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Rocket Dreams

How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond

Introduction

Sitting between the subtropical party towns of Daytona Beach and Vero Beach on Florida's eastern coast, Brevard County is a strip of humid backwater, mosquito infested and stiflingly hot. Everywhere you go the air is soupy, but it hangs more heavily in the northern and eastern districts, where the exotic-sounding Indian and Banana Rivers have sliced the land into spindly fingers and created steamy lagoons full of squawking wildlife and lazing alligators. Rising out of this prehistoric landscape is Merritt Island, a fat belt of white middle-class suburbia shaped like a clothespin and shored up by coastal dunes and brackish marshland. It is a place of little apparent distinction. With its rickety beach houses, green-blue swimming pools, and dowdy strip malls, Merritt Island looks like a poor cousin to the Florida Keys and life there follows the same idling rhythms of fishing and sunbathing. The island is an unlikely destination, yet each year it pulls to its swampy shores thousands of people from around the world. Driving east fr ... read full excerpt from: Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond ebook