Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion

Abstract

What if we viewed the history of human spaceflight somewhat less through the lens of Cold War politics, which admittedly was central to the race to the Moon, but more as an expression of what might be called a religion of spaceflight? There seems to be a deeply religious quality to advocacy for the investment in and support for human space exploration, lending to the endeavor of a “higher purpose” that helps to explain both the generous nature of the actual investment and the ultimate unwillingness of Americans to eviscerate space budgets despite less than full support for space exploration. This article examines religious conceptions as a means of analyzing what might be termed a “space gospel.” I lay out here the proposition that human spaceflight may be viewed as a religion with similar attributes to those present in mainstream religious denominations. This approach to exploring the history of human spaceflight offers a different and useful frame of understanding that broadens basic conceptions about this aspect of the human past.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Kerrie Gensch, Bryn Pernot, and Jonathan Cohen, interns in the Division of Space History, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, in 2012 for their assistance in collecting materials for this essay.

Notes

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On civil religion see Robert Neelly Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedelus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21; Cushing Strout, The New Heaven and New Earth: Political Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); and Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Charles Reagan Wilson, “American Heavens: Apollo and the Civil Religion,” Journal of Church and State 26:2 (1984): 209–226, quote from 210.

For good discussions of the place of religion in American life, see Sidney Alstrom, The Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); and Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volumes 1–4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–2000).

Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Hunger of Eve (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1976), 144, 150.

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This list is based on years of investigation into the meaning of religion. One useful overview is Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

David F. Noble has argued that technology in general has strong religious overtones. See his book, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 115–142.

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Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957-1975 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and Carol L. Mersch, The Apostles of Apollo: The Journey of the Bible to the Moon and the Untold Stories of America's Race into Space (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009).

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Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 231–232.

See Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2002).

K. Zahnle and M. M. Mac Low, “The Collision of Jupiter and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” Icarus 108 (1994): 1–17; Paul W. Chodas and Donald K. Yeomans, “The Orbital Motion and Impact Circumstances of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” in International Astronomical Union (IAU) Colloquium 156: Proceedings of the Space Telescope Science Institute Workshop (Baltimore, MD, 9–12 May 1995), Keith S. Noll, Harold A. Weaver, and Paul D. Feldman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–30. On the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, see Walter Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Frontier Myth in Twentieth Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); and Allen Barra, Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998).

Tom Wolfe, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Esquire, March 1965; Gary Konas, “Traveling ‘Further’ with Tom Wolfe's Heroes,” Journal of Popular Culture 28 (Winter 1994): 177–192; Rachel Mark, “Pilots and Astronauts,” Commentary 49 (February 1980): 85–88; Chares S. Ross, “The Rhetoric of The Right Stuff,” Journal of General Education 33 (Summer 1981): 113–122; and Ben A. Shackleford, “Masculinity, the Auto Racing Fraternity, and the Technological Sublime,” in Roger Horowirz, ed., Boys and their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York: Routledge, 2001), 229–250.

Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Yeager: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1985); Vikas Arora, “The Communications Decency Act: Congressional Repudiation of the ‘Right Stuff’,” Harvard Journal on Legislation 34 (Summer 1997): 473–512; Rodney P. Rice, “Wallace Stegner and Tom Wolfe: Cowboys, Pilots, and The Right Stuff,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 21 (March 1991): 5–7; Dexter Schraer, “Recommended: Tom Wolfe,” English Journal 70 (December 1981): 49–50; and Lisa Stokes, “Tom Wolfe's Narratives as Stories of Growth,” Journal of American Culture 14 (Fall 1991): 19–24.

Much has been written about the meaning of the astronauts. Two approaches get to the question effectively, one literary and the other scholarly. See Tom Wolf, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Giroux, and Strauss, 1979); and Matthew H. Hersch, Inventing the American Astronaut (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

I relate these stories in Roger D. Launius, “Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon,” Florida Historical Quarterly 87 (Fall 2008): 174–209.

Ritualized remembrance is not uncommon by any means, and always exaggerates positive attributes, while minimizing negatives. What is different in the instance of fallen astronauts is its broad-based, homogenized nature. Beyond vernacular history, this characterization of risk and loss in spaceflight is especially well-orchestrated by true believers in the religion of spaceflight. An insightful study of this approach to ritualized remembrance may be found in how memory was conditioned in the creation of the state of Israel. See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Myron J. Aronoff, “Civic Religion in Israel,” RAIN 44 (June 1981): 4–6; and Marsha B. Cohen, “Lions and Roses: An Interpretive History of Israeli-Iranian Relations,” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 2007.

