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

Chapter 10
Far Out:
the Space age in american Culture
emily S. rosenberg
S pace has long provided a canvas for the imagination. For me, the early
Space age intertwined with a sense of youth’s almost limitless possibilities—
the excitement of discovery, the allure of adventure, the challenge of competition,
the confdence of mastery. as a girl in Montana, I looked up into that Big Sky
hoping to glimpse a future that would, somehow, allow my escape from the
claustrophobia of small towns separated by long distances.
But the Space age was also bound up with the encroaching cynicism of
my young adulthood: the fear of a future driven by thoughtless fascination with
technique and a Vietnam-era disillusionment with the country’s benevolence
and with the credibility of its leaders. the night that the frst american landed
on the Moon, I was in the audience at the Newport Folk Festival. Someone from
the audience yelled “What were the frst words on the Moon?” the announcer
replied, “they were: ‘the simulation was better!’” a cluster of people grumbled
that the Moonwalk was probably faked, a suspicion that my barely literate
immigrant grandmother—and a few others in the country—shared.
the new Space age could promise giant leaps and also threaten hal of
2001: A Space Odyssey. Space could be far away or “far out.”
anyone who has been around for the past half century harbors private
memories of the early Space age. a toy, a tV program, a book, a painting,
a school science fair project can each touch of remembrance of a place, an
emotion, the person we once were. For each individual, the Space age ofered
an array of visual representations and symbolic threads that could, intimately
and personally, weave a unique tapestry.
But the Space age was not simply an infnitely personalizable canvas for
individual memories. It also ofered national and global imaginaries that projected
assumptions about, and debates over, national identities and global futures.
the Space age, of course, is in one sense as old as historical time—
humans have long looked to the heavens for meaning. and it is also an age
still of the present as the current schemes to militarize space and the renewed
public visibility of public and private missions into space remind us. But this
essay addresses that shorter moment of the Space age, the couple of decades
beginning in the early 1950s when transcending earth’s atmosphere and