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

x Remembering the Space Age
After 50 years of robotic and human spacefight, and as serious plans are
being implemented to return humans to the Moon and continue on to Mars, it
is a good time to step back and ask questions that those in the heat of battle have
had but little time to ask. What has the Space Age meant? What if the Space Age
had never occurred? Has it been, and is it still, important for a creative society to
explore space? How do we, and how should we, remember the Space Age?
It is with such questions in mind that the NASA History Division and the
National Air and Space Museum Space History Division convened a conference
on October 22-23, 2007, to contemplate some of the large questions associated
with space exploration over the last half century. The conference was designed
to discuss not so much the details of what has happened in space over the last 50
years, nor even so much the impact of what has happened, but rather its meaning
in the broadest sense of the term. 2 In doing so, the organizers made a conscious
attempt to draw in scholars outside the usual circle of space history. This was not
an easy task; we found that, with few exceptions, historians had not contemplated
the meaning of the Space Age in the context of world history, even though the
Space Age has given rise to an embryonic movement known as “big history”
encompassing the last 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang. 3 We therefore turned
to “big picture” historians, among whom is John R. McNeill, who had recently
coauthored The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of Human History with his father,
William H. McNeill, another big picture historian. 4 With the idea that space is
the ultimate “bird’s-eye view” and that it has enlarged and enhanced the human
web, we invited the younger McNeill to deliver our opening keynote lecture.
Readers will fnd his provocative thoughts in chapter 1.
The conference encompassed two main themes, refected in the frst two
sections of this book. The frst, “national and global dimensions of the Space
Age,” was meant to examine the place of space exploration in human history.
Here the guiding questions were as follows: Has the Space Age fostered a new
global identity, or has it reinforced distinct national identities? How does space
history connect with national histories and with the histories of transnational
or global phenomena such as the Cold War, the rise of global markets, or
global satellite communications? One might argue there is a fundamental
2. On the question of societal impact, see Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds., Societal Impact
of Spacefight (NASA SP-2007-4801:Washington, 2007).
3. On “big history,” see David Christian’s “The Case for ‘Big History’” in The Journal of World
History,2,No.2 (Fall 1991):223-238 (http://www.fss.uu.nl/wetfl/96-97/big.htm);David Christian,
‘Maps of Time’:An Introduction to ‘Big History’, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004;
as well as Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until Today, Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1996, and Marnie Hughes-Warrington, “Big History,” Historically
Speaking, November, 2002, pp. 16-17, 20 (available at http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/november02.
html#hughes-warrington).
4. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web:A Bird’s-eye View of Human History (W. W.
Norton, New York, 2003).