Lost in Aerospace : BLUE SKY DREAM: A Memoir of America’s Fall From Grace.<i> By David Beers (Doubleday: $23.95, 273 pp)</i>

“Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall From Grace” is an important book and a fascinating one, arriving just in time to provoke a few thoughts before an election. David Beers, a journalist and a former staffer for “Mother Jones,” has really written two stories in one: The first is a chronicle of the rise and fall of America’s aerospace industry; the second is a personal memoir of growing up in the 1960s in suburban California. In the anthropological terms the author likes to use, it’s the story of a privileged, favored tribe, blessed in every respect, and the God of Technology they end up worshiping in vain.

Beers was still a baby when his father went to work for Lockheed’s Missiles and Space Division in the late ‘50s. The family settled in Central California, in what was then known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Once an area of orchards and farms, it was soon transformed into suburbs by other “promising modern” families like the Beerses, all members of the “Blue Sky Tribe” whose fortunes were tied to aerospace.

The Beerses--mother, father and four children--were a perfect blue-sky family. David’s father, a Navy pilot turned engineer, took pride in his job as well as his fix-it-up skills at home. His mother was a model housewife and fervent Catholic, given to chanting, “Tony, Tony, listen, listen, hurry, hurry, something’s missin’ / Tony, Tony look around. Something’s lost and must be found” when calling St. Anthony to assist in finding lost objects. It’s a world of “Leave It to Beaver” normalcy, at least on the outside. Inside, it’s a somewhat different story.

Beers’ father is shown to be a moody and unpredictable man who’s under a lot of stress from his job. There is a moment of seminal violence in David’s youth, when his father loses control and hits him in the face, an incident that Beers analyzes at length. He sees how it must not have been easy to hold a job where one’s security clearance required that one submit to surprise polygraph tests or fly to Washington for impromptu questioning--a realm of such secrecy that, at the center of it, there’s a “black world” few know anything about.

The idea of secrecy, and of spying, is integral to this story just as it was essential to the space program of the 1960s, when the first spy satellites were launched and began sending back pictures of the Soviet Union to the Valley of Heart’s Delight. It was all about the stealing of secrets to keep the power shifted to the good guys. But increasingly, as Beers writes, it was also about the lining of pockets with lucrative contracts.

“I had stars in my eyes for technology,” the elder Beers tells his son, who doesn’t share his enthusiasm. “I had dreams of the cutting edge.” But the time comes when even his father begins to wonder where all this technology is taking us and he starts reading books by “thinkers” like John Kenneth Galbraith, men who are “trying to make sense of society and human nature and where the country is headed.” To his teenage son’s “ungrateful surprise,” the books form a new bridge between the boy and his father.

Occasionally--and only occasionally--Beers’ descriptions of family life, particularly the portrait he draws of his father, rely a little too heavily on the sort of irony that’s easy to employ, particularly to the values of one’s parents. The predictable trait, or a solitary quirk, is required to stand for too much and the picture grows fuzzy.

More often, however, Beers employs a clear and pungent style, whether describing the “soft life of private consumption” in the suburbs, or evoking his passion for the TV program “Lost in Space,” featuring the “poor Robinsons,” middle-class white folks who, as the Earth becomes overcrowded, volunteer for a transfer to space: “Now they found themselves every week alone together in the ultimate single-family detached residence, forced to invent over and over their own haven in a heartless cosmos.”

Poor Beers family, too, alone together in their own rapidly detaching world. By the late ‘70s, their tidy cosmos starts to look rather heartless. The military-industrial complex, to which aerospace was linked from the very beginning, began to suffer its first serious cutbacks and men like Beers’ father started to fear for their jobs. Dreams of a “Star Wars”-like “space shield” revived things for a while but--after billions were spent plumping out that turkey--the notion was all but abandoned due to problems of “feasibility.”

Feasibility, however, was never the real issue. Money and jobs were. The aerospace industry, with its “bloated bureaucracy and guaranteed hidden profits,” had always operated behind a curtain of black-budget secrecy. When the crunch came, the real losers would be the thousands of engineers and workers in related fields--numbering now almost half a million--whose jobs disappeared. Beers interviews some of these “losers.” The result is a cry straight from the American vox populi.

By the end of “Blue Sky Dream,” the Valley of Heart’s Delight, in a wonderful ironic turn, has been given a new name: the Silicon Valley. Goodbye Lockheed, hello Internet!

Beers writes about going back to visit his parents, who still live in the same house. His father puts on a video, recently distributed to employees at Lockheed, meant to explain massive layoffs and future direction. “The strong will survive,” the workers are told, “the weak will be consolidated into the strong.” Nice rhetoric. But the unanswered question is how?

“Blue Sky Dream” is both well-researched and well-written. It takes subjects we think we know something about and tells us so much more that we didn’t. Both as cultural history and personal memoir, it succeeds admirably, adding to our understanding of both society and human nature by offering what the publisher quite rightly calls a “communal memoir.”