Little information has been released about the psychological effects of space travel, both on the astronauts and the public at large. Over the years NASA spokesmen have even denied that the astronauts dream at all during their space flights. But it is clear from the subsequently troubled careers of many of the astronauts (Armstrong, probably the only man for whom the 20th century will be remembered 50,000 years from now, refuses to discuss the moon-landing) that they suffered severe psychological damage. What did they dream about, how were their imaginations affected, their emotions and need for privacy, their perception of time and death? The Space Age lasted barely fifteen years, from Gagarin’s first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown live on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public’s loss of interest - the brute-force ballistic technology is basically 19th century, as people realize, while advanced late-20th-century technologies are invisible and electronic-computers, microwave data links, faxes and VDUs are the stuff of which our dreams are made. Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it inevitably recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems, before the development of our sense of balance and upright posture - a forced return to infantile dependency. Only intelligent machines may one day grasp the joys of space travel, seeing the motion sculpture of the space flights as immense geometric symphonies.
