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

Far OUt: the SpaCe age IN aMerICaN CUltUre
173
government embraced the funding for research and development (r&d). panels
of experts, paid through government grants, became a regular feature of defense
and space planning. 42 Steering the enormous space bureaucracy and its complex
contracting processes even spawned a new management style called “systems
engineering.” Just after Sputnik’s launch, Newsweek pointed out a “central fact”
that had to be faced: “as a scientifc and engineering power, the Soviet Union
has shown its mastery. the U.S. may have more cars and washing machines
and toasters, but in terms of the stuf with which wars are won and ideologies
imposed, the nation” now had a frightful opponent. 43 But what might be the
impact of the fusion between government and technical/scientifc expertise in
creating this stuf? Could technocracy, which the Soviet system seemed able
simply to impose, be reconciled with democracy?
In flms, comics, and literature of the pre-Sputnik 1950s, space travel had
provided an ideal venue for elaborating various utopian and dystopian visions
of a technological future directed by techno-scientifc and political elites. Films
such as Destination Moon presented a positive view, but others, such as Rocketship
XM, predicted that technology (and the life in space that it sustained) would
ultimately fail, bringing death and destruction as the primary outcome. 44
the same year that Sputnik prompted calls for building new cadres of space
scientists and technicians the flm The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) presented
a dark fantasy about a man who, after exposure to radioactivity, became
gradually smaller and more insignifcant until he disappeared entirely. drawing
on fears of atomic power, the flm advanced a thoroughly alarming vision of the
inexorable prospects of man’s “shrinkage” in an expanding universe, a victim of
his own technology. (a few years later the Jetsons brought this theme to tV in
“the little Man,” an episode in which a faulty compression technique reduces
george Jetson to six inches tall.) the theme of human insignifcance resulting
from an almost god-like technology and an awareness of earth’s smallness in a
vast cosmos ran through Space age culture.
It was within this broad debate over technocracy, of course, that NaSa’s
own public afairs ofces weighed in. By emphasizing group competence and
the good individual character of those in the space program, NaSa depicted
science and technology as being under control and debunked popular worries
of shrinking men and overbearing machines. Moreover, NaSa’s stress on the
innovative products and better living arising from space research aimed to
difuse the darker fears of technology’s impact.
42. See, for example,ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons:The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite (New York,
NY: penguin Books, 2006).
43. Quoted in lucena, Defending the Nation, p. 29.
44. Frederick I. Ordway, III, and randy leiberman, eds., Blueprint for Space: From Science Fiction to
Science Fact (Washington dC: Smithsonian Institution press, 1992) deals with the popular culture
of spacefight.