Moondust by Andrew Smith

in general, with the words: “It is not surprising that in the 1950s, in the heartland of consumer democracy, the leading school of painters abdicated before image-makers so much more powerful than old-fashioned art.”
    Which is absolutely right, but also misses the point. At theemerging school’s first big show in October 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Warhol, who grasped the trajectory of his society better than anyone, explained his work by saying, “I feel very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rocket ships and television.” More specifically, the critic James Rosenquist summed up what he saw as “post beat and not afraid of an atomic bomb,” while for the painter Robert Indiana it was “a re-enlistment of the world. It was shuck the bomb! It was the American dream – optimistic, generous and naïve.” It’s easy to forget that in the beginning, Pop Art, like the space programme, defined itself explicitly in relation to the Cold War – about which there seemed a decisiveness, as if this was a bridge humanity had to cross to its future, grim or glorious as that might be. Thus, when Warhol set up his Factory in 1964, he decorated it top to bottom in silver, explaining that “silver was the future, it was spacey, the astronauts …” The impact of the spacemen when they first appeared is easy to underestimate.
    Something here feels wrong, though. NASA was late catching on to the power of the image in an age where information was travelling further and faster all the time, and you can still feel this as you watch pasty-legged dads straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon dragging their kids – thought bubbles whining,
“What about Disneyland?”
– to an IMAX movie about the International Space Station. I sit through it myself and gradually become aware of a disturbance at the back of my mind, evolving into a strong sense of pathos. The movie was directed by Ron Howard and narrated by Tom Cruise and its remorseless tedium seems to say everything about the bind NASA finds itself in after three decades spent loitering in low Earth orbit. And in a flash I see the difference between the space shuttle’s 200-mile-high beat and Apollo ploughing 240,000 miles to the Moon: before me now is a space that’s been domesticated and rendered routine, while at a quarter of a million miles you’ve left the Earth and are on the outer edge of experience; are riding the skein between us and Deep Space, being dwarfed by infinity itself. Well over 400 people have now been into space, but only twenty-four have left Earth orbit and been out
there,
all with Apollo. But Apollo’s dark allure seems distant here – I’ve felt none of it – and as I wrestlethe sterile wrapping off my cutlery in the cafeteria, I find myself grumbling that I bet Pete Conrad never used sterile cutlery: indeed, if I hear Strauss’s
Also Sprach Zarathustra
– the theme from
2001
– one more time, I may very well attack someone with it. The cutlery seems emblematic of the whole Kennedy Space Center experience so far. Sterile.
    So I’m not expecting much of the bus tour, but as we sweep past the alien archaeology of the launch gantries, which look as though they’ve towered over this wasteland forever, there comes a kind of relief. A breeze blows in from the Atlantic and a wildness takes hold of the land, and now I can picture Shepard and Armstrong climbing steely-eyed into their ships. There’s no need for presentation here. Wherever you look, the squat shape of the Vehicle Assembly Building is somewhere in the corner of your vision, growing out of the marram grass, the highest point in the state of Florida and the largest human-made structure on Earth when it was built; the place where they put together the rockets, so big that they say it has its own weather system and could admit the United Nations building