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

210 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
“foating signifers”—symbols without fxed meaning—that are reinterpreted
again and again as they pass through diferent contexts. No single group or
agency—even a government agency—can fully control them.
From a cultural anthropologist’s perspective, the interaction between
NaSa and broader culture could be recast as a dialogue of diferent cultures:
NaSa’s own culture(s) and the diverse subcultures of space fans, activists,
educators, and artists. a study of this interaction might fnally bring together
two disparate research areas—the analyses of the Space age in popular culture
and the studies of NaSa’s own institutional culture(s). 28 the anthropological
models of cultural contact, confict, translation, mediation, and the “trading
zone” may prove useful here. 29
Combining the notion of historical memory with the model of cultural
exchange leads to an investigation of the dynamics of memory in diferent
cultures. Within larger american culture, every distinct group—space engineers,
astronauts, and space fans, for example—nurtures its own memories, its own
folklore, and its own historical visions of the Space age. What happens when
diferent groups interact and exchange their memories? What new mythologies
and hybrid identities emerge?
although diferent groups and diferent nations may have diferent
memories of the Space age, the cultural mechanisms by which these memories
are exchanged and altered over time prove remarkably similar. If we look beyond
american culture and examine the convolutions of the historical memory of the
Space age in russian and Soviet culture, we will fnd a similar struggle between
a master narrative and an array of counter-stories, even though the dynamics of
this struggle will follow a specifc russian political and cultural trajectory. 30
28. On NaSa culture(s), see alexander Brown, “accidents, engineering, and history at NaSa,
1967–2003,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spacefight, pp. 377-402; Yasushi Sato, “Local
engineering and Systems engineering: Cultural Confict at NaSa’s Marshall Space Flight
Center, 1960-1966,” Technology and Culture 46:3 (July 2005): 561-583; Diane Vaughan,
The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago:
University of Chicago press, 1996); Vaughan, “Changing NaSa: the Challenges of
Organizational System Failures,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spacefight, pp. 349-376.
29. See peter Galison,“trading Zone: Coordinating action and Belief,” in The Science Studies Reader,
ed. Mario Biagioli (New York, NY: routledge, 1999), pp. 137-160.
30. On memorialization practices in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, see Svetlana Boym, The
Future of Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001); Frederick C. Corney, “rethinking a
Great event:the October revolution as Memory project,” Social Science History 22:4 (Winter
1998): 389-414; Geofrey a. hosking,“Memory in a totalitarian Society:the Case of the Soviet
Union,” in Memory, ed. Butler, pp. 97-114; and James V.Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University press, 2002).