This song (and the album, To Our Childrens Children) was recorded in 1969...WAY before the shuttle, Mindhuntress! However, you are close. At a concert several years ago I heard Graham Edge state that this song was written immediately after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. The lines "Blasting, billowing, bursting forth" and "Man with his flaming pyre" refer to the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo to the moon. Of course, one might also give this song double meaning, as the Moodies (and Mike Pinder in particular) had done their fair share of experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens, so "Higher and Higher" might also be referring to the use of drugs to achieve higher consciousness. The line "now we've learned to play with fire" can refer BOTH to rockets (and the astronauts OR nukes they carry) and hallucinogens. That is just my opinion, of course, perhaps the Moodies never conceived of this song being related to LSD. (And perhaps the Beatles really had no idea "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" might be interpreted as referring to LSD. Yeah, right.)
This song (and the album, To Our Childrens Children) was recorded in 1969...WAY before the shuttle, Mindhuntress! However, you are close. At a concert several years ago I heard Graham Edge state that this song was written immediately after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. The lines "Blasting, billowing, bursting forth" and "Man with his flaming pyre" refer to the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo to the moon. Of course, one might also give this song double meaning, as the Moodies (and Mike Pinder in particular) had done their fair share of experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens, so "Higher and Higher" might also be referring to the use of drugs to achieve higher consciousness. The line "now we've learned to play with fire" can refer BOTH to rockets (and the astronauts OR nukes they carry) and hallucinogens. That is just my opinion, of course, perhaps the Moodies never conceived of this song being related to LSD. (And perhaps the Beatles really had no idea "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" might be interpreted as referring to LSD. Yeah, right.)