Are we all rocket men at heart?
What is it about rockets that attracts us as surely as moths to flames? Is it the flame, too bright to watch? Is it the noise, like an ongoing explosion? Would we still love rockets if they were quiet, if they lifted off with a faint whirring sound and no flame at all?
Do girls too, like rockets? Do they find the same magic in that roaring, flaming candle that boys find? Is the fascination universal? If I remember watching my schoolmates watch grainy TV coverage of launches and recoveries during the Apollo years, think so, I think it is universal.
Your subject is too big for one post, in fact, too big for this venue, and I’d like you to go bigger yet, go for the gold, write a modern history of amateur rocketry. There are volumes about national and military rockets, but the last time I read anything at all about amateurs it was about Goddard. Amateur rocketeers are now recapturing a spirit they last had eighty years ago.
As your subjects point out, they’re using NASA and Russian engineering to accomplish their goals but, they’re doing it for a small fraction of the cost and with a small fraction of the workforce. These aren’t legions of physicists spending tens of billions of dollars, smashing infinitely small particles together to create other, even smaller particles to prove concepts too narrow and esoteric for us to understand, they are cheerable underdogs with a goal that is recognizable and intellectually accessible to us all, and better, they are slowly winning.
We may not understand our love for rockets, or our fascination with space, but we all have it, we all feel it and hold our breaths and hope against the odds that this time our rocket won’t explode, this time it will fly high, along with our dreams.
