Humankind no longer lives in the Edenic garden, for we have lost the beginning. Even the mechanical wonders of the man-made city are said to have been first built by Cain.
The question of whether technological progress inevitably breeds alienation from the presence of God merits deep consideration. For God’s fragile and freely spoken Word is threatened by those tempted to sacrifice the Word on the dehumanizing altar of technological progress. Renowned journalist and writer Norman Mailer observed this reality firsthand during his on-the-ground coverage of NASA’s mad 1969 race to reach the surface of the moon, in his prophetic, foreboding, long-winded, yet brilliant account of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
Of a Fire on the Moon received divisive and mixed reviews from critics. First serialized in Life Magazine in 1969 and 1970, it is the longest non-fiction piece ever published by Life. In some ways, Mailer’s work is an early piece of Gonzo journalism, complete with detailed screeds against modernity and winding anecdotes about his place in an increasingly corporatized writing world. One critic interpreted Of a Fire on the Moon as representative of the decreased relevance attached to the Romantic view of literature.
Yet Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon is far more than a threadbare and technical account of the moon landing. In it, the aging Mailer questions the mass mentality and celebration of humanity’s technical prowess so inherent in the achievement. Mailer believes the sheer technical dedication imbued within the moon landing project is a drive comparable to outright worship. He asks, “What force resides then in the…thought that our voyage to the moon was finally an exploration by the century itself into the possible consequences of its worship of technology?” and is disturbed by his struggle to answer.
Mailer refers to himself in the third person throughout the work, making for a surreal and disembodied read. Calling himself “Aquarius,” Mailer’s piece opens with a meditation on the recent death of Ernest Hemingway, filling him with dread.
“Now the greatest living romantic was dead. Dread was loose. The giant had not paid his dues, and something awful was in the air. Technology would fill the pause. Into the silence, static would enter. It was conceivable that man was no longer ready to share the dread of the Lord.”
Our journalistic narrator is convinced that technology presents some sort of Babylonian grasping towards the power held and lost at the beginning, at the brief time when humans were not yet separated from the presence of God. The question remains: are these technology-fueled attempts at reaching the heavens a numbing replacement for facing the wrath of God?
Mailer analyzes the engineers and technicians behind NASA and is left deeply frustrated by their utter dedication to their technological craft. The man once considered the greatest living journalist in America sees these workers as “the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, and root-destroying people on earth.” Mailer slyly wonders if the same people will somehow find a way to deliver humanity from death. The world of NASA plays second fiddle to the triumph of sight, with Mailer observing how “if the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye…the collector of incontrovertible facts.” Mailer senses within himself that there is something off and otherworldly about the entire venture, but he is loath to find answers behind his searing and confused questions about a world that he thinks no longer recognizes the power behind the written word.
Mailer realizes that the engineer’s machine is his art, a new and revelatory reality of the rapidly advancing modern world. Eerily, he mocks the engineers who “work in the electronics computeroid complex, and need no windows, for we are the architectural skull case for a new kind of brain.” There is something deeply mysterious about this mad dash to the moon, and Mailer cannot decide if it is the “noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.”
Mailer questions aerospace engineer and NASA Manned Spacecraft director Robert Gilruth during a press conference. Despite the gravitas of what humanity is doing, Mailer sees Gilruth’s responses as technocratic, droning, and unremarkable. When Mailer asks Gilruth if he ever worries that landing on the moon might cause earthly psychic disturbances, Gilruth blankly provides a non-answer.
“‘I expect the moon is many things to many men…perhaps kind of a nice place to be,’” he says.
Mailer is later privy to a press conference with astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, where he is met with similarly dull and aimless responses. The enterprising Mailer sees their bureaucratic talk as symbolic of a “jargon which could be easily converted to computer programming.” Humans are breaking the very boundaries of heaven by exploring worlds beyond Earth. And yet, the very men accomplishing this feat have virtually nothing substantive to say to their countrymen who search for responses about the ramifications of their accomplishment.
Mailer recalls how different this world is from the days when “men had been afraid to utter the name of the Lord, or even to write it in such a way as to suggest the sound, for that might be enough to summon some genie of God’s displeasure at so disrupting the heavens.” The heavens have become desacralized. What was once called “heaven” is now known as “space,” an emptiness that betrays the desacralization of a universe now severed from its divine origins. The unimaginable progress of the twentieth century has become a narcotic. “The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation,” writes Mailer.
The banality of technocracy triumphs when the enterprising press sets its sights on Neil Armstrong. A journalist asks Armstrong if he has ever dreamed, and the astronaut initially provides no reply. After an awkward pause, the astronaut admits he sometimes has a specific and recurring vision.
“‘I guess after twenty hours in a simulator, I guess I sometimes have dreams of computers,’” responds Armstrong without further elaboration.
Mailer notices he is not the only one disappointed by Armstrong’s uninteresting replies. This is one of humanity’s grandest achievements, and these are his responses? Another enterprising reporter asks Armstrong if he sees any philosophical reason behind the decision to reach the moon, which Mailer implies is asking if Armstrong is aware of any underlying philosophy to one’s existence.
“‘We’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream,’” says Armstrong.
