“As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket's
becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units,
controls, tail sections . . .”
The above quotation (you guessed?) is from Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Tyrone
Slothrop is walking through the factory where they made V2 rockets, the Vergeltungswaffe 2, Nazi Germany’s super sonic “revenge
weapon,” subsequently seized by the Russians and Americans.
I was a little surprised, as I was walking
down Tooley Street, in London earlier this year to find that this thing was
still in place on the wall above what used to be, and perhaps still is (though their website
seems to be in hibernation) a museum called Britain at War.
That rocket (let’s call it that) has been in
place for 20 odd years, but I really don’t know what it is. It’s obviously not a “real” V2.
There are quite a few of the real things
around, though they tend to be in serious aeronautical museums rather than on
the wall of tourist attractions. The nearest I’ve been to one was at the White Sands Missile Range, outside of Alamogordo in New Mexico. I walked
around it, stood beside it, and could probably have reached out and touched it,
but since but I was standing on the property of the American military
industrial complex I decided against that.
There’s a kind of “rocket garden” at the White Sands Missile Range where you can
walk around and look at scary hardware. Most of the
stuff is out in the open air, but the V2 is in a solid substantial
building, because it needs protection and preservation.
Not many miles down the road from the missile range
is the entirely separate White Sands National Monument, a fabulous, two hundred plus square miles
of white desert that are a wonder even to a skeptical old desert rat like me.
White Sands has been on mind lately since I was
looking for something else in the Nicholsonian archive and found this
photograph taken of me – oh good god – probably 25 years ago.
The thing I’m holding that looks like a bit like a
clipboard is in fact some kind of rocket debris that must have found its way
into the dunes from the missile range next door, after some kind of explosion or
jettisoning operating.
It’s one of the smaller regrets
of my life that I didn’t stick this piece of detritus in my hand luggage and
take it home, though conceivably it was drenched in rocket fuel and evil
chemicals and would have done awful things to me. And maybe I wouldn’t have got it through airport
security – though this was obviously well before 9/11.
I know I’ve bleated on elsewhere about gardens of
subversion, places that are less than Edenic, and possibly all the better for that. And without having more than the average
interest in rocketry or space or ballistics I seem to have walked among quite a
few flying objects, some identified, some not.
This one in Essex for instance:
The most recent one I went to was in Utah, actually
called the Thiokol Rocket Garden, belonging to ATK
Thiokol, “Supplier of aerospace and defense products.
Munitions, smart weapons, propulsion and composite structures.” It’s a place designed so that you can walk and sit and have a snack – all of which I did.
Depending on your finer feelings you can regard this
place as a garden of death, or a tribute to man’s greatest achievement, or a piece
of accidental “land art.” But my favorite
thing about it was this:
Sure, a standard rocket is good enough for me – who
needs anything too fancy?
And finally a last word from one of White Sands’ most famous
inhabitants, begetter of the V2, and therefore of much else besides, Herr Wernher von Braun, words that form the epigraph to the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow, from an article he wrote titled “Why I Believe in Immortality.”
“Nature does not know
extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me,
and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our
spiritual existence after death.”
This
is him in later life, with a very nice display of model rockets behind him:
And this is him earlier, working on his Dr. Strangelove impersonation.
