Space travel's in my blood, there ain't nothing I can do about it...

I've been reading a book by Andrew Smith called Moon Dust, about the lives of the Apollo astronauts. It's a mix of biography, autobiography, travelogue, and history, and it really takes in the hopes, madness and aftermath of the space race. Smith was about 8 when the first Moon landing happened, I guess near enough to my age for his story to have a lot of resonances for me.

During, and after my time at University, I was fairly obsessed with the Space Race, on a number of levels. There's something incredibly lonely about the idea of a human in space, which has obviously been a feature of Science Fiction and Pop Culture before and since the first manned rockets were launched. In Moon Dust, you're even more struck by that, not only by the stories by the astronauts, but by the fact that the whole thing was done on such a wing and a prayer, and with such flimsy technology, you wonder how anyone not only got there, but how they got back. There are some hair raising moments in the book, and some extremely close calls, where you can imagine that intense feeling of desolation where having landed on the Moon, and looking back at the whole earth, you know that the chances of getting home safely are slim. There's a story about Buzz Aldrin jamming a pen into a broken switch on the Lunar Module just so they could lift off again, and plenty more besides.

I got a book years ago called the Home Planet, a collection of stories and photographs from astronauts, describing their experiences in space. What's striking is how difficult it is to describe that image, and that feeling, of being out there, looking down on the earth, 'Lost in Space'. Some of the writing was so clumsy, like bad poems sent into in the paper, but beautiful too for that.

During that post-Uni time, in the mid/late nineties, the seemingly misplaced and romantic adventures of Apollo etc. chimed with the fear of a new century, the pre-millenial tension that ratched up to fever pitch, and was dispelled by a global night on the lash and lots of fireworks. In that end of a century moment, we didn't know what the 00's would bring us - what if all the computers in the world died, taking us with them, because of faulty clocks? Were we on the brink of global environmental disaster? Would the new century hurl us into the actual future, given that the real future just kept creeping up on us and becoming the past before we even noticed, and would that be the future we wanted? All those dreams, hopes and fears we were feeling then were like those of a post WW2 world, and the Space Race was at once Cold War territorial pissing, and a totem for a better future - if the world does end, don't worry, cos Humans are great, and we'll find a way, even if we have to go somewhere else! It's not just symbolic, though - of course Buzz Aldrin, Stephen Hawking and loads of others are constantly making the case for Mars even now.

If all this waffle about the space race and the nineties seems over nostalgic and sentimental, perhaps it is. It seems odd that the Space Race has fallen so far into the sepia tinted past (when it was such a futuristic gesture), and that the passing of a new years eve should send us all into such a spin. I guess there was a certain naivety to both, both fearful and optimistic. And while the 00's seem to be driving us further into chaos and fear, I hope we've got enough bile, cockiness and magic left in us to still think that something incredible can happen, that we can all allow ourselves a moment of wonder...

In the words of Frank Sidebottom, 'Space is Ace'!