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Abstract
From the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a new theory emerged regarding the future of international relations. Growing out from the budding science-fiction genre popularized by figures such as H. G. Wells, and maturing in the popular interwar space movements of Russia, Western Europe, and the United States, this theory proposed that human spaceflight would have a transformative impact on world society. Rocket engineers, sci-fi authors, and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic argued that 1) space exploration would provide a vessel through which to channel aggression and violence; 2) the cost and technical difficulty of opening space would force once rival nations to cooperate; and 3) spaceflight would transform human consciousness itself, making of homo sapiens a more magnanimous, egalitarian, and pacific species. This article traces the rise and spread of what I call ‘interplanetary’ theory across time, nations, and professional disciplines, as well as the ways in which that theory departed from prevailing convictions about international relations after World War I.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Thomas Gangale, How High the Sky? The Definition and Delimitation of Outer Space and Territorial Airspace in International Law (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 2.
2 Yves Béon, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
3 Daniel Lang, ‘A Romantic Urge’, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 1951, 85–86.
4 A.V. Cleaver, ‘The Interplanetary Project’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS), 7, (1948), 21–39; Andrew Chatwin, Val Cleaver: A Very English Rocketeer (London: British Interplanetary Society, 2015).
5 Cleaver, ‘The Interplanetary Project’, 27.
6 Ibid, 27.
7 Ibid, 28.
8 Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship: Astronautics and Its Impact Upon Human Society’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 6, no. 3 (December 1946), 66–81; Robert Poole, ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the History of the Future, 1930–1970’, History and Technology, 28, no. 3 (September 2012), 255–80.
9 Fraser MacDonald, Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019); Patrick McCray, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).
10 James T. Mangan, ‘Sky Merchandisers Notified They Are Out of Order’, press release, Nation of Celestial Space, March 5, 1963, quoted in Virgiliu Pop, Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold the Moon (Atlanta, GA: Exposure, 2006), 33; ‘Chicago Man takes Claim to Outer Space’, Science Illustrated (May 1949), 43; ‘Trespassers Beware! Designer Got Deed to All Outer Space’, Los Angeles Times, 19 Jan. 1949, 1; ‘‘Ruler’ of All Space Would Like to Bring Ike Up to Date’, Boston Globe, 7 May 1958, 12.
11 William Sim Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1976).
12 Frank Winter, Prelude to Space: The Rocket Societies, 1924–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 73–86; Beryl Williams and Samuel Epstein, The Rocket Pioneers: On the Road to Space (New York: Julian Messner, 1955), 171–203; Chris Gainor, To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 50–52. Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001); Harry Wulforst, The Rocketmakers (New York: Orion Books, 199).
13 Bradley G. Shreve, ‘The US, the USSR, and Space Exploration, 1957–1963’, International Journal on World Peace, 20, no. 2 (June 2003), 78; Karsten Werth, ‘A Surrogate for War—The U.S. Space Program in the 1960s’, Amerikastudien /American Studies, 49, no. 4 (2004), 563–87.
14 Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship: Astronautics and Its Impact Upon Human Society’, JBIS, 6, no. 3 (December 1946), 42.
15 Garrett P. Serviss, Edition’s Conquest of Mars (Los Angeles, CA, 1947 [1898]), 16–9.
16 Dandridge Cole, Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space (Amherst, WI: Amherst Press, 1965), 137–38.
17 Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics, 1998); Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, ‘Planets Are Inhabited by Living Creatures’, The Cosmic Philosophy, accessed January 12, 2023, https://tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/planets-are-inhabited-by-living-creatures-1933/.
18 Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 1, 7.
19 As one of the principal Martian characters, a captain in the spacefaring fleet, explains amidst Britain’s violent resistance: ‘The humans are insane. . . . I hear that [they] have named our planet after the god of War. We wanted to bring peace, but it appears that our contact with this wild species in throwing us back into barbarism.’ Quoted in William B. Fisher, Empire Strikes Out: Kurd Lasswitz, Hans Dominik, and the Development of German Science Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 129. Ingo Cornils, ‘The Martians are Coming! War, Peace, Love, and Scientific Progress in H. G. Wells’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ and Kurd Lasswitz’s ‘Auf Zwei Planeten’’, Comparative Literature, 55, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 24–41; Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), chap. 4.
