KEY POINTS:
No one, according to received wisdom, ever remembers who came second; but perhaps, all these wasted years later, an important exception should be made in the case of the 1969 moon landing.
The first scripted words, Neil Armstrong's "one small step for [a] man ... ", famous but also famously unanalysed for years, were not only a mild stumble but also, ultimately, meaningless.
Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin, who followed him on to the turbid grey dust, spoke next, with quiet spontaneity. "Magnificent desolation" was his hushed, crackled, under-reported verdict on outer space; 38 years later, it seems infinitely the wiser.
When the millennium passed seven years ago, there was a good amount of stocktaking, with much 20/20 hindsight, over the dispiriting contrast between the global euphoria that greeted touchdown - in Lapland, they tended reindeer with transistors frozen to their ears; in Milan, crime fell by two-thirds; everywhere they held their breath and their neighbours' hands in ways unseen since except in movies - and today's desultory regrets and confusions over such promise so unfulfilled.
Gerard DeGroot, professor of modern history at St Andrews University in Scotland, goes far beyond his precise academic remit in bringing us this caustic, absorbing and astute exploration of how and why the dream died: essentially, depressingly, because there was never really a proper dream; or, if there was, it remained at best half-formed.
Since the first gunpowder rocket was launched on the banks of the Bosphorus in 1623, reaching 300m and bringing its inventor gold and fame for the stunt, a simple premise was established: what happened on Earth, what accrued to the rocket men, would ever be more crucial to mankind than what went on in the heavens.
Never more so than during the Cold War. The author, stretching back to the century's earlier and less amorphous wars, shows how the very beginnings of the space race were mired in duplicity, expedience and colliding egos.
America's immediate postwar "rehabilitation" and repatriation of Wernher von Braun and his V2 experts, all far more willing Nazis and far less squeamish about the murderous use of slave labour for rocket research than the usual narrative curves attest, is detailed here with a particularly forensic dispassion.
DeGroot reserves more wit but equal contempt for the "gang of cynics, manipulators, demagogues, tyrants and ... criminals" who later followed the space-race bandwagon on both sides of the Iron Curtain, who saw bread on the table from the circus in the sky.
He shows how both sides struggled and compromised between the dreams of pure science, often fantastical science, and the mundane ability to launch rockets over lengthy stretches of this same Earth simply to kill people.
Both warriors and rocketeers needed each other, for money and for expertise; almost always, the compromises were unhappy ones.
He is perhaps at his most serious and valuable when reconstructing America's mood of the times:
* the carefully spun comparisons, swallowed and regurgitated for a decade and more by an alarmingly supine media, of space as an almost Disney-like "Frontierland", there for the starry, stripey conquering - a comparison which, as he points out, always had and always would fail since "exploration was pointless unless commerce followed";
* the almost incalculable shock, hard for us now to understand, of the way in which the news that a chrome ball about 45cm in diameter had rocked the whole of America from complacent postwar technological torpor;
* how the Russians, with little finesse but gargantuan belching rockets, put Sputnik first into orbit and thus so rudely guillotined the smug, innocent early autumn of 1957 in the US, a time which would now seem to have had a similar resonance there to that of our British forebears' memories of that last perfect summer before the First World War.
There is much fun here. The orgies. The cock-ups. The divorce rates. The mad, mad plans: plans to send up the first moon rocket complete with an A-bomb, just to show that America could, yay, Bomb the Moon!; plans to make edible spacecraft so astronauts could last longer until relieved; the millions of dollars spent developing (and marketing) anti-gravity pens which would let ink flow in any environment or heat at any angle. The Russians used pencils.
And the style delights, even though it will infuriate some Americans who have produced lengthier, fuller, more pro-American, less readable versions of the same tale. There is much welcome British cynicism here in DeGroot's careful and verifiable analysis of why the dream, by its very ephemeral nature - its simple lack of anyone, ever, apparently thinking, for almost half a century: Man on moon. Great. And then what do we do? - was doomed.
And the more you read of this dry, wise, timely book, of everything that went wrong and everything else that so infinitesimally just didn't, the more miraculous mankind, and its luck, and its adaptability, begin to seem.
Never mind, yet, the heavens. "The truth isn't out there," he concludes. "It's right here."
- OBSERVER
* Published by Jonathan Cape
