Blue Sky Dream (38 page)

N
ow I am high above the California of Don Morris, the baby boomer who dreamed up the X-21. His is the California where, in the spring of 1995, the entertainment industry eclipsed aerospace as the state’s largest employer. His California is Disneyland, an invented place that, Morris has told me, he yearned to experience while growing up in the Midwest. When he reached Northern California as a young engineer at Hewlett-Packard, he loved to jet south for a day and ride Disneyland’s Star Tours, “my first experience inside a real simulator.” As a young father, he fashioned a two-seat prototype of the X-21 in his suburban garage, blocking the gap under the door to the kitchen with towels to keep the Fiberglas fumes from seeping in. When the home project was done, he and his son would sit side by side inside their plastic capsule, immersed in a
Star Wars
movie playing on the windscreen before them. What remained was to make the prototype flyable, the windscreen interactive. This was achieved by adding hydraulic rockers to buck and roll the pod, and by flashing before the pilot software imagery by Paradigm Simulation Inc., a maker of flight simulators for Boeing, Lockheed, and other military contractors.

At this altitude above virtual California, the effects of the disappearance of more than half a million aerospace-related jobs are invisible to the eye. Swooping lower offers no better understanding. In my neighborhood the saplings lashed to stakes have grown into trees, there are far fewer children in the street, and Shopwell is now Yoahan, an all-Japanese store selling rice, seaweed, and pickled oddities in bulk. But there are no husks of factories or rows of boarded-up houses to inspire folksongs about hard luck aeronautical engineers. Where blue sky culture fades, the suburban veneer remains implacably pastel.

A hard pull back on the joystick aims my X-21 higher and higher, until the virtual blue tints with the ink of space, a blackness that is, these days, returning to what it represented before
Sputnik
. During that strange decade or so after
Sputnik
, astronauts were seen to be blazing a trail so that any citizen might one day make a personal visit to the place of space. No one really believes that anymore. Better to see in the blackness of space a vast projection screen, the use film director Fritz Lang made of space early in this century with his
Girl in the Moon.
Better to inhabit the space within our video monitors, where personal fantasies of individual freedom and morphing identity can be lived. Hostile outer space, an airless freeze where survival demands total obedience to “procedure,” could never offer that. What, then, has a national space program to offer the imagination of me today, as I pilot my X-21 dream machine? Amid the hundred thousand pieces of space junk that swirl around Earth, the authentic astronauts try to catch a satellite on a pole or reel one out on a long tether. As Don Morris and his son so well understood, even an old George Lucas movie is far more entertaining.

Or better still, one of Captain Kirk’s alien romances. My father’s industry has gone the way of
Star Trek
: Originally watched to see how the Manifest Destiny of the American way would play out, it is now scavenged for kitsch. The famous footage of Neil Armstrong hoisting the American flag on the surface of the moon is replayed on MTV, albeit with an MTV flag. The hull of a rocket used to launch a satellite advertises Schwarzenegger’s
Last Action Hero.

Small wonder that the last president’s call for a $400 billion mission to Mars met quiet coughs, that the space station keeps shrinking, that due to lack of interest we will not land a probe on a comet after all. No, the only thing a national space program has to offer me, pilot of the X-21, is what the Hubble telescope so efficiently mines from the galaxies: images. Once they have been properly computer enhanced and digitized, I will be able to fly through those sunset thunderheads Hubble has shown us, those pillars of star gas seven thousand light-years from Earth and trillions
of miles high, as beautiful in their chiaroscuro rendering as anything that Chesley Bonestell ever painted for Wernher von Braun.

I nose earthward, locking in bearings for the plains of Kazakhstan, leveling out for a low flyover once I have in my sights the Baikonur Space Center of the former Soviet Union. There the most powerful rocket engines ever built, two twenty-story Energiyas, lie ten years dormant in a hangar, feathers and bird dung coating the platforms around them. “If you could just find some rich guys to pay for them, I know we could send them up.” That is what the chief engineer of the space center told a reporter for the
New York Times.