Margaret A. Weitekamp, “Mourning Men and Women: Gender in the Coverage of the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident and Other Space Tragedies,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, San Jose, CA, 3 April 2005.

Sue Anne Pressley, “Reagan Bids Shuttle Crew Farewell,” Washington Post, 1 February 1986, A1, A6; and David Hoffman, “Reagan Tries to Soothe Grieving Nation, Families, President Delays Affairs of State to Speak From Nationally Televised Pulpit,” Washington Post, 1 February 1986, A6.

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Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Steven J. Dick, “Risk and Exploration Revisited,” NASA Headquarters, 30 August 2005, http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/Why_We_14.html (accessed October 2012).

See Joan Hoff, “The Presidency, Congress, and the Deceleration of the U.S. Space Program in the 1970s,” Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spaceflight and Myth of Presidential Leadership (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 92–132.

“Dr. Rocco Petrone, Third Center Director, Jan. 26, 1973 March 15, 1974,” http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/management/center_directors/pages/petrone1.html (accessed January 2013).

Personal correspondence with author [undated].

“What Are We Waiting For?” Collier's, 22 March 1952, 23.

“Man Will Conquer Space Soon” series, Collier's, 22 March 1952, 23–76.

Wernher von Braun with Cornelius Ryan, “Can We Get to Mars?” Collier's, 30 April 1954, 22–28.

Alex Roland, “How We Won the Moon,” New York Times Book Review, 17 July 1994, 1, 25.

Randy Liebermann, “The Collier's and Disney Series,” in Frederick I. Ordway III and Randy Lieberman, eds., Blueprint for Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 141; and Ron Miller, “Days of Future Past,” Omni, October 1986, 76–81.

Alan Murphy, “The Losing Hand: Tradition and Superstition in Spaceflight,” The Space Review, 27 May 2008, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1137/1 (accessed 30 May 2013).

Ibid.

Apollo 13, a film by Ron Howard, Universal Studios, 1995.

This is the thesis of Bayla Singer, Like Sex with Gods: An Unorthodox History of Flying (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

Ray Bradbury, presentation to annual meeting of the American Astronautical Society, 4 December 1995, as quoted in Roger D. Launius, “The Thrill of Spaceflight,” Profile: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery News 4 (2003): 8.

Walter Cronkite, “Our Infinite Journey,” in Anne Collins Goodyear, Roger D. Launius, Anthony M. Springer, and Bertram Ulrich, eds., Flight: A Celebration of 100 Years in Art and Literature (New York: Welcome Books, 2003), 231.

Greg Easterbrook, “The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped, Time, 2 February 2003, http://www.mercola.com/2003/feb/8/space_shuttle.htm (accessed February 2006).

I made this argument in relation to Apollo in Roger D. Launius, “Perceptions of Apollo: Myth, Nostalgia, Memory or all of the Above?” Space Policy 21 (May 2005): 129–139.

The visitation numbers for the National Air and Space Museum were: 2001—9.8 M; 2002—7.6 M; 2003—10.8 M; 2004—6.5 M; 2005—6.1 M; 2006—6.2; 2007—7.0 M; 2008—8.2 M; 2009—7.4 M; 2010—9.4 M; 2011—8.2 M; and 2012—8.2 M. See “FY 2007 Budget Submission to Congress,” 224, copy in possession of author; “Visitor Statistics,” Smithsonian Institution, http://newsdesk.si.edu/about/stats (accessed October 2012).

John Spencer and Howard Wolff, “Early Precursors,” in General Public Space Travel and Tourism, Volume 2, Workshop Proceedings (Washington DC: NASA CP-1999-209146, 1999), 54. Also, see the KSC Visitor Center web site at http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/ and the Space World site at http://www.spaceworld.co.jp/english/exactly/index.html (both accessed April 2013).

This point is nicely made in David T. Courtwright, Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 220–224.

See New International Version, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy +7%3A6&version = NIV (accessed April 2013).

Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.

H. Reinhold Niehbuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 159.

See Grady McWhiney, Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers (Abilene, TX: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2002); Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988); Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The South from Self-sufficiency to Peonage: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 85:5 (1980): 1095–1118; Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, “Celtic Origins of Southern Herding Practices,” Journal of Southern History 51:2 (1985): 165–182; and Grady McWhiney, “Continuity in Celtic Warfare,” Continuity 2 (1981): 1–18.