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

Far OUt: the SpaCe age IN aMerICaN CUltUre
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explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly
go where no man has gone before.” the show revolved around thinly veiled Cold
War themes, as the Federation’s Enterprise dealt with rivalries with the Klingon
and romulan civilizations. Would new kinds of policing be able to enforce rules
within a new kind of intergalactic, or internationalist, order?
the more practical minded turned to forging international space law in
the real world. development of international norms might create precedents for
turning space-race competition into Spaceship earth cooperation and reconfgure
the landscape of the Cold War. the United Nations Committee on the peaceful
Uses of Outer Space (COpUOS) worked to develop international space law,
and the U.S. Congress undertook various cooperative initiatives. 52 the Outer
Space treaty of 1967, for example, banned weapons of mass destruction from
space, demilitarized the Moon and other non-terrestrial bodies, and promised
peaceful international cooperation in space. In 1975, apollo astronauts and
Soyuz cosmonauts orchestrated a symbolic handshake in space. 53
In 1969, U.S. astronauts posed for a much-debated iconic image in
which they planted an american fag on the Moon. they also left behind a
gold olive leaf and a plaque that stated “We came in peace for all mankind.”
throughout the Space age, a multitude of such representations persistently
and unproblematically mixed rhetoric of a national “conquest” of space with
invocations of peace and cooperation; they embedded calls for national greatness
within universalistic justifcations. the tensions between serving the nation
and humanity as a whole may have seemed insignifcant, indeed even invisible,
to most americans because such juxtapositions sounded so familiar. a long
rhetorical tradition avowing america’s unique national mission to and for the
world, after all, stretched from the puritans through america’s long experience
of frontier expansionism to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin roosevelt and
into Kennedy’s New Frontier. In classic american tradition, Space age
representations both raised and quieted or masked the tensions between serving
the nation and representing all of humanity.
another question implied in the concept of Spaceship earth concerned the
social make-up of its denizens. how, for example, might earth-bound racial
and gender diferences appear when rendered in outer space? Some historians
have seen science fction (like early space travel itself) as a rather exclusionary
52. eilene galloway, “Organizing the United States government for Outer Space, 1957-1958,” in
Reconsidering Sputnik, ed. launius, et al., pp. 309-325; Joan Johnson-Freese, Changing Patterns of
International Cooperation in Space (Malabar, Fl: Orbit Books, 1990) examines cooperation in space.
house Committee on Science and technology, Toward the Endless Frontier, pp. 367-450 details
congressional eforts.
53. the text of the Outer Space treaty of 1967 may be found at the NaSa history division, http://
history.nasa.gov/1967treaty.html (accessed September 15, 2007).