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great obsessions of my tribe, the race into space orbit, a thing that Eisenhower, as much as he wished it, could not ignore. Should there be in the president’s best scenario a treaty freezing the Cold War missile buildup, an orbiting satellite could verify compliance by looking down on the Soviets. Should there be instead Cold War as usual, a spy satellite could tell the president how many missiles were being added to the Soviet arsenal so that we might not over-invest in our own supply. Either way, a satellite could save money for the parsimonious Cold Warrior. Either way, the Soviets, with their improving ground-to-air missiles, were only getting better at shooting down our U-2 spy planes, trapped as they were in Earth’s atmosphere. And so, in addition to the millions he forlornly gave the missile makers, Eisenhower signed the work orders for a fledgling satellite industry.
    Once onboard, Eisenhower intended America’s try at a satellite to be a thorough and successful one. But during most of his tenure, the satellite program was also largely civilian-directed and unhurried, for this president chose not to imagine that national prestige, or for that matter his popularity as a president, might be tied to an orbiting symbol. Eisenhower did not particularly believe in a space race. Not even America’s stunned reaction to
Sputnik
changed that about Ike.
Sputnik
, he said, “does not rouse my apprehensions, not one iota … They have put one small ball in the air.”
    On November 7, 1957, four days after the Soviets had beaten us into orbit again with far larger
Sputnik II
, six tons of space vehicle carrying one dog, President Eisenhower told the nation:
    There is much more to science than its function in strengthening our defense, and much more to our defensethan the part played by science. The peaceful contributions of science—to healing, to enriching life, to freeing the spirit—these are [its] most important products … And the spiritual powers of the nation—its underlying religious faith, its self-reliance, its capacity for intelligent sacrifice—these are the most important stones in any defense structure.
    As I say, Ike did not care much at all for my family’s star, our future, our story.
    P erhaps that is why the blue sky children of my generation have made Dwight D. Eisenhower into a figure of addled docility. We have made him our retro mascot for a lost era’s bliss, and this has allowed us to forget his scolds. He may never have liked us, but we like our idea of Ike. He is our kitschy joke of a grandpa.
    Our true father is someone quite different, a man who not only embraced our star, our story, but wrote that story for us over and over again in whatever way suited the mood of the moment, in whatever way made our version of the future seem inevitable. Many times the ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun has been named “the father of America’s space program.” He is father to more. Wernher von Braun fashioned a new creation myth for his tribe and (lasting awhile, at least) for all of America.
    Three years before
Sputnik
’s launch, this is what Wernher von Braun said about the prospect of a satellite to those American officials who held the purse strings. He said he could build a “humble” one right away for a mere $100,000, that it would work just fine, and that
“it would be a blow to U.S. prestige if we did not do it first.”
In this familiar patter—
Low, low price. Immediate delivery. Be the first to have one.
—we find the hard-selling entrepreneur, a type that belongs to all America timelessly. But here, too, is a quality quite particular to my people, our moment.
    The classic American entrepreneurial hero searches out unmetdesires in the everyday world and then, with a certain flexible flair, invents the answers, products for the masses to use. Von Braun’s genius lay elsewhere. He was brilliant at inventing new and different uses for the only product he ever desired to