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

Far OUt: the SpaCe age IN aMerICaN CUltUre
175
Walter a. Mcdougall’s prize-winning history of the Space age examined the
dilemmas raised by the nation’s expensive and expansive networks of scientifc
and technological expertise. the space program, he argued, led americans
to accept a greater concentration of governmental power and the enlistment
of technological change for state purposes. Mcdougall ended with a plea to
neither worship nor hate technology; to neither expect utopia nor fear distopia. 48
In Kubrik’s, Mailer’s, and Mcdougall’s very diferent kinds of representations
that occurred years apart, humans had no choice but to continue to embrace
technology and confront its challenges.
like “technocracy,” the phrase “Spaceship earth” echoed in a broad
range of cultural products during the Space age. In 1963, Buckminster Fuller
published Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth; in 1966 Kenneth Boulding wrote
Human Values on the Spaceship Earth. Both aimed to map a new consciousness
for a sustainable environment that would abandon reliance on fossil fuels and
develop sources of renewable energy. along with so many other works of
the era, they sought to unite science, engineering, humanities, and art in an
integrated efort to focus upon ameliorating human problems. Some connected
the current fears of overpopulation and the “population bomb” with the
prospects of space colonization. 49
the apollo crews in 1968 and 1969 captured from outer space the now
famous images of a Spaceship earth. perhaps the best known photo, called
“earthrise,” showed earth ascending over the Moon. Such visions of a whole
earth, drifting in space, became among the age’s most meaningful icons. On
the front page of the New York Times, poet archibald Macleish wrote that these
images might transform human consciousness. “to see the earth as it truly is,
small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it foats, is to see ourselves
as riders on the earth together.” 50 to many people, especially the young who
were beginning to call for a counterculture—a new way of living and relating—
such images signifed a global consciousness that might spur transnational and
global networks of non-governmental organizations (NgO) to work beyond
48. Walter a. Mcdougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, and Joseph N.tatarewicz, Space Technology and
Planetary Astronomy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 1990) examine the interaction
between government and “big science.”
49. r. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster,
1969); Kenneth Boulding, Human Values on the Spaceship Earth (New York, NY: National Council
of Churches, 1966). the idea that technocratic skills needed to be wedded to more humanist
values was a common theme of Space age writers. See, for example, r. Buckminster Fuller, eric
a.Walker, and James r. Killian, Jr., Approaching the Benign Environment (auburn, al: University
of alabama press, 1970). Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon explored the tension between
NaSa’s appeal to nationalism and the countercultural humanism of the 1960s.
50. archibald Macleish,“a refection: riders on earth together, Brothers in eternal Cold,” New
York Times, (december 25, 1968); discussed in Finis dunaway, Natural Visions:The Power of Images
in American Environmental Reform (Chicago, Il: University of Chicago press, 2005), pp. 207-208.