Life in the Space Age

Two decades ago, Florida's Brevard County was a somnolent, 70-mile stretch of citrus groves along the Atlantic Coast. Thanks largely to the Cape Kennedy space complex, the county's population has grown to 250,000 today, and there are more engineers and technicians (35,000) than there were people in 1948. Nearly one-fourth of Brevard County's residents have a college education, six times the national figure; incomes in this affluent subsociety range from $8,000 to the moon. Most families own a boat and at least two cars.

Nonetheless, Brevard County, beneath its pleasant surface, is more than normally edgy. The technicians who assemble and service the rockets have chosen a tense career, and it has taken its toll on their personalities, their marriages and their community. Local psychiatrists and social workers describe the prevailing pattern of life as "the engineer syndrome," and often it seems that only a computer could love it.

Unnatural Environment. The rhythms of life at Cape Kennedy are set not so much by the clock or the seasons as by the irregular flights of the missiles. Bouts of furious activity and 14-hour days may be followed by periods of idleness. "It's not a natural environment," complains Ray Forbes of General Electric, who visits the space center for launchings but leaves as soon as he can. "Down here you oversmoke, overeat, overdrink, overworry and undersleep."

Many Cape Kennedy engineers bring home the fail-safe attitudes necessary to their work. "These are intelligent, perfectionist males who are usually intolerant of the feelings of those around them," says Psychiatrist Burton Podnos, administrator of the local Mental Health Center. Absorbed all day in scientific precision, engineers are apt to accuse their wives of sloppy housekeeping if they find an unwashed coffee cup in the sink. It is hard for some of them to understand why there is not an effective system for toilet-training the baby.

Divorce is common. County Circuit Judge Volie Williams, who has handled 3,000 divorces in the past two years, finds that plaintiff wives of engineers present a strikingly similar recital of marital discord. By their accounts, says the judge, "the husband never wants any family life. He likes to build a stereo set from component parts and then dare anyone in the family to touch it. Every weekend he goes out in his boat by himself and doesn't want his wife or kids to go with him. He never physically abuses his wife and he's a good provider, but when he gives material things he thinks he is fulfilling his obligations. He's selfish, but he doesn't think so."

A. C. Martin, 45, engineer in charge of operations on the Saturn SII rocket, feels that he has a secure marriage, but he fits the pattern to a remarkable degree. Except when a moon shot is in preparation, he plans his day to get home for dinner, chats first with his five-year-old daughter, then with his teenage girl. After dinner at 6:30, he retires to a den, where the family knows he is not to be disturbed. He reads technical material for about two hours, eases his tension by drinking a beer and smoking the one cigarette of the day, is in bed by 9:30. "If your wife isn't with this business," says Martin, "you are better off out of it."

Saturn Engineer John J. Cully, 51, insists: "We work around here. That's all we have time for." Well, not quite. Infidelity is so common that Father Vincent Smith, pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in Cocoa Beach, wryly says that it has become a community joke. An investigator for the American Social Health Association, sent down to measure Cape Kennedy's incidence of prostitution, quickly abandoned his search. Professionals were unnecessary, explained a succession of bartenders and bellhops, because of the numerous eager amateurs, among them single girls and divorcees drawn to the secretarial ranks of NASA and the space contractors. Liaisons often begin at "Thank God It's Friday" parties that fill the bars until past midnight, or at the frantic launch and splashdown celebrations thrown at The Mouse Trap or The Missile Lounge in Cocoa Beach.

Some engineers eventually find that they have more in common with jargon-speaking secretaries than with their wives. Electrical Engineer Kenneth Ongemach, for example, met his second wife Grace when she was a secretary at the company where he worked two jobs ago. Now 32, Ongemach owns a stereo set so complicated that he objects when other people try to operate it. His garage shelters a 1966 Cadillac and 1968 Pontiac Firebird with a 400-h.p. engine that he souped up himself. When his cars or his job preoccupy him so much that Grace complains, he told TIME Miami Bureau Chief Joseph Kane, he may react by saying: "I want you to be happy. Here is some money. Go buy yourself a mink stole or something."

Not Involved. Deeply committed to their demanding work, few engineers vote or participate in politics or community projects. "They think they don't really live here, and so they tend not to get involved," explains Psychiatrist Podnos. About 14% of Brevard County residents have been there less than a year, and only 4.5% expect to stay for more than five years. The Cape is a society of "ten-percenters"--men who move from one space contractor to another seeking a 10% pay increase. Their insecurities are heightened by shifts in space policy. With the Apollo program drawing to its end, the space center has announced that 5,000 employees will be dropped from its payroll by next summer.

To be sure, many of the symptoms of unhappiness in Brevard County can be found in any U.S. executive suburb. Countless families also manage to cope successfully with the rootless life of the space technician, just as thousands managed to surmount the pressures and temptations of boom towns in World War II. Yet the turmoil in some Brevard County homes is so corrosive that Dr. Ben Storey, a general practitioner in Titusville, reports that he finds one new case of ulcers every week in adolescents that he sees. He has even discovered one case in a 2 1/2-year-old child. Considering the strains, Dr. Huey P. Long, a sociologist at Florida State University's Urban Research Center, concludes: "It's a wonder that things in Brevard aren't worse than they are."

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