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Legend

© Larry Winn

Near the end of the eighteenth century, scout and Indian fighter John Stuart provided Thomas Jefferson with the bones of a "Tremendous animal of the clawed kind lately found by some saltpeter manufacturers." Jefferson wrote to Stuart, "I cannot help believing that this animal, as well as the Mammoth, are still existing." Jefferson called the incognitum Megalonyx, "the Great Claw". Clearly, the unexplored wilderness of the American frontier provided a stimulus to the imagination not unlike our modern inventions of aliens and starships.

From 1802 to 1806, President Jefferson oversaw the initial work of opening the frontier. The Lewis and Clark expedition of those years marked the first U.S. government sponsorship of a scientific expedition. By 1900, the vast territory that had been an engine of economic, political and cultural expansion had ceased to satisfy the requirements of a frontier.

Nothing happened for almost seventy years. Oh, there was a boom, a bust, a couple of wars and two or three spectacular demonstrations of technological arrogance. But nothing happened.

However ...

On July 16, 1969, an American Saturn V rocketship lifted slowly away from Launch Pad 39A at Florida's Cape Canaveral and began a four-day journey to another world. The over-forty generation remembers the event with a pathetic sort of reverence. Many expected to have the opportunity to live and work on the moon, or maybe on Mars or in deep space.

By December of 1972, with the splashdown of Apollo 17, it was clear that the adventure was over for at least a generation. The Apollo Program, in spite of all its spectacular accomplishments, left nothing of value in its wake. Even the technology to build those giant rockets is gone and forgotten after 30 years of disuse. For American aerospace engineers, Apollo became a cautionary tale of how not to run a space program.

However,in the ruins of Apollo, some people have found the seeds of a new beginning. Every summer, a few space veterans and enthusiastic newcomers, kids and parents, businessmen and visionaries celebrate the golden age of space exploration with anything they can find ... films, displays of old Apollo hardware, models, guest astronauts, slide shows, balloons and imagination.

In a typical example, the City of Lompoc, a bedroom community to California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, declared an official "Space Week" in 1984. A "Camp Fire Astronautics" adjunct to Camp Fire Boys and Girls began a campaign of decorating the local library with space art. They were soon joined by the Western Spaceport Museum and Science Center and the local chapter of the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics (AIAA). Camp Fire kids operated a local theater, donated for the occasion by a supporter, showing Star Trek reruns and classic space movies. The Museum and the AIAA rounded up nationally known speakers and organized a space art competition.