Space City, the housing development built for Baikonur workers, is a place of breadlines nowadays, a society without enough milk for its children. Of what work remains, some is due to the fact that my father’s employer lost a contract, in a sense, to the Russians. The design of the space station’s escape vehicle, once a Lockheed program, is now in the hands of Russian rocket scientists who are paid four dollars an hour. I know this because I spoke with a Lockheed engineer just back from a consultation with his former adversaries. He was an old hand who considered this his last project. What he remembered most was the feel under his feet of the stairs of the Russians’ design complex, the saddle of wear in concrete left by aerospace engineers much like him (except for being the enemy) as they went about their millions upon millions of work days.

T
he trigger on the Hornet stick will fire off a motherlode of munitions.… I gotta hand it to those R and D guys because the weapons onboard are
sweet.…
My personal favorite: your high velocity projectiles, referred to as HPVs. Now, these babies are kinda like skippin’ rocks at mach four
.…

With memories of Max Power’s briefing singing me along, I veer southwest, skim the Caspian Sea, Tehran, Baghdad. Desert
Storm, that booster of consumer interest in the product I am flying today, was a Cold War’s worth of aerospace systems engineering for all to see: the satellites and drones and AWAC planes mapping the attacks; the Tomahawk cruise missiles and A6E Intruders and F-18s and F111s and F-4G Wild Weasels and A-10 Tankbusters and F-15E Eagles and B-52s and Tornado GR-1s and Apache helicopters and F-117A Stealth strikers wreaking their various specialties of destruction; the KC-135 and KC-10 air tankers circling above for midair refueling; a mere eight allied planes crashing to Earth in the first two thousand sorties. After the nasty, illicitly thrilling shape of the Stealth fighter, what icon of power is left for aerospace to put in the sky? After the traffic jam of retreating Iraqi soldiers was turned to a smear of immolated bodies on the sixty-mile stretch of road out of Jahra, Kuwait, what gesture of technological omnipotence is needed?

In a blink of the imagination, the East Coast of the United States rolls into view, and then the factory towns and farmhouses, the industrial parks and trailer parks, the America that lacks focus when subjected to the scrutiny of focus group facilitators. I am flying over the fifteen American communities where, at the end of 1995, focus group discussions were conducted for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. The man who summarized the findings, Richard Harwood, found Americans believing their nation was no longer a fair place to work, believing their economy was “unraveling before their eyes,” believing that no institution—government, corporations, the media—reflected their concerns. “People are deeply ambivalent about what we should do. They believe this nation is entering a new era. They’re not looking to return to the ’50s. They know that’s not desirable. But they don’t believe that we have the capacity to work through these major shifts.”

Finally a familiar circuitry of Silicon Valley freeways appears before me, and then all the cement-walled tilt-ups surrounding the cement-walled tilt-up that houses the Magic Edge, Inc. entertainment center. It would be incorrect to consider the complex nothing more than one more elaborate video game parlor. Those
are intended as places for teenagers to spend their quarters consuming electronic “thumb candy.” But Don Morris and his cofounders of Magic Edge, Inc. saw a very different market for their product. They set out to create a virtual
culture
consumable in twelve dollar and seventy-five cent increments. Don Morris has told me his product is geared for people with good jobs, the kinds of people who work in the high-tech business campuses surrounding his complex. Should they want to slip into a flight suit uniform and hear Max Power extol their worth to the organiztion, Magic Edge, Inc. will sell them what they desire. The public relations person at Magic Edge, Inc. assures me the center is drawing thousands of customers a month. Especially popular are package deals offered to corporations who see in the X-21 a tool for employee “team building.”

My allotted eight minutes in the X-21 Hornet are coming to a close. I realize I have done little other than settle in at high altitude and let my mind do the aerobatics. The simulation software shows me an image of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I think to myself that it would be exciting to fly under the span, a trick my father could only have dreamed of pulling off in his Grumman F9F-8 Cougar way back in the 1950s. I ease the joystick forward, apply the air brakes some, begin to line up my approach.

But the X-21 is suddenly in free fall, the hydraulic rockers beneath pitching me forward, the pixilated azure of the Pacific Ocean filling more and more of my windscreen.

This is what comes from not paying attention during the briefing. I had not recorded the fact that this day’s other fliers, my squadron mates, were not only allowed but invited to accumulate extra points by shooting down one of their own. “You are hit,” the voice of our squadron leader informs me in my headset. The controls are useless in my hands, and virtual blue is all I see.