The other is more meta. It is nominally a photo of the combined group of American and Chinese engineers posing in front of the earth station. But a Chinese photographer stepped into the shot, so it actually records the recording of the event, and the satellite pointing west towards China.



As I frantically took photos of the old pictures, Lancaster's girlfriend read aloud from the Apollo documents that formed the rest of their collection. Most of it consists of testing procedures and operations for the various Apollo missions. These are work documents without much flavor. But among the technical bits, we found a letter that Scroggs sent his staff. It was a letter meant to be saved.

If I had to guess, I'd say Lancaster has the last copy of that "souvenier" left on earth. I would also say that it is pretty much the only human trace of what it was like to work at Jamesburg before it was demoted from our national dreams and the site and the people who worked there became subject to the logic of a market that immune to its sublime project. Before the earth station was mothballed, sold, and gutted, the people who worked there did important things. Scroggs, I later found out, died in 1985 and is buried at the El Carmelo Cemetery in ritzy Pacific Grove.



I finished taking photographs. There wasn't much else to say. Lancaster seemed a bit out of sorts, but also excited that I'd be writing about him. I promised to mail him a printout of the story. I think saving the documents he did and holding on to them for years was a kind of heroism, a tribute to his country. He knew that these documents should not be thrown away, for one reason or another. And if he can convert his act of preservation into a few bucks, more power to him.

Lancaster and his girlfriend packed the files into the backpack and walked back across the road over the creek, the one that often floods this whole area. In years past, when the water got too high, the Jamesburg Earth Station was Jensen's emergency shelter.

* * *

A few years after the Chinese Satellite Communications Study Group left Jamesburg, counterculture icon Stewart Brand published a piece in CoEvolution Quarterly by physicist and space promoter Gerard O'Neill, which proposed the idea of a self-sustaining space colony.



As O'Neill described it, the space colony would have had been a utopia with nice homes and beautiful flora and fauna. The colonies could be modeled on the most "desirable" places on Earth. "A section of the California coast like Carmel could be easily fit within one of the 'valleys' of a Model III Colony," O'Neill explained. Paintings were even made of what that might look like.



Many of Brand's friends and colleagues derided the idea as an abandonment of the values of the counterculture. But one critique, by solar inventor Steve Baer, was more subtle and more damning. It got at the way O'Neill tried to leave behind the inevitable grit of human life.

The project is spoken of as if it were as direct as... flinging people into space. But I know that instead it consists of order-forms, typewriters, carpets, offices, and bookkeepers; a frontier for PhD's, technicians and other obedient personnel. Once on board, in my mind's eye I don't see the landscape of Carmel-by-the-Sea as Gerard O'Neill suggests... Instead, I see acres of air-conditioned Greyhound bus interior, glinting slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint - I don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean - I hear piped music and smell chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous vague low-key "airplane fear."

Space travel would not be like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but Cachagua. It would take a lot of Jensen Camps and Jamesburg Earth Stations to make anything as grand as a space colony work. The area above the Earth might be known as the heavens, but there would be no escaping being human. No matter how glorious the triumph, humans have to grind through all of it, scheduling meetings and making coffee, documenting and processing, trimming and forgetting. No technology stands outside society, and no society exists without the people who build it.

