Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

38 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
and an inch deep.” But it is surely our task as scholars to criticize this obsession
with human spacefight—however important it may be to maintaining NaSa’s
momentum—and draw the public’s attention to the many other reasons for
a major technological nation to have a space program. In remembering the
Space age, we must uncouple the conquest of space from the always-contested
domain of human space exploration in order to recognize that that conquest has
multiple dimensions that range from stimulating basic science and engineering
to national security applications.
Secondly, in the article in USA Today, the history of the Space age shrinks
geographically: the commemorative article is entirely americo-centric. even
though Soviet feats are mentioned, their context is how they impacted the
United States and provided the challenge that stimulated the U.S. response.
Such an approach is misleading in many ways. For one thing, it completely
overlooks the fact that human spacefight is no longer at the core of superpower
rivalry and the associated ideologies of leadership and “domination” that went
along with this competition. On the contrary, human spacefight is increasingly
seen as an international, collaborative venture in which america’s partners—
including its previous Cold war rival—play a critical role. this narrow
americo-centrism also ignores the fact that some major space eforts, such as
that typically occurring in Western europe—my concern here—have never
included their own transport system for human spacefight, nor attempts to
compete with the two superpowers in this domain. (the project to develop
the space plane hermes was a brief but quickly abandoned efort to do just this:
its rejection reinforces my point.) If we remember the Space age through the
prism of countries other than the United States, human spacefight assumes
an entirely diferent and far less central signifcance. the conquest of space is
also seen to be driven by concerns other than the competition for “leadership”
between two Cold War rivals. It is time that the american public understand that
america’s ongoing activity in human spacefight requires genuine partnership
in ways that were inconceivable 20 years ago. the article in USA Today gives
no indication of this context.
thirdly, in the feature in USA Today, the history of the Space age shrinks
in time: it is confned to the frst decade or so from the launch of Sputnik
in 1957 to the frst steps on the Moon in 1969. this narrowing of temporal
context is obviously related to the two previous points. Such an approach is
acceptable as long as one realizes that the events in that period were driven by
an historically specifc agenda that was not respected in other domains of space
or, indeed, even in the domain of human spacefight in the U.S. beginning
in the 1970s. While this may seem trivial on frst blush, it is not so when
we consider that serious policy prescriptions may be based on the assumption
that the way to redynamize the space program is to reconstruct in the present
day the situation that prevailed in the late 1950s and 1960s. these arguments
conclude, in efect, that only competition with a rival superpower (and China is