San Francisco is full of young people in flowers this summer, and I’ve been thinking about what they think of the space program — if they think of it at all.

The “Summer of Love” is in every magazine this month. Haight-Ashbury, 100,000 young people, music and drugs and a general rejection of everything the generation before them represents — conformity, materialism, the corporate structure, the war. They want something different, though exactly what is unclear even to them.

I find myself occupying an odd position. I’m 42 years old, which puts me firmly in the generation being rejected. I drive a late-model Ford. I wear a suit to work. I’m the demographic that the counterculture is defining itself against.

But I’m also a person who thinks the most important thing happening right now is the attempt to go to the Moon, which is not obviously compatible with the anti-materialism, anti-technology strain of the counterculture.

Some of the young people in San Francisco, from what I read, are excited about the space program in their own way — they see it as part of a larger expansion of human consciousness and possibility. Space is psychedelic in a metaphorical sense: looking at the Earth from space, seeing the planet as a whole, could change how people think about their relationship to the world.

Others in the counterculture see the space program as the military-industrial complex in a different hat: government money, corporate contractors, test pilots following orders from generals in Houston. The same system that’s running the Vietnam War is running the space program.

I don’t think these views are entirely wrong. The space program does have military roots and corporate structure. And there is something genuinely consciousness-expanding about the idea of seeing the Earth from outside.

What I know is: the people building the Apollo program are mostly not hippies, but they’re also not the gray suited conformists of the stereotype. They’re passionate, obsessive, willing to work 80-hour weeks for years on a problem because the problem is worth solving. They don’t look like the counterculture but they share the underlying drive — the sense that the ordinary world is insufficient and that something larger is possible.

Different paths. Same restlessness.