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

Far OUt: the SpaCe age IN aMerICaN CUltUre
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the Sputnik moment of 1957 had telescoped fear and mobilized resources
in response to a seemingly imminent enemy threat. Space exploration had
been underway before Sputnik, of course, and had been driven by many
factors: the nationalism inspired by World War II; frontier nostalgia for new
lands to discover; public relations campaigns by scientists such as von Braun,
entertainment moguls such as disney, corporations interested in aerospace,
and astrofuturist writers. But the Cold War’s international rivalry shaped
its character and accelerated its tempo into a space race. the space race was
exhilarating because it seemed dangerous and character-defning. Boring things
such as careful deliberation, cost-consciousness, and safety could be efaced
as exciting “new frontiers” of risk and daring beckoned. advocates of Space
Keyesianism saw political and economic advantages—at least until arguments
about “big government” and “Moon-doggles” gained traction. a remarkable
conjuncture of popular culture, pressure from techno-scientifc elites, and
political imperatives may have initially produced the space race, but, over time,
they also sparked contention over priorities.
after america’s lunar landing in 1969, the space race abated and provoked
neither the intense fear nor the vaunted inspiration of a decade earlier. But the
race had made a lasting imprint. It helped deeply embed a rhetoric of peril
into the nation’s foreign policy and the practices of large-scale governmental
contracting into the nation’s political economy.
2. the MedIa age: SpaCe SpeCtaCUlarItY
the postwar Media age fed the dynamics of the space race. New media
forms—visible in photography, flm, and television—helped project the beauties,
mysteries, and dangers of space. Space was a star of this historical moment in
which media spectacularity still seemed really spectacular.
the mass media of the era provided an ideal milieu for coverage of
the Space age, a term that suddenly circulated everywhere. a few weekly
magazines and news services dominated the print media, and photography and
television images—sometimes live—played a growing role in news delivery.
It could be argued that Sputnik prompted little initial popular uproar until
techno-scientifc elites and politicians teamed with these infuential media
outlets to frame the event as a Cold War crisis. 28 the space race, after all,
provided the attractions of a rich storyline punctuated by stunning images. the
initial sensationalized sense of crisis fowed into the breathless score-keeping of
28. For example, amitai etzioni, “Comments,” in The First 25 Years in Space, ed. allan a. Needell
(Washington, dC: Smithsonian Institution press, 1983), pp. 33-36.