ABOUT A CENTURY AGO, WHEN NASA Shuttle launches were just a twinkle in the fantasist’s eye, John Masefield wrote one of the most romantic poems about the mystery of deep space, I Could Not Sleep for Thinking of the Sky. Masefield dreams of “Night, where my soul might sail a million years/ In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.”

I was thinking of that longing for the infinite majesty of space when I heard that the astronauts on Discovery are woken up by Mission Control blasting Walk of Life, by Dire Straits. Dire Straits! It makes the whole project seem like a version of the Big Brother house, just more cheesy.

So, of course I wish the team well when Discovery attempts its risky landing in the next few days, but I can’t say I have been particularly inspired by their trip.

All sorts of groups, from scientists to bean counters, have argued against Nasa’s dogged insistence on continuing with its manned space programme. You would not think moon-eyed dreamers would be among them. But I think they should be first in the queue.

It is not space exploration that I have an issue with. It is that populating space does something unexpected to those left behind, after the novelty has worn off. To see universal wonders through the eyes of another human being seems to contract space’s once infinite pull on our imagination.

Take Tom Wolfe’s classic history of the early space pioneers, The Right Stuff. The title is half-ironic, a phrase the test pilots use to honour themselves, and they are depicted here as arrogant jocks. If they are not winding down by drinking and driving, they are “driving and balling” — taking advantage of the local space groupies.

We like to imagine Alan Shepard, the first American in space, ascending the heavens in one euphoric bound. But humanity is frailer than that: among other indignities, Shepard pees his pants.

No man is a hero to his dry cleaner, but Wolfe shows how these supermen seethed with super-egos. When Shepard was selected as the first to go up into space, his rival, John Glenn, burns up with jealousy. Thirty-seven years later, at the age of 77, Glenn would return to space, in what critics called the ultimate vanity project, a “gold watch” from Nasa.

Wolfe does not underestimate the bravery of these explorers, nor that they were supremely talented, intensively trained pilots. His book proves that a certain type of professional is required (rather than Nasa’s idea of sending teachers into space, as in the doomed shuttle Challenger).

Indeed, it is the necessary bravery of these men that makes them a little closed to doubt, to wonder. Julian Barnes does a magnificent job of sending this up in his book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.

Just as the real Moon-walkers adopted folksy, macho nicknames (Buzz Aldrin’s real name was Edwin), Barnes’s hero is called Spike Tiggler.

Tiggler seems to be loosely based on Shepard, who, being the fifth man to land on the Moon, needed something to draw attention to himself, so had the idea of playing golf. I resent Shepard’s jokey, locker-room affront to our great Moon, the idea that, given the privilege of watching Earth rise, your first instinct would be to busy yourself with a few practice rounds. It lacks . . . gravity.

I would like to think that had the Women in Space programme of the early 1960s, chronicled in last year’s Right Stuff, Wrong Sex by Margaret Weitekamp, ever got off the ground (it was stymied by gross discrimination), they would not have started games of beach volleyball up there. But who knows?

Anyway, back to Barnes’s Spike Tiggler, whose wheeze is to throw a football on the Moon. Tiggler is the archetypal lad in space, who just about notices that the “Moon looked pretty rough and beat-up”, with dust like “sand from a dirty beach”. But something mystical does happen to Tiggler up there, and it leads to him cracking up on re-entry.

Perhaps reaching space is not such a test of character as coming down to Earth. In Andrew Smith’s excellent new nonfiction book Moon Dust, a kind of sequel to The Right Stuff, he tracks down the nine surviving men who have set foot on the Moon.

Hardly any of them have coped very well. Buzz Aldrin has a nervous breakdown, another sets up the wacky “Institute of Noetic Sciences”. Yet Smith’s awe for the heroes of his youth is undimmed by the consistently depressing reality of what they did next.

Smith argues that to put people in space “offered us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small”. To me, it does not make us seem small, but somehow diminished, less than we could be.

There is something beautiful about the fact that to print the photographs of space in Full Moon, a pictorial catalogue of early space flight, they had to develop a special black ink they named Luna Nero. The black we are used to is really a kind of grey compared with the dense, endless dark of the cosmos.

Yet I do not find any poetry in the fact that, as Andrew Smith relates, the first reaction of one Moon-walker on returning to Earth was to go and sit in a Houston shopping mall, for hours, just eating ice-cream.

I started by remembering Masefield’s yearning to go to space precisely because it was inhuman, it was “night indeed”. Many decades later the fellow British poet Ted Hughes lived through the era of manned space flight and thought differently. In Earth-Moon, when a man meets the Moon, he kills it for his own “trophy”.

“The moon shrank, like a punctured airship,/ Shrank, shrank, smaller, smaller,/ Till it was nothing/ But a silk handkerchief, torn,/ And wet as tears.”

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