers, our bikes like rocket ships. We were going to the stars, to Mars we’d make round trips. We swung on vines like Tarzan, and flashed Zorro’s keen blade. We were James Bond in his Aston, we were Hercules unchained. We looked upon the future and we saw a distant land, where our folks were always ageless, and time was shifting sand. We filled up life with living, with grins, scabbed knees, and noise. In glass I see an older man, but this book’s for the boys.

When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker, a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart of goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar ma; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding other. - pg 3

After all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer, given the opportunity), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment—but how in the name of God could you either hang it out or haul it back if you were a lab animal sealed in a pod? Every

There were fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments.

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good.

Open Letter to Neil Armstrong" Dear Neil Armstrong, I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon dust to the one you loved could only be wrapped in your imagination.. Before the world knew your name; before it was a destination in the sky.. What was the moon like from your back yard? Your arm, strong warm and wrapped under her hair both of you gazing up from your back porch summers before your distant journey. But upon landing on the moon, as the earth rose over the sea of tranquility, did you look for her? What was it like to see our planet, and know that everything, all you could be, all you could ever love and long for.. was just floating before you. Did you write her name in the dirt when the cameras weren't looking? Surrounding both your initials with a heart for alien life to study millions of years from now? What was it like to love something so distant? What words did you use to bring the moon back to her? And what did you promise in the moons ear, about that girl back home? Can you, teach me, how to fall from the sky? I ask you this, not because I doubt your feat, I just want to know what it's like to go somewhere no man had ever been, just to find that she wasn't there. To realize your moon walk could never compare to the steps that led to her. I now know that the flight home means more. Every July I think of you. I imagine the summer of 1969, how lonely she must have felt while you were gone.. You never went back to the moon. And I believe that's because it dosen't take rockets to get you where you belong. I see that in this woman down the hall, sometimes she seems so much further. But I'm ready for whatever steps I must take to get to her.I have seem SO MANY skies.. but the moon, well, it always looks the same. So I gotta say, Neil, that rock you landed on, has got NOTHING on the rock she's landed on. You walked around, took samples and left.. She's built a fire cleaned up the place and I hope she decides to stay.. because on this rock.. we can breath. Mr. Armstrong, I don't have much, many times have I been upside down with trauma, but with these empty hands, comes a heart that is often more full than the moon. She's becoming my world, pulling me into orbit, and I now know that I may never find life outside of hers. I want to give her EVERYTHING I don't have yet.. So YES, for her, I would go to the moon and back.... But not without her. We'd claim the moon for each other, with flags made from sheets down the hall. And I'd risk it ALL to kiss her under the light of the earth, the brightness of home... but I can do all of that and more right here, where she is..And when we gaze up, her arms around ME, I will NOT promise her gifts of moon dust, or flights of fancy. Instead I will gladly give her all the earth she wants, in return for all the earth she is. The sound of her heart beat and laughter, and all the time it takes to return to fall from the sky,down the hall, and right into love. God, I'd do it every day, if I could just land next to her. One small step for man, but she's one giant leap for my kind.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.

If Only We Had Taller Been The fence we walked between the years Did bounce us serene. It was a place half in the sky where In the green of leaf and promising of peach We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky, If we could reach and touch, we said, 'Twould teach us, not to ,never to, be dead. We ached and almost touched that stuff; Our reach was never quite enough. If only we had taller been, And touched God's cuff, His hem, We would not have to go with them Who've gone before, Who, short as us, stood tall as they could stand And hoped by stretching, tall, that they might keep their land, Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul. But they, like us, were standing in a hole. O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall Across the Void, across the Universe and all? And, measured out with rocket fire, At last put Adam's finger forth As on the Sistene Ceiling, And God's hand come down the other way To measure man and find him Good, And Gift him with Forever's Day? I work for that. Short man, Large dream, I send my rockets forth between my ears, Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years. Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall: We've reached Alpha Centauri! We're tall, O God, we're tall!