20 Stites, ‘Fantasy and Revolution’ in Alexander Bogdanov (ed), Red Star (trans. Charles Rougle: Bloomington, IN, 1984 [1908]), 7; Mark B. Adams, ‘‘Red Star’: Another Look at Aleksandr Bogdanov’, Slavic Review, 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 1–15; Michael G. Smith, Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 42.
21 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1962 [1934]), 106.
22 David Lake, ‘Introduction to H. G. Wells’, in David Lake (ed), The First Men in the Moon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiv.
23 H. G. Wells, ‘A Talk with Gryllotalpa’, in Philmus and Hughes (eds), Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975).
24 Wells, The First Men in the Moon, 281–83.
25 H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (London: Macmillan, 1924 [1906]), 273–74.
26 Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 128–29.
27 Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), chap. 2; I. F. Clarke, ‘Trigger-Happy: An Evolutionary Study of the Origins and Development of Future-War Fiction, 1763–1914’, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20, no. 2 (1997), 117–36; I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749 (New York, 1993); I. F. Clarke, Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871–1900’, Science Fiction Studies, 24, no. 3 (November 1997), 387–412.
28 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, ‘Exploration of the Universe with Reaction Machines’ Doc. I-5 in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume I: Organizing for Exploration (Washington DC: NASA, 1995), 59–83; Robert H. Goddard, ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes’, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 71, no. 2 (Washington, DC, 1919); Hermann Oberth, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (Munich, 1923); Bainbridge, Spaceflight Revolution, 19–20.
29 George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Political Implications of the Occult Revival’ in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Asif Siddiqi, ‘Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia’, Osiris, 23, no. 1 (2008), 265; Boris Grois, ed., Russian Cosmism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
30 Quoted in Young, The Russian Cosmists, 47.
31 Asif Siddiqi, ‘Imagining the Cosmos’, 266. As Michael G. Smith (Rockets and Revolution, 94–95) notes, the time-condensing speed of spaceflight was itself a form of lifespan-extending time travel, one Bogdanov referred to in his poem ‘A Martian Stranded on Earth’, in which ‘space, yes, and time have been conquered by man / And the elements and death are but words’.
32 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, ‘Citizens of the Universe’, (2 Aug. 1933); ‘Necessity of Cosmic Mindset’, (1934); ‘Planets are inhabited by Living Creatures’, (1933), The Cosmic Philosophy, 21 Jan. 2022, http://tsiolkovsky.org/en/cosmic-philosophy-by-tsiolkovsky/; Shubin, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, 146; Young, Russian Cosmists, 145–54.
33 David Lasser, ‘The Rocket and the Next War’, Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society, 1, no. 13 (November 1931), 6–10.
34 David Lasser, Annual Report to the American Interplanetary Society (appendix item), April 13, 1931, in Lasser, David Lasser, The Conquest of Space (Burlington, ON: Apogee Books, 1931), 114, 137, 181; De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 38.
35 Daniel Lang, ‘A Romantic Urge’, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 1951, 85–86.
36 As quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 244.
37 Jared Buss, Willy Ley: Prophet of the Space Age (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2017), 66. Ley was at one time a member of the Nazi Party, but by 1928 he had become a critic (if not a public one) of the Party and the direction of German politics generally. After he declined to renew his membership, he published his articles in Vorwärts , the official newspaper of the Social Democratic Party.
38 John MacCormac, ‘War with Rockets Pictured by Oberth’, New York Times, 31 Jan. 1931, 8; Alexander C. T. Geppert, et al., Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia, and the Cold War (London: Palgrave, 2021), 7.
39 Hermann Oberth, Man Into Space (New York, 1957), 1, 151.
40 Siddiqi, ‘Imagining the Cosmos’, 285.
41 Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 244–45; Alexander C. T. Geppert, ‘Space Personae: Cosmopolitan Networks of Peripheral Knowledge, 1927–1957’, Journal of Modern European History, 6, no. 2 (2008): 279.
