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

56 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
McDougall has since revised his original argument by noting that the
space technological revolution was an “ephemeral episode in the larger history
of the Cold War, rather than the Cold War having been an episode in the larger
story of the march of technocracy.” 3 this revisionism addresses the eventual
fate of the space technological revolution. It is the purpose of the current essay
to revise the story of the birth of that technological revolution. Specifcally,
it will be argued that the conception of the Sputnik launch as a discontinuity
that ushered in a technocratic revolution in modern america does not ft the
historical record. the environment in which the Sputnik crisis unfolded in the
United States was already saturated with preconceived, technocratic notions of
the relation of science to the state. the crystallization of the new agency that
would become NaSa was a process that was both simultaneously instigated by
a singular event and followed in the footsteps of institutional ancestors. the two
are not mutually exclusive; contingency must be embedded in a framework of
continuity. the precursor of the space technological revolution was the atomic
energy Commission (aeC).
“technocracy” is a contentious term, with defnitions running the gamut
from a literal etymological interpretation as “the control of society or industry
by technical experts” 4 to the idolization of science for propaganda purposes
by non-scientifc bureaucrats. 5 an attempt at a precise defnition is necessarily
doomed to failure, but for the purposes of this essay I will adopt McDougall’s
defnition of technocracy as “the institutionalization of technological change
for state purposes, that is, the state-funded and -managed r&D explosion of
our time.” 6 McDougall’s defnition captures the key features relevant to the
current analysis: massive state funding and intentional control of technological
development to serve state purposes. there exist a myriad of other possible
defnitions, which remain outside the scope of the present argument. 7
3. Walter a. McDougall,“Was Sputnik really a Saltation?” in Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since
the Soviet Satellite, ed. roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon, and robert W. Smith (harwood
academic publishers, 2000), pp. xviii.
4. The Oxford English Dictionary (New York, NY: Oxford University press, 1989).
5. a famous example in space history is Nikita Khrushchev’s shrewd tactical use of spacefight for
internal and external political maneuvering. For an overview of Khrushchev’s manipulation
of the space program, see asif Siddiqi Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville, FL:
University press of Florida, 2003), especially pp. 409-460.
6. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 5.
7. David Noble in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
(Oxford University press, 1977) inverts the hierarchy and sees this explosion not as statecentric
manipulation, but as a “wholesale public subsidization of private enterprise” to serve
the ends of technocratic corporate managers working as government contractors (p. 322).
John Kenneth Galbraith in The New Industrial State (Boston, Ma: houghton Mifin, 1967)
envisions technocracy as having a decision-making mind of its own within a given institutional
constellation, the “technostructure,” which operates autonomously from corporate or
governmental intentions, often to the detriment of the public good. Don price argues in The