Remembering the Space Age

PART II. REMEMBRANCE AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SPACE AGE ~ CHAPTER 10 FAR OUT: THE SPACE AGE IN AMERICAN CULture Emily S. Rosenberg pace has long provided a canvas for the imagination. For me, the early SSpace Age intertwined with a sense of youth’s almost limitless possibilities— the excitement of discovery, the allure of adventure, the challenge of competition, the confidence of mastery. As a girl in Montana, I looked up into that Big Sky hoping to glimpse a future that would, somehow, allow my escape from the claustrophobia of small towns separated by long distances. But the Space Age was also bound up with the encroaching cynicism of my young adulthood: the fear of a future driven by thoughtless fascination with technique and a Vietnam-era disillusionment with the country’s benevolence and with the credibility of its leaders. The night that the first American landed on the Moon, I was in the audience at the Newport Folk Festival. Someone from the audience yelled “What were the first words on the Moon?” the announcer replied, “They were: ‘The simulation was better!’” A cluster of people grumbled that the Moonwalk was probably faked, a suspicion that my barely literate immigrant grandmother—and a few others in the country—shared. The new Space Age could promise giant leaps and also threaten Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Space could be far away or “far out.” Anyone who has been around for the past half century harbors private memories of the early Space Age. A toy, a TV program, a book, a painting, a school science fair project can each touch off remembrance of a place, an emotion, the person we once were. For each individual, the Space Age offered an array of visual representations and symbolic threads that could, intimately and personally, weave a unique tapestry. But the Space Age was not simply an infinitely personalizable canvas for individual memories. It also offered national and global imaginaries that projected assumptions about, and debates over, national identities and global futures. The Space Age, of course, is in one sense as old as historical time— humans have long looked to the heavens for meaning. And it is also an age still of the present as the current schemes to militarize space and the renewed public visibility of public and private missions into space remind us. But this essay addresses that shorter moment of the Space Age, the couple of decades beginning in the early 1950s when transcending Earth’s atmosphere and 158 REMEMBERING THE SPACE AGE gravitational pull so stirred emotions that space exploration became an intense cultural preoccupation. Focusing on representations that comprise collective, not individual memory, this essay seeks to suggest some of the diverse symbols and narratives of the Space Age as they circulated in American culture. As a complex of collective signs and symbols, the Space Age intertwined with other rival designations for the postwar era: the Cold War, the Media Age, what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the Technetronic Age, and the Age of a Mid-century Modernist aesthetic. Space exploration augmented the Cold War with the space race, enhanced the Media Age with truly amazing dramas and visual spectacularity, heightened the Technetronic Age’s moral and philosophical concerns over the implications of Technocracy and a so-called “Spaceship Earth,” and inspired Mid-century Modernist impulses that emerged as Googie and abstract expressionism. Refracting aspirations and fears, the Space Age held multiple meanings for foreign policy, politics, media, engineering, morality, art, and design.1 1. THE COLD WAR: SPACE RACE In October 1957, Sputnik I became a media sensation. Hurled into orbit by a massive rocket, the Soviet-launched space satellite, circling Earth every 95 minutes, appeared to demonstrate urgent strategic dangers. This “Sputnik moment,” in which fear mingled with fascination, prompted significant changes in America’s Cold War landscape. It by no means, however, began America’s fascination with a new Space Age. A vibrant spaceflight movement comprised largely of science fiction writers and engineers had preceded Sputnik and helped set a tone for the space race that emerged in Sputnik’s wake. A team of mostly German rocket-scientists headed by Wernher von Braun had worked for the U.S. Army since the summer of 1950 under order to develop a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.2 On the side, von Braun had energetically promoted popular interest in spaceflight, and his efforts during the mid-1950s became part of a boom in both science and science fiction writing about space. A group that the scholar De Witt Douglas Kilgore has called “astrofuturists”—writers who based their tales of an intergallactical future on new scientific breakthroughs in physics—included Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Willy Ley, and others.3 1. The author wishes to express special thanks to Norman L. Rosenberg for his contributions to this essay. 