42 C. P. Ives, ‘Mere Devices Aren’t Going to Be Enough’, The Sun, November 18, 1945, 14.
43 ‘The Future is Here’, The Enquirer (Cincinnati, OH), 20 Feb. 1949, 2.
44 Oliver Dunnett, ‘The British Interplanetary Society and Cultures of Outer Space, 1930-1970’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2011); Oliver Dunnett, ‘Geopolitical Cultures of Outer Space: The British Interplanetary Society, 1933-1965’, Geopolitics, 22, no. 2 (2017), 452–73.
45 Cleaver as quoted in Bainbridge, Spaceflight Revolution, 154.
46 Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Extraterrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?’ Wireless World, 51, no. 10 (October 1945), 305–8; Letters to the Editor, ‘Peacetime Uses for V2’, Wireless World, 51, no. 2 (February 1945), 58; ‘The Rocket and the Future of Warfare’ in Ascent to Orbit (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984), 70; Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934–1998 (New York, 1999), 32.
47 Clarke, ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’; Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 116–19.
48 Clarke, ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’, 42.
49 Stapledon, ‘Interplanetary Man’, 220–23.
50 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (London: Ballantine Books, 1953); Arthur C. Clarke, Prelude to Space (New York: Gnome Press, 1954), 112.
51 Segal, Technological Utopianism; Kilgore, Astrofuturism.
52 McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011 (2nd Edition), 10, 23, 233.
53 G. Lowes Dickinson, The European Anarchy (London: Routledge, 1916), 9–10; G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (New York: The Century Co., 1926), 14; James Bryce, International Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 3–4.
54 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
55 Konstantin Tsiolkovski, ‘Creatures Higher Than a Man’, June 28, 1939; ‘Creatures from Different Stages of Evolution’, n.d, The Cosmic Philosophy, https://tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/creatures-higher-than-a-man-1939/.
56 Clarke, Greetings, 35, 107, 134; Poole, ‘Challenge of the Spaceship’, 259.
57 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Year’s Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1949 [1939]), 5–8.
58 Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 9-10; Alison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 163.
59 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G. L. Ulmen trans. (New York: Telos Press, 2003 [1950]).
60 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Raymond Aron and the Theory of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 29, no. 1 (March 1985), 16.
61 Donald E. Kash, The Politics of Space Cooperation (West Lafayette, IN, 1967). Arnold Frutkin, International Cooperation in Space (New York, 1965); Harvey and Ciccoritti, U.S.-Soviet Cooperation in Space (Miami, FL, 1974).
62 James Canan, War in Space (New York: HarperCollins, 1982); John MacVey, Space Weapons, Space War (New York: Stein and Day, 1985); Bhupendra Jasani and Christopher Lee, Countdown to Space War (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1984); Robert Salkeld, War and Space (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970); David Pahl, Space Warfare and Strategic Defense (London: Exeter Books, 1988).
63 Joan Johnson-Freese, Space as a Strategic Asset (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 5.
64 Joan Johnson-Freese, Heavenly Ambitions: America’s Quest to Dominate Space (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3.
65 Namrata Goswami and Peter Garretson, Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020). See in particular the authors’ possible scenarios on pp. 299–315.
66 Bleddyn Bowen, War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics (Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Press), 1.
67 Everett C. Dolman, Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age (London: Frank Cass Publishing, 2002), 5.
68 Linda Dawson, War in Space: The Science and Technology Behind Our Next Theater of Conflict (London: Springer, 2018); Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy (London: Routledge, 2006).
69 Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), xx, 366.
70 Bleddyn E. Bowen, Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), introduction (Kindle edition).
71 Andrew G. Haley, ‘The Rule of Law in the Space Age’, Foreign Policy Bulletin, September 1, 1958, 190.
72 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York, 1987), chap. 7.
73 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 5, 89.
74 Deudney, for one, has done this beautifully.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Buono
Stephen Buono is a Harper & Schmidt Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Province of All Mankind: How Outer Space Became American Foreign Policy, is under contract with Cornell University Press. As an Ernest May Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center in 2022-23, he began a global history of lunar politics during and after the Cold War.