With the present space policy, the U.S. will never reach another planet. On the abandoned launch pad at the cape, dry grass bends in the sea breeze. In another quarter-century it is likely that all twelve who walked on the moon will have passed into history. And there are now two generations who cannot remember when spaceflight was still a dream.

Were some catastrophe to destroy the human species, alien explorers might one day discover on the Florida coast a great stone table, standing Sphinxlike against a gray blend of sea and sky. Stenciled with the words ABANDON IN PLACE, it was intended to stand forever. Perhaps they would see it with other enigmatic monoliths—Stonehenge or the pyramids—as having some religious function. They would be correct.

Abandoned since the days of Apollo, Pad 34 rests like an ancient ruin at the center of a great circle, the old roads radiating in all directions. Lofty arches formed by the four legs of the great launch table frame another arch in the distance; and beyond that, lying in the scrubby weeds, the giant flame deflectors gather rust. There is something eternal about the scene, something elegiac in the lonely arches, crumbling at the edges, abiding in silence but for the song of dry grass in the sea breeze, requiem not only for the three who died there in the fire, but for the greatest project in human history.

The greatest generation. 1959-1972

Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.