In the wake of the Korean War, the government set out to manufacture public enthusiasm for itself as the defender of the nation against hated enemies—the South, Japan, and the United States. The DPRK built a million-man army, the world’s fourth largest, and pulled together a formidable arsenal of rocket launchers and missiles.

In some ways, indeed, Russia far outstrips America; not only does the US at present rely on Russia for its entire manned space-launch capability, but even a good portion of its own unmanned launch capability — namely, that provided by Orbital Science’s Antares rocket — is powered by Russian-made engines (antique ones, at that).

In building towers into the clouds, man is proving to himself that he is above nature. And that’s exactly how you feel at the top of one of these rockets of concrete and aluminum, glass, and steel: everything I can see belongs to me, no more traffic jams, gutters, sidewalks, I am man above the world. It is not the thrill of power, but of pride.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was

It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?

A man isn't a collection of chemical reactions, he is a collection of ideas.

After the meal, Borman dropped me off at my hotel, then went to visit his wife at the nursing home where she lives. As he drove away, it seemed to me strange—I felt I’d come to know Susan as well as I had Frank, despite having met her for just a few minutes, despite the fact that she had been too ill to speak. When I returned home and transcribed the tapes of my interviews, I understood why. Borman spoke of Susan constantly; there didn’t seem an aspect of his life he could explain without discussing how much she meant to him or how much he loved her. I’d heard the same from Lovell and Anders about their wives. When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate. Men founder like ships. Children also. There are children who settle to the bottom at the age of nine, carrying with them the secret of their betrayal. There are perfidious monsters who look at you with the bland, innocent eyes of youth; their crimes are unregistered, because we have no names for them.

After a haf hour or so, they was beatin on the tables with they knives an forks like in a prison riot, an I knowed I had to do somethin fast, so I turned the boiler up high as it could go. I’m settin there watchin it, so nervous I didn’t know what to do, when all of a sudden the first sergeant come bustin thru the door. “What in hell is goin on here?” he axed. “Where is these men’s food?” “It is almost ready, Sergeant,” I say, an jus about then, the boiler commenced to rumble an shake. Steam begun to come out of the sides an one of the legs on the boiler tore loose from the floor. “What is that?” the sergeant axed. “Is you cookin somethin in that boiler!” “That is the supper,” I says, an the sergeant got this real amazed look on his face, an a secont later, he got a real frightened look, like you might get jus before an automobile wreck, an then the boiler blew up. I am not exactly sure what happened nex. I do remember that it blowed the roof off the mess hall an blowed all the winders out an the doors too. It blowed the dishwasher guy right thru a wall, an the guy what was stackin plates jus took off up in the air, sort of like Rocket Man. Sergeant an me, we is miraculously spared somehow, like they say will happen when you are so close to a han grenade that you aren’t hurt by

Shortly afterwards, it sounded as if the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) were landing dangerously close - so close that I immediately dropped to the floor, prompting an unflinching Congolese man in the lobby, who’d obviously endured much worse, to jokingly say, ”I see you do not enjoy the beautiful music we play here in the Congo.” It is still one of the most reassuring things anyone has ever said to me in the midst of a crisis….

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.

The new episode always started with the ending of the last one. They showed him going down the hill, they showed the cliff, they showed him banging on the car door, trying to open it. Then, just before the car got to the edge, the door banged open and out he flew onto the road! The car went over the cliff, and all the kids in the theater were cheering because Rocket Man got out, but I wasn’t cheering, Paul. I was mad! I started yelling, ‘That isn’t what happened last week! That isn’t what happened last week!’ 

But are we strong enough?” wondered Blackwood. “How strong is strong? They won’t be prepared for us, at least. They haven’t the imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains, scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers, steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood—blasphemy to their clean lips.

She sprays cops when they have their windows down and are cruising slowly past our house because she hates them after what they did when Grandpa died, and just period. When they get out of the car and walk up to her she says things like, Here comes Rocket Man! Send in the clowns! The cops smile because they think she’s just a crazy old lady. But she really means business. She hates them. She doesn’t want to hate anybody but she can’t help it and she isn’t even going to pray about it because she thinks God secretly hates them too.

Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), whose Egyptian museum in San Jose took up an entire city block. It stressed the virtues of reason and science while also suggesting that ancient Egyptian wisdom would allow its followers to re-lease the hidden powers inherent in man.

Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.” “Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?” “Old.” “I’m not old.” “You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. “Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

It was this philosophy that had Harvey taking the hovercraft Sagan had stolen, mounting it, and, after a few moments to glean the fundamentals of navigating it, rocketing on it toward the door of the Obin mess hall. As Harvey approached, the door to the mess hall opened inward; some Obin heading to duty after dinner. Harvey grinned a mad grin, gunned the hovercraft, and then braked it just enough (he hoped) to jam that fucking alien right back into the room. It worked perfectly. The Obin had enough time for a surprised squawk before the hovercraft’s gun struck it square in the chest, punching backward like it was a toy on a string, hurling down nearly the entire length of the hall. The other Obin in the room looked up while Harvey’s victim pinwheeled to the ground, then turned their multiple eyes toward the doorway, Harvey, and the hovercraft with its big gun poking right into the room. “Hello, boys!” Harvey said in a big, booming voice. “The 2nd Platoon sends its regards!” And with that, he jammed down the “fire” button on the gun and set to work. Things got messy real fast after that. It was just fucking beautiful. Harvey loved his job.

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

Well . . . anyhow, I’ve got another idea. This place is an electronics man’s dream—all that vacuum! I’m going to try to gimmick up some really big power tubes—only they won’t be tubes. I can just mount the elements out in the open without having to bother with glass. It’s the easiest way to do experimental tube design anybody ever heard of.

Socially, too, we have seen a defiant Promethianism that is basically innocuous: the confident power that can catapult man to the moon and free him somewhat of his complete dependence and confinement on earth-at least in his imagination. The ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, an empty-headed immersion in the delights of technics with not thought to goals or meaning; so man performs on the moon by hitting golf balls that do not swerve in the lack of atmosphere. The technical triumph of a versatile ape, as the makers of the film 2001 so chillingly conveyed to us. On more ominous levels, as we shall develop later on, modern man's defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of sky-rocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don't have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.

Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.” “Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.” “We’re sure we have the right fellow.” “Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?” “Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.” “Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.

In the summer of 1949, Borman was one of a select few cadets to tour postwar Germany. For him, the biggest impression came at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau...The trip sickened and saddened him, and it reinforced his certainty that America was a force for good in the world, a country that stepped up to help suffering people and defend freedom.

Snow and soot covered the ancient tree's broken branches and seared bark. It wasn't dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren't doing well. The end was near. A shadow loomed, and a creature settled into the drifts, and old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree. Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest--a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ruined wood on the ground, piling the bits higher until it was clear that it was not a nest at all. It was a pyre. The bloody, dying thing settled in atop the kindling, and crooned soft music unlike anything ever heard before. A glow began to build, surrounding the beast soon in a rich purple lambience. Blue flames burst forth. And the tree seemed to respond. Aged, ruined branches curled forward toward the heat, like an old man warming his hands. Snow shivered and fell, the green patches grew and began to fill the air with the fragrance of renewal It was not the creature on the pyre that was reborn, and even in sleep, that surprised Gordon. The great bird was consumed, leaving only bones. But the tree blossomed, and from its flowering branches things uncurled and drifted off into the air. He stared in wonderment when he saw that they were balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships. Dreams. They floated away in all directions, and the air was filled with hope.

For years, the Pacific had been trying to get basic assistance in the synthetics field from the Reich. However, the big German chemical cartels, I. G. Farben in particular, had harbored their patents; had, in fact, created a world monopoly in plastics, especially in the developments of the polyesters. By this means, Reich trade had kept an edge over Pacific trade, and in technology the Reich was at least ten years ahead. The interplanetary rockets leaving Festung Europa consisted mainly of heat-resistant plastics, very light in weight, so hard they survived even major meteor impact. The Pacific had nothing of this sort; natural fibers such as wood were still used, and of course the ubiquitous pot metals.

