Star truck

摘要

Space flight defies mere reason. From its beginning in the 1950s until the present day, it has teetered along the line that divides science from science fiction. The rocketeers who took America into orbit were, many of them, space cadets drawn to the field by the shiny spaceships and bug-eyed monsters of the pulp fiction of their boyhoods-and the same was probably true of their Soviet counterparts. What they produced, too, was only quasi-real. The Apollo programme, to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth, in the words of John Kennedy, America's president at the time, was a deadly serious engineering and diplomatic project. It aimed to show the world that American know-how was better than the Russian variety. But it was also an idealised fantasy of American power. ("We came in peace, for all mankind.") The flag Neil Armstrong planted in the Sea of Tranquility staked a claim to what many hoped would be a new frontier.