Free Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer

like the sound of surf off a sea of wheat. It was the grain elevator which communed on prairie nights with the stars. Here in the cricket-dinning tympani of Florida’s dunes and marshes, the launching towers of rockets now obsolete give that same sense of the sentinel in a field of space, stand already as monoliths and artifacts of a prehistoric period when rockets usually exploded in the first few hundred feet of their flight.
    Yes, the Cape has given a turn to Aquarius. If at Houston he still remained attached to a somewhat disembodied ego (which felt like a balloon on a tether)—if for all his extorted admiration at the self-sufficiency of NASA and its world, he could still not quite like it,quite rid himself of the idea that finally space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires, his ego was therefore of use. He would pull in the string from time to time to criticize what he saw. If he were heard to utter “This is not unimpressive,” when encountering some perfection of cooperation or technique, he was also ready to whisper—in his heart at least—that the Manned Spacecraft Center was not the coziest home for the human heart. Indeed, it was so cold that one could finally walk away from it like from a chill corridor in a dream. The beauties of MSC went on in the minds of technicians, but the soul of a visitor felt locked in the vault with an air conditioner. So it was attractive to think that one could end the dream, unlock the door, and walk away.
    That was hardly possible on the Cape. If the abandoned launch towers and the hot lonely ocean breeze opened vistas of the West and thoughts of how many of the most important events in America seemed to take place in all the lonely spaces—as if the Twentieth Century had become the domain of all the great and empty territories (the Saharas, the Siberias, and the Minutemen in the buried silos of the West)—that was forced to give way to a sense of huge activity and gargantuan dimensions. If MSC near Houston was a brain, then Cape Kennedy was the body, and at Launch Complex 39, up twenty miles to the north of Cocoa Beach and Canaveral, were found the bones and muscles of a Colossus. Here the big components of Saturn V came in by cargo plane, came by ship through the Panama Canal and by barge through the Gulf, came from Los Angeles and Sacramento, from Huntsville in Alabama to Michoud in Louisiana, and from Michoud to the Cape; here at Complex 39 the parts were assembled in a mammoth cube of an edifice with a smaller box attached, the Vehicle Assembly Building, 526 feet high, a building just about as large as the combined volume of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the Pentagon. Covering eight acres, enclosing 129 million cubic feet, the Vehicle Assembly Building was nonetheless windowless, and decorated from the outside in huge concentric rectangles of green-gray, and charcoal-gray, ivory-gray and light blue-gray; it lookedlike a block of wood colored by an Op Art painter, but since it was over fifty stories high, it also looked like the walls of a gargantuan suburban department store. If by volume it was when built the largest building in the world, the Vehicle Assembly Building, as one saw it standing on the flat filled-in marshes of the Cape, had to be also a fair candidate for the ugliest building in the world. Viewed from any external approach it was the architectural fungoid of them all.
    Once inside, however, it was conceivably one of the more beautiful buildings in the world. Large enough to assemble as many as four moongoing Apollo-Saturn vehicles at once, it was therefore open enough to offer interior space for four tall bays, each of these niches tall enough to house the full rocket, which was thirty-six stories high. Since the rocket in turn sat on a transporter, called a crawler, of some dimension itself, the doors to the four bays were each over forty stories and therefore high enough and wide enough to take in through their portals the UN