Abandon in Place: Cape Canaveral, August 2010
Page 2 - Nuclear War & Project Mercury
We round the bend at the end of Lighthouse Road, turning onto Central Control Road, and then turn again, at the intersection of Central Control Road and ICBM Road.
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Sometimes it's hard to imagine how things came to be the way they are.
Rockets fly, and nobody thinks very much about it.
It's just the way things are.
But once upon a time, rockets did not fly.
They blew themselves to hell on a regular basis, and flew poorly, or not at all, for the most part.
Incredible sums of money and energy were poured into the business of learning how to design, assemble, and launch rockets that would work, and work well.
Why?
People willingly threw the best years of their lives away, working sixty, eighty, and even hundred hour workweeks, driven like madmen grappling with a never-ending torrent of intractable problems, all in an effort to get the damn rockets flying, and flying right.
Why?
Wives and husbands languished at home, abandoned, alone, day after day, night after night.
Whole neighborhoods of children attempted to raise themselves in the absence of any actual parenting, and many children came to bad ends in the attempt.
Stress. Heart attacks. Alcoholism. Debauchery. Broken health, broken lives.
Why?
Fear.
Fear is why.
Fear is the Great Motivator, and fear was everywhere palpable back when the feverish work of bringing operational rockets on line was still in its infancy.
In the 1950's, there was one and only one justification for the Sisyphean heartbreak of trying to create working rockets, and that justification was thermonuclear warheads.
The warheads were the payload that justified the existence of the rocket. PAYload. As in that which pays for the rocket. Without the payload, money would never have been spent, work would never have been done, and time would never have been taken.
And without a payload, the rockets simply would never have flown, imperfectly or otherwise.
Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, ICBM's, would never have coalesced into flying amalgams of stainless steel and fire.
But vast military instrumentalities in two opposing Great Powers had thermonuclear contrivances. Both had payloads. Both were eager to develop the systems which could hurl devices capable of murdering tens of millions of people half way around the planet in less time than it takes to read these essays. And both were terrified that their Main Adversary might seize this ability for themselves first, thus holding an entire nation's population hostage for the dictation of terms, or, if terms weren't met, mass incineration on a scale that would make the ovens of Auschwitz look like child's play.
Rockets, at their very foundation, in their innermost soul, are unimaginably evil machines.
The work of proper operational rocketry took its first toddler's steps in the 1940's with Nazis who sought only to kill mere hundreds of people simultaneously, using primitive chemical explosives. Things were stepped up vastly in scope and ambition during the 1950's when the development of payloads employing nuclear explosives began to justify the time and expense despite significant errors in aim-point accuracy. And the work goes on today, on a much more refined and terrorizing scale, with no end in sight.
The people and machines are in place and spreading, and the work never slackens, although we try hard not to think about it.
But from these flowers of evil an unexpected seed was produced that fell into fertile ground.
A seed that grew into something which bears no resemblance whatsoever to its parents.
And it was the Russians we can thank for this unexpected turn of events.
First in October of 1957, and again in April of 1961, the Russians, miraculously, found by mistake a way to turn the grim work of designing more efficient and more effective Systems of Murder into something entirely different. Something that served to siphon off some of the venomous energy of work on thermonuclear delivery systems and instead turn it into an amazing competition between the two largest power blocs the world had ever known up to that time.
We'll never know for sure, but it just might be that by starting the Space Race, the Russians saved all of our lives, and may even have kept truly insane individuals like General Curtis LeMay from killing us all and poisoning the entire planet whilst so doing.
The competition that was at the root of the Space Race of the 1960's was simplicity itself: Place people on top of an ICBM, launch it, and see if the rocket would explode or not, see if they might survive, see how far they could go, how long they could stay up there, what they might be able to do up there, and all for the greater glory of that nation which sent them on their harrowing way.
Along the way, a brash young leader upped the ante, and suddenly we found ourselves with the most absurd target possible, the goddamned Moon for christ's sake, squarely in the cross-hairs.
If you weren't around when it was all going down, then there will be no way to convey to you the sense of urgency, the sense of wonder, the sense of unified pulling together against a Dark Power, and the sense of accomplishment when it all went as planned.
Take my word for it, those were Amazing Days.
We had somehow gotten ourselves caught up in a Race for Outer Space, A Race to the Moon, and the outcome was by no means certain. And the Race had somehow become serious business indeed, and an awful lot was riding on it.
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| The intersection of Central Control Road & ICBM Road |
At the intersection of Central Control Road and ICBM Road, I ask Sean to stop, so that I might get a picture of the street sign, and he obliges me.
ICBM road bends to the left and we find ourselves looking down the roadway that fronts missile row.
There's not much here anymore, but once upon a time, this was the center of things.
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This was where it all came together and it was truth or consequences time.
This is where the button got pushed, the fire spouted into the flame buckets, and the gleaming result of all that labor, hope, sweat, prayers, time, and money tried its best to rise up into the Florida sky.
Rosy-cheeked engineers in their late twenties, guys with PhD's in mathematics, and Master's Degrees in systems engineering, cheerfully abandoned their wives and children and did their utmost to get their machines to work.
Machines that could burn the entire population of Moscow to vapor in a single stroke.
And no one thought the least thing about any of it.
It was the most normal thing in the world.
Down the row of launch pads, at Complex 14, swords had been beaten into plowshares of a sort, and elements of the doomsday apparatus had been co-opted away from Murder Writ Large, if only just a little bit, in a frantic effort to place an individual into orbit around the earth.
It was called Project Mercury.
Except for the Russians, nobody had ever done it before, and the Russians weren't giving anything away, and so it all had to be figured out from scratch, and it was all being done at a dead run, fueled by torrents upon torrents of money.
Why more people were not killed in the effort, I cannot fathom.
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There's nothing left to see.
Nothing here but the indigenous low scrub of Cape Canaveral and the asphalt we're gliding over as we head northward on ICBM Road and pass Complex 11, then Complex 12, then Complex 13, then...
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