There’s a poetry to it, engineer’s poetry…it suggests Haverie—average, you know—certainly you have two lobes, don’t you, symmetrical about the rocket’s intended azimuth…hauen, too-smashing someone with a hoe or a club…” off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks…Slothrop’s first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening…an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.

Early on December 25, Houston time, Lovell missed a step. He meant to enter Program 23 and then select Star 01. Instead, he entered Program 01 into his computer. An alarm rang out. Suddenly, Apollo 8’s guidance system reset itself, losing all memory of how the ship was oriented in space. As a result of Lovell’s mistake, the guidance system now believed Apollo 8 to be back on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy.

When the card came back you couldn't have found any red on it with a microscope. The pitchman handed down a ponderous mohair Teddybear and Ballard slapped down three dimes again. When he had won two bears and a tiger and a small audience the pitchman took the rifle away from him. That's it for you, buddy, he hissed. You never said nothin about how many times you could win. Step right up, sang the barker. Who's next now. Three big grand prizes per person is the house limit. Who's our next big winner. Ballard loaded up his bears and the tiger and started off through the crowd. They lord look at what all he's won, said a woman. Ballard smiled tightly. Young girls' faces floated past, bland and smooth as cream. Some eyed his toys. The crowd was moving toward the edge of a field and assembling there, Ballard among them, a sea of country people watching into the dark for some midnight contest to begin. A light sputtered off in the field and a blue tailed rocket went skittering toward Canis Major. High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of lit glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon. burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like a huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky. In the bloom of light too you could see two men out in the field crouched over their crate of fireworks like assassins or bridge blowers. And you could see among the faces a young girl with candy apple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, woman child from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitch light of some medieval fun fair. A lean sky long candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

Unwashed and undernourished, having spent over four days on five different trains and four military jeeps, Alexander got off at Molotov on Friday, June 19, 1942. He arrived at noon and then sat on a wooden bench near the station. Alexander couldn’t bring himself to walk to Lazarevo. He could not bear the thought of her dying in Kobona, getting out of the collapsed city and then dying so close to salvation. He could not face it. And worse—he knew that he could not face himself if he found out that she did not make it. He could not face returning—returning to what? Alexander actually thought of getting on the next train and going back immediately. The courage to move forward was much more than the courage he needed to stand behind a Katyusha rocket launcher or a Zenith antiaircraft gun on Lake Ladoga and know that any of the Luftwaffe planes flying overhead could instantly bring about his death. He was not afraid of his own death. He was afraid of hers. The specter of her death took away his courage. If Tatiana was dead, it meant God was dead, and Alexander knew he could not survive an instant during war in a universe governed by chaos, not purpose. He would not live any longer than poor, hapless Grinkov, who had been cut down by a stray bullet as he headed back to the rear. War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war. But Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo. For two hours Alexander sat on the bench in unpaved, provincial, oak-lined Molotov. To go back was impossible. To go forward was unthinkable. Yet he had nowhere else to go. He crossed himself and stood up, gathering his belongings. When Alexander finally walked in the direction of Lazarevo, not knowing whether Tatiana was alive or dead, he felt he was a man walking to his own execution.

The scope and audacity of John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on “Urgent National Needs”—the speech that launched the Apollo program—dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world—a world not yet explored, not even in a preliminary way, not even by robots—and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?” “I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.

There is a famous painting of the young Napoleon crossing the St Bernard Pass on his way to the Italian campaign which rocketed him to fame. Louis David’s canvas shows him on a rearing horse, and everything about the painting is motion; the horse rears, its mouth open and eyes wide, its mane is wind-whipped, the sky is stormy and the General’s cloak is a lavish swirl of gale-driven colour. Yet in the centre of that frenzied paint is Napoleon’s calm face. He looks sullen and unsmiling, but above all, calm. That was what he demanded of the painter, and David delivered a picture of a man at home amidst chaos.

Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.

Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger. It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept. It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

Silverstein, one of those leading the charge toward more far-ranging flights than Mercury, had been looking for a suitable name for a payload for the Saturn rockets. None suggested by his associates seemed appropriate. One day, while consulting a book on mythology, Silverstein found what he wanted. He later said, “I thought the image of the god Apollo riding his chariot across the sun gave the best representation of the grand scale of the proposed program.” Occasionally he asked his Headquarters colleagues for their opinions. When no one objected, the chariot driver Apollo (according to ancient Greek myths, the god of music, prophecy, medicine, light, and progress became the name of the proposed circumlunar spaceships. At the opening of the conference on 28 July 1960, Dryden announced that “the next spacecraft beyond Mercury will be called Apollo.

It took the sun a long while to come over the mountains and until it did my vision was bound to the few gray yards around the trailer. It was day but not day, dim but not night, a fugue of half-thoughts and disconnected images, pulsing with power beyond easy meaning—a crow flapping, glowing black against the gray—a shadow like a man crouched with a knife—parking lots aching with pink blur—so overwhelmed by thought I’d have to sit back, set down the pen, set down my coffee, and it goes on—glass towers gleaming out of gray cityscapes, blinding silver—an old man with a red guitar—the booming flame of rockets trailing smoke—a girl’s face, her freckled cheek downy with fine hairs, fleshy lips spread in a smile over crooked teeth. I sink in reverie—and what, what does it mean?—then scrape a few more lines with my pen. Nothing even approximate. Another failure.

We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and the fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead. Over the comm channel, I heard my father gasp at the sight—one he hadn’t seen with his own eyes in an entire lifetime. My lifetime. “There it is,” he said softly. “Home sweet home. Man, I really missed it.” I’d missed it, too, I realized. And I’d been gone less than a day. As our five ships moved into formation and turned homeward, toward Earth, I checked my scope and saw that the three unmanned Interceptors were heading in the opposite direction, out into space, toward whatever destination my father had programmed into them. I turned my gaze back to Earth and watched it begin to grow in size as we approached, until its blue curve completely filled the view outside of my spacecraft. My father sent a tactical map to the display screens inside our cockpits. “They’re dividing their forces in half again,” my father said over the comm. “See?

The Air Force has always had more money than sales resistance, and they bought a one-year program (probably for something in the order of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and in June of 1961 Hawkins and Summers punched the “start” button and the machine started to shuffle IBM cards. And to print out structures that looked like road maps of a disaster area, since if the compounds depicted could even have been synthesized, they would have, infallibly, detonated instantly and violently. The machine’s prize contribution to the cause of science was the structure, to which it confidently attributed a specific impulse of 363.7 seconds, precisely to the tenth of a second, yet. The Air Force, appalled, cut the program off after a year, belatedly realizing that they could have got the same structure from any experienced propellant man (me, for instance) during half an hour’s conversation, and at a total cost of five dollars or so. (For drinks. I would have been afraid even to draw the structure without at least five Martinis under my belt.)