To Mailer, this curt reply unconsciously reveals “the itch to accelerate” towards an unknown metaphysical direction. Humanity is ambitious to accelerate, but to what end? Such are the new horrors of the twentieth century, where nature is dominated as never before in a world of never-ending contradiction. “A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction,” warns Mailer. This is a world obsessed with the possibility of its own destruction, “yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us…a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend.” Mailer is agonized by his journalistic profession devolving amidst the advent of the newly invented concept of a press release, emblematic of an accelerating world that values rapid-fire responses over deeply mystical and magical writings that celebrate the human spirit.
God’s Word warns His people never to worship celestial bodies. Yet the moon is still a wondrous work of God’s own creation, and Mailer is horrified by just how much this great orb has been profaned. In an interview with astronaut Pete Conrad, who was the third person to walk on the moon, Conrad admits something that fills Mailer with great horror.
“‘The moon is nothing but facts to me,’” he says. At this, Mailer realizes he is witnessing the dawn of an unprecedented human psychology, with the astronauts representative of a hitherto unknown age of humankind. Though Mailer admires the self-sufficiency behind NASA, he cannot help but fear the possibilities behind space travel “proposed a future world of brains attached to wires.”
Mailer prophesies that technology aims to create a parallel alternative to nature. The interiors of these spaceships are the very “antechamber of a new Creation,” a new cathedral at the center of the age of technology. Mailer believes this rocket is an ascendant Leviathan, created thanks to the metaphysical amputation of the human body into a machine, ready now to ascend into heaven as an act of worship under the sacred technological altar.
Mailer finds himself at yet another press conference, where he listens to Wernher von Braun, the high priest of modern manufacturing. Von Braun, a German-American aerospace engineer and former member of the Nazi Party, co-developed the V-2 Rocket, the world’s first ballistic missile and artificial object to travel through space. An unmatched inventor and engineer, von Braun provides Mailer with the religious underpinnings behind such grand inventions. A journalist asks von Braun about the significance of putting a person on the moon.
“I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up the land,” he replies amidst applause from the press and an outright standing ovation. Everyone but Mailer is pleased by his reply, “for it passed without pause over the birth and death of Christ.” And yet, von Braun delivers remarks wherein he expresses gratitude to God. “Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made…tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’” he states. For von Braun, the exploration of space is the key to humanity’s earthly future. He openly worships a god of fanatical progress, and says he hopes the moon-landing trip will expand the “mind of men. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit…for what we will have attained…is a completely new step in the evolution of man.’” But the Word and holy presence of God are eternal and without end. What is this extended man that von Braun so desires? Moreover, does von Braun see any limits to his worldview of nonstop progress? Is there a transcendent end to this madness, or are there only stages of endless evolutionary progression? He triumphantly proclaims that the exploration of the moon shall “‘cause a new element to sweep across the face of this good earth and to invade the thoughts of all men,”’ for doing so will bring humanity closer to heaven. Von Braun believes it is impossible to know more about the Creator without seeing more of His creation, a perspective that hopelessly contradicts Mailer. It is this tension over whether or not man is truly looking for God that concerns Mailer.
“Man was voyaging to the planets in order to look for God. Or was it to destroy Him?” he writes. This daring notion “that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God was either the heart of the vision or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent. A ship of flames was on its way to the moon.” As Mailer continues to explore the inner workings of NASA, he finds himself angered by the technocratic astronauts who deny the majesty and power of the universe. The astronauts hold a “complacent assumption” that the universe is “an ultimately benign field of investigation,” a reality which horrifies Mailer. Ever since humanity reached a Herculean might that matched what could once only be imagined, the “chambers of the heart had shrunk to the dry hard seeds of some hybrid future.” God’s creatures believe they have attained godlike proportions, a belief filling the century with dread. While technological inventions have accomplished great tasks, they have also torn man from his natural environment, made humans treat gold like dirt, and provided humanity with the power to destroy the entire world.
The god that von Braun worships contradicts belief in an everlasting Word. For von Braun worships a being whose heroes are “technologists, not poets,” while looking forward to a time when “all of mankind would yet be part of one machine.” But what becomes of the fully determined human, once they eventually mirror an inhuman machine?
“To believe in progress and believe in God as well might make it necessary to conceive of our Lord as a vision of existence who conceivably was obliged to compete with other visions of existence in the universe, other conceptions of how life should be,” responds Mailer, who believes the underlying impetus behind modern technology is an idolatrous suspicion that God is somehow irrational in His judgment. The renowned journalist closes his analysis of the moon landing with his belief that humanity psychologically felt the need to explore outer space because “technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness.” While Mailer admires man’s moon-reaching efforts, he is rightly troubled by their sanitized impersonality and wonders whether these men prove that the dominance of the moon was an evil attraction we were not meant to make. The moon landing demystified a once-heavenly sphere in a world where multitudes of technocratic men reign supreme yet without soul, which Mailer saw as an evil desacralization of reality and God Himself.
Sophia Mandt is a senior studying Sociology & Social Thought and Journalism who is fascinated by the philosophical underpinnings behind the modern world. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2026 International Jacques Ellul Society Conference.
