Chapter 51
In the 1950s, there were few products or brands that couldn’t be burnished by associating them with the space race—Tupperware, Popsicle, Pez, even that staple of mankind for 30,000 years, bread.
To promote its Silvercup bread, the Detroit-based Gordon Baking Co. debuted this custom-built rocket at the Michigan State Fair in 1954. Nearly 100,000 attendees toured the thirty-five-by-eight-foot spacecraft, christened the Silver Moon, where they could take the pilot’s seat and pull back on a throttle that imitated the roaring sounds of a jet engine.
Yet in 1954, the space age was barely off the ground. Less than thirty years after its seminal World’s First Exhibition of Models of Interplanetary Apparatus, Mechanisms, Instruments, and Historical Materials, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1. Sputnik 2, with poor doomed Laika, the stray dog found on the streets of Moscow, stuck aboard, was just three years away. And it took until 1959, with the Russians’ Luna 1, before the first artificial object slipped the surly bonds of Earth’s imprisoning orbit. When the United States did try to venture into space, it was with a Vanguard TV3 in 1957, which exploded on the launchpad, as if it had been lit for a Fourth of July celebration.
And yet Americans believed that space was every bit as much theirs as the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore.
The United States’ own promotion of space travel had always skewed more toward the adolescent than the adult. In the era of the 1927 Russian exhibition, for instance, the best-known book in the United States on artificial satellites might have been 1912’s “The Rocket Book,” which follows the trajectory of a missile, fired by young Fritz from the basement to the twentieth floor. Along its flight path, the missile seems to surge through holes literally cut into the pages to show the rocket bursting dinner tables and flowerpots.
Similarly, the 1949 children’s book “The Conquest of Space,” and the eight-part Collier’s magazine series in 1951, starting with “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!,” generated the same kind of enthusiasm for space in Americans that “Is Utopia Really Possible?” and Robert Goddard did Russians. Chesley Bonestell’s illustrations for both “Conquest” and the Collier’s sequence left readers feeling like they had looked through God’s contact lenses.
Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-00000
Born 15 years before the Wright brothers initial flight, Bonestell made the Beta Lyrae binary system look like an eye of Sauron, and the chill of the way-below-zero surface of the Saturnine moon, Titan, feel so real, that viewers needed to put on a goose-down parka just to look at it.
After that, Americans were sold on space. They could not achieve escape velocity fast enough from what Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (aka SpaceX), years later called “a fixer-upper of a planet.” They yearned to hear David Bowie’s “Check ignition and may God’s love be with you” before leaving forevermore in a “spaceship [that] knows which way to go.”
Perhaps it was simply a spiritual ache for a new and unspoiled terra incognita, a malaise brought about in no small part by Frederick Jackson Turner’s eulogy of a thesis, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” that he delivered to historians at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The sirens of space had called and American popular culture lunged toward them. Advertisers for the most banal products—from Puffin Biscuits to Oldsmobiles—glommed on to the space craze, hoping for relevancy and hipness by association. Kraft Foods Inc., for one example, held a contest promoted in comic books and newspapers. Awarding telescopes, “moon cars,” toy missile launchers, spaceship model kits, and giant Hammond space maps, Kraft dangled an out-of-this-world grand prize: an actual spaceship simulator that came complete with space suits and helmets based on their real-life counterparts.
A meteor storm of space-based TV shows filled the airwaves: “Flash Gordon,” “Buck Rogers,” “Space Patrol,” “Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe,” “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,” and “Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers.” “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” was the source material for Silvercup’s rocket, the Silver Moon, in actuality a custom-built semitrailer requiring three months to assemble.
The company offered guests tours of the spacecraft from uniformed Space Rangers who highlighted an interplanetary radio that could receive (prerecorded) messages from Rocky Jones himself and an interplanetary TV that connected with Rocky via a rear-projected sound film that appeared on the screen. At the tour’s end, children received a miniature loaf of Silvercup, “The Official Bread of All Spacemen.” Nearly 100,000 people visited the Silver Moon at the 1954 Michigan State Fair, a metric that, understandably, excited imitators.
One of the best-known clones was the rocket built a year later, in 1955, by the Los Angeles–based Luer Meat Packing Co. The packaged-meats company likely derived its vessel from the Terra IV spaceship that appeared on “Space Patrol.” Inside, a 16-mm projector showed space adventures to budding astronauts, who received promotional pamphlets titled “Frankie Luer’s Space Adventures with Davey Rocket.” In the illustrated comic, Frankie, an extremely large hot dog, and Davey, a young boy, travel to Venus, encountering an extraterrestrial environment out of Tim Leary, with mushroom people and moss-covered cities. On the back of the pamphlet was a “Flight Certificate,” attesting “This is to certify that ________ has traveled to Venus, Mars, Saturn and the Moon aboard the Luer Space Ship.”
Abandoned on the roadside in Arizona, the Luer spaceship eventually landed at Connecticut’s Space Age Museum. The Silvercup rocket’s fall from sky-high popularity was more graceful, appearing at the Michigan State Fair annually until 1962, when show organizers replaced it with a replica of astronaut John Glenn’s Mercury capsule, the Friendship 7. Today it is a relic residing at the Air Zoo in Portage, MI, perhaps waiting for one more chance to commence countdown.