Rethinking the Space Age: astroculture and technoscience

We have had an age of steam-power, an age of electricity and of the petrol engine, and an age of the air, and now with the coming of atomic power the world should, in due course, find itself in the Space Age. And this should be the greatest age of all.

Harry Harper, Dawn of the Space Age, 1946. ¹

This special issue of History and Technology analyzes selected aspects of the cultural history of outer space in the twentieth century from a West–European perspective. It aims to rethink and relocate the Space Age, the term commonly used to define ‘the period of human exploration and exploitation of outer space’ and conventionally applied to the years from the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957 through the six Apollo Moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972. ² Long before any actual space accomplishments were achieved, however, the coming Space Age had already been billed as ‘the greatest age of all,’ as the above epigraph indicates. Hitherto predominantly treated as driven by either technological development or political imperatives, in particular during the Cold War, space travel and space exploration merit closer scholarly scrutiny, more comprehensive analysis and better integration into mainstream historiography, above all with a view to their cultural significance, societal impact, and imaginative dimension, within the broader frame of twentieth-century modernity and globalization. ³

As a nascent field of research, the cultural history of outer space may seem peripheral, obscure or even irrelevant, but the argument here is that outer space, or rather its making and deployment by a wide range of historical actors, stands as a central and characteristic feature of the twentieth century. For several decades, it was key to the self-image of public, governmental, and technical elites, and to modernist narratives of progress. This history, embodying core modern themes, also provides a distinctive perspective on transnational and global historiography. Digging out and zooming in on the countless, frequently buried historical attempts to transcend Earth’s gravity, to depart from humankind’s home planet in order to explore, settle and colonize nothing less than the universe, space history should be considered ‘global’ by its very subject matter, adding to and contrasting with much of the ‘global history’ literature. As early as 1998, MIT historian Bruce Mazlish realized such an inherent connection. Arguing that the very term ‘global … points in the direction of space; its sense permits the notion of standing outside our planet and seeing “Spaceship Earth,” ‘Mazlish posited ‘this new perspective’ – space – to be one of the keys to global history. ⁴ Indeed, Mazlish’s quote may be read as an indicator of the strong correlation between outer space, its exploration and imaginaries, and our analytic outlooks. Nothing explains the current renaissance of space thought and gives relevance and urgency to its historicization as much as our attempts at thinking globally.

Aiming to disrupt and overcome worn dichotomies such as science/fiction, real/imaginary and human/environment, contributions to this special issue operate with two distinct concepts, as its title indicates: ‘astroculture’ and ‘technoscience.’ The former is a neologism of my own which, as such, necessitates further explanation and justification. Designed and introduced as a culture-related equivalent to better known and long-established terms such as ‘astrophysics,’ ‘astropolitics,’ and ‘astrosociology,’ astroculture is defined as comprising a ‘heterogenous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space while stirring both the individual and the collective imagination.’ ⁵ Building on early forms of science fiction avant la lettre authored by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Kurd Lasswitz and numerous others, astroculture coalesced in the late 1920s together with the rise of the international spaceflight movement; saw a first peak during the so-called ‘Golden Age of Spaceflight’ in the early 1950s, that is during the decade before Sputnik; and found its global apogee in December 1968, with the first photograph of a rising Earth seen from space taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8. ⁶ Because the suggested definition of astroculture is as short and concise as it is aims to be broad and inclusive, it allows for the common historicization and comparative analysis of a wide range of practices and projects that all attempt to come to terms with the infinite void that surrounds Earth. Astroculture is by no means identical with ‘astrofuturism,’ a related, yet different concept introduced by literary scholar De Witt Douglas Kilgore in 1997 to describe the close association between narratives of spatial conquest and futuristic thinking so prevalent in the postwar United States and elsewhere. ⁷ Astrofuturism can be seen as a specific subcategory of astroculture, emphasizing a close nexus between imperial expansion and utopian speculation, and expressing the belief that future space would travel define a distinct and higher stage of human development or even of human evolution. By comparison, astroculture is conceptually broader, as it includes manifestations of space-related culture that are neither necessarily utopian nor future-prone.

