Techno Archaeology - the prehistory of a moment that never quite was

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.

It is not hard to picture the event. The time is just after dawn and the sun is rising behind the Californian mountains although the chilly launch field is still crepuscular. The assembled crowd gawk and gasp in wonder as out of the brightly lit inwards of a staggeringly immense hangar - one of the biggest structures on earth - slowly emerges a vast, glistening, futuristic finned shape pulled along by the mobile launch tower. The future has arrived. The date is sometime in early April 1933.

Hangar 1 now squats forlorn and desolate at the edge of Moffett Field, a sinister shape vaguely redolent of a double headed phallus or, perhaps more accurately, a wounded triceratops.  Its fate uncertain, its cladding partly removed as the building bleeds toxic waste into the Bay through a gash in its side, the structure bears mute testament to a short-lived moment in American history.  It was built in the 1930s to house USS Macon, a huge airship (a mere 20 feet shorter than the ill-fated Hindenburg) that was in service for less than two years before crashing ignobly into the sea near Monterey taking with it dreams of a lighter than air US Navy and floating aircraft carriers.

Looking at the picture of USS Macon's awe inspiring fuselage floating within the dramatically illuminated bowels of Hangar One and imagining the launch, those of a certain age are, perhaps, reminded of Richard Strauss's, Also sprach Zarathustra. Strauss's tone poem was made famous for its part in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's  2001 A Space Odyssey (1968).  A year later, the piece rose to even greater prominence as the spine-tingling anthem of the Apollo 11 and man’s first landing on the moon.  This conflation of the space era and the zeppelin age is not entirely inappropriate given that the area now belongs to NASA – it is part of the Ames Research Centre.

Within the shadows of Hangar 1 is a disused McDonald's that incongruously serves as testament to this other truncated moment in time. Where diners once sat, an underfunded team of NASA scientists, engineers and student interns from San Jose University struggle with 'ancient' Ampex FR-900 drives and reconstructed demodulators to recover and digitise images of the Moon taken by lunar orbiters during the early space program.  To the layman, the process seems as technically challenging as the process by which the images were acquired in the first place. The project is a prime example of a field known as techno-archaeology.

McMoon, or to use its official title, The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, is overshadowed in more ways than one by Hangar One. The Space Program offered us so much yet went away so quickly. For one instant in time the future seemed to have arrived and we were all about to take giant leaps; we had lift off, the Moon was conquered and Mars was surely a mere step away. We didn't really know what it all meant, but portentous things seemed afoot and star children might well be involved.  Now all seems as stale as the fat in the disused burger fryers of the re-purposed McDonald's.  Meanwhile the remains of USS Macon welter in the sea off Big Sur.

To refer to yet  another truncated dream of a bright glorious future, Hardy’s reflections on the end of the Titanic insist on intruding:

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"  

The day we visited the base there was another poignant reminder of the end of the space age, the demise of NASA and the diminishment of our hubristic dreams. On arriving, we noticed the sound of a countdown eerily echoing and reverberating through the stripped girders and ribs of the long dead, long empty hangar. Tracing the source of this, we eventually discovered not a Saturn 5 throbbing its way into the atmosphere but a group of schoolchildren and their parents cheerfully launching homemade model rockets into the air from NASA’s slightly down-at-heels concrete airstrip.  These shot up about five hundred feet before fluttering gently back to Earth supported by toy parachutes.