Book Review: Dark Side of the Moon

Like a liquid inside a clear vessel, opinions define their holder. When opinions are forged through the process of research, the bearer is frequently deemed a scholar. When opinions are emotionally rendered from the ether, the carrier is often considered a curmudgeon.

Although Gerard J. DeGroot wears the scholar's costume that comes with his position as Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, he has one foot on the banana peel of curmudgeoness with his new book, Dark Side of the Moon. DeGroot believes that America was politically suckered into a manned space race during the mid-20^th century and was fleeced by the Apollo moon program in particular. He is convinced in hindsight that unmanned, robotic space exploration would have been financially, culturally and scientifically superior to the hero-centric astronaut method.

DeGroot's thesis is not unique, but there is still room to flesh out persuasive arguments in this field of study that might be called New Frontier Redux. The pervasive problem with DeGroot's approach is that he has performed no apparent new research and arrives at no original opinions. We can see straight through his vessel, as it were, and it may only be half full at that.

DeGroot goes about proclaiming his purportedly unconventional opinion in a conventional manner. He recounts a familiar chronological history of the evolution of rocketry and space travel. Most of his material derives from other sources who have previously visited these topics in depth, including Tom Wolfe, William E. Burrows, Dennis Piskiewicz and Walter A. McDougall. For instance, huge swaths of Paul Dickson's impressive book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century are paralleled thought for thought, paragraph by paragraph, often with attribution but sometimes not. DeGroot apparently so admired the odd 19^th century tale called "The Brick Moon" as recounted in the opening of Dickson's 2001 book that he duplicated the story for the beginning of his own.

Whether DeGroot knows it or not, much of the information he recounts about rocket pioneer Robert Goddard comes from Milton Lehman's 1963 biography of Goddard titled This High Man, a tool previous researchers have utilized. However, there is no attribution and Lehman's book does not appear in Dark Side's bibliography. Such an absence is indicative of DeGroot's heavy reliance upon secondary sources.

While standing upon the shoulders of giants, DeGroot can't seem to help himself from hurling contradictions at some conclusions drawn by these better researchers. He is prone to doing so with no factual foundation and through sheer emotion, like a poker player bluffing with only a pair of deuces. An example is DeGroot's indictment of Wehner von Braun's affiliation with the Nazi Party in the statement that von Braun "enjoyed wearing his smart SS uniform whenever anyone important visited Peenemunde," the construction site of the V-2 rockets. There is no information offered to substantiate this claim. In fact, it flies in the face of the deep and thorough work of Michael J. Neufeld and his 1995 book titled The Rocket and the Reich which found that von Braun "is known to have worn his uniform only once, and that was during Himmler's second visit in June 1943, when (Army Colonel Walter) Dornberger allegedly ordered him to do it."

Dark Side of the Moon is an emotional work. When he keeps his wits about him, DeGroot is capable of crafting provocative, even witty thoughts. He describes Sputnik II, launched by the Soviets in November 1957, as "a satellite weighing about 500 kilos, or about the size of a small car (something virtually unknown in America)." He sniffs at the moon project: "Expressed in the terms set by the Soviets and the Americans, the lunar race was shallow and trivial. The two superpowers behaved like two bald men fighting over a comb." At this level, his writing works well as the stuff of newspaper op-ed pieces. Not surprisingly, DeGroot writes many such articles on a freelance basis.

The text has a disappointing tendency to dissolve into diatribe and leach out its historical value. DeGroot's pessimism is on parade when he laments, "Virtually every major technological development, including television, nuclear power, and the Internet, was initially expected to improve man, either physically or morally or both. Instead, they have rendered man more efficient in his moral corruption." It can only go downhill from there.

Indeed, it tumbles like a boulder off a cliff. "In place of goals, Americans were offered fantasies... held together by the flimsy mantra that man must explore," DeGroot preaches. "It was all one great fantasy, one collective willingness to indulge a romantic illusion. Americans didn't really want to confront the stark realities of what they were attempting. They didn't want to think of the cost. They didn't want to think about whether the quest had point, purpose, or value... The 'need to explore' is in fact a great myth, an imagined construct used to fleece the taxpayer who gets vicarious adventures instead of hospital beds. The quest to explore might inspire a few people who feel the need to climb Everest or walk to the North Pole, but it is not an indicator of cultural vitality. The malady is most common among those who lack the imagination to enjoy life on Earth or to see how it might be improved." Just when DeGroot sounds like the ultimate Luddite, killjoy and miser wrapped into one tight bundle, he unleashes this gnashing characterization of the space age: "Prestige, a thing which neither filled bellies, nor kept people warm, nor kept predators at bay, was suddenly the number one priority of an embattled nation... Shortly after Sputnik, the American people took the road labeled shallow. Forget democracy, forget liberty, forget the American dream. The worth of a nation would henceforth be measured by its ability to put a dog in orbit."

Wearing his politics on his sleeve, DeGroot finds fault with every decision made, every statement uttered and every action taken by a known Democrat and yet gives Eisenhower, and other Republicans, undiluted kudos for rarified statesmanship. The disapproval gets uncomfortably personal, as in this venomous hiss: "Kennedy was a lot like NASA. On the surface, both were handsome, articulate, bold, and brave. Underneath, both were manipulative, mendacious, scheming, and untrustworthy." In a spectacularly awful passage, DeGroot tries to explain the national rush to fulfill the Kennedy challenge of conducting a safe moon voyage within the decade of the 1960s by saying, "One thing is certain. Kennedy was much more valuable to NASA dead than he ever was alive." He then compounds the outrage by footnoting it with yet another cockamamie assassination conspiracy theory.

DeGroot simply doesn't see the moon as a target worthy of money, challenge or destiny. "Why were so many people so keen to go to a worthless rock in the sky?" he asks rhetorically, but then provides an answer anyway; a mind-blowingly ridiculous answer. "Part of the reason was the worship of technology. At the time, technology was synonymous with progress." He tries to make that "time" sound quaint and provincial, but when, pray tell, in the history of mankind has technology not been synonymous with progress? "The Portuguese and Spanish courts would have pulled the plug on the explorers quicker than you can say Vasco da Gama if their voyages had been exclusively esoteric, or if they had brought back only worthless rocks," says DeGroot in the form of a finger wag. But he fails to follow through and acknowledge that is exactly what the United States did in 1972 after moon golf and lunar rovers lost their luster.

The textural weaknesses of Dark Side of the Moon are a shame, because the issue of manned space exploration deserves continued intelligent scrutiny, both of the historical and contemporary variety. We must keep weighing the costs and the benefits, be they financial, cultural, technical or spiritual. In 1965, Whitney Young of the National Urban League commented, "It will cost thirty-five billion dollars to put two men on the Moon. It would take ten billion dollars to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something is wrong somewhere." On the other side of this great coin, J. Robert Oppenheimer observed that scientific discovery is made not because it is useful, but because it is possible.

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest
By Gerard J. DeGroot
New York University Press, 321 pages, $29.95
ISBN 0814719953