Rocket Dreams by Marina Benjamin

Why aren't we interested in outer space any more? This is the straightforward question that Marina Benjamin's engaging journey of ideas and reportage poses. Her answer is equally to the point: we discovered cyberspace instead. And we currently find that to be a much more agreeable repository for our fantasies than Promethean hulks of metal shuddering fumingly skywards from the keys of Florida.

For us, the post-human future is now more compelling than the interplanetary one. We're not interested in launching "spam in the can" (as the old rocketeers used to call manned space flight) and plonking it on Mars, Luna, Europa or any other rampantly inhospitable bit of rock. But we are obsessed by designer babies, artificial intelligences, and our growing mind-machine interfaces. We confine our fascinations with the cosmos (and its residents) to post-ironic media franchises, whether playful or ponderous – Men In Black or Star Wars – where digital special effects do the intergalactic work for us.

These seem to be, literally, much more grounded times. The threatening aliens are humanoid, cognitive and cultural – toxin-brewing Algerians in north London – rather than anything ectoplasmic sending us signals from deep space. The slogan of the bestselling anti-capitalist manifesto, Negri and Hardt's Empire, is that "there is no Outside": nothing, that is, beyond the incessant machinations of global networks. At the very least, that means no imaginative headroom for cartwheel-style space stations, or teeming colonies on the Red Planet.

What is clever about Benjamin's book, and sets it apart from the usual threnody to the men with the "right stuff", is that it identifies the crossover points between cyberspace and outer space. When we were able to see real-time images of Mars through our web browsers, during the 1997 Pathfinder expedition, hundreds of millions of miles of distance became instantly banalised. Now infonauts, dunkin' their donuts at brunchtime, are just as intrepid as astronauts.

Benjamin devotes a whole chapter to the SETI@Home project: an initiative which asks millions of computer users to lend their spare PC processing power to the search for extraterrestrial messages. And her correct conclusion is that SETI@Home is more about hacker-style cultures of collaboration, nerds seeking semi-Utopian reasons to come together, than it is a serious search for life.

But one of the most affecting aspects of Rocket Dreams is the author's frank admission that she was, once, a fully accredited space cadet. "Growing up in central London, idolising the astronauts from afar, I had tracked the moon landings with a diligence that bordered on obsession ... If a flag had been planted, a buggy deployed, a crater explored or moon rocks scooped into specimen boxes, I knew about it." So is this also a Fever Pitch for the Apollo generation? Given her CV – former arts editor for the New Statesman – we're going to get as many references to French semioticians (hello, Gaston Bachelard) as detailed descriptions of Apollo 11 collage-making on a rainy Saturday. Yet this is a pleasingly garrulous and inquisitive book, the author immersing herself in a number of thick moments of reportage that both enrich, and problematise, her central theory.

For example, in her encounter with some actual Apollo astronauts (at a rather cheesy signing event in North Hollywood) she admits to being "a little starstruck", even as these leathery survivors of the Great Age of Space Exploration are plucking $50 bills (the price of a signature) out of the hands of devotees. Yet Benjamin is judicious, generous and insightful about the various pathways of the Apollo astronauts and scientists after their great moment.

The "silence and mysticism" that J G Ballard once noted as the inevitable condition of the retired space traveller is taken seriously. The Noetics Institute – a New Age centre founded by Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell – is read as "an ingenious way" to reconcile us to the failure of interplanetary ambitions, through a spiritual stew that mixes "Mary Eddy Baker with Buddhism". Noetics takes space as a symbol of our unconscious mind: "instead of conquering space, Mitchell enabled space to invade us".

Benjamin is the daughter of progressive parents, who approved of space pioneers as "rare and precious reminders that when humanity determined to surpass itself, it could do so". Her most yearning recollection is kept for the Seventies, when it seemed as if the next place for the counter-culture to sprawl was into the heavens, with the US Congress undergoing pressure to realise an "America in the skies": a Utopia of leisure, collective production, sustainable economics and harmony.

Benjamin conjectures that because the business case was never convincing, moon-bases never got built. Yet she strangely omits discussion of expensive space projects such as the Strategic Defense Initiative: Reagan's own Star Wars, whose panoptical ambitions to discipline the globe through space technology are now being revived.

When Benjamin finally admits there is a bit of space expenditure she'd endorse, it's probably the only centre-left space programme you will ever encounter: Al Gore's suggestion that we place a satellite equidistant to the Sun and Earth, called Triana, able to beam images of our planet back to a Gaia-conscious world citizenry. Never mind the Milky Way: let's head for the Third Way.

Benjamin sounds almost excited again, ready to get out her Stanley knife and resume her collages. This isn't space technology as a means of surveillance, but as "humanity's Third Eye": Triana would be "too far away to invade our privacy", but close enough "to tug at our heart strings and perhaps even boost our flagging belief in humanity's collective potential".

In an admittedly personal journey, there are still some odd omissions. A chapter on some of the SF novelists of the period might not have gone amiss. And the complicated relationship between space, race and popular culture – from Gil Scott-Heron's scorn about "Whitey On The Moon" to the techno-futurism of much black dance music – seem to have passed Benjamin by.

Yet this book is an eloquent response to a historical failure. In the age of immaterial labour, it seems that the materiality of human-bearing space flight involves too much collective effort for us to contemplate. Instead of journeying to the stars together, we writhe in our terran (and terrorised) webs of information and power. A requiem for rocket dreams, indeed.