His expression was perturbed, as if he’d been reminded of something he had wanted to forget. But as his gaze slid over her bewildered face, his mouth curved a little, and he settled into the cradle of her body with an insolent familiarity that temporarily robbed her of breath. “Mr. Rohan … how … why … what are you doing here?” He replied without moving, as if he were planning to lie there and converse all day. His infinitely polite tone was an unsettling contrast to the intimacy of their position. “Miss Hathaway. What a pleasant surprise. As it happens, I’m visiting friends. And you?” “I live here.” “I don’t think so. This is Lord Westcliff’s estate.” Her heart thundered in her breast as her body absorbed the details of him. “I didn’t mean precisely here, I meant over there, on the other side of the woods. The Ramsay estate. We’ve just taken up residence.” She couldn’t seem to stop herself from chattering in the aftermath of nerves and fright. “What was that noise? What were you doing? Why do you have that tattoo on your arm? It’s a pooka—an Irish creature—isn’t it?” That last question earned her an arrested stare. Before Rohan could reply, the other two men approached. From her prone position, Amelia had an upside-down view of them. Like Rohan, they were in their shirtsleeves, with waistcoats left unbuttoned. One of them was a portly old gentleman with a shock of silver hair. He held a small wood-and-metal sextant, which had been strung around his neck on a lanyard. The other, black-haired man looked to be in his late thirties. He wasn’t as tall as Rohan, but he had an air of authority tempered with aristocratic arrogance. Amelia made a helpless movement, and Rohan lifted away from her with fluid ease. He helped her stand, his arm steadying her. “How far did it go?” he asked the men. “Devil take the rocket,” came a gravelly reply. “What is the woman’s condition?” “Unharmed.” The silver-haired gentleman remarked, “Impressive, Rohan. You covered a distance of fifty yards in no more than five or six seconds.” “I would hardly miss a chance to leap on a beautiful woman,” Rohan said, causing the older man to chuckle.

Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.” “Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?” “Old.” “I’m not old.” “You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. “Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now—an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line: "Go od morning!" And the three secretaries—each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style—recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply "Good morning!" to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)

...Me, I do not want to go to no suburbans not even Brooklyn. But Joyce wants to integrate. She says America has got two cultures, which should not he divided as they now is, so let's leave Harlem." "Don't you agree that Joyce is right?" "White is right," said Simple, "so I have always heard. But I never did believe it. White folks do so much wrong! Not only do they mistreat me, but they mistreats themselves. Right now, all they got their minds on is shooting off rockets and sending up atom bombs and poisoning the air and fighting wars and Jim Crowing the universe." "Why do you say 'Jim Crowing the universe'?" "Because I have not heard tell of no Negro astronaughts nowhere in space yet. This is serious, because if one of them white Southerners gets to the moon first, COLORED NOT ADMITTED signs will go up all over heaven as sure as God made little green apples, and Dixiecrats will be asking the man in the moon, 'Do you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?' Meanwhile, the N.A.A.C.P. will have to go to the Supreme Court, as usual, to get an edict for Negroes to even set foot on the moon. By that time, Roy Wilkins will be too old to make the trip, and me, too." "But perhaps the Freedom Riders will go into orbit on their own," I said. "Or Harlem might vote Adam Powell into the Moon Congress.'' "One thing I know," said Simple, "is that Martin Luther King will pray himself up there. The moon must be a halfway stop on the way to Glory, and King will probably be arrested. I wonder if them Southerners will take police dogs to the moon?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1965 My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone, but ours together. We are one nation and one people. Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen, but upon all citizens. This is the majesty and the meaning of this moment. For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own. Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves m a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change-- rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and uprooting old ways. Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged character of our people, and on their faith. THE AMERICAN COVENANT They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-- to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish. JUSTICE AND CHANGE First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land. In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write. For the more than 30 years that I have served this Nation, I have believed that this injustice to our people, this waste of our resources, was our real enemy. For 30 years or more, with the resources I have had, I have vigilantly fought against it. I have learned, and I know, that it will not surrender easily. But change has given us new weapons. Before this generation of Americans is finished, this enemy will not only retreat--it will be conquered. Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, "His color is not mine," or "His beliefs are strange and different," in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this Nation. LIBERTY AND CHANGE Liberty was the second article of our covenant. It was self- government. It was our Bill of Rights. But it was more. America would be a place where each man could be proud to be himself: stretching his talents, rejoicing in his work, important in the life of his neighbors and his nation. This has become more difficult in a world where change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men. We must work to provide the knowledge and the surroundings which can enlarge the possibilities of every citizen. The American covenant called on us to help show the way for the liberation of man. And that is today our goal. Thus, if as a nation there is much outside our control, as a people no stranger is outside our hope.