The issue’s second key concept, ‘technoscience,’ is longer established and better known, if not necessarily by historians then in Science and Technology Studies. ⁸ Variously (and not always unambiguously) defined, it stands here for the idea that science and technology, rather than constituting two separate disciplines, must be understood as one dynamic system of simultaneously making knowledge and producing commodities. Employing the conceptual unit of ‘technoscience’ indicates the convergence and assemblage of scientific practices and technological processes, highlights the permeability of their boundaries, and bridges the division between scientific knowledge and its ‘application,’ for instance in engineering. ‘I use the term technoscience,’ historian of science John V. Pickstone has explained, ‘for technological projects which are heavily dependent on science (or vice versa),’ explicitly including ‘high-tech projects funded and directed by state agencies, or even by state-backed academic consortia.’ ⁹ Technoscience targets not only interfaces between neighboring disciplines, but also between otherwise distinct value systems that accentuate distinct objectives, broadly ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ on the side of science, and the achievement of specific ends such as prestige, commerce, and power on that of technology. Worth noting, the term arose in the 1970s/1980s and hence precisely at a time when the contrast between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ sciences was taken to have lost much of its social force.

If outer space is a story of the twentieth century, such a contrast between values (and their associated claims on authority/power) must form part of the historical account. Featuring technoscience as its second key concept, this volume then focuses on the ways in which space exploration has been imagined and accomplished through such a synthesis of technology and scientific knowledge, and by accommodation among their associated, and not always compatible, values. These values have in turn been filtered by the interests of governments, the military, business, and academia. Such knowledge-creation and meaning-making was by no means limited to space scientists and rocket engineers. Contributions in this issue are especially at pains to demonstrate how historical actors comprehended, negotiated and defined these boundaries. They draw attention to the fact that socially different groups including science fiction authors, intellectuals, media producers, and consumers, and not least the public were instrumental in defining spaceflight and space exploration as both feasible and necessary for the advancement of Western modernity.

Habitually, the Space Age is believed to have been bound up with a well-defined period of bipolar opposition between the twentieth century’s two superpowers, the USA and the former Soviet Union, and tantamount to a byproduct of the Cold War or even a surrogate for ‘real’ war. As the Cold War intensified and expanded globally, the standard argument goes, rivalries and the quest for national prestige extended even to the realm of outer space, leading to the Space Race. Contributions do not seek to deny the value of such a line of reasoning, but aim to shift the focus away from explanations centered on bipolar Cold War contexts and to produce more inclusive and complex narratives that engage outer space as a cultural concern throughout the twentieth century.

The five articles in this special issue enlarge the existing historiographical focus in three different ways: conceptually, geographically and contextually. Rather than framing space exploration as a history of ideas and consecutive technologicacontexts and to produce more inclusive and complexl refinements under ever-changing politico-economic constellations, they employ the two complementary concepts of astroculture and technoscience to argue that the search for meaning in space is socioculturally embedded. Geographically, they highlight and examine the popularity of space exploration in Western Europe, in particular Great Britain, (West) Germany, and, to a lesser extent, France, providing a certain counter-perspective, however inchoate, to the prevailing USA–USSR dominance in the existing historiography. ¹⁰ Contextually, they provide much-needed support for a de-exoticization and ‘normalization’ of space history, with a view to integrating it more closely into mainstream social and cultural historiography of the twentieth century.