2. Tom D. Crouch, Aiming for the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers of the Space Age (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), p. 118. 3. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) examines the major scientific and literary productions. FAR OUT: THE SPACE AGE IN AMERICAN CULTURE 159 These astrofuturists offered especially powerful images and narratives about a new “age of discovery” in which brave individuals would guide interplanetary explorations. Walt Disney employed von Braun and Ley, both powerful advocates of human piloted spaceflight, as consultants to help design rocket ships and Moon rides for Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, which opened in 1955, and a series of TV episodes such as “Man is Space” (March 1955), “Man and the Moon” (December 1955), and “Mars and Beyond” (December 1957). Chesley Bonestell carved out a specialty as a spaceflight artist, illustrating in colored ink during the 1950s much of the equipment and procedure that later NASA scientists would construct for real. Bonestell’s collaboration with Ley in The Conquest of Space, for example, exuded technological authority in both words and illustration, moving the subject of space travel away from the interwar Flash Gordon style and into scientific respectability.4 Likewise, comics and popular magazines frequently featured human-piloted space travel, and Hollywood also filled screens with visions of space. Destination Moon (1950), a film whose images and messages influenced a generation of movie makers as well as scientists, celebrated the idea of a Moon landing.5 In the realm of popular music, songwriter Bart Howard’s Fly Me to the Moon (1951) became such a hit, especially after Peggy Lee sang it on the Ed Sullivan Show in the mid-1950s, that Howard was able to live out his life on its royalties. Fiction writers and rocket scientists such as von Braun, in elaborating their dreams of manned flight and space stations, implied that control of the Moon and of outer space by any other nation would leave the United States abjectly defenseless. Hollywood’s Destination Moon had especially contributed to this idea. In addition, the well-developed popular fears associated with atomic power led credence to the idea that an enemy’s penetration of space might pose an existential threat. Might the rockets that launched Sputnik indicate that the Soviet Union’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) had the power to send a nuclear weapon to the United States? Might Sputnik signal the enemy’s capability of mounting a Pearl Harbor-style attack from the skies, this time with atomic bombs coming from orbiting satellites? Many scholars have argued that the ideas and literary productions of the astrofuturists “prepared the American public for the conquest of space with elaborate visions of promise and fear” and helped shape the nation’s cultural and political responses.6 As Sputnik orbited overhead, these space-exploration 4. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, pp. 72-74; Willie Ley, The Conquest of Space (New York, NY: Viking, 1951). 5. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, pp. 52, 56-58; Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. 41-43. 6. Crouch, Aiming for the Stars, pp. 118-121; Kilgore, Astrofuturism, pp. 31-48; McCurdy, Space, pp. 54-74 [quote p. 54]. Roger E. Bilstein, Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) traces the development of interest in early aerospace flights. 160 REMEMBERING THE SPACE AGE boosters, who had long advocated more energetic efforts, fused their previous visions of human-piloted voyages of discovery together with the heightened Cold War national security concerns to frame the parameters of an urgent new international competition—the space race. President Dwight David Eisenhower tried to calm the alarm. His scientific experts saw no ICBM gap or even any parity in missile know-how between the United States and the Soviet Union. Had the White House pushed a program similar to that which produced Sputnik, they advised, a U.S. satellite could already have been aloft. While von Braun pressed for a crash program, promised that his team could launch a satellite in 90 days, and called for building a space station, Eisenhower embraced a measured approach with lower costs and greater focus on scientific and military applications. The chair of Eisenhower’s science advisory committee, James R. Killian, issued a short Introduction to Outer Space that downplayed manned flight and advocated carefully constructed scientific projects that employed automation and robotics. Eisenhower ordered the government printing office to distribute Killian’s pamphlet to the public for 15 cents a copy.7 As a seasoned military strategist, the President had always been his own most-trusted national security adviser.

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