It is the story of God.” God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas. Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean man with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He leaned down and peered in. A spark. An alien pulse of light. He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. The rings of Jupiter. The broken, sunburned back of Mars. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. He could touch each one, if he wanted. He could control them. There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. They are wrong. Charlie was God before he was even born. It was only a matter of him finding out. Charlie lives in every generation. When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. At any moment, you might meet him. He has been a Confederate soldier. He has been a bank teller. He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day’s growth of beard graying his cheeks. He has cooked dinner for his mother. He has driven to the ocean. He has fallen in love.

She felt the electric tickle of Finn behind her. He must have come from the hallway. She turned. Standing on the first step, she was almost eye level with him. He’d carried the irresistible smell of the morning in with him, caught in his hair and clothes. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said. Teagan leaned closer. “What are you doing?” Aiden asked. Sniffing Finn. How weird would that sound? She changed the sniff into a kiss on the cheek, but Finn turned just before her lips met his face. She felt a shock as their lips touched, the wild inside her exploding like fireworks, rocketing through her to Finn. He swayed, and she managed to get her arms around him before his knees gave way. “Wa,” he gasped. “Could you steer me toward the couch, girl?” “Oh, my god,” Abby said from behind her. “The couch? Are you going to let them do that in your living room, Mr. Wylltson?” “Do what?” Finn flushed red. “Oh. I just meant . . . I need to sit down. The girl’s that good a kisser.” Thomas and Mr. Wylltson were staring. Aiden’s mouth was hanging open. “What are you doing, Tea?” Abby asked. “You totally lunged at him.” “I did not lunge.” I was just sniffing him. That would sound worse than lunging. “I just . . . caught him.” “Then why don’t you let him go?” Because he wasn’t steady on his feet yet. Finn’s electronics had gone haywire. “Well played.” Thomas winked at Finn and grinned at Teagan. “And well caught.” Finn groped for the banister. “I’m telling you I never meant to kiss her. Not in front of her da, that is—” “Unhand the young man, Teagan, and step away,” Mr. Wylltson said. “You are befuddling him.” “By that”—Finn found the banister and Teagan let go and backed up a stair—“I did not mean that I intended to carry on behind your back. This whole thing isn’t what it looks like”—his eyes lifted to Teagan. “Is it?

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A. Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it. When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.” The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct. Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a handful of the SpaceX team had any idea how to make a launch happen.

Progress is the same rocket that launches the manned Soyuz. Our three new crewmates, due up in a little less than a month on May 26, are about to trust their lives to the same hardware and software. The Russian space agency must investigate what went wrong and make sure there won’t be a recurrence. That will interfere with our schedule up here, but no one wants to fly on a Soyuz that’s going to do the same thing this Progress did. It would make for a horrible death, spinning out of control in low Earth orbit knowing you will soon be dead from CO2 asphyxiation or oxygen deprivation, after which our corpses would orbit the Earth until they burn up in the atmosphere months later.

At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn’t make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn’t seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn’t showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, so I let him be. A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans. RPG. We had no way of calling the convoy directly—to this day I don’t know exactly who they were, except that they were Army. But I put my scope on him and fired, hoping to at least scare him off with the shot or maybe warn the convoy. At 2,100 yards, plus a little change, it would take a lot of luck to hit him.

We fight for mass especially with a reusable upper stage, which nobody has ever succeeded in,” he said. “Just FYI. It’s not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw their rockets away all the time. It’s fucking hard to make something like this. One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket. Nobody has succeeded. For a good reason. Our gravity is a bit heavy. On Mars this would be no problem. Moon, piece of cake. On Earth, fucking hard. Just barely possible. It’s stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system. It would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of humanity. That’s why it’s hard. Why does this hurt my brain? It’s because of that. Really, we’re just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago.

I GOT started on Carp’s laptop by working my way around the password security. I plugged my laptop into his via a USB cable, ran a program that took control of his hard drive from my laptop, deleted his password file, and I was in. It ain’t rocket science.