Based on archival research, each article featured in this special issue of History and Technology differs in terms of geographical setting, time frame, historiographical approach and scholarly focus. Yet, these contributions are more than solitary ‘case studies.’ They seek to address each other directly, in particular conceptually and via shared historical actors. It is not by coincidence, for example, that Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), whom The Times in 1967 aptly characterized as the preeminent ‘prophet of the Space Age, prodigious science fiction writer and popularizer of science,’ figures prominently in three of the five essays. ¹¹ To begin, Daniel Brandau analyzes the genesis and development of ‘early modern’ German spaceflight thought, that is, prior to World War I and hence long before the better-known and better-researched rocket fads and spaceflight enthusiasm of the 1920s, the so-called Raketenrummel of the Weimar Republic. Robert Poole traces the influence historians and philosophers such as Arnold J. Toynbee, Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis had on Clarke, thus contributing to his – and the Space Age’s – intellectual history before Sputnik. William R. Macauley examines how members of the British Interplanetary Society, the oldest extant non-profit space advocacy organization in the world, produced and employed images, models and exhibitionary displays in order to translate, communicate and promote claims about the feasibility of spaceflight to media producers and lay audiences. James Farry and David A. Kirby study the key role the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) assigned depictions of space exploration in their 1950s television programming at a crucial transitional period when the corporation was grappling with the shift away from the previously dominant medium of radio. Last but not least, my own contribution analyzes wide-ranging and far-reaching controversies on the existence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life engendered by innumerable UFO sighting waves both in the USA and in Western Europe between 1947 and the early 1970s.

Focusing on the cultural significance of outer space helps to understand why and how spaceflight became a central subject in both technoscientific debates and the popular imagination. A fascination with outer space can be identified even in national contexts lacking direct access to actual spaceflight before the late 1970s, suggesting a potent global presence comparable only with that other major technoscientific project of the twentieth century, nuclear power. In Western Europe, too, anticipation of spaceflight was intimately bound with notions of modernity and utopian visions of human progress realized through travel to remote planets and concomitant transformation of societies on Earth. For half a century, space exploration stood as the epitome of Western modernity. ‘Today’s world and our present-day human existence is most profoundly influenced and shaped by the fact of spaceflight,’ philosopher Günther Anders noted in 1970. ¹² Contributions to this special issue demonstrate how outer space and space exploration constitute an enduring sociocultural concern through which existing forms of knowledge and power are represented, contested and reformulated in ceaseless attempts to encounter, grasp and make sense of the spatial unknown that limits and engulfs the planet Earth.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks are due to all contributors, commentators and reviewers. However, without the journal’s editor, Martin Collins, this special issue simply would not exist.

Notes

1. Harper, Dawn of the Space Age, 5.

2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989, vol. 16: 90.

3. Standard histories of the so-called ‘First Space Age’ include McDougall’s ...the Heavens and the Earth, and Burrows, This New Ocean.

4. Mazlish, ‘Comparing Global History to World History,’ 389 [emphasis in original].

5. For a more comprehensive discussion of ‘astroculture’ as a concept, see Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism,’ 6–9, here 8.

6. In lieu of an extensive literature that argues for a (re-)discovery of planet Earth, literally a new Weltanschauung, as being the most significant impact of space exploration, see only Poole, Earthrise.

7. See Kilgore, ‘Engineers’ Dreams,’ 104; and Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 1–3.

8. The locus classicus is Latour, Science in Action, 174–75, but see also Marcus, Technoscientific Imaginaries, 3–4; Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, 13–15, 199–202; and in particular Barnes, ‘Elusive Memories of Technoscience,’ 157–60.

9. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, 3, 15.

10. It goes without saying that this particular focus on West-European astroculture does not represent a complete Europeanization of space history, with the Scandinavian countries, for instance, or the wider Mediterranean world, not receiving any attention in this issue. The relationship between Western Europe and the former Soviet bloc is another open question and equally uncharted territory. Two recently published volumes, Andrews and Siddiqi, Into the Cosmos, and Maurer et al., Soviet Space Culture, each include a single essay on non-USSR countries, namely East Germany and Yugoslavia respectively. Possibly still an inevitability given the current state of research in European space history, there is no doubt that such a general bias is unsatisfactory and must be overcome.

11. ‘Prophet of the Space Age.’

12. Anders, Der Blick vom Mond, 11: ‘Unsere heutige Welt und unser heutiges menschliches Dasein [wird] durch die Tatsache der Raumflüge aufs tiefste mitbeeinflußt und mitgeprägt.’